Arthur Mastick Hyde was a governor of Missouri and secretary of agriculture.
Background
Hyde was born on July 12, 1877, in Princeton, Missouri, the son of Caroline Emity Mastick and Ira B. Hyde. He also had two older half-brothers by his father's previous marriage. Ira Hyde, a native of New York state and an alumnus of Oberlin College, had practiced law in Minnesota and Washington, D. C. , before settling in Missouri in 1866. He was a Union Army veteran and served as Republican congressman from the state's Tenth District in 1873-1875. From his parents, both of colonial Massachusetts descent, Arthur presumably acquired his conservative and puritanical bent. Since Arthur's mother died when he was twelve, he was particularly influenced by his father.
Education
With the exception of two years following his mother's death, when Arthur lived with an aunt in Rocky River, Ohio, he attended private and public schools in Princeton. He then spent two years at Oberlin Academy in Ohio and in 1895 entered the University of Michigan, where he received the B. A. in 1899. He earned an LL. B. from the State University of Iowa.
Career
He returned to Princeton and entered into a law partnership with his father.
During the following years, as he widened his circle of influence in church, civic, and business affairs, Hyde's prominence as a leader of rural Republicans increased. His work in Sunday-school organization and his speeches in behalf of prohibition made him one of the outstanding Methodist laymen in Missouri. He was a captain in the Missouri National Guard, 1905-1906. He was elected mayor of Princeton in 1908 and reelected two years later. He expanded his business activities to include an automobile distributorship, farm and lumber interests, loan and investment enterprises, and an insurance agency. He also continued to practice law, and in 1915 moved to Trenton, Mo. , where he established a new firm with Judge Samuel Hill.
Hyde welcomed the progressive Republicanism of Theodore Roosevelt and won nomination as the Progressive party's candidate for attorney general of Missouri in 1912. Although he lost the election and quickly returned to the Republican party, he gained statewide attention with his vigorous campaign for morality in government. By 1920 the political stage was set for Hyde's leadership of his party and state government. The advent of national prohibition that year and political corruption in Missouri urban politics assisted the shift of Republican power from wet St. Louis to outstate rural dry areas. Hyde's reputation as a staunch prohibitionist and a friend of business carried him to the forefront of the gubernatorial aspirants.
With Democrats of Missouri divided over prohibition, as well as American entry into the League of Nations, Hyde gained an easy victory, thus becoming the state's second Republican post-Reconstruction governor. The principal accomplishments of his administration were increased appropriations and higher standards for the state's public schools, especially rural schools; increased distribution of technical information to farmers; financial stabilization of the state penal institutions; and the construction of 7, 640 miles of highways. The state constitution limited Hyde to a single four-year term, but a further limitation on his political career was his uncompromising support of prohibition. This denied him any chance of support from the state's wet urban Republicans when he sought nomination to the United States Senate in 1928.
He had moved to Kansas City in 1925 to practice law and became head of the Sentinel Life Insurance Company in 1927. He seemed destined to remain out of public affairs but, in 1929, President Herbert Hoover invited him to join his cabinet as secretary of agriculture. Hyde accepted the post reluctantly, for as one columnist noted, "He isn't a dirt farmer nor yet a scientific agriculturist. He is a politician who knows more about farmers than farming". Hyde's secretaryship was burdened with the exigencies of the Great Depression and a severe drought in 1930. His conservative principles precluded all but limited aid for agriculture, with a preference for improving marketing mechanisms for farm commodities, encouragement of farm efficiency through increased capitalization and mechanization, agricultural research, road construction and improvement to provide employment and more efficient consumer traffic, and the retirement of submarginal land through government purchase and reforestation. As secretary of agriculture, he served on the Federal Farm Board established by the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, an act created to promote effective merchandising of agricultural commodities, thus placing agriculture on an equal economic basis with other industries.
In 1930 he organized and served as chairman of the Federal Drought Relief Committee. After leaving office with Hoover in 1933, Hyde vigorously opposed New Deal agricultural programs, and in 1937 he collaborated with Ray Lyman Wilbur, former secretary of the interior in the Hoover administration, on The Hoover Policies, a useful compilation of the former president's speeches and state papers and a stout defense of his philosophy and principles. Hyde settled permanently in Trenton in 1934 and spent his final years there devoting most of his energy to his farm holdings. In 1935-1936 he helped organize and promote the Conference of Methodist Laymen, a conservative organization designed to counter the social welfare activities of some members of the Methodist clergy.
He died of cancer at Memorial Hospital in New York City in 1947 and was buried in the Odd Fellows' Cemetery in Trenton, Mo.