Malcolm Lafargue

Malcolm Emmett Lafargue (November 4, 1908 – March 28, 1963) was a United States Attorney from Shreveport, Louisiana, who in 1950 ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate in a heated campaign against his fellow Democrat, Russell B. Long.

"I have been fighting the Longs for fourteen years. This isn't something new", said Malcolm Lafargue in his announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1950 against Russell Long.

Background

Lafargue was the oldest of six children of Edwin Louis Lafargue (1881–1922) and the former Martha Elizabeth O'Bannon (1879–1969). He was born in Marksville in Avoyelles Parish in south central Louisiana. His grandfather, Adolphe Jolna Lafargue, studied law at Tulane University Law School and was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and a state court judge. A great-uncle, Arnaud D. Lafaruge, was also a state legislator, Adolphe Lafargue published The Marksville Weekly News, a newspaper begun under other names by Malcolm Lafargue's great-grandfather, Pierre-Adolphe Lafargue (1818–1869). The Lafargues are descended from a French family in the Pyrenees Mountains.^[1]

Lafargue's maternal great-grandfather, Alfred Briggs Irion, was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Louisiana's 6th congressional district from 1885 to 1887; the district then extended as far north as Avoyelles Parish. Lafargue's uncle, Alvan Lafargue, was a 50-year physician who founded a hospital and served as a mayor of Sulphur near Lake Charles. The two died within six weeks of each other in 1963.^[2]

Malcolm Lafargue graduated from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and in 1932 Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans. While in law school, he worked in the minerals division of the Louisiana Conservation Department in New Orleans.^[3]

U.S. attorney in Shreveport

After he received his law degree, Lafargue moved to Shreveport to engage in the practice of law. He remained there for the rest of his life. After an unsuccessful but competitive race for district attorney for Caddo Parish,^[4] Lafargue was named in 1937 as assistant U. S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana under Harvey Fields, a Longite political figure who was also coincidentally a native of Marksville. The Western District then encompassed forty of Louisiana's sixty-four parishes.^[3]

In 1939, Lafargue was assigned the task of investigating and prosecuting within the Western District the defendants in the Louisiana public corruption cases known as the Louisiana Hayride.^[3] The corrupt practices led to the removal in Baton Rouge of Governor Richard W. Leche, succeeded by Lieutenant Governor Earl Kemp Long,^[5] and LSU President James Monroe Smith.^[6] Lafargue worked in the prosecution of Leche and other Long associates, the architect Leon C. Weiss, the contractor George Caldwell, and labor commissioner B. W. Cason.^[7]

In 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt elevated Lafargue from Assistant U.S. Attorney to U.S. Attorney. In 1946, after local officials had failed to act, Lafargue was directed by the United States Department of Justice to institute federal proceedings against six men in a case involving the lynching of 28-year-old John Cecil Jones and the mortal beating with a blowtorch of 17-year-old Albert Harris, Jr., two African-Americans accused of prowling in the backyard of a white woman. The deaths occurred at Dorcheat Bayou west of Minden in Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana. The six defendants included deputy and later Sheriff O. H. Haynes, Jr., and Minden Police Chief Benjamin Garey Gantt. The charges against Gantt were dropped, and the other defendants were quickly acquitted.^[8]

Though he was a segregationist, Lafargue argued for civil liberties and warned that neither police officers nor private citizens could take the law into their own hands.^[9] Prior to the jury's decision to exonerate all the suspects, Lafargue delivered an impassioned argument:

We are here in federal court because free government and good government were not available in Webster Parish. ... I come from this state. My grandfather had slaves. But to me civil liberties means human rights, God-given rights for all Americans. This is not a social question. This is not an economic question. It is a question of God-given rights. If you want a feudal society with overlords, or a Hitler or Mussolini government, then this country is no place for you. We can have as much danger from within this country, from groups of intolerant men who would destroy the rights our forefathers gave us, as from any outside enemies.^[10]

Years later, Lafargue's son, Robert, described his father, a short, stocky man, as "an honest, straitlaced, aboveboard man, who was not afraid to tangle with anybody."^[10]

Senatorial campaign

In 1950, Lafargue resigned as U.S. attorney^[3] to challenge in the Democratic primary election Senator Russell Long, son of Huey Pierce Long, Jr., and nephew of Earl Long. Russell Long successfully sought the first of six consecutive six-year terms in office. Long had been nominated and elected in 1948 for a two-year term created by the death of Senator John H. Overton of Alexandria, who had earlier defended Huey Long in the 1929 impeachment trial before the Louisiana State Senate.^[11] Overton had recommended Lafargue for the assistant U.S. attorney position.^[3]

