John M. Parker Papers

Collection 44

Parker, John M. (1863–1939). Papers, 1920–1932

16 feet, 8 inches

Parker, John Milliken, planter, businessman, politician, governor. Born, Bethel Church, Miss., March 16, 1863; oldest son of John Milliken Parker and Roberta Bunchner. Parker and Bunchner families then having extensive plantation properties in Mississippi. The senior Parker removed to New Orleans, 1871, where he prospered as a cotton factor. Suffering from poor health as youth, subject attended private schools including Chamberlain Hunt Academy at Port Gibson, Miss.; Belle View Academy in Virginia; and Eastman's Business School in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. At about seventeen Parker worked briefly on a family plantation near Port Gibson; joined his father's cotton business; and in 1884 formed Parker-Hayes, Co., a wholesale grocery business. In the late 1890s and early 1900s subject was described as one of the wealthiest businessmen and planters in the South, and was also a prominent spokesman for various commercial and agricultural interests, having served in the 1890s as the youngest president in the history of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange and the New Orleans Board of Trade; later he was an organizer and first president of the Southern Commercial Congress, 1908-1911. He promoted agricultural diversification and federalization of flood control. As his father before him Parker was prominent among New Orleans business leaders who opposed the Democratic party organization of professional politicians, commonly identified as the city machine. He was secretary of the Young Men's Democratic Association in 1888; supporter of Gov. Francis T. Nicholls (q.v.) and active in the Anti-Lottery League and the Citizens' League in 1892 and 1896, respectively. After 1904 he opposed the New Orleans Choctaw Club, the Democratic party organization whose alleged power and corruption became the principal issues in the state campaigns from 1908 to 1920. Parker emerged to prominence statewide as an advocate of civil-service expansion, governmental consolidation, and electoral reform. In 1910 he helped persuade Luther E. Hall (q.v.) to run for governor as the candidate of the Good Government League, which Parker had founded. Elected governor, Hall disappointed Parker despite enactment of a commission form of government for New Orleans, one of the reformers' goals. In 1912, Mayor Martin Behrman (q.v.) and his machine ticket was victorious; removal of Behrman, who had served as mayor since 1904, became the leading issue in state politics as Parker ran for governor as the Progressive party candidate in 1916 and successful Democratic primary candidate in 1920. Parker joined the national Progressive party formed by former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 when the third party challenged Republican President William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Parker had been frequent host and hunting companion of Roosevelt in Louisiana; and Roosevelt's support for federalization of flood control and the sugar tariff appealed to Parker and South Louisiana planter and sugar interests. In 1912 Parker was the leading Southern Progressive responsible for the exclusion of blacks from Southern Progressive party organizations; in 1916 he received 38% of the vote against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ruffin G. Pleasant(q.v.) whose allies claimed that the Progressives challenged white supremacy. Repudiated by its leader, the national Progressive party in 1916 nonetheless re-nominated Roosevelt for president and Parker for vice-president, in which position he effectively campaigned for the re-election of Wilson. He served under Herbert Hoover as the Louisiana Food Administrator during World War 1; in 1918 rejoined the Democratic party to commence his triumphant quest for the governorship. During the period 1912 to 1920 Parker espoused causes associated with progressivism, including women's suffrage, abolition of child labor, income and inheritance taxes, and conservation. Candidate for governor, he advocated increased support for public education and eleemosynary institutions, expansion of Louisiana State University, and, with the support of Huey Pierce Long (q.v.), increased state regulation of utilities, notably oil and gas pipelines controlled by Standard Oil of New Jersey. His priorities as governor were the elimination of the New Orleans machine, structural reforms and modernization of state services to be achieved partly through the adoption of a new state constitution. While the Parker administration was controversial, the period 1920 to 1924 witnessed a reordering of the traditionally dualistic framework of New Orleans machine-antimachine conflict, to one in which conservative, liberal, populistic, and progressive forces would be identified with Long-anti-Long factionalism. Parker established an agenda of reform, which Long, in opposition, refashioned in a more popular and, from Parker's viewpoint, radical and irresponsible form. Long and machine leaders, formerly Parker's supporters, later attacked various aspects of his reform program. Parker assisted in defeating Behrman in 1920, but the mayor returned to office in 1925; he failed to deliver cheap gas to New Orleans, as promised; he vigorously and arguably successfully fought the Ku Klux Klan movement at the growing support for his critics. The lengthy and cumbersome Constitution of 1921 did incorporate structures for modernization of state services and provisions for additional revenues. Reaching "gentlemen's agreements" with industry leaders, Parker introduced or raised severance taxes on natural resources and increased the regulatory powers of the Public Service Commission. His methods of negotiation, limits imposed on taxes, and dispersal of revenues resulted in charges, forcefully articulated by Long, that the governor was a tool of corporate interests. Parker's admirers have claimed that he was principally responsible for the mapping of a modem highway system and establishment of Louisiana State University as a major institution. During his administration appropriations for state institutions increased from $12.3 million to $28.1 million with significant improvement in the treatment of the insane as many were transferred from state prisons to charity hospital facilities. After 1924, Parker devoted himself to his experimental farm at Bayou Sara near St.Francisville; directed flood relief in Louisiana in 1927; became a leader of the anti-Long Constitutional League, 1930-1932. Nominally Presbyterian, Parker was a member of the Boston and Pickwick clubs of New Orleans, the Audubon Club, and the Masonic fraternity. He married Cecille Airey, daughter of a New Orleans cotton broker in 1888. Children: Saidee, Virginia, John Milliken, and Thomas Airey. Died, Pass Christian, Miss., May 20, 1939; interred Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans.

[Narrative taken from "A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography"]

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