HISTORY OF TENNESSEE
Civil Rights and Modern Tennessee
*During
the Second World War, more than 300,000 Tennesseans served in the US
armed forces. 6 received the Medal of Honor. 5,731
Tennesseans were killed, including the first American woman to die in
service during WWII: Cornelia Fort, of Nashville, served as a
flight trainer, and was accidentally killed by a student in March
1943—she had previously been shot at by Japanese warplanes over
Honolulu, where she was a flying instructor in December 1941.
*The War changed Tennessee. It created the city of Oak Ridge,
spread Tennesseans involved in war industries across the country, and
showed thousands of young people a wider world—and none of them wanted
to go back to the farm.
*In McMinn County, veterans came back from defeating Hitler and the
Japanese to find out that their own county government was even more
corrupt than they had left it. McMinn County (between Knoxville
and Chattanooga) had traditionally been Republican—they had elected
Harry Burn to the statehouse before and after he voted for women’s
suffrage—but in 1932, the wealthy Cantrell family, allied with Boss
Crump, backed FDR in the presidential elections, and won support for
the Democratic Part in McMinn County. Paul Cantrell was elected
sheriff in the 1936, 1938 and 1940 elections, but by slim margins. The
sheriff was the key county official. Cantrell was elected to the state
senate in 1942 and 1944; his chief deputy, Pat Mansfield, was elected
sheriff. In 1946 Paul Cantrell again sought the sheriff's office.
*Cantrell and Mansfield had been famous for taking bribes from
moonshiners, for shaking the local populace down for fees and fines,
for using their power to control the ballot boxes, and for general
corruption. The citizens of the county had repeatedly asked the
Department of Justice or the FBI to send someone to observe the county
elections, but they were repeatedly ignored.
*In 1946, the WWII veterans of McMinn county vowed to change
things. They put together a ‘GI Party’ of all former
servicemen. They were non-partisan, and promised fair and free
elections. In response, Cantrell hired 200-300 deputies to watch
the polls.
*The GI election observers were beaten up and most of them were sent
home; a few were taken prisoner. A black veteran came to vote,
and one of the deputies told him 'Nigger, you can't vote here
today.' He tried to vote anyway, was beaten up, and then shot
(although he lived).
*In Tennessee, the law stated that ballots had to be counted in a
public place, so that anyone could see them. Cantrell’s deputies
kept GI poll watchers hostage to serve as ‘witnesses,’ but they broke a
window and escaped. The deputies then took all the ballot boxes
to the county jail in Athens, threatening to shoot any GIs who got in
their way.
*The deputies fired at GIs from inside the jail, wounding two.
The GIs returned fire, then went to the local National Guard armory and
got out what few weapons were there. They laid siege to the jail
overnight, and eventually blew up the front porch with dynamite, after
which the deputies surrendered.
*When the votes were counted properly, the GI candidate for sheriff won
1,168 to 789, and other GI candidates won by similar margins. The
GIs set up a three-man council and a small police force (6 men for
Athens, 12 for Etowah), and others were asked to patrol the
county. Mansfield moved back to Georgia, and Cantrell went on to
become a successful car dealer.
*A similar revolution occurred two years later on a state-wide
level. In 1948, Jim McCord (supported by Boss Crump) ran for a
third term as governor. However, in 1947, he had convinced Boss Crump
(against his better judgment) to help him create a 2% general sales tax
to fund better schools. In the 1948 Democratic primary, he was
opposed by former governor Gordon Browning, whom Crump had forced from
office in 1938.
*Browning got 56% of the state’s vote in the Democratic primary,
despite Crump’s opposition, and then beat the Republican candidate,
country music star Roy Acuff with 67% of the state’s vote.
*The senatorial race in 1948 was even more complex. The current
senator was Tom Stewart, who had been supported by Crump for
years. However, he had not had an impressive Senate career, and
had not been particularly supportive of TVA. He also had a
reputation for nepotism, and over the years had managed to put fourteen
different relatives on his staff at various times. Crump decided
not to back him in the 1948 Democratic primary, but Stewart decided to
run anyway.
*Crump’s people chose a different man, John Mitchell, despite the fact that they had never even met him.
