SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR transcript three

SIDNEY McMATH - DAVID PRYOR

DAVID PRYOR: Well, here you are, Governor, in 1949. You've been sworn in as the new Governor of our State, the youngest in history probably and maybe one of the youngest Governors throughout the country. They're even now referring to you as "Mr. Charisma". You had sort of invented charisma way before John Kennedy and his people came along and it was a dynamic time, not only for you, you were a dynamic Governor but it was a dynamic time for our State.

SIDNEY McMATH:It was right after the war.

PRYOR: After the war and things were rolling and people were buying things and there was a great deal of excitement. There was, let's say the new crowd was coming in and you were right at the forefront, the apex of this movement.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: Let's talk a little bit about Arkansas for that moment. How our road systems, for example, I think, I've always heard that when you became Governor, there were eight (8) counties in our State that didn't have a mile of paved roads. What did you do about that?

MCMATH: Well, you know, getting back to my farm life, we went to town over a corduroy road. That's the logs, the trees laid parallel, you know, and dirty wet spots that left areas flooded and so forth and I never saw a paved road until I went to Hot Springs, if you can believe that, when I was ten (10) years of age.

PRYOR: First time you saw a paved street.

MCMATH: First time I'd seen a paved street. I'd seen sidewalks and my sister and I were taking the streetcar out to South Whittington where we lived, West Whittington was where we lived and we had to change streetcars at the junction of Park Avenue and Whittington junction. And while we were waiting, my sister used to tell this on me and just get the biggest kick out it. She said I went out in the middle of the street and tapped on the pavement and I said, "Look a-here, sister, here's a pavement out in the middle of the street."

PRYOR: A pavement out in the middle of the street.

MCMATH: So, we didn't have any hard surface roads and, of course, Arkansas, at that time, we'd just been through a war and most things had been neglected, particularly the roads and we didn't have the roads, the farmers didn't have roads to get their produce to the market and get the children to school and we were losing population in the rural areas. And so we came up with a bond issue, and we were able to sell the bonds and get a road program going and one of the interesting things that happened was that I went to New York to help sell the bonds, and incidentally we sold those less than 3% interest. We had to pay, I think, a little more than 2 1/2% interest or anyway, the Chase Manhattan Bank, I believe was the bank, it had a cocktail party for me. See?

PRYOR: In New York?

MCMATH: In New York and it seemed to me like all the people there were Vice Presidents of the bank and I figured then that the job of a Vice President was to attend cocktail parties, be a personal relations person. Anyway, we were standing around talking and one of the Vice Presidents said, "Governor, how close to Little Rock can you get by airplane?" I said, "Well", I looked at him and saw he was serious, and I said, "Well", I said, "We can get to Memphis by airplane" and I said, "At Memphis we take a boat and go down to the Arkansas River and we go up the Arkansas River to Pine Bluff and at Pine Bluff we get a stagecoach in to Little Rock." And by then he figured out I was putting him on. But anyway, back then people didn't know much about Little Rock and Arkansas. One of them asked me, he says, "What kind - do you have any moisture in Arkansas? Do you have any water? Is it like Arizona? Is it arrid?" See?

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: They didn't think there was anything west of the Mississippi but now then everybody knows about Little Rock and half of the people have been here. See? So, we got the road program bonds passed and a good road program started and we divided the money equally between the rural to market roads and the primary highway.

PRYOR: Well, Governor, if I'm not mistaken, you built probably more miles of paved roads than any other Governor in history and you did this in a four (4) year period and you did it with a bond issue.

MCMATH: Right.

PRYOR: And it's really amazing.

MCMATH: And those bonds were paid off.

PRYOR: They were paid off.

MCMATH: With I think a $.02 tax on gasoline.

PRYOR: Now, speaking of a $.02 tax. Every time today that I go by the University of Arkansas Medical Center, and by the way, I go there often, but every time I drive by there and look up at that great facility and what we're doing in cancer. We're renowned all over the world now. People are coming here to the AC or RC Unit, the Cancer Center Unit but we're renowned in many ways, as many of our other facilities are in the city and in the state. But every time I go by there or go in the Med Center, I say, "Thank goodness for Sidney Sanders McMath" and the reason I do this is you helped build the Med Center. You did it with a $.02 per tax per package of cigarettes. Let's talk about that. Was that a hard thing to pass?

