9
9
Jimmy Karam darted to a gas station phone booth to fill the
Governor in on the situation. Faubus threw a press conference at the
Sea Island Governor's convention and declared soberly that, "The
trouble in Little Rock vindicates my good judgement."
President Eisenhower was forced to send in the 327th Battle
Group of the 101st Airborne Division to try to restore calm and enforce
the Supreme Court's desegregation order. Now Faubus had two
enemies threatening his virtuous citizens: the murderous blacks and
the Yankee government, the same government that had humiliated the
South in the Civil War. Faubus strutted, preened and protested. He
got national news time on ABC-TV, lambasting the president for
having stripped The South of its freedom. He declared that the FBI
had taken innocent southern girls into custody, grilling them for hours,
and condemned the Federal soldiers for putting "bayonets in the backs
of schoolgirls... the warm, red blood of patriotic Americans staining the
cold, naked, unsheathed knives." He accused the soldiers of invading
the girls' locker-rooms to leer at the helpless women pinned there by
brute force. Investigation showed that the events Faubus described so
vividly had never occurred. But that scarcely mattered. In the minds
of Arkansas' citizens, only one man was standing up to these Northern
attacks--Governor Orval Faubus.
The result was simple. Faubus had been in danger of losing the
election. Instead, he outstripped his closest opponent by nearly
five-to-one. And Faubus won every election after that until he finally
retired. By creating an enemy, Faubus had galvanized Arkansas
behind him, turning a cloud of disorganized citizens into a social
mass.15
Fidel Castro found the existence of enemies equally indis-
pensable. But he had a stroke of luck Faubus lacked. His enemy
actually existed. The foe Fidel used to achieve social cohesion was the
United States, the massive, imperialist monster that over the years, he
said, had stripped Cuba of her sovereignty.
<< < GO > >>