Albert Benjamin "Happy" Chandler Sr. (July 14, 1898 – June 15, 1991) was an American politician from Kentucky. He represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate and served as its 44th and 49th governor. Aside from his political positions, he also served as the second commissioner of baseball from 1945 to 1951 and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. His grandson, Ben Chandler, later served as representative for Kentucky's sixth district.
A multi-sport athlete during his college days at Transylvania College, Chandler briefly considered a career in professional baseball before deciding to pursue a law degree. After graduation, he entered politics and was elected as a Democrat to the Kentucky Senate in 1929. Two years later, he was elected 36th lieutenant governor, serving under Governor Ruby Laffoon. Chandler and Laffoon disagreed on the issue of instituting a state sales tax and when Chandler, the presiding officer in the state senate, worked to block the legislation, Laffoon's allies in the General Assembly stripped him of many of his statutory powers. The tax then passed by a narrow margin. Knowing that Laffoon would try to select his own successor at the Democratic nominating convention, Chandler waited until Laffoon left the state—leaving Chandler as acting governor—and called the legislature into session to enact a mandatory primary election bill. The bill passed, and in the ensuing primary, Chandler defeated Laffoon's choice, Thomas Rhea. He then went on to defeat Republican King Swope by the largest margin of victory for a Kentucky gubernatorial race at that time. As governor, Chandler oversaw the repeal of the sales tax, replacing the lost revenue with new excise taxes and the state's first income tax. He also enacted a major reorganization of state government, realizing significant savings for the state. He used these savings to pay off the state debt and improve the state's education and transportation systems.
Convinced that he was destined to become President of the United States, Chandler challenged Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley for his U.S. Senate seat in 1938. During the campaign, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the state to campaign for Barkley, and Chandler lost a close race. The following year, Kentucky's other senator, Marvel Mills Logan, died in office, and Chandler resigned as governor so his successor could appoint him to the vacant seat. A fiscal conservative and disciple of Virginia's Harry F. Byrd, Chandler opposed parts of Roosevelt's New Deal and openly disagreed with the president's decision to prioritize European operations in World War II over the war in the Pacific. In 1945, Chandler resigned his Senate seat to succeed the late Kenesaw Mountain Landis as commissioner of baseball. His most significant action as commissioner was the approval of Jackie Robinson's contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, effectively integrating Major League Baseball. He also established the first pension fund for Major League players, earning him the title "the players' commissioner". Baseball owners were upset with Chandler's governance, however, and did not renew his contract in 1951.
Following his term as commissioner, Chandler returned to Kentucky and won a second term as governor in 1955. The major accomplishments of his second term were enforcing the racial integration of the state's public schools and establishing a medical school at the University of Kentucky, later named the Chandler Medical Center in his honor. Following his second term as governor, his political influence began to wane as he made three more unsuccessful runs for governor in 1963, 1967, and 1971. His endorsement of dark-horse candidate Wallace G. Wilkinson was seen as critical to Wilkinson's successful gubernatorial campaign in 1987. Wilkinson later resisted calls to remove Chandler from the University of Kentucky board of trustees following Chandler's use of a racial epithet during a board meeting in 1988. In his retirement, Chandler made numerous public appearances and remained active in state politics and events. Chandler died at the age of 92 years, 11 months; at the time, he was the oldest living former Kentucky governor as well as the earliest-serving former governor.
Early life
Albert Benjamin Chandler was born in the farming community of Corydon, Kentucky, in 1898. He was the eldest child of Joseph Sweet and Callie (Saunders) Chandler. Chandler's father allegedly rescued his mother from an orphanage and married her when she was 15, but no record of their marriage has ever been found. In 1899, Chandler's brother Robert was born. Two years later, their mother, still in her teens and unable to cope with raising two young children, abandoned the family. She fled the state and left her sons with their father.
