Courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission
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Thomas McRae was born on December 21, 1851, in the Union County community of Mount Holly, a Presbyterian colony his father had helped found in 1843. When McRae's father died in 1863, the young boy assumed responsibility for the farm and did not resume his formal education until his mother remarried in 1868. He entered law school at Washington and Lee University in 1871 and graduated the following year.
In 1871 McRae became the youngest member of the Arkansas legislature in the midst of Reconstruction. In 1874 McRae married Amelia Ann White. They had six daughters and three sons. Elected to Congress from the Third District in 1884, he served for eighteen years and when he stepped down in 1903, he was the senior member of Arkansas's Congressional delegation.
In 1905 McRae purchased and became president of the Bank of Prescott. He later served as head of the Arkansas Bankers Association. Unlike most bankers, McRae proved a particularly progressive sort of banker. Unlike most bankers, he championed the creation of the Federal Reserve System; he also supported state regulation of banks, and helped draft the model bank regulatory law enacted by the legislature in 1913.
A practicing attorney as well as a banker who served as president of the Arkansas Bar Association in 1917, McRae was one of the most prominent members of a convention which drafted a new progressive constitution. That constitution was submitted to the people for a vote, but a controversial ruling by the Arkansas Supreme Court prevented its adoption. In many ways the failure of the new constitution marked the decline of progressivism in Arkansas.
In 1920, at age sixty-eight, McRae entered the race for governor. For the first time women were able to vote in statewide and federal elections. The Republican Party had also split along racial lines and ran two candidates for governor. In the spirited contest McRae won election by obtaining sixty-five percent of the votes. He was reelected two years later.
One of McRae's priorities as governor was the salvaging of Arkansas's highway program. By 1920 Arkansas's highway program had become a national scandal and its federal funding was threatened. To head off such an eventuality McRae invited officials from the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads to assess the situation in Arkansas and recommend legislative remedies. These recommendations were drafted into legislation and submitted to the General Assembly, but failed to win approval. McRae, however was able to shift some of the cost burden of road construction from property owners to road users in the form of a 1-cent per gallon tax on gasoline. This was not enough to placate Congress, which in November 1921 voted to withhold funding for any road construction not supervised solely by state highway departments. When the federal government withdrew highway construction funds and recalled technical personnel, Governor McRae was able to get enacted the Harrelson Road Law which met federal requirements. At McRae's urging the legislature imposed severance taxes on extractive industries such as the booming lumber and oil industries of south Arkansas. Such taxes were earmarked for education and within three years produced $3.5 million for the public school fund.
Next: Thomas Jefferson Terral
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