Estes Kefauver
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| Estes Kefauver | |
|---|---|
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| United States Senator from Tennessee |
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| In office January 3, 1949 – August 10, 1963 |
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| Preceded by | A. Thomas Stewart |
| Succeeded by | Herbert S. Walters |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee's 3rd district |
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| In office September 13, 1939 – January 3, 1949 |
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| Preceded by | Sam D. McReynolds |
| Succeeded by | James B. Frazier, Jr. |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Carey Estes Kefauver July 26, 1903 Madisonville, Tennessee |
| Died | August 10, 1963 (aged 60) Bethesda, Maryland |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Nancy Kefauver (1911-1967) |
| Alma mater | University of Tennessee, Yale Law School |
| Religion | Baptist |
After leading a much-publicized investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, he twice sought his party's nomination for President of the United States. In 1956, he was selected by the Democratic National Convention to be the running mate of presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Still holding his U.S. Senate seat after the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket in 1956, Kefauver was named chair of the U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee in 1957 and served as its chairman until his death.
Contents
Early life
Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee, to Robert Cooke Kefauver and Phredonia Bradford (née Estes). Robert Kefauver was a hardware manager. Estes attended the University of Tennessee from 1922 to 1924, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree and being initiated into the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. After a year of teaching mathematics and coaching football at a Hot Springs, Arkansas, high school, he attended Yale Law School, from which he received an LL.B. cum laude in 1927. For the next dozen years Kefauver practiced law in Chattanooga, first with the firm of Cooke, Swaney & Cooke, as a partner in Sizer, Chambliss & Kefauver, and later in the firm of Duggan, McDonald, & Kefauver. In 1935 he married Nancy Pigott of Glasgow, Scotland, eight years his junior, whom he had met during her visit to relatives in Chattanooga. They raised four children, one of them adopted. Mrs. Kefauver died in 1967.[2]Aroused by his role as attorney for the Chattanooga News, Kefauver became interested in local politics and sought election to the Tennessee Senate in 1938. He lost but in 1939 spent two months as Finance and Taxation Commissioner under the newly elected governor Prentice Cooper. When Congressman Sam D. McReynolds of Tennessee's 3rd district, which included Chattanooga, died in 1939, Kefauver was elected to succeed him in the House.
Kefauver in Congress
In the House
Following his election to the House of Representatives as a Democrat, he was reelected four more times.As a member of the House during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's time in office, Kefauver distinguished himself from the other Democrats in Tennessee's congressional delegation, most of whom were conservatives, by becoming a staunch supporter of the President's New Deal legislation. In particular, he backed the controversial Tennessee Valley Authority and was best known for his successful bid to rebuff the efforts of Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar to gain political control over the agency. As a member of the House, "Kefauver began to manifest his concern over the growing concentration of economic power in the United States",[3] concentrating much of his legislative efforts on congressional reform and anti-monopoly measures. He chaired, for instance, the House Select Committee on Small Business, which investigated economic concentration in the U.S. business world in 1946. That same year, Kefauver also introduced legislation to plug loopholes in the Clayton Antitrust Act.
In a May 1948 article that appeared in the American Economic Review, Kefauver also proposed that more staff and money be allocated to the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department and to the Federal Trade Commission; that new legislation to make it easier to prosecute big corporations be enacted; and that the danger of monopoly should be publicized more.
The Kefauver investigation into television and juvenile delinquency in the mid-1950s led to an even more intensive investigation in the early 1960s. The new probe came about because people were increasingly concerned over violence with juveniles, and the possibility that this behavior was related to violent television programs.[4]
His progressive stances on the issues put Kefauver in direct competition with E. H. Crump, the former U.S. congressman, mayor of Memphis and boss of the state's Democratic Party, when he chose to seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1948. During the primary, Crump and his allies accused Kefauver of being a "fellow traveler" and of working for the "pinkos and communists" with the stealth of a raccoon. In a televised speech given in Memphis, in which he responded to such charges, Kefauver put on a coonskin cap and proudly proclaimed, "I may be a pet coon, but I'm not Boss Crump's pet coon." After he went on to win both the primary and the election, he adopted the cap as his trademark and wore it in every successive campaign.
Kefauver was unique in Tennessee politics in his outspoken liberal views, a stand that established a permanent bloc of opposition to him in the state. Kefauver's success despite his liberal views was predicated largely on his support by the Nashville Tennessean, a consistently liberal newspaper that served as a focus for anti-Crump sentiment in the state. His constituency included many prominent citizens whose views were considerably less liberal than his but who admired him for his integrity.
