Sid McMath
Sidney Sanders McMath (June 14, 1912 - October 4, 2003) was a Democratic Governor of the State of Arkansas, United States.
Sidney 'Sid' McMath was born in Columbia County, Arkansas. McMath graduated from the University of Arkansas law school in 1936.
During World War II McMath served in the United States Marine Corps and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He took part in the battles of the Pacific Theater including the Battle of Bougainville, directing the Battle of Piva Forks, the determinative action. McMath won the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit. During the mid-1960's, he served two reserve tours in Vietnam with the 3d Marine Division as a Major General.
Returning home to Hot Springs, Arkansas from World War II, McMath and other veterans became disenchanted with the political system and banded together to fight corruption in the city government which was dominated by illegal gambling interests. Hot Springs at the time was a national gambling mecca frequented by organized crime figures from Chicago, New York and other metropolitan areas. Casinos flourished along with illicit off-track betting. Mobsters maintained control of the local government through the time honored technique of purchasing and holding hundreds of poll tax receipts, often in the names of deceased or fictitious persons, which would be used to cast multiple votes in different precincts. Law enforcement officers were on the payroll of the local "organization" headed by long serving Mayor Leo McLaughlin. A sheriff who attempted to enforce the state's anti-gambling laws was murdered in the late 1930's. No one was ever charged in the killing. McMath's "GI Ticket", except for McMath, himself, who as a district candidate carried neighboring Montgomery County by a sufficient majority to win the nomination for prosecutor, were defeated in the Democratic primary. However, they resigned from the party and ran again as independents in the 1946 general election after McMath persuaded a Federal judge to toss out the fraudulent poll tax receipts. All won their offices.
McMath served as prosecuting attorney for the 18th Judicial District [Garland and Montgomery Counties] counties starting in 1947. The newly installed GI officials shut down the casinos and a grand jury indicted a number of owners, pitch men and politicians, including the former mayor. Some were convicted of racketeering, but Mayor McLaughlin was acquitted by a Montgomery County jury. However, the back of his political organization was broken. With the development of Las Vegas in the years afterward, Hot Springs lost its premier gaming status, although there was a brief small-scale casino revival during the administration of Governor Orval Faubus (1955-1967). These operations were closed by Republican governor Winthrop Rockefeller, Faubus' successor, in 1967.
McMath was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1948 and entered office in early 1949. He was reelected in 1950.
McMath's administration focused on infrastructure improvement including new highways and roads and a medical center in the capital city. McMath supported anti-lynching statutes and appointed African-Americans to state boards. His administration improved the state's educational system, including the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences which was financed with a two-cent tax on cigarettes--a major innovation at the time. McMath often stated that he considered UAMS, now recognized as one of the nation's leading teaching and research institutions, to have been one of his most significant accomplishments. McMath worked tirelessly with then-chancellor Lawerence Davis, Sr. to save the state's all-Negro college, AM&N, from suffocating budget cuts by a hostile legislature. Now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the school maintains high academic standards and is a major player in South Arkansas' educational and agricultural communities. A significant minority of its students are white. McMath also reformed the state's mental health system and increased the minimum wage.
In spite of these reforms, or perhaps because of them, McMath ran afoul of the state's entrenched moneyed interests who for half a century had dominated the state's politics but with whom McMath was non-compliant, even hostile. These included utility magnates, a few wealthy bankers and bond dealers, the Murphy Oil conglomerate, and planters in the Mississippi Delta who feared McMath's progerssive racial policies would lead to a disruption of the captive ("sharecropping") cheap labor system which kept small black farmers and laborers in constant debt. These interests put aside their often bitter differences with each other to defeat McMath's bid for a third term in the 1952 election. McMath ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 1954 and again for Governor in 1962, with largely the same opposition united against him.
