Read more Chattanooga History Columns
- Gaston: Paul John Kruesi was Edison's right-hand man
- Robbins: The old Richardson's house and the Civil War
- Gaston: James Williams was a man of the world
- Raney: Mason Evans, the 'Wild Man of the Chilhowee'
- Gaston: The legacy of Adolph Ochs endures
- Martin: Ed Johnson said, 'I have a changed heart,' the day before his lynching in Chattanooga on 1906
- Thomas: The inventiveness of Judge Michael M. Allison
- Moore: Chattanooga's first Chinese community
- Summers, Robbins: Chattanooga's Tuskegee Airman - Joseph C. White
- McCallie: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 says so!
- Gaston: John McCline's Civil War - from slave to D.C. parade
- Raney: Exploring Chattanooga businesses in the Green Book
- Elliott: Remembering the Freedmen's Bureau in Chattanooga
- Gaston: Nancy Ward was a beloved, respected Tennessean
- Martin: Prohibition - the noble experiment
- Elliott: 'A shameful, disgraceful deed': The destruction of the Sewanee cornerstone
- Gaston: Robert Cravens was ironmaster, Chattanooga area's first commuter
- Robbins: Dr. T.H. McCallie's Christmas 1863
- Robbins: Journalist writes of a trip to Missionary Ridge in 1896
- Summers, Robbins: Mine 21 disaster - gone but not forgotten
- Elliott: Collegedale incorporates to avoid Sunday 'blue laws'
- Gaston: 'Marse Henry' Watterson's journalism fame began in Chattanooga
- Robbins: Orchard Knob battle recalled in 1895
- Elliott: Chattanoogans joined in an 'orgy of joy and gladness' on Armistice Day, 1918
- Thomas: Noted service, speakers are marks of Rotary Club of Chattanooga since 1914
- Summers and Robbins: Remembering noted Tennessee author North Callahan
- Raney: 'I auto cry, I auto laugh, I auto sign my autograph'
- Gaston: Sequoyah's alphabet enriched Cherokees
- Robbins: A look at Sam Divine's life during the Civil War
- Robbins: Memories of a Confederate nurse
- Robbins: More notes from Bradford Torrey's 1895 visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Robbins: Journalist in 1895 details visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Elliott: Telephone exchange firebombing was distraction for grocery store robbery
- Gaston: Worcester brought Christ's message to Cherokee at Brainerd Mission
- Robbins: 1896 travel diary: 'A Week on Walden's Ridge'
- Gaston: Elizabeth Strayhorn, WAC Commandant at Fort Oglethorpe
- Robbins: The history of the Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park
- Moore: Do you own a Sears Roebuck home?
- Summers and Robbins: Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest in World War II
- Gaston: Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain remembered
- Elliott: Daisy the center of tile, ceramic manufacturing in Hamilton County
- Gaston: FDR inaugurates the Chickamauga Dam
- Summers, Robbins: Interned WWII Germans had it easy at Camp Crossville
- Elliott: A war correspondent on Lookout Mountain
- Gaston: Chickamaugas finally bury hatchet in Tennessee Valley
- Gaston: Chickamaugas in Chattanooga
- Robbins: The history of the Riverbend festival
- Raney: Sadie Watson, the first woman elected in Hamilton County government
- Moore: Remembering Chattanooga's Hawkinsville community
- Elliott: Welsh coal miners transformed Soddy after the Civil War
- Gaston: Chattanooga's best-kept secret
- Elliott: Cabell Breckinridge loses his horse
- Raney: Martin Fleming is the people's judge
- Gaston: The amazing career of Francis Lynde
- Martin: Hamilton County's Name Sake: Alexander Hamilton
- Summers, Robbins: The crosses at Sewanee
- Bledsoe: The fiery truce at Kennesaw Mountain
- Moore: Talented architect's life cut short by tragedy
- Rydell: Chattanooga's place in soccer history
- Robbins: Tennessee Coal, member of the First Dow Jones Industrial Average
- Raney: In the barber chair
- Lanier: Becoming the Boyce Station Neighborhood Association
- McCallie: John P. Franklin: Living history among us
- Barr: Chattanooga's first railroad: The Underground Railroad
- Summers, Robbins: Charles Bartlett was a Pulitzer Prize winner, Kennedy confidant
- Rainey: 'We have seen it'
- Elliott: Feinting and fighting at Running Water Creek and Johnson's Crook
- Gaston: The Spring Frog Cabin at Audubon Acres
- Raney: Wauhatchie Pike was moonshine motorway
- Robbins: Oakmont was home of venerable Williams clan
- Summers and Robbins: Rebirth of the Mountain Goat Line
- Elliott: Bad investments led to Soddy Bank failure in 1930
- Summers and Robbins: Pearl Harbor attack left football behind
- Gaston: Jolly’s Island namesake had long ties with Sam Houston
- Return Jonathan Meigs, Indian Agent
- Moore: Did you know about St. Elmo's other two cemeteries?
