Charles de Gravelles - Louisiana GOP Mulls Nixon and Reagan

Louisiana GOP Mulls Nixon and Reagan

In the fall of 1966, deGravelles made his only race for public office: the Third District seat on the Louisiana State Board of Education. He polled 24,236 votes (35.3 percent) against the Democrat Harvey Peltier's 44,413 ballots (64.7 percent). The Democrat William J. "Bill" Dodd was then the education superintendent, and the state board was all-Democratic. DeGravelles’ interest in education had been whetted from 1955 to 1962, when he taught oil and gas law at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then known as Southwestern Louisiana Institute and the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

In 1968, deGravelles succeeded Charlton Havard Lyons, Sr., of Shreveport in Caddo Parish, as the Louisiana party chairman. On March 3, 1964, Lyons had been the pioneer Republican gubernatorial candidate in the general election. After the Goldwater national defeat, though he wad won Louisiana’s then ten electoral votes, deGravelles and Lyons committed themselves in 1968 to the nomination of former Richard M. Nixon. A minority within the Louisiana delegation to the 1968 Republican National Convention held in Miami Beach, however, favored then Governor Ronald W. Reagan of California for the party’s nomination. DeGravelles summed up the majority opinion of the Louisiana party when he said, "much as I admire Governor Reagan, I feel that Nixon has a broad appeal and is the best qualified man in either party."

In May 1968, deGravelles discounted the victory by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York in the presidential primary in Massachusetts over the favorite-son choice, Governor John Volpe. DeGravelles predicted that if a second candidate emerged at the Republican convention it would be Reagan, not Rockefeller. Two weeks later, however, a Harris Poll showed Rockefeller the strongest candidate for president in either party, with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in second place. Rockefeller had entered the race for the nomination too late to amass the critical delegates needed. Humphrey's late start was mitigated by his inheriting the supporters of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who withdrew from consideration on March 31, 1968.

Chairman DeGravelles correctly predicted that Nixon would be vigorously challenged in Louisiana, not by Humphrey but by the third-party forces pledged to then former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, Jr., a favorite of many blue collar white workers. Most of the Louisiana GOP delegates favored Reagan as a vice-presidential choice in 1968, a selection that ultimately went to Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, who was subsequently forced to resign in 1973 for tax evasion and bribery.

Louisiana was among the five states which supported Wallace in 1968. Nixon-Agnew electors drew 257,535 votes (23.5 percent) in Louisiana, to Wallace's 530,300 (48.3 percent) and Humphrey's 309,615 (28.2 percent). Nixon ran 26,55 votes ahead of his 1960 showing in raw popular votes in Louisiana, but his 1968 showing was 5.1 percentage points below the previous standing.

The deGravelleses each attended one national GOP convention: he in 1972 in Miami Beach, and she in 1964 in San Francisco. DeGravelles was succeeded as chairman by businessman James H. Boyce of Baton Rouge. Under Boyce's tutelage from 1972 to 1976, the Louisiana GOP participated in the 49-state sweep for Nixon, having lost the presidential vote in 1972 only in West Feliciana Parish. Moreover, under Boyce the still fledgling party did capture its first two seats in the United States House of Representatives since Reconstruction, with the election in 1972 of David C. Treen in the New Orleans suburbs and William Henson Moore, III, in a 1975 special election, which was a rerun of the regular November 1974 general election in the Baton Rouge district.