Chapter 44
… And evening folded on Tennessee.
—John Galsworthy
THE case of Mr. Crump is something tart and special. This is a boss in the grand manner—the last of the great city bosses to function unimpaired in the United States.
Actually, Crump is more than just a city boss; he not only runs Memphis, he runs the state of Tennessee. His closely notched machine has always had more than the merely metropolitan importance of Pendergast in Kansas City or Kelly-Nash in Chicago. Boss Hague once dominated most of New Jersey as well as Jersey City, but as we know the November 1946 elections seriously bit into his statewide influence. Crump alone, among the old-style bosses, is still a constringent power on a city, county, state, and indeed a national level.
Two fine old Negroes heard some time ago that the Pope had died.
“Who was he?” one asked the other.
“Oh, a big fellow very important—in a county east o’ heah.”
“He died, you say? Who do you reckon Mr. Crump is goin’ to put in his place?”
How does E. H. (“Ed”) Crump run Tennessee? The answer could not be simpler. First, the state is usually Democratic by two to one; the total vote runs about 400,000 of which some 260,000 is normally Democratic; in other words, to win any Tennessee election, all you need is something over 130,000 votes. Of these, Crump has 100,000. So, in effect, he “spots” any candidate he favors with this solid overwhelming mass of voting power. Sixty thousand of Crump’s 100,000 votes are concentrated in Shelby County,1 of which Memphis is the county seat. Time and time again opposition candidates are well ahead until the Shelby vote is counted; they “come in up to Shelby” as the phrase is; then the great Memphis vote drowns them under. Technically, Crump controls this through the kind of organization and behavior familiar in several American cities, but Memphis, 41 per cent Negro, is a special case; it has the largest proportionate Negro population of any southern city. Tennessee is not a white primary state, and the Negro vote is consequently of very considerable value; Crump has controlled it for years, absolutely. Tennessee is, on the other hand, most distinctly a poll-tax state, and the poll tax is, as we shall see, the chief single element serving to perpetuate the Crump regime.
Beyond all this is much else: Mr. Crump has famous exoteric and esoteric methods. He doesn’t, I heard it said, “go in for any rough stuff except in a very nice way,” but whether this is true or not depends on your definition of the good word “rough.” Suppose, like Edward W. Carmack,2 in 1946, you are running against a Crump candidate, who in this instance happened to be McKellar. You will find several obstacles in your path, to put it mildly. For one thing, Mr. Crump will buy advertisements in most of the state’s newspapers at considerable cost, in which he will call you anything from a “donkey” to a “vulture,” with assorted adjectives like “cruel,” “treacherous,” and “venomous,” and will say that you have “no more right to public office than a skunk has to be foreman in a perfume factory.” You will find, as Mr. Carmack did, that you can find no arena or other site in downtown Memphis available for speechmaking, and that no printer will dare make your campaign posters.3
Beyond this, Crump has other powers. He controls federal and state patronage completely, and all state employees are expected to contribute 10 per cent of their salaries to the campaign, while it is going on. Also, citizens like insurance agents, road contractors, liquor dealers, automobile agents, and the like, if they have any business with Memphis or the state, may be called upon for contributions. Then, of course, Crump controls all municipal employees, though he holds no public office at the moment. Memphis distributes its own electricity, water, and gas; therefore the number of city employees at the service of the machine is considerable. The organization works hard and well. Among other things it maintains a card catalogue of every voter in the county.
Let no one doubt the concrete blistering efficacy of all this. In 1936, Gordon Browning, running for governor with Crump’s backing, won Shelby County by 60,000 votes. They fell out, and two years later Crump opposed him when he ran for re-election. Browning then lost Shelby County by 60,000 votes!
In a more personal field Mr. Crump does things with real zest. He donates boat rides to cripples and shut-ins, organizes opossum hunts for the faithful, and gives a prodigious annual picnic at the fair grounds; at a recent one he distributed—free—30,000 frankfurters and 1,600 gallons of lemonade. He loves to roam around with firecrackers in his pocket, which he tosses to the children, under pennants and banners streaming with the words THANK YOU, MR. CRUMP !
