Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Olivia Paschal is a journalist studying rural history and political economy at the University of Virginia. Enjoy our conversation about uneven development in Northwest Arkansas, bike trails in the boonies, and back ways into corporate archives, below.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? Where are you from? What do you do?
Olivia Paschal: I grew up in Rogers, Arkansas. And my dad’s side of the family is from the Arkansas Ozarks, south of Fayetteville, in the Elkins area, and that community was very present in my life growing up. But I also grew up very close to Walmart and Tyson’s corporate headquarters in Northwest Arkansas. And so that has informed my life trajectory and my intellectual trajectory.
After college, I was a journalist for several years, first in DC at the Atlantic, where I wrote some stories about the farm bill and about Arkansas, but then I moved to Durham, North Carolina, to work for the Institute for Southern Studies and Facing South. In Durham I really focused in on issues in the rural South. So I was covering politics and organizing and then when the pandemic hit, I was covering rural hospitals and rural health care access. And then I started a big, over a year long, investigative series on Arkansas poultry processing workers and labor conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic. After that, I realized that I wanted some time and space to think more deeply about a lot of the issues of political economy and labor I’d been writing about. So I applied to grad school, and I’m now a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia.
My dissertation project is about Walmart, Tyson and J.B. Hunt, which are three huge multinational companies that all started in Northwest Arkansas, or kind of came up in Northwest Arkansas at roughly the same time, in the mid-to-late 20th century. So I’m thinking about the intertwined development of those corporations, how they interacted politically, economically, socially in that region, and how they’ve reshaped that region and also reshaped the global economy.
DY: I know this is one of the major questions you’re researching for your dissertation, so obviously you’re not gonna have a complete answer to it. But I’m wondering if you can walk me through some of the hypotheses you have for what it was about that region that led it to be such a source of 20th-century corporate and neoliberal innovation?
OP: Scholars have written a lot about Walmart and its place in the Arkansas Ozarks, and pointed out that one thing Walmart did really well was find new markets for retail stores – especially in rural places that no other company had seen as a potential market before. I think that those scholars are right on the money in many ways. But I think that what folks have missed in writing about Northwest Arkansas often is that, before Walmart was there, Tyson was there. The poultry industry was there and, in similar ways, that industry was able to take advantage of folks who lived on land that was not necessarily useful for growing things. Our soil is very poor. There used to be a fruit orchard scene, but then there were some blights and diseases and that market kind of collapsed. And so they found some folks who had land that wasn’t really useful for planting most major crops, but was useful for these huge chicken houses. That industry developed over the course of a few decades, but I think that, in the same way that Walmart found an untapped customer base, Tyson and the poultry industry found folks who just didn’t really seem to have any other options. And thus, they were able to, in many ways, exploit those farmers.
Tyson and other poultry companies started as trucking businesses, hauling chickens. So to me, I think trucking, distribution, logistics, and the supply chain – which is to say, J.B. Hunt, and other trucking firms – are really the connective tissue between these businesses. Sam Walton used to say – and I think this is a little tongue in cheek and part of his practice of appearing folksier than he was – that he was hiding up in the Ozark hills, away from his competitors. That is drawing on all these stereotypes of hillbillies who are disconnected from the world, right, which is actually not at all true of northwest Arkansas because we are very connected to global commodity markets. But there’s also some truth to it because the Ozarks are far away from Little Rock, for example, which is the state’s political and – at that time – financial center of power.
This is a hypothesis that I have – and I haven’t totally borne it out yet – that they’re far away from networks of activist and advocacy work, so they kind of flew under the radar for many years. I’ve been in activist records in North Carolina, for example and the southern activist networks were not really worried about them for several decades, or they didn’t really think about these Ozarks businesses as gaining a lot of economic power. I suspect that’s literally because they were so far away from where some of the organizing centers were.
On the other hand, Bill Clinton was friendly with all three of them. Hillary Clinton was on Walmart’s board of directors. And so I think this is the part that I haven’t totally plumbed yet, but that I’m hoping to get into this summer. I think there’s some relationship between the Clinton gubernatorial administration’s approach to policy in Arkansas at the state level – and regulatory policy specifically – that I suspect kind of carries over into the way that he approaches the presidency. And, you know, scholars like to think of Bill Clinton as a major neoliberal figure, in terms of how he approached the presidency, and how he was able to kind of bring the Democratic Party into alignment with freer markets, NAFTA, open trade, that kind of thing. So that’s the kind of stuff I’m thinking about. I have a lot of archival work to do, but that’s informed l by my journalistic work, and also just by growing up in a place that’s deeply corporatized in weird ways.
