Nathan Green Caldwell (July 16, 1912 – February 11, 1985) was an American journalist who spent fifty years on the staff of the Nashville Tennessean.
[4] At about age 14 he formed a small "citrus fruit tree trimming, spraying, fertilizing service" that employed "about eighteen kids."
[6] In 1940, he spent a year at Harvard University, where he studied labor relations, utility organization, and civic management on a Nieman Fellowship.
A former Tennessee Valley Authority chairman said, "Nat Caldwell is responsible for more TVA and Corps of Engineers dams and lakes than any member of Congress.
"Nashvillians who plan to send an elderly relative to one of this city's 26 nursing homes," he wrote at the beginning of the first article, "should be aware that they may be committing their loved one to a crowded, unsanitary, ignored existence."
Another time, "the newspaper was sued for $1 million by a nominee for the TVA Board after a U.S. Senate Committee recited Caldwell's news stories as grounds for refusing to confirm the nomination.
"[5][2] Caldwell himself described a series of eight articles about "the migration of millions of black and poor white people out of the South as a consequence of the anticipated mechanization of Southern agriculture" as his "most significant" project.
For this story, Charles S. Johnson, president of Fisk University, chartered a small plane for six weeks in which Caldwell traveled around the country interviewing "black families who left Southern farms and migrated to military defense plants during World War II."
His series was reprinted in twenty-eight newspapers, including the London Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times, with magazines like Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly summing up his conclusions.
They had worked together for six years on the story, and "exposed a sweetheart deal between John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, and Cyrus Eaton, the billionaire financier who had major interests in the coal fields."
Their articles, published under both journalists' bylines, "exposed how the deal robbed mine workers, many suffering from black lung disease, of their hospitalization,"[5] and led to a federal investigation and to lawsuits in which the union was found guilty of violating anti-trust laws.
Although he was unable to save Nat due to the freezing weather conditions of the lake, Jack was honored by the Mayor of Nashville for his bravery.