By Ray Hill Governor Prentice Cooper was seeking a third two-year term in 1942 and found himself hard pressed by his opponent, J. Ridley Mitchell. Mitchell was a wily politician and had served as the Congressman from Tennessee’s Fourth District from 1931-39, leaving...

By Ray Hill The administration of Governor Prentice Cooper, unlike that of his predecessor Gordon Browning, had been relatively quiet. Cooper and Browning were as different in temperament as they were in appearance. Gordon Browning was a big, bluff man with a shock of...

By Ray Hill By the fall of 1937, E. H. Crump, leader of the Shelby County political machine, was openly fighting Governor Gordon Browning. After having supported Browning for governor in 1936, Senator Kenneth D. McKellar’s prediction that Crump could not trust...

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 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 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...