As a Hispanic small business owner myself, I can attest to the challenges faced by small businesses. In my role, I am devoted to ensuring that small business owners and entrepreneurs have the tools they need to succeed. I have come across many entrepreneurs whose journeys reflect my own.

The Hispanic community is one of the most entrepreneurial spirited groups in the nation. It lives in the dreams of those who have only just arrived here and in the legacy of families who have been here for centuries. 

The Biden-Harris administration and U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman are committed to the success of Latino communities. More Hispanic individuals than ever before are seizing the opportunity to create new businesses which improve their cities and neighborhoods.

Data shows that five million Hispanic-owned businesses contribute $800 billion each year to our economy. In the past decade, Hispanic entrepreneur growth rates have risen 10 times faster than non-Hispanic business rates. 

SBA Administrator Guzman, the highest-ranking Latino woman in the President’s Cabinet, has made strengthening our Hispanic-owned small businesses a priority. Over the last 44 months we have seen the fastest creation rate of Hispanic-owned businesses in over a decade, which was more than 20 percent faster than pre-pandemic levels. The Biden-Harris administration has also made a goal of increasing by 50 percent the amount of federal contracting dollars going to small, disadvantaged businesses by 2025—which would translate to an additional $100 billion for minority-owned and other underserved businesses. 

SBA is committed to empowering Hispanic businesses as they continue to break down barriers and achieve success in business. As we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, let us not only recognize the contributions of Hispanic entrepreneurs but also uplift the next generation of business leaders and build a prosperous business landscape for all. 

For more information about SBA’s programs and services visit www.sba.gov. 

The post OPINION: Hispanic entrepreneurship at the forefront of the American business boom  appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

David Pryor, a natural-born politician who spent thirty-four years in public offices, including governor, the state legislature and both houses of Congress, died April 20, 2024 at his home in Little Rock at the age of 89.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture called him “arguably the most popular Arkansas politician of the modern era,” although the description might have covered a much longer stretch of history. He ran for public offices 13 times between 1960 and 1996 and lost only once—a 1972 race for the U.S. Senate against Sen. John L. McClellan. 

After McClellan’s death before the end of the term in 1978, Pryor defeated two other rising political stars for the Senate seat—Congressmen Jim Guy Tucker and Ray H. Thornton Jr., both of whom would be elected to other major state offices. Pryor would hold the seat until January 1997, when he retired, owing to heart problems and his dismay over the rising partisanship, wrath and extremism in Congress and national politics.

In 2002, years after he retired from the Senate, Pryor’s son Mark, a former state representative and attorney general, won his seat by defeating Senator Tim Hutchinson and served two terms.

His nearly 35-year career in the state and national capitols were marked by passionate and sometimes lonely efforts for better and affordable medical care for the elderly and poor, peace, public safety in the nuclear age, the direct election of American presidents, reform of the state’s ancient constitution and, perhaps most markedly, for collaboration among political foes and parties.

Former President Bill Clinton, who got his inspiration for politics and public service as a 20-year-old Georgetown University student in 1966 from the “Young Turk” state lawmaker from a couple of rural counties east of him in south Arkansas, said he and his wife, Hillary, were deeply saddened by the death of their friend and collaborator, who was always “honest, compassionate and full of common sense.”

In every office he held, Clinton said, Pryor “fought for progressive politics that helped us put the divided past behind us and move into a brighter future together. He was always one of America’s greatest advocates for the elderly, waging long battles to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to improve nursing home and home care to help more people live in dignity.”

“David made politics personal—from his famed retail campaigning to his ability to calmly and confidently explain tough votes to his constituents,” Clinton said. Clinton was Arkansas’s attorney general in Pryor’s last two years as governor. He was elected governor in the same election that voters promoted Pryor to the US Senate.

“I first met him and Barbara in 1966 when David was running for Congress and over the next 58 years he would be my mentor, confidant, supporter and, above all, friend. Having him and Dale Bumpers in the Senate when I was president was an extraordinary gift. I never felt far from home, and I always trusted the unvarnished advice he gave, especially when the going got tough. I’ll always be grateful that he served as the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, where his very presence embodied the nobility and joy of public service.”

David Pryor lived a mythical life of politics and public service, said his longtime aide in Congress, Carmie Henry—starting with his election as president of the third grade. He defined retail politics in Arkansas as a campaigner and in public office, cementing personal bonds with everybody in both parties and in every executive office, including the security workers all over the Capitol. He became easily the most beloved member of the Senate and also with Arkansas voters.

“If any one person’s career marked the changing of an era in American politics, it was David Pryor’s,” Henry said. “There are no David Pryors in Washington anymore.”

Pryor was a liberal Democrat long before it became a term of opprobrium. He was stirred to enter politics, first as a crusading weekly newspaper editor at Camden and then as a candidate for the legislature, by the rise of racial hatred and discord after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in the nation’s public schools. A senior and student leader at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Pryor traveled to the Capitol in February 1957 to testify at a dramatic public hearing on a bill creating a state sovereignty commission that would stop racial integration and find and punish people and groups that supported integration—or “race mixing,” as it was commonly called. He thought the bill was a flagrant violation of the federal and state constitutions. He was blocked from testifying, he would learn, at the instigation of university officials, notably the president, who feared a backlash against the school. The passage of a raft of bills to maintain white supremacy and Gov. Orval E. Faubus’s signing them into law in early 1957 and then Faubus’s dispatch of National Guardsmen to prevent nine Black youngsters from entering Little Rock Central High School that fall turned Pryor and his new wife, the former Barbara Jean Lunsford, into crusaders and reaffirmed his notion from early childhood that politics was the best way to spend his life.

David Hampton Pryor was born Aug. 29, 1934, in Camden, the third of four children of William Edgar Pryor and Susan Newton Pryor. His father ran a car dealership, was Ouachita County sheriff for four years and was always politically connected and influential. Governor Ben T. Laney (1945–1949) was a neighbor and family friend, although Laney’s leadership of the Southern white-supremacy  movement and his disloyalty to the Democratic Party in 1948 disturbed young Pryor, whose hero was Gov. Sid McMath from next-door Magnolia and Hot Springs, who had thwarted Laney’s Dixiecrat party and carried Arkansas for President Harry S. Truman that year. Pryor’s mother, who was known as Susie, had been a champion of women’s suffrage, and was the first woman to run for public office in Arkansas, losing a race for circuit and county clerk in 1926. She later won a school board race.

His autobiography, A Pryor Commitment, published in 2008 by Butler Center Books, gave a self-effacing and often humorous account of growing up, pursuing popularity and providential encounters with famous political figures that would shape his destiny. He was an unusually gregarious child who sought friendship with everybody and was attracted to politics almost from the time that he could read, perhaps owing to his father’s engagement in politics and with politicians. (The elder Pryor raised the money in 1942 that kept Congressman John L. McClellan from leaving the US Senate race, which he won in a Democratic runoff primary with Attorney General Jack Holt. McClellan was later shocked and embittered that his patron’s son would run against him. He had expected Pryor to succeed him when he retired.) 

Pryor wrote that he ran for president of Mary Bragg Wheeler’s third-grade class at Camden and that the teacher sent him and the other two candidates into the hall while the class voted.

“Sweating under the tension,” Pryor remembered, “I promised God that if He would let me win this election, I would never again run for political office. Our teacher called us back into the room. I had won! Before I sat down, I was already planning my race for fourth-grade president.”

His boyhood hero was the Razorback and Olympic star Clyde Scott from Smackover, 16 miles down the road from him, to the extent that 50 years later he stuttered trying to talk to the sainted old man, by then a retired insurance executive for Jackson T. “Jack” Stephens. Pryor was a football star for the Camden High School Panthers—a triple-threat tailback who made the all-district team. His memoir, however, confessed that he actually hated football and every minute of practice and the games, but social pressure forced him to stay with it. “Any Camden boy in the 1950s who entertained the slightest interest in peer acceptance—and who could circle the practice field in a heavy uniform without crumpling to earth—went out for football,” he said. Pryor dreaded “the 200-pound linemen” who smashed him to the ground nearly every play. 

