Kefauver, Estes

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Kefauver, Estes 1903-1963

Carey Estes Kefauver was born to Phredonia Estes and Cooke Kefauver July 26, 1903 on a farm near Madisonville, Tennessee. His older brother, Robert, and younger sisters, Nancy and Leonora, rounded out his family. Following a career in law and service in the U.S. House of Representatives (1939–1949) and the U.S. Senate (1949–1963), Kefauver died in Washington, D.C. August 10, 1963. Kefauver attended local public schools, and then entered the University of Tennessee, where he participated in various extracurricular activities. He earned a BA in 1924 but had already begun to study law. After brief service as a teacher and coach in Arkansas, Kefauver entered Yale Law School and was granted an LLB cum laude in 1927. He had previously passed the Tennessee bar examination, so Kefauver moved to Chattanooga and joined first a practice set up by his cousins and later another firm, where he became a junior partner in 1930. Civic affairs, work with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and representation of a local newspaper promoting government reform led Kefauver into political activism, and in 1936 he was narrowly defeated in a state senate bid.

In 1939 Kefauver was appointed state finance and taxation commissioner, served briefly, returned to his law practice, then entered a special election for Tennessee’s third congressional district (Chattanooga) seat upon the incumbent’s death. Kefauver won, and was reelected four times; in 1948 he sought a U.S. Senate seat and won a plurality victory in the Democratic primary over the incumbent and a third candidate sponsored by Tennessee’s “Boss” Crump. He was reelected in 1954 and 1960, and in intervening years pursued the Democratic presidential nomination. In 1952 President Harry S. Truman and other party leaders offset Kefauver’s surprising string of primary victories and delivered the nomination to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson; the 1956 rematch also produced a Stevenson nomination, but Kefauver’s withdrawal in favor of Stevenson late in the campaign encouraged Stevenson to allow convention delegates to select his running mate. Kefauver was nominated, but the Democratic ticket was again defeated in the election, by Dwight Eisenhower.

Kefauver’s presidential efforts grew out of his work chairing the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce during the Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses. While a congressman, Kefauver had supported Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the TVA, and government reform and antitrust policy; he sponsored the modern presidential succession statute and supported abolition of the poll tax. Kefauver’s involvement in a House investigation of judicial corruption, as well as his personal ambition, underscored by encouragement of some newspaper executives, caused him to see opportunity in a Senate study of organized crime. Events overcame the Democratic Senate leadership’s reluctance, and internal Senate politics led to Kefauver’s selection as chair when the committee was authorized in May 1950.

The committee held hearings in several cities and began to attract attention as witnesses helped to build a case that criminal elements had developed a national organization substantially rooted in illegal gambling and protected from law-enforcement efforts through bribery and the efforts of friends in useful offices. Public interest in the investigation grew with the publicizing of the connections between racketeers and various public officials, as well as several prominent political organizations; it flourished as hearings first in New Orleans and subsequently in other cities were televised. Committee proceedings were less popular, however, in the White House and in Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas’s office, as they suggested ties between the Kansas City Democratic organization (President Truman’s home base) and gangsters and between Cook County, Illinois, Democrats (Lucas’s base) and criminal elements. Kefauver refused to defer study of them, which probably led to Lucas’s defeat in his 1950 reelection bid and Truman’s opposition to Kefauver’s 1952 Democratic presidential nomination quest. The committee’s work bore legislative fruit only after the Kennedy administration took office, but several states defeated legalized gambling, and a number of cities established crime commissions in the immediate wake of its reports.

Kefauver had married Nancy Paterson Pigott, Scottish-born daughter of American expatriates and an aspiring artist, in 1935. Daughter Eleanor was born to the couple in 1941, and when other children did not quickly follow, they adopted six-week-old David in 1946. Diane was then born in 1947, and Gail completed the family upon her birth in 1950.

Kefauver fell ill during the summer of 1963 and was diagnosed as having an aortal aneurism; it burst before remedial measures could be taken, and he died at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was buried in the family cemetery in Madisonville, Tennessee.

SEE ALSO Congress, U.S.; Crime and Criminology; Mafia, The