Read the Review. For much of this century, Arkansas has been ridiculed as America's Dogpatch, a poor, rural home for yokels, a place where hounds amble along dirt roads, chickens peck for bugs in the yard, and well-to-do families flaunt Sears washing machines on their front porches. Perennially, we are at the bottom of every economic indicator, fighting Mississippi for forty-ninth place.
Our population is less than any southern state, and our land area the slightest of any state on the continent west of the Mississippi River. No airline uses Arkansas as a hub. The federal interstate highway system bypasses much of the state. Even the name of our capital begins with the word "little. At the state university in Fayetteville, a menacing boar from the Ozarks--the razorback hog--was adopted as a symbol of the school.
A hog call became Arkansas's war cry. At sporting events, the student body still rises as one, hands fluttering skyward, to issue the blood-curdling refrain: "Whooooooooo, pig! In the days when radio was the main form of home entertainment, Arkansas was a frequent butt of humor. We were the target of gentle yarns spun by a native son, the comedian Bob Burns.
A popular voice in the s, Burns talked of his barefoot relatives. Arkansas was the source of cracker-barrel philosophy broadcast by Lum and Abner, who held court at their Jot 'Em Down Store in the mythical Arkansas village of Pine Ridge.
Sponsored each week by Horlick's Malted Milk, Lum and Abner created a world of bucolic characters, peopled by the likes of kindly Grandpappy Spears. Sometimes, the Arkansas jokes took malevolent form. Mencken, the iconoclastic columnist for the Baltimore Sun papers, mocked Arkansas mercilessly in the s.
