United States Senate
McKellar ran for the Senate in 1916, defeating incumbent Senator Luke Lea in the Democratic primary and winning the general election against former Republican Governor Ben W. Hooper. He was reelected to the Senate in 1922 (defeating former Senator Newell Sanders), 1928 (defeating former U.S. Assistant Attorney General James Alexander Fowler), 1934 (again defeating Ben Hooper), 1940 (against Howard Baker, Sr., father of future Senator Howard Baker), and 1946.
McKellar was considered something of a progressive in his early days in the Senate, supporting many of President Woodrow Wilson's reform initiatives as well as ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. He also staunchly supported the New Deal, especially the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. McKellar was also a close ally of Memphis political boss E. H. Crump.
Despite his early support for Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies, McKellar grew more conservative in his political stances and began opposing the administration's appointments. The most noted of these would be a prolonged feud with FDR's appointee to head the TVA, David E. Lilienthal.
As ranking member of the Appropriations Committee he successfully forced the TVA to properly reimburse landowners whose property was taken over by the TVA for such purposes as dam building. Prior to McKellar's threats to withhold Federal appropriation's for the purchase of uranium early in World War II, the TVA was commonly offering to give landholders "pennies on the dollar" for their property taken over by the TVA. As head of the Appropriations Committee, McKellar had full knowledge of the appropriations needed for the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. He was often called upon to "keep the secret" of the Manhattan Project by mingling funds for the bomb project with other projects, or through carefully planned (secret) War Projects Funding. As the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was centered in Tennessee, his home state, McKellar felt that the harsh treatment of his constituents by the TVA was a personal affront by David Lilienthal.
McKellar's threat to withhold funding for purchases of uranium had a much deeper meaning though. Lilienthal was also intimately associated with the Manhattan Project's work done to electromagnetically enrich uranium at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Ernest Lawrence's "magnetic" enrichment of uranium at Oak Ridge would eventually use the electricity created by the TVA to enrich every single bit of uranium used in the first (test) bomb as well as the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan to end the War. By "threatening" to withhold funding for the purchase of uranium, Tennessee Senator McKellar was making it clear to David Lilienthal that it was he (MacKellar, as ranking member and Acting Chairman of the Appropriation's Committee) who was holding the cards, and that it was Lilienthal who was being forced to give a fair market value for land appropriated by the TVA.
McKellar twice served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate, commencing in 1945, being the first to hold the position under the system that has prevailed since of reserving it for the most senior member of the majority party. When FDR died, and Harry Truman became President of the U.S., Truman did not appoint a Vice President, and McKellar became a sort of post facto Vice President. As the Presidential line of succession had been to the Vice President and then the President pro tempore of the Senate in the past, Truman honored that tradition by seeing McKellar as the logical wartime replacement for himself, and asked McKellar to attend all Cabinet meetings. As there was no Vice President during the wartime (first) Truman Administration, Senator McKellar would likely have been found to be the rightful President of the United States had Truman died during the War. He also served as chairman of the Civil Service Committee, Post Office and Road Committee, and, most notably, the powerful Appropriations Committee from 1945–1947 and again from 1949–1953.
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