Sid McMath - Legacy

Legacy

Sid McMath served a bare six years in public office, only four as governor. He left behind no powerful political organization or claque of partisans. Gambling in Hot Springs, though subdued from its brazen heyday, returned sporadically for another 20 years. Every Arkansas home eventually would have been wired for electricity – although up to a decade later and under AP&L monopoly pricing rather than lower Co-op rates. The Interstate highway system was mostly completed through Arkansas by 1980 – tying into the thousands of miles of farm-to-market roads built or begun by McMath. National repeal of the poll tax was achieved by Constitutional Amendment, the adoption of which was enhanced by the support of a few Southern moderates, including McMath. The Civil Rights acts of the 1960s and changing cultural attitudes ultimately ameliorated, but did not end, discrimination against African-Americans. More problematical is whether President Truman would have won re-election had the Laney forces prevailed and Arkansas and the majority of the remaining Southern and Border states gone for the Dixiecrat Thurmond, thus throwing the election to the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, or into the U.S. House of Representatives, where mischief deal making by vested interests, particularly the tidelands oil lobby who were among Thurmond's primary contributors, would have shadowed any result. The support of McMath and a handful of other stalwarts was almost certainly determinative. And although McMath was not successful in his decade-long contest with Faubus, his vigorous, reasoned opposition during those years of upheaval may well have foreclosed a more violent outcome. It can be said with near certainty that without McMath's foresight and perseverance, Arkansas AM&N would not have survived and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences would not have become the world-renowned institution that it is today.

Whatever fame McMath once had fled well before his death. In recent years he sometimes had to spell his name for bank tellers, reservations clerks, state employees – once even for a newspaper reporter. He accumulated no great wealth, owning at the end a modestly upscale condominium and a small residual interest in his law firm. The latter, though no longer occupying the field alone, remains the state's premier personal injury practice. Ironically, some of its major cases are referred by competitors, many of whom appear amongst the swarms of television, billboard and yellowpage advertisements directed at "victims" and the "hurt" now common throughout America.

A key to McMath's ultimate legacy may be found in the memory of those who knew him, if only for a time. "You always left Sid McMath with the feeling, not that you had been with someone important, but that you were important, that your life had been uplifted", Arkansas Circuit Judge John Norman Harkey has said of McMath. "Sid took your cares away. He refreshed your spirit. No matter how down you were before, he made you want to charge back into the battle, but with a smile, knowing, by gosh, we can really win this thing. And we did win." But, of course, McMath did not always win. A stock remark he would offer following a loss was, "The bastards know they've been in a fight. You have to let them know you're not afraid to leave your blood on the courtroom floor. I've left a lot of blood on the courtroom floor."

There was also the matter of honor, the upholding of which by a public officer amidst great tumult and peril (and against the most persuasive and enticing machiavellian temptation to do otherwise), and at the risk not only of one's career and personal fortune but, in the darkest days, of one's life and those of his loved ones—may prove to be McMath's singular legacy. Once a noted collegiate thespian, McMath on occasion would recite lines dealing with honor from roles in which he had acted (or aspired to act) in his youth. He was high-school cast in The Valiant and as Hamlet, Romeo and Henry V at university. But among his favorites, which he had not played but often wished he had done, was the lead in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, a work he knew practically by heart, particularly the closing scene, in which the grenadier is dying alone except for his beloved Roxanne, to whom he confides that his paucity of means and acclaim, and his unconsummated love – all are nothing beside his intact honor, "and that is … my white ... plume."