By Ray Hill Governor Tom C. Rye had run for the United States Senate in the 1918 Democratic primary against Senator John Knight Shields as a supporter of President Woodrow Wilson and lost.  Rye’s defeat did not necessarily mean the people of Tennessee had turned...

By Ray Hill Colonel Luke Lea, away in Europe during the First World War, had never gotten along with John Knight Shields when they were colleagues in the United States Senate.  Lea’s newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean sided with Shields’ opponent, Governor Tom Rye in...

By Ray Hill The United States was finally catching a glimpse of the end of the bloodiest conflict in human history, World War II, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt vacationed at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia.  Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait by artist...

The Strickland Case By Ray Hill “I’m guilty,” were the only words spoken by William “Billy” Strickland, a fresh-faced twenty-eight year old when he revisited the Knox County Court House.  Strickland had been engaged in a bitter battle for custody of his four year-old...

By Ray Hill The very idea that anything but a Democrat could represent Tennessee’s Hermitage District in Congress seemed not only outlandish, but utterly unthinkable. The Fifth Congressional district of Tennessee was known as “the Hermitage District” because it...

By Ray Hill Congressman Joseph W. Byrns, Jr. had first been elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1938, toppling incumbent Richard M. Atkinson in a hard fought campaign inside the Democratic Primary. Tennessee’s “Hermitage District,” so named because the...

By Ray Hill Joseph Wellington Byrns was almost surely the most popular political figure inside Tennessee’s “Hermitage District.”  That was the Congressional district in Tennessee which encompassed Nashville and the “Hermitage”, home of General Andrew Jackson.  For...

 By Ray Hill   Kenneth D. McKellar, Tennessee’s senior United States senator, had won a thumping renomination inside the Democratic primary, beating Congressman Finis Garrett, the Minority Leader of the U. S. House of Representatives.  Tennessee Republicans...

By Ray Hill Tennessee politics was in flux in 1928 due to the nomination of New York governor Alfred E. Smith as the Democratic nominee for president.  Smith, a cigar-chomping, derby hat wearing product of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen was a pronounced wet who openly...

  By Ray Hill Former governor Prentice Cooper was running hard for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate against incumbent Albert Gore, who was seeking a second term.  The sixty-two year old Cooper toured the state accompanied by his much younger...