Pryor wrote that after seeing the 1950 movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden and Judy Holliday and set in political Washington, he ran home and sent a letter to Congressman Oren Harris of El Dorado, a family friend, asking if he could be a congressional page that summer. Harris agreed. Pryor drove to Washington, finally found the Capitol and reached the House doorkeeper’s office, where he was rebuked for being late and sent to the Senate, where there was an emergency—an all-night filibuster after all the Senate pages had gone home. When he reached the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (the anticommunist conspiracist who was later censured by the Senate) snapped his fingers at Pryor, scribbled a note, fished out a ten-dollar bill and handed him a ring of keys. 

Pryor’s account: “Here, son,” he said. “Get a taxi and go to this address, and on the floor of the closet in the bedroom you’ll find my bedroom slippers. Bring them to me.” It was David Pryor’s first act of public service. 

After Pryor enrolled as a freshman at Baylor University at Waco his father died suddenly and he canceled his enrollment and went instead to Henderson State Teachers College at Arkadelphia, 45 miles up Highway 7. When he arrived on campus late he was greeted by a sign in front of Womack Hall, the men’s dormitory, saying “David Pryor for Freshman Class President.” He was elected. After a year, he transferred to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He took a horse with him and put the colt in a stable at a farm south of town. He wrote that it had been a stupid thing to do because he rarely found time to ride the animal. He figured that he had done it because the last time he had seen his father alive was when the old man was astride a horse in the 1952 Ouachita County Fair parade.

As the spring semester was ending in 1954, Pryor got a note to call Gov. Francis Cherry, who had defeated his hero Sid McMath two years earlier. Cherry wanted him to be his driver while he was campaigning for re-election in the Democratic primaries against Faubus and two other men that summer. In his autobiography and two oral histories late in life Pryor gave poignant accounts of Cherry’s grace and caring and the agonizing dilemmas the governor had faced in the historic confrontation with Faubus in the runoff primary; Cherry had decided to question Faubus’s patriotism by making an issue of his attendance at a socialist self-help school at Mena, Commonwealth College, and subsequently lying about it. It was to be an evening television speech at the KARK studio, which Pryor called “the speech of Cherry’s political life.” Pryor said he waited in the car for Cherry to leave the mansion for the studio and the governor veered into the shrubs next to the car and vomited. After his stumbling and wooden speech, Cherry returned to the car solemnly and said, “How’d I do, kid?” Pryor said he congratulated Cherry but began to realize that the speech had been a terrible mistake.

It occurred while the country, including Arkansas, rebelled against “McCarthyism,” which had been exposed as a fraud the previous month in the Army-McCarthy hearings before a Senate committee, including Arkansas’s John McClellan. It ended with Army attorney Joseph Welch’s famous putdown of Joe McCarthy, whose bedroom slippers Pryor had fetched four years earlier, for relentlessly attacking a young lawyer at the hearing: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Pryor concluded that the very decent Cherry had been a poor politician who did not sense the great shift in public attitudes and was unable to rally voters against a smart but unprincipled politician. An even bigger mistake had been the unfortunate campaign line “we’re going to get the deadheads off the welfare rolls.” Faubus made him look cruel. 

After Cherry’s humiliation, a bitter Pryor decided that politics was miserable business and changed his major from political science to business administration. He took courses in accounting, banking and statistics but found them tedious and boring. Then he became violently ill with a strange malady that required multiple surgeries—he withered to 130 pounds and partially lost his eyesight—that cost him a year of school. 

He returned to the university in 1955 as a government major again. From his arrival, he was active in student government, including serving as a senator. Led by Pryor, Ray Thornton and others who would later seek state executive, legislative and judicial offices, the students took a special interest in the conflagration over integration that was growing at Little Rock, which was under federal court orders to desegregate its schools in the fall. A number of punitive bills to head off the desegregation consumed the lawmakers in the January–March session—notably the creation of a state sovereignty commission, which was based on the long-repudiated theory of John C. Calhoun that states could interpose their sovereignty between the federal government and the people. Pryor and one of his many college roommates, Kenneth C. Danforth of El Dorado, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Traveler, and later a journalist for the Arkansas Gazette, Time magazine and The National Geographic, drove to Little Rock to carry the students’ message to the lawmakers and the state that the legislation trampled upon the human rights of American citizens, who would be criminalized for even expressing the view that Blacks and those who might sympathize with them were entitled to equality and free expression and assembly. Pryor was embittered by the experience that day but, according to his memoir, the stayover at the Marion Hotel and association with the legislators and lobbyists, sharpened his understanding that politics and government—in Ouachita County, Little Rock, or Washington, D.C.—did not follow the examples in civics textbooks.

He left Fayetteville with his degree but could not find a job. The Gazette would not hire him, even when he volunteered to work free for a few months to prove his worth. Later, as a lawmaker and law student, he would be the Gazette’s Fayetteville correspondent. He married Barbara Jean Lunsford of Fayetteville, a classmate, and in late 1957 started a weekly newspaper, the Ouachita Citizen, with a printing press acquired from a local businessman. His wife and mother wrote weekly columns and reported, and Pryor sold advertisements and wrote editorials, often criticizing local government officials but mainly Gov. Faubus and legislative houses that went along with everything Faubus sought to do. The city’s daily newspaper, like most others around Arkansas after the school crisis, rarely took issue with the governor and the legislature. Faubus took pleasure in taunting Pryor and his little paper. At a big rally at Camden in his 1958 race against the meatpacker Chris Finkbeiner, whom Pryor supported, Faubus held up copies of Life and Time magazines and Pryor’s little paper, all of which had made Faubus look bad. 

“Life is for people who can’t read,” Faubus said. “Time is for people who can’t see, and the Ouachita Citizen is for people who can’t think.” The crowd roared and Pryor crawled in his car and went home.

But in 1960 Pryor told the county’s representative, a family friend, that if he did not begin to oppose Faubus on legislation he was going to run against him. The representative demurred and Pryor ran against him. He was 26 years old. Pryor’s memoir said he got elected mainly owing to the relentless campaigning of Barbara, carrying their infant son, David, with her as she went door to door across the county asking people to please vote for her husband. The family briefly moved to Little Rock. They sold the newspaper in 1962. He was elected twice more, in 1962 and 1964, while attending law school at Fayetteville when the legislature was not in session. He finished law school in 1964.

Except for his votes, Pryor’s legislative record was unremarkable, which was not unusual for new legislators. A Civil War buff, Pryor read about battles in South Arkansas and at his first session in February 1961 he introduced and passed a bill creating Poison Springs Battlefield State Park about eight miles from his home. It was the site of one of the Confederates’ few big victories in Arkansas, a victory most notable for the slaughter of a Kansas infantry regiment that included former slaves. The Confederates took no prisoners and used wagons to crush the skulls of the captured Black men. 

Pryor became one of a handful of liberals who jousted with Faubus and the legislative “Old Guard” on a wide variety of reforms. Called “the Young Turks” in the media, Pryor, Virgil Butler, Sterling R. Cockrill Jr., Jim Brandon, Hardy W. Croxton, Ray S. Smith Jr. and Hayes C. McClerkin introduced legislation outlawing the poll tax, reforming election laws, overhauling county purchasing and spending (Pryor had been on a grand jury investigating government fraud in Ouachita County), convening a constitutional convention, and overhauling highway administration. They got nowhere with the legislation. In 1961, Pryor introduced a bill to require competitive bidding on county purchases of more than $300, but he could get only few votes for it each year. Faubus had another legislator, Harry Colay of Magnolia, put his name on a similar bill in 1965, it passed, and Faubus signed it.

Pryor opened a law practice in 1964 at Camden with his friend Harry Barnes. He liked to mention a case where he represented a man in a dispute over who owned a coon dog. It was finally resolved by bringing the disputed mutt into the courtroom, which wandered around until it spotted Pryor’s client and put a paw on his knee. The judge immediately awarded him custody. For a different reason, the Arkansas Gazette cartoonist George Fisher later always put a happy coon dog at Pryor’s side. But Pryor never got to practice a lot of law.

Faubus’s enmity toward Pryor took a bizarre turn in the summer of 1965. Late in life, Faubus and Pryor would cement a friendship, and he told Pryor that one of the joys of his life had been setting in motion the events that year which sealed Pryor’s long career. In law school at Fayetteville, Pryor had become a close friend of Faubus’s son, Farrell, a shy, portly and tormented young man who would take his own life in 1977 at the age of 36. Farrell had felt shunned and ridiculed by the other students and some of the faculty. The two students studied, played golf, drank beer and got their law degrees together.

