Len Blaylock

The once and future Arkansas

DO THEY make them like Len Blaylock anymore? One might as well ask if there is still an Arkansas, land of the free and home of true grit. Let’s hope there is, and always will be.

Though it hurts to admit it, sometimes we wonder where the Len Blaylocks of the future could come from in this coming age of airbrushed, perfectly coiffed politicians with not a scratch on ’em, untouched by struggle. And are tempted to despair.

“Poor but proud” might as well have been this state’s unofficial motto through the long, poverty-ridden years when Arkansas had little to offer but hope—and just about the hardest-working people in the country. This state’s official motto tends to change from time to time in keeping with the latest fashions in these things—from Land of Opportunity to The Natural State—but the character of her people has always been Arkansas’ greatest asset. And to abuse it by appealing to our worst instincts is the lowest trick a politician can play. For we’ve had our share of demagogues as well as leaders who appealed to our best, not our worst.

The life of Len Blaylock, his struggles and triumphs, exemplifies a whole state’s spirit over the last century. The sixth of seven children whose father would die when he was eight, and who lost his mother when he was 17, he was working to provide for the family early on. It took some doing. Young Blaylock would drop out of high school a time or three before he graduated—at the age of 20. He was not the sort to give up. Even if it might take him a while to reach his goal, and exceed it. His whole life was like that, a story about overcoming the odds. A story of endurance, achievement and unrelenting perseverance. A little like Arkansas’.

Young Blaylock would go from working in the Civilian Conservation Corps out West—boy, could we use a CCC now instead of hand-outs, corporate and otherwise—to serving with the Eighth Air Force in the European theater during the Second World Unpleasantness.

He would enter the service as an enlisted man, an Arkansas boy with a talent for tenacity (it’s now called the work ethic) and, before he left, would be a major. And serve in Curtis Lemay’s then new Strategic Air Command. (Its motto: Peace is our Profession, and SAC became very good at it, which helps explain why there’s been no World War III. Deterrents do deter.)

Major Blaylock would retire to Arkansas—to the tiny Nimrod community in Perry County, to be exact—but not to a life of leisure. When he went into local politics as a bright-eyed reformer, a stalwart of the Old Guard named Paul van Dalsem would turn him into a Republican out of sheer reaction against the stultified status quo exemplified by the state’s Faubus machine and one-party politics. The switch took some grit at a time when being a Republican in Arkansas was less a political affiliation than a curiosity. But it was just the kind of thing Len Blaylock was always doing. He was never intimidated by long odds.

Then a New Yorker with a wellknown name, Winthrop Rockefeller, moved to Arkansas, and reformers had a leader and patron at last. Chosen to head the state’s welfare department during the Rockefeller administration, Mr. Blaylock handled the state’s money even more carefully than he did his own, which was very carefully indeed. You don’t come from a background like his and throw money around.

As head of the state’s welfare department, he would visit every local office in the state looking for ways to cut waste and improve services to those who needed a hand up. His middle name was Everette but it might as well have been Independence. He always wanted to be self-reliant himself, as his life story indicates, and thought other people should be, too. In that sense, he was a Republican long before he became one officially.

AS ONE of a whole wave of Rockefeller Reformers in state government, he shook up a staid bureaucracy that, as he recalled, “was full of little plots and plans to embarrass me.” None succeeded; his integrity was bone-deep, his reputation for honesty and hard work beyond undermining. No, he would never be one of your snazzy ever-new politicians who could change their beliefs with every shift in the wind—there wasn’t an ounce of slick to him—but he would always be trusted. If we had to come up with a single term to sum up his approach to government, and to life itself, it would be plain dealing.

Sometime in the 1970s, Len Blaylock ran for governor—for no better reason than his party needed a sacrificial lamb one election year to put up against the ever popular Dale Bumpers. He could never resist an appeal to his sense of duty. Whatever the odds.

As the years passed, Len Blaylock’s face grew even more lined. He’d earned every crease, and they all became him. His wavy hair turned gray, as gray as duty itself. Like the man himself, his looks did not deceive.

Are there more like him to come? Let’s hope so, let’s expect so. That’s because men like Len Blaylock and Tom Glaze—another Rockefeller Reformer the state has just lost after a lifetime of public service—represented not just the best of Arkansas’ past but the best hope for our future.