Her name may not ring as many bells any more, but Martha Mitchell was as famous an Arkansan as there was in the Western world for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Martha Beall Mitchell was a child of Pine Bluff at a time when the notion of “Southern woman as Scarlett O’Hara” still rode shotgun inside the cultural station wagon.
She became famous as the sometimes-controversially outspoken socialite wife of John Mitchell, the U.S. attorney general under then-President Richard Nixon. She was, in a sense, the original Steel Magnolia, her Southern-fused propensity to call things as she saw them during the Watergate investigation helping bring down a presidential administration.
Before her husband resigned in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, in which she is now credited as an early whistleblower, Martha Mitchell — dubbed “The Mouth of the South” by D.C. media — was a regular on the talk-show circuit and even adorned the cover of Time magazine. Her renown experienced a huge boost in 1971, after she refused to bow before Queen Elizabeth II on a trip to London with her husband.
Sadly, most locals younger than 50 recognize her now only as the namesake for the expressway that connects downtown Pine Bluff to Interstate 530.
Her 1887 childhood home, which sits at 902. W. Fourth St. and was built by Martha’s maternal grandparents, is now the Martha Mitchell House & Whistleblower Museum. It was built close to and facing the railroad tracks so occupants could see “who’s coming and going,” said Jennifer Louviere, owner of the house and curator of the museum.
The house was owned by Mitchell until 1978, when she sold it to neighbor and local business legend Bob Abbott and his wife, Vanya — before dying from multiple myeloma a few weeks later, that is. Realizing its historical significance, the civic-minded Abbotts renovated and restored the home to its 1920s glory, even securing many of the house’s original furniture pieces, including Martha’s teenage bedroom suite.
Louviere purchased the home from Abbott in 2022 with designs to turn it into a full-fledged museum and help kickstart downtown revitalization efforts. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, the first home in the city to receive the designation, the house includes many period pieces, such as a working wind-up Victrola and one of the first electric refrigerators, and its rooms are staged just as they would have appeared when Mitchell was living there as a child during the 1920s and ‘30s.
History-buff and native Louisianan Louviere said she was motivated to purchase the house in part by her desire to help properly recognize Mitchell’s status as a whistleblower and the role she played in the scandal, which cost Nixon his job and sent many of his political allies, including John Mitchell, to prison.
“She was completely blackballed because she wasn’t afraid to the speak the truth to what she was seeing and experiencing,” Louviere said. “This is a way to honor her legacy while encouraging active community involvement and attracting visitors to Pine Bluff.”
Louviere said she wants to host etiquette classes and other community events at the house, which she envisions as something like an historical community events center.
Indeed, Mitchell’s role got her blackballed from D.C. high society. She was made the butt of jokes by operatives looking to minimize the damage from Watergate and ultimately kidnapped to keep her from speaking publicly about what she knew of her husband’s dealings and painted in the media to be delusional.
The “Martha Mitchell effect” was coined by the psychiatry industry to identity a therapist who mistakenly or willingly diagnoses a patient’s extraordinary but true claims as delusions.
“If they really gave Martha a fair shake, the world would be a better place,” Louviere said.
A bust of Mitchell erected outside Pine Bluff Convention Center bears a plaque reading, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Nixon even told interviewer David Frost in 1975 that without Mitchell, the Watergate scandal never would have played out.
A wreath at Mitchell’s 1978 funeral in Pine Bluff was adorned in white chrysanthemums spelling, “Martha was right.”
Photo: Martha Mitchell House
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