*A third Democrat also chose to enter the race. Estes Kefauver
was a congressman from Chatanooga, and a young and energetic
figure. He supported TVA and world peace, and he sincerely
opposed Boss Crump.
*Crump tried to discredit Kefauver by linking him with communism, and
said he looked as shifty as a pet raccoon. At a speech in
Memphis, Kefauver pulled a coonskin hat out of his pocket (see page
288), put it on, and said that he might be a pet coon, but he wasn’t
Boss Crump’s pet coon. He got 42% of the primary vote, while
Steward got 32% and Crump’s man Mitchell only got 24%.
*Kefauver then beat the Republican candidate, B. Carroll Reese, a former congressman from East Tennessee.
*Even the presidential election of 1948 split the Democrats.
Harry Truman had become president upon the death of FDR, but to
everyone’s surprise (including his own) he had come out in support of
civil rights for black Americans, and angered many conservatives.
At the same time, liberals hated him because he was tough on communism.
*Conservative southern Democrats walked out of the party in 1948,
forming the States’ Rights Party, also called the Dixiecrats, and
nominated South Carolina’s governor, Strom Thurmond. Crump gave
Thurmond his whole-hearted support, and denounced Truman.
*Liberal Democrats formed what they called the Progressive party, and
nominated Henry Wallace, another of FDR’s former vice-presidents.
*The Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, governor of New York. He
had run against FDR in 1944, mostly as a formality, but this time
around he was expected to win. Truman’s first term had not been
as successful as FDR’s terms had been, and most people thought the
country was tired of him, and that, with the Democrats split, he was in
trouble.
*Dewey did carry 16 states and won 45% of the popular vote and 180 electoral votes.
*Strom Thurmond carried four states in the Deep South and got one
electoral vote from Tennessee, but he only got 2.4% of the national
vote and 39 electoral votes. Thurmond would go on to be a Senator
from South Carolina, and would be the the longest-serving senator, the
only senator to serve at the age of 100, and one of the few politicians
to serve in the 21st Century who had also received votes from Civil War
veterans.
*Wallace only got about 12,000 fewer popular votes than Thurmond, but he got no electoral votes.
*Truman got the eleven electoral votes from Tennessee that Thurmond
didn’t get (we had 12 in those days), and he also won 49.7% of the
popular vote and enough other electoral votes to total 303, enough to
win a term on his own.
*Crump’s men had been defeated in three major races, and his own power was sharply reduced.
*In 1952, Crump’s old friend Senator McKellar, was up for re-election, and he too was beaten, by Albert Gore, senior.
*Tennessee as a whole even voted Republican in 1952, because we liked
Ike—since the Republican party was founded in 1856, this was only the
fourth time Tennessee had voted for a Republican president.
Crump’s power was largely finished, and he died two years later.
*In 1952, governor Browning was also up for re-election, and by this
point, he represented the old guard in Tennessee politics. He was
challenged by a young man named Frank Clement, who accused Browning of
being controlled by the railroads, and condemned him for not ending the
2% sales tax.
*Clement was an energetic public speaker, a deeply religious man, a
veteran, and he opposed taxes. Tennesseans chose him over
Browning in the Democratic primary, and elected him in November.
*Only 32 when he was elected, the boy governor Clement immediately set
out to visit all 95 counties in Tennessee, making friends with the
rural voters of the state. He had a plan to pave the roads and
improve schools, both of which he did, although he did so in part by
reversing his campaign pledge and raising the 2% sales tax to 3%.
As part of his school improvement plan, he saw to it that schoolbooks
were provided for free to Tennessee’s elementary and secondary
students, which had never been done before. He also created a
state Department of Mental Health, and made its leader part of the
governor’s cabinet. He even campaigned against the death penalty,
but without success.
*Clement was the first governor to benefit from something that had
actually been done by his predecessor. In 1952, Browning had
called for a convention to amend the state constitution.
