By Ray Hill Kenneth McKellar was forty-two years old when first elected to the House of Representatives in a 1911 special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Congressman George Washington Gordon. His rise to political prominence had come despite the...

  By Ray Hill It will soon be one hundred years since the people of Tennessee elected their first United States Senator by popular vote in 1916.  Prior to that time, senators had been elected by state legislatures.  The framers of the U. S. Constitution had never...

  By Ray Hill Tennessee’s longest serving United States Senator, Kenneth D. McKellar, employed several secretaries during his thirty-six years as a member of the nation’s upper chamber. For sixteen years, Senator McKellar’s secretary was his youngest brother,...

By Ray Hill   Kenneth Douglas McKellar arrived in the United States Senate in 1917 and it was a much sleepier place than it would become a few decades later. Capitol Hill has always been almost a world unto itself through the ages and still is; the Senate had its...

  By Ray Hill Despite encountering stiff opposition to the candidates supported by Shelby County Boss E. H. Crump and Tennessee’s senior United States Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, the two men were supporting Jim Nance McCord for governor in 1944. McCord had been...