Bryant Bailey

Background

Bailey was born and briefly educated in Winn Parish to immigrants from Georgia.

Career

In October 1890, he moved from his family property to the parish seat of Winnfield to become the manager of a branch store of the local Farmers Union Cooperative Association. By 1894, he was owner of the Bailey Hotel in Winnfield. In 1902, Bailey drilled the first oil well in Winn Parish, a year after the first such structure had been undertaken in the state in 1901 near Jennings in Jeff Davis Parish in southwestern Louisiana.

Prior to 1890, like most Louisiana voters at that time, Bailey was a Democrat.

Thereafter, he joined the, which claimed to represent the "common man" against the entrenched "interests." Soon Bailey emerged as a regional leader of the Populists. The party"s Louisiana branch was organized on October 2, 1891, at a convention of delegates from seventeen parishes held in Alexandria, the seat of Rapides Parish in central Louisiana.

In addition to Bailey, another leading Populist at the founding convention was Hardy L. Brian, a Grant Parish native then residing in Winnfield. In both 1894 and 1896, when the Populists endorsed the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, for United States. President, Bailey was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States House of Representatives on the Populist ticket.

In 1898, Bailey was the only Populist delegate to the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention held that year in Baton Rouge.

He refused to sign the final document, which after ratification remained in effect until 1921. This Constitution contained the grandfather clause allowing whites whose fathers or grandfathers were registered to vote as of January 1, 1867, to be exempt from the literacy test otherwise given to potential African American voters. The grandfather clause, which spread to other states including Oklahoma, was subsequently struck down in 1915 in the case Guinn v.

United States as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

By 1904, the had disbanded. In 1908, Bailey was elected to a single term as a Democrat to the office of Winn Parish sheriff.

In 1913, after his tenure as sheriff, Bailey began a 20-year stint as vice president and then president of the Bank of Winnfield. Bailey also worked to establish the Northwest Louisiana Game and Fish Preserve.

He obtained state legislative funds to build a dam on Saline Lake, a part of Saline Bayou near the boundary of Winn and Natchitoches parishes.

Bailey worked for improved roads and was partly instrumental in securing the wide city streets of Winnfield. He was influential in removing livestock from municipal streets. Mistress Bailey died twenty-two days after her husband"s death.

There is no indication of any children.

Achievements

• The national Populists offered their first presidential nominee in 1892, General James B. Weaver of Iowa, who won four states, mostly in the American W.

Politics

From 1893 to 1907, Bailey edited his Winnfield Comrade newspaper in Winnfield, which became the ancestral home of the Democratic Long political faction. Longism was considered an outgrowth of the early Populist movement. Indeed some viewed Huey Pierce Long, Junior., as a "radical populist.".

Membership

Bailey was a member of the Methodist Church and the Masonic lodge.