Though overshadowed by his more famous son and namesake, during his time in office, Albert Gore Sr., was one of those politicians who went from unknown to national celebrity seemingly overnight.
Gain national fame after he publicly decried the Southern Manifesto (a document produced by members of the Democratic Party in 1956 opposing racial integration in public places), Gore quickly became known as the “Architect of the New South”.
Yet when it actually came to civil rights, Albert Gore Sr., simply known as Al Gore before the rise of his more famous son, had a checkered past both voting for it and against it.
Early Life
The man who would later go on to be known as Al Gore (and then Al Gore Sr. before the rise of his more famous son and namesake) was born as Albert Arnold Gore on December 26 1907 in the vicinity of Granville, Tennessee.
Born as the third of five children to Allen Arnold Gore and his wife Margie, Gore could trace his ancestry all the way back to the 17th century, when a prescient ancestor, John Gore (sometimes spelled Goare) left his homeland in search of a new life Virginia.
Settling in Middlesex County, Virginia and later the nearby Shenandoah County, the Gores later moved to Tennessee not long after the American Revolution.
Growing up with his five siblings, as well as an orphaned cousin, when Al was five, his family moved from Granville to Possum Hollow, Tennessee, to become farmers.
Succeeding in this endeavor, the Gores were able to live somewhat comfortably and a young Al excelled at school, particularly in music, where he gained the nickname “Music Gore” from his fellow classmates.
Graduating high school, Al enrolled at Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, supporting himself by working part-time as a teacher, later considering a career as a teacher before abandoning it.
Early Political Career
Though most lifelong politicians tend to start their political careers quite early on, Albert Gore Sr.’s started earlier than you’d think: he was 23.
Having been a teacher, Gore knew that when the position of superintendent of school in Smith County, Tennessee (a publicly elected office) came up for grabs, he had to at least run for office.
Though his campaign was well-organized and appealed to many voters, Gore ultimately lost the election to an older, more experienced man. With this loss under his belt, Gore returned home and worked on his family’s farm.
Yet it wouldn’t last.
At least to Al Gore Sr., his political career was over, but when the man who defeated him died a year after the election, he named Gore to succeed him, with Gore faithfully serving the schools of Smith County with pride.
It was whilst he was acting as the superintendent of schools that Gore attended Nashville YMCA Night Law School, eventually graduating and passing the bar exam.
A chance encounter in 1936 saw Albert Gore Sr. meet Pauline LaFon at a restaurant. At the time, she was studying law at Vanderbilt University and was supporting herself by waiting tables at a restaurant Al frequented.
Getting to know one another, the two realized that they were both studying for the bar exam, and chose to study together. One thing led to another and the couple eventually began dating and later married in 1937.
The year prior, in 1936, Gore was appointed Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Labor, where he served for a year before officially joining the Democratic Party and resigning to run for Congress.
Congress
Running for Tennessee’s 4th District (a safe Democratic seat at the time), Al Gore Sr. replaced four-time Representative John R. Mitchell who was retiring to run for the Senate, though he was ultimately unsuccessful.
Facing token Republican opposition, Albert Gore Sr. quickly became the representative for Tennessee’s 4th District in 1938, being elected again in 1940, 1942 and 1944 respectively.
House of Representatives
Serving during the 76th, 77th and 78th Congresses, Albert Gore Sr.’s early time in Congress was marked by WWII, including the US’s entrance into the war and the opposition to it.
Months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a 33 year-old, second term congressman Al Gore gave a radio interview where he issued a dire warning: “we are in grave danger”.
Yet this wasn’t from the Japanese, it was from the Germans. He continued by saying “People regard this as an ordinary regional war. But this is no regular war. Each conquest is used as a steppingstone from which other peoples are attacked”.
Following this up, he issued a second dire warning: if the US doesn’t intervene now to save Britain (who were then against the ropes fighting the Germans), Germany will eventually wage war on the US – on American soil.
This made his quite a famous figure in Tennessean politics, with almost everyone in the state, regardless of political affiliation, having at least heard of him, with most having an opinion on him for it.
As such, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Gore was one of the most vocal pro-war members of Congress, supporting the US’s declaration of war on Japan and later, the one on Germany.