- Summers: Orme - Marion County's almost lost community
- Davis: Spooky revival at Sharp Mountain in 1873
- Robbins: The story of Longholm
- Raney: Women labored to help the U.S. win World War I
- Even in the city, the 'wheel' changed everything
- Murray: Confederate dilemma after Chickamauga
- J.B. Collins — Newsman extraordinaire
- Robbins: The Story of the Lyndhurst Mansion
- Chattanooga artist and wife lost on the Lusitania
- Chattanooga History Column: Battelle, Alabama and the Battelle Institute
- John Ross, a founder of Chattanooga
- Hamilton County casualties in World War I
- Chattanooga Power Couple
- 'Somewhere in France'
- The Ray Moss family
- Battery B from Chattanooga
- Ulysses S. Grant, Clark B. Lagow, and the Chattanooga Bender
- Songbirds Museum Timeline
- Hamilton County World War 1 roster
- The Soddy Girl and the Memphis Belle
- Blues icon Bessie Smith was the Empress of Soul
- Women's Army Corps at Chickamauga
- Emma Bell Miles' life at the top of the 'W'
- The Tivoli Wurlitzer is one of Chattanooga's priceless assets
- Chattanooga in struggle for freedom during Civil War
- October 1918, Chattanooga paralyzed by Spanish flu epidemic
- Eli Lilly and the Ditch of Death
- One hundred years ago, Chattanooga goes to war
- The legacy of Anna Safley Houston
- Harriet Whiteside was ahead of her time
- Southern Adventist University
- Chattanooga native's writings aided Civil Rights movement
- Zion College, Chattanooga's only African American College
- The North Shore's hidden past
- Mayme Martin -- Businesswoman and community leader
- Thomas Sim's epic struggle for freedom
- Top of Cameron Hill was price of rerouting interstate
- Cameron Hill has rich history
- Temperance movement included Harriman university
- The sweetest music this side of Heaven
- Conquistadors at Chattanooga
- Chattanooga and the 'General'
- Chattanooga's first Thanksgiving, 1863
- Chattanooga's greatest flood caught city unaware
- Opening the Cracker Line
- European trip in 1900 enlightens Sophia Scholze Long
- Sophia Scholze Long spoke out when others were silent
- Little South Pittsburg and its big silent movie stars
- Lot attendant recalls hottest job in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's Forest Hills is final resting place for known, unknown
- Burritt College -- Pioneer of the Cumberlands
- Chattanooga's nicknames trace city's evolution
- The 25th annual meeting of the Tennessee Press Association
- Clemons Brothers Furniture Store
- The Short Life of the USS Chattanooga
- Ellen Jarnagin McCallie lived a truly remarkable life
- Dr. Jonathan Bachman was a revered city father
- Second guessing the Confederate failure on Missionary Ridge
- Nancy Kefauver, ambassador for the arts
- William Gibbs McAdoo kept his Southern roots
- Chattanooga's Secretary of the Treasury
- Howard Baker remembered as a statesman/photographer who snapped history
- Tivoli's last picture show
- The history of one of Chattanooga's oldest businesses
- Chattanooga's roller derby skaters
- Myths of Coca-Cola in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's neighborhood grocery stores
- The tale of the Scottsboro Boys
- The people's history of Chattanooga
- Howard School is Chattanooga's reminder of Reconstruction
- Elevator operator, painter, mystery man: meet Rice Carothers
- Raulston Schoolfield made enemies amid his rise to power
- Website lets users peer into Chattanooga's past
- The flood of 1917
- Chattanooga's 'wickedest woman' buried at Forest Hills
- History of Cummings Highway
When a broadly smiling Nancy Kefauver appeared on the June 30, 1952, cover of Life magazine, with the headline "Political Charmer Nancy Kefauver - A Convention Goers Guide to Chicago," Chattanoogans probably weren't surprised. Estes Kefauver, her husband who was running for the presidential nomination, called her his "secret weapon." Despite Nancy's charm, her husband didn't get the nomination, but four years later in 1956 he was selected as Adlai Stevenson's running mate against Dwight Eisenhower, who won a second term. Some said that if the ticket had been reversed, the Democrats might have won.
