Arkansas Catalyst

Of the five millionaire sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only one to win the name and tabloid fame of a moneyed playboy is big (6 ft. 3 in., 235 Ibs.), genial Winthrop Rockefeller, 44. The details of his life and marital woes--gleefully chronicled in the nation's press--have attracted as much public attention as the sober hard work of all his brothers combined. Four years ago, hoping to get away from it all, Winthrop forsook the cabarets of Manhattan for the hills of Arkansas. There, on a ridge 50 miles from Little Rock, he built a magnificent, $1,500,000 cattle farm called Winrock, from which he can gaze for 40 miles across the Arkansas River valley, heart of the razorback state. Today the Arkansas that Winthrop Rockefeller views from Winrock is undergoing a startling change --and he is responsible for much of it. "We thought he had come down here just to sit on his tail," says Harry Ashmore, executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette. "We soon found out different."

Like many a playboy before him, Winthrop needed only a cause to set him to work. He found it in the plight of his adopted state, the butt of countless hillbilly jokes and the state with the second-lowest per-capita income in the union (lowest: Mississippi). Jobs were so scarce that 400,000 residents had been forced to leave the state in search of work. To check the emigration, the business men of Arkansas, under the leadership of C. Hamilton Moses, then chairman of Arkansas Power & Light, set up the Arkansas Economic Council in the middle 1940s to attract new industry (TIME, Feb. 9, 1953), managed to bring in $854 million in new plants in ten years. But this was far from enough. In March 1955 Governor Orval E. Faubus, who had campaigned on a program of industrialization, asked the Arkansas legislature to declare a state of emergency, formed the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission to industrialize the state. He asked Winthrop Rockefeller to run it.

Up by the Bootstraps. Rockefeller agreed, stipulating that the commission remain nonpolitical. Then, ignoring legislative recommendations that an $8,000-a-year man be hired to administer the program, he went out and hired two topflight members of the Baltimore Association of Commerce. William Rock. 52, and William Ewald, 34--for $20,000 and $12,000, respectively. By the time he had gathered the eleven members of his staff, the state appropriation of $127,500 had already been spent. Rockefeller asked a newly formed Arkansas Industrialization Panel of 100 men to kick in $100 each, started things rolling with a $5,000 contribution. Then he and the panel took to the hills to convince the money-pinched people of Arkansas that they had a vital stake in the commission's future. Spurred on by their enthusiasm, Arkansans contributed $200,000. Says Rockefeller: "This is part of being a catalyst. That's how I see my role in Arkansas."

The commission launched a $100,000 advertising campaign in major U.S. magazines to combat the state's hillbilly reputation, plugged the state's advantages, e.g., cheap plant sites and a big labor pool. Every paper in the state ran free commission ads urging Arkansans to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and commission members canvassed the state to explain the new program.

But most of the commission's efforts have gone into its real job: to attract out-of-state industry. Armed with voluminous research material and aided by state departments, the commission has zealously uncovered prospects, wooed them with hard facts and friendly talk and dinners at Winrock or the governor's mansion. Many a wavering industrialist has been won over by personal visits from Rockefeller, e.g., Akron's Mohawk Rubber, which built a $2,000,000 plant after a little personal persuasion.

A Lake for Expansion. Nothing is too good for prospective industries. A new state plan allows communities to build plants for industry; local citizens put up 20% of the cost themselves (at no interest), raise the balance by selling bonds to private investors and the state. For example, residents of Greene County put up a $700,000 plant for Emerson Electric in Paragould at no immediate cost to the company. (The company pays off the cost of the building over 20 years at 5% interest.) They floated bonds, sold $50 membership certificates, got loans on pledges of future contributions. When Duracraft Boat Corp. of Monticello could not expand because there was no water nearby on which to test and demonstrate its boats, Monticello residents dammed up a stream and created a 20-acre lake. The company expanded--to the tune of $350,000.

As it expanded industrially, the state also found it necessary to broaden its cultural and educational opportunities. After several Northern firms rejected the commission's blandishments simply because they did not want to bring wives and children into a cultural desert, Rockefeller and his associates set out to match Arkansas' industrial revolution with a cultural revolution. They scurried all over the state, sparked community playhouses, libraries, symphony orchestras, opera, even established a commission-sponsored Concert Hall of the Air to broadcast classical music. After losing out on a $100 million Glenn Martin guided-missiles plant because Arkansas lacked technical schools to provide advanced training for workers, the commission began agitating for a graduate school of technology at the University of Arkansas. Result: the senate has passed a $1,000,000 bill to establish such a school, and approval is expected in the house.

Strawberries & Industry. Such intensified efforts have created an atmosphere in which citizens and businessmen's groups across Arkansas are putting their shoulders to the task of attracting new industry. The result has had a startling impact on the state's economy. The sleepy little town of Searcy in central Arkansas, which once lived off strawberries and cotton, has already been transformed by the prospect of four new plants worth nearly $5,000,000 (two already built), and its population has doubled to 7,000. In 1956 alone, 12,521 new jobs were created in Arkansas, 194 industries either brought into the state or expanded during the year, $130 million laid out in capital investment. The state's per-capita income went up 9.3% (to $1,062). Most important of all, Arkansans are coming back home: the state's population climbed last year for the first time since World War II. Taking notice of such progress, the Arkansas legislature this week was ready to appropriate a healthy $500,000 budget for the commission, was preparing to pass a raft of new bills that will help the commission do its work better. Perhaps the most satisfying feature of the industrial renaissance for Arkansans is the fact that other Southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Texas are making inquiries to find out how Arkansas has done so well. Says Executive Director Rock: "When you get Texas asking for advice, you know you're doing a good job."

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