Lawrence Wetherby

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title: "Lawrence Wetherby" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1908-births", "1994-deaths", "burials-at-frankfort-cemetery", "democratic-party-governors-of-kentucky", "lieutenant-governors-of-kentucky", "louisville-cardinals-football-players", "kentucky-lawyers", "democratic-party-kentucky-state-senators", "politicians-from-louisville,-kentucky", "university-of-louisville-alumni", "20th-century-american-lawyers", "southern-methodists", "american-united-methodists", "players-of-american-football-from-louisville,-kentucky", "baseball-players-from-louisville,-kentucky", "louisville-cardinals-baseball-players", "20th-century-methodists", "20th-century-members-of-the-kentucky-general-assembly", "20th-century-american-sportsmen"] description: "American politician (1908–1994)" topic_path: "law" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Wetherby" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American politician (1908–1994) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox officeholder"]

Field	Value
birthname	Lawrence Winchester Wetherby
image	Lawrence Wetherby (1954).png
order1	48th
office1	Governor of Kentucky
lieutenant1	Emerson Beauchamp
term_start1	November 27, 1950
term_end1	December 13, 1955
predecessor1	Earle Clements
successor1	A. B. "Happy" Chandler
order2	40th Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky
term_start2	December 9, 1947
term_end2	November 27, 1950
governor2	Earle Clements
predecessor2	Kenneth H. Tuggle
successor2	Emerson Beauchamp
state_senate3	Kentucky
district3	20th
term_start3	January 1, 1966
term_end3	January 1, 1970
preceded3	Marvin Edwards
succeeded3	Mack G. Walters
birth_date
birth_place	Middletown, Kentucky, U.S.
death_date
death_place	Frankfort, Kentucky, U.S.
restingplace	Frankfort Cemetery
party	Democratic
spouse	Helen Dwyer
alma_mater	University of Louisville (LLB)
profession	Lawyer
::

|birthname = Lawrence Winchester Wetherby |image = Lawrence Wetherby (1954).png |order1 = 48th |office1 = Governor of Kentucky |lieutenant1 = Emerson Beauchamp |term_start1 = November 27, 1950 |term_end1 = December 13, 1955 |predecessor1 = Earle Clements |successor1 = A. B. "Happy" Chandler |order2 = 40th Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky |term_start2 = December 9, 1947 |term_end2 = November 27, 1950 |governor2 = Earle Clements |predecessor2 = Kenneth H. Tuggle |successor2 = Emerson Beauchamp |state_senate3 = Kentucky |district3 = 20th |term_start3 = January 1, 1966 |term_end3 = January 1, 1970 |preceded3 = Marvin Edwards |succeeded3 = Mack G. Walters |birth_date = |birth_place = Middletown, Kentucky, U.S. |death_date = |death_place = Frankfort, Kentucky, U.S. |restingplace=Frankfort Cemetery |party = Democratic |spouse = Helen Dwyer |alma_mater = University of Louisville (LLB) |profession = Lawyer Lawrence Winchester Wetherby (January 2, 1908 – March 27, 1994) was an American politician who served as 40th lieutenant governor and the 48th governor of Kentucky. He was the first of only two Kentucky governors born in Jefferson County, despite the fact that Louisville (the county seat) is the state's most populous city. The second governor born in Jefferson County is the incumbent governor, Democrat Andy Beshear, who grew up in the Lexington area. Two other governors have been elected when residents of Jefferson: Republicans Augustus Willson, 1907–11, and Matt Bevin, 2015–19.

After graduating from the University of Louisville, Wetherby held several offices in the Jefferson County judicial system before being elected lieutenant governor in 1947 as the quiet choice of 2nd District U.S. Rep. Earle C. Clements, D-Morganfield, who won the primary for the top job. Wetherby was called Kentucky's first "working" lieutenant governor because Clements had him to carry out duties beyond his constitutional responsibility to preside over the state Senate, such as preparing the state budget and attending the Southern Governors Conference. In 1950, Clements was elected to the U.S. Senate, elevating Wetherby to governor on Nov. 27. Wetherby won immediate acclaim by calling a special legislative session to increase funding for education and government benefits from the state's budget surplus, which had been boosted by the Korean War. In 1951, campaigning as a "Middletown farmer" in a largely rural state, he won a full four-year term, during which he continued and expanded many of Clements' programs, including increased road construction and industrial diversification. He endorsed the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation order in the case of Brown v. Board of Education and appointed a biracial commission to oversee the successful integration of the state's schools. As chairman of the Southern Governors Conference in 1954 and 1955, he encouraged other Southern governors to accept and implement desegregation.

