Robert Max Ross

Robert Max Ross (August 5, 1933 - September 15, 2009) was a retired businessman from Mangham, in Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana, who has been a perennial Republican candidate for public office even though he has never made a significant showing in an election.

Ross grew up in Mangham and graduated from Mangham High School in 1951. Thereafter, he obtained a bachelor of science degree, with a major in agriculture, from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War. After his military service, he returned to Mangham, where he engaged in a number of businesses, including the ownership of a mobile home park.

Ross first ran for office in December 1971 in the only Republican gubernatorial closed primary ever held in the history of Louisiana. He was soundly defeated for the GOP nomination by the Metairie attorney David Conner Treen, who had also run unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives from suburban New Orleans in 1962, 1964, and 1968. Treen had the support of the party leadership, including chairman Charles C. de Gravelles of Lafayette. Ross was the "outsider" in the party, whose leaders and voters preferred the "insider" Treen.

Ross also filed as a candidate for the Louisiana State Senate in the February 1, 1972, general election but was easily defeated, 78-22 percent, by incumbent Democrat Charles M. Brown of Tallulah, the seat of Madison Parish in northeastern Louisiana. While Ross was running for the state Senate, his stepfather, Terry Clingan (born 1918), the Manham town barber, waged an unsuccessful campaign against Democratic State Representative Lantz Womack of Winnsboro, the seat of neighboring Franklin Parish. Clingan, a widower, was married to Ross' mother, Ruby Ross Clingan (1911-2002). Ross' father was killed in an accident in a shipyard in Galveston, Texas, when Ross was a small boy.

After the 1971-1972 campaigns, little was heard of Ross again for a decade. In 1983, he filed for the jungle primary for governor and polled a minuscule 7,625 ballots. The other Republican candidate was David Treen, by then the embattled incumbent governor, who failed in his bid for a second term. Treen received 588,508 ballots, but the easy winner was the Democratic choice, former Governor Edwin Washington Edwards, with 1,006,561 votes.

Ross surfaced again in 1984, when the Louisiana GOP leadership declined to offer a challenge to entrenched incumbent U.S. Senator John Bennett Johnston, Jr., of Shreveport. Several minor candidates filed against Johnston in the jungle primary but none made a showing. Some Republicans had encouraged Treen to make the race, but he demurred after his lopsided loss the previous year for governor. Ross therefore ran as the best-known of the Republican candidates against Johnston. The tally was 838,181 votes (85.7 percent) for Johnston and 86,546 votes (8.9 percent) for Ross.

When U.S. Senator Russell B. Long retired, Ross entered the jungle primary in September 1986 to choose a successor. He finished far to the rear, as two members of the United States House of Representatives, Republican W. Henson Moore, III, of Baton Rouge and Democrat John B. Breaux of Crowley, the seat of Acadia Parish, secured general election berths. Breaux went on to defeat Moore and held the seat for eighteen years until he retired in January 2005.

In October 2002, Ross ran for mayor of Mangham, but he polled only ten votes, or 7 percent of the total against the incumbent Democrat, Robert Neal Harwell, who received 141 votes (93 percent). Ross had quarreled with Harwell and the town council over water-related issues when he made his mayoral bid. In 1990, a Republican, Royce V. Lowery, was elected to the Mangham Town Council, while the Republican Mayor Frellsen Reese was retiring. In addition to Lowery, the council then had two Democratic members and two no-party aldermen.

In 2007, Ross resurfaced with an advertisement in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate which urged that a candidate, presumably a Republican, step forward to challenge the reelection of Democratic Attorney General Charles C. Foti, Jr., in the October 20], 2007, jungle primary. Ross listed a mailing address in the ad, but no telephone number or email address. Shortly after Ross' ad appeared, District Attorney James D. "Buddy" Caldwell, Jr., of Tallulah, a Democrat, announced that he would challenge Foti in part as a reaction to Foti's arrest of of a doctor and two nurses in connection with deaths in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Caldwell comes from the historically Democratic area of East Carroll, Madison, and Tensas parishes. In addition to Caldwell, Foti faced a Republican candidate, Shreveport attorney Royal Alexander, in the primary. Foti was narrowly eliminated in the primary. Caldwell and Alexander now meet in the November 17 general election, with Caldwell believed to be the presumptive favorite based on overall primary results.

Bennie Hixon of Monroe, Louisiana, a former principal at Mangham High School, said that Ross may have been the first Republican in Mangham. "He helped break ground for the growth of the Republican Party in Richland Parish," Hixon said. Hixon self-published The History of Mangham and the Big Creek-Boeuf River to 1940.

Ross and his wife, Bobbi (born 1939), have a son, Kenneth Ross of Slidell in St. Tammany Parish, and three daughters. Ross was a Baptist. Ross's late brother, J. Dale Ross, was a Republican leader in Jonesville in Catahoula Parish.

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