Frank Burton Ellis

Early years

Ellis was born in Covington, the seat of St. Tammany Parish in suburban New Orleans, to Harvey E. Ellis (born 1875), a lawyer and the founder of the St. Tammany Banking Company, and the former Margaret Burton Whiteside (born 1884), a niece of U.S. Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia who was also secretary of the interior under U.S. President Grover Cleveland. Burton was descended on both sides from a line of slaveholders and Confederate military men and civic and government leaders. He was well-connected politically, among other relations being a second cousin of Robert Stephen Ellis, Jr. (born 1899), a Louisiana state circuit court judge who was a son-in-law of U.S. Representative Bolivar E. Kemp and a brother-in-law of Louisiana Attorney General Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Jr. Ellis attended Gulf Coast Military Academy in Gulfport, Mississippi. In 1929, Ellis received his L.L.B. degree from the Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge.

Louisiana politics

He engaged in the private practice of law until 1961 while also dabbling in politics. He was a special assistant attorney general in Louisiana and, as a state senator from 1940 to 1944 from St. Tammany Parish, he was the Senate president pro tempore during the term of the anti-Long Governor Sam Houston Jones of Lake Charles.

Ellis did not seek reelection to the state Senate in 1944 but ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor, when Earl Kemp Long was also a candidate in the race for the second position. Ellis ran on the gubernatorial slate headed by Sam Caldwell, the mayor of Shreveport. The winner of the lieutenant governor's position was J. Emile Verret of Iberia Parish, elected with the winning gubernatorial candidate Jimmie Davis. Ellis was later politically close to Earl Long as well as Long's nephew, U.S. Senator Russell B. Long, and to Long's powerful aide, municipal Judge Edmund Reggie of Crowley in Acadia Parish, later the father-in-law of U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

In 1948, 1952, and 1956, Ellis was a delegate to each Democratic National Convention. In 1948, he, like Governor Long, supported President Harry S Truman, rather than the official Louisiana state Democratic choice, then Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, later a U.S. senator. In 1960, Ellis, along with Reggie, were electors for Kennedy and Johnson, the easy winner of Louisiana's then ten electoral votes.

U.S. Senate race, 1954

In 1954, Ellis ran against the Huey Long protégé and entrenched incumbent Allen J. Ellender of Houma in Terrebonne Parish for the Senate even though Ellender was close to Russell Long. Ellis was handily defeated in the Democratic primary. In his campaign, Ellis vowed if elected to conduct the office without regard to "race or creed" and labeled himself a champion of farmers and the "working man." Speaking for the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, he vowed to "eliminate by rational methods radical and left-wing elements in and out of government," a view consistent with the outlook of conservatives in the McCarthy era. Ellis challenged Ellender's seniority, having claimed that longevity "means nothing without leadership and progressive thinking." Ellender led the race with 268,054 (59.1 percent) to 162,775 (35.9 percent) for Ellis, with the remaining 4 percent for minor candidates. A third candidate, W. Gilbert Fauk, a state representative, also ran in the Senate primary. Ellender then retained his seat without Republican opposition.

Civil defense director

In 1956, Ellis worked to elect Adlai E. Stevenson, II, as U.S. President. He similarly labored for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and was Kennedy's chief presidential elector that year in Louisiana. Ellis used the slogan "Bring prosperity to the '60s" in his support for Kennedy and running-mate Lyndon B. Johnson. In that same election, Ellis' former rival, Allen Ellender, faced a rare Republican challenge in George W. Reese, Jr., a New Orleans lawyer and state party official.

In 1961, President Kennedy named Ellis to direct the new civil defense office. He was also a member of the National Security Council. He took on his assignment with zeal: "Heretofore, there has been a lack of federal leadership and example — the very qualities we must now exhibit if we are to convince a skeptical Congress and a disinterested public." Ellis declared the civil defense office "completely inadequate," and he demanded a larger budget and cabinet-rank status. In April 1961, without informing Kennedy, he proposed $300 million for his department, instead of the $104 million approved in the last Dwight D. Eisenhower budget. He claimed that greater funding was essential to construct more bomb shelters, improve existing shelters, stockpile medicines, and expand the educational programs of the agency. Turned down by the administration, Ellis ruffled feathers further with his decision to proceed with his budget plans. He attempted to insert a clause into FHA loan contracts to require bomb shelters. The Presbyterian Ellis even vowed to go to Rome to plead with Pope Paul VI to order such shelters in the basement of every Catholic church. Ellis's civil defense office was renamed the Office of Emergency Planning as of July 20, 1961.

Federal judgeship

With Ellis in seeming runaway bureaucratic mode, Kennedy removed him from the agency by appointing him in 1962 to the federal bench in New Orleans to the seat being vacated by J. Skelly Wright, a Truman appointee who had been in the forefront of civil rights rulings and was given a promotion to the circuit court in Washington, D.C. In his three-year tenure on the bench, Judge Ellis frequently ruled in favor of segregationists. On December 5, 1962, his decision in Guillory v. Administrators of Tulane University of Louisiana sided squarely with Tulane in regard to compulsory desegregation. Unlike Wright, who had not wavered in pursuing desegregation, Ellis "approached civil rights litigation with a strong concern for local white opinion and a determination to avoid drastic actions that would destabilize established educational educations. Ellis' early years on the bench were marked by his evident desire to slow down and scale back Skelly Wright's ambitious agenda for the integration of New Orleans public schools, and he approached the Tulane case in a similar spirit of judicial retrenchment." At the time, Tulane and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the city's leading newspaper, had both resisted integration.

Marriages and death

Ellis was twice married. By his first union in 1934 to the former Alice Grima (1905–1993), he had three children. Alice was the daughter of George Grima, a commission merchant, whose four older brothers had fought for the Confederacy. Ellis divorced Alice, and in 1965, having retired early from the bench, he married 34-year-old Marjorie L. Wheatley of New Orleans. The marriage lasted until his death four years later in Tangipahoa Parish at the age of sixty-two. He is interred in the parish seat of Amite.