John Henry Baker
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John Henry Baker, III (born October 20, 1934), is a semiretired farmer and landholder from Franklin Parish who was active in the rebirth of the Republican Party in Louisiana in the 1970s and 1980s. Baker was his party's nominee for the District 22 seat in the Louisiana state Senate in 1972 and for the former position of state elections commissioner in 1979. He was the first to propose the abolition of the separate elections commissioner's post (originally called the "custodian of voting machines"), with the return of the duties to the Louisiana secretary of state. Baker's proposal was finally adopted a quarter of a century later in 2004.
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[edit] Early years, education, farming
Baker was born in Greenville, Mississippi, in Washington County to John Henry Baker, II (died 1946) and the former Cecilia Myers (died 2002). He grew up in the rural area near Delhi (pronounced DELL HIGH), where everyone in the community seemed to know one other and was willing to help neighbors in times of need. Delhi is actually in neighboring Richland Parish, but the Baker plantation is in northern Franklin Parish.
As a teenager, Baker left the area to attend Marion Military Institute in Marion, Alabama. He thereafter served in the U.S. Air Force from 1955-1958, between the Korean and Vietnam wars. After his military duties ended, Baker returned to commence farming on his family's plantation. He is a Methodist.
Baker has been twice divorced. He is married to his third wife, the former Linda Rae Martin. He has a child and grandchild by the first marriage.
[edit] Franklin Parish Police Jury
In 1968, Baker, at 33, was elected as a Democrat to the Franklin Parish Police Jury (equivalent of county commission in most states). He won his primary, then equivalent to election, by only nineteen votes. In February 1969, he switched to the Republican Party and set forth to build a competitive two-party system in his region and state, a herculean task, as he recalled.
Baker has been the Franklin Parish Republican chairman intermittently since the 1970s. Even in 2006, it was still difficult to recruit Republican candidates for local office in historically Democratic Franklin Parish, centered about the town of Winnsboro south of Monroe. Yet in presidential elections or competitive state elections, Franklin Parish is more likely to vote Republican than not. Franklin Parish is also known for its anti-tax attitudes, as witnessed by difficulties that blocked the raising of school property taxes in the first decade of the 21st Century.
Baker said that much of his interest in politics was centered on locating new businesses and industries into northeastern Louisiana. He said that even in 2006 Louisiana still lags behind Arkansas and Mississippi in attracting companies where the population can find meaningful work. Baker said that young people from Franklin Parish once could move to Monroe or Shreveport to find work. "Now they go into Texas and elsewhere to find jobs," he lamented.
[edit] Running for the state Senate
In the winter of 1971-1972, Baker ran for the state Senate against the 31-year-old Democratic nominee, James H. "Jim" Brown (born 1940), a graduate of Tulane University in New Orleans. Brown at the time was a politically ambitious lawyer in Ferriday in Concordia Parish, located along the Mississippi River across from Natchez, Mississippi. Besides Franklin and Concordia, the district included Catahoula (Jonesville) and Tensas (St. Joseph and Newellton) parishes.
Baker spent about $3,000 of mostly his own money in the Senate campaign, primarily for fuel and printing costs. He conducted handshaking tours, some door-to-door, in the different communities in the district. In some cases, people slammed the door in his face when they learned that he was a Republican. He was bitten by a dog in Catahoula Parish and required nineteen stitches. Such personal campaigning would be less effective today, Baker said, because so many voters are in the workplace, with few at home during daytime hours.
Brown was an easy winner in the general election, 17,151 votes (64.1 percent) to Baker's 9,587 (35.9 percent). Baker had been the first Republican to contest the 32nd District seat. As of 2006, the district had yet to elect a Republican state senator.
[edit] Running for constitutional convention delegate
In August 1972, five months after he lost the state Senate race, Baker ran in the nonpartisan race for delegate to the state constitutional convention. The convention was held in Baton Rouge in 1973. It adopted a new constitution, which voters approved in a special election held in the spring of 1974.
Baker filed for delegate in the state legislative district for Franklin and Tensas parishes. He was defeated by Democratic state Representative Lantz Womack (1914-1998) of Winnsboro. As a young man, Womack had played baseball for the former Winnsboro Red Sox at a time when many small towns had their own teams. Womack, a businessman and farmer, was first elected to the House seat from Franklin Parish House in a special election in 1958, and he held the seat until 1976. In his last reelection in March 1972, Womack polled 67 percent of the vote against the Republican nominee, Terry Clingan (born 1918) of Mangham. Coincidentally, Womack was once a bookkeeper for the Bakers.