Not long ago a well-known young attorney who was running for the legislature went to an outing given by one of Crump’s cronies; he happened to be playing gin rummy when it was announced that all guests would join up in soft-ball teams. The young man, not dreaming that he was committing political suicide, said lightly, “When the boss says you gotta do something, you gotta do it.” This remark was reported back, and incredible as it may seem, the would-be legislator was compelled to resign his candidacy and in fact soon found Memphis so uncomfortable that he moved to Nashville. Crump is very sensitive about being a boss; the legislator’s remark was not only considered to be lese-majeste, but also an intrusion into the forbidden. The fact that the wretched creature apologized, saying “I didn’t realize what I had said,” made no difference. One of the Crump lieutenants dismissed the whole episode by announcing, “Our friend made a mistake; he can now go on his way.” Such magnanimity!
Of course the Crump machine could not exist unless it did “deliver the goods.” The boss is very responsive to public opinion; he watches carefully what people want. A minor instance of this is that, the day I met him, he had spent the entire morning in the Memphis streetcars, riding up and down as an ordinary passenger, because he wanted to check on complaints about inefficiency. There is no doubt that Crump has given Memphis good government at low cost; the city has admirable public services cheap. This is no Kansas City. There is no graft, no corruption; Crump has never taken a cent from the public treasury, nor will he permit anybody else to do so. Gambling is abolished, and crime has been cut down; Memphis is one of the few big cities with no policy or numbers racket, and prostitutes have been driven out. But on this general topic of “good government,” more anon.
One must not distort the picture. Crump is relentless, yes, if anybody really gets under his skin; once an entire county was redistricted to get rid of a magistrate he didn’t like; once the legislature went to the length of writing specific legislation purely to embarrass one of his enemies. Yet the great majority of citizens feel no threat to their liberties civil or otherwise; there is no atmosphere of tension or reprisal; people, by and large, get along. One of Crump’s most consistent critics, on good and legitimate grounds, has been Edward J. Meeman, who has ably edited the Press-Scimitar for many years. Crump writes fantastically vituperative letters to him, signed with a giant floriferous scrawl, but Meeman has never been threatened or otherwise interfered with.4
Crump, aged 72, looks like three apples. He is a very tall lean man, and under a streaming mop of pure white, cotton-wool hair, his hard, round, red cheeks stand out like apples and so does the hard, round, red chin. He is a vegetarian (shades of Hitler and Mussolini!), and doesn’t swear, drink or smoke. He is president of E. H. Crump & Company, investment bankers, one of the most prosperous real estate and insurance firms in the South. There has never been any whisper or intimation that the company mixes in politics improperly; its reputation is, and always has been, impeccable. Members of the business community in the Memphis area may be asked for campaign contributions, but there is no evidence that Crump himself ever applies pressure to sell insurance. But it is only natural that people in and around Memphis with real estate to sell or insurance to buy should think that the Crump firm is an excellent one with which to do business.
The Red Snapper
Edward Hall Crump was born in a Mississippi village in 1875; the family came from Virginia originally, and has traces of Scottish and Norwegian ancestry. His mother died at the age of 97. Crump, after working as a farmhand, moved to Memphis when he was seventeen to make his way in the world; soon he organized the E. H. Crump Buggy & Harness Company, and then branched out into real estate. He was about twenty-six when he first went into politics; he was redheaded in those days, and gained the nickname “the red snapper.” He was elected to several minor municipal posts, and in 1909 became mayor of Memphis. His hold on the city has never slackened since; for almost forty years it has been his to do with almost as he chose. Does everybody know the song “Memphis Blues”? Actually, this ditty, written by W. C. Handy, the well-known Negro musician, was originally called “The E. H. Crump Blues”; it was written for Crump and dedicated to him, as a marching song. Since 1909, Crump told me, he has run for office twenty-three different times, without a single defeat, and in addition has “taken part” in seventy-nine more elections, all successful. Once he sent out petitions for a mayoralty election with the candidate’s name left blank; even so, everybody signed them. In 1940 he ran for mayor; four seconds after his inauguration on January 1, 1941, he resigned the post5 and took off for New Orleans to see a football game, in the company of McKellar.
Once he superintended an election on a nine million dollar bond issue for a municipal electric system to distribute TVA power. It won seventeen to one. Promptly he renamed a street to honor the day, and in the European manner called it Sixth of November Street. One odd point is that he has never made a public speech in his life.
