Arkansas Gazette editor and owner John Netherland Heiskell believed that a newspaper was an institution first and only incidentally a business. "Newspapers are not sawmills," he once said.
The Gazette would live up to that philosophy with its coverage of the Central High Crisis.
Heiskell was almost 85 years old, the son of a Confederate colonel, in September 1957. But the stance he allowed his newspaper to take would cement its place in history.
As the Little Rock School District neared implementation of its plan for gradual desegregation beginning in the fall of 1957, the Gazette- the state's oldest newspaper- editorialized that Little Rock could be a model for the rest of the country. That optimism dimmed, though, when word circulated that Governor Orval Faubus was going to make a move to stop the desegregation.
Law-and-Order Stance
Harry Ashmore, the Gazette's executive editor, and Hugh B. Patterson, publisher and Heiskell's son-in-law, were the younger, more progressive soldiers in the Gazette's triumvirate. Ashmore asked to meet with Heiskell and Patterson at the Gazette office on September 1- as it turned out, the day before Faubus called out the National Guard.
Roy Reed, then a young Gazette reporter, recalled Ashmore's memory of the meeting:
As Harry recounted it to me, he said to Mr. Heiskell, 'I know in my own mind what would be the right course for the paper to take, the stand that we should take, the editorial position. But it's not my paper. You stand to lose a lot of money. This is going to be an unpopular decision if we do this. It's not my decision to make.' And Hugh was backing him up, and he knew exactly what stand Harry was talking about. And as Harry told it, the old man listened patiently and heard them out, and he had a swivel chair, and he turned the chair so that he could look out his window down Louisiana Street, and when he turned back around, he said, 'I'm not going to let those people take over my town.' And that was the answer that Harry and Hugh wanted. And that set the stage.
After the guardsmen turned away the Little Rock Nine as they tried to enter the school on September 3, the Gazette's front-page editorial, "The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made," on September 4 took the argument beyond segregation versus integration argument to the supremacy of the federal government in all matters of law. Unlike Ashmore and Patterson, Heiskell did not believe in integration. But with his memory running back to Reconstruction, the old man knew the result of a state's defiance of the federal government.
Taking the Financial Risk
The Gazette continued the editorial pressure, standing virtually alone in insisting that the Constitution must prevail. But its stance for law and order was a costly one. Many local businesses dropped advertising, and the paper was the subject of threats and intimidation. The Capital Citizens' Council organized a boycott against businesses that advertised in the Gazette. Circulation dropped from 100,000 to 83,000 in a matter of weeks. The dollar loss in 1957 was $1-2 million—approximately $13 million in 2017 dollars.
"I thought that spoke volumes about J.N. Heiskell and the owners, Hugh Patterson, Louise Patterson, to be willing to accept that kind of monetary loss for basically a principle," said Jerry Dhonau, then a young reporter who went on to become the final editorial page editor of the Arkansas Gazette.
For all their courage, it is important to note that Ashmore, Heiskell, and Patterson stopped short of advocating integration. While this decision is easy to criticize today, when placed in the time and place, the law-and-order stance was likely as far as they could go.
Arkansas's Gray Lady
Ashmore and other Gazette employees were threatened with violence as opponents organized boycotts and mobs attempted to prevent trucks from delivering papers. But Heiskell, Ashmore, and Patterson held firm, and in May 1958, the Arkansas Gazette won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service "for demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of mounting public tension." Ashmore won the Pulitzer for distinguished editorial writing "for the forcefulness, dispassionate analysis and clarity of his editorials." It was the first time one newspaper had won two Pulitzers for coverage of the same event. The public service citation continued: "The newspaper's fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an overwrought community, reflecting great credit on its editors and its management."
Other accolades followed, including the first Columbia Journalism Award and the Freedom House Award "for devotion to principles - for courageous and responsible journalism in a time of crisis."
Heiskell's remarks at the Freedom House dinner in New York on October 14, 1958, summed up his philosophy of the crisis and of journalism itself:
(M)aterial losses and abuse and misrepresentation may well be borne for the recompense of the respect of right-thinking people...Every newspaper must come to judgment and accounting for the course that forms its image and its character. If it is to be more than a mechanical recorder of news; if it is to be a moral and intellectual institution rather than an industry or a property, it must fulfill the measure of its obligation, even though, in the words of St. Paul, it has to endure affliction. It must have a creed and a mission. It must have dedication. It must fight the good fight. Above all else it must keep the faith.
The Arkansas Gazette died on October 18, 1991, the loser in perhaps the nation's last great newspaper war. Some argue that its death could be traced to its stand in the 1957 crisis. A significant number of Arkansans believed, even through the 1980s, that the Gazette was trying to push its liberal agenda on the state. Once the more conservative Arkansas Democrat became a viable alternative for both readers and advertisers, the Gazette became vulnerable.
Arkansas Gazette Business Files. UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock Arkansas.
Ashmore, Harry. "An Epitaph for the Old Lady." Arkansas Business. November 25, 1991.
Dhonau, Jerry. Interviewed by Donna Stephens, 2006.
"Mr. J.N. and a Legend at the Gazette," National Observer. September 28, 1964.
Reed, Roy. Interviewed by Donna Stephens, 2006.
Roberts. Gene and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.
U.S. Congress. Congressional Record. 109th Cong., 2nd sess., 2006. Vol. 152, No. 69.
Donna Lampkin Stephens is associate professor of Journalism at the University of Central Arkansas. She was a sportswriter at the Arkansas Gazette from 1984 until the newspaper's death on Oct. 18, 1991. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2012. Her dissertation, "'If It Ain't Broke, Break It': How Corporate Journalism Killed the Arkansas Gazette," earned honorable mention in the American Journalism Historians Association's Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Award contest in 2013. It was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2015.