*When the convention met in 1953, they had a problem that no Tennessee
constitutional convention had ever had before: no-one alive had
attended an earlier state (or national) constitutional convention, so
they weren’t entirely sure what to do. One thing they did do,
which makes the Tennessee constitution different from that for all the
United States, was to declare that when amendments were made, the
original text that they changed would simply be wiped out. In the
US Constitution nothing is ever remove, more amendments are just added
at the end. This means, for example, that the US Constitution
still refers to blacks as counting as only 3/5 of a person for purposes
of taxation and representation, even though this was changed during
Reconstruction. The Tennessee Constitution changes when its laws
do, which makes it conform to standards of most civil law practise, but
harder for historians to see how the document has changed.
*The most significant amendment made in 1953 lengthened the governor’s
term to 4 years, but forbade any governor from having consecutive terms
(although the sitting governor was exempt from that rule).
*This meant that in 1954, Clement could run again, and when he won, he
got to serve four more years before an election. However, he
could not run in the next election, so he supported his old campaign
manager, Buford Ellington, who also won, in 1958. Ellington then
supported Clement in 1962, and Clement supported Ellington in
1966. The Nashville Tennessean ridiculed this practise as
‘leapfrog government,’ but the voters of Tennessee did not seem to
mind. Clement was young and exciting and nationally well-known,
while Ellington was seen as more moderate and responsible, and both
remained popular with Tennesseans. Clement would probably have
run for governor in 1970, and probability would have won, but he was
killed in a car accident in 1969.
*During this period, Clement (and Ellington) saw Tennessee transformed
from a rural agricultural state to an urban manufacturing one. In
1960, Tennessee was more urban than rural for the first time, with over
half the population living in cities and towns with at least 2,500
people each. What farming there was also became more modern and
mechanised (from a state total of 12,000 tractors in 1940 to 100,000 in
1960), and the crops Tennesseans grew became more diversified, as
tobacco, soybeans, and corn became the most important (legal) cash
crops, and in 1967, Tennessee grew the smallest cotton crop it had
produced in a century.
*Tennessee was a powerful force in the nation in the 1950s. In
1956, Frank Clement, Estes Kefauver, and Albert Gore, senior were all
considered for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clement
was even the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention, but he ended
up hurting himself by giving a wild and energetic stump speech full of
religious symbolism and frenzied attacks on the Republicans that was
seen as unsuited for a national audience. Kefauver was selected
as the Vice-Presidential candidate, but the 1952 candidate, Adlai
Stevenson, was given another shot at the top position, and again he
lost.
*This was also the decade when Disney released Davy Crockett, King of
the Wild Frontier as a movie and television series. In 1959, The
Battle of New Orleans about Andrew Jackson’s victory in 1815 was the
number one single for nine weeks in a row.
*A man from Bristol, Tennessee Ernie Ford, was one of the most popular
musicians of the 1950s, as he blended popular and country hillbilly
music into rockabilly music. Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium
broadcast the Grand Ole Opry (including some of the Carter Family)
across the nation, and Sun Records in Memphis made the first recordings
of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.
*Tennessee also experienced profound changes in the 1950s, particularly
as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka. This case overturned the old ruling of
Plessey v. Ferguson, and its doctrine of separate but equal
facilities. In Brown v. Board, the Court declared that separate
facilities were inherently unequal, and could not be made so.
Therefore, under the XIV Amendment, segregation in the South was
illegal and had to end. This sparked a wave of resentment across
the South.
*In Tennessee, as in most of the South, blacks and whites lived, in
many ways, in separate worlds. They mostly lived in separate
neighbourhoods, each race had its own schools, churches, parks,
swimming pools, and its own facilities in places that had to be
shared: there were separate water fountains, restrooms, sections
of busses, and balconies in theatres.
*Still, when desegregation became national policy, Tennessee did not
take the approach that much of the rest of the South did, which was one
of massive resistance. In 1956, a group of Southern politicians
issued the so-called Southern Manifesto, condemning the Brown v. Board
decision, but neither of Tennessee’s Senators (Kefauver or Gore) signed
it, nor did many of Tennessee’s US Representatives. South
Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond, on the other hand, would earn the
record for the longest filibuster ever on the floor of the Senate by
peaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to stop
civil rights legislation in 1957.
*The truth is that Tennessee had even begun some desegregation before
Brown v. Board. In 1950, four black men sued for admission to
UT’s graduate school and law school. Judge Robert Love Taylor of
Knoxville (nephew of the governor and senator of the same name) ruled
in their favour, but did not order the school to actually let them
in. When they took it to the US Supreme Court, UT relented and
the two who still wanted in were admitted in January 1952.