Chandler was raised by his father and relatives, and by age eight, he virtually supported himself financially from his paper route and doing odd jobs in his community. In 1917, he graduated from Corydon High School, His father wanted him to study for the ministry, but Chandler instead entered Transylvania College (now Transylvania University) in Lexington, Kentucky. It was there that he received his lifelong nickname "Happy" because of his jovial nature. He also joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society. He attended a professional baseball tryout in Saskatoon but did not make the team. Briefly considering a career in baseball, he finally decided to study law. He entered Harvard Law School that same year, His former teammate Charlie Moran, then coaching the Centre College Praying Colonels football team in Danville, Kentucky, asked him to scout the national powerhouse Harvard Crimson, an upcoming opponent for Centre.
After a year, Chandler was not able to afford Harvard. He was an assistant coach and scout for Charlie Moran at Centre, and he coached the freshman football team there. They would have four children: Marcella, Mildred ("Mimi"), Albert Jr., and Joseph Daniel. Mimi Chandler played one of the four singing sisters in the 1944 film And the Angels Sing, appearing with Dorothy Lamour, Betty Hutton, and Diana Lynn before abandoning acting and working for the Kentucky Department of Tourism.
For the next five years, Chandler simultaneously practiced law, coached high school sports, and served as a scout for Centre. The following year, he was elected as a Democrat to represent the 22nd district in the Kentucky Senate.
thumb|right|upright|alt=Cleanshaven man, about 45, wearing a suit and tie.|Former Governor J. C. W. Beckham was one of Chandler's allies in his early political career.
As the 1931 gubernatorial election approached, Chandler and Prestonsburg native Jack Howard were mentioned as candidates for lieutenant governor. US Representative Fred M. Vinson backed Howard, a fellow Eastern Kentuckian, but political bosses Billy Klair, Johnson N. Camden Jr., and Ben Johnson supported Chandler. Despite the disharmony within the ticket, the worsening of the Great Depression under Republican president Herbert Hoover and Governor Sampson ensured a Democratic victory.
Shortly after their election, the divide between Chandler and Laffoon widened over the issue of implementing a state sales tax. In retaliation, Laffoon's allies in the Kentucky General Assembly stripped Chandler of some of his statutory power as lieutenant governor, and they were then able to pass the tax by a single vote in each house of the legislature. Rhea secured the services of rising political boss Earle C. Clements as his campaign manager.
Laffoon knew that the primary bill would be widely supported in the General Assembly since both the legislators and their constituents had grown to distrust party nominating conventions. Accordingly, he proposed a bill enacting a mandatory two-stage primary in which a runoff election would be held between the top two candidates in the first round. Whatever the case, the legislature passed the bill that Laffoon proposed. Frederick A. Wallis received 38,410 votes, and Elam Huddleston received 15,501. Infuriated by their loss, Laffoon and his allies abandoned the party and supported the Republican nominee, King Swope. When Chandler touted his service during World War I, Laffoon's adjutant general Henry Denhardt countered by pointing out that Chandler had been only a cadet in training and never had engaged in active service in the war. Ultimately, the campaign turned on the failed presidential administration of the Republican ex-president Hoover and that of the sitting president, the Democratic Roosevelt. Knowing that lobbyists hostile to the suggestions would likely try to encourage legislative gridlock until the constitutionally-mandated end of the 60-day session, Chandler asked his allies in the General Assembly to adjourn after 39 days to allow him to call a special legislative session that would not be time-limited and could entertain only the agenda he specified.
Critics pointed out that the act also centralized more power in the hands of the governor and accused Chandler of ulterior motives in supporting the act.
Chandler used the savings realized from his reorganization of government to eliminate the state's budget deficit and to pay off most of the state's debt. Chandler allocated funds for free textbooks for the state's schoolchildren, created a teacher's pension fund, and provided extensive funding for the state's colleges and universities.
In 1939, he appointed the first woman trustee on the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees, Georgia M. Blazer of Ashland. She served from 1939 to 1960.
In 1936, Chandler urged implementation of the state's first rural roads program and development of electrical infrastructure with assistance from the federal Rural Electrification Act. Following the flood, Chandler convinced the legislature to construct the new Kentucky State Reformatory, at La Grange.
