Right Place, Wrong Time: The Rise And Fall Of Governor Harvey Parnell
...burst. The stock market crashed and the United States found itself deep in the worst economic depression the country had ever known. The year before, Harvey Parnell, a farmer and the Lieutenant Governor, rose to the highest office in the State of Arkansas after John Martineau left his post to pursue a position as a federal judge. Parnell’s governorship will be tainted by the depression and will, for a short time, be viewed as the worst in the State’s history. Even though Harvey Parnell was viewed by many as the “Herbert Hoover of Arkansas,” he did attempt and accomplish some rather impressive reforms and improvements in the State, some of which include: road improvements, education reform, and his attempts to save the farming community from complete obliteration. Unfortunately, his success was often clouded by the Great Depression, which would eventually lead to his retirement from office.
Harvey Parnell once said that “[at] one time public roads in Arkansas were so bad that the wild geese, honking southward, would go around them.” In 1927, Parnell, as Lieutenant Governor, helped get the legislation for the Martineau Road Plan passed in the State Legislature. This legislation dealt with the improvement of the state highway system. Parnell also proposed the building of roads in the rural areas connecting outlying communities with the main state highway. Parnell, and Martineau before him, worked to make sure that the new highway system would not be paid for by personal property taxes but by the taxes on gasoline and vehicle licenses. This way the people paying for the new highway would be the people who actually use it. As a result, by 1930 more than four thousand miles of the state highway had been improved.
“In almost every county of the State, bright-faced, mind-hungry boys and girls of pure American blood, with intellects as...
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