    9

    9

    Jimmy Karam darted to a gas station phone booth to fill the

    Governor in on the situation.  Faubus threw a press conference at the

    Sea Island Governor's convention and declared soberly that, "The

    trouble in Little Rock vindicates my good judgement."

    President Eisenhower was forced to send in the 327th Battle

    Group of the 101st Airborne Division to try to restore calm and enforce

    the Supreme Court's desegregation order.  Now Faubus had two

    enemies threatening his virtuous citizens: the murderous blacks and

    the Yankee government, the same government that had humiliated the

    South in the Civil War.  Faubus strutted, preened and protested.  He

    got national news time on ABC-TV, lambasting the president for

    having stripped The South of its freedom.  He declared that the FBI

    had taken innocent southern girls into custody, grilling them for hours,

    and condemned the Federal soldiers for putting "bayonets in the backs

    of schoolgirls... the warm, red blood of patriotic Americans staining the

    cold, naked, unsheathed knives."  He accused the soldiers of invading

    the girls' locker-rooms to leer at the helpless women pinned there by

    brute force. Investigation showed that the events Faubus described so

    vividly had never occurred.  But that scarcely mattered.  In the minds

    of Arkansas' citizens,  only one man was standing up to these Northern

    attacks--Governor Orval Faubus.

    The result was simple.  Faubus had been in danger of losing the

    election.  Instead, he outstripped his closest opponent by nearly

    five-to-one.  And Faubus won every election after that until he finally

    retired.  By creating an enemy, Faubus had galvanized Arkansas

    behind him, turning a cloud of disorganized citizens into a social

    mass.15

    Fidel Castro found the existence of enemies equally indis-

    pensable.  But he had a stroke of luck Faubus lacked.  His enemy

    actually existed.  The foe Fidel used to achieve social cohesion was the

    United States, the massive, imperialist monster that over the years, he

    said, had stripped Cuba of her sovereignty.

    <<  <  GO  >  >>