Kefauver was practicing law in the Chattanooga firm of Chambliss, Sizer & Kefauver when he met Nancy Pigott, who was visiting her aunt, Mrs. John L. Hutcheson, in the summer of 1934.
Born near Glasgow, Scotland, on Jan.21, 1911, to Stephen Pigott, a marine engineer from New York and Mary Lewis of Tennessee, Nancy was a talented artist who had studied art in Glasgow, London, and then in Paris for two years with Andrew Lhote of the School of Paris. The Kefauvers became the parents of four children and lived primarily in Washington after he was elected to the U. S. House in 1939.
In 1948 he was elected to the U.S. Senate where he served until his death in August 1963. Nancy declined to run for her husband's Senate seat, but she did not refuse three months later when President John F. Kennedy appointed her to be the first director of the newly established Art in Embassies (AIE) Program. It was Kennedy's last presidential appointment before he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
This global visual arts program first conceived by the Museum of Modern Art was formalized under the U. S. State Department when Nancy Kefauver became director. Her international background as the daughter of Sir Stephen and a native of Scotland educated in Europe, and her outgoing personality, made her the perfect ambassador.
Her goal was to replace the bare, white walls of U. S. embassies around the world with work by American artists. The cultural implications were enormous - Arnold Glimcher of Manhattan's Pace Gallery recalled that "Before American Art became so interesting to intellectuals everywhere, it [the U.S. Embassy] was the one place in Africa, Eastern Europe and elsewhere that American painting could be seen." Nancy Kefauver threw herself into the project, which was enthusiastically embraced by art lovers, although some conservatives expressed doubt about modern art representing American values.
"It was as though we were working in the Middle Ages, the whole cultural and governmental climate was so totally different," recalled former Smithsonian and Corcoran Gallery director David W. Scott in 1990. "It was at a time when we were still fighting the battle of whether modern art was seditious or evil or un-American." It was Scott who helped Nancy Kefauver start the program, providing two basement rooms for storing and displaying the art to ambassadorial couples. At first there was only a small budget, a staff of two, and no in-house collection.
Critics, supporters and perhaps even Nancy, would have been astounded by the success of the AIE program by the time it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013. Secretary of State John Kerry praised its "active diplomatic role by creating meaningful cultural exchange through the visual arts." The statistics are impressive. At the 50-year mark, Kerry described the AIE as "a public-private partnership engaging over 20,000 participants globally, including artists, museums, galleries, universities, and private collectors [at] over 200 venues in 189 countries." The AIE sponsors an American Artist Lecture Series and hosts art contests and shows at embassies around the world. It also awards a Medal of Arts to outstanding American artists; recent recipients include Maya Lin (2015) and Jeff Koons (2013).
On Nov. 20, 1967, only four years after her husband died in August and President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Nancy Kefauver collapsed at a formal dinner at the Mayflower Hotel awaiting a dinner speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson in honor of Sen. Everett Dirksen. Her husband's cousin, New York lawyer Malcolm Foshee, had accompanied her to the dinner. He saw that she was taken to a room upstairs where medics were summoned, but they were not able to resuscitate her. She was buried next to the husband she had married in Scotland on Aug. 8, 1935 in the cemetery of his family farm near Madisonville, Tenn.
Kay Baker Gaston is a regional historian and former Chattanoogan. For more visit Chattahistoricalassoc.org.