Estes Kefauver
Carey Estes Kefauver (born July 26, 1903) is an American politician who served the 35th president of the United States from January 20, 1957 to January 20, 1961. He took office following the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and was succeeded by Richard Nixon.
Biography
Hailing from Madisonville, Tennessee. Kefauver won political notoriety upon accession to the House of Representatives in a 1939 special election. A maverick he stood out against E. H. Crump, whose political organization had controlled Tennessee for decades and associated himself with Roosevelt's Liberals. Through the years of the disastrous Second World War he served on the Judiciary Committee and the Select Committee on Small Business, advocated congressional reform and federal aid to education, and cosponsored the Kefauver-Celler Antitrust Act and the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946.
Kefauver staunchly defended civil liberties and favoured the abolition of the poll tax which long disenfranchised African-American voters in former Confederate states. Kefauver's political manoeuvring in Tennessee and humiliation of E. H. Crump in the 1948 Senate Election earnt him favour with senior Democrats who nominated him as chair for the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, where he established a reputation as fair and thorough. It would be through his diligent crusades against corrupt political dealings and its mass publicization amongst Middle America that capitulated him to national fame allowing him to take the Democratic ballot in 1956 clinching a victory at the convention against dissident inner city political machines that harboured resentment to his destructive nature with organised crime. However his ultimate victory was a needed insurance of liberalism's enduring place in Washington.