In November 1956, Brooks defeated, 68-32 percent, the Republican nominee Calhoun Allen, a longtime military reservist and the past president of the Holiday in Dixie festival, who later turned Democrat and was elected as Shreveport's public utilities commissioner and as mayor of Shreveport. Brooks declared himself a lifelong Democrat in that campaign and urged voters to support Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois for president over Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of Louisiana. Allen, at the time, had declared himself an "Eisenhower Republican".