Frank Goad Clement was an American lawyer and politician who served as Governor of Tennessee from 1953 to 1959, and from 1963 to 1967.
Background
Frank Goad Clement was born on June 2, 1920 in Dickson, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of Robert Samuel Clement, a lawyer, and Maybelle Goad. Reared in hard times in a deeply religious fundamentalist Christian household, Clement became a political populist and a devout "Bible toter" at an early age. He also developed a special talent for old-style oratory with the help of his father's half-sister, Dockie Shipp Weems. While other schoolboys dreamed of success in sports or country music, Clement's ambition was to become governor of Tennessee.
Education
After attending public schools in Kentucky and Tennessee, Clement entered Cumberland University in 1937. A young man in a hurry, he transferred to Vanderbilt Law School in 1939 and passed the state bar in 1941. The following year, he received his LL. B.
Career
Clement eschewed private practice and became an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working on wartime internal security and selective-service cases out of the bureau's Chicago office. He was inducted into the army as a private in November 1943 and was discharged in 1946 a first lieutenant and commander of a military police battalion in Texas. Upon his return home, political friends maneuvered Clement's appointment as general counsel for the Tennessee Railroad and Public Utilities Commission. Serving from 1946 to 1950, he gained a reputation as a "people's lawyer" for his handling of rate cases. At the same time, Clement took on numerous civic and charitable tasks. In addition to becoming a popular speaker on the high school commencement circuit, he was chairman of the Young Democrats of Tennessee and of the state March of Dimes and was chosen state commander of the American Legion, all in a relatively short span. In 1950, just as Clement was preparing to make a bid for the governorship, the Korean War intervened, and he was called back into the army. Before he left, he announced his intention to run for governor in 1952. As in World War II, Clement was spared from overseas duty and became a civilian again in late 1951. He immediately mounted a campaign against Governor Gordon Browning, who had served six terms in Congress as well as three two-year gubernatorial terms. Clement proved successful in courting the state's teachers as well as Ed Crump of Memphis, one of the last great machine bosses, and other foes of Browning. As a result, the challenger defeated the incumbent impressively (47 percent to 38 percent) in the Democratic primary. He then won the general election by the largest popular vote in Tennessee history to become, at thirty-two, the youngest governor in the United States. In 1954, Clement captured 68 percent of the vote in a primary rematch with Browning and went on to win Tennessee's first constitutionally mandated four-year term. Clement was a forceful, charismatic campaigner whose rhetorical repertoire included florid biblical phrases, matter-of-fact indictments of opponents' records, and substantial plans of action for Tennessee. He often wore white linen suits to speak at rallies, which had all of the fervor of evangelistic revival meetings. As governor, Clement was regarded as a liberal social spender by conservative Tennessee standards. In his first term, he engineered a $5 million bond issue for free textbooks for school-children, created a new department of mental health and a division of services for the blind, and worked to increase teachers' salaries, old-age pensions, and aid to the disabled. The trend toward expansion of services continued in Clement's four-year term. As a result, the state debt limit had to be raised more than once and the sales tax had to be boosted. After the United States Supreme Court's decision on school integration in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), racial tension in Tennessee heightened. Adopting a moderate stance, Clement vetoed hard-line segregationist bills sent to him and authorized the National Guard to help restore order in the town of Clinton, where white rioting had occurred during the implementation of a federal judge's desegregation order in the late summer of 1956. In 1957, in an eloquent speech before the legislature, Clement told Tennesseans, "We must not overlook that the Negro is equal to the white in the eyes of the law and in the sight of God. " At the same time, however, Clement promoted legislation providing for educational choice for whites, clearly violating the spirit of the Brown ruling. In 1956, Clement won the assignment of delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. He hoped that a rousing performance might bring him the vice-presidential nomination, as Alben Barkley's keynote address had earned him the nomination in 1948. In his familiar bombastic style ("How long, oh how long, America?") , Clement recited a long litany of sins allegedly committed by the "opposition party of privilege and pillage. " Especially notable was his portrayal of the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket as the "vice-hatchetman slinging slander and spreading half-truths while the Top Man peers down the green fairways of indifference. " Clement received only mixed reviews for his speech and lost out to a Tennessee rival, Senator Estes Kefauver, in the race to be Adlai Stevenson's running mate. Forbidden by law to succeed himself, Clement endorsed the gubernatorial candidacy of his longtime campaign manager and commissioner of agriculture, Buford Ellington, who prevailed in the election of 1958. Virtually ignored during the fiscally conservative Ellington years, Clement returned to the political wars in 1962, securing a third term as governor by defeating two opponents in the Democratic primary and besting retired Nautilus commander William Anderson, an independent candidate, in the final election. Clement's agenda again called for substantially increased spending for education and social services. Consequently, he had to guide through the legislature an extremely unpopular revenue package that included a sales tax on utilities. He also appointed a racially mixed human-relations commission and made a serious effort to find places for blacks in his administration. Still, he failed to sign a state code of fair practices drawn up by his own commission in 1964 in the midst of the critical struggle for passage of federal civil rights legislation. An interesting highlight of Clement's last term was his impassioned crusade against the death penalty. After fruitlessly proposing its abolition in the legislature, he commuted the sentences of five men facing execution. In 1964, Clement entered the race to fill out the remaining two years of the term of Senator Kefauver, who had died in 1963. Clement lost narrowly to Congressman Ross Bass in the Democratic primary because white voters were alienated by the utilities tax and black voters were repelled by the rejection of the fair-practices code. Clement tried again in 1966 and upset Senator Bass in the primary. Clement was in turn upset in the general election by Howard Baker, Jr. , the scion of a family of Republican lawyer-politicians and son-in-law of United States Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen. Baker benefited from steady Republican advances in Tennessee over the years, and his cool urbanity seemed better suited to the age of television than Clement's unbridled passion. Clement took his defeats hard and never completely resigned himself to private law practice. Before he could make another political comeback, however, he died in an automobile accident in Nashville.
Achievements
His 10 years in office was the longest of any of the state's 20th-century governors. Clement owed much of his rapid political rise to his ability to deliver rousing, mesmerizing speeches. His sermon-like keynote address at the 1956 Democratic National Convention has been described as both one of the best and one of the worst keynote addresses in the era of televised conventions.
Views
Quotations:
"If a man's religion and politics don't mix, there is something wrong with his politics. "
Connections
On January 6, 1940, Clement married Lucille Laverne Christianson, the daughter of a lumber dealer and politician; they had three children.
