William M. Rainach

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Monroe "Willie" Rainach, Sr. (July 13, 1913 -- January 26, 1978) was a state legislator from the town of Summerfield in Claiborne Parish who led Louisiana's "Massive Resistance" to desegregation during the last half of the 1950s. He served both Claiborne and neighboring Bienville Parish in north Louisiana for three terms in the state Senate from 1948-1960. Earlier, he represented Claiborne Parish in the state House of Representatives from 1940-1948. In 1959, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, then equivalent to election in Louisiana at a time when few Republicans even bothered to contest elections.

Contents

[edit] Adoption and early years

Rainach was born as "William Odom" in Kentwood in Tangipahoa Parish, east of Baton Rouge. His mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1917, when Rainach was four, and his invalid father placed Rainach and his three brothers in the Baptist Orphanage in Lake Charles. In 1917, he and a foster sister, Leona Aron Rainach, were adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Albert M. Rainach of Summerfield.

Rainach was such an excellent primary student that he completed grades one through four in two years. He graduated from Summerfield High School and attended Southern Arkansas University (then College) in Magnolia, Arkansas, from 1932-1933. He attended Strayer's Business College in Washington, D.C., from 1935-1936, when he also worked for the U.S. government. Thereafter, he attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, but there is no record in A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography as ti whether he graduated.

Rainach wanted to be a baseball player, but in 1924, he was struck by a bat. He later lost his sight in one eye because of the injury. Coincidentally, one of his 1959 political rivals, William J. "Bill" Dodd, did achieve his own goal of playing professional baseball for a time.

In 1939, Rainach organized the Claiborne Electric Cooperative, Inc., based in Homer, which brought the first electricity to farms in northwest Louisiana. He founded Claiborne Butane in Homer in 1945 and was the company president from 1948-1977. He was also president of the Arcadia Butane Co., Inc., in Arcadia, the seat of Bienville Parish, in 1967. The Rainachs lived on a 450-acre farm near Summerfield.

[edit] Supporting "right-to-work" legislation

In the 1954 legislative session, Rainach led the successful attempt to pass Louisiana's first right-to-work law, which was strongly opposed by organized labor. The law was passed but repealed in 1955.

Right-to-work was reinstituted in Louisiana in 1976 in the second administration of Governor Edwin Washington Edwards. For some twenty years, Louisiana and Oklahoma had been the only southern states that could compel a worker in a unionized work place to join the union against his personal choice. Oklahoma adopted a right-to-work law in 2001.

The right-to-work issue in the legislature was overshadowed thereafter by looming school desegregation though the first schools, starting in New Orleans, would not be desegregated until the 1959-1960 school year.

[edit] White Citizens' Councils

Rainach, at his own expense, founded the first White Citizens' Council in Claiborne Parish. He was also the founder and president of the Louisiana Association of Citizens' Councils from 1955-1959. He founded and chaired the Citizens Council of America from 1956-1958.

The goals of the Citizens Council were listed as follows: "to protect and preserve by all legal means our historical southern social traditions in all their aspects . . . to spell out expressly that the states have the sovereign right to regulate education, health, morals, and general welfare in fields not speciifically related to the federal [national] government." Rainach envisioned the councils as a balance to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

He was the primary mover behind the Louisiana "pupil placement law" which made parish school superintendents responsible for assigning individual students to schools. This was seen as a subterfuge to maintain segregated schools. "I believe that segregation must be maintained throughout the width and breadth of our great state," Rainach proclaimed, as cited in A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana.

Part of Rainach's strategy was to purge the rolls of black voters, an important part of Governor Earl Kemp Long's coalition. To do this, Rainach and his supporters relied on an unenforced section of the Louisiana constitution of 1921 (replaced in 1974), which required all registrants to fill out applications without assistance and to read and interpret a portion of the U.S. Constitution selected by the registrar. Rainach said that some 100,000 black voters at the time were illegally registered. Black registration fell afterwards from 161,410 to about 130,000 because of purges in several north Louisiana parishes.

By the time of the 1966 elections, large numbers of blacks were registered and voting for the first time in the Deep South from Louisiana to South Carolina. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed the use of federal examiners, if needed, to prevent local officials from preventing the registration of blacks who desired to exercise the franchise.

[edit] Defending segregation

Rainach became the state's most visible defender of segregation through his role as the first and only chairman of the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation (1954-1959). He challenged the authority of the United States Supreme Court to strike down segregation. His efforts were, however, repudiated in the New Orleans federal court, which declared state segregation laws unconstitutional. Rainach noted that Article III of the United States Constitution gives the Congress the power to remove certain matters from the review of the high court. At that time, Congress had not yet struck against school segregation: it was the Supreme Court which had done so.

In 1959, Rainach delivered a racially inflammatory speech before the legislature in which he professed to "love the [expletive deleted], but I know he can't run this country. The breeding in him does not allow him to run a civilization, and I won't let our civilization go to ruin." Like his segregationist associate from Plaquemines Parish, Leander H. Perez, Rainach equated racial integration with communism in his book Subversion in Racial Unrest.

After desegregation, public schools in his Claiborne Parish, which includes the principal towns of Homer and Haynesville (near the Arkansas border), quickly became majority black in student composition because many white families left the system and either moved out of the parish, opted for private schools, or, later, home schooling. Rainach was the founder in fact of the private Claiborne Academy. The parish population itself was 47 percent black in the 2000 census.