Lafargue was succeeded as U.S. attorney on an acting basis by William J. Fleniken.^[7] The pro-Long Harvey Locke Carey was appointed as Lafargue's permanent successor. Carey served less than two years from August 1950 to January 1952.^[12] An Arkansas native, Carey was a former clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives who had married into the powerful Drew family in Minden. He had managed the 1948 campaigns in northwest Louisiana for both Earl Long and Russell Long.^[13] Fleniken, who had continued as assistant U.S. attorney under Carey, was sworn in to succeed Carey on April 23, 1952 and remained in the position until the early part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.^[14]

In the 1948 senatorial primary, Russell Long had narrowly defeated Robert F. Kennon of Minden, an intraparty rival of the Drews. Four years later Kennon was elected governor.^[15] Long thereafter in the general election overwhelmed Clem S. Clarke, a Shreveport oilman who was the first Republican since implementation in 1914 of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution even to run for a U. S. Senate seat in Louisiana.^[16]

In an advertisement in his race against Long, Lafargue questioned how the then freshman senator was the self-proclaimed "poor man's friend" because Long "pretends to sneer at millionaires, but Long is a millionaire himself."^[17] In his announcement of candidacy, Lafargue said: "I have been fighting the Longs for fourteen years. This isn't something new".... [The Longs] have heaped taxes on the pocketbook of consumers and industry and have given relatively little in return. In Baton Rouge, they preach private enterprise but practice a kind of semi-socialism of which the people have had their fill."^[7]

Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison formally endorsed Lafargue in the primary against Long as did Morrison's erstwhile ally, Robert Kennon. Morrison's backing of Lafargue was intended to satisfy his good government base and the anti-Long Crescent City Democratic Organization that Morrison had founded as an alternative to former Mayor Robert Maestri's pro-Long "Old Regulars". Yet Morrison's move was a smokescreen, for he had struck a deal with his intraparty rival, Governor Earl Long, that he would not actively oppose Russell Long for a full term in the Senate if Earl Long would agree to the restoration of home rule for New Orleans. The city was at the time was virtually being governed by the state from Baton Rouge. Morrison endorsed Lafargue but privately urged many of his followers to support Russell Long, whom he expected to win the election anyway.^[18][19]

Glen Jeansonne described Lafargue as "an obscure United States attorney with no statewide organization whose chief asset seemed to be that he was a French-speaking Cajun Protestant who resided in Shreveport, which presumably was calculated to appeal to both South Louisiana Cajuns and North Louisiana rednecks."^[20]

While he spoke in rural Marthaville in Natchitoches Parish, where his great-grandfather had once taught school, Lafargue accused Senator Long of having broken campaign promises from just two years earlier. Specifically, Lafargue claimed that Long failed to work to lower federal income tax rates and to obtain funds to widen U.S. Highway 71 between Shreveport and New Orleans and U.S. Highway 80 from Shreveport to Monroe. Lafargue said that some blacktopping had been undertaken on Highway 71 but no improvements then to Highway 80: "So we have high taxes out of Russell's pledges to work for lower taxes.... We have blacktopping of concrete roads out of his pledges to make them into four-lane highways."^[7] Lafargue claimed that the movement of state welfare funds proposed by the Earl Long administration was for "political highway bribes in behalf of Russell Long now and for Long candidates in state elections later.... Most of the people who are supporting Russell are getting something out of it. They've either got their hands in the pot or their heads in the trough."^[7]

Unworried about Lafargue's challenge, Russell Long campaigned little in his reelection bid, but Earl Long took to the stump and made colorful speeches on behalf of his nephew. Russell Long prevailed in the primary, 359,230 to 156,918. Lafargue carried only Plaquemines Parish, with 93.7 percent of the vote. There he held the support of the powerful Judge Leander Perez, a leader among the state's former Dixiecrats of 1948, who was unhappy at the time with both Earl and Russell Long.^[19][21][20]

In the general election, Long overwhelmed the Republican Charles Sidney Gerth (1882-1964), a businessman from New Orleans, who had run unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary in 1948 against the state's senior senator, Allen J. Ellender of Houma in Terrebonne Parish. Long and Ellender were senatorial colleagues from 1948 until Ellender's death in 1972.

After the failure of his Senate race, Lafargue joined Percy N. Browne in the Shreveport law firm of Browne and Lafargue.^[3] Lafargue was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity, the Masonic lodge, the Shriners,^[22] and the Episcopal Church.^[3]

Death at 54

Lafargue died of a heart attack in Shreveport at the age of fifty-four. He is interred at Centuries Memorial Park in Shreveport. He and his wife, the former Jewett Todd, a native of Marietta, Georgia, whom he married in 1931, had one son, Robert Todd Lafargue.^[3]

References