William M. Rainach
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William M. "Willie" Rainach (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.
Adoption and early years
Rainach was born as "William Odom" in Kentwood in Tangipahoa Parish, east of Baton Rouge. His mother died during World War I, 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.
He graduated from Summerfield High School and attended Southern State University (then College) in Magnolia, Arkansas. He worked for the U.S. government for a time and studied further at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
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 1937, Rainach organized the Claiborne Electric Cooperative, which brought the first electricity to farms in northwest Louisiana. He founded Claiborne Butane in 1945. The Rainachs lived on a 450-acre farm near Summerfield.
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 The law was passed but repealed in 1955.Right-to-work was reinstituted in Louisiana in 1976 in the second administration of Governor Edwin Washington Edwards.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.
White Citizens' Council
Rainach, at his own expense, formed the first White Citizens' Council in Louisiana. The goals of the Citizens Council were listed as: "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 in the Deep South from preventing the registration of blacks who desired to exercise the franchise.
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. He challenged the authority of the U.S. 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 U.S. Constitution gives 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.
After desegregation, public schools in his Claiborne Parish, which includes the principal towns of Homer, the parish seat, 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. The parish population itself was 47 percent black in the 2000 census.
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."
The gubernatorial primary of 1959
see Louisiana gubernatorial election, 1959-60Rainach 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 A. 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'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 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 candidacy.
Services were held on January 27 at the Trinity Southern Methodist Church, a conservative body that had broken with the more liberal United Methodists.
In addition to his wife, Rainach was survived by two sons and a daughter.
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."
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
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