Dale Bumpers
Dale Leon Bumpers (born 12 August 1925) is an American politician who served as Governor of Arkansas from 1971 to 1975; and then in United States Senate from 1975 until his retirement in January 1999. He is member of the Democratic Party.
Dale Bumpers was born in Charleston, Arkansas. He attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He served in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1946 during World War II. Bumpers graduated from Northwestern University Law School in Evanston, Illinois, in 1951. From his time in Illinois, he became a great admirer of Adlai Ewing Stevenson, II. Bumpers was admitted to the Arkansas bar in 1952. He started practicing law in his hometown in that same year and served as Charleston city attorney from 1952 to 1970. He served as special justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1968.
Bumpers and his wife Betty are known for their dedication to the cause of childhood immunization.
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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.
Bumpers graduated from law school in 1951 and returned to Charleston to practice law and run the family hardware store. He lost a bid for the state legislature in 1962. When he entered the governor's race in 1970, hardly anyone had ever heard of him.
Despite the progressive role Bumpers had played in the integration of the schools in his hometown of Charleston, when he entered the governor's race in 1970, hardly anyone had ever heard of him.
The field of eight in the Democratic primary included Orval Faubus, Attorney General Joe Purcell, and Hayes McClerkin, the Speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives. Bumpers soon distinguished himself as the most "progressive" of the candidates, which earned him the early notice of the Gazette. There was also something intangible at work. Bumper's apparent honesty and sincerity came across like a breath of fresh air. Everywhere he went people took an instant liking to him. "Nobody could have beaten Bumpers in that election," Faubus later offered by way of explanation, "a man and the mood of the voters suddenly and inexplicably got in tune." After eking past Purcell for second place in the first primary, - thanks largely to his brilliant use of television in the last two weeks of the campaign - Bumpers walloped Faubus in the runoff and then Rockefeller in the general election.
Bumpers continued his political miracle into his first term. He proposed and enacted an astonishing array of reforms. Sixty state agencies were consolidated into thirteen departments whose heads formed the governor's cabinet. He made the structure of the state's income tax more progressive and increased it, earmarking the funds for education. Other measures included: an increase in teacher's salaries, more power to municipal governments, the establishment of a consumer protection agency, and major improvements to the state's prisons. A special session of the legislature also brought far reaching advancements in the care of the elderly, the handicapped, and the mentally retarded. About the only reform which Bumper proposed that the legislature failed to pass was limits on campaign expenditures.
Bumpers proved just as successful in his second term, where he fought back efforts by special interests to hijack the state's budget surplus. Instead he used the money to increase teacher's salaries and for expansion of the state's colleges. Bumpers also sought to end a spoils system that was more than a century old. He created a professional central employment office for the state with civil service style exams. This time only two of the major measures he supported failed: the Equal Rights Amendment and a proposal to purchase $10 million in scenic and wilderness land.
Doug Smith, the veteran political reporter for the Gazette, termed Bumper's tenure in office: "Damn near revolutionary, but hardly anybody noticed." If governors were rated solely by their accomplishment, then Bumpers was arguably the greatest in Arkansas history.
Why was Bumpers so successful? For starters, his arrival coincided with the departure of the Old Guard, the dismantling of the Faubus machine begun under Rockefeller. Secondly, because Bumpers came literally out of nowhere, he was truly independent and not beholding to any special interests. Thirdly, the Old South was giving way to the New South and Arkansas, always something of a progressive maverick, was one step ahead of the pack. Fourthly, there was Bumper's palpable charisma, his almost evangelical aura of integrity. Thus, Dale Bumpers represented change at precisely the moment that was what the people of Arkansas wanted.
When he left the governor's mansion, Bumpers challenged and defeated J. William Fulbright, a policitcal giant, for the United States Senate, cementing for all time his reputation as the "Giant Killer" of Arkansas politics.
Betty Bumpers was an active First Lady. She was instrumental in a program called "Every Child in '73" which succeeded in immunizing ninety percent of the school-aged children in Arkansas. She participated in the effort to have the public health nurse program included under the State Health Department. She continued efforts made by Mrs. Rockefeller to extend an appreciation of the arts to schoolchildren in the state. She attempted to share the Governor's Mansion with the people of Arkansas and set up tours of the house and grounds for schoolchildren. Scouts identifying trees found on the grounds can now earn a merit badge.
Betty Bumpers continued her activities as a Senator's wife. She assisted in the development of a plan for the immunization of the nation's schoolchildren that was fashioned after the Arkansas plan. Concerned about the nuclear arms race, she founded Peace Links, a grassroots organization that works "to create peace in any way they can, at any level."
Source: Old State House
