Alfred A. Taylor
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Alfred Alexander Taylor (August 6, 1848 - November 25, 1931) was Governor of Tennessee from 1921 to 1923.
He was born in the Happy Valley community of Carter County, Tennessee. He was the older brother of former Democratic Governor Robert Love Taylor who served from 1887 to 1891 and 1897 to 1899; in fact, they were opponents in the 1886 election where Alf Taylor was the Republican nominee and Bob Taylor the Democratic one. (This contest was known as the War of the Roses after the event in English history in which the related York and Lancaster families fought for the English crown.)
Before this memorable contest, Alf Taylor had served two terms in the state legislature; after being defeated by his brother he served three terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives, 1889 to 1895. He never distanced himself overly from Republican politics between his time in Congress and his 1920 nomination for governor; although the state as a whole was predominantly Democratic, his native East Tennessee was equally ardently Republican. In fact, in 1910 Alf Taylor had waged a spirited campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination against the evental nominee, Ben W. Hooper. When incumbent Democratic governor Malcolm R. Patterson subsequently withdrew from the race, Taylor's brother Robert, then a United States Senator, was nominated by the Democrats as a replacment. Hooper defeated Bob Taylor in the general election, giving Hooper a rare accomplishment in politics, the defeat of two brothers, one at a time, in the same year.
In 1920, Alf Taylor was the oldest nominee ever put forward by either major party for the office of governor of Tennessee. He and Bob were also the second (and to date last) set of full brothers to serve as governors of Tennessee; William Blount, governor of the predecessor Southwest Territory, and Willie Blount were half-brothers; Neill S. Brown and John C. Brown were full brothers. Interestingly, there were seven intervening governors serving between Bob Taylor's last term and Alf Taylor's only one; there were also seven intervening governors serving between the Brown brothers according to the official list. Bob Taylor had been deceased for over eight years when his older brother was inaugurated. Alf Taylor was the first governor of Tennessee chosen in an election in which women were eligible to vote; Tennessee's ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was the one which completed its ratification and brought about women's suffrage on a national basis.
Taylor seemed to have a fairly successful administration. Highlights of it included the passage of a tax reform plan. Taylor was involved in the successful lobbying effort to have the federal government convert a nitrate plant built for World War I at Wilson Dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on the Tennessee River not far south of the state line, into an electrical power plant for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Tennessee Valley. (This became part of the basis for the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority over a decade later.) Despite this apparent success, Taylor was defeated for re-election in 1922 by Democrat Austin Peay IV; he was to be last Republican chief executive of the state for almost half a century.