Military Service And Return to Congress
Prior to the start of the war, the US military was still quite small, having only 335,000 active duty members in 1939.
Yet once the US officially declared war on Japan and Germany, literally millions of young men and veterans signed up to fight for their country and democracy as a whole, prompting a huge increase in military spending.
Wanting to ensure that the trillions of dollars in today’s money Congress was earmarking for the military was being well spent, several younger members of Congress joined the military incognito to observe training and combat so they could deliver firsthand reports to Congress.
Among those younger Congressmen asked to do this was Albert Gore Sr., who was asked primarily due to his pro-war stance before it became accepted.
Honored by the request, Gore resigned his seat in the House of Representatives (a condition of the agreement), joined the Army, where he held the rank of private and received his training at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Serving in occupied Germany as a prosecutor in one of the US military’s many courts, Gore’s main job was prosecuting captured German civilians who’d supported the Nazi Party in some way, often determining whether they posed at threat or not.
In March 1945, Gore resigned from the military to retake his seat in Congress, which he’d won the previous November. Upon retaking his seat, Gore delivered his findings to Congress, finding that the money was indeed being well-spent.
Gore continued to serve in the House of Representatives during the 79th, 80th, 81st and 82nd Congresses, serving through another war: the Korean War.
Here, he began a minor celebrity when he supported General MacArthur’s plan to nuke what’s the North Korea-China border to prevent the Chinese from joining the war (which they later did, but not before President Truman fired MacArthur).
Though MacArthur had been fired, and several members of his own party had turned on him, it didn’t stop Al Gore Sr. from later suggesting that nuclear weapons should be used to create a permanent demilitarized zone along the 38th Parallel.
Once again, many of his own party scoffed at the idea… as did most Republicans.
Senate
Serving until the end of the 82nd Congress in 1953, Gore chose not to stand for re-election in 1952. Instead, he chose to stand for election to the US Senate, once again serving his home state of Tennessee.
Campaigning against 83 year-old sixth term incumbent Senator Kenneth McKellar (who was standing for an unprecedented seventh term), Gore fought a tooth-and-nail campaign to win his party’s nomination.
Eventually, Gore won the nomination due to being younger and more progressive than McKellar. Facing token Republican opposition as he’d done when running for the House, Al Gore Sr. became Tennessee’s junior senator.
Later becoming Tennessee’s senior senator after Estes Kefauver passed away in 1963, Albert Gore Sr.’s senatorial career would be marked by two things: the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the Vietnam War.
Though he didn’t write the bill himself (that was George Hyde Fallon), he was one of its most vocal supporters, delivering hours of speeches in support of the bill, gaining not only the votes of his fellow Democrats, but also a few Republicans too!
Ultimately, when it was signed into law by President Eisenhower, connecting Tennessee to both the East Coast and Deep South, Tennesseans praised Gore as a policymaking maverick as the bill brought thousands of jobs to the state.
Yet all was not well for Senator Gore. Though previously one of the most outspoken supporters of WWII, when it came to Vietnam, Gore sided with the antiwar Eugene McCarthy, denouncing the war in every sense.
Not only did this open him up to attacks from the Republicans, but also many of his own Southern Democrats, who believed the war was a necessary evil – just as many had argued WWII was decades prior.
He also gained significant media attention when he publicly denounced the Nixon Administration’s “do-nothing” policy about inflation (at the time, inflation was averaging between five and six percent, double the government’s goal).
Civil Rights And Opposition to The Southern Manifesto
During Gore’s time in Congress – both the House and Senate – almost all Southern Democrats were vocal anti-desegregation and anti-civil rights. Yet Albert Gore Sr. didn’t seem to share the views of his fellow party members.
When Democratic politicians wrote the Southern Manifesto opposing racial integration in 1956, every Democratic Senator from the former Confederate States signed it except three.
Al Gore Sr. was one of them, as was Tennessee’s other Senator, Estes Kefauver, and then-Senate Majority Leader (and future president) Lyndon B Johnson, the latter of whom was asked not to sign it for plausible deniability.
