Harvey Fields

For the American Reform rabbi, see Harvey J. Fields.

Harvey Goodwyn Fields, Sr. (May 31, 1882 – 1961), was a lawyer and Democratic politician from Farmerville, Louisiana, who was affiliated with the Long political faction.

Career

Fields was born in Marksville in Avoyelles Parish in South Louisiana. In 1908, Fields married the former Evelyn Sanders (1889–1961), and they had two sons, Thomas Theodore Fields, Jr., and Harvey Fields, Jr. (1918–1965), and a daughter, Joy (1915–1980). Fields attended Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, taught school for a time, and then graduated from Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. He served for one term in the Louisiana State Senate from 1916–1920 for adjoining Morehouse and Union parishes in North Louisiana.^[1] Field's Senate tenure paralleled the administration of Governor Ruffin Pleasant of Shreveport, who was a Union Parish native.

After his Senate tenure, Fields was from 1922 to 1925 the district attorney for his adopted Union Parish. From 1926 to 1929, he was the chairman of the Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee. He was a delegate to the 1924 (alternate), 1928, 1932, and the 1936 Democratic National Conventions. He succeeded Huey Pierce Long, Jr., on the elected Louisiana Public Service Commission in the then Third PSC District, a position which he filled from 1927 to 1936. Earlier, Fields had briefly been Long's law partner in Shreveport. From 1937 to 1941, Fields was the United States Attorney for the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, based in Shreveport, an appointment under the administration of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1939, Fields assigned his assistant attorney and subsequent successor, Malcolm Lafargue, also a native of Marksville, to prosecute the Louisiana Hayride scandals in the forty parishes within the Western District.^[2]

Fields and his wife both died in 1961. Son T. T. Fields was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from Union Parish from 1956 to 1964 and from Union and Morehouse parishes from 1968 to 1972.^[3]

Thomas T. Fields, a grandson of Harvey Fields, penned a biography in 2009 of his grandfather, I Called Him Grand Dad.^[4]

References