Charlton Lyons

Background

Lyons was born in Abbeville in Vermilion Parish in southwestern Louisiana, to a middle-class couple, Ernest John Lyons and the former Joyce Bentley Havard. He was reared in Melville in St. Landry Parish on the banks of the Atchafalaya River. The community was accessible not by railroad but by steamboat. As a teenager, Lyons worked in a Melville soda fountain and during two summers as a water boy for a railroad gang. Lyons' maternal grandfather and namesake, Charlton Wright Havard, was president of the Bank of Melville and the owner of two or three steamboats and several plantations.

In his memoir Songs I Heard My Mother Sing, Charlton H. Lyons, Jr., of Shreveport recalls his father's recollection of the tranquil life in Melville:

... one of the things Papa never forgot was that red-letter day in December when the steamboat would arrive from New Orleans carrying on board the great wooden barrel that would be loaded with cast-iron toys for every child in town. Those toys were of every size and description, and all were packed in sawdust ... One toy from that barrel would be each child's whole Christmas. Well--that toy and an apple...
Papa's sense of humor went toward the visual, the kind that lends itself best to live performance. He'd tell me all sorts of stories about his boyhood there in Melville, and most of them were probably true. ... Most of them I thought were hilarious.

Lyons first attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge but completed his Bachelor of Arts at Tulane University in New Orleans. In 1916, he earned a degree from the Tulane University School of Law and was admitted to the Louisiana bar. However, he lacked the funds at the time to establish his own legal practice. On August 28, 1917, Lyons married his college sweetheart and an aspiring actress, the former Marjorie Gladys Hall, who graduated from Newcomb College, the then-female counterpart to Tulane. In the spring of 1917, Maurice Fromkes painted a portrait of Marjorie Hall displayed at the Marjorie Lyons Playhouse (established 1956) at Centenary College in Shreveport. Mrs. Lyons was born on March 27, 1895, in Eagle Point, Wisconsin. The marriage ended with her death on July 11, 1971.

From 1916 to 1917, Lyons was a teacher and an assistant principal at Glenmora High School in Glenmora in south Rapides Parish. From 1917 to 1918, Lyons was briefly the principal of Pollock High School in the community of Pollock in southeastern Grant Parish. He then entered the United States Army as a private near the end of World War I. Marjorie Lyons taught at Pollock High School while her husband was away.

The Lyonses relocated to Winnfield, center of the Long dynasty, where the legendary Huey Pierce Long, Jr., was rising to prominence. There Lyons practiced law for several years. The couple then relocated in 1921 to Shreveport, where Lyons practiced law for an additional nine years. In 1930, however, he entered the oil business through his "C. H. Lyons Petroleum". By the 1950s, Lyons had become so successful in his field that he was named president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. He was also a director of two other trade associations, the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association and the National Association of Manufacturers. He operated a 240-acre (0.97 km²) cattle ranch west of Shreveport near Greenwood in Caddo Parish.

Lyons was appointed by United States Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay to the National Petroleum Council.

Marriage and associations

Charlton and Marjorie Lyons had two sons: Charlton Havard Lyons, Jr. (born December 1921), like his father an oilman but a political Independent, and Hall McCord Lyons (1923–1998) of Shreveport, Lafayette, and later Grand Isle, an oilman and a former Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and the American Independent Party nominee for the U.S. Senate in 1972. One of the Lyons daughters-in-law was Shreveport socialite and philanthropist Susybelle Lyons, later divorced from Charlton, Jr., who is now married to the former Peggy McClure. Susybelle Lyons' father, W. Scott Wilkinson, a Shreveport attorney and businessman, served as a Democrat in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1920–1924.

Lyons was a member of the Masonic lodge, American Legion, Shreveport Country Club, and the Kappa Alpha Order and Phi Delta Phi fraternities. He was a member of the boards of both Tulane and Centenary. He was considered by friend and political rival alike as a man of great optimism and impeccable character. Virginia deGravelles of Lafayette, the Louisiana Republican national committeewoman from 1964 to 1968, called him a "wonderful, compassionate man." Lyons was a vestryman of the Episcopal Church though a trustee of Methodist-affiliated Centenary College.

