by Ray Hill | Oct 15, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
Governor Tom C. Rye had run for the United States Senate in the 1918 Democratic primary against Senator John Knight Shields as a supporter of President Woodrow Wilson and lost. Rye’s defeat did not necessarily mean the people of Tennessee had turned against Wilson; in...
by Ray Hill | Oct 8, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Colonel Luke Lea, away in Europe during the First World War, had never gotten along with John Knight Shields when they were colleagues in the United States Senate. Lea’s newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean sided with Shields’ opponent, Governor Tom Rye in...
by Ray Hill | Oct 1, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Tennessee had been staunchly for Woodrow Wilson, both in his 1912 campaign for the presidency and his 1916 reelection campaign. Tennessee’s junior United States senator, Kenneth D. McKellar, had been a fervent admirer of President Wilson as a member of the...
by Ray Hill | Sep 24, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill For more than two decades, Finis James Garrett represented a West Tennessee district in Congress. Garrett was a talented politician and his rise was meteoric. Winning a seat in Congress when he was barely twenty-eight years old, he rose to become the...
by Ray Hill | Sep 17, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Ross Bass, for ten years a congressman from Tennessee’s Sixth District and U. S. senator for two years, was seeking to return to Congress in 1976. Bass had earlier announced he was done with politics after a disappointing defeat in 1974 for the Democratic...
by Ray Hill | Sep 10, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill The 1974 Tennessee gubernatorial campaign took a heavy toll on the finances of several aspirants. Dortch Oldham, who had run in the Republican primary, acknowledged spending perhaps $300,000 of his own money to fund his campaign. Oldham said, “I don’t...
