Earle Clements

Although encouraged to run for a seat in the Senate in 1946, Clements instead made the race for governor in 1947.[13] In the Democratic primary, he faced Harry Lee Waterfield, a former Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives.[5] Not known for his oratory or personality, Clements was a masterful campaign organizer.[7] He secured the support of many Western Kentucky Democrats by allying himself with Logan County political boss Emerson "Doc" Beauchamp, an ally of the recently deceased Rhea.[7] He chose Lexington Herald-Leader editor Tom Underwood as his campaign manager, strengthening his influence in Central Kentucky.[7] He befriended Judge Lawrence Wetherby of Jefferson County, which helped him with the urban vote and Carl D. Perkins of Knott County which helped him in rural eastern Kentucky.[7]

During the primary campaign, two major issues surfaced. Waterfield favored a tax on parimutuel betting, while Clements opposed it.[7] Waterfield supported development of electric power through public utilities, while Clements favored private development (which won him the support of the Kentucky Utilities company).[14] The Clements campaign also attacked Waterfield for being deemed physically unfit for military service.[14] Clements received a late boost when he gained the endorsement of John Y. Brown, Sr., garnering added support from organized labor.[14] Ultimately, Clements defeated Waterfield by over 30,000 votes.[5]

In the general election, Clements faced Republican state attorney general Eldon S. Dummit.[5] While Clements managed to keep the Democrats united following the primary, Dummit had fractured the Republicans by attacking the administration of Republican Gov. Simeon S. Willis and his preferred successor during the Republican primary.[14] Dummit mounted a meager challenge by citing Clements' opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act that organized labor opposed, but this was not very effective.[14] Dummit had replaced his campaign manager from the primary election, and when the ousted manager turned against him in the general election, it sounded the death knell for his campaign.[14] Clements won the election by a vote of 387,795 to 287,756.[5] He resigned his seat in the U.S. House to accept the governorship.[1]

As governor, Clements enjoyed a three-to-one Democratic majority in both houses of the state legislature.[15] As a result of that, much of his proposed legislative agenda was passed.[14] In the 1948 legislative session, the General Assembly attracted new businesses by lowering taxes on stocks and bonds and the inheritance tax, but offset these cuts by approving Clements' proposals to increase taxes on gasoline and distilled spirits.[14] Clements also reversed his campaign stance against a tax on parimutuel betting, reportedly proposing a 3% tax because he feared a higher rate would be proposed if he did not take the initiative.[16] With this new revenue, Clements authorized $6 million to improve and expand the state park system.[17] The improvement program included twelve large parks and several smaller ones, with Kentucky Dam Park being the centerpiece.[17] To oversee the developments, he appointed Paducah Sun Editor Henry Ward as commissioner of conservation.[18] Between 1948 and 1950, New York was the only state that spent more than Kentucky on its park system.[5] Clements was one of several people who have been referred to as the "father of Kentucky's state parks".[18] Although the park system was started in 1926 by Willard Rouse Jillson, Clements did much to develop them during his administration.[18]

Clements authorized significant road building projects. During his administration, the state funded or built 3,800 miles of rural roads and 4,000 miles of primary roads.[17] Further, he initiated plans for the Kentucky Turnpike and the Western Kentucky Parkway.[17] The state also assumed maintenance of 6,000 miles of county roads under Clements.[17] During Clements' tenure, only Texas spent more money on developing its roads.[5] Besides improving the roadways themselves, Clements replaced the Kentucky Highway Patrol, which had become a corrupt vehicle of political patronage, with the Kentucky State Police.[5] Clements also used some of the revenue generated from his tax increases to raise the salaries of the state's public school teachers.[15] He approved a 15% increase in funding to the Minimum Foundation Program which provided funding for poor school districts.[5] This was not enough, however, to stave off a 1950 protest march on his office by teachers demanding that he raise another $10 million for education.[19] Clements' lieutenant governor and successor, Lawrence Wetherby, was able to meet this demand in 1951 by using increased tax revenue resulting from the Korean War.[19]

