Sid McMath

Sidney Sanders McMath (June 14, 1912 - October 4, 2003) was a U.S. Marine hero and progressive Democratic reform Governor of the State of Arkansas, United States, who championed clean elections, rural electric power, highway and school construction, the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and expansion of opportunity for black citizens in the decade following World War II. He 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 integration crisis. He later became one of the nation's foremost trial attorneys, representing thousands of injured persons in precedent-setting cases.

Sidney 'Sid' McMath was born at the old McMath home place near Magnolia, Columbia County, Arkansas, on Flag Day, Friday, June 14, 1912, the son of Hal Pierce and Nettie Belle Sanders McMath. His paternal grandfather, Columbia County Sheriff Sidney Smith McMath, had been shot to death in the line of duty the previous year leaving a widow and 8 children, Hal being the eldest. After wrangling horses and wildcatting in the Southwest Arkansas oil fields, Hal McMath moved his family by wagon to Hot Springs in the winter of 1922. There, he sold the last of his horses and took a job as a barber. Nettie went to work for the Malco theatre as a ticket vendor. Sidney and his sister, Edyth, attended Hot Springs public schools, where the boy excelled in boxing and drama and became an Eagle Scout, while shining shoes and hawking newspapers to supplement the family's meagre income. He later attended Henderson State College and the University of Arkansas Law School, where he was elected president of the student body. He was graduated in 1936.

War service

During World War II, McMath, having taken an ROTC commission as a second lieutenant, served with the United States Marine Corps, to which, now a captain, he had voluntarily returned on active duty in 1940 to assist in the training of officer candidates at Quantico, Virginia. Promoted to major, he was billeted in June of 1942 to Samoa to command the combined forces jungle warfare school. Later that year and into 1943, he led Marines in numerous battles of the Pacific Theatre, including New Georgia, Vella Lavella, Guadalcanal and Bougainville, during which he directed the Battle of Piva Forks, the pivotal action. Cited for extraordinary heroism, he received a battlefield promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and was awarded the Silver Star and Legion of Merit. During the mid-1960's, McMath served two reserve tours in Vietnam with the 3d Marine Division as a Major General.

Early career in politics

Returning to Hot Springs from World War II, McMath and other veterans became disenchanted with the political system and banded together to fight corruption in the city government which was dominated by illegal gambling interests. Hot Springs at the time was a national gambling mecca frequented by organized crime figures from Chicago, New York City and other metropolitan areas. Casinos flourished along with illicit off-track betting. Mobsters maintained control of the local government through the time-honored technique of purchasing and holding hundreds of poll tax receipts, often in the names of deceased or fictitious persons, which would be used to cast multiple votes in different precincts. Law enforcement officers were on the payroll of the local "organization" headed by long-serving Mayor Leo McLaughlin. A former sheriff who attempted to have the state's anti-gambling laws enfored was murdered in 1937. No one was ever charged in the killing. McMath's "GI Ticket", except for McMath, himself, who as a district candidate carried neighboring Montgomery County by a sufficient majority to win the nomination for prosecutor, were defeated in the Democratic primary election. However, they resigned from the party and ran again as independents in the 1946 general election after McMath persuaded a federal judge to toss out the fraudulent poll tax receipts. All won their offices.

McMath served as prosecuting attorney for the 18th Judicial District (Garland and Montgomery Counties) starting in 1947. The newly installed GI officials, led by McMath, shut down the casinos and other rackets and a grand jury indicted a number of owners, pitchmen and politicians, including the former mayor. Some were convicted, but Mayor McLaughlin was acquitted of bribery by a Montgomery County petit jury. However, the back of his political organization was broken. With the development of Las Vegas in the years afterward, Hot Springs lost its premier gaming status. A limited casino revival during the administration of Governor Orval Faubus (1955-1967) was ended in 1967 by Republican Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, Faubus' successor.

