In defiance of his state's political establishment, he championed rapid rural electrification, massive highway and school construction, the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, strict bank and utility regulation, repeal of the poll tax, open and honest elections, and broad expansion of opportunity for black citizens in the decade following World War II.

His paternal grandfather, Columbia County Sheriff Sidney Smith McMath, grand nephew of his martyred Goliad namesake, had himself been killed in the line of duty the previous year, leaving a pensionless widow and eight children, Hal being the eldest.

Sid 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 meager income.

McMath's administration focused on infrastructure improvements, including the extensive paving of farm-to-market and primary roads "to get Arkansas out of the mud and the dust", rural electrification, and the construction of a medical center in the capital city.

McMath was elected by the governors of other petroleum producing states to chair the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which sought to improve pricing structures and broaden federal support for fossil fuel exploration.

These included Arkansas Power & Light, headed by 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.

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 Arkansas River 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' fault 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 the human anatomy.

McMath's courtroom victories were all the more remarkable for being won in an era of "blue ribbon" juries handpicked by commissioners, themselves selected by state court judges beholden to insurance defense law firms from whom they received thousands of dollars in non-reportable (and non-refundable) campaign contributions for re-election races in which few were ever opposed.

These include Franco v. Bunyard, which held gun merchants liable for negligently selling a pistol to escaped convicts who kidnapped and murdered store clerks; Fitzsimmons v. General Motors, which pioneered the rule of consumer induced misuse through seductive advertising (the first of three "Smokey and the Bandit" Trans Am cases handled by the firm in which it was shown that clips and outtakes from scofflaw motion pictures were spliced by GM into TV commercials aimed at adolescent males); Miller v. Missouri Pacific Ry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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 the state's medical college, a policy of openness and inclusion toward African-Americans generally and a concerted public school improvement program, including a reduction of the number of school districts from 1,753 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 leadership of Dr. A.B.

Moses had similarly partnered with McClellan's predecessor, Joe T. Robinson, who prior to his death in 1937 had used his considerable power as Senate majority leader to divert the New Deal's showcase Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) public electricity generating project away from the Arkansas River, the basin for which it was originally proposed.

The former governor's October 22, 1954 sworn statement before the U.S. Senate committee investigating monopoly influence over the distribution of the nation's electrical power, in which he recounts Middle South-AP&L's manipulation of the Arkansas "Highway Audit Commission" and the grand jury process, warrants inclusion in any anthology of significant state papers of the 20th century.

It was this Congressional manifesto, McMath laments in Promises Kept, that gave 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.

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 more than 80% in the 1964 Democratic primary.

These developments accelerated an already growing shift in influence over black voters from white bosses toward African-American clergy, due in part to the gradual displacement of plantation labor by mechanized agriculture, swelling the unemployment and welfare rolls.

Rockefeller's campaign took full advantage of this dynamic by wooing hundreds of black ministers with church improvement contributions and cash get-out-the-vote payments, setting a precedent for future candidates of both parties and considerably raising the cost of electioneering.

Rather than altering the status quo with some 18% to 22% of the vote statewide (40% to 60% in some counties), blacks have been absorbed into it through disproportionate hiring as lower level public employees and as low wage "associates" of mega-retailing enterprises, poultry processing emporia, tertiary health and casualty insurers, the utility monopolies and other concerns buoyed by the state's parochial, right-to-work economy.

Although Faubus died a pariah in 1994, the example of his agility in placating a credulous electorate, now multiracial, with a veneer of populism and dashes of largesse, while simultaneously accommodating the forces of extraction – whom Sid McMath illustriously, if momentarily, challenged half-a-century ago – remains the guidepost for political survival in 21st century Arkansas.

McMath's own account, Promises Kept, ISBN 1-55728-754-6 (University of Arkansas Press, 2003) contains a wealth of primary source material including, in addition to the author's personal recollections, photocopies of correspondence exchanged between him and President Truman and others.

For a colorful local history of Hot Springs, Arkansas during the McLaughlin period, including the mayor's 1947 indictment and trial, see Leo & Verne: The Spa's Heyday, by Orval Allbritton, with a foreword by McMath, ISBN 0-929604-87-3 (Garland County Historical Society, 2003).