John S. Wilder
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John Shelton Wilder (born 1921) has served as Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee since 1971.
Wilder is from Fayette County, Tennessee. He is from an affluent family with extensive agricultural and agribusiness interests. He and his family were known for fairer dealings with black farm employees and tenants than was typical of the area during the segregation era. During this time, Fayette County was one of only two Tennessee counties with a black majority [citation needed], so this fact served him very well upon entering into elective politics at about the time that Tennessee blacks in rural areas were first being allowed their constitutional rights to participate in political decisions which had been guaranteed under the Tennessee and federal constitutions but previously unenforced. Wilder is also a prominent attorney in Somerville, Tennessee, county seat of Fayette County. His law degree is from Memphis State University, now the University of Memphis.
Wilder is a U.S. Army veteran of World War II. He was a member of the former Fayette County Quarterly Court (now referred to as the County Commission) for 18 years. A Democrat, he was first elected to the Tennessee State Senate in 1958, serving until 1960.
Wilder did not run for reelection in 1960, but returned to the state Senate in 1966. After this point, a state constitutional amendment extended the length of terms in the state Senate to four years. Wilder was elected to a four-year term in 1968 and has been reelected every four years since then. He represents Senate District 26, which currently includes Chester, Crockett, Fayette, Hardeman, Hardin, Haywood, McNairy, and Wayne counties.
Wilder was elected Speaker of the State Senate by his fellow Senators in January, 1971, which made him the state's Lieutenant Governor. Under the state constitution, the Speaker of the Senate is first in line of succession to the governorship. The title of Lieutenant Governor was granted to the Speaker of the Senate by statute in 1951.
He was the first Lieutenant Governor in almost half a century, and only the second since Reconstruction, to serve under a governor of a different political party, Republican Winfield Dunn, who had been elected the previous November.
Prior to this time, the General Assembly had never had its own independent staff, or even its own offices, frequently working out of hotel rooms. Wilder now oversaw a massive building project (which somewhat ironically entailed the demolition of one of the hotels that many legislators had previously favored) was undertaken to correct this and make the legislative branch of state government more co-equal to the other two.
Wilder defied precedent by seeking to serve as lieutenant governor for an extended period. Previously, no one had served more than three consecutive terms as Speaker of the Senate since Tennessee's current constitution was adopted in 1870. He faced little opposition until the mid-1980s. By then, many of the members of the Senate Democratic Caucus had tired of his leadership. There were also regional issues at stake as well – by this point the speakers of both houses of the legislature had been from West Tennessee for almost two decades. The dissident faction coalesced around the leadership of State Senate Majority Leader Riley Darnell from Clarksville in Middle Tennessee. When Darnell received the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 1987, Wilder's long tenure as Lieutenant Governor appeared to be over. However, in a surprise (but not entirely unprecedented) move, Wilder was then nominated by the Republican Caucus for Lieutenant Governor. With the support of all 15 Republicans in the chamber, and six dissenting Democrats, Wilder won the vote 21 – 15 and then proceeded to organize the Senate on a "bipartisan" basis, awarding a majority of the committee chairmanships to his Democratic loyalists, the rest to Republicans. This was not out of character for Wilder; in 1979 he had acquiesced in the ouster of Governor Ray Blanton three days before his term was supposed to end after a series of controversial pardons. The state constitution is somewhat ambiguious on when a governor is supposed to be sworn in, so Wilder and his counterpart in the State House, Ned McWherter, supported the early swearing-in of his Republican successor, Lamar Alexander. Wilder called the move "impeachment, Tennessee style."
After this, Wilder, until 2005, continued to be reelected "unanimously" and to award chairmanships to his supporters in both parties, making the Tennessee Senate one of the few legislative bodies in the world to be elected on a partisan basis, but organized on a more-or-less nonpartisan one. Even when two outgoing state Senators switched parties in the mid-1990s, giving the Republicans a short-lived one-seat Senate majority, nothing of consequence changed.
This coalition has made Wilder one of the longest-serving (reputedly the longest) freely-elected legislative leaders in the world. Given his support among many Republican state senators, he has faced little opposition in holding onto his State Senate seat.
On November 2, 2004, Wilder was elected to his 11th consecutive term (and 12th overall) in the Tennessee Senate. However, the Democrats lost control of the Senate, albeit by only a one-seat margin. This meant that if the Republicans could have established true party discipline, they could have chosen either to retain Wilder or replace him; however, since several incumbent Republicans who were either reelected or whose terms did not expire in this election cycle were known to be allies and close friends of Wilder, the outcome that was considered to be most likely by most close observers was that these Republicans would join with the Democratic minority to continue Wilder's working majority and that he would be reelected Lieutenant Governor. [citation needed]
At least one Nashville television station had theorized that Wilder would actually become a Republican before or at the start of the next session in order to maintain his power. [citation needed] This was not an unreasonable possibility, as in much of his district he is the only elected Democrat above the county level. [citation needed] However, others suggested that this was unlikely and that he would probably remain a nominal Democrat but would appoint Republicans to all or most of the committee chairmanships; by mid-November 2004 this was regarded to be by far the most likely outcome, despite some telephone calls to Wilder's Republican supporters from United States Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. [citation needed]
In December 2004 the executive committee of the Tennessee Republican Party announced that sanctions were possible for Republican legislative members who cast votes for Democrats for organizational purposes. [citation needed] (These votes are open, not secret ballots). These were potentially to include party endorsement of opposing candidates in future primary elections. This was a major policy change, as traditionally the Tennessee Republican Party has made no endorsements in contested primary elections. [citation needed] Nonetheless, two Republican members of the Tennessee State Senate – enough to assure Wilder's reelection provided his traditional unanimous Democratic support in recent years – voted for Wilder on January 11, 2005, and he was sworn in for his 18th term as lieutenant governor. (One of them, Michael Williams, was then rewarded with the post of Speaker pro tem.) Wilder then appointed Republican majorities to seven of the nine committees but left the five existing Democratic chairmen in place; this resulted in Democratic majorities and chairs on two committees, including what is regarded as the most important one, the Senate Finance Committee, which left many Republicans very upset. Asked about this unusual arrangement, Wilder was quoted in the Nashville City Paper as saying, "Nobody needs control of the Senate. The Senate needs to be the Senate," which seems to be a typical Wilder quote that sums up his seemingly-minimalist philosophy of government and perhaps of life as well.
Wilder is a most unusual figure. Unlike many lieutenant governors, particularly in other states, he has never expressed any ambition whatever for higher office. [citation needed] In a now almost-vanished Southern style, he often refers to himself in the third person, as in, "The Speaker likes being Speaker." [citation needed] He is a cycling enthusiast and has been a licensed private pilot for over a half-century, occasionally still flying himself from Fayette County to Nashville for legislative meetings, a distance of almost 200 miles (320 km). [citation needed] When Republicans recently attacked him for this, claiming that the partial reimbursement that he receives for this has cost the state over $250,000 over the past ten years, his campaign's reply was that much of this travel was to enable him to both to attend to his Senate duties and still be involved in the giving of care to his wife of 63 years, Marcelle, who died in the summer of 2004. [citation needed] In fact, his campaign team has cited an ad on this topic as being the key to his most recent reelection. Wilder often appears feeble, but then expresses a ready dry wit and a remarkable memory for past people and events. He has been known to address the Senate in a long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of old-time Southern country lawyers, with frequent references to now-obscure persons and events. He is regarded by friends, and even some detractors, as a unique living human monument to an otherwise almost bygone era. [citation needed]
[edit] References
Much of the information contained in this article is in the Tennessee Blue Book.