Following his 1952 defeat, McMath returned to the practice of law and over the next half-century became one of the leading personal injury trial attorneys in the United States. His cases set a number of legal precedents, including a woman's right to recover for the loss of her husband's consortium (an element of damage previously limited to men), manufacturers' responsibility for harm caused by defective products and negligent advertising encouraging their misuse, the chemical industry's liability for crop and environmental damage, and the right of workers to sue third party suppliers for job injuries. He and his partner Henry Woods, who had served as his gubernatorial chief of staff and later was appointed U.S. District Judge, became nationally known for their effective use of powerful demonstrative evidence such as detailed models of accident scenes and cut-away charts of the human anatomy. In 1976 he was elected president of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, an exclusive group of 500 of the world's most distinguished barristers. He wrote a memoir entitled Promises Kept (University of Arkansas Press, 2003, ISBN 1-55728-754-6) detailing his rural upbringing and his years as governor and in military service. An appendix discusses his more interesting and significant cases from the layman's point of view. These include Fitzsimmons v. General Motors Corporation, which pioneered the concept of consumer induced misuse of dangerous products through seductive film and television advertising, Brinnegar v. San Ore Const. Co., a landmark admiralty case, and several cases in which hundreds of tomato farmers and others were saved by McMath's extraordinary environmental lawyering from financial ruin when their crops were destroyed by defective pesticides. In 1991, McMath's firm was the first to propose state suits against the tobacco industry to recover medicaid funds expended caring for smoking victims. The proposal was rejected by Arkansas authorities, who had close political ties to tobacco lobbyists and their law firms--although the state grows no tobacco. However, in 1993 Florida, Mississippi and Minnesota built on the McMath proposal to begin legal actions which won billions of dollars in recoveries for their taxpayers and, eventually, for those of other states. Arkansas, which could have led the way and reaped multiple additional billions as the principal litigator, concluded a modest, belated, tag-along, structured settlement in 1999.
Sid McMath remained active into his 90's, speaking at Arkansas schools and events and supporting local civic organizations, including the Scottish Rite Masons who awarded him its highest honor of the Grand Cross and the Lions World Services for the Blind, whose training school in Little Rock he completed in 1999 following the loss of his vision due to macular degeneration. A video commercial featuring McMath has been aired nationally by the school in recent years.
In a 1999 opinion poll of Arkansans McMath polled number four on the list of top Arkansas Governors of the 20th century. In a December 2003 forum of historians and journalists sponsored by the Old State House Museum, there was a consensus that McMath's early commitment to civil rights, particularly his support of President Truman in the 1948 presidential election against Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, the abolition of the so called "white primary" in Arkansas (1949), the opening of the state's medical and law schools to African Americans (1949), his relentless opposition to segregationist governor Orval Faubus, a former McMath ally, in the darkest days of the Central High School integration crisis and throughout Faubus' subsequent 9 years in office, could well result in his elevation by future historians to first place--not only among Arkansas governors, but among Southern governors generally.
McMath's grit in the face of almost certain defeat at the polls (when compromise with his opponents would have probably assured his survivial "to fight another day") has caused some commentators to question his residual commitment to a political career rather than to a dogged but naive Arthurian chivalry--or perhaps a fatalistic resignation. Of his resolute political courage there is little doubt. One participant at a Southern Arkansas University forum on McMath held November 3, 2003 in Magnolia, Arkansas noted: "When Sid McMath stood for civil rights in the 1940s and 1950's he stood virtually alone among the South's political leaders, most of whom were waving the bloody shirt. By the 1970s every Southern pol was supporting full citizenship for African Americans. It was by then politically correct. But for McMath, it took unprecedented courage. And in fact it cost him whatever chance he had to salvage his political career. He certainly deserves a chapter in the next "Profiles in Courage". He was a true hero, not only to the South, but also to the Nation. He ranks with John Peter Altgeld [Illinois governor who pardoned the Hay Market rioters] and [Texas reform governor] James Stephen Hogg as the greatest of the American governors, whose stands on principle undoubtedly cost them a genuine chance to contend for the presidency. His life can be summed up in one word: Valor."