Despite opposition from the Crump machine, Kefauver won the Democratic nomination, which in those days was tantamount to election in Tennessee. His victory is widely seen as the beginning of the end for the Crump machine's influence in statewide politics. Once in the Senate, Kefauver began to make a name for himself as a crusader for consumer protection laws, antitrust legislation, and civil rights for African Americans. On civil rights, he was ambivalent: he admitted later that he had difficulty adjusting to the idea of racial integration, and in 1960 he held out to the last in favor of permitting cross-examination of black complainants in voting rights cases. But he did support the civil rights program generally and was a consistent supporter of organized labor and other movements considered liberal in the South at that time.
In the Senate
Overview
After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, Kefauver guided the Celler–Kefauver Act of 1950, which amended the Clayton Act by plugging loopholes allowing a corporation to purchase a competing firm's assets, through the U.S. Senate. Between 1957 and 1963, his U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee investigated concentration in the U.S. economy, industry by industry, and it issued a report exposing administrative, monopoly prices in the steel, automotive, bread and pharmaceutical industries. In May 1963, Kefauver's subcommittee concluded that within monopolized U.S. industries no real price competition existed anymore and also recommended that General Motors be broken up into competing firms.Kefauver's Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee also held hearings on the pharmaceutical industry between 1959 and 1963 that led to enactment of his most famous legislative achievement, the Kefauver-Harris Drug Act of 1962, after Kefauver expressed shock about the excess profits that U.S. drug companies were taking in at the expense of U.S. consumers. Some of what Kefauver's hearings on the U.S. pharmaceutical industry revealed includes the following:
"Witnesses told of conflicts of interest for the AMA (whose journal, for example, received millions of dollars in drug advertising and was, therefore, reluctant to challenge claims made by drug company ads)…The drug companies themselves were shown to be engaged in frenzied advertising campaigns designed to sell trade name versions of drugs that could otherwise be prescribed under generic names at a fraction of the cost; this competition, in turn, had led to the marketing of new drugs that were no improvements on drugs already on the market but, nevertheless, heralded as dramatic breakthroughs without proper concern for either effectiveness or safety."[5]
At that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had limited authority to require efficacy standards or disclose risks. Kefauver was accused of expanding the power of government excessively, interfering with the freedom of doctors and patients, and threatening the viability of the pharmaceutical industry. His legislation seemed likely to fail. However, at the end of 1961, European and Australian doctors reported that an epidemic of children born with deformities of their arms and legs was caused by their use of thalidomide, which was heavily marketed to pregnant women.[6]
These positions made him even more unpopular with his state party's machine than ever before, especially after he, fellow Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas became the only three southern Senators to refuse to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto in 1956. In fact, these unpopular positions, combined with his reputation as a maverick with a penchant for sanctimony, earned him so much enmity even from other Senators that one Democratic insider felt compelled to dub him "the most hated man in Congress."
Kefauver also led hearings that targeted indecent publications and pornography. Among his targets were pin-ups, including Bettie Page, and the magazines that featured them.[7]
Kefauver Committee
In 1950, Kefauver headed a U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime. The committee, officially known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, was popularly known as the Kefauver Committee or the Kefauver hearings. The Committee held hearings in fourteen cities and heard testimony from over 600 witnesses. Many of the witnesses were high-profile crime bosses, including such well-known names as Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, the latter making himself famous by refusing to allow his face to be filmed during his questioning and then staging a much-publicized walkout. A number of politicians also appeared before the committee and saw their careers ruined. Among them were former Governor Harold G. Hoffman of New Jersey and Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York City. The committee's hearings, which were televised live just as many Americans were buying televisions, made Kefauver nationally famous and introduced many Americans to the concept of a criminal organization known as the Mafia for the first time ever.[8] In fact, in 1951, Kefauver appeared as a celebrity guest on the new game show What's My Line? discussing the hearings briefly with the panel, showing how popular these hearings were with early television viewers.Although the hearings boosted Kefauver's political prospects, they helped to end the twelve-year Senate career of Democratic Majority Leader Scott Lucas. In a tight 1950 reelection race against former Illinois Representative Everett Dirksen, Lucas urged Kefauver to keep his investigation away from an emerging Chicago police scandal until after election day, but Kefauver refused. Election-eve publication of stolen secret committee documents hurt the Democratic Party in Cook County, cost Lucas the election, and gave Dirksen national prominence as the man who defeated the Senate majority leader.
1952 election
No primary
Estes Kefauver
1956 election
No primary
Adlai Stevenson
Estes Kefauver
Frank Lausche
John William McCormack
By April 1956, "it appeared that Kefauver was on his way to a primary sweep matching the spectacular performance in 1952."[5] Stevenson, however, was able to defeat Kefauver in the 1956 Oregon, Florida and California primaries and, overall, ended up winning more primary votes than Kefauver in 1956, before being re-nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention.
In 1956, Kefauver received active competition not only from Stevenson, but also from Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York, who was endorsed by former President Truman. Though Kefauver once again won the New Hampshire primary and upset all predictions by winning the Minnesota primary, he found himself hopelessly outmatched by Stevenson's lead in endorsements and fund raising. After a devastating loss in the California primary, Kefauver suspended his campaign.
