Rex Nelson speaks at the Hope/Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce Banquet Monday night.
Jamie Pafford-Gresham, part owner of Pafford Medical Services introduced keynote speaker Rex Nelson, listing the many roles he has played over his life, including journalist, political staffer, lobbyist, author and blogger: “Mr. Nelson has written millions of words about Arkansas, and he's actually a gentleman that I could get a pitcher of tea, get on the front porch and just listen to him talk all afternoon long,” Pafford-Gresham said.
Nelson began by praising the attendees’ commitment to the improvement of their community. “You’re the doers,” he said. “You're the ones that make things happen in a community and I've done a number of chamber banquets this year, and this is one of if not the biggest ones. So hats off to Hope.”
He then spent a few minutes on his memories of coming to Hope while growing up as an Arkadelphian: “We would not miss games when I was a kid. So we'd load up the car and come down and get a meal and go to Hammond stadium. And I can always remember how, how good those hamburgers they cooked down there in the endzone were, and I had to have some of those.”
His other associations with Hope included covering the election of Bill Clinton as president, the page one story of which in November of 1992 included Nelson’s byline. Then he was an aide to Mike Huckabee for ten and a half years.
The meat of Nelson’s speech was a recounting of Arkansas history from before it was a state to the present as he sees it and the future he believes possible. He said that natural and human-made disasters had driven Arkansas’ development, bringing tragedy and chaos but later growth as the state recovered and found itself in new conditions it could benefit from.
Among the debacles were the series of earthquakes from the movement of the New Madrid fault in the years 1811 and 12, whose damage to forests, ravages of land and creation of new swamps made it difficult for settlers to get into the state. By the time of statehood, granted in 1836, Nelson said the state’s population was quite distinguished for its roughness. “Don’t take this personally. But if your ancestors did get here during that period, I can almost bet they were violent, or they were crooked, or maybe both. You go back to old Arkansas Gazettes. It’s been around since 1819. And you go back and read those old front pages. We were an incredibly violent place.”
Every few decades a new disaster would unfold. The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the ensuing “Big Cut” of forest by northern timber interests and railroad companies. The flood of 1927. The Great Depression and the flood of 1937. The mass movement of people from the state between 1940 and 1960. The damage to Arkansas’ reputation from its reaction to the federally enforced integration of Little Rock Central High.
From 1960, Nelson dates the recovery of Arkansas due to the Congressional triumvirate of Senators John McClellan and William Fulbright and Representative Wilbur Mills and Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockfeller. Entrepreneurs like Bill Dillard, J.B. Hunt, the Murphy and Tyson families, Jack and Whit Stephens also drove economic growth.
Nelson said the present-day challenge is to address the uneven quality of that growth. He said 53 of the 75 counties were still seeing population reduction, while counties in the relatively more urban areas grew, most notably Benton and Washington, which gained 105,000 residents in a decade.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, Nelson said, Arkansas had a chance to solve the unevenness of its progress if it succeeded in attracting the legion of workers who now do their jobs remotely. The beauty of the state, its many opportunities for outdoor recreation, its people’s friendliness and its comparatively low costs for housing all place Arkansas at an advantage in attracting these workers.
The most crucial investments toward this goal, Nelson said, would be in broadband infrastructure and improvement of public schools. “Make your community the best place to live it could be,” Nelson urged. “That’s where your time is better spent.”