Homer Martin Adkins was the 32nd governor of the U.S. state of Arkansas.
Career
Adkins served one term as sheriff of Pulaski County and was the collector of internal revenue from 1933 to 1940, when he was first elected as governor. In the 1940 general election, Adkins defeated the Republican Harley C. Stump, the mayor of Stuttgart and a leader of the Arkansas Municipal League. Adkins sought to build a voting base based on his background as a Methodist Sunday school teacher and church employee. He campaigned on a platform of reform and ending the practice of bootlegging. In his second term Adkins signed into law a bill that would prevent anyone of Japanese descent from owning land in Arkansas. Looking for a new challenge, he was defeated in 1944 in a bid for the U.S. Senate. In 1948, Adkins was appointed administrator of the Arkansas Employment Security Division, the agency responsible for worker's unemployment insurance. In 1954, Adkins strongly supported the Democrat Orval Faubus in the gubernatorial general election against Pratt C. Remmel, the Republican mayor of Little Rock. In 1956, he established a public relations firm in Little Rock.
Politics
Governor Homer Martin Adkins stands as a symbol of many Arkansans’ ambivalence about the growing power of the federal government in the mid-twentieth century and their resistance to attendant changes in the Democratic Party. Adkins’s clout as a factional leader during the 1930s derived from federal spending in the state, and his successes as governor had everything to do with the U.S. government’s massive investment in military facilities, defense production, and state bonds. But Adkins remained a self-described conservative, always ready to support states’ rights, such as when Democratic administrations in Washington DC and federal courts began to more actively support the civil rights of African Americans.
Historian Ben F. Johnson names Adkins, “the state’s most overtly racist governor in the modern era.”
Adkins once said: “If I cannot be nominated by the white voters of Arkansas, I do not want the office.”
Views
Adkins stood four-square for constitutional government according to the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, and opposed with vigor the usurpation of the rights of the states and the people by the federal government.