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Congressman Oren Harris to a federal judgeship, creating a congressional vacancy that Faubus was supposed to fill for the last 16 months of Harris’s term by calling a special election. It was Pryor’s dream, but there was no time to put together a campaign organization throughout the large Fourth District. State Auditor Jimmie “Red” Jones, who was known to every voter in the state, would be the automatic winner. Pryor mentioned his dilemma to his friend Farrell. He would learn later that Farrell told his dad that Pryor had helped him get his law degree, was the only person at the university who befriended him and about the only true friend he ever had.

Faubus dawdled about calling the special election for weeks and finally announced that the district did not really need a voting representative for the next year and a half, so he called the special election for the same day as the general election in November 1966. Voters would simultaneously fill the seat for the last two months of the year but also the following two years—two elections for the same seat on the same day. It gave Pryor more than a year to build a campaign organization. Red Jones then chose not to run because he would have to give up his safe lifetime job at the Capitol for a risky congressional election. Pryor won the special election and the general election handily. He defeated Richard S. Arnold of Texarkana, a future federal district and appellate judge, and three other prominent politicians from around the district, John Harris Jones of Pine Bluff, Charles L. “Chuck” Honey of Prescott and Dean Murphy of Hope. 

Pryor’s three terms in the seniority-driven House of Representatives were hardly notable, except for a controversy that he engineered—a crusade over the mistreatment of the elderly and disabled in nursing homes—and his personal dilemma over the Vietnam War, which he eventually came to oppose. 

His mother told him that after visiting friends in nursing homes over the years she had concluded that the warehousing of people in the profit-driven industry had to be a national scandal rather than a local one. Now that her son was a congressman, he ought to do something about it. Having little else to do as a freshman, Pryor started volunteering on weekends as an orderly in nursing homes in the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia, and recording the lack of staffing and lapses in medical care that he saw. His mother was right. Nursing homes often were just profitable warehouses for those waiting for the grave. Government inspectors often gave owners notice of their inspections, which rarely found lapses and, when they did, nothing was done about them. The industry had lobbyists who kept Pryor’s congressional colleagues and other government monitors at bay. 

Pryor made a speech on the House floor revealing his secret work. He said he had encountered only two nursing homes where he would put his mother, but he couldn’t have afforded either one on his $42,500 salary. He was attacked by Maryland’s state mental-health director and people in the industry. Pryor called for the House to create a select committee on nursing homes and homes for the aged. A majority of the House voted for his resolution, but it was non-binding and Congress did nothing. The House, led by the 80-year-old Mississippian who headed the Rules Committee, would not provide space or staffing for the committee. Pryor decided to do the work himself, after finding a vacant lot beside a gasoline station near the Capitol. The station’s owner found two house trailers that became the site for Pryor’s investigations and hearings. Pryor tried and failed to set up a permanent Committee on Aging, as the Senate had done in 1959. President Richard M. Nixon joined Pryor’s cause in 1971, deploring conditions in nursing homes and proposing to end payments to substandard homes.

In 1974, two years after Pryor left, the House joined the cause and established the Select Committee on Aging. For the next 50 years, Congress, federal and state administrators and the industry would wage a continuous battle over standards of care for the aged and the degree of regulation that government should provide.

When Pryor went to Washington, the Vietnam War had engaged the United States for ten years. (President Eisenhower sent the first US troops in 1955 and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had raised the commitment.) After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Congress gave Johnson new authority to dramatically expand America’s commitment, still without a declaration of war. By 1968, congressional and public opposition to the war had grown. Vice President Hubert Humphrey asked Pryor to make a short speech to the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago—Humphrey was the presidential nominee—in support of the Vietnam plank, an oblique statement that neither endorsed nor opposed the war effort. Pryor went to the convention as an Arkansas delegate and had already alienated other Southern congressmen, especially Mississippians, by voting as a member of the Credentials Committee to seat Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats—Blacks and liberals—instead of the white delegation picked by the party in Mississippi. In his two-minute speech, he urged an end to the war but called for unity and wisdom. Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright had already decided America’s war policies were improvident and conducted hearings that began to turn public sentiment against the war.

President Johnson, who had had misgivings about the war from the first, had then made himself the champion of the war against communism after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He became more and more sorrowful and morose as tens of thousands of Americans a year died, but he could not become the first president to lose a war. In 1967, Johnson asked Pryor to fly to Texas with him for rallies to pump up flagging support in his home state. Pryor would write that Johnson seemed glum and introspective the whole trip. Pryor understood why. As they were flying back to Washington at night in Air Force One, Pryor looked out the window and figured that the lights below were his hometown of Camden. 

“Mr. President,” he said, “it looks like we might be flying directly over Camden, Arkansas. That’s my hometown. If you look straight down at the ground, you might see Jim’s Café on Washington Street.”

The president leaned across him and looked out the window. He slumped back in his seat and shook his head.

“God a’mighty!” he sighed. “I wish I was at Jim’s Café right now.” He was silent the rest of the trip.

For Pryor, the climax to the moral struggle over the war was more personal, as he would recall in A Pryor Commitment and oral histories. On an airline trip from Washington to Arkansas he fell into conversation with a young serviceman from his district who was headed to Vietnam. Many months later, he got on a plane for the same flight back home and recognized the young man, in uniform. He asked the soldier about his tour of duty. The soldier pulled back a blanket across his lap, which showed that he had lost a leg in combat.

 “Congressman Pryor,” the young man said, “I would not have minded losing my leg, if only someone had told me why we were there in the first place.”

Pryor sent constituents a newsletter announcing that he would thereafter oppose any further funding of the war and calling for troops to be brought home. It was not an altogether popular step. At a fishfry at the Carlisle High School stadium soon afterward, a man ran out of the crowd, jumped on Pryor’s back and began hitting him and calling him a traitor. Mayor Bobby Glover, later a state representative and then a senator, pulled the man off Pryor. Two decades later Pryor would write a letter to his son Scott, explaining his dilemma over the war and the consequences. He likened it to the contemporary dilemma over the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 1972, McClellan, by then chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which had funded the development of the navigation dams on the Arkansas River in Arkansas and Oklahoma, announced he was running for a sixth term. His hearings on labor racketeering had made enemies of organized labor. Unions representing wood, paper, oil, chemical and electrical workers in South Arkansas had supplied much of Pryor’s political strength. He announced that he was running for the seat, too, along with Ted Boswell, a liberal trial lawyer, and Foster Johnson, a book salesman who for the third straight Senate election went around towns wearing clanging metal campaign signs over his shoulders. 

Pryor survived a rough campaign in which he was accused of being a friend of draft dodgers and a supporter of gun control. (As a freshman legislator, he had sponsored a bill making it illegal to carry a loaded weapon in a vehicle inside city limits—a reaction to a neighboring boy accidentally killing himself with a loaded shotgun on a Safeway parking lot.) But Pryor was a close second in the preferential primary and entered the runoff as a heavy favorite, certain to get all the votes that had been cast for the more liberal Boswell. W. R. “Witt” Stephens, the gas baron and investment banker, summoned a meeting of the state’s banking and business leaders with McClellan in the board room of the Union National Bank at Little Rock where everyone ponied up tens of thousands of dollars for McClellan or pledged to collect it.

The two-week runoff ended with the famous televised debate. McClellan, wearing a white suit, taunted Pryor for his support by unions, particularly “labor bosses” from outside the state. Pryor responded that the money reported on his campaign finance forms came from the cookie jars and overall pockets of hardworking men. McClellan responded that Pryor had gotten $79,000 from “bosses” from outside the state. 

“David, David,” he taunted, shaking a finger, “this is no cookie-jar nickels and dimes!”

Pryor’s campaign gifts paled alongside the money from businessmen and bankers in McClellan’s campaign, but McClellan’s commanding performance showed him as anything but a doddering 76-year-old man. But his victory in the election the next week depended more on the massive get-out-the-vote effort by political leaders commanded by Witt Stephens. Pryor got only 20,000 more votes than in the first primary, McClellan 22,000 more. On election night, Pryor faced the TV cameras early, conceded and said the voters had elected the right man, a typical Pryor reflection on his opponents.