Although neither of them graduated, the first black student to graduate
UT did finish in 1954: her name was Lillian Jenkins, and she
earned a master’s degree in Special Education.
*In the early 1950s several private colleges began to desegregate, too,
including the Divinity School at Vanderbilt and the School of Theology
at Sewanee.
*Black students in Clinton, in Anderson County, began to seek admission
to the local high school as early in 1951. At the time, they had
to ride a bus to Knoxville to attend the black high school there.
*In 1955 Judge Taylor ordered Clinton High School to admit black
students in the 1956-57 school year. 15 black students registered
at the school, which had about 800 students. This made it the
first public school in the South to desegregate.
*At first there were no apparent problems. However, an advocate
of segregation from Washington, D.C. named John Kasper came down to
organise anti-integration protests. He tried to force the
principal, B.J. Brittain to resign, but his students and parents
supported him.
*Still, things got worse, and Judge Taylor issued a restraining order
against Kemper, who was later charged with inciting a riot (although he
was eventually acquitted). Local officials asked Governor Clement
to send help, and he sent 600 National Guardsmen.
*Some black students reported harassment and even death threats from
white students. Others said things weren’t so bad, and one white
student said ‘No, actually the black students weren't harassed that
much. They got to school without incident, because they came in the
back of the school, and the mob was in the front...Once inside the
school, they faced no harassment, neither was there any welcoming with
open arms.’
*When black students asked the school officials for additional
protection, it was denied, so local white citizens offered to escort
them to school. The most prominent of these was Reverend Paul
Turner, minister of the local white Baptist church. After
escorting his students to class on 4 December, he was attacked, beaten,
and left bleeding on the sidewalk. This attack on such a
respected figure shocked the town so much that there was no more
outright violence for the rest of the school year.
*In May 1957, Bobby Cain became the first black student to graduate
from a desegregated high school in Tennessee. In July, Judge
Taylor sentenced Kasper to a year in prison for violating a federal
injunction meant to force him to obey Taylor’s restraining order.
Everything seemed to be returning to normal.
*In October 1958, Clinton High School was blown up with dynamite.
Because it was on a Sunday, no-one was hurt, but the building was
destroyed. The Atomic Energy Commission lent the school officials
and abandoned school in Oak Ridge, and school continued. Overall,
integration had been a success, with the biggest problems instigated by
outside forces. Most whites might not have been happy with
desegregation, but they did not want to destroy their town over it.
*Things were harder in Nashville. There, the federal district
judge, William Miller, ordered schools to begin integrating in the fall
of 1957. The school board opposed this, and a compromise was
reached: only first grade would be integrated, and each year, as
those students moved up, the next set of first graders would be
integrated, so that desegregation would be a slow but relatively
painless process.
*Even with this concession, the school board redrew district lines so
that almost all school either served white or black communities, and it
allowed black students in mostly white areas to request to be shifted
to black schools. In the end, only 19 black students registered
for traditionally white schools.
*Still, people had second thoughts, especially when John Kasper showed
up in town and began to hold anti-desegregation meetings (see page 297
for a flyer). Nashville officials were ready, though. They
immediately arrested him on four separate charges, and when he posted
bond, they arrested him for illegal parking. Later he was
arrested again for inciting a riot. Judge Miller issued an
injunction against anyone who tried to interfere with desegregation,
and except for one school bombing (at night, with no injuries) things
went fairly smoothly after that.
*Until 1963, the plan to gradually integrate the schools, one grade at
a time, was used. In that year, the US Supreme Court ordered that
all grades in the Nashville schools be integrated.
*In 1960, Judge Taylor ordered that Knoxville and Knox County’s schools
be integrated one the one-grade-at-a-time plan (he had delayed a ruling
until he saw if Nashville’s plan would stand up at a 1959 Circuit Court
trial, which it did).
*Memphis spent much of the 1950s desegregating its busses, libraries,
and the city zoo, but did not desegregate the schools until 1961,
although Memphis State University began a gradual desegregation plan in
1959. There were no overt protests.
*Chattanooga did not desegregate until the 1960s.
