Huckabee Page 4

  CHAPTER 3

  ONE DAY IN 1955

  August 24, 1955

  None of us got to choose how we came into this world. We can’t choose our parents, our hometown, or the physician who ushers us into this life.1

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  MICHAEL DALE HUCKABEE WAS BORN ON WEDNESDAY, August 24, 1955, at Julia Chester Hospital, the same hospital where Bill Clinton was born. The doctor who delivered Huckabee, Dr. George Wright, is the same doctor local residents of Hope suspect was the biological father of Bill Clinton. An entire chapter of the book In Search of Bill Clinton documents a factual case for this claim.2 If true, it stands as one of the most fascinating overlaps between the lives of Huckabee and Clinton.

  Had Huckabee waited just one more month to be born, he could have enjoyed the splendor of the brand-new Hempstead County Memorial Hospital, which opened just weeks after his birth. He may even have been held or kissed by then governor Orval Faubus, who came to Hope to dedicate the hospital upon its opening. As it was, Huckabee became the agent of change for health care in Hope, seeing how he was one of the last babies born in the old digs. The town converted the old hospital into a nursing home, and then eventually tore it down. A funeral home now sits on the site. Which is to say, people in Hope old enough to have been born in Chester might have the distinction of having their births and deaths commemorated on the exact same patch of ground.

  Governor Faubus had just been elected to his first term of office that year, and he would go on to serve the state for twelve years. As Huckabee turned two, Faubus earned himself a place on the front cover of the September 1957 issue of Time magazine because of his defiance of court-ordered desegregation.3 Three weeks earlier, Faubus had ordered units of the Arkansas National Guard into Little Rock to “maintain or restore order and protect the lives and property of the citizens.”4 Nine black students were to begin classes at the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, but segregationists determined to prevent this from happening. Faubus, acting on both racist and political impulses, argued that it wouldn’t be possible to maintain law and order if forced integration were to take place. Therefore, he said, “the schools in Pulaski County, for the time being, must be operated on the same basis as they have been operated in the past.”5

  President Eisenhower devised a different strategy. On September 24, he ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army into Little Rock, and he federalized the Arkansas National Guard. The ten thousand members of the Guard would report to the president, not the governor. Faubus responded by shutting down Little Rock’s high schools for the 1958–1959 school year.

  Historians debate the meaning of the 1950s. Some describe the decade as a peaceful time of building highways, jobs, and families. Others paint a less rosy picture, describing the decade as ten years spent ignoring urgent social problems for the benefit of keeping the economic wheels turning. In 1975, Ronald Reagan commented on what he considered to be the strengths of Eisenhower’s administration—and the 1950s in general. Challenging the prevailing view of Eisenhower, Reagan wrote:

  [Consider] the “Eisenhower years”—the era of the ’50s when we are supposed to believe an entire college generation stagnated,—probably because they didn’t burn down the library. Well, Ike ended a war in Korea that had killed tens of thousands of our young men and for the rest of his eight years, no young Americans were being shot at anywhere in the world. He also halted dead in its tracks the advance of communism. Big government didn’t get any bigger and a citizen could go for an evening stroll in the park without getting bopped over the head. Wages went up steadily but prices remained the same. Steak was 85 cents a lb. and a gallon of gas was only 28 cents. You could be well dressed in a $50 suit and $9 shoes. The work day & the work week grew shorter and our taxes were reduced. Suddenly more kids were going to college, more families were buying homes, never had a nation’s wealth been so widely distributed and we were so strong that no one in the world even thought about challenging us.6

  In closing, Reagan could not have been more clear about how the nation could find an “old path” on which to walk out of the moral morass of the late 1960s and first half of the 1970s: “Well as I say you can make up your own mind about the images versus the man but maybe we ought to go back and see what they did that we aren’t doing.”7