Limited to one term by the state constitution, Wetherby joined Clements and Lt. Gov. Emerson Beauchamp in supporting Bert Combs for governor, but Combs lost in the Democratic primary to former governor A. B. "Happy" Chandler, their factional adversary. When Democratic Sen. Alben Barkley died in April 1956, Clements refused to compromise with Chandler on selection of a Democrat for the special election to fill the vacancy, and got the state Democratic committee to nominate Wetherby. With Chandler's organization against them, Wetherby lost to Republican John Sherman Cooper, a former senator who had lost to Barkley in 1954, and Clements narrowly lost to Republican Thruston Morton.

In 1964–65, Wetherby served on a commission that proposed a new state constitution, and in 1965 he was elected to the state Senate from Frankfort, where he provided leadership in drafting the state budget and served as Senate president pro tempore. Following this, he retired from politics and served as a consultant for Brighton Engineering in Frankfort. Wetherby died on March 27, 1994, of complications from a broken hip and was buried in Frankfort Cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Early life and career

Lawrence Wetherby was born January 2, 1908, in Middletown, Kentucky. He was the fourth child of Samuel Davis and Fanny (Yenowine) Wetherby. His grandfather was a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War.

After graduating from Anchorage High School, Wetherby enrolled in the pre-law program at the University of Louisville. He was later inducted into the university's Athletic Hall of Fame. In 1929, he earned his Bachelor of Laws degree and went to work for Judge Henry Tilford. On April 24, 1930, he married Helen Dwyer; the couple had three children.

Thanks to his father's influence, Wetherby became interested in local politics at an early age. School board races fascinated him, and he allied himself with a faction of the Jefferson County Democratic Party headed by Leland Taylor and Ben Ewing. When Ewing was elected county judge in 1933, he appointed Wetherby as a part-time attorney for the Jefferson County juvenile court. He held this position through 1937, then returned to it in 1942 and 1943. In March 1943, he was appointed the first trial commissioner of the juvenile court.

Lieutenant governor

Wetherby was elected chairman of the 34th Legislative District Democratic Committee in 1943 and held the position through 1956. May had sought the support of gubernatorial candidate Earle Clements, but Clements refused and chose Wetherby as his unofficial running mate.

Some observers called Wetherby Kentucky's first "working" lieutenant governor. Previous lieutenant governors did little beyond their constitutionally mandated duty of presiding over the Kentucky Senate, but during Clements' administration, Wetherby was charged with preparing a state budget, presiding over the Legislative Research Commission, leading tours for the state Chamber of Commerce, and attending the Southern Governors Conference. Clements also made Wetherby executive secretary of the State Democratic Central Committee, which allowed Wetherby to make many important political contacts.

Governor of Kentucky 1950–1955

Partial term (1950–51)

On Nov. 27, 1950, Clements was sworn in as senator for the remainder of an unexpired term, vacating the office of governor and filling it with Wetherby. One of his first actions was to call a special legislative session for March 6, 1951, for the purpose of allocating the state's $10 million budget surplus. Wetherby's popularity soared as a result of this session, and he seriously considered running for the Senate seat vacated by the death of Virgil Chapman in 1951 but his wife and children vetoed the idea. With the support of Beauchamp, who slated with him for lieutenant governor, he ran for his own term as governor.

1951 gubernatorial election

Among the potential candidates for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1951 was former governor A. B. "Happy" Chandler, who was about to be released as baseball commissioner. Chandler and Clements were factional foes, and the possibility of a Chandler candidacy provided the Clements faction with the impetus to unite behind Wetherby to prevent Chandler from gaining the nomination. Wetherby had little trouble defeating Howell Vincent and Jesse Cecil in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, polling the largest majority ever in a Kentucky primary race.

In the general election, Wetherby faced Republican Court of Appeals Judge Eugene Siler. Siler was a fundamentalist Christian who claimed that the state government was full of corruption, and only he could stop it. He deployed the newly organized Kentucky State Police to counter organized crime in Campbell and Henderson counties. Wetherby won Re-election by 58,331 votes.

Full term (1951–55)

Early in Wetherby's term, the state's revenues were inflated by the Korean War. Having adopted a pay-as-you-go program for the state, he was forced to raise additional revenue after the war ended. He did so by imposing sin taxes on cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and parimutuel betting, but he was unable to convince the General Assembly to adopt a sales tax.

