By Ray Hill A bare-knuckle political battle had rolled across Tennessee for the Democratic nomination fort the United States Senate in 1938. The contest was a three way fight between incumbent U. S. Senator George L. Berry, Congressman J. Ridley Mitchell, and A. T....
By Ray Hill Following the demise of Governor Gordon Browning’s plan to emasculate the Shelby County political machine headed by E. H. Crump, Tennessee Democrats were deeply divided. Governor Browning watched with dismay as his appointee to the United States Senate,...
By Ray Hill The political pot in Tennessee ceased to boil when Governor Gordon Browning appointed George L. Berry, President of the International Printing and Pressmen’s Union, to the United States Senate on May 7, 1937. Still, the pot certainly continued to...
By Ray Hill The unexpected death of Senator Nathan L. Bachman had plunged Tennessee politics into turmoil. The responsibility for filling the vacancy caused by Senator Bachman’s death fell to Governor Gordon Browning. The pressure on Browning very quickly became...
By Ray Hill Nathan Lynn Bachman, Tennessee’s junior United States senator, had every reason in the world to be content; he had easily been reelected to his first six-year term in November of 1936. Bachman was also one of the most personally popular members of the...
By Ray Hill While growing up, one of the names I heard most frequently on the television news was that of J. William Fulbright, the senator from Arkansas and Chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. Of course that was during a time when there were...
By Ray Hill Harold Earthman had been a successful businessman, served for a brief time in the Tennessee House of Representatives and as the County Judge (or County Mayor) of Rutherford County. A portly man with prematurely gray hair, Earthman easily won the...
By Ray Hill Tennessee was represented by ten men in the U. S. House of Representatives and two in the United States Senate in 1945. This column will provide mini-biographies of Tennessee’s Congressional delegation at that time. Kenneth D. McKellar was Tennessee’s...
By Ray Hill There are few people in our community who haven’t either heard of or visited the magnificent Biltmore House. Biltmore was the vision of George Washington Vanderbilt II, the grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. George Vanderbilt’s father, William,...
By Ray Hill Almost entirely forgotten today, Benton McMillin was one of the most popular politicians in Tennessee for decades. McMillin served in Congress for twenty years, two terms as Tennessee’s governor, and went on to serve as a diplomat. McMillin’s wife,...
By Ray Hill Despite...
By Ray Hill Kenneth...
By Ray Hill...
By Ray Hill It will...
By Ray Hill Kenneth McKellar...
By Ray Hill Even as a...