Governor of Arkansas

Sid McMath, flush with success as a handsome, crusading prosecutor, was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1948 after a close, hotly contested election during which his run-off opponent, the state's attorney general, accused him of "selling out to the Negro vote." At 36, he entered office in early January 1949 as the nation's youngest governor. He was reelected in 1950 by a wide margin over his immediate predecessor, former governor Ben Laney, who attacked McMath for remaining loyal to President Harry Truman during the 1948 general election after Laney and a number of other southern governors bolted the Democratic convention following its adoption of a civil rights plank in the party platform. Laney and the other walk-outs switched their allegience to Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who ran as a "Dixiecrat". McMath wrested control of the Arkansas party from Laney and used it to carry the state for the Truman-Barkley ticket. McMath campaigned for the President throughout the South and was credited by Truman with helping to save most of the region for the Democratic column. The two developed a lifelong friendship with some suggesting that Truman viewed McMath as an eventual successor. He was mentioned early as a possible vice-presidential choice in 1952.

McMath's administration focused on infrastructure improvements, including the extensive paving of farm-to-market and secondary roads "to get Arkansas out of the mud and the dust," expansion of electric power to rural areas and the construction of a medical center in the capital city. McMath supported anti-lynching statutes and appointed African-Americans to state boards. His administration improved the educational system, supervising the consolidation of hundreds of small school districts and the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences which was financed with a two-cent tax on cigarettes--a major innovation at the time. McMath often stated that he considered UAMS, now recognized as one of the nation's leading teaching and research institutions, to have been his most significant single accomplishment. The UAMS faculty awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1990 for his many years of service to the college. McMath also worked tirelessly with then-chancellor Dr. Lawerence Davis, Sr., a prominent African American educator of the era, to save the state's all-black college, AM&N, from suffocating budget cuts by a hostile state legislature which jeopardized accreditation and threatened closure. Now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the school is a major player in South Arkansas' educational, business and agricultural communities. McMath also reformed the state's mental health system and increased the minimum wage, while speaking to groups of investors and radio audiences around the country in a campaign to promote Arkansas as "the land of opportunity."

Defeat for third term and U.S. Senate

In spite of these reforms, or perhaps because of them, McMath ran afoul of entrenched interests in the state's extractionist economy who, since the turn of the century, had dominated Arkansas politics but toward whom McMath was non-compliant, even disdainful. These included electric 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 who feared McMath's progressive policies would lead to a disruption of the captive cheap-labor system (sharecropping) which kept small black and white farmers alike in constant debt and drove wages of seasonal labor to near-starvation levels. These interests put aside their own differences to work in concert to defeat McMath's bid for a third term in the 1952 election. McMath ran unsuccessfully for the US 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. McMath was considerably handicapped by the requirement that, in order to be eligible to vote, one's $1 poll tax (roughly $25 in 2004 dollars) had to be paid at least a year prior to an election. This effectively disenfranchised thousands of working class voters while facilitating ballot fraud by those able to buy up large numbers of poll tax receipts. McMath strove in vain to repeal the tax, which remained an oppressive Jim Crow relic until it was abolished by the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964.

Trial law practice

Following his 1952 defeat, McMath returned to the practice of law and over the next half-century became one of the leading consumer trial attorneys in the United States. His cases set a broad range of legal precedents, including the first million-dollar personal injury verdict in a U.S. District Court (for an injured barge crewman, in 1968), a woman's right to recover for the loss of her husband's consortium (an element of damage previously limited to men), manufacturers' responsibility for harm caused by defective products and negligent advertising encouraging their misuse, the chemical industry's liability for crop and environmental damage, drug companies' responsibility for fatal vaccine reactions in children, gun dealers' wrongful death liability for the negligent sale of firearms, and the right of workers to sue third-party suppliers for job injuries. He and his partner Henry Woods, who had served as his gubernatorial chief of staff and later was appointed U.S. District Judge, became nationally known for their effective use of powerful demonstrative evidence such as detailed models of accident scenes and cut-away charts of the human anatomy. In 1976 he was elected president of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, an exclusive group of 500 of the world's most distinguished barristers.

