US senator, born in Monroe Co, Tennessee, USA. Elected to the US House of Representatives (Democrat, Tennessee, 193949), he sponsored the so-called GI Bill, which gave various benefits to veterans of World War 2. Elected to the US Senate (194963), he was an internationalist and civil-rights advocate, and won national fame as head of the Kefauver Committee, which investigated organized crime. His presidential ambitions were frustrated in the 1950s.
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. 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.
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. 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).
In a May 1948 article that appeared in the American Economic Review journal, Kefauver also proposed: 1.
His progressive stances on the issues put Kefauver in direct competition with E.H.
Despite opposition from the Crump machine, Kefauver won the Democratic nomination, which in those days was tantamount to election in Tennessee. 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. 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; 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.
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.
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'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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. Walters
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Preceded by: John Sparkman |
Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate 1956 (lost) |
Succeeded by: Lyndon B. Johnson |
| United States Democratic Party Vice Presidential Nominees |
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