MCMATH: Well, of course, that Medical Center is one of the things that I'm proudest of and it's a tremendous place and they have so many dedicated people. The doctors and nurses who could get more money at other places and they're doing a tremendous job there and as you say, it's internationally recognized and you go out and see the cancer research waiting room or treatment room and it's like going to the United Nations. You've got people there from different parts of the world. And Louis Webster Jones was the President of the University of Arkansas and he and several other people came to me and talked to me about the Medical Center, the need for a medical school, among other things to train doctors, to encourage them to go into the rural areas and so forth. So, we put our heads together and came up with a tax of $.02 on each package of cigarettes and that was in 1949 and you can see what's happened since. What an excellent source of revenue for a tax. Half of the patients at the hospital at the time were being treated for a tobacco related disease, emphysema, lung cancer or what not and so that passed and we were able to build the Medical Center and the Medical School, you'll recall was, up until, about 1925 was over in the old State House.

PRYOR: Right. Where the Old State House is.

MCMATH: Down in the basement.

PRYOR: The Medical Center, yeah.

MCMATH: And then in about 1925 they had this incident about the Sheriff losing his dog, you know, his hound dog and he found over behind the Medical Center with the other dogs that they were using for experiments and they wouldn't let him have his dog back, the doctors in charge. So, they thought, well, you know, he's just an old hound dog. And so, he got an indictment, he got an indictment issued against the doctors for stealing his dog. But he got his dog back but they then, the neighbors had been complaining about the animals over there and all the fuss they were making. So, they moved the Medical Center out to McArthur Park, I believe in the building where the law school is now. And then after they got the Medical Center operating and I guess we passed the Bill in '49, I guess '50, '51 it started to operate the hospital over there and the Med School moved over to the Medical Center. It's a wonderful med school.

PRYOR: You've always had a special relationship with the rural areas of Arkansas, out in the communities and the farm areas and I'm sure, that is some degree of reflection of your upbringing.

MCMATH: That's where I came from.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: That's my roots.

PRYOR: Right. One of the areas of your intense interest early on in your administration was trying to get electricity to rural Arkansas. Now, to do this you had to take on some pretty powerful forces. Let's talk about that a moment.

MCMATH: David, that was a passion with me to get electricity to the farms. Where I lived on the farm in south Arkansas, we had no electricity. You know, a washing machine was a black pot in the backyard and a dryer was a clothesline, you know, and we had a tub with a scrub board, you know. And we had no indoor plumbing, you know, and so, I recognized the quality of life that could be experienced by the people in the rural areas if they had electricity. It certainly would lift the burden of the women on the farm. And when I was running in 1948, two (2) people came to see me in Hot Springs. It was Tom Fitzhugh who was the attorney for rural electric coop and Harry Oswald.

PRYOR: Harry Oswald.

MCMATH: Bless his heart, that pioneer, that champion.

PRYOR: What a man.

MCMATH: He did a tremendous job. They came to me and talked about their program and what they wanted to do.

PRYOR: And at that time what portion of the State did they cover? Do you remember at all?

MCMATH: Well, at that time 50% of the rural area in Arkansas had no electricity. See? And they wanted to extend it up in to the rural areas and they couldn't get the power interests to do it. Arkansas Power and Light Company was totally owned by the MidSouth Utilities. And although they told us that was a just a little ole Arkansas county, company, it was owned by Middle South Utilities. They owned all the common stock and they were opposed to the power company extending lines out in the rural areas because it was not profitable at that time but they foresaw that some day it would be highly profitable, which it has happened, you know. So, they were opposed to the coops extending out into this rural area beyond the area that they already had. And they wanted to build their own steam generating plant, build their own steam generating plant and their own generating lines to get the power up into the northern part of Arkansas. And they had to get a loan on the REA program from the federal government. At that time it was up to the Interior Department and Secretary Wickard was the Administrator at that time and so we started working with Secretary Wickard in order to get a loan to the coops in Arkansas to build this plant. Well, that was in 1951 and Steelman, who was from Arkansas and he was the President's Executive Assistant, we worked with him. John R. Steelman.

PRYOR: John R. Steelman.

