U.S. House of Representatives Kefauver was elected to five terms in the
House of Representatives as a
Democrat. As a member of the House during President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's time 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. In particular, he backed the controversial
Tennessee Valley Authority and was best known for his successful bid to rebuff the efforts of Tennessee Senator
Kenneth McKellar to gain political control over the agency. As a member of the House, "Kefauver began to manifest his concern over the growing concentration of economic power in the United States", concentrating much of his legislative efforts on congressional reform and
anti-monopoly measures. Among the committees Kefauver chaired was the
House Select Committee on Small Business, which investigated economic concentration in the U.S. business world in 1946. That same year, Kefauver also introduced legislation to plug loopholes in the
Clayton Antitrust Act. In a May 1948 article, which appeared in the
American Economic Review, Kefauver also proposed that more staff and money be allocated to the
Antitrust Division of the
Justice Department, and to the
Federal Trade Commission; that new legislation to make it easier to prosecute big corporations be enacted; and recommended the danger of monopolies should be publicized more. The Kefauver investigation into television and
juvenile delinquency in the mid-1950s led to an even more intensive investigation in the early 1960s. The new probe came about after people became increasingly concerned over juvenile violence, and the possibility of this behavior being related to violent television programs. His
progressive stances on the issues put Kefauver in direct competition with
E. H. Crump, the former U.S. Congressman, mayor of
Memphis, and boss of the state's Democratic Party, when he chose to seek the Democratic nomination for the
U.S. Senate in 1948. During the primary, Crump and his allies accused Kefauver of being a "
fellow traveler" and of working for the "pinkos and communists" with the stealth of a
raccoon. In a televised speech given in Memphis, in which he responded to such charges, Kefauver put on a
coonskin cap and proudly proclaimed, "I may be a pet coon, but I'm not Boss Crump's pet coon." To win election to the Senate, Kefauver defeated the incumbent
Tom Stewart in the 1948 Democratic primary. Kefauver was backed by the influential editor
Edward J. Meeman of the
Memphis Press-Scimitar, who had long fought the Crump machine for its corruption and stranglehold over Memphis politics. After he went on to win both the primary and the election, he adopted the cap as his trademark and wore it in every successive campaign. He received the cap from journalist
Drue Smith. 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. Kefauver's success—despite his liberal views—was predicated largely on his support by the
Nashville Tennessean, a consistently liberal newspaper that served as a focus for anti-Crump sentiment in the state. His constituency included many prominent citizens, whose views were considerably less liberal than his, but who admired him for his integrity. Despite opposition from the Crump machine, Kefauver won the Democratic nomination, which in those days was
tantamount to election in Tennessee. His victory is widely seen as the beginning of the end for the Crump machine's influence in statewide politics. Once in the Senate, Kefauver began to make a name for himself as a crusader for
consumer protection laws and
antitrust legislation. On
civil rights, he was ambivalent: he admitted later that he had difficulty adjusting to the idea of
racial integration, and in 1960 he held out to the last in favor of permitting cross-examination of black complainants in voting rights cases. Despite this fact, Kefauver supported the civil rights program generally, and consistently supported organized labor and other movements considered liberal in the South at that time.
U.S. Senate Overview After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, Kefauver guided the
Celler–Kefauver Act of 1950, which amended the Clayton Act by plugging loopholes that allowed a corporation to purchase a competing firm's assets, through the U.S. Senate. Between 1957 and 1963, his U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee investigated concentration in the U.S. economy, industry by industry, and it issued a report exposing monopoly prices in the steel, automotive, bread and pharmaceutical industries. 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 Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee also held hearings on the pharmaceutical industry between 1959 and 1963 that 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. Some of what Kefauver's hearings on the U.S. pharmaceutical industry revealed includes the following: "Witnesses told of conflicts of interest for the
American Medical Association (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; this competition, in turn, had led to the marketing of new drugs that were no improvements on drugs already on the market, but nevertheless heralded as dramatic breakthroughs without proper concern for either effectiveness or safety." At that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had limited authority to require efficacy standards or disclose risks. 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. His legislation seemed likely to fail. However, at the end of 1961, European and Australian doctors reported that an epidemic of children born with deformities of their arms and legs was caused by their use of
thalidomide, which was heavily marketed to pregnant women. These positions made him even more unpopular with his state party's machine than ever before, especially after fellow Tennessee senator
Albert Gore Sr.,
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of
Texas, and he became one of the only three Southern senators to not sign the so-called
Southern Manifesto in 1956. He was named in a popular account of the Senate as a Southern Senator who had been excluded from the
Southern Caucus due to his opposition to the
filibuster and less than impeccable defense of
States rights. In fact, these unpopular positions, combined with his reputation as a maverick with a penchant for sanctimony, earned him so much enmity even from other senators that one Democratic insider felt compelled to dub him "the most hated man in Congress". Kefauver also led hearings that targeted indecent publications and pornography. Among his targets were
pin-ups, including
Bettie Page, and the magazines that featured them.
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 held hearings in fourteen cities and heard testimony from over 600 witnesses. Many of the witnesses were high-profile crime bosses, including such well-known names as
Willie Moretti,
Joe Adonis, and
Frank Costello, the last making himself famous by refusing to allow his face to be filmed during his questioning and then staging a much-publicized walkout. A number of politicians also appeared before the committee and saw their careers ruined. Among them were former Governor
Harold G. Hoffman of
New Jersey and Mayor
William O'Dwyer of New York City. The committee's hearings, which were televised live, just as many Americans were first 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. In fact, in 1951, Kefauver appeared as a celebrity guest on the new game show ''
What's My Line?'' discussing the hearings briefly with the panel, showing how popular these hearings were with early television viewers. 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. Election-eve publication of stolen secret committee documents hurt the Democratic Party in
Cook County, cost Lucas the election, and gave Dirksen national prominence as the man who defeated the Senate majority leader.
1952 election In the
1952 presidential election, Kefauver ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. In the opening
New Hampshire primary, he campaigned against incumbent president
Harry S Truman. He wore his coonskin cap, sometimes going by dogsled through the snow. Kefauver won in an electrifying victory. Truman then withdrew his bid for re-election. Kefauver won 12 of the 15
primaries in 1952, losing two to "
favorite son" candidates and
Florida to leading
Southern Democrat Richard Russell. He received 3.1 million votes, while the eventual 1952 Democratic presidential nominee,
Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, got only 78,000 votes. But primaries were not, at that time, the main method of delegate selection for the national convention. Kefauver entered the convention with a few hundred votes still needed for a majority of the delegates. The Kefauver campaign became the classic example of how presidential primary victories do not automatically lead to the nomination itself. he faced staunch opposition for renomination from his party's still-thriving pro-
segregation wing. Nonetheless, he won the Democratic primary decisively, receiving nearly double the votes of his rival, judge Andrew T. Taylor of
Jackson. 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. into law, President
John F. Kennedy presents the pen to Senator Kefauver Kefauver voted in favor of the
24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1962, 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
Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act. The bill imposed controls on the pharmaceutical industry that 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. In signing the Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act, President
John F. Kennedy stated, "As I say, we want to pay particular appreciation to Senator Kefauver for the long hearings which he held which permitted us to have very effective legislation on hand when this matter became of such strong public interest." == Death ==