Harrison Bagwell

Harrison Garey Bagwell Sr. (December 6, 1913 - December 2, 1973), was an attorney and politician in his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is notable as the Republican nominee for governor of Louisiana in 1952; he was only the second Republican to have sought the governorship of Louisiana since 1924.
With the state's passage of a constitution in 1898, which raised barriers to voter registration, most African Americans were disenfranchised and excluded from the political system. As they had comprised the great majority of the Republican Party in the state following emancipation, it was essentially destroyed as a competitive force for decades until the late 1960s and later.
Background
Bagwell was a son of Arthur D. Bagwell (1878-1955), a native of Lincoln Parish, and the former Birdie Mae Harrison (1878-1961), a native of Houma in Terrebonne Parish. The couple died in Oak Grove in West Carroll Parish and they are interred there at Oak Grove Cemetery.
Bagwell attended local segregated schools through high school. He graduated from Louisiana State University and the Louisiana State University Law Center, both of which were also segregated. In 1952, Bagwell ran as only the second Republican candidate for governor in the 20th century.
In the gubernatorial general election held on April 22, 1952, Bagwell polled 4,958 votes (4 percent) of the vote statewide in a low-turnout contest against the Democrat Robert F. Kennon, a judge from Minden, who received 118,723 (96 percent). Bagwell reached double digits in only three parishes, St. James (13 percent), Iberia (12.5 percent), and his own East Baton Rouge (11.8 percent). In three parishes, Concordia, DeSoto, and Tensas, Bagwell received no votes.
Bagwell's gubernatorial showing was far below the votes secured by Republican US Senatorial candidate Clem S. Clarke in 1948. The Shreveport oilman polled just over 100,000 votes in his challenge of Democratic incumbent Russell B. Long, who won. By 2015, Republicans for the first time held both Senate seats from Louisiana.
Bagwell said that his primary goal in running for governor was to try to establish a competitive two-party system in Louisiana. He said that the state Republican party was being held back by its traditional leaders so that they could maintain their control over the party organization. As the US Representative from Louisiana's 6th congressional district, Bagwell was a delegate to the 1952 Republican National Convention. It met in Chicago and nominated Dwight Eisenhower, with Richard M. Nixon for vice president. Bagwell assisted John Minor Wisdom in making the case for seating the pro-Eisenhower delegation, rather than the pro-Taft delegation favored by the entrenched state party leadership. Because he was successful, they were instrumental in securing the nomination for Eisenhower.
Governor Kennon endorsed the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket. Although it was successful nationally, it lost the Louisiana electoral vote that year. White conservatives in the state were still overwhelmingly Democratic. but would by the 21st century become predominantly Republican.
Bagwell sought a federal judgeship but was not selected by the Eisenhower administration.
In the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater was the first Republican to carry the Deep South, although he lost nearly everywhere else. Bagwell called for an "overhaul" of the state party leadership, arguing that more moderate policies were necessary for broader party success. The more conservative party leaders, including Floyd O. Crawford, the defeated Republican candidate for U.S. representative from Louisiana's 6th congressional district; and Morton Blackwell, later active as a Republican party official in the state of Virginia, criticized Bagwell for his comments: They "seem to come from another world and another era." Crawford and Blackwell said, "if Bagwell wishes to be a liberal, then he should become a Democrat."
Bagwell died in 1973, four days before his 60th birthday. He and his wife, who predeceased him by two years, are interred at Resthaven Gardens of Memory in Baton Rouge.
Legacy
Bagwell's namesake son, Harrison Garey "Gary" Bagwell, Jr. (1937-1985), entered the United States Navy during the Vietnam War. He served aboard the transport ship, U.S.S. Caddo Parish. His letters home described the Viet Cong, military operations, and the people and landscape of South Vietnam and Taiwan. His papers are held in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections of the LSU Archives. There is also a special feature in the archive from the New Orleans Item on the Louisiana Republican Party in 1952.
One of Bagwell and June's younger daughters, Bonnie (Bagwell) Messer (born September 1954), recalled in 2013 that her father had treated the neighborhood children at their home in University Acres each Halloween to hot dogs, chili, and Kool-Aid. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Bagwell's death, Messer said that when she was a child, "Our house was THE place to go, and he fed everyone. It has been forty years since his last Halloween at our house ... I hope all our neighbors who trick-or-treated at our house will remember him this Halloween and the love he had for Halloween and them."

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