Estes Kefauver

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The issue of Time Magazine in which Kefauver's victory in the New Hampshire primary was reported.

Carey Estes Kefauver (July 26, 1903–August 10, 1963) was an American politician from Tennessee who opposed the continued concentration of U.S. economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands.

Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee, and attended the University of Tennessee and Yale University. 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 to his death in 1963.

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 Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee in 1957 and served as its chairperson until his death.

[edit] Kefauver in Congress

His political career began in 1938, when he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat from the state's 3rd Congressional District, based in Chattanooga. He was reelected four more times.

As a member of the House during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's term 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, particularly the controversial Tennessee Valley Authority. As a member of the House, "Kefauver began to manifest his concern over the growing concentration of economic power in the United States," according to the 1971 book by Joseph Bruce Gorman, Kefauver: A Political Biography (NY: Oxford University Press). He chaired, for instance, the House Select Committee on Small Business subcommittee that investigated economic concentration in the U.S. business world in 1946. That same year, Kefauver also introduced legislation to plug loopholes in the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.

In a May 1948 article that appeared in the American Economic Review journal, Kefauver also proposed: 1. That more staff and money be allocated to the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department and to the Federal Trade Commission; 2. That new legislation to make it easier to prosecute big corporations be enacted; and 3. That the danger of monopoly should be publicized more.

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.

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.

After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, Kefauver then guided the Kefauver-Cellar 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 Anti-Trust 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 subcommittee also held hearings on the pharmaceutical industry between 1959 and 1963 which 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. In his book Kefauver: A Political Biography, Joseph Bruce Gorman described some of what Kefauver's hearings on the U.S. pharmaceutical industry revealed:

"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."

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 is one of numerous public officials alleged to have had drinking problems during the time [1].

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 Manifesto, he faced staunch opposition for renomination from his party's still-thriving pro-segregation wing and he only won the primary by a slim margin. 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 an estimated 65% 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 which 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 which 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.

On August 8, 1963, Kefauver suffered a massive heart attack on the floor of the Senate while attempting to place an antitrust amendment into a NASA appropriations bill which would have required that companies benefitting 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.

[edit] The 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.

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.

[edit] Kefauver for President

In the 1952 presidential election, Kefauver decided to offer himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Campaigning in his coonskin cap, often by dogsled, Kefauver made history when he defeated President Harry S. Truman, the sitting President of the United States, in the New Hampshire primary. Although Kefauver would go on to win twelve of the fifteen primaries that were held that year, losing three to "favorite son" candidates, primaries were not, at that time, the main method of delegate selection for the national convention. Kefauver, therefore, entered the convention a few hundred votes shy of the needed majority. In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Kefauver received 3.1 million votes, while the eventual 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, a Choate prep school graduate named Adlai Stevenson, received only 78,000 votes.

Yet, as Kefauver: A Political Biography observed, "The Kefauver campaign for the nomination in 1952 became the classic example of how presidential primary victories do not automatically lead to the nomination itself." The Democratic Party political bosses and their U.S. corporate sponsors apparently distrusted Kefauver. So the Democratic Party political bosses blocked Kefauver's presidential nomination in 1952 and, instead, selected Stevenson.

Although he began the balloting far ahead of the other declared candidates, Kefauver eventually lost the nomination to Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Stevenson, a one-term governor who was up for reelection in 1952, had previously resisted calls to enter the race, but he was nominated anyway by a "Draft Stevenson" movement that had been energized by his eloquent keynote speech on the opening night of the convention. He would go on to lose the general election to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in a landslide.

In 1956, Kefauver again sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination and, initially, he again won some Democratic Party presidential primaries. In the March 13, 1956 New Hampshire presidential primary, for instance, Kefauver defeated Stevenson 21,701 to 3,806. A week later, Kefauver again defeated Stevenson in the March 20, 1956 Minnesota presidential primary, winning 245,885 votes compared to Stevenson's 186,723 votes. Kefauver was also victorious in the 1956 Wisconsin presidential primary.

By April 1956, "it appeared that Kefauver was on his way to a primary sweep matching the spectacular performance in 1952," according to Kefauver: A Political Biography. 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 by the Democrats at the 1956 Democratic Party's national convention.

In 1956, Kefauver not only received active competition 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 fundraising. 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 be 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.

Preceded by: Sam D. McReynolds	United States House of Representatives for Tennessee's 3rd District 1939-1949	Succeeded by: James B. Frazier, Jr.
Preceded by: Arthur Thomas Stewart	U.S. Senator (Class 2) from Tennessee 1949-1963 Served alongside: Kenneth D. McKellar, Albert Gore	Succeeded by: Herbert S. Walters
Preceded by: John Sparkman	Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate 1956 (lost)	Succeeded by: Lyndon B. Johnson