Because three members of Wetherby's close family had been killed in automobile accidents on the state's roadways, improving roads was a high priority for him. Using revenue from a 2-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax passed under the Clements administration, Wetherby authorized the building, re-building, or re-surfacing of nearly 6000 mi of roads during his administration. He encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to construct a federal toll road connecting the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Wetherby also brought national attention to Kentucky as prime hunting and fishing land by conducting his own personal sporting excursions in the state.

Wetherby followed Clements in trying to diversify industries in Kentucky to balance the state's primarily agrarian economy. He expanded the Agricultural and Industrial Development Board and charged it with conducting land surveys to identify potential industrial sites. In 1954, he used the state police to quash labor unrest in Central City and other parts of the Western Kentucky Coalfield. He was not a pawn of industry, however: He secured passage of the state's first laws regulating strip mining and killed a right-to-work bill in 1954.

Neither did Wetherby ignore the needs of agriculture. Under his Green Pastures Program, measures were enacted to diversify crop production, improve beef production, and encourage soil conservation. He secured federal flood control programs for the watersheds of the Salt, Licking, Green, and Kentucky Rivers, saving valuable farmland. In 1952, Wetherby organized an agricultural council to consolidate the work of the state's agricultural bureaucracy. He oversaw completion of the state fairgrounds in Louisville, a project begun under Clements, to better display the state's agricultural products.

Improvements in education were a hallmark of Wetherby's term as governor. Over the course of his administration, he increased funding to education by $20 million. He called for the creation of an educational television network and initiated the state's first publicly funded bookmobile program. He supported the 1954 Minimum Foundation Program, an amendment to the state constitution that allowed funding to be allocated to school districts based upon need rather than number of pupils.

In 1954 and 1955 Wetherby chaired the Southern Governors Conference and urged the sgovernors to peacefully implement desegregation as required by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In Kentucky, he appointed an advisory council of both white and black citizens to oversee public school integration, which was accomplished with little acrimony compared to other states. Desegregation was one issue where Wetherby and Beauchamp disagreed, but because Beauchamp hoped to succeed Wetherby as governor, he did not openly oppose Wetherby's actions.

Among Wetherby's other accomplishments were the creation of a Department of Mental Health and the construction of 15 hospitals and 30 health centers throughout the state. He constructed new state prisons, modernized the probation and parole systems, and established a more orderly system of selecting grand and petit juries. He also oversaw some voting reform measures, including the provision of funds to purchase voting machines in areas where they were desired. He was not as successful in the area of government reform. He failed in his efforts to amend the state's constitution to allow the governor to serve consecutive terms. He was also unable to win support for a plan to consolidate some of Kentucky's counties. In 1955, the state's voters approved a constitutional amendment granting suffrage to 18-year-olds over Wetherby's objections.

1955 gubernatorial election

Clements and Wetherby concluded that Beauchamp would not be the best candidate for governor against Chandler, and endorsed Bert Combs for governor. Wetherby had named Combs to the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1951 to fill a vacancy created by the death of Judge Roy Helm. Chandler ran his campaign not just against Combs, but against Clements and Wetherby, painting Combs as a pawn of "Clementine" and "Wetherbine." He charged both Clements and Wetherby with extravagant spending in their administrations. Chandler's charges may have been inaccurate, but he defeated Combs in the primary and went on to win the general election.

1956 U.S. Senate bid

Following his term as governor, Wetherby resumed his private law practice. The timing of his death meant that the state would elect two senators in 1956. Clements' term was expiring and now Barkley's seat was vacant. Barkley's death occurred so late in the year that there was not time for a Democratic primary to choose the party's candidate for the open seat; Chandler had persuaded the legislature to move the primary from early August to late May to complicated the re-election bid of Clements, who had become acting majority leader when Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson suffered a heart attack in 1955. Gov. Chandler proposed that the Democratic state committee nominate his close ally Joe Leary, who was friendly with Clements, but Clements has the committee choose Wetherby, who was only six months removed from his term as governor.

Neither Wetherby nor Clements enjoyed the support of Chandler. It was the first time Clements had lost a race, and Kentucky Democrats would not elect a senator for another 16 years.

State senator 1966–70

After this defeat, Wetherby moved to the state capital of Frankfort and secured a position at Brighton Engineering, owned by his former foe, Bill May. From 1964 to 1966, he and other ex-governors served in the legislatively created Constitution Revision Assembly, which proposed a new state constitution, chaired by Clements.

