The Life and Times of W. H. Arnold of Arkansas: Reconstructing the Southern Ideal

The Life and Times of W. H. Arnold of Arkansas: Reconstructing the Southern Ideal. By Mari Serebrov. (West Conshocken, PA: InfinityPublishing.com, 2005. Pp. xxx, 433. Preface, note about sources, foreword, illustrations, appendices, notes, index of place names, index of people, general index. $20.95, paper.) W. H. Arnold founded both a Texarkana law firm and a dynasty of distinguished attorneys. This book chronicles the story of W. H. Arnold, who lived from 1861 to 1946, and his family in Arkansas. The author contends that Arnold's life epitomized the elite "Southern ideal," comprising a commitment to family, community, and religion, as described by historians such as C. Vann Woodward, Wilbur J. Cash and Bertram Wyatt-Brown (p. xxv). The author convincingly makes her case that Arnold believed in the ideal and made his choices in life accordingly. The chronicle begins in the early 1800s with the Arnold ancestor who moved from Alabama to Arkansas and follows his family's migration to what was then Hempstead County. His daughter Temperance married David Arnold (a distant cousin), who had himself migrated from South Carolina to settle near Lisbon. The couple's children included W. H., who was born at the onset of the Civil War. The fortunes of David, Temperance, and their family are followed through prosperous antebellum times, the disastrous Civil War, and the upheavals of Reconstruction. Roughly the last half of the text traces W. H. Arnold's life. Arnold read for the bar, the most common means of professional training for a lawyer in the nineteenth century. In addition to practicing law, he held various public offices, such as Texarkana city recorder, mayor from 1892 to 1894, and county chair of the Democratic Party. He was an influential member of the Arkansas bar, serving as vice president of the Arkansas Bar Association and a delegate to the 1917 state constitutional convention. He was also one of the founding members of the prestigious American Law Institute, established to reform the common law of the United States. The appendices include a genealogy of the family, selected military and slave records, endnotes, a bibliography, and indexes by place, name, and subject. The book is well researched. The approximately 150 sources include books, articles, censuses, and newspapers. But it has several weaknesses. First, the antebellum chapters of the book contain numerous passages that verge on historical fiction. We are told that "there were moments, long ones, in which [William Bideston Arnold's] eyes settled musingly on the distant horizon" (p. 1). William is said to have "ignored the sounds of bears ravaging the cornfields and the wolves howling in the woods" while he listened to a preacher at a service in Alabama in 1821 (p. 2). However the endnote to this paragraph tells us that "[tjhere is no record of William's conversion or of his attendance at this meeting. …