Mr. Crump writes famous letters to the newspapers. Those he sends Meeman are soft as silk compared to the philippics received by Silliman Evans, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean. For Mr. Evans, who organized and led the poll-tax fight against him, he reserves the really sulphurous thunder. Mr. Evans has shown me some of these letters. They are really quite remarkable. Crump delivered one in January, 1945, by messenger, in order to avoid possible violation of the postal laws, and after causing it to be read in the legislature as “privileged” matter. He called Evans a man “with a foul mind and wicked heart,” with “ventosity” [sic] as his chief stock in trade. He called Jennings Perry, then the editor of the Tennessean and one of the ablest and most disinterestedly sincere liberals in the South, “unworthy, despicable, a venal and licentious scribbler … with the brains of a quagga,” who writes unintelligently on any subject “just as one would expect of a wanderoo.” Of a third Tennessean victim, the political columnist Joe Hatcher, Crump said simply that he had “a low, filthy, diseased mind” full of “ululation” [sic]. The three together—I am choosing only the mildest language—were called “mangy, bubonic rats, yellow to the core.” Evans is a doughty character with no mean sense of humor. What he did was simply print on his front page Crump’s full and unexpurgated text, under pictures set side by side of Crump, one of Crump’s cronies, a “wanderoo” (purplefaced ape), and a “quagga” (a kind of African wild donkey).
No one should think that Mr. Crump is crazy or even some type of monster. Actually—the kind of paradox that so often happens—he is a man of considerable erudition and, when he wants to turn it on, of the most persuasive and engaging charm. I didn’t particularly want to meet him. I said to a newspaper interviewer that I didn’t care much about how Boss Crump bossed Memphis since the pattern is the same in most cities, but that I would be interested in what forces, if any, bossed the boss.
The phone rang the next day, and it was Mr. Crump speaking gently, “So you want to know who bosses me!” He said flattering things about my books, and asked me to come right over. I hesitated and he went on, “Really, I don’t think you can write about Tennessee without seeing me.” Then we had a wonderfully fascinating couple of hours. Mostly he gossiped and reminisced. He described his own career; he talked with admiration of TVA, and said that it was silly for Arkansas, in contrast to Tennessee, to be at the mercy of a power company; when I asked about his organization he laughed in deprecating reply, “Oh, we have friends all over the state,” and murmured that he merely likes to “assist things”; he averred that his only real interest was in building a good community, and talked of the work he had done for Negroes. He added that his position was totally unlike that of the usual boss; he has never made a nickel out of it, he and his family are liked and respected, and he only gives the newspapers “the deuce” occasionally because they don’t have “the real interests of the people at heart.” He talked of Tennessee history from Andrew Johnson to Cordell Hull, of politics and such in cities as far afield as Duluth and Des Moines, and of Roosevelt, his great friend for many years. “I tried to help him down here,” Mr. Crump concluded, “in a minor kind of way.”
Of course the boss has given Memphis first-class government—in some respects. But almost all the creditable items are the equivalent of Mussolini making the trains in Italy “run on time.” Perhaps they did run on time, and a good thing too. But at what sacrifice?—at what cost to things much more important? Mr. Crump has made Memphis a “clean” enough city. But it is a community that has not really functioned as a democracy for more than a quarter of a century; a whole generation has grown up without fulfilling the first and simplest duty of citizenship, that of exercising political choice. Participation in the American democratic process has passed Memphis by; city and county both have surrendered their most essential prerogatives out of laziness and fear. And for most of this civic infantilism E. H. Crump is alone responsible.
What will happen when Crump dies? There is no discernible successor. Everything depends on the old man himself. Stanley Baldwin once wrote that dictatorship is like a giant beech tree—very fine to look at, but nothing grows underneath.
Poll Tax and Veterans’ Revolt
Indissolubly associated with all this is the poll tax. Obviously anything that keeps the vote down and makes it the more easily controlled serves the Crump machine. Tennessee is 82 per cent white, and so, more than in any other southern state, its poll tax is not predominantly a Negro question; what the poll tax does is to drastically curtail the white man’s vote. Crump is, however, careful always to state publicly that he is in favor of “repeal” (at the same time that he makes repeal impossible); since, if by some miracle repeal should come, he doesn’t want to face several hundred thousand new voters with a record of having opposed it. In 1943, mostly as a result of a brave and intensive crusade by the Tennessean, poll-tax repeal did go through the legislature.6 Then, following a suit filed by a Crump associate, the bill was held up on a charge of being unconstitutional—though the legislature had, in the most regular manner, passed it. The case went to the state supreme court, which voted three to two to support the allegation of unconstitutionality, i.e., to keep the tax on the books. But the chief justice vigorously dissented from this opinion, and it would not have been made at all had not another justice conveniently died; he was happily succeeded by a local Memphis judge who was proudly wont to call Mr. Crump “our leader.” One of the dissenting justices, shocked by a decision which implied that a legislature could not repeal one of its own acts, stated that it was of a kind unknown “in the history of English and American jurisprudence.” But—the Crump crowd won, and the poll tax still rules Tennessee.