  So what did the 1950s mean? For Mike Huckabee’s parents and grandparents, the 1950s represented stability, tranquility, and routine. By 1955, Mrs. Virgil Huckabee (Mike’s grandmother Ernie Jo) began showing up in the newspaper on a monthly basis, thanks to her participation and leadership in various ladies groups: “The WMS [Women’s Missionary Society] of Garrett Memorial met in the home of Mrs. Virgil Huckabee.”8 For Ernie Jo, who would be a major presence in Mike’s life, weekly routines revolved around domestic responsibilities and church activities at Garrett Memorial Baptist Church. Now in her fifties, she had a teenage daughter, a son (Dorsey) and new daughter-in-law (Mae) approaching thirty, and a toddler granddaughter (Pat). Soon, Mike would join the family. Life was good.

  The fireman’s pay was not Dorsey’s only income, as he also worked on automobiles in his off hours. Mike remembers the family finances being modest but workable for a frugal family, and he learned from his parents to pay cash and avoid debt.9

  An essential part of making ends meet meant practicing good home economics, skills handed down to both Dorsey and Mae. And since one could never stop learning new skills—or passing them down to younger women—the “Melrose Home Demonstration Club” became a regular event on Ernie Jo’s calendar. On Valentine’s Day 1955, the “HDC,” as these clubs were known throughout the state, met for their monthly meeting. You don’t have to wonder about the highlights of the meeting; they were promptly printed in the Hope Star. For example, “Mrs. C. J. Barnes gave an interesting demonstration on trends in furniture arrangements.” And, “Trends in window treatment will be the demonstration given at the March meeting.” One other Huckabee-historic point of business that month: “The club welcomed Mrs. Virgil Huckabee as a new member.”10 Then, in June, Ernie Jo hosted the club’s meeting in her own home, as the ladies discussed “How to make a collar.”11 Over the next thirty years, the newspaper recorded the monthly involvement of “Mrs. Virgil Huckabee” in such meetings. The reported discussions maintained their domestic focus throughout the decades, and Ernie Jo enjoyed such pursuits.

  And why shouldn’t she? Sure, when Betty Friedan polled her former female Smith College classmates in 1957, she discovered many of them were unhappy with the limitations of domestic life. Friedan took her interviews and wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, ushering in second-wave feminism. The feminist trees of the 1960s were planted as seeds in the 1950s, but Smith College in Massachusetts is a long way removed from Hope, Arkansas.

  Friedan’s nascent critique of women’s roles would shape the conversation about gender for the entire baby boomer generation, continuing today in the endless “How to Juggle Career and Home” magazine articles, or in words like, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” stated by Hillary Clinton during Bill’s 1992 campaign. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”12

  Friedan, four years older than Mae Huckabee, enjoyed the intellectual open doors she had been given, knowing that most women, past and present, did not have such opportunities. Mae had longed to go to college, but the large family of younger siblings demanded a different course of life: work. But the people who knew her, as well as the record of her advancement in the workforce, testify to her strong intellect and giftings. It is fascinating to consider how, though Huckabee’s grandmother filled a traditional domestic role, his mother was stuck rather in the middle. She was neither a traditional stay-at-home mother nor a college-educated professional. And Janet Huckabee’s mother al
so missed out on the “Leave It to Beaver” experience of motherhood, having been abandoned by her husband to raise five children on her own. It would seem that Mike Huckabee has a unique background for bringing an empathetic eye to the economic and educational realities that face everyday women in America.

  Compared to Elvis Presley, the name of rock-and-roll pioneer Carl Perkins would be less familiar to people today. But near the time of Huckabee’s birth, Perkins was a star of the new rock-and-roll sound. In 1956, he sold a million copies of a song he wrote called “Blue Suede Shoes.” Perkins found inspiration for the song one night at a gig when he looked down at a guy who should have been happy dancing with his beautiful date, except that he couldn’t stop worrying about the gal stepping on his . . . blue suede shoes.