"Everybody can vote for Charlton Lyons"

Lyons registered to vote as a Democrat in 1915 at the age of twenty-one. In 1952, he headed the "Democrats for Eisenhower" organization and welcomed future U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower during Eisenhower's visit to the newly constructed Shreveport Regional Airport. Lyons officially switched to the Republican Party in 1960, when he supported Richard M. Nixon for the presidency, rather than the Democrat John F. Kennedy. At the time of his party switch, Lyons said, "I am not leaving the Democratic Party -- for it had already deserted me." He called the 1960 Democratic platform "socialism" and proclaimed that Kennedy/Johnson could not be the representative of the party of Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson believed in limited government. As a new member of the party, Lyons was soon named to succeed George W. Reese, Jr., of New Orleans as the Louisiana Republican national committeeman when Reese became the unsuccessful Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate that year against Allen J. Ellender.

Lyons is best known for his gubernatorial campaign waged in the winter of 1964, running as a strong segregationist. The Republican nominee posted billboards which declared that "Everybody Can Vote for Charlton Lyons," for he had to inform Louisiana's Democratic voters, then more than 98 percent of the registrants, that they had a choice in the general election that year -— a phenomenon widely unknown in Louisiana since Reconstruction. The party's 1960 nominee, Francis Grevemberg, also a former Democrat, had finished with only 17 percent of the vote against Jimmie Davis.

Democratic nominee John McKeithen at first warned voters that they were required to vote for him as the party standard-bearer because their participation in a party primary carried with it a loyalty oath to the eventual nominee. Lyons, however, cited Section 671, Title 18 of Louisiana Revised Statutes which states that voters are free to support any candidate of their choice in a general election.

McKeithen noted that he, at forty-five, was a generation younger than the 69-year-old Lyons. McKeithen claimed that the GOP consisted of "a handful of men who are attempting to take over this state government [and] are counting on your [Democratic voters] staying home on March 3." Lyons said that his gubernatorial candidacy was predicated on "preserving for the young people the same opportunities I had to start with nothing ... and build success for themselves ..."

In February 1964, two Alabama Republicans, James D. Martin of Gadsden, who had made a particularly strong U.S. Senate bid in 1962, and state party chairman John Grenier of Birmingham, attended a Lyons fund-raising dinner held in Shreveport. Martin's claim that a Republican governor would provide regular inter-party competition proved premature. Numerous Republicans who won southern governorships after 1966, including Winthrop Rockefeller in Arkansas and Claude R. Kirk, Jr., in Florida lost reelection bids, and none then established GOP majorities of significant duration in their legislatures.

Lyons also received backing from Ronald W. Reagan, former host of CBS's General Electric Theater. At the time, Reagan did not fly and came to Louisiana by train, a trip that required several days. He was accompanied by his wife, Nancy. The stops for Lyons occurred ten months before Reagan delivered his address, "A Time for Choosing", on national television on October 27, 1964, to promote Barry Goldwater's presidential bid against President Lyndon B. Johnson. The speech was credited with catapulting Reagan into the vanguard of national politics. Like Lyons, Reagan was a former Democrat who had switched party allegiance in 1962. Charlton Lyons, Jr., said he cannot recall how his father met Reagan but believes the two had been friends for several years before the 1964 campaign.

Reagan's support of the segregationist Lyons would later be used to attack him, including, famously, by Gore Vidal in his 1968 televised debate with William F. Buckley, Jr.

Outraged at Reagan's visit, McKeithen urged the actor "to return to Hollywood and do something about the standing immorality and communism that flourishes in that city." Lyons described his opponent as the representative of "the same old crowd."

