Estes Kefauver turns 100
by Jack Neely
My friend Paul Ashdown, who teaches journalism at the university, remarked on a curiosity. He grew up in New Jersey idolizing Tennesseans. We were cool in the 1950s, the era of Elvis and the Everly Brothers. Paul revered two specific Tennesseeans as a youth, and they both wore coonskin caps. One of them, of course, was Davy Crockett—or Fess Parker's portrayal of him in a couple of hit movies. The other was Estes Kefauver.
The crime-fighting senator was a hero in the 1950s. He had defied the Crump machine, the last major political mob here, then busted it up altogether. He was first elected to Congress in 1939, and his resemblance to Jimmy Stewart's character in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, released the same year, seemed like more than coincidence.
At every socially acceptable opportunity, Kefauver wore a coonskin cap. He wasn't just identifying with his fellow member of the Tennessee congressional delegation, Mr. Crockett. The guy who inspired him to wear the cap was Boss Crump, himself, who, suggesting Kefauver was a secret agent for the Communists, compared him to the furtive raccoon. So Kefauver put on a coonskin cap. If he was a coon, he said, he wasn't Boss Crump's pet coon.
His election to the Senate is remembered as the end of the Crump machine. He became one of America's most prominent senators in the 1950s, chairman of a Senate committee on organized crime, whose hearings were seen by 25 million television viewers. It was maybe the first, and best, reality show.
He ran for president twice and was nominated as Adlai Stevenson's running mate in the Democrats' unsuccessful bid against Ike's re-election in 1956. Later, he made presidential historian Theodore White's short list of men who should have been president, but weren't.
But he made the most of 15 years in the Senate. In 1954, Kefauver was lonesome among Southern legislators in his refusal to denounce the Supreme Court's anti-segregation rulings. Despite predictions that he'd made a suicidal political error, he was reelected by a landslide. He voted for civil-rights legislation. As cars got bigger, he foresaw the importance of fuel-efficiency. He sought to put control on the pharmaceutical industries, and he introduced legislation that banned the deforming drug thalidomide. He co-sponsored the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax.
His career ended suddenly, with a heart attack on the Senate floor in 1963.
No Tennessee legislator ever made a bigger difference for good. But 40 years after his death, Estes Kefauver is almost completely forgotten, especially here.
Paul Ashdown was in Madisonville, Kefauver's hometown, recently. The Senator's home site is now a Wal-Mart. Paul asked around. Madisonville is a patriotic town. There are lots of flags and Bush stickers. But the Madisonvillians he spoke with had never heard of Estes Kefauver.
Kefauver was considered something of a bumpkin when he attended UT in the early 1920s (he lived in the Kappa Sig house, which was the old Melrose mansion). At one time he intended to return here to live. After his graduation from Yale in 1927, he wandered up and down Gay Street, attempting to get a berth in a local law firm, but was frustrated. Like many folks who give up on Knoxville, he landed in Chattanooga.
In Knoxville, there are no statues or plaques. He has never earned a spot in the Hodges Library's UT alumni Hall of Fame, which must be very difficult to explain. But there are two places where you can learn a few things about him.
One is the Estes Kefauver collection on the second floor of the medieval-style tower on the southwest corner of UT's old Hoskins Library. It's the nation's primary collection of Kefauver papers and memorabilia—some five tons of it by one estimate—but what's likely to startle you is at the end of the collection's portrait-lined conference room: behind velvet ropes is a painstaking reconstruction of the furniture and bric-a-brac of Kefauver's cluttered Washington office as it was found the day he died, complete with tacky souvenirs from cities around the country, drawings by his kids, framed and autographed portraits of dozens of Kefauver friends like Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Dinah Shore. And of course Kefauver's coonskin cap. It's one of Knoxville's truly unique spectacles.
Curator Nick Wyman says they get three or four researchers a year. Maybe about as many people come to see the Kefauver office. Classes meet in the conference room next to the office-shrine. Wyman says most students who visit here have never heard of Estes Kefauver.
The only other Kefauver shrine I know of is a little livelier: Harold's Deli on Gay Street. Harold Shersky voted for Kefauver more than once and is proud to keep a Kefauver campaign poster behind the counter. The bespectacled, clean-cut senator has gazed down benevolently on many kosher meals.
Estes Kefauver, who was first elected to the Senate the same fall that Harold opened his restaurant, used to come in occasionally for a sandwich, usually in the company of Democratic Party big shots like jeweler and City Councilman Max Friedman. "He was a great man," Harold says. "A really nice guy."
Harold still keeps an assortment of Kefauver campaign literature behind the counter; he may be Estes Kefauver's greatest advocate in East Tennessee. His kitchen staff knows the guy better than many UT academics do; Big Sam calls him "Keef."
Estes Kefauver turns 100 this Saturday. Have a glass of whiskey, or a deli sandwich, in honor of a great senator who's not quite forgotten yet.
July 24, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 30
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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