page_title: Sid McMath
section_title: Political image
hierarchical_section_title: Sid McMath / Legacy / Political image
caption_attribution_description: English: Sid McMath
context_page_description: Sidney Sanders McMath was a decorated U.S. Marine, attorney and the 34th governor of Arkansas 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. At the time of his death, he was the earliest-serving former governor.
context_section_description: McMath's standing has been enhanced by contemporary re-examinations of his administration's extraordinary accomplishments, given the poverty and parsimony of the era.  These included the use of an unprecedented bond issue to secure the paving of more hard surface roads than all previous administrations combined (and more than those paved by any other Southern state during the period), taxing cigarettes to build the state's medical college, a policy of openness and inclusion toward African-Americans generally and a concerted public school improvement program, including a reduction of the number of school districts from 1,753 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 under the leadership of Dr. A.B. Bonds, Jr., one of the country's top young educators, a former training director for the Atomic Energy Commission, and a native Arkansan whom McMath persuaded to return to the state as director of the Department of Education.
  Most important was McMath's politically fatal but ultimately successful war against Middle South Utilities (now Entergy Corporation), the then-dominant political force in state politics, which operated locally as Arkansas Power & Light (a subsidiary of Entergy) Co. (AP&L).  The corporation and its affiliates opposed the extension of Rural Electrification Administration (REA)-generated electrical power to rural areas, which its directors and chief shareholders saw as a captive territory for AP&L's own eventual expansion.  Fewer than half of Arkansas farm homes had electricity in 1948.  REA-affiliated cooperatives, however, 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.
  Middle South led the combination that defeated 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 Middle South's chairman C. Hamilton Moses, referred to the REA co-ops as "communistic" during the campaign, which was conducted at the height of the "red scare" heightened by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's claims 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. Liberal senators Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and others, as well as Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, signed newspaper ads supporting McClellan. Moses had similarly partnered with McClellan's predecessor, Joe T. Robinson, who prior to his death in 1937 had used his considerable power as Senate majority leader to divert the New Deal's showcase Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) public electricity generating project away from the Arkansas River, the basin for which it was originally proposed. Moses, who had supported McMath in 1948 but had since cooled toward him, brought AP&L's entire board of directors to the governor's office just before the 1952 candidate filing deadline to lobby McMath against the building of the initial steam generating plant, at Ozark, Arkansas. They promised to aid McMath's third-term re-election bid, in spite of past differences, if he would withdraw his support for the plant.  The governor heard the businessmen out but reaffirmed his commitment to Co-op power.  Shortly afterward, four heavily AP&L-funded gubernatorial candidates filed against McMath, one of whom, Chancery Judge Francis Cherry of Jonesboro, defeated him in the August primary run-off during which Cherry hosted a round-the-clock radio "talkathon" lambasting "the McMath Highway Scandal." (See below.) Cherry was elected in November but served only one term, being defeated by Faubus in the 1954 run-off.
  McClellan narrowly defeated McMath in the 1954 senatorial 
caption: Sid McMath, 1953, by George Fisher
  Arkansas State Capitol, Little Rock
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