McKeithen predicted that Louisiana Democrats would "repel this second invasion by the carpetbaggers." McKeithen portrayed Lyons as the beneficiary of "special interests" and "a group of millionaires" who would "help the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." Lyons, however, denied that most of his supporters were even wealthy. "A Victory for Lyons Will Electrify the Nation", said one of the candidate's brochures. Two years later, Reagan was elected governor of California and hence became a gubernatorial colleague of McKeithen's.

McKeithen resented having to face a Republican challenger after he survived two Democratic primaries. He called for an end to two Democratic primaries followed by a general election with a Republican opponent. A similar reaction by 1971 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Edwin Edwards evoked the state's switch to a nonpartisan blanket primary, which as of 2016 the state continues to use.

The Louisiana media gave wide coverage to the McKeithen-Lyons battle. Adras LaBorde, managing editor of the Alexandria Daily Town Talk,' took advantage of the state's first heated Democrat-Republican campaign for governor and covered the election widely in his column "The Talk of the Town". Both Shreveport papers, The Times and the now defunct Shreveport Journal, owned by Douglas F. Attaway and edited by the conservative journalist George W. Shannon, covered nearly every aspect of the campaign. Both papers endorsed Lyons and later in the year Goldwater.

Lyons developed a cadre of young followers in the Republican Party. He designated George Despot, another Shreveport oilman, and Certified Public Accountant George A. Burton, Jr., as his gubernatorial campaign co-chairmen, mostly because it was Despot and Burton who pleaded with Lyons to enter the race. Burton, a lifelong Louisiana Republican, described Lyons in glowing terms: "a great American ... a friend of impeccable integrity." Lloyd E. Lenard, later a Republican member of the Caddo Parish Commission (formerly called Police Jury) from 1984 to 1996 and an author, flew around the state with "Papa" Lyons, as he called him, and interviewed Lyons for radio and newspapers. Lyons named James H. Boyce, a businessman from Baton Rouge and a former Democrat who had been a member of the Draft Goldwater Committee, as his gubernatorial campaign treasurer.

37.5 percent

Lyons lost to McKeithen in the March 3, 1964, general election, but his 297,753 ballots (37.5 percent), helped to pave the way for the victory in Louisiana that November of the Goldwater-Miller presidential electors. McKeithen polled 469,589 votes (60.7 percent). The last of the Louisiana States' Rights Party gubernatorial nominees in Louisiana history, Thomas S. Williams from the town of Ethel in East Feliciana Parish, received 6,048 votes, or 1.8 percent.

Lyons polled majorities in five parishes, Caddo, Bossier, Claiborne, Lincoln, and De Soto, all in north Louisiana. He polled more than 47 percent in East Baton Rouge and Webster parishes. In La Salle Parish, which had supported Richard Nixon in 1960 and Taylor W. O'Hearn, another Louisiana Republican pioneer, for the U.S. Senate in 1962, Lyons drew less than 30 percent of the vote, a factor explained by the geographic location of La Salle near McKeithen's native Caldwell Parish.

In victory, McKeithen was magnanimous toward his rival: "My opponent waged a tremendous campaign for a man of his age. I am glad I don't have to run against him again." The Shreveport Journal observed that the Republican vote was "not so much a vote against John McKeithen, who had already taken the district in Democratic balloting, as it was an expression of endearment for a man who is regarded as one of our most outstanding citizens."

Billy Guin, later the last Shreveport municipal public utilities commissioner who had been one of five Republican state legislative candidates from Caddo Parish on the Lyons ticket, described Lyons as "a good man who wanted to change the political complexion of Louisiana. He built the Republican Party in its present form. He was a great campaigner, and there was much grassroots fervor. When he began to make inroads, the sheriffs and other Democratic officeholders proceeded to block his election." Two Republicans were elected to the legislature on the Lyons slate, Morley Hudson and Taylor O'Hearn. Their victories eliminated veteran Democratic Representatives Wellborn Jack and Jasper K. Smith. Two other Caddo legislative candidates who lost were Edd Fielder Calhoun (1931-2012), an insurance agent and civic figure originally from Oklahoma City and Art Sour, who made his livelihood in the oil business. Sour lost again in 1968 but rebounded in 1972 to win a seat in the state House, which he held for twenty years.