Witt Stephens was watching television that night and was struck by the Pryor’s magnanimity. Two years later, when Gov. Dale Bumpers announced he was not running for a third term as governor but instead for the Senate—against Fulbright—Stephens picked up the phone and called Pryor, suggesting that he run for governor. Pryor said he was about to call Stephens and urge him to run (they had served in the House of Representatives together as freshmen in 1961). Stephens said no, he was serious, and promised his full organizational support if Pryor announced. He did, and so did former governor Faubus and Lt. Gov. Bob Riley. Faubus, making his second comeback attempt since retiring in 1966, was shocked to discover that nearly his entire political machine marshaled by Stephens had been diverted to Pryor. Pryor won without a runoff. For the rest of his life, Faubus remained bitter about his old friend and supporter’s betrayal while also warming to the young man whom his son Farrell had asked him to help. 

Providence seemed always to shine on Pryor at election time—but with actual governance, not so much. Bumpers had raised income and motor-fuel taxes and closed tax loopholes. Furious economic growth filled the state treasury so that Bumpers could enhance public schools and higher education, build many state parks, improve highways, expand medical care and build hospitals and college classrooms. Bumpers called a special legislative session to spend the big surplus that had accumulated in the treasury. The moment that Pryor moved into the Governor’s Mansion the nation was hit with a long recession complicated by inflation, and the treasury was depleted. Pryor had to slash budgets and freeze hiring even for filling job vacancies. In his four years, Bumpers had carried out all the reforms prescribed by the liberal group Democrats for Arkansas during the late 1960s—nearly everything but a new state constitution, which became Pryor’s biggest goal. It was never fulfilled.

Pryor proposed a dramatic refashioning of state spending—a 25 percent reduction in state income tax rates and empowerment of local governments to implement the income tax themselves to address all the problems of cities, counties and schools. The Arkansas Plan, as it was called, consumed a legislative session. Pryor traveled the state promoting the plan, explaining to a group at Jonesboro that he was cutting state taxes and allowing people locally to use it in whatever way pleased them—jokingly suggesting that if they didn’t want to levy taxes to build roads and streets they could spend the money on “a new coon dog.” Gazette cartoonist George Fisher labeled it the “Coon Dog Plan” and thereafter always put a grinning mutt at Pryor’s side. The Arkansas Plan failed.

Another passion was litter. Pryor hated the trash along the state’s streets and roads. He started a “Pick Up Arkansas” campaign and proposed a bill levying a small tax on soft drinks, pet foods, newspapers and plastic wrappers to discourage littering; the money would be used for highway and street cleanup. Local governments were encouraged to dispose of solid waste like abandoned cars and refrigerators. The bill passed, but a letter from the state Revenue Department to businesses on how to collect the tax warned that they might go to prison for failing to remit the litter tax. Legislators who had voted for the bill heard from merchants and demanded that Pryor call them back into session to repeal the bill before it took effect on July 1. He did but always regretted it when he saw sandwich wrappers and soft-drink containers strewn along streets and on the roadsides.

Constitutional revision, an obsession with an aging legislator who had been the leader of the Young Turks, was Pryor’s biggest failure. Voters had defeated a liberalized constitution drafted by a popularly elected convention in 1970. Pryor decided to try again after taking office in 1975. The solution had to be to avoid the pitched battles over a few issues such as the state’s antiunion law (the Right to Work Amendment), usury, judicial elections and county-government reform. He offered a bill calling for the appointment, by the legislature and the governor, of 35 delegates who would write a new constitution but leave those and a few other features of the 1874 constitution untouched and then submit the document to the voters in September. On the day the delegates convened, the state Supreme Court voted four to three to abolish the convention because the delegates were prohibited from changing some parts of the constitution. It had to be all or nothing. In 1977, Pryor tried again with a bill that called for the election of 100 delegates in 1978 and a vote on the document in 1980. But voters defeated that new constitution decisively. 

McClellan died in November 1977 and Pryor appointed Kaneaster Hodges of Newport, a lawyer and minister, to finish his term, which ended Jan. 1, 1979. Pryor soon announced that he would run for the seat. So did US Rep. Jim Guy Tucker of Little Rock and Rep. Ray H. Thornton Jr. of Sheridan. It would be a race between three friends and philosophical triplets. A. C. Grigson, a Texarkana accountant, joined the race claiming to be McClellan’s philosophical successor. Pryor barely led in the first primary and Tucker edged Thornton for the second spot. The runoff would also be amiable until its final days when Tucker accused Pryor’s campaign manager of trying to persuade a friend on the state Public Service Commission to approve a rate increase for Witt Stephens’s western Arkansas gas company in exchange for the Stephens family’s support in the runoff. Pryor won by a safe margin. Tucker later shrugged off his defeat. No one, he said, was going to believe that David Pryor did anything even slightly deceitful, and wouldn’t blame him if he had.

The Senate years were Pryor’s most pleasurable. His Arkansas colleague, Dale Bumpers, was a close friend and an ally on most but not all issues. After their retirements, they became a popular team for television and political events, taunting and telling tall tales about each other.

During the eight-year administration of President Ronald Reagan, both senators opposed much of the Reagan program, including the tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 and later the big binge of military spending. Bumpers, a deficit hawk, publicly opposed the tax cuts, and Pryor finally joined him by voting “present” on the roll call, the same as a no vote. The month after the tax cuts passed the nation fell into a deep 14-month recession with double-digit unemployment, the deepest since the 1930s, although the charming Reagan was never blamed for the longest and deepest recession in modern times or the staggering budget deficits and debt that he ran up for eight years or for the repeated tax increases that the Reagan administration described as “revenue enhancements” instead of taxes.

But Pryor also became a leading critic of Pentagon spending, calling attention to such excesses as the orders for thousands of ball-peen hammers and toilet seats at hugely inflated prices. He also veered from Bumpers and the state’s four congressmen in his opposition to the development of binary chemical weapons. He opposed developing and storing the chemical weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Vice President George H. W. Bush, a friend who went to Congress the same time as Pryor, went to the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote for the arsenal.

Even before Reagan’s election, the Pentagon already suspected that Pryor was not a votary, especially after he called attention to the perils of the Titan II missile system after a series of dangerous failures around the country and two catastrophes in Arkansas. When the Defense Department developed the Titan II system—54 underground intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads—US Rep. Wilbur D. Mills agreed to vote for President Kennedy’s tax cuts if he agreed to put a ring of 18 of the new missiles in Arkansas. A fire in a silo with a nuclear warhead near Searcy in 1965 killed 53 workers who were retrofitting the missile’s fuel system. In January 1978, a fuel transporter at a missile silo at Damascus overheated and sent thousands of gallons of deadly nitrogen tetroxide vapor over the countryside. In 1979, after more such leaks in the Arkansas and Kansas missile networks, Pryor and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas were regretting having Titan sites in their states and talked about whether they should be anywhere near American citizens. 

After rumors of incidents at the silos, Pryor in the summer of 1980 did his own secret investigation and found nine major incidents in the previous 14 months that could have endangered Arkansas lives around the silos. Clearly, the Air Force had been lying about the safety at the Titan sites in Arkansas, Kansas and New Mexico. Pryor gave the detailed results of investigation of the eight incidents to two Arkansas Gazette reporters, who described the incidents and Pryor’s conclusions. Surrounding residents were never informed about any of them, despite an Air Force vow that residents would always be informed.

Pryor and Dole went to Congress to push an amendment to the Defense Department appropriation that called for an early-warning system around all the silos. The amendment passed. Three days later, on Sept. 18, 1980, the missile in a silo at Damascus exploded, blowing the nuclear warhead and two technicians into the air. One of the men died almost instantly and the other’s health was permanently impaired. Two years later, the Pentagon decided to abandon the Titans for more advanced, and perhaps safer, missile systems. But Pryor’s negativity about defense weaponry and spending took a political toll, at least nationally.