*Johnson City desegregated by court order in 1965, and Langston High
School was shut down (along with most other coloured schools) because
no white parent was willing to let their child go to a black
school. ETSU had admitted its first black student, Eugene
Caruthers, a graduate student in music, who went on to direct the band
at Langston High for its last few years in operation.
*During the 1950s, all of Tennessee’s major politicians—our governors
and senators—were attacked on the grounds that they did not oppose
desegregation enough, and the truth is that Clement, Gore, and Kefauver
all supported integration, or at least did not oppose it.
Ellington flipped on the issue, at first supporting desegregation, then
telling the public that he was an old-fashioned segregationist, but
even then he did not do much to prove that. By the 1960s, most of
Tennessee’s major politicians needed the black vote too much to oppose
civil rights.
*There was some organised opposition to civil rights in
Tennessee. In 1955, Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson founded
the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, which opposed
integration. It claimed members in 75 counties of Tennessee, but
later admitted that it only had enough to form proper chapters in 14
counties, mostly in West Tennessee.
*There was also an attempt, in 1961, to organise a Citizens Council in
Memphis, which was part of a movement across the South to oppose
segregation. The Citizens Councils eventually merged with the
TFCG, but they never were very successful in Tennessee—one called
Nashville ‘the worse city in the world’ when so few Nashville people
would join up.
*The 1960s also saw the third appearance of the Ku Klux Klan, although
it was less important in Tennessee than elsewhere in the South, where
resistance to desegregation was more violent.
*In fact, Tennessee helped train some of the civil rights workers who
worked in other parts of the South. The Highlander Folk School
had been founded in Monteagle, in Grundy County, Tennessee in 1932 to
offer adult education, but with a socialist bent. In the 1950s,
emphasis focused towards training people to fight for civil rights, and
for complete integration of society, not just school
desegregation. One of the most famous students of Highlander was
Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King also attended the school.
Because Highlander had been founded by socialists, though, and some of
its leaders had communist ties, it was regarded as particularly
suspicious by many people at the time. In 1961 it was forced to
close for disobeying state segregation laws, but it reopened in
Knoxville where it stayed for ten years. Today it exists in New
Market as the Highlander Research and Education Center.
*The success of school desegregation led many civil rights leaders in
Tennessee and elsewhere to demand more. In 1960, the Nashville
Christian Leadership Council (a branch of King’s Southern Christian
Leadership Conference) staged sit-ins in four downtown Nashville
department stores. The demonstrators, mostly students, followed
the tenants of non-violence, being polite, reserved, and putting up
with almost anything.
*At the end of February, white agitators attacked black students at the
sit-ins, and the police came in to break things up, arresting the
blacks but not the white.
*Mayor Ben West appointed a bi-racial committee to try to work on a
solution, but in the meantime the Greyhound bus station started serving
anyone. Elsewhere, students told merchants that they would
boycott their stores if they were not served lunch, and most soon gave
in. Sit-ins brought desegregation faster in Nashville than in any
other place they were used.
*Sit-ins in Chattanooga in the same year led to race riots.
Knoxville had lengthy boycotts before store-owners gave in.
Sit-ins in Memphis resulted in the desegregation of almost all
businesses except lunch-counters by the fall of 1960; lunch counters
would be desegregated in 1962.
*Despite this, many blacks still had problems voting. In fact,
Fayette and Haywood Counties, the only two counties in Tennessee with
more black than white people, had the worse records of all. Of
17,000 voters in Haywood County, 17 were black. When blacks tried
to organise in these counties, hundreds of black tenant farmers were
kicked off their lands, denied access to local goods and services, and
had their bank loans called in. However, many of them
re-organised in a vast tent city around a few black-owned businesses
and properties. The US Justice Department had to come in, and
issued injunctions against the governments of both counties.
*By 1964, one year before the Civil Rights Act forced it on everyone
everywhere, Tennessee achieved 69% voter registration among
blacks. 1964 saw the first black legislator elected since the
1880s—A.W. Willis, junior, a Memphis attorney—and others soon
followed.
*Blacks particularly benefited from the 1962 redistricting of
Tennessee, the first since 1901, that re-drew election districts to
represent the changes in population distribution since then. This
gave even more power to the cities, where most blacks lived.
