Albert Gore, Jr.
Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948, Washington, DC, US), American politician who served vice president of the United States from 1993-2001.
The son of Democratic congressman and senator Albert Gore, Sr. from Tennessee, Gore graduated from Harvard University in 1969 and was inducted into the army, serving in Vietnam as a military reporter in 1969-71. He then became a reporter for The Tennessean, a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee. While working (1971-76) for that paper, Gore also studied philosophy and law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Gore won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976 and was reelected twice before he won a seat in the Senate in 1984. In 1988 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Gore was reelected to the Senate in 1990, and in 1992 he was picked by the Democratic presidential nominee, Bill Clinton, to be his running mate. A moderate Democrat, Gore became vice president when Clinton defeated Republican incumbent George Bush in the 1992 presidential election. In 1993 Gore helped the Clinton administration secure congressional passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Gore and Clinton were reelected in 1996 to a second term, defeating the Republicans led by Robert Dole. In 2000 Gore ran unsuccessfully for President, having been defeated by Republican George W. Bush, son of former President George Bush.
Cordell Hull
US Secretary of State (1933-44) whose initiation of the reciprocal trade program to lower tariffs set in motion the mechanism for expanded world trade in the 20th century; in 1945 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in organizing the United Nations.
As a young Tennessee attorney, Hull early identified with the Democratic Party. He served in the US House of Representatives for 22 years (1907-21, 1923-31) and in the Senate (1931-33). While a US Representative, he wrote the income-tax law (1913) and the inheritance-tax law (1916). He also served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Appointed Secretary of State by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the beginning of the New Deal, he called for a reversal of high tariff barriers that had increasingly stultified U.S. foreign trade since the 19th century. He first won presidential support and public acclaim for such proposals at the inter-American Montevideo Conference (December 1933). He next succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (March 1934), which set the pattern for tariff reduction on a most-favoured-nation basis and was a forerunner to the international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), begun in 1948.
Throughout the 1930s Hull did much to improve U.S. relations with Latin America by implementing what came to be known as the Good Neighbor Policy. At the Montevideo Pan-American Conference (1933) his self-effacing behaviour and acceptance of the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other nations began to counteract the distrust built up through decades of Yankee imperialism in Latin America. He also attended the Pan-American Conference at Buenos Aires (1936) and a special foreign ministers’ conference at Havana (1940). Because of the favourable climate of opinion that he had largely created, Hull successfully sponsored a united front of American republics against Axis aggression during World War II.
In East Asia, he rejected a proposed “Japanese Monroe Doctrine” that would have given that country a free hand in China (1934). When Japan served notice later that year that it would not renew the naval-limitation treaties (due to expire in 1936), Hull announced a policy of maintenance of U.S. interests in the Pacific, continuing friendship with China, and military preparedness.
With the outbreak of World War II, Hull and Roosevelt felt that efforts to maintain neutrality would only encourage aggression by the Axis powers; they therefore decided to aid the Allies. In the crucial negotiations with Japan in the autumn of 1941, Hull stood firm for the rights of China, urging Japan to abandon its military conquests on the mainland.
When the United States entered the war, Hull and his State Department colleagues began planning an international postwar peace-keeping body. At the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers (1943)–despite his frail health and advancing age–he obtained a four-nation pledge to continue wartime cooperation in a postwar world organization aimed at maintaining peace and security. For this work, President Roosevelt described Hull as “father of the United Nations,” and universal recognition of his key role came with the Nobel Prize. He resigned after the 1944 presidential election and wrote his Memoirs of Cordell Hull (1950).
Hull was born October 2, 1871 in Overton County, Tennessee and died July 23, 1955 in Bethesda, MD. He graduated from Cumberland Law School. He served in the Tennessee legislature, fought as a captain in the Spanish-American War, and was a circuit court judge in Tennessee.
Albert Gore, Sr.
Albert A. Gore Sr. (December 26, 1907- December 6, 1998) was a former U.S. Senator and the father of Vice President Al Gore. Gore, a Democrat, served as a U.S. representative for Tennessee from 1939 through 1952 and senator from 1953 until 1970, when his opposition to the Vietnam War led to his defeat.
In 1956, he was suggested as a presidential possibility. At the 1956 convention he was, instead, nominated for vice president but withdrew and fellow Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver became the running mate of Adlai Stevenson.
His son followed in his political footsteps, serving in the House and Senate before unsuccessfully seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. Bill Clinton chose him as his vice presidential running mate four years later.
Gore was the chief Senate architect of the 1956 Federal Highway Aid Act and the Highway Revenue Act. They authorized $31.5 billion in federal and state aid to build 42,500 miles of interstate highways. He fought against the GOP plan to finance the highways with bonds and got pay-as-you-go taxes on fuel, tires, and trucks.
Some called him a moderate on civil rights. He refused to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which advocated resistance to school desegregation; in 1964, he voted against a civil rights bill, but urged Tennessee to obey it after it passed.
President John F. Kennedy in 1962 named Gore, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as a U.S. delegate to a session of the United Nations. He helped negotiate a limited nuclear test ban ratified in 1963.
Gore opposed Kennedy’s 1963 $11 billion tax cut. He argued that it would stir up a conservative movement to cut spending as well. He backed Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society social welfare programs, but opposed the Vietnam War. Gore was born in Jackson County on Dec. 26, 1907. He attended Gordonsville High School, Murfreesboro Teachers College, and the University of Tennessee. He served as superintendent of schools for Smith County from 1932 to 1936.
He received a law degree by attending the Nashville YMCA Night Law School and began law practice in 1936 at Carthage. Carthage was the hometown of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Gore in Congress often was called a protege of Hull. He raised black angus cattle on his farm about 50 miles east of Nashville, and was a partner in a seed mill and hardware store in Carthage.
In 1947, Gore opposed a constitutional amendment to limit a president to two terms. He called it “a definite restricting on the freedom of choice of our children and our children’s children.” After a 1951 trip to Turkey, Gore warned that the United States can’t solve all the problems of the world. “We cannot feed them all, neither can we guarantee their liberties,” he said. In his 1952 Senate campaign, reacting to a charge he was a soldier who never had been shot at, Gore said he was proud of his service record.
He said he waived any congressional draft deferment and was drafted Dec. 29, 1943. He reported to Camp Shelby, Miss., on Jan. 19, 1944, but at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt he transferred to the inactive reserve and returned to Congress.
Gore resigned from Congress and went on active duty Dec. 4, 1944. He was assigned to a military government detachment and took part in the battle to cross the Ruhr River. He filed a report with the Pentagon on restoration of civil government in occupied towns, got an honorable discharge, and returned to Congress.
Republican Bill Brock defeated him in 1970. Under fire for his dovish stand on Vietnam and his votes against two Southern nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court, he did well in middle Tennessee, but Brock got the west Tennessee conservative vote.
Gore taught law at Vanderbilt University from 1970 to 1972. His book, “The Eye of the Storm: A People’s Policies for the Seventies,” was published in 1970.
Gore met his wife, Pauline LaFon Gore, while she was working as a waitress in Nashville to pay her way through Vanderbilt University law school. She was one of the school’s first women graduates. They were married in 1937 and for a time operated a joint practice at Carthage. She also ran his Washington office when he was serving in the war.
