by Ray Hill | Oct 29, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Despite intense pressure from constituents and his own political party, Senator John Knight Shields of Tennessee remained determined to vote his convictions as the United States Senate considered the Treaty of Versailles. John Knight Shields had been the...
by Ray Hill | Oct 22, 2017 | Columnist, Hill, Stories In This Week's Focus:
By Ray Hill Tennessee’s senior United States senator, John Knight Shields, had surprised tens of thousands of his constituents and infuriated many members of his own Democratic Party when he had voted to add reservations to the Treaty of Versailles in the Senate. The...
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...
