Clarke recalled that unlike John D. Rockefeller , I , Benedum encouraged independent oil drillers . Clarke went to Pittsburgh for the occasion of Benedum 's 80th birthday dinner held on July 16 , 1949 . He recalled : There were governors , senators , men of industry , and I 've never heard from any group of men in my whole life the amount of nice things that these people had to say about Mr. Benedum during that birthday dinner . ... Mr. Benedum has been known around Pittsburgh and around the industry as a maker of millionaires . He has n't tried to keep it all to himself - he 's taken other people in with him . All of his associates that have been with him have all turned out to be millionaires or almost millionaires and some of them have made several millions of dollars by sticking to him and working with him . I think that 's extremely commendable , because I 've known in my life a number of great men who have been moneymakers , but a great portion of them have always wanted to get all of the money for themselves . They did n't want anybody else to share it with them . So I think it 's extremely commendable that Mr. Benedum has never been a man who wanted to make all the money . ... Clarke recalled that Benedum had a " sentimental attachment to Caddo Parish . He has spent a lot of money around this area ... just because he wanted very badly to get something more ... from where he made his first big strike . " In addition to his oil holdings , Clarke was the federal postmaster in Shreveport from 1926 to 1930 during the administrations of U.S. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover . He was an alternate delegate to the 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia , which nominated Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Governor Earl Warren of California to challenge , respectively , President Harry Truman and U.S. Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky for vice president . Benedum encouraged his fellow Republican Clarke to run in the special election for the two-year seat in the U.S. Senate created by the death of the Democrat John H. Overton . Clarke was the first Republican Senate candidate since Reconstruction , at which time senators were chosen by state legislatures . He could not overcome Louisiana 's strong Democratic hegemony and the failure of the Dewey-Warren ticket to defeat Truman-Barkley or of the Republicans to retain their two-year majority in the U. S. Senate . Clarke was hence handily defeated by Russell Long , who just short of his thirtieth birthday was making the first of his seven successful Senate races , the first having been for the two-year term . Long had won the Democratic nomination over subsequent Governor Robert F. Kennon of Minden in Webster Parish . In the general election , Long polled 306,337 votes ( 75 percent ) to Clarke 's 102,339 ( 25 percent ) . Clarke outpolled Dewey in Louisiana by thirty thousand votes . Clarke received some 97,000 more votes than did Harrison Bagwell , an attorney from Baton Rouge , who on April 22 , 1952 , polled just 4 percent of the gubernatorial vote in his general election race against Robert Kennon , who had won the Democratic nomination in a runoff election against Kennon 's fellow judge , Carlos Spaht of Baton Rouge
1948 Republican National Convention
1948 Republican National Convention
Clem S. Clarke