Lyons' strength was reflective of that of former Little Rock Mayor Pratt C. Remmel, the 1954 Republican gubernatorial nominee in neighboring Arkansas. Remmel—-a decade before Lyons—-also polled 37 percent of the vote in his hard-fought race against the Democrat Orval Eugene Faubus and won six of the state's seventy-five counties. Remmel paved the way for the election twelve years later of Winthrop Rockefeller. Lyons was the forerunner for David C. Treen, fifteen years later the first modern-day Republican to have been elected governor of Louisiana.

Four months before McKeithen defeated Lyons, the Mississippi Republican pioneer Rubel Phillips waged a similar campaign with comparable results against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Paul B. Johnson, Jr., of Hattiesburg.

Supporting Barry Goldwater

In 1963, Charlton Lyons and the Baton Rouge businessman James H. Boyce, then a nominal Democrat, went with a group of mostly Republican conservatives to urge Goldwater to seek the presidency. Goldwater was at first reluctant to take on the challenge but nevertheless declared his candidacy early in 1964, when the Democrat Lyndon Johnson had been president for less than two months and the heavy favorite for a full term of his own.

Boyce thereafter switched parties and became the campaign treasurer for the Lyons gubernatorial bid. He would serve as state party chairman from 1972 to 1976. In that campaign, McKeithen had accused Lyons of being pre-committed to the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, and he incorrectly predicted that the nominee would be, not Senator Goldwater, but then Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller of New York, considered the liberal, internationalist candidate. McKeithen said that he would keep his options open for the 1964 presidential election. As it turned out, he remained neutral in that race, but the state's two popular Democratic senators, Allen Ellender and Russell B. Long, both supported the Johnson-Humphrey ticket.

No sooner had the gubernatorial race ended than Lyons resumed working for Goldwater's nomination as president. As state party chairman, Lyons headed the state delegation to the national convention held in San Francisco's Cow Palace. At twenty-five, Morton Blackwell of Baton Rouge was the youngest elected delegate to the 1964 convention. Lyons's party vice chairman was Harriet Belchic, a Shreveport civic and political leader reared in Winnfield who was the first woman to have received both bachelor's and master's degrees from LSU in the field of geology. Her husband, Dr. George Belchic was also active in state Republican causes.

Lyons also recruited congressional candidates in 1964: David C. Treen of New Orleans, in a second race against Hale Boggs; William Stewart Walker of Winnfield, in a challenge to Speedy O. Long in the since defunct 8th district; Robert Angers of Lafayette, who opposed Edwin E. Willis of St. Martinville in the 3rd district, and Floyd O. Crawford of Baton Rouge, making a race against James H. Morrison. While Goldwater defeated Johnson in Louisiana and won some parishes by 5-1 margins or better, particularly in the northern tier, none of the congressional candidates fared better than Walker's 46 percent showing against Speedy Long.

Lyons opposes Waggonner for Congress, 1961

Three years before his gubernatorial campaign, Lyons ran in a special election for the Fourth Congressional District seat based in the northwestern quadrant of the state. A vacancy developed with the death of long-term Democratic Representative Thomas Overton Brooks of Shreveport.

In a campaign advertisement, the Republicans proclaimed that "A Vote for Charlton Lyons for Congress Is a Vote Against the New Frontier", the domestic program of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Lyons declared that the "election of a Republican from this district would have a profound impact upon the rest of the nation and upon Democratic congressmen in the South." He vowed if elected not to "trade votes" with colleagues to obtain passage of bills. "I think the trading of votes is one of the reasons this country is in such bad shape today. . . . When a central government becomes all powerful, a dictator inevitably takes over."

