June 14, 1912

Sid McMath, Arkansas’s thirty-fourth governor, was born in Columbia County. McMath launched his political career after he returned home from World War II, having served in the Pacific. In 1946, he and other recently returned veterans in Hot Springs (Garland County) launched the “GI Revolt,” taking on Mayor Leo McLaughlin’s corrupt political regime. He was a close political friend to President Harry Truman and a dedicated foe of the Dixiecrat movement that tried to control the Democratic Party in the South in the 1948 presidential campaign. He was elected governor at age thirty-six in 1948, the youngest person to serve in that position in Arkansas since the Civil War.