The payoff came in 1984, when the White House and the party leadership persuaded Congressman Ed Bethune of Searcy—the Pryors and Bethunes were social friends—to run against Pryor with the promise of financial backing. More than 20 Reagan administration officials and Republican senators came to Arkansas for fund-raising events for Bethune. Rev. Jerry Falwell, the right-wing leader, came to Arkansas to call for Pryor’s defeat. Pryor eschewed the same strategy, feeling that Democrats from out of the state would hurt rather than help him. Bethune’s ads said Pryor had voted against the popular former movie star, Ronnie Reagan, on 77 percent of the issues in the Senate. The Saturday before the election Reagan, who was approaching a landslide win of his own, made a speech at the packed Excelsior Hotel ballroom. 

“Don’t send me back to Washington alone,” Reagan said with the smiling Bethune beside him. Reagan carried Arkansas with 60 percent of the vote. Pryor got 57 percent.

In 1994, Pryor ran for re-election and no Democrat or Republican opposed him—a rarity in any state. Betty White, a homeless woman, ran as a write-in and got 832 votes. (Pryor’s son Mark also had no opposition, except for a Green Party candidate, in his second race for the same seat in 2008.)

Pryor spent much of his second term fighting for a taxpayer’s bill of rights, to curb abuses by the Internal Revenue Service. Reagan signed Pryor’s bill into law in 1988.

Pryor’s last crusade was against the pharmaceutical industry. In 1990, he introduced the Pharmaceutical Access and Prudent Purchasing Act, which sought to end the spiral of drug prices; it would have allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drug makers on prices that would be charged to Medicare and Medicaid patients. The industry fought back. 

Pryor had a massive heart attack on April 15, 1991. The illness hobbled him for the rest of his career. Majority Leader George Mitchell and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas took up the cause of drug pricing but they never were able to pass a bill. President Joe Biden finally took up Pryor’s cause in 2023.

Another passionate reform effort was to end the electoral college so that the winner of the popular vote would always be the next president. The most important job in the whole democracy was president, but it also was the only political job in the country, from members of the county quorum court to the top, that might go to the loser. In 1992, sensing that the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot could tilt the election of George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton regardless of the size of Clinton’s election victory, Pryor again introduced a Senate resolution for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college and assure that election winners always took office. The Senate never sent the amendment to the states for ratification. Only one election loser had ever failed to become president—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 —but two subsequent losers, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016, became president. Trump lost the actual balloting to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

Like Bumpers, Pryor found the relationships in Congress profoundly different after radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh and Republican House leader Newt Gingrich turned American politics into a war of saintly Republicans vs. evil Democrats. Friendly Republicans departed and were replaced by politicians who called Democrats socialists and radicals who were out to destroy the country. Pryor did not run again in 1996; Bumpers made the same choice in 1998. The Capitol, they said, was no longer an enjoyable place to be.

Pryor’s retirement did not end his engagement with politics and government. In 2000, he was director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught courses at the University of Arkansas and gave his unexpended campaign funds to form the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the university. He was the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at Little Rock, serving for two years. After the murder of Bill Gwatney in 2008, he was chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party for a spell. In 2009, Gov. Mike Beebe appointed him to a 10-year term on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, where he did not enhance his popularity by protesting the lavish spending on athletics and stadium additions. A massive stroke in 2016 curtailed his activities for good.

Survivors include his widow, Barbara; his sons and their wives, David Jr. (Judith), Mark (Joi) and Scott (Diane); his grandchildren, Hampton, Adams, Porter and Devin; and his great-grandson, Raven. 

The post In Memoriam appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

My Papaw is no longer living, may God rest his soul. But if he were, I am certain he would be ashamed of what has become of the Grand Old Party. Papaw was a hardworking business man with stories for days of growing up on a Louisiana farm with dozens of cousins. He always spoke to me and my cousin about hard work, individual responsibility, and the value of a dollar.

My papaw fostered within me a sense of accomplishment and pride in any work I was doing. When I grew up and became a voter, these values, to me, reflected the heart of the GOP.

So what changed?

If you pressed me for an answer to that question, I’d have to say it was Donald Trump.

At some point in the last eight years I started to realize that my family members were deviating from the conservatism that raised us. With each new story of a disgusting joke, sexual assault allegation, or racist soundbite I would watch for a shift — Would they take their Trump flag down? Might they stop sharing Trump’s outlandish messages on social media? Could they be trusted to talk about social issues without parroting his deceitful talking points?

For some – too many – of them, the answers were no, no, and no. And that is the heartbreaking place we find ourselves in 2024.

Donald Trump has amassed a following of millions who believe everything he tells them, will do anything he asks, and even cause harm and distress to their own families for the sake of his mission.

There is no word for that besides “cult,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Donald Trump is going to be the Presidential nominee for the Republican Party. His influence will only grow, and the impact on our families will continue to be traumatic. Here in Arkansas, it’s especially difficult to confront the loss.

Trump’s face is on billboards across the state and the gospel of his elusive plan to make America great is preached in many of our churches. “Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?” is a litmus test when political conversations arise. Answer a definitive, “no,” and you might lose another friend, or miss your chance to make a new one.

I know I am not alone in the complex grief of losing a loved one to the cult of Trump. There are thousands of us in states like Arkansas. We aren’t trying to change anyone’s mind— we just want our people back.

The post Losing Loved Ones to the Cult of Trump appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Come to Arkansas and find seemingly contradictory values represented: hospitality and rugged individualism, grit and obedience, candor and a hefty dose of minding your own business. We are a beautiful collection of perspectives, wouldn’t you agree?

Arkansans are also stubbornly proud, especially in their mistrust of government. Rural Southerners have an especially unique skepticism of government intervention, which is as ingrained in us as the right to bear arms and looking out for your neighbors.  

But despite our diverse opinions and our indignation with nosy government, we have a problem standing up to overreach with one specific issue. Why? Well, it’s simply impolite to talk about certain things.

Chief among the “impolite” topics is the issue of reproductive freedom. In other words: abortion. Or women’s healthcare. Or murdering babies. Or the right to choose… depending on who you’re asking. 

Earlier this week, I read that the Arkansas Abortion Amendment was certified by the Attorney General. According to Arkansans for Limited Government, the group behind the Amendment’s effort to restore some abortion access in the state, politicians make for bad doctors. Regardless of how one feels about abortion, the group argues, we don’t need politicians regulating reproductive decisions. We don’t need government in the exam room, so to speak, regulating things as personal as pregnancy.

I cannot help but agree.

Regulating people’s healthcare, especially a woman’s organs, is not only a divergence from our cherished values of personal freedom and individual liberty but a stark example of burdensome—even deadly—government overreach. 

The notion of limited government has been etched into our consciousness and our traditions, but the regulation of reproductive healthcare challenges this ethos. It forces us to question whether a government that we already view with suspicion should extend its reach into the most private corners of our lives. 

Personal independence is not just a value, but a way of life in Arkansas, and interference should be seen as an affront to the principles that make us who we are—people in control of our own lives. Personal liberty means we alone decide our destiny. And we alone know what is best for ourselves and our families. 

The regulation of abortion is a logical paradox, even outside of a morality paradigm, because of its relevance to government overreach. And I’d like you to bear with me for a minute. I know it’s a polarizing issue; I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about how they morally feel about abortion. What I’m aiming to do is reinvigorate a healthy skepticism of government.

I would never presume to know what is best for another person’s health or for the choices their family must make.

Now extend this to the Arkansas state government, which has proven that it  cannot be trusted on matters of the collective or individual good. When the government regulates our healthcare and steps into our doctors’ offices, the government undermines our trust, implying that the entity of the state knows better than we do when it comes to decisions about our own lives. This is antithetical to what it means to be an Arkansan—a self-reliant, responsible individual.

And speaking of responsibility: government overreach, well-intentioned as it may be, often brings about its own unintended consequences. In Arkansas, regulations disproportionately affect our rural communities. It is our duty to ensure that any policy reflects a commitment to fairness and justice for our rural communities rather than perpetuating already awful health disparities between urban dwellers and rural folk.

I’m not here to change minds on how people feel about abortion. Your judgment of the issue is yours, and yours alone. You are entitled to your opinion, and oftentimes, those opinions are rooted in compelling and valid experiences. 

No, this is not about changing minds. But it’s about keeping the government out of our homes and hospital rooms, out of conversations with our families and our doctors.

