Richard Fulton - Congress

Congress

In 1962 he entered the Democratic primary for the Nashville-based 5th Congressional District against incumbent Congressman Joseph Carlton Loser. In the August voting, Loser was the apparent victor. However, the election was contested by Fulton and a minor candidate, union activist Raymond Love. A subsequent series of articles on the front page of the Nashville Tennessean and a lawsuit followed. The allegations of fraud were serious enough that a judge ordered a new primary election. Love did not participate in this race, stating that his only desire had been one for an open, honest election and that the fraud alleged, while sufficient to have perhaps thwarted the election of Fulton, had not been of an extent sufficient to have prevented his election in any event. In the closely monitored rematch, Fulton defeated Loser rather handily, and breezed to victory in November.

Fulton was handily reelected in 1964, but in the next four cycles came closer than any Democrat before or since to losing a district that has been in Democratic hands since 1875. While his opponents were unwilling to state it publicly, much of the opposition to Fulton among some voters was his unabashed support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which most white Southern Democrats actively opposed.

In 1966, 1968, and 1970, his Republican opponent was George Kelly, who owned a prominent flower shop in the Nashville suburb of Donelson. In 1968, Kelly almost defeated Fulton, losing by only four points—the closest any Republican has come, before or since, to winning the seat. It is very likely that Kelly would have won but for the presence of a candidate running under the banner of George Wallace's American Independent Party, who siphoned off enough conservative votes to keep Fulton in office. Wallace actually carried Nashville in that year's presidential election--the first time since the end of Reconstruction that the Democrats had failed to carry the city in a presidential election. Despite Kelly's repeated efforts to brand Fulton as an "ultra-liberal" in television spots, his campaign faltered in 1970, and he decided not to run for Congress again. (He later achieved regional fame around Nashville as the man who paid young people $10 for memorizing the Ten Commandments.) In 1972, Fulton faced a fairly well funded challenge from attorney Alf Adams, who tried to tie Fulton to Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. However, Adams was badly defeated, winning only 38% of the vote to 62% for Fulton. This was a considerable embarrassment to the Republicans, since Richard Nixon carried Nashville by a substantial margin—the first Republican to do so since Reconstruction—with the support of many local Democrats, including Mayor Beverly Briley. The Republicans have only put up nominal challengers in the 5th since then.

Fulton was very well known in Nashville and the immediate area, but quite obscure outside of it. He was a staunch supporter of music interests in his votes, taking especial interest in areas such as copyright law. This may have in part been because Fulton, like many Nashvillians, was an amateur songwriter himself, at one point recording a song about a paperboy somewhat like the one that he had been in his youth. This interest landed him a slot as a contestant on the To Tell the Truth game show as the song-writing Congressman. (The show was not regarded as particularly dramatic in the Nashville area, however.)