  Perkins’s “rockabilly” spanned the genres of country and the emerging rock and roll. The rockabilly style can be heard in the early recordings of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Cash was raised in the Arkansas Delta, west of Memphis. Presley came from Tupelo, Mississippi, two hours from Memphis. Perkins resided in Jackson, Tennessee—halfway between Memphis and Nashville. All of these men would testify to the importance of their having grown up within earshot of the music of the African-American community, coming from the workers in the fields or from the congregants in the pews of segregated churches. That is to say, early rock and roll came about through the cross-racial mixing of blues, jazz, country, western, and gospel. And all of this happened just a few hours’ drive from where Huckabee was born.

  Another such gifted musician with Memphis-area roots was B. B. King, an African-American blues player who strummed a guitar he called “Lucille.” God put B. B. King on this earth within the state of Mississippi—Leflore County, Mississippi, to be precise, south of Memphis. King was born in a tiny town with a funny name: Itta Bena. And just twenty miles to the north—but still in Leflore County—sat another little town with a funny name: Money.

  On the very day that Mike Huckabee was born—August 24, 1955—Emmett Till, an African-American teen from Chicago, walked into a store in Money, Mississippi. His visit set off a chain of events that led both to his murder and to the expedited passage of the Civil Rights Acts by the United States Congress.

  Till was visiting his cousins from Chicago, and together they headed to the store for some gum. What exactly happened next has been debated for sixty years, but the basic story goes like this. Till allegedly flirted with the cashier, a married Caucasian woman, before leaving the store and wolf-whistling at her. Two days later, the woman’s husband came home and heard the story. He and another man rode over to where Till was staying, kidnapped the teen, and brutally killed him.

  The men were arrested, tried, and acquitted. Newspapers throughout the nation ran the ongoing story, and regional bias determined the vocabulary of the headlines. California’s San Bernardino County Sun stated the facts: “Body of Kidnapped Boy Found in River.” But the Blytheville, Arkansas, Courier News printed: “Mississippi’s ‘Wolf-Whistle’ Murder Trial Opens Today.”13 Too often, the Southern headlines were shorthand for: “The boy deserved what he got.” The next year, one of the men bragged to Look magazine that they had, in fact, killed the teen.

  Therein lies the struggle with wearing Mayberry-tinted glasses. Sheriff Taylor’s fictional town aired for eight years (1960–1968), but it only gave speaking lines to one African-American during that entire span of time. There were a few other blacks in the background on occasion, but you have to look closely for them. Even if you argue that, in real life, some towns just didn’t have any blacks living in them at all, does that justify the abdication of leadership for a popular national television program? In like manner, the Hope Star essentially ignored the Emmett Till story. Nevertheless, Jim Crow’s days were numbered, hastened along by the national scandal of tragedies like Till’s murder.

  In August 1961, six years after the birth of Mike Huckabee and the murder of Emmett Till, Barack Obama was born. Forty-seven years later, he became the first African-American president of the United States. The Chicago residence of President Obama sits just two miles from the house where Emmett Till lived at the time of his death and the church where his body lay in state.14

  Before Till’s murder, the last major civil rights legislation passed into law came in 1875. But in the thirteen years following Till’s death, five new, major civil rights acts became law. More important, they became enforceable by cultural pressure. To even consider the possibility of an African-American president in the United States, so very much had to change. In at least one Chicago home, that change came at the cost of deep, maternal sorrow. Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett’s mother, insisted that her son’s mangled body be laid in an open casket, with nothing but plate glass to separate eyes from viewing Jim Crow’s carnage. Thousands of Chicagoans streamed through the Roberts Temple Church of God to mourn. They left with an energetic resolve to change their nation.

