Our Arklahoma Heritage:The Polk County farmer who fought Arkansas law on vaccinations...and lost

In the isolated hollows of Polk County , a quiet farmer and furniture upholsterer named Archie Theodore Cude sparked a legal firestorm that would test the very limits of religious freedom and public health in Arkansas.

His unyielding conviction, born from a personal interpretation of the Bible, set him on a collision course with the state, culminating in a landmark 1964 Arkansas Supreme Court decision whose echoes are still felt in modern debates over government mandates.

Archie Cude was a man shaped by the land. Born and raised near Houston, Texas, he was no stranger to hard work. In 1948, seeking a different life, he relocated his family to a remote farm in Board Camp, a small community nine miles east of Mena.

His family life was unconventional; after his first marriage to Lena Nell Highnote produced a son and a daughter who died in infancy, he married Lena's sister, Mary Frances Highnote, in 1942. In a strange twist of family ties, Lena Nell later married Archie’s brother, George.

On their Polk County farm, Archie and Mary Frances raised their children in relative seclusion, guided by Archie's deeply held principles.

The conflict began not with a sudden act of defiance, but with the quiet enforcement of state law. In the early 1960s, Arkansas, like other states, had laws mandating both compulsory school attendance and vaccination against smallpox, a dreaded and deadly disease. Cude, however, refused to comply.

Citing his personal religious beliefs, he kept his three school-aged children--then 12, 10, and 8--at home, uneducated and unvaccinated.

For Polk County authorities, this was a matter of public safety and a child's right to an education. In 1963, they took the drastic step of seeking state custody of the Cude children.

The case, which became known as Cude v. State, quickly ascended to the state’s highest court. The central question was profound: could a parent’s religious freedom override the state's authority to protect the community from disease and ensure children are educated?

The Arkansas Supreme Court delivered its verdict in 1964. The court ruled decisively against Cude, affirming that the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom "does not mean that a person can do anything he wants to, at any time he wants to, in the name of religion."

Citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Prince v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1943), the court established that the government’s responsibility to protect public health and safety could supersede individual religious objections.

James D. “Justice Jim” Johnson

One powerful voice on the court, Justice James D. “Justice Jim” Johnson, issued a dissent, arguing the state’s power was limited to fining Cude, not seizing his children. But the majority opinion stood.

The ruling was clear: the children would be vaccinated and sent to school.

The legal battle, however, was not without its strange and politically charged chapters. During his 1964 reelection campaign, Governor Orval Faubus briefly intervened, housing the Cude children at the Governor’s Mansion in a move widely seen as a publicity stunt.

In the wake of the ruling, the children were vaccinated under state supervision and enrolled in school. The transition was difficult; reports from the time noted their disruptive behavior led to frequent suspensions.

The state’s scrutiny of Archie Cude continued, even subjecting him to a mental evaluation in 1965, which ultimately found him to be sane.

Years later, Cude would find himself before the Arkansas Supreme Court again, this time in a 1970 inheritance dispute, Ida Hiler v. Archie Cude.

A widow named Rose Gordon had named Cude's sons as the beneficiaries of her will. When the will was challenged on grounds of fraud, the court ruled 5-2 in Cude's favor, upholding the inheritance.

Despite the legal turmoil, the Cude family remained in Polk County through the 1960s, with the children eventually returning to their father's care. Sometime in the 1970s, Archie Cude left the hills of Arkansas and moved to Sallisaw.

He lived there until his death on February 11, 1993, and was laid to rest in the Akins Cemetery.

Today, Archie Cude is remembered not as a simple farmer, but as the plaintiff in a foundational legal case. Cude v. State remains a cornerstone of public health policy in Arkansas and beyond, reinforcing the principle that personal liberty, even when rooted in sincere religious belief, is not absolute.

The case’s central conflict between individual freedom and the collective good proved remarkably prescient, resurfacing with vigor during the COVID-19 pandemic in debates over vaccine and mask mandates, proving that the questions Archie Cude forced a court to answer more than half a century ago are still with us today.