Senate Career
In 1920, Tyson made an unsuccessful effort to receive the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. In 1923, he purchased a newspaper, the Knoxville Sentinel, but upon his election to the U.S. Senate the following year, he sold the newspaper to Scripps-Howard. In 1926, Scripps-Howard merged the Sentinel with the Knoxville News to form the Knoxville News Sentinel.
In the early 1920s, the Democratic Party had grown frustrated with Senator John Knight Shields, who had opposed President Wilson's League of Nations, and had stalled a number of the Executive Branch's political appointments. Sensing Shields's vulnerability, Tyson ran against and defeated Shields in the Senate primary in 1924, and defeated Republican candidate, Hugh B. Lindsay, in the general election later that year. He was sworn in as a Senator on March 4, 1925.
Tyson's first major piece of legislation was the Tyson-Fitzgerald Act of 1925, which authorized federal compensation for disabled World War I officers. After President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the bill, Tyson rallied enough opposition in the Senate to override the president's veto. In 1926, Tyson sponsored legislation authorizing the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Read more about this topic: Lawrence Tyson
Famous quotes containing the words senate and/or career:
“At first I intended to become a student of the Senate rules and I did learn much about them, but I soon found that the Senate had but one fixed rule, subject to exceptions of course, which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)