MCMATH: John R. Steelman. And then Mr. Wickard and we weren't making too much progress because the power company was really opposed to this and MidSouth Utility had a lot of power, political power and so I thought, well, I'd call on the President. Of course, he was involved in the Korean War, you know, at that time, he had a lot on his mind but I thought this was sufficiently important to talk to the President. Well, I got in touch with the President and he must have made a telephone call to Wickard because right after that Wickard sent me a wire announcing that they were loaning some $10,000,000.00 plus to the coop to build an Ozark steam generating plant. Of course, the coop had to get the approval of the Public Service Commission, the State of Arkansas Public Service Commission because they supervised the granting of permits and licenses and supposedly supervised the rates and so forth. Well, they filed this petition and the power company opposed it and, of course, there was a real in-fight that went on for months trying to persuade the power commission, I mean the Arkansas Power Commission, yeah, it was the Power Commission, to deny the application but they granted it. And then the power company went to a Judge and got a restraining order which was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Arkansas saying that the REA, in its original act, back in about '36, way back there, did not authorize the power and the cooperative to build their own generating system. And, of course, our argument was that if they authorized them to build transmission lines and if they were authorized to build transmission lines by implication, they could build the same generating plant to furnish the power to go over the transmission lines to their customers but the Supreme Court didn't see it that way and they ruled against us. Well, in 1953, I guess, or '54, we introduced a Bill in the Legislature because I was out of the Governor's office at that time. I'd been defeated for the third time to permit the coops to build a steam generating plant and the power company had a lot of influence and the Legislature defeated it and then the next year, I think that was '54, we got another Bill passed. So, the coops got the loan to build the steam generating plant at Ozark, Arkansas and then they were off to supply electricity to the rural areas that hadn't been getting their electricity. Now, let me give this as an aside. Of course, I was the first Governor to go to a rural electrification state meeting. Now, the people were pretty well convinced that now this coop was going in and borrowing money, that the government was going to compete with the private power companies, it's Socialism.

PRYOR:It's Socialism. Yeah, that's what they called it.

MCMATH: So, I was invited to go up to Berryville to talk to a coop meeting and I flew up there in a one (1) engine airplane and we had land in a turkey pasture and so we had to make two (2) passes to shoo the turkeys out of the way.

PRYOR: To shoo the turkeys out of the way.

MCMATH: Yeah. And so, I had my statement for the press and the committee all ready. You know, I'd thought about it and I was just sure there was going to be a big crowd out there, you know, to meet me at the air field. I got out of the airplane, walked to the gate, wasn't anybody there. Nobody. Anyway, it was a hot July day.

PRYOR: Well, how did you get to town?

MCMATH: So, I took my coat off and I started walking down a dusty road, another road that I paved. And a farmer came along in a truck. He stopped and he was, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going to the coop meeting."

PRYOR: And here you were, the Governor of Arkansas.

MCMATH: Yeah. I was the Governor of Arkansas. He said, "Get in. That's where I'm going." Well, we visited and so forth. I didn't tell him I was the Governor, I assumed he knew, my name had been in the paper and picture and so forth and so we went to the coop meeting in a great big tent. You know, they used to have great big tent. And when it came time for me to talk, I was the speaker and Russ Gates was the manager of the coop and he introduced me, again a flowery introduction. He said, "I give you Sid McMath, the Governor of Arkansas." Well, this old farmer that had brought me to town was sitting on the front row there and he leaned to his neighbor and he said in a loud voice, he said, "That ain't no Governor. He's a hitch-hiker because I know cause I brung him to town."

PRYOR: He thought you were an imposter, didn't he?

MCMATH: That's right. And then, of course, we tried to get...

PRYOR: I'll bet they had a big crowd of people there, didn't they?

MCMATH: Oh, yeah.

PRYOR: Harry Oswald could get more people to turn out and he'd put them all in a tent.

MCMATH: That's right.

PRYOR: And he had two (2) secrets that I recall getting people to turn out to a meeting. One, he would feed them. He would feed them well and it was free and he would have some music and fiddlers and whatever and the second thing, he would give away, let's say a color TV, or an old second-hand pickup or a fishing box or something and he would make them stay, he wouldn't give it away until right at the last. So, they had to sit there and listen to the speakers.

MCMATH: Yeah, that's right.

PRYOR: I've been to some of those myself. That's a great story though about rural electrification in our State.

MCMATH: Well, Harry and Tom Fitzhugh and Ellis, Congressman Ellis, Clyde Ellis...

PRYOR: Clyde Ellis.

MCMATH:... they were pioneers and today we have 16 electric cooperatives and I believe they have around 175,000 customers.