Both Lyons and his opponent, Joe Waggonner, ran as segregationists. Waggonner had once been president of the Louisiana Citizens Council. Lyons was considered a trade protectionist. In an advertisement underwritten by his friend George Burton, Lyons opposed the "vast influx of imported products which are flooding the country" and causing unfair competition to American manufacturers.

Lyons made a much stronger showing in the northwest Louisiana district, but the seat remained in Democratic hands. Waggonner, a native and resident of Plain Dealing in Bossier Parish, held the seat until he retired in 1979. He had already announced that he would challenge Brooks for renomination in 1962 because of Brooks' vote in 1961 to enlarge the membership of the House Rules Committee. This permitted Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas to add new liberal representation to the panel which had long been chaired by the Virginia conservative Howard W. Smith.

Lyons claimed that victory by Waggonner would be interpreted as support for Kennedy-Johnson policies. Waggonner claimed that the election of Lyons would mean increased importance being placed on black bloc voting through the establishment of a two-party system. In the special election on December 19, Lyons won his own Caddo Parish with 58.7 percent, but district-wide, the totals were 28,250 votes (45.5 percent) for Lyons and 33,892 (54.5 percent) for Waggonner. Waggonner carried the editorial backing of the Shreveport Journal, then edited by the influential conservative, George W. Shannon. However, Shannon switched in 1964 to endorse Lyons for governor in the unsuccessful race against John McKeithen.

After the Lyons campaign of 1961, no other Republican opposed Waggonner, who was customarily reelected without opposition. In 1988, a Republican, Jim McCrery, a Shreveport native who grew up in Leesville in Vernon Parish, won the district in another special election created by the election of Congressman Buddy Roemer of Bossier Parish, as governor. With relatively little difficulty McCrery remained in Congress until 2009, when he was succeeded by Republican John C. Fleming.

Lyons passes the GOP baton to Treen

Lyons had stepped down as party chairman in 1968 after working for the second nomination of Richard Nixon at the party convention in Miami Beach, Florida. He joined with the Mississippi state chairman Clarke Reed, the Alabama state chairman Alfred Goldthwaite, the South Carolina chairman Harry S. Dent, Sr., and Howard Callaway, the unsuccessful 1966 gubernatorial nominee in Georgia and Nixon's overall "southern coordinator," to hold the line for Nixon against weak challenges waged by Governors Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan. Lyons was succeeded as state chairman by his friend and fellow oilman Charles deGravelles, Jr., of Lafayette. Charles' wife, Virginia Gravelles, had been the national committeewoman from 1964 to 1968.

In 1971, Lyons was named finance chairman for the 1972 Republican gubernatorial candidate David Treen of suburban New Orleans even though Lyons's younger son, Hall Lyons, was running for governor on the American Independent Party ticket, an organization founded in 1968 by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace. Hall Lyons withdrew from the race and endorsed Treen, who lost the general election to Democrat Edwin Edwards. Unlike his son, Charlton Lyons had opposed Wallace, who had carried Louisiana's then ten electoral votes in 1968. Charlton Lyons supported the Nixon-Agnew elector slate, which fared poorly in the state. Lyons had also held most in the Louisiana delegation for Nixon at the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, despite Lyons's personal friendship with Ronald Reagan, who launched a brief presidential run on the Monday of the national convention.

The death of Lyons

Lyons died some eight months after David Treen had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the reconfigured Third Congressional District, which included parts of suburban New Orleans. Thus Lyons lived just long enough to witness the first glimpse of his dream of a two-party system for traditionally Democratic Louisiana.

The Lyonses are interred in the family plot at Forest Park East Cemetery off St. Vincent Avenue in Shreveport. Lyons' only sister, Sally, was married to Thomas M. "Tom" Logan, who was a partner with Lyons in the petroleum business. The Logans are also buried at Forest Park but across the street from the Lyons-Hall plot.

Honors and legacy