Estes Kefauver is a name that, mostly likely only those who have studied American political history will know about. But he was an important figure in Washington Politics and at the center of a number of crucial issues that confronted America in the 1950s.
Estes Kefauver (July 26, 1903 – August 10, 1963) was a politician from Tennessee. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1939 to 1949 and in the U.S. Senate from 1949 until his death in 1963. He was the winner of the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, though he was not nominated at the convention.
After leading a much-publicized investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, he twice sought his party’s nomination for President of the United States. In 1956, he was selected by the Democratic National Convention to be the running mate of presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. He continued to hold his U.S. Senate seat after the Stevenson–Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. Kefauver was named chair of the U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957 and served as its chairman until his death.
In a May 1948 article, which appeared in the American Economic Review, Kefauver also proposed that more staff and money be allocated to the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, and to the Federal Trade Commission; that new legislation to make it easier to prosecute big corporations be enacted; and recommended the danger of monopolies should be publicized more.
The Kefauver investigation into television and juvenile delinquency in the mid-1950s led to an even more intensive investigation in the early 1960s. The new probe came about after people became increasingly concerned over juvenile violence, and the possibility of this behavior being related to violent television programs.
After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, Kefauver guided the Celler–Kefauver Act of 1950, which amended the Clayton Act by plugging loopholes that allowed a corporation to purchase a competing firm’s assets, through the U.S. Senate. Between 1957 and 1963, his U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee investigated concentration in the U.S. economy, industry by industry, and it issued a report exposing monopoly prices in the steel, automotive, bread and pharmaceutical industries. In May 1963, Kefauver’s subcommittee concluded that within monopolized U.S. industries no real price competition existed anymore and also recommended that General Motors be broken up into competing firms.
Kefauver’s Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee also held hearings on the pharmaceutical industry between 1959 and 1963 that led to enactment of his most famous legislative achievement, the Kefauver-Harris Drug Act of 1962, after Kefauver expressed shock about the excess profits that U.S. drug companies were taking in at the expense of U.S. consumers. Some of what Kefauver’s hearings on the U.S. pharmaceutical industry revealed includes the following:
“Witnesses told of conflicts of interest for the American Medical Association (whose journal, for example, received millions of dollars in drug advertising and was, therefore, reluctant to challenge claims made by drug company ads)…The drug companies themselves were shown to be engaged in frenzied advertising campaigns designed to sell trade-name versions of drugs that could otherwise be prescribed under generic names at a fraction of the cost; this competition, in turn, had led to the marketing of new drugs that were no improvements on drugs already on the market, but nevertheless heralded as dramatic breakthroughs without proper concern for either effectiveness or safety.”
When he ran for reelection to a third term in 1960, his first and, it would turn out, last attempt at running for office after refusing to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto and voting in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, he faced staunch opposition for renomination from his party’s still-thriving pro-segregation wing. Nonetheless, he won the Democratic primary decisively, receiving nearly double the votes of his rival, judge Andrew T. Taylor of Jackson. Kefauver went on to defeat his Republican opponent in the general election, attorney Bradley Frazier of Camden, by more than a 2-to-1 margin.
Kefauver voted in favor of the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1962, Kefauver, who had become known to the public at large as the chief enemy of crooked businessmen in the Senate, introduced legislation that would eventually pass into law as the Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act. This bill, which Kefauver dubbed his “finest achievement” in consumer protection, imposed controls on the pharmaceutical industry that required that drug companies disclose to doctors the side-effects of their products, allow their products to be sold as generic drugs after having held the patent on them for a certain period of time, and be able to prove on demand that their products were, in fact, effective and safe.
To get a better idea of who Estes Kefauver was and his day-to-day on Capitol Hill, here is an interview he conducted for a program called “In Your Senators Office” from March 18, 1950.
Yet another reason to get curious about history.
