J. D. de Blieux - Entering Louisiana Politics

Entering Louisiana Politics

In 1948, DeBlieux ran for the Louisiana House of Representatives from East Baton Rouge Parish but was defeated. In 1952, he ran for the state Senate but lost to Charles F. Duchein (December 23, 1914 – October 19, 1998). It was an anti-Long year in Louisiana, with Robert F. Kennon of Minden, the seat of Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana, winning the governorship. DeBlieux rebounded to unseat Duchein in 1956, when Earl Kemp Long made his comeback for a second full term as governor. At the time DeBlieux, like Earl Long, was strongly supported by organized labor because of his advocacy of the repeal of the right-to-work law passed during the Kennon administration,

DeBlieux was a Louisiana delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1956, when delegates nominated the Adlai Stevenson—Estes Kefauver ticket, the first national Democratic ticket since Reconstruction to fail to win Louisiana's electoral votes.

DeBlieux also served for a time on the 144-member Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee, a powerful organization with influence in election procedures and campaigns.

DeBlieux was unseated in the Democratic runoff election in January 1959 by segregationist Wendell P. Harris (March 13, 1917 – February 4, 1994). Under a revised districting plan following the 1960 census, East Baton Rouge Parish gained two additional state Senate seats. DeBlieux entered the 1963 Democratic primaries and managed to unseat Harris, who had been indicted for illegal wiretapping.

In the March 3, 1964, general election, DeBlieux defeated Republican businessman and Illinois native Floyd O. Crawford (1907–1995) of Baton Rouge, 55-45 percent. That fall, Crawford, running with the Barry Goldwater electors, unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Representative James H. Morrison of Hammond. DeBlieux was thereafter reelected to the state Senate in 1968 and 1972.

DeBlieux's support for civil rights caught the eye of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who invited DeBlieux to the White House. DeBlieux had supported the Kennedy-Johnson, Johnson-Humphrey, and Humphrey-Muskie tickets in 1960, 1964, and 1968, but only Kennedy secured Louisiana's then ten electoral votes.

DeBlieux was unlike most of his Senate colleagues. He published his annual income in the newspaper. He tried to prevent Louisiana department heads from soliciting campaign contributions from state employees. He sought to examine the records of state agencies. He opposed an attempt by the Louisiana House to invoke the doctrine of interposition in regard to federal-state relations and authored an unsuccessful amendment that affirmed the state's recogniton of federal constitutional authority. He hired future state district and appellate court judge Henry L. Yelverton of Lake Charles on his Senate staff. Yelverton later said that DeBlieux's public posture was an inspiration for his own.

In 1966, midway in his second term in the state Senate, DeBlieux waged an intraparty challenge to U.S. Senator Allen J. Ellender of Houma, the seat of Terrebonne Parish in south Louisiana. While DeBlieux challenged the entrenched incumbent from the political left, another candidate, Troyce E. Guice (1932–2008), a conservative businessman then from Ferriday in Concordia Parish in eastern Louisiana, ran to Ellender's right. Ellender polled 484,519 votes (74.2 percent) to DeBlieux's 94,154 (14.1 percent) and Guice's 78,137 (11.7 percent). Ellender was then unopposed in the November 8 general election for the last of his six Senate terms.

In 1968, DeBlieux, with little available funding, waged a losing intraparty challenge to conservative U.S. Representative John Richard Rarick, an Indiana native and a lawyer from St. Francisville in West Feliciana Parish.