Estes Kefauver was growing restless. He had secured a firm hold on his House seat representing the Tennessee 3rd district, having been elected five times by huge margins, and had established himself as a thoughtful Representative who was a leader on monopoly and antitrust issues and defense of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But ever ambitious, Kefauver was looking to climb the ladder.
He first considered running for the Senate in 1946, as a challenger to Tennessee’s long-serving Kenneth McKellar. He wisely ducked that race. But two years later, he spied an opportunity, when the state’s political bosses accidentally set a trap for themselves.
Welcome to the Machine
McKellar and Ed Crump, the boss of Memphis, had formed a political machine that essentially dominated Tennessee politics. They made a powerful combo: McKellar used his patronage powers to reward friends and punish enemies, while Crump used his control of the votes in what was then the state’s biggest cities to swing the Democratic primaries toward his chosen candidates.
According to Kefauver biographer Charles Fontenay, even the state GOP was essentially an adjunct to the Crump-McKellar machine. The little political strength that Republicans then had in Tennessee was concentrated in the eastern part of the state; Crump would strategically avoid fielding candidates in county races there in exchange for Republican votes for his candidates in Democratic primaries. It added up to a political powerhouse that you challenged at your peril.
Tennessee’s junior senator at the time was Tom Stewart, whose prior claim to fame had been serving as the chief prosecutor of the Scopes monkey trial. Stewart was an affable sort who generally voted along with McKellar. His one big idea, such as it was, was a 1942 bill to revoke the citizenship of Japanese-Americans. (This was shortly after the beginning of Japanese internment, so Stewart was in popular – if morally disgraceful – company.)
For reasons that remain unclear to this day, in late 1947 Boss Crump decided that he’d had enough of Stewart and decided to replace him in 1948. Crump made this call against the advice of McKellar, who liked Stewart, but apparently not enough to make a fuss about it.
To replace Stewart, Crump anointed a fairly obscure judge named John Mitchell. What Crump saw in Mitchell was a mystery, but what did it matter? With the power of his machine, Crump could get a potted plant elected to the Senate. Or so he thought.
As it turned out, there were a couple things Crump hadn’t counted on. One was that Stewart didn’t intend to take Crump’s heave-ho lying down. He decided – not unreasonably – that people might actually decide to keep their incumbent Senator rather than voting for some nobody judge just because Boss Crump told them to.
The other thing that Boss Crump didn’t count on was Estes Kefauver.
A Challenger Arises, With a Little Help From His Friends
Although the story of Kefauver’s ’48 campaign is generally told as a David-vs.-Goliath tale – not unfairly, mind you – the upstart Congressman had some influential backers in his corner. In particular, two of the state’s biggest newspapers – the Nashville Tennessean and the Memphis Press-Scimitar – had been opposed to the Crump machine for decades.
But Kefauver – setting a pattern that would define his career – was also a tireless advocate on his own behalf. Before Stewart or Mitchell even began to campaign, Kefauver had already completed an informal tour of the entire state and was about to embark on another “official” statewide tour.
He kicked off his formal campaign with an event in his hometown of Madisonville on June 5th. In his speech, Kefauver struck a populist note, saying, “My course of action as a friend of the common man has gained for me much abuse… If to believe in the right of every man to the good life, to the utmost liberty and to the most complete happiness is to be a radical, then I expect the description fits most of us.”
By this point, Crump already knew that he had a problem. His hand-picked candidate, Judge Mitchell, turned out to be a complete dud on the stump. McKellar quickly abandoned ship, shifting his support to Stewart. But the Memphis Boss was determined to get his man over the line, no matter what. So he devised a plan to bury the upstart Kefauver once and for all, to show him what it was like to mess with the bull.
A Wild Attack Hands Kefauver A Powerful Symbol
He fired his shot on June 10, taking out an ad in newspapers across Tennessee entitled “ESTES KEFAUVER ASSUMES THE ROLE OF A PET COON.” For those who think that campaigns and attack ads have gotten uglier over time, this ad is a striking rebuttal to that notion. The ad, which Crump signed with his own name, attacks Kefauver as a deceptive Communist sympathizer.
“Kefauver reminds me of the pet coon that puts its foot in an open drawer in your room,” the ad reads, “but invariably turns its head while its foot is feeling around in your drawer. The coon hopes, through its cunning by turning its head, he will deceive any onlookers as to where his foot is and what is into.”
And what Kefauver was “into,” according to the ad, was doing the bidding of the Communist party. The ads calls him the Communists’ “Red-Apple Boy” and blares, “NO PATRIOTIC AMERICAN INTERESTED IN THE SECURITY OF HIS COUNTRY CAN VOTE FOR KEFAUVER.” (There’s a lot of all-caps text in the ad.) The ads notes the times when Kefauver voted with Communist New York Rep. Vito Marcantonio and notes his opposition to the filibuster, which the ads calls “[t]he only legitimate weapon of defense that the South has in Congress” to block civil-rights legislation.
