This collection primarily consists of correspondence addressed to Samuel Ungerleider. The majority of correspondence is from Estes Kefauver. Other correspondents include James Cox, G. Keith Funston, Morris Goldstein, Nancy Kefauver, Charles Neese, Henrietta O’Donoghue, and Melvin Richard. Additionally, the collection contains newspaper clippings regarding the life and death of Estes Kefauver.
Click here for the Guide to the Samuel Ungerleider papers, Circa 1944-1963, mpa.166 / ms.0635, mpa.166 / ms.0645. Collection location: row 11, box 31.
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 Yale Law 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 eventually had four children.
Three years after a 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.