Albert Gore, Sr.

Albert Arnold Gore, Sr. (December 26, 1907–December 5, 1998), an American politician of the Democratic Party, was a U.S. Representative and a U.S. Senator from Tennessee. He was the father of Vice President Al Gore.

The son of farmer Allen Gore and Margie Denny, Gore was born in Granville, Tennessee. He attended the public schools and graduated from the State Teachers' College in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1932 and from the Nashville Y.M.C.A. night law school in 1936. He taught in the rural schools of Overton and Smith Counties (1926-1930).

He served as county superintendent of education of Smith County from 1932 to 1936, was admitted to the bar in 1936, and commenced practice in Carthage, Tennessee. After serving as Tennessee Commissioner of Labor from 1936 to 1937, he was elected as a Democrat to the Seventy-sixth Congress in 1938, reelected to the two succeeding Congresses and served from January 3, 1939, until his resignation on December 4, 1944, to enter the United States Army. Reelected to the Seventy-ninth and to the three succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1945-January 3, 1953), he was not a candidate for reelection but was elected in 1952 to the United States Senate. He was reelected in 1958 and again in 1964, and served from January 3, 1953, to January 3, 1971, after he lost reelection in 1970. In the Senate, he was chairman of the Special Committee on Attempts to Influence Senators (Eighty-fourth Congress).

Gore was unseated in the 1970 election by Republican Congressman William Brock. In this Senate race, Brock was widely perceived to have won by playing on white voters' fears of civil rights and desegregation for blacks. This tactic was part of the historic "Southern strategy" devised by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew to win over racist Southern voters to the Republican Party. In fact, Gore was one of the key targets in the Nixon/Agnew Southern strategy; Agnew himself traveled to Tennessee in 1970 to mock Gore as the "southern regional chairman of the Eastern Liberal Establishment." Gore had been one of only two senators who refused to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto opposing integration.

Other prominent issues in this race included Gore's opposition to the Vietnam War and Gore's vote against Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen's amendment on prayer in public schools.

After leaving Congress, he resumed the practice of law with Occidental Petroleum Co. and became vice president and member of the Board of Directors, taught law at Vanderbilt University 1970-1972, and was a member of the boards of several petroleum and coal companies. He is buried in Smith County Memorial Gardens in Carthage.