*Things were still far from equal, though. Blacks received worse
treatment and worse pay than white workers, no matter what they
did. In 1968, sanitation workers in Memphis began to strike for
better wages. They soon turned it into a civil rights issue as
well, for almost all of them were black. The NAACP came to
support them, and in March, Martin Luther King came to town, and urged
a one-day general strike for all black workers.
*King led a group of 5,000 peaceful demonstrators on a march through
town, but a small group of Black Power advocates called the Invaders
were there, too, and began looting and rioting.
*King was criticised across the nation, because it was obvious he did
not have control of the situation. He planned another march to
prove himself, but on 4 April 1968, he was shot by an assassin and
died. Blacks across Tennessee rioted.
*Shortly afterwards the mayor of Memphis agreed to give the black
sanitation workers a slight raise and recognition of their labour
union, and the strike ended.
*By the end of the 1960s, Tennessee had largely achieved integration
and the main goals of the civil rights movement, although certainly
racial inequality and racial discrimination existed afterwards and
still exist today.
*In the 1970s, Tennessee continued to change. In a 1977
constitutional convention, the Constitution was again amended.
The convention’s amendments changed interest rate laws so that credit
card companies could charge more than 10% interest (which had
previously been illegal). Counties no longer had to appoint a
constable or a cattle ranger. County sheriffs could now be
elected to any number of terms, which would last four years (before
they could have, at most, three consecutive two-year terms). Most
importantly, Tennessee’s governors were now allowed to serve two
consecutive terms (to avoid leapfrog government as seen in the
Clement-Ellington years), and could serve additional terms after a
break of at least one term.
*This period also saw the resurgence of the Republican Party. The
Democrats, especially on a national level, had become increasingly
associated with the civil rights movement, which was distasteful to
many white Southerners, even those in Tennessee who did not violently
oppose desegregation. During the Viet-Nam War, Democrats also
came to be associated with the anti-war movement and Republicans with
more solid, conservative values. Overall this was a switch that
had begun during the New Deal, when the Democrats began to become what
in modern terms would be called a liberal party and the Republicans, in
response, became conservative. Later, especially in the 1980s and
1990s, Republicans would also be seen as defenders of traditional
religious values, and Democrats as a group opposed to them, which would
also be important in a very religious state like Tennessee.
In 1966, Howard Baker defeated Frank Clement in a bid for the US
Senate. In 1968, Republicans took control of the lower house of
the General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction, and for
the rest of the century, control would switch between the two parties.
*In 1968 Tennessee also voted for the Republican presidential
candidate, Richard Nixon, and has ever since then been about as willing
to vote for one party in the presidential elections as for the other.
*In 1970, Buford Ellington could not run for governor again, so the
Democrats chose John Jay Hooker of Nashville (as they would again in
1998), who was defeated by Winfield Dunn, a Memphis dentist. Dunn
was the first Republican elected governor since Alf Taylor in
1920. In the same year, Albert Gore was defeated by William Brock
III in the Senate race.
*Dunn was succeeded by Democrat Ray Blanton, who defeated Lamar
Alexander in 1974. Blanton oversaw a very corrupt administration,
and would later end up in jail himself. Although the new
constitutional amendments let him run for governor again in 1978, he
did not. He did pardon 52 criminals in the last days of his term,
though, including a convicted murderer who was the son of one of his
political allies.
*The state was so shocked that the incoming governor, Republican Lamar
Alexander, and the Democratic-controlled legislature, worked out a deal
to inaugurate Alexander two days early, to prevent any more last-minute
pardons.
*Alexander was re-elected in 1982, the year that Knoxville hosted the
World’s Fair, building the Sunsphere as its centrepiece. The
Sunsphere is a 266-foot tall tower with a golden sphere on the
top. It was the first spherical building constructed in the
United States, and the golden colour actually comes from 24-karat gold
dust sealed between glass panes. During the World’s Fair it had a
restaurant in the top, but it closed afterwards. 22 nations and
more than 50 corporations participated, and the Fair was a moderate
success: the last World’s Fair in America to turn any profit, and
Petro’s Chilli and Chips invented their signature dish there.