Generally a friend of organized labor, Chandler supported miners' efforts to unionize, organized the state Department of Industrial Relations, and prohibited mine operators from being appointed as deputy sheriffs. However, he opposed closed shops and sitdown strikes, and he used the Kentucky National Guard to quell labor-related violence in Harlan County. That endorsement drew the ire of Chandler's former ally, Democratic representative John Y. Brown Sr., who believed that in exchange for his support of Chandler in the 1935 gubernatorial race, Chandler would support him in the senatorial contest. The retirement of Justice George Sutherland in January 1938 gave President Franklin Roosevelt the opportunity to accommodate Chandler's wishes, but Roosevelt preferred younger justices (Logan was 63), and Kentucky's senior senator, Alben Barkley, recommended Solicitor General Stanley Forman Reed for the appointment.
thumb|left|upright|alt=A man with dark, wavy hair, wearing a black coat, patterned tie, and white shirt|Alben Barkley retained his US Senate seat in 1938 despite a challenge from Chandler.
Barkley, who had been recently chosen as Senate Majority Leader by a single vote, was a strong supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Chandler identified with the more conservative southern Democrats, who were wary of Roosevelt and sought to gain control of the party ahead of the 1940 presidential election. Because Roosevelt was very popular in Kentucky, Chandler was put in the awkward position of expressing personal support of the president and opposing his handpicked leader in the Senate and his New Deal legislation. In April, polls showed Barkley ahead of Chandler by a 2-to-1 margin, and the May 3 primary victory of Florida Senator Claude Pepper, who supported the New Deal, finally persuaded Chandler to abandon his attacks of the program.
In late May 1938, Chandler's campaign manager publicly claimed that federal relief agencies, especially the Works Progress Administration, were openly working for Barkley's re-election. Although the WPA administrator in Kentucky denied the charges, veteran reporter Thomas Lunsford Stokes launched an investigation of the agency's activities in the state and eventually raised 22 charges of political corruption in a series of eight articles, covering the Barkley-Chandler campaign. Federal WPA administrator Harry Hopkins claimed an internal investigation of the agency refuted all but two of Stokes' charges, but Stokes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1939 for his investigation.
Roosevelt personally visited Kentucky to campaign on Barkley's behalf on July 8, 1938. As governor of the state, Chandler was on hand to greet Roosevelt on his arrival in Covington. Seeking to benefit from being nearest to the president, Chandler sat between Roosevelt and Barkley in the back seat of the open-topped vehicle that transported them to Latonia Race Track, the site of Roosevelt's first speech. Throughout his tour of the state, Roosevelt endorsed Barkley but remained friendly with Chandler. After Roosevelt's departure, Chandler played up Roosevelt's complimentary remarks about him but downplayed or ignored critical remarks.
Late in the campaign, Chandler fell ill with chills, stomach pains, and a high fever. After first claiming the symptoms were similar to those that he had experienced a year earlier, Chandler later described his malady as "intestinal poisoning". Barkley frequently mocked it on the campaign trail by first accepting a glass of water offered to him and then shuddering and rejecting it.
With Chandler ally Robert Bingham no longer at its helm, The Courier-Journal supported Barkley, and organized labor, a key Chandler supporter in 1935, also threw its support to Barkley. Ultimately, Barkley defeated Chandler by 70,872 votes.
Appointment and tenure
thumb|right|upright|alt=A portly man with wavy, black hair and a prominent nose, wearing a black jacket and tie and white shirt|Logan's death in 1939 created a vacancy in the US Senate to which Chandler was appointed.
On October 9, 1939, following the death of Senator Logan, Chandler resigned as governor, elevating Lieutenant Governor Keen Johnson to the governorship. The following day, Johnson appointed Chandler to Logan's vacated seat in the Senate. Although he never forgave Roosevelt for backing Barkley in the 1938 senatorial primary, he generally supported the Roosevelt administration except for parts of the New Deal.
left|thumb|220x220px|Chandler as senator in May 1940.
