Arkansas Times Examines Life And Legacy Of Sid McMath
by June 14, 2012 9:30 am 159 views
Kudos to the Arkansas Times and Ernie Dumas for a thoroughly complete retrospective on the life and legacy of former Gov. Sid McMath.
McMath, who would be 100 years old if still alive, was the leader of 20th century political reform in Arkansas. I had the pleasure of getting to know him through a number of one-on-one interviews to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his two terms as Governor.
Writes Dumas:
One hundred years ago, June 14, 1912, Sidney Sanders McMath was born in a dogtrot log cabin—yes, really!, a log cabin—on a hardscrabble farm in Columbia County, near the Louisiana border.
He picked cotton as a boy and moved by muddy roads from one destitute community to another with his alcoholic father “Pap” and his mother and sister, until his father took up barbering and settled at Hot Springs. The hardship and dislocation he experienced everywhere as a youngster, along with all the family sorrows, infused in him a zeal to improve the lives of people, especially in the blighted Arkansas
countryside.
As a student and a Marine, he saw that things were better nearly everywhere else than in rural Arkansas.
The passion to serve people would guide him in heroic pursuits on the battlefields of the Pacific, in the “GI Revolt” against the political machines after the war, in four momentous years as governor, and as the founder and patriarch of what he called a “people’s law firm,” which for the next 60 years represented nothing and no one but ordinary people in their quest for safety and justice in the workplace, equal services in the public realm, and protection of the land, air, water and natural resources that are the gifts to all people.
Take time to peruse the variety of writings that reflect the different aspects of McMath's life and legacy. It's a worthwhile and inspirational endeavor.