It’s not my business, or the government’s, to know the myriad of factors going into a person’s decision regarding the trajectory of their life. I don’t know if a person was raped. I don’t know if a person suffered a miscarriage. I don’t know if a family got a terrible diagnosis. 

The point is, I don’t know what’s best for you. 

The government doesn’t know either and it sure as hell doesn’t have any business telling people what’s good or right. That’s between them, their doctor, and the Good Lord above. 

Let’s get back to our Arkansas roots and keep government where it should be: out of our doctor’s office and back in the business of governing policy, not people’s lives. 

The post Mind your Biscuits: The Case Against Government Overreach in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Conversations about how to make our state and country better have become a constant tit-for-tat exercise in futility — or worse, loved ones lose contact altogether.

Through all of this grief, I can’t help but think “Arkansas, we are better than this.”

We do not have to accept the division and vitriol we’re fed these days. Arkansans are capable of coming together like no one else I know. 

That fact has been on glorious display lately as we’ve watched conservative farmers and liberal lawyers lock arms around an issue dear to every single one of us: transparency in government.

Arkansans have had a uniquely substantial right to know how our government is using its time and resources — that is to say, our tax dollars — since the first Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1967. Then-Governor Winthrop Rockefeller considered it one of the greatest achievements of his administration. The law faced legal challenges, but the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of a broad interpretation that favored transparency. That ruling has guided our state’s focus on transparency for years.

“It is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner. We have no hesitation in asserting our conviction that the Freedom of Information Act was passed wholly in the public interest and is to be liberally interpreted to the end that its praiseworthy purposes may be achieved.” Associate Justice George Rose Smith

But you don’t need a history lesson to understand the main idea here: Do we want the government to be able to keep secrets from its people, or do we believe that the government should be open and accountable to the people who created it?

Arkansans have made our answer clear, and we did it by coming together in ways we haven’t seen in years.

It’s hard to know where we go from here, and we know that the fight against government secrecy isn’t over. But for once, the fight won’t be among neighbors and family members. The fight for government transparency will be between us, the people of Arkansas, and a select few of the powerful.

When the people of Arkansas stand together, we’ve already won.

The post Together, We’ve Already Won appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Hope has yet again produced a public servant of whom all of Arkansas can be proud. Do our two US Senators know where Hope is?

April 14, 2023, was a perfect spring day in Indianapolis, Indiana. At the Birch Bayh Courthouse, enveloped in marble walls, depression-era murals, and octagonal vestibules, a formal investiture ceremony was held for Judge Doris Pryor —  proud daughter of Hope, Arkansas. 

For over 130 years, white men have dominated the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. From its first session back in 1891 to early 2023, the court has only seen two Black judges. Judge Doris Pryor is the third and the first Black judge from Indiana to ever serve on the 7th Circuit Court. 

The Hope native was not the only Arkansan in attendance that spring day. The Chief Judge that performed her swearing in was the Honorable Lavenski Smith, also a native of Hope. 

My good friends — the Honorable Jim Gunter, former Associate Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and his wife Judee — were also present at the ceremony. The Gunters made the ten-hour trek through America’s heartland from Hope to Indianapolis to witness Judge Pryor’s historic investiture. 

But it was more than the judicial backdrop that led Jim and Judee Gunter to Indiana that day. In a curious, only-Arkansas kind of way, Judee Gunter taught Doris (Clark) Pryor in her math classes at Hope High School. Doris was an honor student and on occasion baby-sat Judee’s son, Guy. Like it is in small town, Arkansas, The Gunters were friends with Doris’ parents, James and Linda Clark.

It was poetic; the people of our state know how to have one another’s backs. So it was a “Hope Fest” on that 72º day at the Birch Bayh Courthouse in downtown Indianapolis. 

Hope, the small southwestern town in Hempstead County, has a knack for churning out talented, accomplished Arkansans. In recent memory, Hope has been home to one president (Bill Clinton), two governors (Clinton and Mike Huckabee), a Supreme Court Justice (Gunter), and one Presidential Chief of Staff and hugely successful businessman (Mack McLarty). There’s also the world’s top rated stereo speaker manufacturer and Hope native (Paul Klipsch). And of course the first female country and western singer to sell a million single records was Patsy Montana; she grew up in a small community near Hope.

In keeping with the Hope effect, Judge Doris Pryor graduated cum laude from the University of Central Arkansas in 1999 and worked for a year in her hometown before applying to law school. After graduating from the University of Indiana Mauer School of Law, Pryor returned to Arkansas to work as a public defender. Later on, she served two clerkships for federal judges — Leon Holmes and Lavenski Smith — both appointed by Republican presidents, a fact that would serve as a twist of fate in Judge Pryor’s Senate confirmation hearing.

To say Judge Doris Pryor has good legal chops is like saying the summers in South Arkansas are a tad warm. Judge Pryor has an incredible background in the legal community; she served a four year term as the National Security Chief for the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Indiana, and she was a federal prosecutor for 12 years. Judge Pryor is licensed to practice law in multiple states and was a U.S. Magistrate Judge for four years. Maybe it’s the Hope effect, but it’s also Doris Pryor’s aptitude, drive, and dedication to her vocation that led to such impressive achievements. 

Her most recent feather in cap is the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals nomination, which came from President Biden last May after a seat on the court opened. Indiana, like Arkansas, is run by Republicans, who hold both the Governor’s office and a supermajority in their state legislature. They also have two Republican US Senators, Todd Young and Mike Braun. 

If the Senators wanted to play politics, they could have blocked Judge Pryor’s nomination by refusing to give her a “blue slip” for it to advance. “Blue-slip” is the consultation between the President and the home-state Senators for judicial nominees. The process is used to ensure that nominees, in this case Judge Pryor, are up to snuff — in other words, mainstream and well qualified. In this case, it’s a bi-partisan approach to vetting nominees, resulting in the best-suited candidate for the position at hand.

But Senators Young and Braun did not do that. In fact, they did quite the opposite. When Senator Young introduced her to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July of last year, he specifically expressed his appreciation of the President’s willingness to consult with him and Senator Braun on Judge Pryor’s nomination. It was a heartening display of respect and cooperation from members of both parties. 

During the confirmation, Senator Young was effusive in his praise of Judge Pryor.  He mentioned that she has experience on all sides of the courtroom, that she understands the difference between the role of an advocate and the role of a judge, and that she has know-how on both the criminal and civil side of the docket. She was unanimously rated qualified by the American Bar Association. 

Doris Pryor, the daughter of Hope, AR, shone bright. Recognized as experienced, agile, and of course qualified, Judge Pryor was confirmed on a 60-31 vote in the Senate last December. That roll call vote made her one of the few federal judges nominated by Biden to be confirmed on a strong bipartisan vote. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell voted to confirm Judge Pryor. So did Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.

Hope had yet again produced a public servant of whom all of Arkansas could be proud. So what happened to Doris Pryor’s home state senators on this vote? Astonishingly, neither Senator Tom Cotton nor Senator John Boozman could bring themselves to vote for this highly qualified achiever from the tiny town of Hope, AR. Had she done something to offend? Decide a case they didn’t like? Affiliated with a group that didn’t meet the smell test? With so much experience and such broad bipartisan support, the move by the Arkansas senators is puzzling. 

When Ross Perot was running for president years ago he appeared on the Larry King show a lot. When discussing some public policy with which he disagreed, Perot would often say, “It’s just sad Larry.” That’s the way I feel about our political leaders. We may never know why the senators from Arkansas made a point of voting “no” on Judge Pryor’s confirmation. A quick internet search reveals no quotes or statements explaining either man’s thinking. 

Judge Doris Pryor is a home state gal with all pluses and absolutely no minuses — even Senators Graham and McConnell see it. Arkansas, including its US Senators, should be more than proud to have Doris Pryor at the helm of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Here in the mid-south, we celebrate the accomplishments of our most talented sons and daughters. 

I wonder if Mr. Cotton or Mr. Boozman plan to show up at the Hope Watermelon Festival this year? It might be a little chilly this August, if you catch my drift.

The post What’s in the water in Hope? appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

My journey with lung disease began in the Spring of 2022 as I noticed subtle changes in my heart rate, energy level, and appetite.  I also developed a wicked cough that became much worse at the end of the year.