Chandler's mentor, Harry F. Byrd, led a group of Southern conservatives in the Senate, and through Byrd's influence, Chandler was appointed to the Committee on Military Affairs. As a result of his votes on the anti-lynching bill and the poll tax repeal, the Louisville chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People worked against his re-election effort. Chandler went on to defeat Brown and was easily re-elected in the general election over Republican Richard J. Colbert. As a senator, Chandler had advocated on behalf of baseball during the war, which endeared him to the owners. After Cincinnati Reds president Warren Giles and Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley raised strong opposition to Frick, who had been the frontrunner, New York Yankees co-owner Larry MacPhail began to advocate for Chandler. None of the candidates received the required two-thirds majority, and after lobbying by MacPhail and New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham, the owners took an informal vote to see if anyone had the potential to be elected. He received only his Senate salary until his resignation on November 1, 1945, despite claims to the contrary by the press.
Chandler's election was also met with disdain from much of the press in the Eastern United States, where most of baseball's teams resided at that time. His Southern drawl and his willingness to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" with very little encouragement led some sportswriters to opine that he was too undignified for the office. In some cases, the offers were triple the salaries being paid in the Major Leagues. Vern Stephens initially agreed to play in Mexico as well but returned before Chandler's deadline. Ted Williams, Stan Musial, and Phil Rizzuto were also offered lucrative contracts and incentives, but all eventually declined to play in Mexico. Part of Chandler's intervention included organizing a team of replacement players as a contingency plan; the team would have included Honus Wagner, then 72. On August 27, 1946, the committee presented a draft of a document outlining the changes. The following year, Rickey transferred Robinson's contract from Montreal to Brooklyn, effectively breaking baseball's color line. At the meeting, Rickey claimed that Ford Frick disseminated a report that stated, "However well-intentioned, the use of Negro players would hazard all physical properties of baseball."
Chandler, who was also allegedly at the meeting, made no public mention of it until a 1972 interview. He also recounted that later in 1947, Rickey came to his home in Kentucky to discuss the matter further. Nevertheless, future baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and Washington Post sportswriter Bob Addie maintained that Robinson would not have played without Chandler's intervention. Later that season, he decisively supported Ford Frick's decision to suspend indefinitely any members of the St. Louis Cardinals who followed through on their threat to strike against racial integration.
Other matters
thumb|left|upright|alt=A man wearing a baseball cap with a "B" emblazoned on it and a jersey that reads "Dodgers"|Leo Durocher received a one-year suspension from Chandler for "conduct detrimental to baseball".
During the 1946 postseason, rumors began to swirl that Yankees co-owner Larry MacPhail was lobbying Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher to leave the Dodgers and manage the Yankees. The move angered Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, who encouraged Chandler to begin an investigation into the gambling habits of Durocher and his associate, actor George Raft. In the offseason, Chandler and Durocher had a meeting; Chandler counseled Durocher to abandon his gambling. MacPhail then signed two Dodgers assistant coaches (Chuck Dressen and John Corriden) as aides to Yankee manager Bucky Harris while they were still employed by the Dodgers. When Durocher subsequently married Day, a local Catholic priest declared that attending Dodgers games was a venial sin. Prompted in part by this declaration, Chandler suspended Durocher from baseball for a year, just days before Opening Day, citing "conduct detrimental to baseball." Gardella demanded $100,000 in damages from the suspension, and claimed that the award should be tripled because baseball was subject to federal antitrust laws.
Chandler's contract as baseball commissioner was not due to expire until April 1952, but he asked for the owners to extend it in December 1949. The owners voted against offering the extension at that time but promised to reconsider the request in December 1950. The vote in 1950 was nine votes for Chandler and seven against, leaving him three votes short of the necessary three-fourths majority. The Yankees traded Wakefield to the White Sox for cash, but Wakefield refused to report to the White Sox after a salary dispute, which led to a disagreement between the teams over who was responsible for his salary. Chandler voided the trade, making Wakefield's contract the Yankees' responsibility and angering their co-owner, Del Webb. He hosted Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond at his home when he visited the state, his wife Mildred signed the petition to get Thurmond on the state's ballot, and his newspaper editor, Orval Baylor, was co-chair of the States Rights Democratic Party in Kentucky. He did not officially endorse Thurmond because of his baseball role. He spent the next four years rebuilding his political base in preparation for another run at the office. His opponents in the Democratic Party, led by senator and former governor Earle C. Clements and sitting governor Lawrence Wetherby, had difficulty finding a candidate to oppose him.