  As America reflected on Till’s murder, many began to form a fresh opinion about the entire nation’s culpability in the crimes perpetrated mostly in one region. “All of us, even the most righteous, had a part in Emmett Till’s death,” wrote columnist Robert Smith in a small-town newspaper in western Massachusetts. “We endorse it every time we exchange shocked whispers when a colored girl and a white boy sit in church together, every time we openly despair that the presence of Negroes ‘lowers property values,’ whenever we preach that in educating the young people of the land, segregation is a ‘secondary’ matter, every time we connive to bar colored people from public inns and restaurants, anytime we try to wriggle out of hiring a colored person for a job he is obviously titled to do.”15

  Because nobody gets to determine the cultural context into which he or she is born, each person’s active response to existing evil and injustice becomes the moral measure of who he or she really is as a person. When Mike Huckabee entered the world as a son of the South, his culture gave him a permission slip granting him the right to view African-Americans as being less worthy of human dignity and his respect. But he chose not to use his permission slip—or even to accept the reality of the permission slip. In the national march toward racial equality, Mike Huckabee walked ahead of even his own cultural inheritance.

  CHAPTER 4

  AMERICAN PIE

  1959–1964

  We didn’t lack. I didn’t know I was poor until I got in high school. I mean, it never occurred to me that we were underprivileged.

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  IN AUGUST 1960, A YOUNG MIKE HUCKABEE ENTERED “Miss Mary Purkins’ School for Little Folks.” Because public schools did not yet offer kindergarten, families with working mothers had to look for such alternatives. Purkins, a veteran teacher of said “little folks,” had also taught Bill Blythe (Clinton), making her one of the few people in American history to have taught two presidential candidates as children. Miss Purkins understood the daily rhythms that made for happy five-year-olds. The Hope Star published a photograph of Huckabee with his classmates. A similar photograph exists for Clinton.1 In both pictures, these two future governors of Arkansas posed with cherubic smiles, tempting us to imagine they were already planning their campaigns. Huckabee describes his early childhood as a time when he struggled with shyness. “I was a good kid, but shy,” he said.2

  Mae Huckabee took Mike and his older sister, Pat, to church and Sunday school regularly, as all good folks in the Bible Belt knew to do. He admits that the religion of his home was “nominal.” To be sure, a quantity of religion existed for young Huckabee, in the form of the Garrett Memorial Baptist Church. Huckabee would also attend additional religious meetings in the home, as both his mother and his grandmother hosted Bible studies and mission-support meetings. By necessity, Mike and Pat were often present at such meetings. The Hope Star recorded: “Mrs. Dorsey Huckabee was hostess to the Dorcas Sunday School Class
of the Garrett Memorial Baptist Church. Mrs. Virgil Huckabee gave a most inspiring devotional on tithing.” An inspiring devotional on tithing? For eight-year-old Mike, the highlight of the evening was probably this: “a delicious snack plate and punch was served.”3

  With all that religion being practiced by the women of the family, what role did the men play? The answer is that Dorsey Huckabee did not attend church at all. “Our dad never went,” Mike’s sister, Pat, recalled, “He always thought it was the woman’s place to take the kids to church. I just thought that was the way things were. I guess there were families where both the mommy and daddy went and took the kids . . . but ours did not.”4

  Let that sink in. Mike Huckabee, arguably one of the best-known evangelicals in the world, grew up in a home led by a father who did not practice the Christian faith. Though Dorsey passed along a rich inheritance of general Judeo-Christian values, he was not a professing Christian during Mike’s formative years. In fact, it wasn’t until after Mike had started into ministry in his mid-teens that his father started to attend church regularly. Pat adds some detail to Dorsey’s conversion: “My dad was never a bad man. He was a good man—excellent work ethic. He was the guy in the neighborhood that was always changing lightbulbs and fixing fences for no money—lots of elderly people lived in the neighborhood. ‘Call Dorsey Huckabee; he’ll come and help’—he was that guy. But about the time Mike was called to the ministry, our dad gave his life to the Lord and went and got baptized. After that, he didn’t miss a day. So the last part of our growing-up years was pretty wonderful because our whole family was there at church. But that was when Mike was about sixteen.”5