Death

After his service in the state Senate, Wetherby returned to Brighton, where he became a vice-president. A statue of Wetherby was dedicated at Middletown City Hall in 2014.

References

Bibliography

References

1. "Kentucky Governor Lawrence Winchester Wetherby". National Governors Association.
2. Powell, p. 102
3. His father was also a physician and farmer, and during his childhood years, Wetherby worked on the family farm.Kleber in ''Kentucky's Governors'', p. 191
4. He was a [[Letterman (sports). letterman]] on the [[Louisville Cardinals football
5. "Athletic Hall of Fame". University of Louisville
6. Harrison in ''The Kentucky Encyclopedia'', p. 945
7. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 399
8. In March 1947, he resigned as trial commissioner of the juvenile court in order to run for lieutenant governor. The strongest of his four opponents in the Democratic [[Partisan primary|primary]] was Bill May, the nephew of [[U.S. Representative]] [[Andrew J. May]].Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 400
9. Pearce, p. 48
10. Wetherby was unable to secure Clements' public endorsement until just before the primary, but narrowly won the primary over May and went on to defeat Republican Orville M. Howard by over 95,000 votes.Kleber in ''Kentucky's Governors'', p. 192
11. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", pp. 400–401
12. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 401
13. Wetherby oral-history interview, Nov. 1, 1979, University of Kentucky
14. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 403
15. Ultimately, Chandler did not seek the nomination and, despite implying that Clements controlled Wetherby, Chandler endorsed Wetherby on May 15, 1951.Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 405
16. Pearce, p. 52
17. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 406
18. Citing the gambling in [[Northern Kentucky]], bribery accusations against members of Clements' and Wetherby's administrations, and a 1951 scandal involving the [[Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball
19. To further discourage crime, he supported legislation to revoke the alcohol licenses of establishments that allowed gambling. Siler's pro-[[temperance movement|temperance]] and anti-[[Catholic]] views played well in the state's rural areas, but cost him the vote of the state's growing urban population.Harrison in ''A New History of Kentucky'', p. 402
20. Kleber in ''Kentucky's Governors'', p. 195
21. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 409
22. The most important of these was the state's first toll road, the [[Interstate 65 in Kentucky#Kentucky Turnpike. Kentucky Turnpike]], connecting Louisville and [[Elizabethtown, Kentucky
23. Calls for major highway work from other political leaders persuaded Eisenhower to endorse the long-discussed [[Interstate Highway System]]. Improved roads brought increased tourism, which Wetherby supported by increasing funding to the [[List of Kentucky state parks|state park system]] and adding [[Breaks Interstate Park]], a new park owned jointly by Kentucky and [[Virginia]].Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 410
24. Kleber in ''Kentucky's Governors'', p. 193
25. Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 414
26. Kleber in ''Kentucky's Governors'', p. 194
27. He was one of five Southern governors who refused to sign a statement opposing integration.Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 416
28. In 1952, he created the Youth Authority as a central point for the administration of services to delinquent children.Kleber in "As Luck Would Have It", p. 412
29. Pearce, p. 56
30. Pearce, p. 58
31. Pearce, p. 61
32. Among his allegations were that Clements had purchased a $20,000 rug for his office and that Wetherby had paneled his office with African [[mahogany]]. Chandler promised that, if elected, he would use "good, honest Kentucky wood" in his office and that all Kentuckians would be invited to the capitol to walk on the $20,000 rug. Ultimately, invoices showed that no $20,000 rug had been purchased by Clements, and Wetherby's paneling had been purchased from and installed by a local contractor.Pearce, pp. 61–62
33. Eisenhower convinced former senator and ambassador [[John Sherman Cooper]] to be the Republican candidate for the Barkley seat, hoping Cooper's immense popularity in the state would help his own re-election bid and help Republicans regain control of the Senate.Finch, p. 168
34. Pearce, p. 49
35. He died March 27, 1994, of complications from a broken hip. He is buried at the [[Frankfort Cemetery]]. The administration building at [[Western Kentucky University]] and a gymnasium at [[Morehead State University]] are named in his honor.Harrison in ''Western Kentucky University'', p. 178
36. "Wetherby Gymnasium". Morehead State University
37. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/middletown/2014/03/17/middletown-marker-to-honor-former-gov-wetherby/6542071/

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