Tom Stewart - Political Career

Political Career

In 1938 he entered the race for the balance of the unexpired term of the late Senator Nathan L. Bachman, who had died in office. In the August Democratic primary he defeated labor union leader George L. Berry, who had been appointed to the seat upon Bachman's death by Governor Gordon Browning, and was elected Senator on November 8. Eligible to begin serving immediately, he instead waited until the expiry of his term as district attorney on January 16, 1939 to take his Senate seat.

Stewart was somewhat typical of the Democratic Party's Southern wing of that era. He has been considered by some to be at least somewhat an ally of Memphis political boss E. H. Crump, but less so than Tennessee's other Senator of the time, Memphian Kenneth McKellar. Unlike some of the other Southern Senators, however, Stewart was also a staunch pro-Roosevelt New Dealer and was the only successful Senator win a primary and purge an incumbent Senator who Roosevelt targeted in the infamous 1938 midterm election "purge." Stewart was reelected in 1942. In that year, shortly after the beginning of Japanese internment, he introduced a bill in the Senate to revoke citizenship from all American-born Japanese. In 1948 was challenged for renomination by Estes Kefauver, a progressive East Tennessean who defeated him.

Stewart returned to the private practice of law. He died in Nashville and was interred at Winchester's Memorial Park Cemetery.