PRYOR: One of my proud pictures on my wall is an old store in Ben Hur, Arkansas in Pope, P-O-P-E County, which was the last community to receive electricity and Governor Sid McMath is largely responsible for helping to electrify the State. Now, these were powerful interests that you took on. I'm not saying they were sinister. I'm not saying they were bad. I'm not saying they were not progressive but these were interests that we not encompassing the rural areas at this time and you certainly help make, help to make that possible for many, many thousands of homes and plants and factories and farms to have electricity. Well, those are the major accomplishments but along the way, during that period in your Governor's career, during that four (4) year term and it sounds like all of the things that you've done, you were there much longer than four (4) years. You did an awful lot in four (4) years is my point. Along the way you met up with a man and you brought him in to your administration. His name was Orval Eugene Faubus. Tell us about that.

MCMATH: Well, Orval and I met in Fayetteville. I was running for Governor for the first time in 1948 and we rode from Fayetteville over to Huntsville, his home town in a car and visited. And he was interested in feeling me out, finding out what my platform was and at that time...

PRYOR: Now, he was not the Postmaster yet or what was he at that time?

MCMATH: I don't know whether he was the Postmaster or had been or whether he was a County Clerk or something.

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: But anyway, he was trying to make up his mind who he was going to support in that election. And by the time we got to Huntsville he decided he'd support me. So, he supported me and did a good job for me. Of course, he had a close contact with the rural people in northern Arkansas particularly.

PRYOR: He could speak their language.

MCMATH: Speak their language. He understood their needs. He was one of them. And so, when I was elected Governor, Orval said, he says, "Sid, I'd like to have a paying job." So, he came down and he went to work for me as a secretary and his job was to meet with these county committees coming down to try to get their road paved. See? And he knew their needs and understood them and so forth. He was very good and he was very helpful in that area. And, of course, when I was defeated for the third time by Francis Cherry and then Orval came back and defeated Francis Cherry for his second term and Orval, you know, in the high school, the '57 thing came along and he served for, I guess, five (5) terms. Orval was a good administrator and a very personable guy and one of the best campaign pictures I ever saw was one with him with...

PRYOR: I know that picture. Know it well.

MCMATH: With Orval and his coat and his hat, you know, and so forth, great campaign picture, ran in the Gazette, front page in the Gazette. And we were okay until 1957 and we had the Little Rock high school crisis. I call it a "crisis" because that's what it was and I did not feel that he made the right decision on calling out the Guard to keep those children from entering the high school. And I felt that leadership at that time moving in the right direction could resolve in that before it got out of hand. We'd been making a lot of progress in the racial relationship in getting educational opportunities for blacks. We mentioned the Medical Center. In 1948, during that race for my first term, race was a hot issue in that campaign. I mean it was mean and of course, I took my feelings about it and when I was the farm I had worked with blacks and I had seen their conditions and I had seen them with poor whites at the end of the cotton picking season having just enough money hopefully to get them through the next year and so forth. And so I felt that they needed an opportunity to get an education and go to school like everybody else. And so when Orval called out the Guard, I felt that that was moving in the wrong direction. And now, I started to say in 1948 and that was a hot election on the race issue. During that election, it was the Spring of '48, a black woman applied for admission for the Medical School and her name was Edith Irby. She became Edith Irby Jones and Dean, Dr. Louis Webster Jones and the Dean of the Medical School came and talked to me about it. They didn't know what to do about it. And, because as I say, race was a big hot issue in that campaign and the election hadn't been decided. And so my advice to them, I said, "Well, let's wait until the elections are over and let's see what we can do." Well, as soon as the election was over they contacted me and I told them to take her in to the Med School. So, they accepted her and that was the first black student to be admitted to the Medical School and I think the first student to be admitted in our public schools and there was no court order. There was no demonstrations. It was done orderly and she became an outstanding doctor and she moved to Houston and became President of the National Black Women's Medical Association. And then in '48, another thing that I did, as soon as I was nominated in '48, first I supported President Truman and the other thing I did was that, that the blacks didn't have - couldn't vote in the south, you know. Really, they couldn't participate in the election process because all of the south was Democratic, Democratic Party.

PRYOR: Democratic Party at that time outlawed them to.

MCMATH: Yeah, they were not members of the party, therefore, they couldn't vote.

PRYOR: It's unbelievable.

MCMATH: That's right. And so in '48, in September of '48 at the Robinson Auditorium, we changed the Democratic Party rules so as to get the blacks.

PRYOR: That was one of the most courageous things that you've ever done.

MCMATH: And so we felt it was...

PRYOR: Was that a fight by the way, did you have a fight there?

MCMATH: We had done a lot ground work.

PRYOR: You had.