DY: So, speaking of the ways in which these corporations have developed the region, one problem I have with a lot of writing about rural America – especially for urban audiences – is that class distinctions get totally obfuscated. In some of your writing, I’ve read you describe that there’s relatively well-to-do Bentonville, and then there are the rural hinterlands that lie outside it. Can you describe the geography of the region, the relationships between those towns, and this uneven corporate development you’ve written about elsewhere?
OP: Yeah, so the way that the geography of northwest Arkansas works is there are four major towns arranged north to south along what is now Interstate 49. Bentonville is right near the Missouri border, which is where Walmart’s corporate headquarters are. Rogers, which is where I grew up, is where a lot of vendor offices are, and there’s a lot of folks who work corporate jobs for Walmart or its vendors. Then there’s Springdale, which is where Tyson’s corporate headquarters are. And a lot of chicken plants are in Rogers and Springdale as well. Then there’s Fayetteville, which is where the University of Arkansas is, and that’s all north to south. And so all four of the cities have grown dramatically in the last few decades. They all used to be centers of farm commerce. But more recently, because of the presence of those companies, they have just become the metro centers of the region, which distinguishes northwest Arkansas from a lot of other places, because instead of there being one central city, there’s four. That’s where all of the corporate money is concentrated, particularly in Bentonville, which is kind of a cartoon city. It’s a very weird place. The Walmart wealth that has been put into developing that town is astronomical. Crystal Bridges is there, they have a beautiful downtown. It’s a hard place to describe but you drive into that city and you can immediately tell it’s where the wealthy people live, which again, didn’t always used to be the case.
Once you start moving out east the towns are a lot poorer. A lot of those folks historically have not been working for Walmart or Tyson. Maybe they are contract growers for Tyson chicken, or for another one of the poultry companies, or they work at a poultry processing facility out there. But those are way different jobs than the ones in corporate offices. And up until recently the Tyson and Walmart families have not invested significant philanthropic or commercial dollars in those towns.
That’s recently started to change because the Walton family in particular has been really interested in mountain biking. They’ve had a longstanding interest in nature tourism and ecotourism. So they have been buying up land with shell companies, and one of the reasons they buy with shell companies is that if people knew who the buyers were they’d raise the prices significantly. They’re buying a lot of land in the town of Kingston, Arkansas, right now, which is way out in the boonies there, and they’re carving out mountain biking trails.
DY: How do you know about that expansion into the more rural areas? Like, is there good reporting on the Waltons buying up that land?
OP: Yeah, there’s been some really good stuff. I wrote about it a little bit a couple of years ago. I had an ear to the ground on this stuff and, you know, in small towns people talk – people know that I’m interested in it. And then as it’s really ramped up the Madison County Record – which is a weekly paper in Huntsville, Arkansas – has been covering it really aggressively. There was another effort by the Waltons and our governor’s husband, Bryan Sanders, to change the classification of the Buffalo National River last fall. There was a sense in the surrounding counties that the attempt at changing the classification was to make it easier for ecotourism and recreation outfits to come in, and that’s when people started really paying attention to the Walton shell companies buying up all these lands. There was a town hall in this town, Jasper, that’s really small that I believe over twelve-hundred people attended. I think that was the first public outward display of animosity. It’s a little more egregious now than it was in the past.
DY: I’m curious about your upcoming summer research – what are you hoping to find? What kind of archives are you gonna dig into?
OP: Yeah, so I have two tracks. I need to spend a few months in Little Rock at the Arkansas State Archives, and the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, really looking at records on the Clinton Administration and its interactions with these companies in industries that I’m interested in. It’s hard to research companies that aren’t going to give you their records. So you have to find back ways.
And then the second thing is there’s a ton of similar records at the University of Arkansas and a bunch of personal private collections there that I will hopefully be in a lot in the fall. And I’ve been collecting a lot of oral histories with folks who worked for Walmart or Tyson worked in farming or in the trucking industry. Those give you a way to understand the texture of how folks understood these industries as they formed and grew.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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