Estes Kefauver
Carey Estes Kefauver was an American politician from Tennessee. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1939 to 1949 and in the U.S. Senate from 1949 until his death in 1963. He was the winner of most of the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, though he was not nominated at the convention.
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 at the Democratic National Convention to be the running mate of presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. He continued to hold his U.S. Senate seat after the Stevenson–Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. Kefauver was named chair of the U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957 and served as its chairman until his death.
Early life
Carey Estes Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee, the son of local hardware merchant Robert Cooke Kefauver and his wife Phredonia Bradford Estes. Kefauver was introduced to politics at an early age when his father served as mayor of their hometown. The elder Kefauver would later be an active and enthusiastic helper in his son's campaigns until his death in 1958 at the age of 87.Kefauver attended the University of Tennessee and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924. He was a tackle and guard on his college football team. He taught mathematics and coached football at a Hot Springs, Arkansas, high school for a year before going on to Yale Law School, from which he earned an LL.B. cum laude in 1927.
Kefauver practiced law in Chattanooga for the next twelve years, beginning with the firm of Cooke, Swaney & Cooke, and eventually becoming a partner in Sizer, Chambliss & Kefauver.
In 1935, he married Nancy Pigott, the daughter of British-American engineer Sir Stephen Pigott, whom he had met during her visit to relatives in Chattanooga. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art with a budding career as an artist, she changed focus after her marriage and worked diligently and effectively for her husband's campaigns. The couple raised four children, one of them adopted. Mrs. Kefauver died November 20, 1967.
Moved 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 congressional district, which included Chattanooga, died in 1939, Kefauver was elected to succeed him in the House.
Political career
U.S. House of Representatives
Kefauver was elected to five terms in the House of Representatives as a Democrat. 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", concentrating much of his legislative efforts on congressional reform and anti-monopoly measures. Among the committees Kefauver chaired was 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, which 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 recommended the danger of monopolies 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 after people became increasingly concerned over juvenile violence, and the possibility of this behavior being related to violent television programs.
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."
To win election to the Senate, Kefauver defeated the incumbent Tom Stewart in the 1948 Democratic primary. Kefauver was backed by the influential editor Edward J. Meeman of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, who had long fought the Crump machine for its corruption and stranglehold over Memphis politics. 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. He received the cap from journalist Drue Smith.
Kefauver was unique in Tennessee politics in his outspoken liberal views, a stand which 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 and antitrust legislation. 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. Despite this fact, Kefauver supported the civil rights program generally, and consistently supported organized labor and other movements considered liberal in the South at that time.
U.S. 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 that allowed 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 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 American Medical Association …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."
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.
These positions made him even more unpopular with his state party's machine than ever before, especially after fellow Tennessee senator Albert Gore Sr., Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and he became one of the only three Southern senators to not sign the so-called Southern Manifesto in 1956. He was named in a popular account of the Senate as a Southern Senator who had been excluded from the Southern Caucus due to his opposition to the filibuster and less than impeccable defense of States rights.
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.