Benjamin Travis Laney
Benjamin Travis Laney, Jr. (25 November 1896 – 21 January 1977), was the Democratic Governor of Arkansas from 1945-1949.
He successfully ran for Governor of Arkansas in 1944 and 1946. During his administration, the Public Utilities Commission was formed and funds were appropriated for a stadium to be built in Little Rock. Plans were also formed for the construction of an official Governor's Mansion.
In 1948, Laney supported the unsuccessful Dixiecrat breakaway candidate Strom Thurmond in the presidential election.
Laney was a delegate to the 1969 Arkansas Constitutional Convention.
Laney died of a heart attack in Magnolia, the seat of Columbia County south of Camden. He is interred in the Camden Memorial Cemetery in Camden.
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Several global companies are headquartered in the northwest corner of Arkansas, including Wal-Mart (the world's largest public corporation by revenue in 2007), J.B. Hunt and Tyson Foods. This area of the state has experienced an economic boom since the 1970s as a result.
In recent years, automobile parts manufacturers have opened factories in eastern Arkansas to support auto plants in other states. Additionally, the city of Conway is the site of a school bus factory.
Tourism is also very important to the Arkansas economy; the official state nickname "The Natural State" was originally created (as "Arkansas Is A Natural") for state tourism advertising in the 1970s, and is still regularly used to this day.
His studies were interrupted by World War I. Laney entered the United States Navy in 1918 and served until the end of the war.
In 1924, Laney earned a degree from the University of Central Arkansas (then known as Arkansas Teacher's College), also in Conway. He also took graduate courses from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Laney owned a drugstore in Conway, dealt in real estate, and had interests in cotton gins, feed, and banking. Oil was discovered on Laney's farm near Camden. He was hence called "Business Ben" because of his varied business interests.
Laney was elected mayor of Camden in 1935 and served until 1939.
Historically, the solidly Democratic South had emerged in the wake of Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when the Republican Party worked to help African-Americans make the transition from slavery to freedom, and to secure their civil, political and voting rights. When conservative white Southerners usurped control of their state governments in the 1870s, largely with the aid of white terrorist militias and insurgent groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the region gave its political allegiance to the Democratic Party.
The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a splinter (or offshoot) from the party in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. For more than a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but in 1948 many bolted from the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States.
Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage. For example, it was used to refer to those members of the Electoral College who voted for Harry F. Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy in the election of 1960, and to the white Southern voters and electors who supported George C. Wallace in 1968.
