Winthrop Rockefeller on Two-Party Politics

Fifty years ago this November [2016], Winthrop Rockefeller was elected Arkansas’s first Republican governor in almost a century. He strongly believed that two-party politics was essential to the state’s advancement and to breaking the yoke of white supremacy. As he put it: “It seems clear to me that a one-party system offers no alternatives, no challenges, no possibility for change…and this is true whether it be a one-party Democratic South, a one-party Republican Northeast or Midwest, or a one-party Communist Soviet Union…Let me make it clear that if I had found Arkansas under almost a hundred years of Republican domination with the political stagnation just as bad, I very probably would have set out to reorganize a Democratic Party in Arkansas. Names and labels are not as important as an alternative.”