30 Facts About Estes Kefauver

Carey Estes Kefauver was an American politician from Tennessee.

Carey Estes Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee, the son of local hardware merchant Robert Cooke Kefauver and his wife Phredonia Bradford Estes.

Estes Kefauver attended the University of Tennessee and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924.

Estes Kefauver was a tackle and guard on his college football team.

Estes Kefauver 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.

Estes Kefauver 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.

Estes Kefauver was elected to five terms in the House of Representatives as a Democrat.

That same year, Estes Kefauver introduced legislation to plug loopholes in the Clayton Antitrust Act.

Estes 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.

Estes Kefauver's constituency included many prominent citizens, whose views were considerably less liberal than his, but who admired him for his integrity.

Estes Kefauver's victory is widely seen as the beginning of the end for the Crump machine's influence in statewide politics.

Once in the Senate, Estes Kefauver began to make a name for himself as a crusader for consumer protection laws and antitrust legislation.

In May 1963, Estes Kefauver's subcommittee concluded that within monopolized US industries no real price competition existed anymore and recommended that General Motors be broken up into competing firms.

Estes 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.

In 1950, Estes Kefauver headed a US Senate committee investigating organized crime.

Estes Kefauver won 12 of the 15 primaries in 1952, losing three to "favorite son" candidates.

Estes Kefauver received 3.1 million votes, while the eventual 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, got only 78,000 votes.

Estes Kefauver entered the convention with a few hundred votes still needed for a majority of the delegates.

The Estes Kefauver campaign became the classic example of how presidential primary victories in the Democratic Party do not automatically lead to the nomination itself.

Estes Kefauver defeated Kefauver in the Oregon, Florida, and California primaries and, overall, won more primary votes than Kefauver.

Estes Kefauver timed 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.

Estes Kefauver continued to represent Tennessee in the US Senate; the abandonment of presidential ambitions led to his most productive years as a senator.

Estes Kefauver went on to defeat his Republican opponent in the general election, attorney Bradley Frazier of Camden, by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Estes Kefauver voted in favor of the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution.

In 1962, Estes 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 Estes Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act.

Two days after the attack, Estes Kefauver died in his sleep in Bethesda Naval Hospital of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.

Estes Kefauver was interred in a family cemetery beside his home.

Mrs Estes Kefauver never considered remarrying, remarking that she "had too perfect a marriage".

The federal courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee, was renamed the Estes Kefauver Federal Building and United States Courthouse in his honor.