A fine lively fracas, related to this and other issues, came in the summer of 1946, when—the affair made front-page news all over the country—a group of outraged GI’s rose in Athens, McMinn County, in the eastern part of the state, and by threats of force and after some hours of violence as nearly justifiable as any political violence can ever be, threw out the members of the incumbent political machine. McMinn County was, for many years, one of the most downright unpleasant communities in the United States, and Athens had a vicious reputation. Three counties in this area are, or were, the impenetrable citadel of Sheriff Burch C. Biggs; customarily he delivered 98 per cent of the local vote to the Crump machine. It was Biggs, a character out of rowdy folklore, who once stopped the clock in the Tennessee senate—actually by poking at it with a long stick—to prevent some early anti-poll-tax legislation from passing. His subviceroy in McMinn County was a man named Cantrell who, with members of his family, had maintained an iron-bound grip on it for years.
Out in these mountain districts, things are really rough. The McMinn sheriffs and other officials lived on fat fees, estimated at $25,000 a year, gouged out of the community and unwary passers-through who did not know that they could be fined $16.05 for going over twelve miles an hour. John Jennings Jr., a Tennessee congressman who fought the Biggs-Cantrell gang, has stated7 that “during the war, while more than 3,500 boys from McMinn County were serving … the machine, bloated with official graft running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, drunk with power and emboldened by the absence of the young men, kicked, cuffed, slugged, shot, and robbed the fathers and mothers of these boys in every election held from 1940 to and including … 1944.”
What happened in 1946 was that a group of veterans, led by a young schoolteacher named Knox Henry, and a twenty-three-year-old grocer’s son, Jim Buttram, made a coup d’état when it was clear that, once more, the McMinn crowd was preparing forcibly to steal an election. The GI’s had been certain that this would occur; they had served ample warning on the authorities, but no one paid attention. Mr. Biggs didn’t want to be disturbed, and he is a man with a hasty temper. As outlined in the Congressional Record (July 13, 1946) the gang customarily performed its electoral thievery by (a) voting absentee ballots for persons fictitious or dead; (b) substituting their own whole ballot boxes for others; (c) stuffing them; (d) keeping opposition judges away from the polls with guns and blackjacks; (e) allowing boys and girls under twenty-one to vote; (f) destroying election records.
The young GI’s—and again let it be said that only these most exigent circumstances can excuse their lawlessness—rose in arms. The machine, protected by imported thugs, grabbed the ballots and started to “count” them in the safest place, the local jail, whereupon the veterans simply stormed it. They used gunfire and dynamite, and twenty-odd people were hurt; nobody was killed. The gang and its deputies surrendered after a six-hour siege, and the GI’s took over; Cantrell and a man named Mansfield, the sheriff, fled town precipitously—for days their where-abouts was unknown. Order was promptly restored by the veterans themselves, and young Mr. Henry duly became sheriff; his men have set up a reform administration, and they promise to agitate—legally—for poll-tax repeal.
Pressure was put on the state authorities while the fight was going on to send in the militia. Wisely an order to do so was rescinded. Crump and McKellar dismissed the episode as purely a local matter, but it should have shaken them in their boots for a time.
The Mythical McKellar
The easiest way to describe Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar, who is seventy-seven now, is to call him an old fusspot, though this word may not carry enough connotation of irascibility; Mr. McKellar is one of the angriest men alive. I have had a good many experiences of one kind or other talking to political dignitaries in thirty or forty countries for the last fifteen or twenty years, but only once in my life has anybody ever “shown me the door.” This happened, much to my astonishment, during a brief talk with Senator McKellar, when I called on him in Washington last year. It seems that I made the mistake of asking what I should see in his state “aside from TVA.” The aged senator rose from his desk, turned a color between a prune and a plum, and forthwith ordered me to begone.