McMath wrote a memoir entitled Promises Kept (University of Arkansas Press, 2003, ISBN 1-55728-754-6) detailing his rural upbringing, public schooling, family tragedies--including the untimely death of his first wife, Elaine, during the war and the shooting to death of his father, who had become an enraged alcoholic, by his second wife, Anne, in 1947--as well as his years of military service and as governor. The Arkansas Historical Society awarded the autobiography its 2003 John G. Ragsdale Prize as the year's most outstanding historical work. An appendix discusses McMath's more interesting and significant cases from the layman's point of view. These include Franco v. Bunyard, which held firearms merchants responsible for their negligent sale of weapons to escaped convicts who abducted and murdered four supermarket employees, Fitzsimmons v. General Motors Corporation, which pioneered the concept of a manufacturer's liability for consumer induced misuse of dangerous products through seductive film and television advertising, Brinnegar v. San Ore Construction Co., a landmark admiralty case, and several cases in which hundreds of tomato farmers and others were saved by McMath's extraordinary environmental lawyering from financial ruin when their crops were destroyed by defective pesticides and poultry effluent. In 1991, McMath's firm was the first to propose state claims against the tobacco industry to recover Medicaid funds expended caring for smoking victims. The proposal was rejected by Arkansas authorities, who had close political ties to tobacco lobbyists and law firms. However, in 1993 Florida, Mississippi and Minnesota built on the McMath proposal to bring suits which won billions of dollars for their taxpayers as principal litigators. Texas recovered $18 billion in Texarkana federal court, a suit which Arkansas officials refused to join. Other states eventually were paid lesser amounts. Arkansas finally structured a $60 million per year tag-along settlement in 1999.

Later life

Sid McMath remained active into his 90's, continuing to speak at Arkansas schools and events, particualarly at his first alma mater, Henderson State University, whose faculty established a history and political science lecture series in his honor, and at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to whose scholarship fund he was a substantial contributor. He also supported local civic organizations, including the Union Rescue Mission, the Scottish Rite Masons (who awarded him its highest honor of the Grand Cross), and the Lions World Services for the Blind, whose training school in Little Rock he completed in 1999 following the loss of his vision due to macular degeneration. A video commercial featuring McMath has been aired nationally by the school in recent years. McMath was elected president of the Third Marine Division Association and in 1994 he narrated "The Battle of Bauxite," a television documentary recounting the story of the miners who excavated thousands of tons of aluminum ore from pits near Bauxite, Arkansas which was used for military aircraft production during World War II. Aluminum workers and their families were among McMath's most ardent campaign supporters.

Historical evaluation

In a 1999 opinion poll of some 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 massive highway and school building programs, his early commitment to civil rights, particularly his support of 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 (1949), his championship of rural electrification and his relentless opposition to segregationist governor Orval Faubus, a former McMath ally, during the 1957 Central High School integration turmoil and throughout Faubus' subsequent 9 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.

"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: "[T]he real test of courage was how he handled the defining issue of the century for every Southern political leader. [I]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 metastatize, 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, opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, observed in a March 2004 column that, "If [McMath] 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. [It is] still paying."

The late Harry Ashmore, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock school crisis, wrote in 1976: "Sid McMath 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") lauded McMath as, "the greatest [man] of his era--and of a few others."

"Sid McMath," the newspaper said, "never believed in testing the political winds before speak[ing]out for principle. He remained a true, old-fashioned Harry Truman ... Democrat 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 dintinguished 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 critical of its micromanagement by the Johnson and Nixon administrations, saw as a critical holding action necessary to give the emerging nations of the Asian rim 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 a heresy during the late 1960's onward--indeed, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. McMath's positions on these questions 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.

Yet this was not out of character. McMath's grit (some would say stubborness) in the face of unpopularity and virtually certain defeat at the polls, when compromise with his opponents might have assured his survivial "to fight another day," has caused some commentators to question his residual 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 1950's 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 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 [of Illinois] and James Stephen Hogg [of Texas] as the greatest of the American state governors, whose stands on principle undoubtedly cost them a genuine chance to contend for the presidency. His life can be summed up in one word: Valor."

Bold positions & political consequences

The former governor's stature has been greatly enhanced by contemporary re-examinations of his administration's seemingly herculean 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 a first-class medical college, a policy of openness and tolerance toward African Americans generally and a concerted public school improvement program, including a reduction of the number of school districts from 1753 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 able leadership of Dr. A.B. Bonds, one of the country's top educators 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, in retrospect, gallantly successful war against Mid South Utilities, the dominant political force in state politics at the time. This monopoly operated as Arkansas Power and Light Co., or "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 rich territory for AP&L's own eventual expansion. Fewer than half of Arkansas farm homes had electricity in 1948. REA-affiliated cooperatives, however, were able to open service to those areas by 1956 as the result of Co-op enabling legislation enacted by Congress, in large part at McMath's behest.

