Background
Kefauver was born on July 26, 1903 in Madisonville, Tennessee, the son of Phredonia Bradford (born Estes) and Robert Cooke Kefauver, a hardware manager.
Kefauver was born on July 26, 1903 in Madisonville, Tennessee, the son of Phredonia Bradford (born Estes) and Robert Cooke Kefauver, a hardware manager.
Kefauver graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1924 and received a degree from Yale Law School in 1927.
Returning to Tennessee, Kefauver eventually had a flourishing law practice in Chattanooga. In 1939 he entered politics when he was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives, to which he was reelected four times. He won a U. S. Senate seat in 1948 and retained it in 1954 and 1960. An outstanding exponent of the New and Fair Deals, Kefauver became interested in reforming and modernizing the machinery of Congress. He coauthored 20th Century Congress (1947) with Jack Levin. As a Southern Congressman Kefauver was somewhat of a loner, for he supported anti-poll tax and antilynching legislation as well as school desegregation. Kefauver became nationally prominent in 1950 and 1951 as chairman of the Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. His televised hearings exposed organized crime and its connection with politics in some U. S. cities. His book Crime in America (1951) recounted his experiences. In 1952 and 1956 he was a contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. He won the vice-presidential nomination in 1956 after a close convention floor vote defeated Senator John F. Kennedy. However, Kefauver and his running mate Adlai Stevenson lost the election to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kefauver died of a heart attack on August 10, 1963, in Bethesda, Maryland.
(The super rich having all of the money.)
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 allowing 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.
Member of the U. S. House of Representatives (1939-1949)
In 1935 Kefauver married Nancy Pigott of Glasgow, Scotland, eight years his junior, whom he had met during her visit to relatives in Chattanooga. They raised four children, one of them adopted. Mrs. Kefauver died in 1967.