Despite taking a quite public stance against the manifesto, his fellow Democrats urged him to sign it. He even had a meeting with South Carolina Senator J. Strom Thurmond, who tried to convince the Tennessee senator to sign it.
Yet every time, Al Gore Sr. refused point-blank, and often denounced the Senator that asked them to sign it quite publicly.
As you can probably understand, this put a strain on Gore’s relationship with many of his fellow Southern Democrats.
But Gore also voted this way too, voting in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1968, which greatly expanded and protected the voting rights of African-Americans.
Gore also voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, specifically by outlawing “testing” devices like literacy tests, which were designed to prevent minorities like African-Americans actually casting a ballot.
When Lyndon B Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court (succeeding the retiring Tom C. Clark), Senator Albert Gore Sr. was one of the Democratic senators who voted in favor of his nomination, thus allowing Justice Marshall to become the first African-American Supreme Court Justice.
However, Gore also muddied his pro-civil rights record on two occasions.
When the Senate was voting on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Gore was one of the numerous Democratic Senators who voted against it, in fact filibustering the Act. Yet he didn’t do this because he disliked the bill or didn’t think it went far enough: he did it because he had to.
You see, 1964 was an election year and any Southern politician who voted against the bill would’ve essentially committed career suicide.
As much as he wanted African-Americans to have the civil rights they deserved, he reasoned he could do more good in office than voting in favor of the bill. Despite his efforts, the passed and was signed into law.
On the other occasion, Gore chose not to vote for the 24th Amendment in 1962, though this was again passed into law.
Unseated
Having served three consecutive terms (something almost unheard of in Tennessean politics), Gore had served the Tennessee electorate faithfully, and was loved by most of them.
As such, when the 1970 election came around, Gore chose to run for a fourth term, where he easily won the Democratic nomination, which at the time was tantamount to election as the Republican Party was non-existent in Tennessee at the time.
Campaigning against Republican Congressman Bill Brock, Gore was still the favorite to win, citing the fact that Tennessee hadn’t had a Republican senator since 1913!
Yet what Al Gore Sr. hadn’t counted on was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” – where the Republicans became more conservative in both social and fiscal matters to appeal more to the former Confederate states, who had allowed the Democrats to be in power for most of the last 50 years.
As a Democrat who’d vocally opposed Vietnam, supported civil rights and had once voted against Everett Dirksen’s amendment on prayer being compulsory in all state schools, Brock argued that the 63-year-old, three term senator, who’d spent more time in Washington than his home state, had lost touch with the electorate.
And Tennessee voters agreed.
He also brought up Gore’s long-standing friendship with the Kennedy family – a wealthy, northern, coastal elite family, whose policies under John F. Kennedy had sufficiently damaged the South as a whole, especially Tennessee.
Though he’d served them faithfully for nearly two decades, Bill Brock won the election by a 51%-47% margin, which remains one of the closest in Tennessee history even today!
Relationship With Armand Hammer
Whilst attending a Tennessee cattle auction in 1950, Al Gore Sr. had a chance encounter with Russian-Jewish oil magnate Armand Hammer, who served as an unofficial liaison between the US President and Soviet Premier, and who had known every president since Hoover.
Striking a conversation, the two later became close friends, not only on a political level, but also a personal level too, with both men genuinely enjoying picking the other’s brain about business or political matters.
After Gore’s defeat, he resumed his law career and became Occidental Petroleum’s lawyer. In September 1972, Gore became the chairman of the Kentucky-based Island Creek Coal Co., one of Occidental’s many subsidiaries.
This earned him a place on Occidental’s board of directors.
Earning a salary of $500,000 per year (roughly $3.3 million adjusted for inflation), Gore was also given shares in Occidental Petroleum, which were valued at $680,000 ($1.5 million adjusted for inflation) at the time of his death.
When he died, his shares in the company were owned by his son, Al Gore Jr., who quickly sold them due to his eco-friendly and anti-global warming political beliefs – not that it stopped him from being criticized by environmentalist groups years later…
The two even went into business together.
When Armand Hammer led a group of investors to acquire the Ankony Cattle cattle farm in 1975, Gore was one of the investors who participated, netting a “substantial profit” from the deal according to his biography.
