Sid McMath - Bold Positions & Political Consequences

Bold Positions & Political Consequences

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 member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a native Arkansan whom McMath persuaded to return to the state as director of the Department of Education.

Most significant 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 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 25 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 prior to 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 race, an election now generally 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 (usually plantation stores or gin offices) in Eastern Arkansas by McClellan supporters among the planters of that region who held their workers' poll tax receipts and recorded how they voted. McMath lost some of those precincts by better than 9 to 1 margins as election officials in Lee, Crittenden, Phillips, Mississippi, Desha and Chicot counties delayed completion of vote counts for a full day after the election—allegedly to see how many more fraudulent votes McClellan needed to win without a run-off.

AP&L's (and McClellan's) enmity toward McMath did not end with his defeat in the senatorial election. Nine years later, when President John F. Kennedy suggested McMath's possible appointment as a replacement Secretary of the Interior, McClellan quickly used his special relationship with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a former counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations, of which McClellan had become chairman in 1955, to nip the idea in the bud. A similar suggestion in 1964 by then-President Lyndon Johnson met the same fate. Some of McMath's most stalwart support was from organized labor, whose abuses, particularly by national leaders of the Teamsters, were a focus of the committee's investigations in the late 1950s. No Arkansas union members or officials, however, figured prominently in these probes.

Allegations of corruption in McMath's highway department, brought by a grand jury dominated by utility minions, were eventually proven unfounded in three separate proceedings. Two grand juries returned no indictments, but a third on which several Middle South managers served returned three, each alleging shakedowns of highway contractors for campaign contributions. All of the accused were acquitted. There was no allegation of personal wrongdoing by McMath. However, the assertions against his administration dogged him for the rest of his life and Promises Kept includes a chapter in which McMath refutes the charges and chastises his opponents for abusing the judicial system to fabricate them. The former governor's October 22, 1954 sworn statement before the U.S. Senate committee investigating monopoly influence over the distribution of the nation's electrical power, in which he recounts Middle South-AP&L's manipulation of the Arkansas "Highway Audit Commission" and the grand jury process, warrants inclusion in any anthology of significant state papers of the 20th century. The truthfulness of 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. See Further Reading, below.

McMath opposed the "Southern Manifesto", a March 1956 pronouncement of 19 U.S. Senators, including Fulbright and McClellan, and 81 Congressmen from former Confederate states decrying the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as: "ontrary to the Constitution … creating chaos and confusion … destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races … plant hatred and suspicion explosive and dangerous condition inflamed by outside meddlers …" The document encouraged public officials to use "all lawful means" to thwart the enforcement of the ruling. According to McMath at the time, "This only serves to encourage demagogues to set fires of racial hatred that could consume our people."

It was this Congressional manifesto, McMath laments in Promises Kept, that gave Faubus the impetus and political cover to call out the National Guard in September 1957 to bar the entry of nine black students to Little Rock Central High School. "Emboldened by this support", McMath wrote, "Faubus played his racial card." McMath strenuously opposed this action as well as Faubus' closure of the public schools the following year rather than obey federal court desegregation orders.

McMath counseled President Dwight D. Eisenhower against the use of regular U.S. Army troops, suggesting instead that the U.S. Marshals Service be used to enforce the court's orders. However, this advice was not accepted and paratroopers from the elite 101st Airborne Division were sent to Little Rock after Eisenhower nationalized the Guard and disbanded it. The soldiers forced the admission of "The Little Rock Nine", as the black students became known, but the troops' presence, as McMath foretold, stirred states-rights sentiment to a frenzy, made Faubus a hero to a majority of Arkansas voters, and ensured his re-election to a record six terms in office – each time, ironically, with an increasing percentage of the African-American vote, of which he garnered more than 80% in the 1964 Democratic primary.

McMath became the acknowledged leader of the Faubus opposition and supported insurgent gubernatorial candidates in the 1958 and 1960 Democratic primaries. His law firm was often referred to as resembling "a South American government in exile." McMath, himself, finally ran against Faubus in 1962 under the slogan, "Let's get Arkansas Moving Again." He placed second in a field of five, splitting the black vote with Faubus, while running on a platform of fresh business investment (many firms had fled the state during the years of racial strife or avoided it altogether), stricter regulation of gas and electric utility pricing, and the charging of interest on state revenues, which were held in private banks interest free but which the banks then loaned out at standard commercial rates – a windfall bankers justified as a "fee" for keeping the state's funds. Faubus narrowly avoided a runoff when Marvin Melton, a Jonesboro banker widely seen as the second strongest challenger after McMath, was persuaded by Faubus operatives (who suggested that state funds could be withdrawn from his bank and questions raised about his selling of allegedly inflated insurance company stock) to quit the race.

