The University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleThe Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy

Harry King

This collection contains three letters describing the enclosures of four black and white photographs and three postcards picturing the University of Tennessee Volunteer Football team, the football field, Ayres Hall, and the Science Hall in the 1920s.  Estes Kefauver is one of the players pictured. Kefauver and most everyone else is also described within the letters.

Click here for the Guide to the Harry King paper, post-1923, mpa.308 / ms.0724. Collection location: row 11, box 8.

Estes Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee on July 26, 1903. He graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1924 before graduating from YaleLaw School in 1927. He became a member of the bar in 1926 and practiced in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his firm, Kefauver, Duggan, and McDonald. In 1935, he married Nancy Patterson Pigott and they had four children.

Three years after an unsuccessful bid for the Tennessee State Senate in 1936, Kefauver served as Tennessee State commissioner of finance and taxation for a few months in 1939 before he was elected to the United States Congress where he served for ten years. In 1948, Kefauver was elected to the Senate where from 1949-1952 he held the position of chairman of the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce that gained him national fame. Kefauver was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination twice in 1952 and 1956. However, he served in the United States Senate as a Democratic representative for Tennessee until his death on August 10, 1963.