Leading national accreditation groups attempted to disaccredit many of Kentucky's public colleges during Clements administration in order to end longstanding political interference in the higher education system.[20] Clements worked to help these colleges maintain their accreditation and to secure re-accreditation for Morehead State Teachers College.[20] In 1948, he weakened Kentucky's Day Law—which enforced segregation of the state's education system—by providing an exception for black medical personnel to take post-graduate courses in white public hospitals.[21] He also supported a 1948 bill that allowed blacks to pursue medical training at the University of Louisville.[20] His efforts to secure a similar arrangement at the University of Kentucky were not successful, despite the governor's status as ex-officio chairman of the UK Board of Trustees.[20] In 1949, the federal district court in Lexington granted blacks admission to programs at UK if an equivalent program was not available at Kentucky State College, the state's historically black college.[20]

Clements also created or reorganized several government agencies. In cooperation with Pennsylvania governor James H. Duff, he created the Ohio River Sanitation Commission (ORANSCO) to combat pollution in the Ohio River and its tributaries.[20] He curbed fraud in the insurance industry by reorganizing the state Insurance Commission and hiring a national prominent expert to rewrite the state's entire insurance code.[20] To assist the General Assembly in writing more effective and efficient legislation, Clements created the non-partisan Legislative Research Commission, stocked with professionals from various disciplines, to conduct research and serve as legislative staff.[17] He created the Kentucky Agriculture and Industrial Board (the predecessor of the current Kentucky Department of Commerce), which attracted 250 new industries to the state and created 40,000 new jobs during its first three years.[17] He also created the Kentucky Building Commission to manage and plan all new state buildings.[17] Among the commission's first projects were a new $6 million Capitol Annex and the construction of a new state fairgrounds in Louisville.[17] To retain the most qualified government employees, he supported a constitutional amendment that quadrupled the minimum annual salary for state employees from $5,000 to $20,000.[20]

Although a strong governor with many successes, Clements was not able to enact his full legislative agenda. In 1948, his proposal to create a centralized board that governed all Kentucky colleges failed in the General Assembly.[16] In both the 1948 and 1950 legislative sessions, Clements failed to convince the General Assembly to regulate strip mining.[19] He also failed in his attempts to establish statewide pension and civil service programs, and was unable to enact a merit system to give civil-service protection to state employees.[22] Attempts to fund a veterans' bonus passed the two houses of the General Assembly in different forms and were unable to be reconciled.[22]

Alben Barkley

When Alben Barkley resigned his Senate seat to assume the office of vice president in 1949, Clements appointed Highway Commissioner Garrett L. Withers to fill the seat [3] until Clements could run for the next six-year term in 1950.[3] He won the election over Republican Charles I. Dawson by a vote of 300,276 to 256,876.[5] On November 27, 1950, Withers resigned as senator, Clements resigned as govenror, and Lt. Gov. Lawrence Wetherby appointed Clements to fill the vacancy to allow him to gain seniority over other senators elected that month.[5]

The Democrats lost seats in the Senate in the 1950 election cycle, and party leader Ernest McFarland removed Clinton Anderson as chairman of the Senate Democratic Reelection Committee, replacing him with Clements for the 1952 election cycle.[23] Clements advocated better cooperation between his committee and the Democratic National Committee in 1952.[23] However, Republicans won the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1952, and the Democratic National Committee talked openly of disbanding the Reelection Committee.[23] Clements instead advised that his committee's responsibilities be expanded and that its activities become year-round rather than seasonal.[23]

In 1953, Clements was appointed Democratic party whip, serving under party leader Lyndon B. Johnson.[5] In addition, he retained his chairmanship of the Senate Democratic Reelection Committee for the 1954 election cycle.[23] He and Democratic National Committee chair Stephen Mitchell agreed that the two committees should conduct separate fund-raising operations in order to maximize donations for Democratic candidates.[24] Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1954, and Clements instituted the practice of having his committee provide transition services for freshman senators.[25] That practice continues today.[25]

