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On November 5, 1940, Congressman Bob Sikes raised his right hand and swore his oath of office in Washington, D.C. With that vow, he began his first day of work in a 36-year career that would make him possibly the most influential person in the region’s history.
Sikes had survived a bruising democratic party primary contest that saw him face off against old foes, including the venerable Bill Mapoles, who was a bitter enemy of Sikes since he arrived in the area almost ten years prior.
Sikes won his general election unopposed, as the Republican Party was non-existent in Okaloosa and Walton Counties until the 1970s, when County Commissioner Mike Mitchell won election in the Wake of Sikes’s resignation as a Congressman.
Sikes would have some trying early votes. He described in his autobiography switching his vote on the pre-war draft of young men into the military to prepare for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw as inevitable conflict with the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. He credits Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn with helping him see the light on the upcoming war.
Sikes served on an important subcommittee on military construction before being named to the committee that made decisions on all defense spending several years later. On those committees, he would bring home the bacon for his district – and transform it from a small subsistence farming and logging community into a defense hub through appropriations in Congress – around the land that Chicago transplant James Plew would give to the government for aerial gunnery training. .
RELATED: The land transfer that made Eglin Air Force Base possible.
Simply put, without Sikes intervention on those committees, there would be no defense industrial complex in the area as we know it today. It’s far more likely the local military bases in the area would be shut down after the war or be significantly reduced in size. Instead, defense work accounts for ⅔ of Okaloosa County’s total gross domestic product.
