Faubus loved playing the redneck card. His continued defiance infuriated Eisenhower, who dispatched the 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Military protection ensured that the nine black students slated to attend Central High were not barred. On the national stage, and standing before the cameras, the governor of Arkansas embodied the southern stereotype to a tee. He was a complete caricature of folly and backwardness. A reporter for Time accused him of “manufacturing the myth of violence” and then “whipping up” a mob to make it a reality.49
Little Rock was the most important domestic news story of 1957. It transformed the Central High neighborhood into a newsroom, attracting reporters from the major newspapers, magazines, and television networks. By the end of September, the number of press people had grown from a handful to 225 highly visible journalists and cameramen. The standoff between the courts and the governor—the “crisis” environment swirling about the school grounds—grabbed the world’s attention. On September 24, when President Eisenhower gave a televised speech announcing that he would send troops to the Arkansas capital, 62 percent of America’s television sets were tuned in. As mobs descended, reporters were themselves targeted for violence. A black journalist, Alex Wilson, was beaten and kicked, the attack recorded on film. A Life photographer was punched in the face and then carried off in a police wagon and charged with disorderly conduct. “Thugs in the crowd” pushed his colleagues, said newsman John Chancellor, and heckled them with nasty slurs. One reporter took the precaution of disguising himself. He rented a pickup truck and wore an old jacket and no tie. For a reporter to go undercover safely, he had to alter his class appearance, passing as a poor white workingman.50
The media easily slipped into southern stereotypes, depicting the “many in overalls,” “tobacco-chewing white men,” or as one New York Times article highlighted, a “scrawny, rednecked man” yelling insults at the soldiers. Local Arkansas journalists similarly dismissed the demonstrators as “a lot of rednecks.” Unruly women who stood by became “slattern housewives” and “harpies.” One southern reporter said it outright: “Hell, look at them. They’re just poor white trash, mostly.” In Nashville, mob violence erupted that same month, after the integration of an elementary school. There, a Time reporter had a field day trashing the women in the crowd: “vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses,” not to mention a rock-throwing waitress with a tattooed arm. One obnoxious woman yelled to no one in particular with reference to the African American children: “Pull their black curls out!”51
These were all predictable motifs, serving to distance rabble-rousers from the “normal” good people of Arkansas and Tennessee. Even President Eisenhower, in his televised speech, blamed the violence on “demagogic extremists,” and assumed that the core population of Little Rock were the law-abiding, taxpaying, churchgoing people who did not endorse such behavior. If the women in curlers and the waitress boasting her tattoos reminded readers of trailer trash, the rioting rednecks were more like the wild-eyed, off-his-rocker Ernest T. Bass of The Andy Griffith Show. By 1959, the Times Literary Supplement acknowledged that it was the “ugly faces” of “rednecks, crackers, tar-heels, and other poor white trash” that would be forever remembered from Central High.52
Despite the embarrassment he caused, Orval Faubus did not disappear. Freed from the national media spotlight, he secured reelection in 1958, and went on to serve three more terms. As a governor who refused to lay down his arms, he continued to portray himself as a staunch defender of white people’s democratic right to oppose “forced integration.” Praising his “doggedness,” one southern journalist traced Faubus’s characteristic strength to his Ozark mountain days, when he trudged five miles, dressed in overalls, to a dilapidated school. A hillbilly could get ahead down here. Thus Faubus strategically accepted a loss of support from among the better classes, who resented redneck power in any form. Like Mississippi’s Vardaman and his own state’s Jeff Davis before him, Orval Faubus used the threat of poor white thuggery to stay in power. And it worked.53
In the same year that Little Rock consumed the news media, Hollywood produced a feature-length film that capitalized on the redneck image. Starring Andy Griffith and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd was a completely differently vehicle for Griffith than his subsequent television role as the friendly sheriff. It was a dark drama that followed “Lonesome Rhodes,” a down-and-out man discovered playing guitar in an Arkansas jail, and traced his rapid rise into the national limelight as a powerful and ruthless TV star. For reviewers, Griffith’s performance was a cross between Huey Long and Elvis Presley—a hollering, singing “redneck gone berserk with power.”54
The plot of A Face in the Crowd was only a part of its story. The surrounding publicity focused on Kazan’s directing technique. To get Griffith into character, he exploited the actor’s childhood memories of being called white trash. In this way, it was an unusual film, and it offered a two-part message about class. First, it reminded audiences of the danger in elevating a lower-class redneck above his accustomed station and giving him power—for the redneck personality on-screen was a volatile mix of anger, cunning, and megalomania. Second, Kazan’s exploitation of the backstory on Griffith delivered a stern rebuke of southern culture, where the poor were treated like dirt.55
Kazan tried his hand at another southern story, this time set during the Depression. Wild River (1960) concerned the TVA, as the construction of a dam was displacing an old matriarch and her family who were living on an island in the Tennessee River. The matriarch’s sons were shown as lazy and oafish, unwilling to work or leave the island, and dependent on the black sharecroppers who farmed their fields. The daughter was a bit trampish, more than willing to sleep with the TVA agent because she saw him as her only ticket off the island. A group of surly whites beat up the agent while the local sheriff and his deputy looked on. As in the earlier film, Kazan provoked a news story when he cast real poor whites to play the extras. The “white trash squatters” of the film lived in a place called Gum Hollow, which was an existing shantytown literally situated on the town dump in Cleveland, Tennessee. Community leaders were furious at the appearance of such unappealing men in the movie. Kazan gave in to pressure and reshot the offending scenes, this time hiring what the townspeople referred to as “respectable” unemployed. In this strange episode, proud small-town arbiters of morality refused even to acknowledge the extreme poor.56