Clements remained active in state politics, leading a faction of the Democratic Party that opposed Happy Chandler, who had been less involved in politics when he was baseball commissioner from 1946 to 1951. When Chandler announced in 1955 that he would seek a second term,[26] the Clements faction scrambled to find a candidate.[26] The most likely choice was Wetherby's lieutenant governor, Emerson "Doc" Beauchamp, but his uninspiring persona and ties to boss-dominated Logan County made him unacceptable to Clements.[26] Instead, Clements threw his support to Bert T. Combs, a Court of Appeals judge nominated by Wetherby.[26] Since Combs had little in the way of a political record to run against, Chandler focused his campaign attacks on factional leaders Clements and Wetherby, who he nicknamed "Clementine and Wetherbine".[26] These attacks, combined with a poorly run campaign by Combs, allowed Chandler to win the Democratic primary by a margin of 18,000 votes.[26] He went on to win the general election and a second gubernatorial term.[26]

Clements began his campaign for re-election in 1956 by defeating Joe Bates, the candidate favored by Chandler, in the Democratic primary.[27] On April 30, 1956, Barkley died of a heart attack, opening up the other seat.[26] With filing for the Democratic primary already over, the Democratic State Central Committee was charged with selecting a candidate.[26] They chose Wetherby. [26] Journalist John Ed Pearce later recorded that Clements had favored Chandler's choice, Frankfort lawyer Joseph Leary, over Wetherby.[28] Clements thought Leary, one of the few political figures who remained on good terms with Clements and Chandler, didn't have a very good chance of winning, but his selection would keep Chandler from throwing his support to the Republican candidates.[28]

Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower convinced Ambassador to India John Sherman Cooper, who had served two short Senate terms and was immensely popular in Kentucky, to be the Republican candidate for the seat of Barkley, who had defeated Cooper in 1954.[29] In the Republican primary, voters chose Thruston B. Morton to challenge Clements.[30] With two of his factional enemies as candidates for the Senate, Chandler bolted the party and supported the Republican candidates.[29] Further complicating Clements' campaign was the fact that Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson suffered a heart attack in 1955, and Clements had to spend much of his time covering for Johnson.[29] He devoted much time to Wetherby's campaign, since Democrats believed Clements would be re-elected easily while Wetherby faced much stiffer odds.[29] And Clements had drawn opposition from doctors by voting, at Johnson's behest, to create a disability program in Social Security, an idea they saw as the start of "socialized medicine." These factors, combined with the landslide of support for Eisenhower, the Republican presidential candidate, contributed to the defeat of both Wetherby and Clements.[30] Cooper defeated Wetherby by 65,000 votes, while Clements lost to Morton by a margin of 7,000 votes out of more than 1 million that were cast in the election.[30] It was Clements' first defeat for elected office in a career that spanned thirty years.[30] Johnson biographer Robert Caro blamed Clements' loss on the Social Security vote.[31]

• "About Us". Earle C. Clements Job Corps Center. April 1, 2009. Archived from the original on November 11, 2009. Retrieved October 6, 2009.
• United States Congress. "Earle Clements (id: C000506)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• "Former Senator Earle C. Clements Named Tobacco Institute President" (PDF) (Press release). Brown & Williamson. February 23, 1966. Retrieved October 5, 2009.
• Caro, Robert (2002). Master of the Senate. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-52836-0.
• Harrison, Lowell H. (1992). "Clements, Earle Chester". In Kleber, John E. (ed.). The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Associate editors: Thomas D. Clark, Lowell H. Harrison, and James C. Klotter. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1772-0.
• Harrison, Lowell H.; James C. Klotter (1997). A New History of Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2008-X. Retrieved June 26, 2009.
• Jillson, Willard Rouse (January 1948). "Governor Earle C. Clements". The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. 46.
• "Kentucky Governor Earle Chester Clements". National Governors Association. Archived from the original on May 21, 2012. Retrieved April 3, 2012.
• Klotter, James C. (1996). Kentucky: Portraits in Paradox, 1900–1950. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-916968-24-3. Retrieved June 26, 2009.
• Kolodny, Robin (1998). Pursuing Majorities: Congressional Campaign Committees in American Politics. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3070-5.
• Pearce, John Ed (1987). Divide and Dissent: Kentucky Politics 1930–1963. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1613-9.
• Powell, Robert A. (1976). Kentucky Governors. Danville, Kentucky: Bluegrass Printing Company. OCLC 2690774.
• Syvertsen, Thomas H. (2004). "Earle Chester Clements". In Lowell Hayes Harrison (ed.). Kentucky's Governors. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2326-7.