As a self-employed Illustrator and Graphic Designer, I am accustomed to working extremely hard and hustling non-stop.  It’s typical for me to end my year exhausted and burned out.  This was different.

My doctor visits didn’t reveal any obvious culprits.  Some bloodwork indicated that I had low iron.  I was prescribed iron supplements and spent the next two months trying to function in an incredibly compromised state.  

By the end of 2022, it was obvious that I was getting much worse.

In January of 2023, I began a series of lab work that went on for weeks.  I had dozens of vials of blood taken as well as numerous chest X-rays and C/T scans.  The x-rays and scans revealed my lungs were enlarged as well as my lymph nodes.  My physician had various specialists involved and they all came to the same conclusion-they had no idea what was going on.

By February I was clearly fading fast.  My body wasn’t accepting food and even the most basic human activities required prep work and recovery.  Showering demanded I store up my energy, sit in the shower and do my best to avoid fainting. 

I’ve always been a very independent person.  Realizing I could barely rise from the toilet without help was a profound and shocking blow.  

As I saw my doctors multiple times per week they witnessed my unspooling in real time and became increasingly concerned.  On numerous occasions, they debated hospitalizing me simply to stabilize me and keep me alive.  Without a diagnosis, I wasn’t given any sort of treatment since whatever they prescribed could potentially make my condition worse.  

I’ve jokingly told people that I may not have been at death’s door, but I was certainly walking down the hallway.

The sensation of losing yourself bit by bit every day is equal parts terrifying and liberating.  Rather than feeling raw terror, as you might assume, I felt an unexpected sense of calm.  

This isn’t to suggest I wasn’t scared or unnerved but somewhere within myself, those feelings were combatted by a sense of peace and determination.  During this period, I was adrift from time and any shared reality with the world.

My daily existence was stripped down to its most primal essence.  I was focused on my wife, and my kids, doing what I could to survive and accepting my lack of control over the matter.  

Most of this time I was alone, bedridden, and isolated, with my life existing almost exclusively in my mind.  I lacked the energy to read, or verbally communicate easily.  This time was mainly spent taking inventory of my life and utilizing tools I’d developed in therapy to remain positive and grateful.

I prepared final goodbyes with family and friends, considered my obituary, and did what I could to make dealing with my unfinished business as easy as possible for my wife and kids.

At this time, I was placed on full-time oxygen which stopped my fading and provided a small amount of stabilization.  My Pulmonologist ordered a surgical biopsy to finally determine what was occurring in my lungs.  I was also ordered to have an endoscopy to diagnose my worsening cough and a colonoscopy to rule out cancer.

On Tuesday, February 28 I entered Washington Regional Medical Center to have my endoscopy and colonoscopy.  Due to my dependence on oxygen, these procedures had to be done in a hospital with anesthesia.  Despite waking up with ten minutes left in my colonoscopy (Yes!  You read that correctly!) the procedures went well.  

I entered WRMC on Thursday, March 2, and had a surgical biopsy of my lungs that was done with the DaVinci surgical robot.  Thanks to this technology my surgery was less invasive than I’d feared.  The recovery was still extremely painful and due to issues with my drain port required my staying in the hospital for 4 days.

The following weeks involved a painful recovery from surgery with a comical low point of my waking up to my drain port wound leaking like the world’s most disturbing garden statue.

Once my diagnosis was found I was immediately placed on an extremely high dose of steroids.  

Within a week I felt the effects of the steroids.  Although still severely limited I no longer felt like I was fading, but that I was coming back to life.

The lung disease I’m fighting is relatively mysterious and there aren’t obvious answers for me.  I have no idea what caused the disease, or what my long-term prognosis is.  Living with ambiguity is part of my life now.

I’m learning every week what I can and can’t do.  Although I see progress, it’s small, incremental changes and my desire to get back to normal must be controlled.   My limited state is what’s normal, for now at the very least.

Thanks to my wife I have very good health insurance.  However, even with this insurance, we face a mountain of bills and economic uncertainty.

If my treatment doesn’t go well, I may have to go to specialized clinics that deal with this specific disease.  Although I expect a year or more of recovery to see what my “new normal” is I have no idea when I’ll be able to work again or how we’re going to deal with the financial challenges ahead of us.

What I do know is that with my phenomenal wife by my side and the support of my wonderful family and community, I’ll find a way.

Being able to receive the incredible amount of love I’ve been given during this experience has changed me forever.  Outside of survival my focus going forward is sharing that love as much as I can because no one survives alone.

Chad Maupin has been an Illustrator and Graphic Designer since the Clinton Administration. To learn more about his work visit www.big-bot.com. You can also find him on social media: @bigbotdesign.

To donate toward Chad’s medical costs, visit his Go Fund Me page.

The post No One Survives Alone appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

The greatest dynasty in collegiate athletic history? The Arkansas Razorbacks.

Over 150 years ago, President Andrew Johnson began the tradition of hosting athletic champions when he invited baseball’s Washington Nationals and Brooklyn Atlantics to join him in a White House ceremony.

In the age of television, we’ve made a big production out of the White House hosting Super Bowl winners, NBA champions, and the college equivalents. And they might bring in the women’s gymnastics team if they win Olympic gold. 

But track and field? No, not them. Not the men and women wearing singlets, running around an oval, jumping or throwing heavy objects.

A few years ago Stadium Talk told the story of America’s greatest college sports dynasties. Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama and Notre Dame football teams all received mentions, as did the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball teams. Penn State’s men’s wrestling and women’s volleyball teams. And the Connecticut and Tennessee women’s basketball powerhouses under Gene Auriemma and Pat Summit, respectively. 

How about that dynamite Minnesota women’s ice hockey dynasty that won 6 national championships? Bet you didn’t know the Trinity College Bantams men’s squash program won 17 national titles. To quote the author, Jennifer Studer Daley, “no other team on this list comes close to touching the number of titles that belong to the Iowa Hawkeyes wrestling program.” They won twenty three.

Ms. Daley is correct; no other team on her list comes close. That’s because Ms. Daley’s list does not include the greatest dynasty in American collegiate athletic history: the Arkansas Razorback Track and Field teams, which have won a collective 49 national titles in track and field and cross country, 42 under legendary coach John McDonnell.  

To be fair to Ms. Daley, the iconic Sports Illustrated magazine printed a similar story, and also forgot to mention the Razorbacks.

National spotlights on track and field usually focus on Oregon, where legendary NIKE founder Phil Knight spent his running days. Oregon has won 32 national titles, which is no slouch.

It’s also no Arkansas.

The ancient Greek and Roman empires were the backdrop for the first organized athletic competitions, which evolved into track and field as we know it today. The decathlon is thought of as the supreme test of speed, skill, and endurance to test the best all-around athletes. And we celebrate the marathon today with road races around the world that give everyday all-comers a chance for glory. 

The White House is not going to invite the national champion Arkansas men’s and women’s track teams for a visit. But that does not mean that Arkansans should pat our tracksters and coaches on the head and send them on their way. They deserve better.

In Arkansas, Football is king. Basketball is second. Baseball is third. No need to argue any of that. Would football or basketball recruiting be harmed if we started making a big deal over Track and Field? If the university became known as a track school? No, Track and Field prominence would diminish nothing in football or basketball. If anything, it would make the U of A look more cosmopolitan, adding to the perception that NWA is a sophisticated cultural corridor, complete with spectacular art museums, world class bicycling trails, and a modern medical school with a new way of thinking.  

Hot Springs has impressed me with its presentation of offerings, which celebrate the city’s history as home to some of Major League Baseball teams’ spring training during the 1930s to early 1950s. In February, the city dedicated only the third known statue of Babe Ruth (the other two are in Baltimore and Japan). There’s a baseball trail with plaques depicting the exploits of famous major leaguers. Babe Ruth is said to have hit two of the longest home runs he ever hit during spring training in Hot Springs. The city hosts an annual event bringing in retired major league players to speak on baseball then and now. All of this over spring training from long ago.

I’m not in the PR business, but I think I know a lost opportunity when I see one. When you are the greatest in history at something, step up and tell your story. No one else is going to do your crowing for you. And in the case of Track and Field, it is not even a close call. 