Short, squat, rubicund, and now serving his sixth Senate term, McKellar is like a wonderland creature out of another age. He was a poor boy born in Alabama. He is a bachelor, a prohibitionist, a Presbyterian, a 32nd Degree Mason, a Shriner, and an Oddfellow.
Drew Pearson once wrote a paragraph describing one of McKellar’s adventures in patronage, and on one occasion mentioned that several members of the family were on the old senator’s pay roll. McKellar rose in the Senate in July, 1946, and denounced Pearson in language remarkably lurid, even for Tennessee. Among other things he called him “this miserable, lying, corrupt, dishonest scoundrel, claiming to be a newspaper man, but with a dishonest and disordered mentality and with a putrid and corrupt morality.” But all that Pearson had done was put down figures. McKellar went on, “No person with the character sufficient to sleep with a hog or to associate with dogs or polecats would write such an article…. This paid, low-lived skunk Pearson … this unmitigated liar and mercenary, money-making crook … the biggest liar in Washington.”8 McKellar said all this under senatorial immunity, and hence could not be sued. But Pearson’s brief rejoinder could not have been better: “A hit dog always howls.”
It was not, incidentally, just Pearson’s allusion to McKellar’s family and so on that prompted this rodomontade. What really annoyed the bullfroggish old man was something that the columnist, doing his duty to his public, had written about TVA. The interconnection between McKellar and TVA is somewhat complicated. McKellar claims, now that TVA is a giant success, that he helped to father it; he points out that his Senate committee pushed through the appropriations which made its building possible. This is quite true, and for some years McKellar and TVA got along fairly well together. Then came a straight-out, no-holds-barred fight with Lilienthal over patronage. Lilienthal insisted on putting it down forever as a matter both of philosophy and practice that there should be no political spoils in TVA.9 Then—the details hardly matter since it is the principle that counts—came a quarrel over the location of a dam. Power, after Pearl Harbor, was desperately needed for war production of aluminum. The best site for water to be put to work quickly was at a place where several prominent Tennesseans, if the dam project went through, would be dispossessed. McKellar, seeking to protect the interests of his constituents, fought to keep the dam from being built; he threatened to hold up its appropriations even after the chief of staff of the Army pled the urgency of the case; finally, it took direct personal intervention by Roosevelt himself to call him off.
McKellar would hardly be worth writing about in detail except for his position; his career personifies the evils and inconveniences of committee seniority. He is Democratic doyen of the Senate. For years he was acting chairman of the Appropriations Committee (during Carter Glass’s illness) as well as chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, and second in command of the Committee on Civil Service. As a result of all this he had a comprehensive lookout on senatorial business; not only could he pigeonhole appropriation bills, but he could exert influence on almost every other senator by being able to delay their suggestions for appointment to postmasterships. McKellar is of course an ally of Crump’s. This does not mean that Crump necessarily admires him although he usually lets him have his way on national legislation. What the Memphis boss does respect is the “prestige” and power that accrues to McKellar by reason of his seniority.
The old senator has a shrewd and adhesive eye. Late in 1944 he campaigned quietly to become president of the Senate pro tempore, though no one seemed to appreciate why he was so anxious for this generally thankless job. A few months later Roosevelt died. McKellar, as president of the Senate, then became in effect vice president of the United States under Truman, though of course he had no right of succession to the presidency. But the position gave him 50 per cent more salary, a government automobile and chauffeur, and various privileges. Moreover, while president of the Senate, he still held his committee chairmanships and could make speeches and even vote.
Return briefly to the quarrel over TVA; there is a lesson here. An American politician of the old school needs two things above all vis-à-vis his constituents, first, political credit; second, ability to bestow patronage. Not possibly could McKellar claim full “credit” for TVA. This went where it belonged, to Roosevelt and George Norris. Nor could he get his friends jobs anywhere in the authority. Thus TVA became a kind of permanent symbol and reminder of his own political frustration. He fought back early in 1945 (while still claiming to be an ardent TVA adherent) with proposals for measures that, if passed, would have ruined it. First he demanded that the authority turn in its accounts monthly; second he submitted a bill whereby all TVA salaries over $4,500 a year would be subject to senatorial approval, which—subtle !—would have brought the whole structure under the surveillance of his own Appropriations Committee. Neither bill went through.
