Title: Charles Fontenay's Kefauver Biography Drafts and Critiques

Date/Date Range :   1971

Extent: 0.2 linear feet

Abstract:

This collection, the Charles Fontenay's Kefauver Biography, 1971, contains a draft and two critiques on his book from his publishers and himself.

Call number: MS-2515

Repository: University of Tennessee Special Collections Library, Knoxville, TN

Aquisition Information:

Collection is property of the UT Special Collections Library.

Access Restrictions:

Collection is open for research.

Copyright:

The copyright interests in this collection remain with the creator. For more information, contact the Special Collections Library.

Preferred Citation:

[Identification of Item], Charles Fontenay's Kefauver Biography Drafts and Critiques, MS-2515. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Special Collections Library.

Collection consists of two folders.

Carey Estes Kefauver (1903-1963) was a U.S. House Representative (1939-1949), U.S. Senator (1950-1963), and 1956 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. He graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1924 and Yale Law School in 1927. In 1935 he married Nancy Piggott, a native of Scotland.

During his years in the Senate, he served on the Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and sponsored the Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act of 1962. He lost favor among Southerners with his support of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision to desegregate schools and when he and Albert Gore, Sr., were the only southern senators to refuse to sign the Southern Manifesto, intending to block school integration, in 1956.

In 1952, he lost to Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic Presidential Nomination, but in 1956 he was Stevenson's Vice Presidential running mate.

The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville published Charles Fontenay's book Estes Kefauver, a Biography in 1980, with this statement on Fontenay's qualifications:

"Charles Fontenay is doubly qualified to write this biography. An experience political reporter, he covered Kefauver's 1948 U. S. Senate campaign for the Nashville Tennessean. In addition, his personal friendship with the candidate from that year until Kefauver's death fifteen years later equipped him to probe the late senator's little-known personal story. The author's interviews with Kefauver's family, friends, and Chattanooga colleagues enrich the first portion of the book, which details the politician's early years and family life. In order to describe the public and private aspects of Kefauver's political years more fully, Fontenay consulted numerous documentary sources and extensively interviewed Kefauver's former administrative assistants, staff members of his Antitrust and Monopoly Committee, his secretary, and a key campaign aide."

This collection, the Charles Fontenay's Kefauver Biography, 1971, contains a draft and two critiques on his book from his publishers and himself.

• Fontenay, Charles L., 1917-.
• Kefauver, Estes, 1903-1963.
• United States -- Politics and government -- 1945-1989.