Due to the two men’s close friendship, and Armand Hammer’s great wealth, Al Gore Sr.’s entire political career was dogged by accusations that he was on Hammer’s payroll.
Though efforts to prove or disprove this were inconclusive at the time, once Gore’s political career ended, evidence came to light that Gore was paid two salaries during his time in Congress: the first from the government and the second from Hammer.
And the friendship between Armand Hammer and Al Gore Sr. appeared to be multigenerational.
Having known Al Gore Jr. since he was a small child, it was Hammer who convinced him to get into politics, promising to use his money to make him president. That’s why he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1988.
Sadly, Hammer died in 1990 and thus never saw Gore become vice-president or nearly become president (had he been alive, chances are that Gore would’ve become the 43rd President, not George Bush).
Later Life And Death
At the same time Gore entered private practice, he also began teaching law at Vanderbilt University before leaving to head Island Creek Coal. Eventually retiring from the company, Gore found that retirement didn’t suit him.
Instead, he ran an antiques store called Gore Antique Mall in Carthage, Tennessee. According to him, it wasn’t to support himself – his investments more than supported him – it was just to keep him busy.
Continuing to work well into his eighties and nineties, Gore lived long enough to witness his son and Bill Clinton become the youngest duo to make it into the White House after defeating George H. W. Bush in a landslide in 1992.
Though well into his eighties, Al Gore Sr. became an active member of the Clinton-Gore campaign, drawing upon his years of campaign experience decades prior to help both his son and his running mate.
He even lived to see his son gain a second term in 1996, though at this point he was 88 years old and his health was beginning to fail and he passed away surrounded by his family on December 5 1998, three weeks shy of his 91st birthday.
His funeral was held two days later, on December 7, with attendees including his wife Pauline, his son, Vice President Al Gore Jr., his four grandchildren and the entire First Family – including the President and First Lady.
As his father’s only surviving child (his other child, Nancy, died of lung cancer in 1984), Al Gore Jr. eulogized his father, talking about his father being this “great teacher” who taught his son the ins-and-outs of politics before he even decided to enter politics!
Owing not only to who his son was, but also to his own political career, his funeral and eulogy were televised on C-SPAN and was watched by millions of people who came to pay their respects to the “Architect of the New South”.
His family then laid him to rest at the Smith County Memorial Gardens cemetery in Carthage, Tennessee.
Legacy
Perhaps Albert Gore Sr.’s most obvious legacy would be that of his son, Al Gore Jr. Having been told by his close friend Armand Hammer that his son would one day become president, Al Gore Sr. set about preparing his son for public service.
Attending the best schools money could buy, Al Gore Jr. received a world-class education.
When Al wasn’t in school (say on summer or spring break), he was in the Capitol with his father, meeting and greeting his father’s colleagues and learning the ins-and-outs of politics “on the job” as Gore Jr. once reminisced.
Though he tried to teach his son everything about politics, he made sure to teach his son not to make the mistakes he’d made in his career: namely that victory went to those who were quick and decisive, not slow and indecisive.
But he did all this in such a way that his son never really knew that his father was grooming him to be president one day, teaching his son the aforementioned lesson by briskly walking down the corridors of the Capitol, with a young Al having to run to keep up with his father.
It wouldn’t be until many years later that Gore Jr. understood what his father had spent so long teaching him.
Yet a close contender for this would be Medicare. During his time in the Senate, Gore was a backer of President Johnson’s “Great Society”, and introduced a bill that would form the backbone of today’s Medicare.
Though both the bill and Albert Gore Sr. himself were reviled by many – including many Democrats – and many have since tried to get rid of it, Medicare remains the closest thing to universal healthcare the US has.
For his role in helping to pass the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the stretch of the I-65 that passes through Tennessee was named The Albert Arnold Gore Sr. Memorial Highway in his honor.
Interestingly, on almost all non-Tennessee-made maps, The Albert Arnold Gore Sr. Memorial Highway isn’t listed with its official name, instead just being called the I-65, whilst Tennessee-made maps do list it with its statewide official name!
Do you remember Albert Gore Sr.? What was his greatest legacy? Tell me in the comments!