At the very end of the ad – basically as an afterthought – Crump urges voters to select Mitchell, saying his “patriotism… is beyond question.” As proof of this, the quotes an old army buddy of Mitchell saying that the judge “is admirably equipped in every way to make Tennessee a great United States Senator.” (The fact that this is the best the ad could do to promote Mitchell suggests that Crump may already have realized that he was playing a losing hand.)
Once Kefauver and his campaign staff read the ad, they realized they’d just been gifted a powerful political symbol in the raccoon, one that they decided to turn to their advantage. They first tried bringing live raccoons to campaign events, but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth.
So the campaign devised another solution. When Kefauver made a campaign stop in Memphis – Crump’s backyard – he pulled out a coonskin cap and placed it on his head, proclaiming: “I may be a pet coon, but I’m not Boss Crump’s pet coon!”
Whether Kefauver realized it or not, he had just produced the symbol that would follow him for the rest of his political career. In the moment, he had successfully defused Crump’s wild charges, and tarred both Mitchell and Stewart as lackeys of the Boss’s machine.
Debate Me, You Cowards!
As Kefauver traveled the state, blasting Crump and the machine, he found that he drew larger and larger crowds. He also found that he had a secret weapon: his wife, Nancy, who campaigned by his side. It was rare in those days for spouses to hit the campaign trail, and Nancy Kefauver proved to be as popular with voters as her husband. Supporters now proclaimed, contrary to Crump’s ad, that the only thing “red” about Kefauver was “his beautiful red-haired wife.”
Throughout the campaign, Kefauver repeatedly challenged his rivals to debate him. He frequently peppered his speeches with challenges to Stewart and Mitchell to “stand up on their hind legs on the same platform with me and discuss the real issues of the campaign.”
Neither opponent wanted any part of this challenge, so Kefauver went on the offensive. Whenever his campaign arrived in the same city as either of his opponents, he would try to trap them into appearing on the stage beside them. This led to the hilarious sight of Mitchell and Stewart literally running away to avoid being drawn into a debate. When the League of Women Voters tried to hold an actual debate in Memphis, neither Mitchell nor Stewart showed up, so Kefauver “debated” against a pair of empty chairs.
Kefauver proclaimed this unwillingness to debate a sign of his foes’ cowardice. “I believe that none of them have the moral courage to stand before the people and try to substantiate their accusations against me,” he said. “It is not good sportsmanship to make ugly accusations against a person and then refuse to meet the accused in open debate before the people.”
The Anti-Machine Ticket Springs An Upset
On the campaign trail, Kefauver made common cause with another anti-machine candidate, Gordon Browning, who was running for governor against Crump-backed Gov. Jim McCord. Browning went after McCord for instituting a state sales tax, and both and Kefauver went after Crump. They were making enough of a splash that even national outlets were taking notice. Time magazine ran an article in July trumpeting Kefauver’s crusade.
In addition to turning out the anti-Crump factions within the state, Kefauver also actively sought a group of voters that most politicians of the era ignored: women. “I take no stock in the idea that women vote just as their menfolk say,” Kefauver said. “I think there are about as many cases where the men vote as their wives want them to. Women have political courage and independence, and these are qualities I like.”
Kefauver closed out his campaign ahead of the August 5th primary by holding a torchlight parade through the streets of Nashville, followed by rallies in both Nashville and his home base of Chattanooga. On Election Day, after casting his ballot, he flew to Memphis to shake hands with voters, again treading into Crump’s territory.
The Crump-McKellar machine suffered a double blow that year, as both Kefauver and Browning won their primaries. Kefauver won a bit over 42% of the vote, compared to 32% for Stewart and 24% for Mitchell.
Just One More Thing…
Ordinarily in Tennessee, winning the Democratic primary would be tantamount to election. But there was reason to believe this year might be different, because the Republican had recruited a genuine celebrity to run for governor: Roy Acuff, the legendary country musician. Acuff and his Smokey Mountain Boys were fixtures at the Grand Ole Opry for years, and he was one of the most famous Tennesseans alive at the time.
Acuff and the GOP Senatorial candidate, Rep. B. Carroll Reece, went around the state, combining concerts with political speeches and drawing enormous crowds, making a lot of Democrats nervous. Might the combination of Acuff’s celebrity and the Crump machine refusing to turn out for the Browning-Kefauver insurgency be enough for the Republicans to score a stunning upset in one or both race?
For his part, Kefauver stuck to the strategy that got him there: campaigning relentlessly, and hammering his populist themes. “I believe in a policy of government that places human values above material values,” he told voters. “My opponent, on the other hand, has always been on the side of the big monopoly interests.”
As it turns out, the crowds who turned out at Acuff’s rallies liked his music more than his politics, and he and Reece both lost by margins of nearly 2-to-1.
The Crump-McKellar machine’s reputation for electoral invulnerability would never really recover after that, and McKellar lost his bid for an unprecedented seventh term in the Senate to Albert Gore, Sr. in 1952. Crump died in 1954; McKellar passed three years later, bringing an end to an era of Tennessee political history.
Kefauver was on his way to the Senate, where a remarkable ride – one that even he probably couldn’t imagine – awaited him.
Estes Kefauver for President 
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