Estes Kefauver

Kefauver won his 1948 Senate race by turning an attack into a trademark. E. H. Crump's machine ran full-page ads calling him a raccoon-like tool of the communists, so he put on a coonskin cap in Memphis and said he might be a pet coon but not Boss Crump's. His televised organized-crime hearings drew an estimated 20 to 30 million viewers. In March 1956 he and Albert Gore Sr. were the only Southern senators who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto against school integration.

What the plaque says

Estes Kefauver Born and buried on this land near Madisonville. Graduate of University of Tennessee, Yale Law School. Attorney; State Commissioner of Finance and Taxation January-May 1939; U.S. Representative from the Third Congressional District 1939–1948; U.S. Senator 1948–1963; Candidate for Presidential Nomination Democratic Party, 1952; Vice-Presidential Nominee Democratic Party, 1956; Statesman whose interests were Congressional Procedural Reform, Atlantic Union, Crime Prevention, Anti-Monopoly Legislation.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sequoyah Birthplace Museum — 9.5 mi
  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' museum on Tellico Lake, near the town where Sequoyah was born, telling how he built the Cherokee syllabary and what the Tellico Dam drowned.
• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 9.9 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.
• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 26 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.

More markers nearby

• John Crawford Vaughn — 0.6 mi
• Hiwassee College — 3.3 mi
• Lost Sea — 4.3 mi
• Sequoyah — 9.1 mi