Clarke Reed

Clarke Thomas Reed (born 1928) is a businessman and investor from Greenville, Mississippi, who was from 1966 to 1976 the state chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party. Reed was instrumental in the nomination of U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., at the 1976 Republican National Convention held in Kansas City, Missouri.

Background

Reed was reared in Caruthersville in Pemiscot County in the Bootheel of southeastern Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri at Columbia. Reed's father established a soybean-processing plant in Greenville, and Reed moved there in 1950 to join the family business. Reed and Company, formed in 1953, manufactured and sold grain bins of corrugated-steel. Years later, the Reed-Joseph Company was formed with an unusual mission: to make noise to keep birds away from places where they are a nuisance, such as airports, retention ponds, farmland, landfills, and golf courses.^[1][2]

Despite his Missouri roots, the scholars Jack Bass and Walter DeVries reported in a 1974 interview that Reed is a native of Mississippi. Perhaps they typed "Mississippi," nstead of "Missouri" since both states begin with "Miss", and they were interviewing in Mississippi.^[3]

A member of the First Presbyterian Church of Greenville, Reed has also served as the treasurer of the Los Angeles-based Presbyterian Forum.^[4] In his early years, Reed once said that the church was about his only activity outside of school or work.^[5]

Political life

Overview

A former Democrat, Reed had already cast his first Republican vote at the age of twenty-four in Greenville for Dwight D. Eisenhower for U.S. President. That year, Mississippi sent an all-black delegation to the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago.^[6]

Reed subsequently became the Washington County Republican chairman, the state finance chairman in 1965, and state chairman in 1966 when Wirt Yerger, an insurance agent from Jackson, stepped down after ten years as the founding party chairman. In a 1974 interview, Reed said that the South, because of rural, economic, and religious experience was well-suited to the ideas of the Republican Party. He witnessed the movement of the American South into a critical arm of the national GOP. He considered the defection in 1964 of U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as a particular catalyst to the development of the two-party system in the region. He also found that divisions within the Republican Party in the South were often more of personality than philosophical differences.^[3]

Losses of 1966 and 1967

Upon becoming chairman, Reed faced the challenge of the 1966 mid-term elections, which resulted in the loss of the lone seat in the United States House of Representatives held by a Mississippi Republican. Freshman Representative Prentiss Walker of Mize from Mississippi's 4th congressional district vacated the post to run unsuccessfully against Democratic U.S. Senator James O. Eastland. Walker's House seat was held thereafter for decades by the Democrat Gillespie V. "Sonny" Montgomery of Meridian, who in 1966 defeated the Republican State Representative Lewis McAllister, also of Meridian. Thereafter, Montgomery rarely had significant opposition and carried bipartisan backing. After 1966, the Republicans did not win an election in Mississippi for another U.S. House seat for six years in 1972 and for the U.S. Senate for twelve years in 1978.^[7]

The 1966 double loss continued on November 7, 1967, when Rubel Phillips ran for governor for a second consecutive time and was crushed by U.S. Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi's 3rd congressional district. Sensing that he could not run to the right of Williams, who had lost House seniority in 1965 for having supported Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election, 1964, Phillips shed his former segregationist stance and adopted a more moderate position similar to that employed, also unsuccessfully, by Williams's Democratic runoff rival, state Treasurer and later Governor William F. Winter.^[7]

The Mississippi GOP in 1967 also lost its three seats in the legislature with the defeats of State Representatives Lewis McAllister of Meridian, and later Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Charles K. Pringle of Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as well as State Senator Seelig Wise from Coahoma County, which includes Clarksdale.^[7]

1968: Success and failure

Reed was particularly helpful to the second nomination of Richard M. Nixon at the somewhat divided first convention held in Miami Beach, Florida, where Nelson A. Rockefeller, the governor of New York, and Ronald W. Reagan, the freshman governor of California, were challenging Nixon but with little prospect of success. The southern support for Nixon held at the convention, with Reed taking a major role, along with Senator Thurmond, Drake Edens and Harry S. Dent, Sr., of South Carolina, Charlton Lyons of Louisiana, Alfred Goldthwaite of Alabama, and Howard Callaway, the defeated 1966 Georgia gubernatorial nominee and Nixon's overall "southern coordinator". Rewarded for his work for Nixon's nomination, Reed was invited to Nixon's first state dinner; other attendees reportedly asked, "Who is this guy, never elected to anything?"^[6]

Nixon even visited Mississippi in 1969, the first sitting president to do so since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. The expression "clear it with Clarke" in reference to southern issues was heard briefly, a play on Franklin D. Roosevelt having told aides to "clear it with Sidney," referring to Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union regarding labor issues.^[6]

Yet under Reed, the Mississippi GOP fared poorly in the U.S. presidential election, 1968. Nixon finished a weak third in the state, which cast its electoral votes for George Wallace of neighboring Alabama, the nominee of his own American Independent Party, which carried the backing of millions of segregationists, both regionally and nationally. Mississippi in 1968 was in fact Nixon's worst performing state.^[8]

1970 and 1972

With devastating losses at the state level in 1966, 1967, and 1968, the Mississippi GOP did not field a candidate in 1970 against Senator John Stennis or for either governor or lieutenant governor in 1971, and the African American Charles Evers, running as an Independent was the principal challenger to the Democratic nominee Bill Waller.^[9]

