LeRoy Smallenberger

Political life

Little is known of Smallenberger's early years. He was a native of Peoria, Illinois, a son of LeRoy Charles and Doris Schnert Smallenberger. According to the website The Political Graveyard, Smallenberger came to Shreveport prior to 1948. In 1956, he was practicing law in his Smallenberger, Eatman & Morgan firm. He was an alternate delegate to both the 1948 Republican National Convention, held in Philadelphia, and the 1952 conclave, which met in Chicago.

Prior to the state chairmanship, Smallenberger, a Republican since 1938, had been GOP chairman in Louisiana's 4th congressional district, then represented by the Democrat Overton Brooks. Beginning in 1988, the district switched to Republican representation. In 1959, Smallenberger and the Louisiana national committeeman, George W. Reese, Jr., of New Orleans, the party's 1960 nominee for the United States Senate against Allen J. Ellender, became involved in an intraparty feud with Tom Stagg, a Shreveport Republican lawyer and subsequent judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, and Charles T. Beaird, the later publisher of the defunct Shreveport Journal. Stagg objected when Reese endorsed, with Smallenberger in agreement, a slate of candidates for party position on both the state and parish committees. Stagg described Reese as having attempted to assemble a group of "yes-men" and had hence "earned the enmity of a large number of fair-minded Republicans". Reese, however, defended his endorsements, most of whom won their primary races, on the premise that he as a statewide party leader was obligated to recommend suitable candidates to rank-and-file voters. At the time, Reese appointed Smallenberger as the "assistant national committeeman for North Louisiana".

Smallenger was an alternate delegate to the 1960 Republican National Convention and supported the party nominee, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, in the 1960 presidential election against U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy. Smallenberger said that the original Republican platform was conservative but it was moved to the left when Nixon offered concessions to Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York in a bid for support on the East Coast, areas which Nixon still lost in the 1960 general election.

William M. Rainach, a state senator from Claiborne Parish who was a delegate to the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, agreed with Smallenberger. In Rainach's words, "the Republican platform is not quite as bad" as that offered by the Kennedy/Johnson forces. Rainach said that the influence of Rockefeller had reduced the practical usefulness of the Republican Party to southern conservatives. Rainach added that if unpledged electors had gained sufficient support across the South, as they did in Mississippi and Alabama, he would have urged negotiations among the electors themselves, rather than having the U.S. House of Representatives choose the president with one vote per state in event of a deadlock in the electoral college. Were the House to have chosen a president in 1961, Kennedy would have been an automatic winner because the majority of state delegations were then in Democrat hands, Rainach said.

Though the Louisiana Republican Party coalesced behind Nixon in 1960 and 1968, it could not deliver the state to him until the 1972 campaign, when Nixon also won forty-eight other states.

Smallenberger was later appointed in the Nixon administration as a federal bankruptcy judge for the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.