David W. Pipes, Jr.

David Washington Pipes, Jr. (August 6, 1886 – September 6, 1968) was a Houma, Louisiana (Terrebonne Parish) lawyer and sugar cane planter and previously lifelong Democrat who defected to the Republican Party in 1940 to oppose the nomination of Henry A. Wallace for the vice presidency and to wage his own campaign for an open seat in the United States House of Representatives from the Lafayette-based 3rd congressional district.

Pipes was a vice president of the trade association known as the American Sugar Cane League.

Early years and education

Pipes's great great-grandfather was John Pipes, one of the first settlers of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. David Pipes, Jr., was born in New Orleans to David Washington Pipes, Sr., and the former Anna Fort of West Feliciana Parish. The senior Pipes' first wife died, and in 1885, he married the then 21-year-old Anna, who was born in 1863, the year that the senior Pipes, as a teenager was fighting for the Confederate States of America at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Pipes, Sr., was a state senator from East Feliciana Parish from 1892 to 1896 and 1916 to 1920. Between the Senate terms, he was a member of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1898.

The junior Pipes was educated in public and private schools in Clinton in East Feliciana Parish, and in Port Gibson, in Claiborne County, Mississippi, across the Mississippi River from Louisiana. He attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, the ninth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Robert E. Lee was the W&U president from 1865 to 1870. Pipes obtained his bachelor of art's degree in 1906. Thereafter, he remained at W&U to study law, but he transferred to Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received the LL.B. degree in 1910. He was admitted to the bar in both Virginia and Louisiana and practiced in New Orleans from 1910 to 1913.

Louisiana sugar planter

Leaving his legal practice, Pipes in 1913 accepted an associate manager's position at Southdown plantation, the estate of the late Henry Chotard Minor, located west of Houma. Pipes became a large-scale sugar planter as well as a refinery operator. He was also secretary of the family-owned Chambers Advertising Agency in New Orleans. Through the American Sugar Cane League, he sought to improve the techniques of both growing cane sugar and refinery methods to put the final product on the kitchen table. He was among the first to recognize mosaic disease, which crippled the sugar industry. A United States Department of Agriculture experimental station was established at Southdown.

On February 11, 1910, Pipes married the former Mary Louise Minor (1886-1961) at the Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral in New Orleans. She was the daughter of Henry Minor, one of the owners of Southdown as well as Pipes' predecessor as the plantation manager, and the former Anna Louise Butler. Mary Louise was a graduate of Newcomb College, then the women's division of Tulane. The couple had six children, including David Washington Pipes, III, who was born in 1912 and died the next year. Their other offspring were Anna Fort Pipes (1914-1985), Henry Minor Pipes (1916-1984), John Butler Pipes (1919-1996), Katharine Minor Pipes (1922-1982), Mary Minor Pipes (1925-1982), and Margaret Gustine Pipes (1927-1987).

Pipes had half-siblings too from his father's first marriage, one of whom operated family cotton interests in Morehouse Parish north of Monroe. A half-nephew also named "David Pipes" (1910-1982) ran the Morehouse operations.

Pipes defects to the GOP

Despite his family heritage, Pipes left the Democratic Party to express outrage over the selection of Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace of Iowa as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Pipes' Confederate father, who had fought at the battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, as well as Gettysburg, had been a diehard post-Civil War Democrat, having served in the state senate.

In 1940, however, many sugar growers in south Louisiana opposed the quotas that Secretary Wallace had established. Many of the growers had also supported the Republican presidential nominee Warren G. Harding of Ohio in his successful national campaign in 1920. Harding polled just over 30 percent of the popular vote in Louisiana and had carried fourteen sugar-growing parishes, some by large majorities.^[1]

Pipes announced that he would run as a Republican against Democratic State Representative James R. Domengeaux of Lafayette for a seat in the U.S. House. Pipes had scant chance of victory, but he was making a political statement for the long-term future of Louisiana politics.

Pipes became a Republican about the time that Charles deGravelles and his wife, the former Virginia Wheadon, had become the first whites in decades to register with the GOP in Lafayette Parish. The deGravelleses would later serve as party chairman and national committeewoman, respectively.

Louisiana voters, though some may have objected to a third-term for any presidential candidate or to the nomination of Wallace, still gave the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket 319,751 votes (85.9 percent) of the ballots cast. The Republican ticket of Wendell Willkie of New York and Charles McNary of Oregon lagged at 52,446 ballots (14.1 percent). The strongest Willkie showing in the state was the 34.5 percent and the 29.4 percent that he managed in the sugar parishes of Vermilion and Iberia, respectively.

Pipes polled 13,933 votes (34 percent) in the Third District, more than double Willkie's percent statewide. Democrat Domengeaux led with 27,081 (66 percent). Pipes won 42.5 percent in Iberia, 40.2 percent in Vermilion, 37.4 percent in Assumption Parish, and 31.8 percent in his adopted Terrebonne Parish. Domengeaux served in the U.S. House until 1948, when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. Pipes' performance marked the strongest Republican showing in a Louisiana congressional race since a 1929 special election in the same district. Through 1940, only Democrats had represented Louisiana in Congress since the era of Reconstruction, although a Progressive Party candidate, W. P. Martin of Thibodaux in Lafourche Parish was elected in 1914 in the same Third District. Martin, a former supporter of President Woodrow Wilson, broke with the Democrats over sugar policies but later rejoined the majority Democrats.

By 1995, some fifty-five years after Pipes made his rudimentary congressional race, Republicans had made huge strides in Louisiana. They held a clear majority of the U.S. House seats from Louisiana but had then yet to elect a single U.S. senator. That would change with the election of 2004. Sugar growers, however, were independents who swung between the parties. While many in time voted Republican for president, other growers also supported such Democrats as former Senator John B. Breaux of Crowley in Acadia Parish and sitting Senator Mary Landrieu of New Orleans.

Pipes served on the vestry of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Houma. He died in New Orleans at the age of eighty-two. He and Mrs. Pipes are buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Houma.

References

"David Washington Pipes", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 2 (1988), p. 652

Shreveport Times, November 3, 5, 1940

Membership list of the Louisiana State Senate, 1880-2004, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Secretary of State)

http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi

http://www.pipesfamily.com/winds0001.htm

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000406

http://www2.wlu.edu/web/page/normal/174.html