Chandler's strategy in the campaign was to launch an attack upon the Wetherby administration and, before the Clements-Wetherby-Combs faction could react to it, to launch a new one. After a Wetherby administration official approved the purchase of African mahogany paneling for the governor's office, Chandler charged that Wetherby had gone "clear to Africa" to find paneling for his office and promised that, if elected, he would use good, honest Kentucky wood for decoration. He cut the popular Youth Authority, which had been initiated by Wetherby to unify the state's children's welfare programs, but the savings were not enough to balance the budget. The proposal called for spending in excess of $46 million more than officials estimated would be brought into the state's coffers over the two-year budget. Some of the factionalism came from Clements and Combs supporters who were not willing to co-operate with Chandler, their chief political enemy. Still other resistance to Chandler came from a group of more liberal lawmakers, like John B. Breckinridge, who simply had philosophical differences with the governor. Nevertheless, Chandler delivered on his promise by allocating $5 million to the establishment of what became known as the Albert B. Chandler Medical Center. Some areas of the state resisted the change. Notably, in 1956, when nine black students in Sturgis, Kentucky, attempted to enter the all-white Sturgis High School, they were blocked by 500 opponents of integration. Despite being told by his advisors that the convention would nominate Adlai Stevenson, Chandler continued to seek the nomination but received only 36 1/2 votes.
In the 1959 gubernatorial primary, Chandler threw his support to Lieutenant Governor Harry Lee Waterfield. The anti-Chandler forces eventually put forth Bert Combs as their nominee again.
Having learned from his previous campaign, Combs now attacked Chandler for allegedly requiring state employees to donate 2% of their salaries to his campaign.
Later life
In 1957, Chandler was one of ten inaugural members of the Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame. His opponent in the primary was Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt Jr., the choice of outgoing Governor Bert Combs. However, he found it very difficult to adapt to campaigning via television, an increasingly important medium, and his attacks mostly fell flat. According to Chandler's version of events, after he voted in favor of the war declaration, he called US Secretary of War Henry Stimson and asked to be put on active duty. Journalist John Ed Pearce believed that the loss marked the demise of the Chandler wing of the Democratic Party in Kentucky, but Chandler himself remained somewhat influential.
thumb|right|upright|alt=A graying man in his fifties, facing left, wearing glasses and a suit and tie|Democrat Wendell Ford defeated Republican Tom Emberton and Chandler, who ran as an independent, for governor in 1971.
In 1965, Chandler was named to the University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni and became commissioner of the Continental Football League (COFL). He served as Democratic National Committeeman from Kentucky. After his election, Nunn appointed Chandler to the first of his three terms on the University of Kentucky's board of trustees.
In 1968, Chandler was given serious consideration as the vice-presidential running mate of Alabama's former governor, George Wallace, in the latter's American Independent Party bid for president. Wallace instead turned to Air Force General Curtis LeMay. The ticket lost to Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. Chandler said that he and Wallace had been unable to come to an agreement on their positions on racial matters. Ford's successor, Julian Carroll, again appointed Chandler to the University of Kentucky's board of trustees. In 1987, filmmaker Robby Henson profiled Chandler in a 30-minute documentary entitled Roads Home: The Life and Times of A.B. 'Happy' Chandler.
Chandler endorsed dark horse candidate Wallace G. Wilkinson in the 1987 Democratic primary, and his endorsement helped underdog Wilkinson gain traction early in the race. After Wilkinson's election as governor, he appointed Chandler to a voting seat on the University of Kentucky's board of trustees, where he had been an honorary trustee. While discussing the University of Kentucky's decision to dispose of its investments in South Africa at a meeting of the university's board of trustees on April 5, 1988, Chandler remarked, "You know Zimbabwe's all nigger now. There aren't any whites." The comment immediately drew calls for Chandler's resignation from the University Senate Council and the Student Government Association, and approximately 50 students marched on university president David Roselle's office demanding for Chandler to apologize or resign. Chandler reportedly told the paper, "I said most of the Zimbabweans were niggers and they are niggers."