Pigeon Forge also began its tourist industry at this time, to take
advantage of the people who came from all over the world to see
Knoxville. The Sunsphere still stands in Knoxville.
*In 1984, Tennessee elected a replacement for Senator Baker, Albert
Gore, junior, who would serve in the Senate until becoming
Vice-President in 1992, when he was replaced by a Republican and an
actor, Fred Thompson. In 1986, Tennessee elected Democrat Ned
McWherter governor, and he served for eight years, until Republican Don
Sundquist was elected in 1994. He served eight years and was
replaced by the Democrat Phil Bredesen.
*1994 was the year the Republicans took control of Tennessee, after
close to thirty years of gaining power. In that year, many
prominent Democrats, protesting the increasingly liberal nature of the
Democratic party (or the personal unpopularity of Bill Clinton early in
his presidency) switched sides and became Republicans, as did many
other conservative Democrats in the South. In that year, Dr. Bill
Frist of Nashville was elected to the US Senate over Jim Sasser, who
was running for a fourth term. Republicans also took control of
the state senate, but not the house.
*Three big issues exist in modern Tennessee politics.
*The first, and most obvious, is tax reform. Tennessee has one of
the lowest overall tax rates in the country, with no income tax and
relatively low property taxes. We also have one of the highest
sales taxes in the nation.
*For a long time, legalising gambling was seen as a partial solution,
but it was opposed by many in the state for religious reasons (and it
had been made illegal in the 1835 Constitution, thanks in part to
Andrew Jackson, who hated lotteries). After an amendment in 2002,
the state now has a lottery, and it is paying for many Tennesseans to
attend state colleges. Still, the sales tax falls as a heavy
burden on many Tennessee families, especially the poorer families who
spend the majority of their income outright, rather than saving or
investing it.
*Another issue is legislative apportionment. For most of the 20th
century, election districts (and thus representation in state
government) were based on the 1900 census, which kept power in the
hands of the rural counties. Since the 1960s, districts have been
re-apportioned every ten years, as the constitution demands, but it is
always a difficult battle, because no area wants to lose its support,
and many politicians also use the opportunity to draw district lines in
such ways that they will favour one party or the other. Things
were so bad in 1968 that the federal government had to step in with its
own plan, because Tennessee could not create a good enough one on its
own.
*Thirdly, there is the issue of where power rests in the state.
From the time of Austin Peay to the 1960s, the governor pretty much ran
the state. Once Republicans began to come to power, it was often
the case that the governor and the legislature were of different
parties, and the General Assembly began to assert itself again.
This political shift coincided with a constitutional amendment in 1965
that caused the state legislature to meet every year, rather than every
other year, and that gave the legislators salaries rather than paying
them by the day, so that many of them can afford to be professional
politicians far more so than they could a generation or two ago.
*Both the first and third issue were very obvious in the late 1990s and
early 2000s under Governor Sundquist, who determined, in his second
term, to leave an income tax as his legacy to Tennessee. Despite
his staunch support for the issue, he was defeated by the General
Assembly, which opposed it.
*As of 2003, Tennessee’s population stood at 5,841,748 people.
Memphis remains the largest city, followed by Nashville (although
Nashville has a larger metropolitan area), then Knoxville, then
Chattanooga. Despite this, East Tennessee is now the most
populous part of the state, thanks to having two of the four largest
cities, as well as the Tri-Cities of Johnson City, Kingsport, and
Bristol. Middle Tennessee is the second-largest Grand Division.
*In 1990 Tennessee had 37 cities with a population over 10,000; to-day
there are even more. Tennessee is the 16th most populous state in
the Union, though still just 36th in area. We have the 21st
highest unemployment rate, and our educational system is not among the
best-funded in the nation (in 1990 we ranked 44th nationwide for school
expenditures per student and 45th for high school graduation rates,
although only 43rd for college graduations), but the lottery will
(hopefully) improve that as the years go by. The state’s per
capita income remains below the national average, but so does the cost
of living, the tax rate, and, in most places, the crime rate.
*Tennessee has come a long way since James Needham and Gabriel Arthur
first came over the mountains in 1673, and, despite its faults, most
Tennesseans should feel proud to be Volunteers.