Kefauver's hopes were rekindled, however, when Stevenson decided to let the delegates themselves pick his vice-presidential nominee, instead of having the choice dictated to them. Although Stevenson preferred Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts as his running mate, he did not attempt to influence the balloting for him in any way, and Kefauver eventually received the nomination. Stevenson went on to lose the election to Eisenhower once again, this time by an even bigger margin than in 1952.
Later career
After his 1956 defeat, Kefauver was considered the front-runner for the 1960 Democratic nomination. In an attempt to gain more public exposure, Kefauver capitalized on a nascent public campaign to restrict the sale of switchblade knives at the federal level by introducing legislation in 1957 to ban the sale or possession of such knives. The senator timed his hearings on the legislation to coincide with a series of lurid articles in the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals of the day on the use of switchblades by juvenile delinquents and gangs. At each hearing the senator would display a bizarre array of confiscated bayonets, trench knives, daggers, and switchblades, all of which he described to the press as 'switchblade knives.' However, Kefauver's switchblade bill failed, in large part due to residual bad feelings between Kefauver and other senators. In 1959, the senator let it be known that he was not going to campaign a third time for the presidential nomination. He continued to represent Tennessee in the U.S. Senate; the abandonment of presidential ambitions led to his most productive years as a senator. While he largely faded from the public eye, he earned the respect of congressional colleagues from both parties for his independence and his sponsorship of a number of important foreign and domestic legislative measures.When he ran for reelection to a third term in 1960, his first and, it would turn out, last attempt at running for office after refusing to sign the Southern Manifesto, he faced staunch opposition for renomination from his party's still-thriving pro-segregation wing, but he won the primary decisively, 64% vs. 34% for his opponent, Tip Taylor. During the general election itself, polls showed Kefauver's support to be near-nonexistent and it was later said that, on election day, no one outside of Kefauver's family could be found who would admit to having voted for him. Nevertheless, Kefauver swamped his opponent, winning nearly 72% of the vote.
In 1962, Kefauver, who had become known to the public at large as the chief enemy of crooked businessmen in the Senate, introduced legislation that would eventually pass into law as the Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act. This bill, which Kefauver dubbed his "finest achievement" in consumer protection, imposed controls on the pharmaceutical industry that required that drug companies disclose to doctors the side-effects of their products, allow their products to be sold as generic drugs after having held the patent on them for a certain period of time, and be able to prove on demand that their products were, in fact, effective and safe.
Death
On August 8, 1963, Kefauver, a heavy smoker and drinker,[9] suffered what was reported as a 'mild'[10] heart attack on the floor of the Senate while attempting to place an antitrust amendment into a NASA appropriations bill that would have required that companies benefiting financially from the outcome of research subsidized by NASA reimburse NASA for the cost of the research. Two days after the attack, Kefauver died in his sleep in Bethesda, Maryland, of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.[11] He was interred in the family cemetery in Madisonville.In November 1963, President Kennedy named Nancy Kefauver to be the first head of the new Art in Embassies Program—Kennedy's last presidential appointment.
The federal courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee was renamed the Estes Kefauver Federal Building and United States Courthouse in his honor.[12]
Electoral history
1956 United States Presidential Election (Vice President's seat)| Richard Nixon (R) (inc.) 57.4% |
| Estes Kefauver (D) 42% |
| Thomas Werdel (States' Rights) 0.2% |
| C. Estes Kefauver Tennessee Campaigns | ||||||||
| Year | Office | Winner | Vote | Runner-up | Vote | Third Candidate | Vote | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | U.S. Senate (TN) | Estes Kefauver (D*) | 594,460 | A. Bradley Frazier (R) | 234,053 | [1] | ||
| 1954 | U.S. Senate (TN) | Estes Kefauver (D*) | 249,121 | Tom Wall (R) | 106,971 | [2] | ||
| 1948 | U.S. Senate (TN) | Estes Kefauver (D) | 326,032 | B. Carroll Reece (R) | 166,947 | John R. Neal Jr. (I) | 6,103 | [3] |
| 1946 | TN-03 | Estes Kefauver (D*) | 26,779 | George Bagwell (I) | 2,725 | [4] | ||
| 1944 | TN-03 | Estes Kefauver (D*) | 32,497 | Foster Johnson (R) | 11,541 | Ernest W. Forstner (I) | 3,894 | [5] |
| 1942 | TN-03 | Estes Kefauver (D*) | 14,704 | Walter Higgins (R) | 3,831 | Walter Harris (I) | 902 | [6] |
| 1940 | TN-03 | Estes Kefauver (D*) | 35,332 | Jerome Taylor (R) | 16,099 | [7] | ||
| 1939 | TN-03 | Estes Kefauver (D) | 14,268 | Casto Dodson (R) | 5,355 | John R. Neal Jr. (I) | 375 | [8] |
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