4 July 1861–24 Aug. 1929
Posted to the western frontier as a second lieutenant with the Ninth Infantry, he took part in various campaigns against the Apache Indians, including the capture of Geronimo. On 10 Feb. 1886 Tyson married Betty Humes McGhee, the daughter of Charles McGhee, a leading southern railroad financier of Knoxville. From 1891 to 1895 Tyson, by then a first lieutenant, was professor of military science at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Simultaneously studying law at the university, he received an LL.B. degree in 1894. Two years later he resigned his regular army commission to begin a law practice in Knoxville and become president of the Nashville Street Railway Company, the first of many business ventures he would found or head.
The trumpet sounded again for Tyson in the brief Spanish-American War of 1898. He received a presidential appointment as colonel of volunteer infantry, recruited and trained a regiment, took it to Puerto Rico, and served as military governor of a portion of that island for several months before being mustered out of the active service in mid-1899.
Returning to Knoxville, Tyson resumed his law practice for a few years but became increasingly involved in businesses of various sorts as well as politics and, to lesser extent, military matters. In textiles, he established and was president of the Knoxville Cotton Mills, Tennessee Mills, and Knoxville Spinning Company. He became a key officer in several coal- and iron-mining companies, a manufacturing concern, and a real estate company. He was a director of a number of other corporations and two banks. From 1902 to 1908 he was a brigadier general and inspector general of the Tennessee National Guard. He served in the Tennessee House of Representatives as a Democrat from 1903 to 1905 and was the first person to be chosen speaker in his initial term. There he obtained the first state funding for the University of Tennessee. A delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1908, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1913, being defeated in the Tennessee legislature by a handful of votes.
Back home in Knoxville after the war, Tyson resumed his many business activities, became president and publisher of the Knoxville Sentinel after buying the newspaper, and plunged again into politics. His state's Democrats boosted him as nominee for vice-president in 1920, but he withdrew his name and seconded that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1924 he won election as a U.S. senator in the term 1925–31. On Capitol Hill he led a fight to carry the Tyson-Fitzgerald Act over a presidential veto and give retirement benefits to disabled emergency officers from World War I. In addition to veterans' welfare, his other chief concerns in the Senate were national defense, world peace and the world court, and economic development of the South.
Among Tyson's other interests were his family, the Episcopal church, the Masonic order, and the American Association of Cotton Manufacturers, of which he became president in 1923. He and his wife gave municipal parks to two Tennessee cities. Tyson died at a sanatorium in Stafford, Pa., before his senatorial term was completed. Fellow senators and other colleagues eulogized him as courageous, frank and open, refined and gentlemanly, highly capable yet modest, and a man of integrity.