Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Jr.

Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Jr. (September 23, 1904 – October 27, 1965), was the Democratic attorney general of his home state of Louisiana from 1948 to 1952 during the administration of Governor Earl Kemp Long. He was allied with the Long faction in state politics.^[1]

Kemp was the son of U.S. Representative Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Sr. (1871–1933) of Amite City, the seat of government for Tangipahoa Parish, one of the Louisiana "Florida Parishes" east of the capital city of Baton Rouge. His mother was the former Esther Edwards Conner (1875–1943), known as "Lallie" Kemp.^[2] Kemp's paternal grandparents were Judge William Breed Kemp, Sr., and the former Elizabeth Newsom.^[3] His maternal grandparents were Sidney Simonton Conner of Statesville, North Carolina, and the former Orra Anna Edwards of Tangipahoa Parish. Kemp had a younger sister, Eleanor Ogden Kemp (born 1909), later Eleanor Ellis, married to Louisiana District Court Judge Robert S. Ellis, Jr.^[4]

Kemp's wife, Menette, was one of the three sisters of the Louisiana Cajun chef and humorist Justin Wilson (1914–2001), also of Amite. Their father, Harry D. Wilson (1869–1048), served for thirty-two years from 1916 until his death in January 1948 as the commissioner of the state Department of Agriculture and Forestry. Kemp had one foster son named Richard Tipton.^[5]

Kemp graduated in 1897 from Tulane University Law School in New Orleans; his classmates included later United States Senator John Holmes Overton, Sr. (1875–1948), and E. L. Stewart, a lawyer in Minden and a state representative for Webster Parish from 1904 to 1908^[6]

In 1933, at the time of his father's sudden death, Kemp was an assistant United States district attorney in New Orleans.^[3] In 1943, at the time of his mother's death, Kemp was the district attorney for Tangipahoa Parish.

Kemp was politically allied with William J. "Bill" Dodd, the lieutenant governor from 1948 to 1952, who hired Justin Wilson as Dodd's campaign manager in the 1952 Louisiana gubernatorial election. Kemp and Dodd maintained that Louisiana seriously erred when it rejected a compromise tidelands offer from the Harry Truman administration. According to Dodd, had Governor Earl Long agreed to the plan, Louisiana would have gained billions of additional dollars in state revenues over the coming decades. Long rejected the compromise on advice from Judge Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish, who argued that Louisiana could win a much better settlement before the United States Supreme Court. As it turned out, the assessment of Dodd and Kemp was correct, and the Supreme Court rebuffed Louisiana's attempt to get a greater share of the offshore revenues. Dodd maintained that Louisiana government would have been the best funded in the nation had Long accepted Truman's offer. In 1982, Edgar Poe, former president of the National Press Corps in Washington, D.C., wrote Dodd that "Louisiana would be a tax-free state had the compromoise proposed been accepted. As you know, offshore Louisiana is the most intense oil and gas development area in the world. As a result, the federal government is collecting hundreds of millions of dollars every year from lease sales of its share of the oil and gas sales."^[7]

Kemp's stint as the state's top legal officer fell between the two nonconsecutive terms of Attorney General Fred S. LeBlanc of Baton Rouge, who served in the first Jimmie Davis and Robert F. Kennon administrations, respectively.

Kemp died at the age of sixty-one and is interred beside his wife and parents at Amite Cemetery. Mrs. Kemp, the former Menette Estelle Wilson (1905–1981), predeceased her brother Justin Wilson by some two decades. ^[8]