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I know about Anne Frank because my teacher mother put the diary in my hands when I was in fifth grade. As I grew closer to the age of Anne when she lived in the Secret Annex, my ability to comprehend the story and interest in her grew. By the time I was in college I was hellbent on visiting the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, so Stone and I backpacked there when we graduated, and we took our kids as soon as they were old enough even though we really could not afford the trip.

I am glad that Arkansas collectively appreciates the importance of teaching about the Holocaust. A bill proposed in our legislature, if approved, will require Arkansas public schools to observe Holocaust Education Week the last week of January, in keeping with the United Nations designation of January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

My goal when I speak to students, in a nutshell, is empathy. We start with macro-facts, like the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, close to twice the population of Arkansas. And then we put that number under a microscope and examine closely the one short life of a child the same age as Heathcliff’s 8^th graders. The girl who moved from Germany to Holland to be safe. Who received a small diary covered in red plaid for her 13^th birthday; who was sassy, friendly, and funny; who cut out pictures of movie stars from a magazine to tape to her wall. The girl who, with her family, would leave home in layers of clothes with nothing but a small bag, go into hiding, and stay hunkered down in a tiny apartment in the middle of Amsterdam for two years. Anne would never go outside during that time, or see a movie, or run, or play, or speak to her friends. She would be forced onto a train’s cattle car and taken to a Polish concentration camp. Separated from her parents. Anne Frank would die a few days after her sister at age 15 of starvation and typhus, contracted from the squalid conditions of still another concentration camp in the Netherlands only a short time before it was liberated.

This is painful history we all need to learn. I am scared of junior high students. It takes a special kind of person to teach in a junior high school day in and day out and I am not that special. But these students who might not listen to me about anything else listen to the story of Anne Frank, because they see themselves in her. And the hope in that for a teacher is the same as Otto Frank’s hope in publishing his daughter’s diary: that it will have an effect on the rest of their lives, and insofar as it is possible within their own circumstances, they will work for unity and peace.

Why is it easy for Arkansas lawmakers to agree on the urgency of teaching the Holocaust in all of its darkness and yet when it comes to our own state’s and nation’s terrible sins there is a debate? This contradiction is something we see in the governor’s executive order to ban so-called CRT, which is not being taught in our schools, but nonetheless sends a message that incites fear about teaching basic historical facts on things like slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. 

It is also clear in legislation that would end Affirmative Action in Arkansas. The phrase “Affirmative Action” came from President John F. Kennedy in 1961. He declared by executive order that government contractors must “take affirmative action to ensure applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” It was a way to try to help people who previously had not had equal opportunity under the law for a couple of hundred years. To acknowledge that as a country and attempt to right that wrong by giving them the chance to catch up. I love it when humans do this—acknowledge wrong and try to make it right—and it makes me proud to see America repent of past sins. It is healthy, responsible, and right. It is often a messy process, not an exact science, and we should err on the side of mercy.

But Senator Dan Sullivan seems to believe 60 years is enough time for catching up, and that white men are now victims of discrimination. His bill to end Affirmative Action in Arkansas, SB 71, passed through committee and will go to the Senate floor.

Dr. Jim Ross, historian, writes that “the philosophical assumption behind Affirmative Action was to identify classes of Americans who had been left behind because they did not have the same access to capital development, education, or political influence that the majority had.  It was accepted as a historical fact that because of slavery and Jim Crow laws, African American and Latino business had not grown like they would have in a free and open system where everyone had equal opportunity.” It worries me to imagine schools afraid to teach those facts—and that our lawmakers in Arkansas are no longer accepting of those truths as fact. That they claim somehow 60 years of Affirmative Action has finished the work, when there is not evidence to support such a conclusion. It will be finished when groups marginalized by history’s failings are represented in numbers that correspond to the percentage of those folks who exist in Arkansas. Until then, we still have discrimination, and should keep Affirmative Action until what was wrong is made right. Even if it takes 200 years.

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• Our government only survives with an informed electorate.

We have to be informed citizens.  We have to pay attention to current events, political activity, issues, candidates.  We have to be discerning in our news intake.  We have to recognize propaganda.   We have to constantly think, “Who is telling us this information, and what do they want us to think/do/feel?”  We have to engage our brains.  We have to also remember that it’s not always about ME but about US, and we need to think from not only our perspective but from others’ perspectives.  

• Government is a SOCIAL CONTRACT, not a BUSINESS.

Government is not meant to make a profit.  It is not meant to squirrel away money.  It’s not meant to squander it, either.  Government officials MUST think of ALL their citizens, not only their party.  They must allocate tax revenue to use for the best of their society, not for the most privileged or the most powerful.  Creating a surplus from federal funds meant to improve lives of all citizens during a pandemic and then handing it to the richest of its citizens isn’t good governance, as an example.  It doesn’t benefit the majority or the most in need.  We have to think collectively.  We have to think of each other, not just those who benefit us financially or politically.  We must remember that the opposite of governance is anarchy.  

• Our elected officials must EARN our VOTE.  They must be ACCOUNTABLE to ALL our citizens, not just their party.

We have the responsibility to vote in officials who will work to benefit all our citizens, not just hold a spot for the majority of the party.  Celebrity does not equate to good candidacy.  Just because you recognize the candidate does not qualify him/her as a deserving candidate.  We must listen to his/her words, actions, history.  We need to elect citizens who actually live among us, live in our state, interact with our citizens.  We must elect officials who are concerned with the issues of the majority of our citizens, not just the most powerful and the wealthiest, the lobbyists with the most influence.  We must pay attention to the words and actions of candidates, not just the designated letter behind their names.  Who will represent us the best?  Who has spent the most time among the citizens of the state?  Who seems the most engaged with issues which impact our daily lives?  Whose ads seem the most genuine, positive, issue-oriented?  Campaigning for education which impacts all our students and then advocating vouchers which benefits 8% of the students in the state isn’t best representing the citizens of one’s district.  Not living in the state in which you’re campaigning and holding no public appearances or town hall meetings in the years of your term does not best benefit your constituents.  It benefits you.  Not showing up for a sponsored debate in the state is lazy.  It’s entitled.  It doesn’t speak well for us, the voters, who let a candidate get by with such action.  We should demand accountability.  We should demand a platform.  We should demand and pay attention to debate.  We as informed voters need to pay attention to the words and actions of our elected officials.  We need to vote for the people who best represent all of us.  

• We Are A Democracy.

It’s been said on some media that we are a constitutional republic as a rebuke when someone states that we are a democracy.  These two terms are not mutually exclusive.  A constitutional republic, which we are, is a TYPE of DEMOCRACY, which we also are.  A democratic government relies on its citizens to dictate policy through elections.  We must be an informed electorate.  We must recognize these terms and the fact that we are being manipulated by people trying to divide us with misinformation according to these terms.  Reference the first bullet.

• One of the tenets of our democracy is egalitarianism:  One person, one vote.

In order for our government to function effectively, we must vote.  We must allow every citizen to vote.  We must make it easy to vote.  We must not limit voting.  Everyone’s vote must count and count equally.  Manipulating the vote is un-American; laws which limit voting in minority areas are un-American.  The current Arkansas proposal #2 limiting the access to citizens’ initiatives on the ballot is essentially un-American.   In voting for it, we are ceding our power as voting citizens.

• Another tenet of our democracy is Majority Rule.

The opinions of the majority should dictate the law.  Gerrymandering congressional districts to limit minority votes is un-American.  Using the filibuster to limit the proposal of laws that the majority of the country wants enacted is un-American.  Holding open judicial seats until one’s party can control appointments is un-American.  The Hastert Rule in Congress of not proposing laws unless the majority of the majority will vote for them led to not proposing law unless the President will sign it.  Both ideas go against the American ideal that each branch of government is equal and independent, and that the Founders created a system of checks and balances in our government so that no one branch gained an undo amount of power over another.  Ballot initiative #1, which would give the state legislature the ability to call themselves into session, goes against this tenet and is essentially un-American.  We need to vote for leaders who are concerned with the majority of the citizenry, not leaders who have tried to manipulate the system to gain power.  

No democracy can exist without an informed electorate, said Thomas Jefferson.  The less we understand about our government, the more power we cede to those intent on steering us away from a democracy.  We have a job to do.  Use your power to vote accordingly.  

The post <strong>It’s Your Job!</strong> appeared first on Arkansas Strong.