Sid McMath

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Sid McMath bigraphy, stories - American Marine Corps general

Sid McMath : biography

June 14, 1912 – October 4, 2003

Sidney Sanders McMath (June 14, 1912October 4, 2003) was a decorated U.S. Marine, attorney and the 34th Governor of Arkansas (1949–1953) who, in defiance of his state’s political establishment, championed rapid rural electrification, massive highway and school construction, the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, strict bank and utility regulation, repeal of the poll tax, open and honest elections and broad expansion of opportunity for black citizens in the decade following World War II.

McMath remained loyal to President Harry S. Truman during the "Dixiecrat" rebellion of 1948, campaigning throughout the South for Truman’s re-election. As a former governor, McMath led the opposition to segregationist Governor Orval Faubus following the 1957 Little Rock school crisis. He later became one of the nation’s foremost trial lawyers, representing thousands of injured persons in precedent-setting cases and mentoring several generations of young attorneys.

Defeat for third term and U.S. Senate

McMath ran afoul of the energy and other extractionist sectors who had long dominated Arkansas politics but for whom McMath was not a compliant agent. These included Arkansas Power & Light, headed by utility magnate C. Hamilton Moses; wealthy bankers and bond dealers; piney woods timber companies; the Murphy Oil conglomerate and its retainers; and old-family planters in the Mississippi Delta. All feared that McMath’s progressive politics would increase labor costs and break up the sharecropping farm economy. The utility feared loss of territory to rural electric cooperatives. These interests put aside their differences to work in concert to defeat McMath’s bid for a third term in the 1952 election. McMath ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1954 and again for Governor in 1962, with largely the same opposition united against him—although, by 1962, Moses had been displaced by bond and gas tycoon W.R. "Witt" Stephens as principal kingmaker. In 1962, McMath came within 500 votes of forcing Governor Orval Faubus, who had once been his Executive Secretary and Highway Director, into a runoff. McMath’s voting base among the working class was neutralized by the $2 poll tax (roughly $40 in 2004 dollars) which had to be paid a year prior to an election, effectively disenfranchising thousands of those voters. McMath strove in vain to repeal the tax, which remained a relic of Jim Crow until the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964.

Legacy

Sid McMath served a bare six years in public office, only four as governor. He left behind no powerful political organization or claque of partisans. Gambling in Hot Springs, though subdued from its brazen heyday, returned sporadically for another 20 years. Every Arkansas home eventually would have been wired for electricityalthough up to a decade later and under AP&L monopoly pricing rather than lower Co-op rates. The Interstate highway system was mostly completed through Arkansas by 1980tying into the thousands of miles of farm-to-market roads built or begun by McMath. National repeal of the poll tax was achieved by Constitutional Amendment, the adoption of which was enhanced by the support of a few Southern moderates, including McMath. The Civil Rights acts of the 1960s and changing cultural attitudes ultimately ameliorated, but did not end, discrimination against African-Americans. More problematical is whether President Truman would have won re-election had the Laney forces prevailed and Arkansas and the majority of the remaining Southern and Border states gone for the Dixiecrat Thurmond, thus throwing the election to the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, or into the U.S. House of Representatives, where mischief deal making by vested interests, particularly the tidelands oil lobby who were among Thurmond’s primary contributors, would have shadowed any result. The support of McMath and a handful of other stalwarts was almost certainly determinative. And although McMath was not successful in his decade-long contest with Faubus, his vigorous, reasoned opposition during those years of upheaval may well have foreclosed a more violent outcome. It can be said with near certainty that without McMath’s foresight and perseverance, Arkansas AM&N would not have survived and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences would not have become the world-renowned institution that it is today.