Sid McMath - Defeat For Third Term and U.S. Senate

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.