By Ray Hill Democrats in Tennessee had routinely won elections with but few exceptions since 1900; only three times had Republicans managed to win the governorship. No Republican had ever been popularly elected to the United States Senate from Tennessee. Following an...

By Ray Hill Every so often I am reminded of my age by recalling those leaders of my youth; most of them are gone now. Howard Baker, Bill Brock, John Duncan, Sr., Jimmy Quillen and Robin Beard. Former governor Winfield Dunn is still very much with us, thank God. It...

By Ray Hill For forty years, Brazilla Carroll Reece had been the congressman from the highly Republican First Congressional District of Tennessee with a few interruptions.  Carroll Reece had first gone to Congress in 1920 after beating an entrenched incumbent in a...

Many of our fellow Tennesseans are positively football crazy; most of us remember University of Tennessee quarterback Heath Shuler was elected to Congress from North Carolina. Yet there is hardly any person in the State of Tennessee with better name recognition than...

By Ray Hill The folks who read this column regularly are some of God’s gentlepeople and highly discerning.  That is my opinion, yet I will be positively shocked if a single reader remembers Arthur Wergs Mitchell.  One of the most interesting aspects of history to me...

  By Ray Hill Tennessee had gone Republican in both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections.  Volunteer State Democrats had been especially shocked when Adlai Stevenson had lost Tennessee in 1956 as home-state U. S. senator Estes Kefauver had been the vice...

The 1956 Presidential Election in Tennessee II By Ray Hill Democrats all across the South had gathered in Knoxville, Tennessee, to plan the strategy for the fall campaign at the end of August in 1956. At least ten states had been represented, including much of the...

The 1956 Presidential Election in Tennessee By Ray Hill Dwight D. Eisenhower had carried Tennessee in the 1952 election, albeit it only barely, with the final totals being 446,147 for “Ike” and 443,710 for Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. It was a difference of...

By Ray HIll Key, Jr., famed political scientist and author, gave an excellent description of the grand divisions of Tennessee and its politics in 1949: “Tennessee is a narrow ribbon of real estate stretching from North Carolina to the Mississippi.  Tennessee’s far...