The former governor's stature has been enhanced by recent re-examinations of his administration's seemingly herculean accomplishments given the poverty and parsimony of the era, including the paving of more hard surface roads than any previous administration (more than those paved by any other Southern state during his tenure), a policy of openness and tolerance toward African Americans generally and a concerted school improvement program, including a reduction of the number of school districts from 1753 to 425--a measure begun by others but heartily endorsed by McMath in the 1948 general election and rigorously enforced by his administration after passage. Most significant is McMath's politically fatal but, in retrospect, gallantly successful war against Mid South Utilities, the dominant political force in state politics at the time. This monopoly operated as Arkansas Power and Light Co., or "AP&L". The corporation and its affiliates opposed extension of REA electrical power to rural areas, which its directors and chief shareholders saw as a rich territory for AP&L's own eventual expansion. Fewer than half of Arkansas farm homes had electricity in 1948. REA-affiliated cooperatives, however, were able to open service to those areas by 1956 as the result of Co-op enabling legislation enacted by Congress in large part at McMath's behest.
Mid South and its allies combined to defeat McMath in his 1952 re-election bid and in his 1954 effort to unseat then-Senator John L. McClellan. McClellan, who maintained a lucrative law practice with Mid South's chairman and general counsel, referred to the REA coops as "communistic" during the campaign, which was conducted at the height of the "red-scare" attendant upon assertions by the late U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) of communist influence in the Truman administration. McClellan was the ranking member of the Army McCarthy subcommittee whose hearings were televised live during the lead up to the election. McClellan narrowly defeated McMath in an election now recognized to have been marked by widespread fraud. For example, record numbers of black voters, for whom McMath had only five years before secured the right to vote in Democratic primaries, were trucked to the polls in Eastern Arkansas by McClellan supporters among the planters of that region who held their workers' poll tax receipts. McMath lost some of those precincts by better than 4 to 1 margins.
AP&L's (and McClellan's) enmity toward McMath did not end with his defeat in the senatorial election. Seven years later, when President Kennedy suggested McMath's possible appointment as Secretary of the Interior, McClellan quickly used his special relationship with Robert Kennedy, a former Army-McCarthy hearing aide, to nip the idea in the bud.
Allegations of corruption in McMath's highway department, brought by a grand jury dominated by utility allies, were eventually proven unfounded in three separate proceedings. Two grand juries returned no indictments, but a third on which several Mid South managers served, returned three. All of the accused were acquitted. There was no allegation of personal wrongdoing by McMath. However, the allegations against his administration dogged McMath for the rest of his life and his biography includes a chapter refuting the charges and chastising his opponents for abusing the judicial system to fabricate them.
Sidney Sanders McMath died at his home in Little Rock, Arkansas on Saturday, October 4, 2003. He had had been released from the hospital the previous Wednesday after being treated for an irregular heartbeat. He is survived by his wife, Betty Dorch Russell McMath, three sons: Sandy, Phillip and Bruce McMath; two daughters, Melissa Hatfield and Patricia Bueter; ten grandchildren and one great grandchild. His first wife and childhood sweetheart, Elaine Braughton McMath, died in 1942. His second wife, of 49 years, Anne Phillips McMath, died in 1994.
Sid McMath Avenue in Little Rock is named for him and the Little Rock Public Library recently dedicated a new branch in his honor.
For detailed historical perspectives on McMath's impact on regional and national politics, see "A president from Arkansas" by Ernest Dumas in the November 14, 2003 edition of Arkansas Times Magazine at arktimes.com; Professor Ed Lester's biography "A Man for Arkansas: Sid McMath and the Southern Reform Tradition", ISBN 0194546-11-2(Rose, 1976); Professor V.O. Key's classic "Southern Politics" (various editions), and numerous materials cited in those publications. For an intimate family portrait and a behind-the-scenes narrative, see "First Ladies of Arkansas: Women of Their Times", by Anne McMath, ISBN 0-87483-091-5 (August House, 1989).