[edit] Challenging Jerry Fowler
In 1979, Baker announced that he would challenge the Democrat Jerry M. Fowler, then a Natchitoches businessman, in the race for elections commissioner. Fowler (born 1940) was seeking to succeed his ailing father, Douglas Fowler, Sr., the former Red River Parish clerk of court and one-time Coushatta mayor. Fowler had been appointed to the post by the late Governor Earl Kemp Long, after Long had quarreled with Secretary of State Wade O. Martin, Jr., by procuring legislative consent to remove the elections office from the domain of the secretary of state. Douglas Fowler was then elected to his first full term in 1960 and then reelected with minimal opposition in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. (The primaries for the three latter elections were actually held late in 1967, 1971, and 1975.) To Louisiana voters, the name "Fowler" became as synonymous with the management of elections -- the two won a total of ten consecutive elections -- as the name Dave L. Pearce had become to "agriculture", a reference to the longtime agriculture commissioner originally from West Carroll Parish.
[edit] "Abolish the office"
After he announced for elections commissioner, Baker was largely igored by the media. "I couldn't get on television to make my case," he said. Then he and a group of friends decided that he would base his campaign on abolishing the "useless" office, which then had a salary of $37,400 per year, and returning its duties to the secretary of state, where they had been before Earl Long punished Martin, who had continued to be reelected secretary of state until his retirement in 1976.
Ironically, what Baker was proposing would have worked to the advantage of Baker's former rival, state Senator Jim Brown, who would be elected secretary of state in the same 1979 election. When Baker offered his proposal to abolish the very office for which he was seeking election, he began to make headway. He won a student mock poll at Louisiana State University at Alexandria and several other colleges as well as the the endorsements of "good government" groups and most of the state's newspapers. The liberal New Orleans Times-Picayune did not "endorse" Baker, however, but "recommended" his idea of abolishing the office.
Baker polled 175,017 votes in the jungle primary, just enough to enter the 1979 general election against Jerry Fowler, who had been a former professional football player and a former educator. In fact, Baker and Republican gubernatorial candidate David C. Treen, then of Jefferson Parish, were the first Louisiana Republicans to win statewide general election slots since the implementation of the jungle primary law in 1975. (The law did not take effect for congressional elections until 1978.)
In the second round of balloting, Fowler polled 762,324 votes (62.8 percent) to Baker's 452,189 (37.2 percent). Baker won 68.1 percent in his own Franklin Parish, which Treen lost to the Democrat Louis Lambert of Baton Rouge. Baker won 55.8 percent and 51.2 percent in his neighboring Richland and Ouachita parishes, respectively. He polled 49.1 percent in Caddo Parish (Shreveport) and ran nearly as well in Calcasieu Parish (Lake Charles), where he had the support of former state Representative and state Senator Robert G. "Bob" Jones, the stockbroker son of former Governor Sam Houston Jones.
Baker said that Fowler had the advantage in the race in part because of 150 employees of the elections department who worked to elect Fowler. He also benefited, Baker said, from contributions from the manufacturers and distributors of voting machines.
Like his father, Jerry Fowler was also elected commissioner five times: 1979, 1983, 1987, 1991, and 1995. In 1999, however, he finished in third place in the primary after bribery allegations surfaced. He would later serve a prison sentence. The post was then won by the only Republican who ever held it, Suzanne Haik Terrell.
In 2004, more than four decades after Long's death, the elections division was hence returned to its original administrative home. Baker never received the political credit for his "good government" proposal from 1979. Instead, it was left to Commissioner Terrell to implement Baker's longstanding proposal.
[edit] Board of Election Supervisors
In 1980, Governor Treen appointed Baker to the Louisiana Athletic Commission, since renamed the Louisiana State Boxing and Wrestling Commission. That same year, Baker was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Detroit, which first nominated the Ronald W. Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush ticket.
Though Baker did not win the two principal offices that he sought, the two men who defeated him, Jim Brown and Jerry Fowler, both went to prison after convictions of wrongdoing in connection with their duties.
As of 2006, Baker was still a member of the Franklin Parish Board of Election Supervisors by virtue of his being the parish Republican chairman.
[edit] References
Billy Hathorn, "The Republican Party in Louisiana, 1920-1980," Master's thesis (1980), Northwestern State University at Natchitoches
Billy Hathorn, interview with John H. Baker, July 26, 2006
Baton Rouge State-Times, December 22, 1979
Shreveport Journal, October 11, 1979
Alexandria Daily Town Talk, November 10, 1979
www.legis.state.la.us/archive/2005/1397.pdf
Members of the Louisiana House of Represenatatives since 1880, Baton Rouge: Secretary of State