Mid South and its allies combined to defeat 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 Mid 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" attendant upon assertions by the late U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) 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 (D-Minn), Stuart Symington (D-Mo) and others, as well as Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D-Tex), signed newspaper ads supporting McClellan. McClellan narrowly defeated McMath in an election now 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.

AP&L's (and McClellan's) enmity toward McMath did not end with his defeat in the senatorial election. Seven years later, when President John F. Kennedy suggested McMath's possible appointment as Secretary of the Interior, McClellan quickly used his special relationship with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a former attorney to the Senate investigations committee, of which McClellan had become chairman in 1955, to nip the idea in the bud. 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 1950's. 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 Mid South managers served, returned three. All of the accused were acquitted. There was no allegation of personal wrongdoing by McMath. However, the allegations against his administration dogged McMath for the rest of his life and Promises Kept includes a chapter in which McMath conclusively refutes the charges and chastises his opponents for abusing the judicial system to fabricate them.

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: "[C]ontrary to the Constitution ... creating chaos and confusion ... destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races ... plant[ing] hatred and suspicion [and an] explosive and dangerous condition [which is being] 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 demogogues to set fires of racial hatred that could consume our people."

It was this Manifesto, McMath laments in Promises Kept, that gave Arkansas' Governor Orval 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 counselled President Dwight D. Eisenbower against the use of regular U.S. Army troops, suggesting instead that the U.S. Marshall's 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 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 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. 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 adoption in 1964 of the 24th Amendment repealing the poll tax and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and thus marked a substantial change in influence over the black vote away from white bosses and plantation owners and toward the African American clergy. Rockefeller's campaign took full advantage of this power shift by wooing hundreds of black preachers with church improvement contributions and get-out-the-vote-expense cash payments, thus setting a precedent for future candidates of both parties and considerably raising the cost of electioneering--a phenomenon which, in yet another irony, vastly increased the power of the state's special interests, whose huge bundled contributions, especially after the individual donation limits imposed in 1974 and afterward in the wake of the Watergate scandal, became more critical than ever. This power is enhanced due to the ownership of most of the state's media, including the only statewide newspaper and all but a few local dailies, radio and television stations, by two closely held family corporations, the principals in one of which also operate the nation's largest off-Wall-Street brokerage house.

Rockefeller's administration resumed and significantly 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 fear the state but able, in significant part, to control it, through the franchise--usually by block voting for Democratic candidates, but always as a threat against racist isolates. Yet, rather than changing the status quo, blacks for the most part have been absorbed into it--as state employees, under-wage "associates" for mega-retailing monoliths, over-the-road truckers, poultry processing emporia and warrens of tertiary casualty insurers. Later governors, bereft of Rockefeller's financial independence or McMath's contempt for barony, have gradually reconciled themselves to the exigencies of this quaint realpolitik. While Faubus died a pariah in 1994, the lesson of his success in maintaining a veneer of populism with a credulous electorate (now multi-racial), while simultaneously accomodating the forces of extraction, remains the guidepost for political survival in Arkansas in the 21st Century.

Death

Sidney Sanders McMath died at his home in Little Rock, Arkansas on Saturday, October 4, 2003. He had had been released from hospital the previous Wednesday after being treated for severe dehydration, malnourishment and an irregular heartbeat. He is survived by his wife, Betty Dorch Russell McMath, three sons: Sandy, Phillip and Bruce McMath; two daughters, Melissa Hatfield and Patricia Bueter; ten grandchildren and one great grandchild. His first wife and childhood sweetheart, Elaine Braughton McMath, died in 1942. His second wife, of 49 years, Anne Phillips McMath, died in 1994.

McMath was given a full military funeral by a U.S. Marine Corps Honor Guard. He lay in state for a day in the Capitol rotunda, following which his closed, flag-draped coffin was transported to Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock for services attended by an estimated 1,000 worshipers. The former governor was buried in Pinecrest Memorial Cemetery in Saline County, Arkansas, a few yards from a survey marker denoting the geographical center of the state.

Sid McMath Avenue in Little Rock is named for him and the Little Rock Public Library recently dedicated a new branch in his honor. There is no plaque or other memorial in Hot Springs mentioning McMath or the GI reform movement he led.