MCMATH: Did a lot of ground work on that and got it passed and then Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of the Schools was making lectures and talking to people and so forth and we headed in the right direction and you remember the background of all of this was the Cold War. We were fighting for the minds and hearts of people around the world.

PRYOR: Yet we were the people who practicing segregation

MCMATH: Yeah, so we wanted to demonstrate that everybody was free in this country. So, when this happened, there weren't, you know, that didn't help us around the world from then on. People around the world didn't like that old bad Arkansas from what they knew about Little Rock.

PRYOR: Governor, one of the best books about you, this book was written over 20 years ago now by Jim Lester. It's A Man for Arkansas. It's about the life and times of Sidney Sanders McMath. Wonderful little book. In this book, Jim Lester details your speech in 1951 in Minnesota to, I think, the National Urban Institute or Urban League, talking about the need for tolerance and then in 1956, no longer in office, nothing to gain, nothing to lose, you try to help move for the abolition of the poll tax that we still had at that time.

MCMATH: That's right. Didn't have a policy for poll tax until after '64.

PRYOR: That's correct and the poll tax itself was one of those obstacles created to prevent the minorities from voting.

MCMATH: You're absolutely right, David. The poll tax was used, number one as a means...

PRYOR: That is correct.

MCMATH: ...of corrupting elections.

PRYOR: That's right.

MCMATH: And then it was used as a means of disfranchising the blacks. See?

PRYOR: That is correct.

MCMATH: You had to go down and buy your poll tax and you had to do that a year before the election.

PRYOR: Well, let's stay back on 1957 a moment because Faubus calls out the National Guard. He's the Governor. You're out of office. I want to talk about a campaign or two between that but he is in the Governor's office and he calls the Guard out and you strongly disagree with him in public. And evidently you go on television and you characterized this as a very wrong direction for us to be taking at this time. He fires back at you. You are his own mentor. You're his former boss. He worked for you. And as you said, you paved that highway 23, which we affectionately call the "Pig Trail" and that Faubus had you build. Don't you agree? One of your great mistakes there but personally you and the Governor, Governor Faubus, I guess, at that time had a split and it really never healed to any extent, I guess.

MCMATH: Well, politically yes, it was a serious split, Personally I had no animosity toward Orval. I understood what he was doing and so forth and we got along personally. I never fell out with him as an individual. We didn't see each other. We didn't have lunch and so forth, didn't review old times but the difference was a political difference. Social difference.

PRYOR: Well, it's real interesting about him. This program is not about Orval Faubus but he was such a dominant force in Arkansas politics for so long but the appearance was, and especially in reading Roy Reed's fabulous book that he spent about 10 years in researching and published three (3) years ago. In Roy's book, Roy Reed's book, he characterizes Faubus as not necessarily, especially in his younger years, as what you might call, what we would know as a segregationist. He grew up there in the mountains. There were not very many minorities. There were no black citizens there and he didn't really know black people until he came to the central part of the State and he got acquainted with them but ultimately, it's my theory only, that he ultimately decided that that's where the votes were at the time.

MCMATH: As you recall in his second term, Jim Johnson ran against him.

PRYOR: Yes, in '56.

MCMATH: And Jim Johnson really used the race issue and he ran him a hard race.

PRYOR: He still uses it.

MCMATH: And Orval, at that time, said, "Well, nobody is going to use this race issue against me in the future."

PRYOR: Right.

MCMATH: Nobody is going to, you know, and so forth. And, of course, another thing that happened, I say it was a mistake in light of the progress we were making and so forth, to call out the troops, to bar, block the court order to keep these children out of the school. I also thought it was ill-advised for President Eisenhower to send out his 101st AirBorne. See? Because it just gave the wrong impression and so forth and it's an invasion of the Yankees again and so forth and I talked to Vice President Nixon and asked him if he would, if he could dissuade to the President from using the 101st AirBorne. If we couldn't work it out locally, the United States Marshall would have been a very appropriate instrument by coming down and doing what's necessary to enforce the law. If the United States Marshall shows up, people are going to respect him and so forth but then, but using their 101st Air Borne, you know, we were still close to a civil war. A lot of our people came from Georgia, and Alabama and Mississippi and so forth. So, we inherited that feeling. Regardless of how loyal they are to the flag and so forth, we had some ties that was still binding, you know, and suffered together and so forth but when they used the 101st AirBorne, well the people who were really not for Faubus rallied, "Well, we've been invaded". See? And so that give him the political power that he needed to be in office...