Sid McMath - Historical Evaluation

Historical Evaluation

In a 1999 opinion poll of political science professors, McMath placed fourth on a list of top Arkansas governors of the 20th century. However, in a December 2003 forum of historians and journalists sponsored by the Old State House Museum in Little Rock, there was a consensus that McMath's historic highway and school building programs, his early commitment to civil rights, particularly his support of U.S. President Harry S. 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 (Fall 1948, but only after Governor-elect McMath's express approval), his championship of rural electrification and his relentless opposition to segregationist Governor Orval Faubus, a former McMath ally (Faubus had served as McMath's Director of Highways.), during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation turmoil and throughout Faubus' subsequent nine years in office, could well result in his elevation by future historians to first place – not only among Arkansas governors, but among all southern governors of the time.

During the Little Rock Integration Crisis, McMath called upon U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to take over the Arkansas National Guard if Faubus used it improperly tro obstruct the implementation of federal court orders.

"Sid McMath might have laid legitimate claim to have been the most courageous and far-sighted Southern leader of the 20th century", wrote Arkansas Times columnist Ernest Dumas on October 10, 2003. "What separated McMath from every other leader of that grim time in the South was courage, the moral as well as physical variety."

Concluded Dumas: "he real test of courage was how he handled the defining issue of the century for every Southern political leader. n a field crowded by frenzied men trying to outdo each other in their zeal to keep the Negro in his place, McMath deplored race-baiting. … Had one – just one! – major elected Southern official broken ranks on civil rights, early on, before the racist opposition began to metastasize, history might have been so different. The tragedy of Faubus and Fulbright was that they lacked the courage to do so. The tragedy of Sid McMath was that corporate vengeance denied him the opportunity to do what they would not."

George Arnold, Northwest Arkansas opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, observed in a March 2004 column that, "If had been able to take Arkansas further down the path to modernization and racial harmony, Arkansas history would have been quite different. Arkansas paid a big price when the public utilities muscled him out of office. still paying." See Further Reading, below, for continued utility pricing disparity in Arkansas compared to neighboring states.

Harry Ashmore, whose Arkansas Gazette editorials during the Little Rock school crisis won dual Pulitzer Prizes for him and the paper, wrote in an April 1977 book review that, "McMath's … return to active politics in the Faubus era was pro bono, an act of integrity undertaken when he knew the chances of winning were slight and the personal cost would be high. ne who did not always see eye to eye with him could say of Sid McMath: 'He was there when the people needed him and didn't know it. He is a far better man than any of those who came out ahead of him at the polls.'"

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, in an October 7, 2003 editorial ("Greatness Passed This Way") written by editorial page editor Paul Greenberg, himself a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, lauded McMath as, "he greatest of his era – and of a few others."

"Sid McMath", the newspaper said, "never believed in testing the political winds before speak out for principle. He remained a true, old-fashioned Harry Truman Democrat even as that breed gradually disappeared. When others in the party argued that America could safely co-exist with evil, Sid McMath knew better – and said so. He also knew there are far worse things than losing elections – like winning them for the wrong reasons… He would not accept the expansion of evil in the world, no matter how inevitable that was said to be by distinguished statesmen at the time. Instead he would defy it – and urge others to join him."

The belatedness of McMath's recognition as one of the South's great political leaders has undoubtedly been due to lingering detraction from an ersatz "highway scandal" (see below) contrived by opponents to defeat his 1952 re-election bid as well as his steadfast support of a tough anti-communist foreign policy throughout the Cold War, including the Vietnam War (in which he served two short reserve tours), which McMath, while condemning its micromanagement by the Johnson and Nixon administrations, saw as a critical holding action necessary to give the emerging nations of the Asian rim, most of whom were fending off their own communist insurgencies, time to build market economies and some form of democracy. In Promises Kept he suggests that this goal was in fact achieved, in spite of the 1975 North Vietnamese victory over the south, which 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.

Nevertheless, these views, presented in scores of speeches to school, civic and veterans' groups, were bitterly resented by many of McMath's erstwhile supporters, particularly academics, editorial writers and liberal activists (including some members of his own law firm, who left on this account), for whom an aggressive Cold War stance became heresy during the late 1960s onward – indeed, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In spite of his towering credentials as a social and economic progressive, many of these persons never forgave McMath for his anti-communist, national defense positions, mentioning him, if at all, in detraction or with condescension and omitting him altogether from lists of historical notables. The former governor's stances on these questions (and the anathema with which he came to be held by liberal elites) contrasted sharply with those of popular Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, who, as chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vigorously opposed a hardline policy toward the Soviet Union generally and the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam in particular.

McMath's grit (some would say stubbornness) in the face of sustained unpopularity and virtually certain defeat at the polls, when compromise with his opponents might have assured his survival "to fight another day", has caused some commentators to question his commitment to a political career rather than to a valiant but naive Arthurian chivalry – or perhaps a fatalistic resignation. However, one participant at a Southern Arkansas University forum on McMath held November 3, 2003 in Magnolia, Arkansas put it another way: "When Sid McMath stood for civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s 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 later 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, James Stephen Hogg and Robert M. La Follette as the greatest of the American state governors. His stands on principle undoubtedly denied him a genuine chance to contend for the presidency. His life can be summed up in one word: Valor."