John Shelton Wilder

John Shelton Wilder (born 1920) 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, 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 the former 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 eighteen years. A Democrat, he was first elected to the Tennessee State Senate in 1958, serving from 1959 to 1961. He ran again in 1966, winning another two-year term in the state Senate. After this point, a state constitutional amendment extended the length of terms in that body to four years. Wilder was elected to a four-year state Senate term in 1968. He represents Senate District 26.

He was elected Lieutenant Governor by his fellow Senators in January, 1971, an event reported by at least one Nashville political reporter and commentator as "The Democrats get Wilder!" He was the first Lieutenant Governor in almost half a century to serve under a Governor of a different political party, Republican Winfield Dunn, who had been elected the previous November. This was important, as the Democrats in the state legislature, having just regained control of the Tennessee House of Representatives, set out to make their control of that body an offset to the power of the Governor. 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. Now a massive buiding 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 the established precedent by seeking to serve as Lieutenant Governor for an extended period. By the late 1980s 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. They coalesced around the leadership of State Senator Riley Darnell from Clarksville in Middle Tennessee. When Darnell received the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 1991, 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 fifteen Republicans in the chamber, and six dissident 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. Since then, Wilder has 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 swictched parties, giving the Republicans a short-lived one-seat Senate majority, nothing of consequence changed.

This coalition has made Wilder one of the longest-serving freely-elected legislative leaders in the world. It has also made it awkward for Republicans to oppose him for reelection to the state Senate every four years, and in fact, many do not, and often even assist him in fundraising to ward off his Republican opponents. He has apparently promised to make 2004 his last race and then to retire. Republicans are split on opposing him again, some working vigorously for his defeat, others working with equal ardor on his behalf.

Wilder is a most unusual figure. Unlike many Lieutenant Governors, particularly in other states, he has never expressed any ambition whatever for higher office. In a now almost-vanished Southern style, he often refers to himself in the third person, as "The Speaker likes being Speaker." He is a cycling entusiast and has been a licensed private pilot for over a half-century, occassionally still flying himself from Fayette County to Nashville for legislative meetings, a distance of almost 200 miles (320 km). He 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, with frequent references to those now-obscure persons and events. (Perhaps in this he is most like U.S. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.) He is a unique living human monument to an otherwise almost bygone era.