In 1972, Reed as chairman struggled with the candidacy of Gil Carmichael, then an automobile dealer from Meridian who sought to unseat Senator Eastland, who was in the race for his final term in office.^[10] President Nixon, whom Reed supported in the three national campaigns Nixon waged, refused to endorse Carmichael because of his personal ties to Eastland and instead sent Vice President Spiro Agnew to the capital city of Jackson to speak at a rally for two Republican candidates for the U.S. House, both of whom won their races, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, both also later U.S. Senators. Carmichael was forced to remain at party headquarters while Agnew addressed the partisans just a block away. Mississippi voted for Nixon in 1972 in a general election that went virtually uncontested in the state.^[11] Reed tried to get the White House to support Carmichael but to no avail.^[5]

Carmichael ran again in 1975, this time for governor, but lost to the Democrat Cliff Finch, known for his old-school oratory and support from former Wallace partisans.^[12]

1976 Republican Convention

At the 1976 Republican Convention, Reed had declined to state a preference for the nomination of either President Ford or his intraparty challenger, former Governor Ronald Reagan of California, considered the more conservative choice. Gil Carmichael, Thad Cochran, and Jackson City Commissioner Doug Shanks were Ford partisans, but state senator and Reed's successor as state chairman, Charles W. Pickering of Laurel^[13] and William D. "Billy" Mounger, an oilman from Jackson and the state party finance chairman, were strongly pro-Reagan. Many expected Reed to back Reagan. However, when Reagan proposed Moderate Republican U.S. Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his choice for vice president, Reed used the occasion to announce his backing of Ford. Because Mississippi at the time employed the unit rule, all thirty delegates would be required to support either Ford or Reagan, whoever had at least sixteen votes, or a majority within the delegation. Reed in effect was in likely control of thirty convention delegates. He, therefore, garnered much media attention for his potential role as "kingmaker".^[14]

Even his unusual jacket became the subject of media focus. A gift from his wife, Judy, Reed wore the jacket to both the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, and to the 2004 conclave in New York City,^[14] where his daughter, Julia Reed (born in Greenville in 1960), an author and magazine journalist then resided, but later moved to New Orleans.^[15] Journalist Sid Salter described the jacket as "the oldest, tackiest sport coat seen within the confines of Madison Square Garden that stifling summer." Salter also described the coat as a "rather garish Black Watch plaid affair with gold elephants screened on it." The 2004 convention was the eleventh time that Reed had been a delegate to his national party conclave.^[14]

Reed was widely identified with the Southern Strategy or the conversion of the Solid South from Democrat to Republican, particularly for Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988, but in 2008, the Republicans lost three critical southern states. Reed said, "The basic old conservative principles haven't changed. We got distracted by Washington, we got distracted from having good county organizations," in explaining the defeat of U.S. Senator John S. McCain of Arizona by Democrat Barack H. Obama.^[16]

Reed often attributed his name identification, particularly within the state, to his Democratic journalist friend from Greenville, Hodding Carter, III, who as a young liberal editor of the Delta Democrat Times newspaper, carried extensive news about the emerging Republican Party in Mississippi. Later a widely recognized member of the Jimmy Carter national administration, Hodding Carter said that he liked Reed personally and was interested in all kinds of political stories, including the Civil rights movement, for his small-city paper, which won numerous reporting awards.^[6]

Later years

After the tumultuous convention, which led to a rather narrow Ford nomination but then a close defeat in the fall, both nationally and in Mississippi, Reed stepped down as chairman but remained on the Republican National Committee through his new role as the Mississippi national committeeman.^[2] Wirt Yerger had slowly built the state party from scratch and encountered all manner of obstacles. He left Reed with a skeletal base with which to develop the party. However, during Reed's tenure, most voters continued to consider themselves "Mississippi Democrats" even if they were increasingly disillusioned with the party's dominant national wing.^[17]

In June 2010, Reed was seriously injured with a broken hip and crushed pelvis in a two-vehicle accident in Greenville. He required surgeries and recovered. An 68-year-old Oklahoma man, Leonard Crow, was killed in the accident and a passenger in his vehicle was injured.^[14][18]

Reed remains a major regular contributor to the Mississippi Republican Party and various party candidates for office.^[19]

In 2013, Reed spoke out against the construction of a $3.8 billion lignite coal plant in Kemper County near Meridian that will be financed by customers in 23 counties in southeastern Mississippi served by the Mississippi Power Company. The state legislature passed two bills to permit the company to issue $1 billion in bonds and to establish the electric rate structure on a phased-in plan over seven years. Reed, who favored a less expensive natural gas-fueled plant, described the project as "a horrible thing. And I think it's a political issue that could be used against [Republicans] for years.... [It makes] Republicans [look like they] are for the millionaires and don't give a darn about the state. It's not true. But we're in charge, and it's what we look like." ^[20]

Reed recalled the difficulty in constructing the Republican Party in Mississippi: "We started the party.... in the 1960s, when Republicans comprised about 5 percent of the population. Now, of course, we're the majority. I knew we'd get there. I didn't know it would take so long: It took fifty years."^[20]

References