Monroe Schwarzlose

Monroe Alfred Julius Schwarzlose (September 6, 1902 – November 24, 1990) was a turkey farmer in Cleveland County, Arkansas, who was a Democratic primary opponent in 1980 of incumbent Governor Bill Clinton. He gained 31 percent of the ballots cast, but Clinton lost the ensuing general election to Republican Frank D. White.

Schwarzlose also unsuccessfully ran on other occasions for governor and for other elected offices from the middle 1970s to the middle 1980s.

Life and career
Schwarzlose was born of German ancestry in Seguin in Guadalupe County east of San Antonio, Texas. Schwarzlose was living in Oregon at the time he procured his Social Security number. He settled in Kingsland, Arkansas, but his obituary does not say when he moved to the state.

Schwarzlose ran as a Republican in 1974, a heavily Democratic year nationally, for a seat in the Arkansas House of Representatives from a district which then encompassed Dallas, Calhoun, and part of Cleveland counties in southern Arkansas. He was easily beaten by the Democrat Thomas Sparks of Fordyce in Dallas County.

In 1978, Schwarzlose polled 1 percent of the vote in the Democratic gubernatorial primary against then Attorney General Bill Clinton and three other rivals. He ran on a platform calling for legalized gambling and a state lottery. Schwarzlose said that gambling would continue to be practiced, and the state government should obtain a portion of the proceeds.

In 1980, Schwarzlose, at seventy-eight, became the beneficiary of anti-Clinton sentiment in Arkansas. In his race against Clinton, he spent only $4,000, mostly for travel and for distributing home-canning recipes as campaign literature. The Arkansas Gazette called Schwarzlose "an engaging gentleman with good home-canning recipes and some fetching stories about turkey farming and bucolic life around his home in Kingsland." An editor of The Gazette described Schwarzlose as a "quixotic candidate" and a maverick who was using his own money and campaigning on the most undesirable platform planks, and making the "most outrageous" promises. Schwarzlose, for instance, said that if he were elected governor in 1980, he would donate his farm to the Arkansas Sheriff's Association Boys and Girls Ranches for use as an orphanage.

Schwarzlose ran again for governor in the 1982 Democratic primary against Clinton, former Lieutenant Governor Joe Purcell, U.S. Representative Jim Guy Tucker, and State Senator Kim Hendren. Clinton won the nomination in a runoff with Purcell, and Schwarzlose finished in fifth place. In 1986, Schwarzlose filed as a write-in candidate, when Clinton won his first four-year term as governor.

At the time of Schwarzlose's death, Clinton said through a spokesman that he had first met Schwarzlose at a campaign event in 1978 in Lake Village in Chicot County in the heavily Democratic southeastern corner of the state. He last saw him in 1989 at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Little Rock. Schwarzlose was a veteran of World War II. Clinton added that he "really enjoyed knowing him."

Schwarzlose was a Lutheran. He was survived by a daughter and a grandchild and interred at the Zorn Cemetery in Zorn, Texas, near family members.