The 1962 election cemented the ascendancy of "Witt" Stephens, Faubus' primary financial backer, as the state's undisputed kingmaker. Stephens' banks held the lion's share of state funds. His Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company charged Arkansas homeowners (whom Stephens contemptuously referred to as "the biscuit cookers") the highest residential rates by volume in the Southwest, thanks to Faubus' complaisant Public Service Commission—an advantage that continues today. (See Further Reading, below.) Additionally, Stephens' brokerage firm handled most state bond issues during the 12-year Faubus reign. The Stephens empire today controls more than one hundred billion dollars in investments. "Stephens, Inc", its brokerage arm, was until recently the largest off-Wall Street securities trading firm in the United States. A sign of its political clout – and wariness – is the firm's portfolio of newspaper and other communication holdings, the second largest in Arkansas after the Palmer-Hussman chain, which operates the only statewide newspaper and a spawn of local dailies. Between them, the two interests control, directly or through subsidiaries or associates, more than two-thirds of the state's famously quiescent print and broadcast media.

Many of McMath's staunchest supporters turned out in 1966 for Winthrop Rockefeller in his successful bid to become the state's first GOP governor since Reconstruction. Rockefeller soundly defeated the Democratic nominee, an avowed segregationist supreme court justice, Jim Johnson.

The 1966 election was the first full general election cycle since the repeal of the poll tax and passage of the Voting Rights Act. These developments accelerated an already growing shift in influence over black voters from white bosses toward African-American clergy, due in part to the gradual displacement of plantation labor by mechanized agriculture, swelling the unemployment and welfare rolls. Rockefeller's campaign took full advantage of this dynamic by wooing hundreds of black ministers with church improvement contributions and cash get-out-the-vote payments, setting a precedent for future candidates of both parties and considerably raising the cost of electioneering. Some ministers, themselves locally elected officials, hire out as "consultants" to congressional and gubernatorial candidates, often renting their church buildings and vehicles to a campaign and hiring congregants as canvassers and drivers. Early-voting laws now permit even Sunday balloting, facilitating the busing of entire congregations to polling places after services. In some instances, the churches themselves are designated as early voting precincts. Funding this cornucopia of "walking around money", which can exceed $1 million per election cycle for each major statewide candidate, has substantially increased the power of the state's corporate vested interests, whose large bundled and PAC contributions, many from lawyers, managers and agents of out-of-state parents and affiliates, as well as from international labor union political action funds, are critical in meeting such demanding overhead. Bundling has become even more important in view of individual donation limits imposed following Watergate and subsequent scandals. When rising front-end charges for television advertising (essential for reaching white voters but to which African-American voters are largely unresponsive) are added, Arkansas campaign expenditures, per voter, are among the nation's highest.

The Rockefeller administration resumed and expanded the post-war reforms begun by McMath, particularly with regard to civil rights, which, borne on a national tide of rejection of bigotry as public policy, resulted not merely in blacks ceasing to be excluded from public services but able, in significant part, to control their allocation through the franchise – usually by bloc voting for Democratic candidates, but always as a credible threat against any racist isolate. Rather than altering the status quo with some 18% to 22% of the vote statewide (40% to 60% in some counties), blacks have been absorbed into it through disproportionate hiring as lower level public employees and as low wage "associates" of mega-retailing enterprises, poultry processing emporia, tertiary health and casualty insurers, the utility monopolies and other concerns buoyed by the state's parochial, right-to-work economy.

Bereft of Rockefeller's eleemosynary capacity or McMath's disdain for barony, later administrations have comfortably reconciled themselves to the exigencies of this quaint realpolitik. Although Faubus died a pariah in 1994, the example of his agility in placating a credulous electorate, now multiracial, with a veneer of populism and dashes of largesse, while simultaneously accommodating the forces of extraction – whom Sid McMath illustriously, if momentarily, challenged half-a-century ago – remains the guidepost for political survival in 21st century Arkansas.