[edit] Earl Long scolds Rainach

Governor Earl Long, considered more progressive on race than many Louisiana politicians of his era but uncouth in language, lectured Rainach in a well-known exchange: "Willie, one of these days you gonna retire and go back home. You'll take off your boots, wash your feet, stare at the moon, and get close to God. Then will you realize that [expletive deleted] are human beings too."

Long further defended his own racial policies: If the nation "would leave us alone and quit brainwashing the colored people, we'd solve this ourselves. Yes, I like colored people, and I know there ain't many of them can vote for me either. Now I ain't saying this for votes. I am the best friend the colored man, and the poor white man, and the middle class, and the millionaire, if he wants to do right, ever had in the governor's office in the history of this state. You just check. You just check."

[edit] The gubernatorial primary of 1959

see Louisiana gubernatorial election, 1959-60

Rainach ran third in perhaps the most heated gubernatorial primary of Louisiana history. He received 143,095 votes (17 percent.) There was a runoff between former Governor Jimmie Davis (213,551 or 25.3 percent) and the more liberal candidate, New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison, Sr., (278,956 or 33.1 percent). Two other candidates, Auditor (thereafter called "Comptroller") Bill Dodd of Baton Rouge and former Governor James Albert Noe, Sr., of Monroe, split another 22 percent of the vote.

Rainach, as well as outgoing Governor Long, endorsed Davis, who defeated "Chep" Morrison, 487,681 (54.1 percent) to 414,110 (45.9 percent) in the party runoff. Bill Dodd endorsed Morrison for his own reasons. Years after that election, Rainach said that he should have endorsed no candidate: "If I knew what I know now, I would have sat it out," he told the Shreveport Times. It was the closest he came to criticism of Governor Davis.

Davis thereafter overwhelmed Republican nominee Francis Grevemberg in the general election held on April 19, 1960, by a margin of 82-17 percent.

Rainach was named "Man of the Year" by the Homer Lions Club in 1974. In 1959, he received the "Americanism Award" from the Caddo-Bossier chapter of the newly-formed Young Americans for Freedom. He was a member of the Louisiana Farm Bureau, the Louisiana Forestry Association, the Louisiana Independent Royalty Owners and Oil Producers Associaton, and the American Defense Preparedness Association.

[edit] Rainach's suicide

Rainach, who had been in ill health, shot himself in the right temple with a .38 caliber pistol on a Thursday morning, January 26, 1978, in his backyard. His body was found by the maid. His wife, Mable Justin Fincher Rainach (May 26, 1915 -- January 1995), was shopping in Homer at the time. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.

Though his suicide may have been personal in regard to his declining health, it was somewhat reminiscent of Edmund Ruffin, a Confederate firebrand who also took his own life to avoid living in the northern-dominated South of 1865. Rainach was never reconciled to civil rights and principles of racial equality. He never sought office after his failed gubernatorial bid.

Services were held on January 27, 1978, at the Trinity Southern Methodist Church, a conservative body in Claiborne Parish that had broken with the more liberal United Methodists.

In addition to his wife, Rainach was survived by two sons, William Monroe Rainach, Jr. (born 1941) of Summerfield, and Rex Dean Rainach (born 1946) of Baton Rouge, and a daughter, Mary Elizabeth. William and Mable Rainach are interred in Arlington Cemetery in Homer.

[edit] Rainach viewed himself as "classical liberal"

Unlike many other southern politicians who once supported segregation and later renounced that view -- Russell B. Long, J. Bennett Johnston, Jr., John McKeithen, Strom Thurmond, and George C. Wallace, Sr., for example, Rainach never abandoned his belief in racial separatism.

In a 1974 interview with the Shreveport Times, Rainach rejected the appellation "conservative" though it had long been used by the media to describe his political philosophy. The Times revealed Rainach as:

"the antithesis of the image his cause would suggest. He speaks softly, deliberately, weighing words carefully, and citing historical events, both ancient and modern, as he responds to questions. He rejected the label of 'conservative', preferring to be called a 'classical liberal.'

"In the days of Paine and Jefferson, the classical liberal stood for freedom of the individual as opposed to government control and the worth of the individual. I'm not anti-Negro, but I still feel the same way about it. I don't hate Negroes -- I didn't hate them then -- some of our most valued employees here at the company are Negroes, and I would never want to hurt them.

"But I do not feel the two societies should mix. I wish it were possible for whites and blacks to live together, but it just isn't."

[edit] References

Billy Hathorn, Ph.D., "The Republican Party in Louisiana, 1920-1980," Master's thesis (1980) at Northwestern State University, Natchitoches

Danny Anderson, Homer bureau chief, "Willie Rainach dies of gunshot wound," Shreveport Times, January 27, 1978

"Rainach leaves mark on state, national politics," Shreveport Times, January 27, 1978

http://www.southerninstitute.info/civil_rights_education/divided13.html (Perez and Rainach)

Stowe, William McFerrin, Jr., Ph.D., "Willie Rainach and the Defense of Segregation in Louisiana, 1954-1959", May 1989

http://www.jfk-online.com/jpsgwnol.html (States Rights Party and the "Radical Right")

http://www.accd.edu/pac/communic/Denise/JJ.html (Rainach and segregation)

A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana

"William Monroe Rainach", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 2 (1988), pp. 670-671

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../w/i/l/William_M._Rainach_acfc.html"