John Rarick

John Richard Rarick (born January 29, 1924) is a lawyer in St. Francisville, the seat of West Feliciana Parish, who was a Democratic congressman from southern Louisiana between 1967 and 1975. A staunch conservative, he frequently quarreled with his party's increasingly liberal philosophy and leadership. In 1980, he sought the presidency as the nominee of the former American Independent Party, which had been founded in 1968 by George C. Wallace, Jr., of Alabama.

Early years and military service

Rarick was born in tiny Waterford in Elkhart County, Indiana. He attended Goshen High School in Goshen. He studied at Ball State (then Teacher’s College) in Muncie, and he then transferred to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Rarick served for three years in the United States Army in World War II. He was captured and later escaped from a German prison camp. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

After his military service, Rarick graduated from LSU and then the Tulane University School of Law in New Orleans in 1949. He was admitted to the Louisiana bar later that year and set up a law practice in St. Francisville near Baton Rouge. He was elected as a district judge of the West Feliciana Parish-based Twentieth Judicial District on June 28, 1961. He resigned the judgeship on May 15, 1966, to declare his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Unseating Congressman Jimmy Morrison

Rarick had been a member of the Democratic Party in Indiana, where he had served as City Chairman of the Democratic Party of Goshen, and continued a Democrat when he moved to Louisiana. Rarick upset veteran Sixth District Congressman James Hobson "Jimmy" Morrison of Hammond in a Democratic primary runoff with 51.2 percent of the vote. (Jimmy Morrison is unrelated to the late New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison, Sr., though the two shared a moderately liberal political philosophy.) Rarick's victory coincided with the selection of another controversial conservative, the late Lester Garfield Maddox, as the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia. Maddox had become known for closing a restaurant in Atlanta to avoid compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Both Rarick and his 1966 Republican opponent, Crayton G. "Sparky" Hall, later left their major parties. Hall was in 1976 a Sixth Congressional District elector for the fledgling Libertarian Party, pledged that year to the Virginian Roger MacBride. Rarick quickly compiled a very conservative voting record, even by Louisiana Democratic standards. He was also a member of the pro-segregation White Citizens Council. He often spoke at events sponsored by the anticommunist John Birch Society.

Challenging John McKeithen

In November 1967, with less than a year of congressional service to his credit, Rarick challenged popular Democratic Governor John Julian McKeithen for renomination. Rarick who sought term limitations secured the support of various "far right" groups in the state, but was badly defeated, winning only 17.3 percent of the vote to McKeithen's 80.7 percent, among those two candidates. (There were several minor candidates not included in the percent breakdown.) Rarick did not poll a gubernatorial majority even among those voters expected to support Wallace for president in 1968.

Supporting George Wallace

In 1968, Rarick supported Wallace for president against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard M. Nixon. Rarick himself was reelected to the U.S. Congress by a wide margin that year, and he was reelected two more times without opposition. West Feliciana Parish was the only parish in Louisiana to support Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in the 1972 general election, which contrasted with their representation by Rarick, who had the most conservative voting record of the Louisiana congressional delegation.

Losing renomination in 1974

In 1974, Rarick was denied renomination (as he had done to Morrison eight years earlier) by a young Baton Rouge broadcaster, Jeff LaCaze, who made much of Rarick's conservative voting record. LaCaze, a "national Democrat," in turn lost the seat to Republican Henson Moore of Baton Rouge in a disputed November 1974 general election. In a special election rematch held in January 1975 to resolve the dispute, LaCaze lost by nearly eight percentage points to Moore. The seat has been in Republican hands ever since, first with Moore, then with Richard H. Baker, also of Baton Rouge.

Running for Congress again, 1976

Rarick resumed the practice of law after his congressional defeat. In 1976, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the American Independent Party's presidential nomination. The AIP had been founded by Wallace in 1968 as a partisan vehicle for his presidential bid. Thereafter, Wallace returned to the Democratic fold and largely let the new party fend for itself. Rarick lost the AIP nomination to ex-Georgia Governor and ardent segregationist Lester "Axe Handle" Maddox. Rarick then turned his attention to returning to Congress. He ran in the suburban New Orleans-based First District in 1976 and ran for the seat as an independent. The seat had come open when 36-year incumbent F. Edward Hébert announced his retirement. Rarick polled only 12,227 votes (9.4 percent). However, he siphoned off enough votes that presumably otherwise would have gone to Republican Robert L. "Bob" Livingston to throw the election to Democrat Richard Alvin Tonry. In a surprise development, Tonry was forced to resign from the U.S. House in May 1977 because of allegations of electoral misconduct. Livingston thereafter won the seat in a special election held in August 1977.

AIP presidential nominee, 1980

In 1980, Rarick secured the AIP nomination with Eileen Knowland Shearer of California (the wife of AIP founder William K. Shearer) as his running mate, but he finished in seventh place, with 40,906 votes (or just 0.05 percent). Rarick's most respectable showings were in Louisiana, where he polled 10,333 votes (0.67 percent and about the same number that Maddox had received four years earlier) and in Alabama where he captured 15,010 votes (1.12 percent). Overall, his totals were so meager as to have been omitted from most presidential election tallies. He opposed the Republican Ronald Reagan for president that year on the grounds that Reagan was too accommodating to the welfare state to address the pressing needs of the nation in the 1980s.

Rarick today

Rarick's first wife was Marguerite P. Rarick (September 10, 1924 - April 10, 2003). He married the former Frances Eldred on January 21, 2004.

He was among the charter members of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The CofCC (as it is known among its members and supporters, perhaps in order to distinguish its name from the KKK) is a far-right, paleoconservative political association which some of its critics regard as having segregationist and/or White Nationalist sympathies.

References

Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, September 3, 1977
Shreveport Times, November 4, 1974

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