58 Facts About Sid McMath

Sidney Sanders McMath was a US marine, attorney and the 34th governor of Arkansas from 1949 to 1953.

Sid McMath 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.

Sidney Sanders McMath was born in a dog-trot log cabin on the old McMath home place near Magnolia, Columbia County, Arkansas, the son of Hal Pierce and Nettie Belle Sanders McMath.

Sid McMath was elected president of his class each of his high school years, the last of which he won the state Golden Gloves welterweight boxing title.

Sid McMath attended Henderson State College and the University of Arkansas, where he was elected president of the student body.

Sid McMath was a member of the Arkansas Pershing Rifles military fraternal organization, Blue Key, and Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

Sid McMath graduated from the university's School of Law in 1936.

Sid McMath received a reserve ROTC commission as a second lieutenant in the Marines upon graduation from college.

Sid McMath received a battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Silver Star and Legion of Merit.

Sid McMath then served in the Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, DC planning an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Sid McMath was promoted to major general on November 7,1966.

Sid McMath served a second brief Reserve tour in Vietnam, with the 3rd Marine Division, in 1969.

Sid McMath headed a "GI Ticket", which, except for Sid McMath himself, was defeated in the Democratic primary election.

However, the others resigned from the party and ran again as independents in the 1946 general election after Sid McMath persuaded a federal judge to toss out the fraudulent poll tax receipts.

Sid McMath served as prosecuting attorney for the 18th Judicial District starting in 1947.

Sid McMath entered office January 11,1949, as the nation's youngest governor.

Sid McMath was easily reelected in 1950 over his immediate predecessor, Benjamin Travis Laney of Camden, who attacked McMath for having supported Truman in 1948 when Laney and many other southern Democrats bolted the Democratic party over its civil rights plank.

Sid McMath campaigned vigorously across the region and was credited by Truman with helping to save most of the South for the Democratic column, providing the electoral margin for a stunning upset victory.

Sid McMath's administration focused on infrastructure improvements, including the extensive paving of farm-to-market and primary roads "to get Arkansas out of the mud and the dust", rural electrification, and the construction of a medical center in the capital city.

Sid McMath supported anti-lynching statutes and appointed African-Americans to state boards for the first time.

Sid McMath's administration consolidated hundreds of small school districts and built the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Sid McMath worked tirelessly, often clandestinely, with Dr Lawrence Davis, Sr.

Sid McMath reformed the state's mental health system and increased the minimum wage.

Sid McMath was elected by the governors of other petroleum producing states to chair the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which sought to improve pricing structures and broaden federal support for fossil fuel exploration.

Sid McMath was elected chairman of the Southern Governor's Conference.

Sid McMath invited muckraking Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore to speak to the governors.

Sid McMath's topic was the waste of scarce public funds in maintaining separate school systems for white and black pupils.

Sid McMath ran afoul of the energy and other extractionist sectors who had long dominated Arkansas politics, but for whom Sid McMath was not a compliant agent.

Sid McMath strove in vain to repeal the tax, which remained a relic of Jim Crow until the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1964.

Sid McMath remained active into his 90s, continuing to speak at Arkansas schools and events, particularly at his first alma mater, Henderson State University, whose faculty established a history and political science lecture series in his honor, and at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, to whose scholarship fund he was a substantial contributor.

Sid McMath supported local civic organizations, including the Union Rescue Mission, the Scottish Rite Masons, 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.

Sid McMath taught a senior Bible study class for 26 years at Little Rock's Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church, with emphasis on the Old Testament prophets.

Sid McMath died at his home in Little Rock on October 4,2003.

Sid McMath had been released from a hospital stay three days earlier after being treated for severe dehydration, malnourishment, and an irregular heartbeat.

Sid McMath was survived by his third 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.

Sid McMath was given a full military funeral by a US Marine Corps Honor Guard.

The tragedy of Sid McMath was that corporate vengeance denied him the opportunity to do what they would not.

Sid McMath is a far better man than any of those who came out ahead of him at the polls.

Sid McMath remained a true, old-fashioned Harry Truman Democrat even as that breed gradually disappeared.

In Promises Kept he suggests that this goal was in fact achieved, in spite of the 1975 North Vietnamese victory over the south, which Sid McMath saw as pyrrhic in light of the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the rest of Southeast Asia as a free-trading powerhouse.

Sid McMath certainly deserves a chapter in the next Profiles in Courage.

Sid McMath was a true hero, not only to the South, but to the Nation.

Sid McMath's stands on principle undoubtedly denied him a genuine chance to contend for the presidency.

Sid McMath served barely six years in public office, only four as governor.

Sid McMath left behind no powerful political organization or claque of partisans.

Whatever fame Sid McMath once had fled well before his death.

Sid McMath accumulated no great wealth, owning at the end a modestly upscale condominium and a small residual interest in his law firm.

Sid McMath was high-school cast in The Valiant and as Hamlet, Romeo and Henry V at university.

Sid McMath's standing has been enhanced by contemporary re-examinations of his administration's extraordinary accomplishments, given the poverty and parsimony of the era.

REA-affiliated cooperatives guided by Harry L Oswald, for 32 years their Arkansas general manager and a fervent McMath loyalist, were able to open service to those areas by 1956 as the result of co-op-enabling legislation, including authorization for the building of steam generating plants, which was enacted by Congress in large part at McMath's behest.

For example, record numbers of black voters, for whom Sid 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 and recorded how they voted.

However, the assertions against his administration dogged him for the rest of his life and Promises Kept includes a chapter in which Sid McMath refutes the charges and chastises his opponents for abusing the judicial system to fabricate them.

The truthfulness of Sid McMath's testimony describing in detail this use of raw corporate power to defeat reform and destroy the reformer was never disputed, and no rebuttal was offered.

Sid McMath became the acknowledged leader of the Faubus opposition and supported insurgent gubernatorial candidates in the 1958 and 1960 Democratic primaries.

Faubus narrowly avoided a runoff when Marvin Melton, a Jonesboro banker widely seen as the second strongest challenger after Sid McMath, was persuaded by Faubus operatives to quit the race.

US District Judge Henry Woods, Sid McMath's partner of 27 years, was a prolific legal writer and his articles on their cases occasionally appeared in the Arkansas Law Review.

Sid McMath's papers, including personal letters and memoranda on a variety of matters dating from McMath's governorship through their years of practice together, were donated in 1998 to the special collections section of the University of Arkansas library in Fayetteville.

Shortly after his first inauguration, Sid McMath candidly discussed his political thinking and legislative goals in a widely syndicated interview with Joseph Driscoll, national correspondent for the St Louis Post-Dispatch.