After the 1946 primary campaign, Edward W. Carmack, whom McKellar defeated, filed with the Senate an allegation that McKellar’s organization had spent wholly unreasonable sums, mostly obtained from the liquor interests. Also Carmack alleged a secret deal whereby McKellar would “throw” Tennessee’s twelve electoral votes to the Republican party in 1948 in return for Republican support in the primary. The Senate dropped the charges.
When Truman acceded to the presidency he invited McKellar, as president of the Senate, to sit in at Cabinet meetings. The motives for this were several and, in a sense, understandable. But the Richmond Times-Dispatch was not afraid to say, “A hack sits in the Cabinet…. Senator McKellar is a vindictive … grudge-bearing politician with an incurable itch for spoils … a shoddy impresario of the patronage grab.”
Tennessee, Its Cities and Geographical Divisions
To cross Tennessee is almost like crossing Texas; the extreme eastern tip of the state is nearer Washington, D. C., than Memphis. The flagships of American Airlines have four Tennessee stops, Tri-City Airport,10 Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, and in the old days it seemed inconceivable, flying between these points hour after hour, that one could still be in the same state. Tennessee is in fact a most extraordinarily varied and three-fold commonwealth. Very few Tennesseans call themselves “Tennesseans.” They say that they are from “west” or “east” Tennessee. The state is, in actuality, cut into three “grand divisions,” not merely two; each is recognized by the constitution as a kind of entity.
West Tennessee is mostly a flat alluvial plain, dominated by Memphis and based on cotton. East Tennessee is the area behind the Cumberland ridge, mountain country almost indistinguishable from that of North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, full of Scotch-Irish, small landowners, and Republicans; Tennessee has had two Republican governors within living memory, and Harding carried it in 1920, incredible as this may seem.11 In east Tennessee some unique survivals are to be found, like the Melungeons, a “tribe” of dark people unlike any other in America. I mentioned Meigs County in the preceding chapter. There is at least one other county without a single telephone, and one that, until very recently at least, had no paved roads.
Look at the Rand-McNally pocket map of Tennessee. “Towns” are solemnly listed—scores of them—with “populations” of four, seven, five, and nine people. Mostly these are mountain outposts.
Middle Tennessee is the heart of the state; this is the blue-grass, mint-julep, big-plantation, old-southern-aristocracy area pivoted on Nashville. Tennessee has some four million acres of blue grass; Kentucky, with about a million, is nevertheless called “the” Blue Grass State. Thirty miles from Nashville, in the southeastern corner of Davidson County, you can see the difference between blue grass and the rest as sharply as you can see the line between irrigated and nonirrigated land in Arizona. The blue grass is so rich that it stays green all winter; hence it is good for grazing, and the animals raised on it have sturdy bones full of lime and phosphorus. Why can’t all grass be made “blue”? Cannot enough phosphate be put in artificially? The answer appears to be no. This part of Tennessee is a great fox-hunting region; the Nashville area is also the home par excellence of the Tennessee walking horse. I asked innocently enough if Tennesseans were much prejudiced against other types. Answer: “Kill a non-Tennessee horse and one drop of its blood will poison the Atlantic Ocean.”
Clarksville, Tennessee, is the world’s largest market for “dark-fired” tobacco; Columbia, Tennessee, notorious as we know for something less pleasant, is the world’s largest mule market; “mule day,” the first Monday in April, is called “Big Monday.” Tobacco, horses, and livestock in general as well as mules, are still sold by auction; a thousand people from all over the country will come to the walking horse auctions in a town like Lewisburg. Auctioneers’ jobs, by tradition at least, pass from father to son—it takes heredity to understand the gibberish—and auctioneering is probably the most honorable profession in the state; the legend is that really successful auctioneers end up in the governorship. As a matter of fact, the present governor, Jim N. McCord, is an auctioneer by trade. An auction is of course simply a public market, a kind of stock exchange without a ticker, meeting at fixed intervals. A good auctioneer will get as much as $250 a day.
A word, finally, on Tennessee’s fascinatingly varied cities. MEMPHIS (population 293,000), “the Chicago of the South,” lives on cotton and timber as well as Mr. Crump. It contains Beale Street, which Negroes almost everywhere consider their “Fifth Avenue,” and characters like Alonzo Locke, an eminent head waiter in the Hotel Peabody; Mr. Locke, a Negro, is also a newspaper and real estate man and the vice president of a local bank. Like many southern towns, Memphis is much given to censorship in the realm of the arts; the local movie board refused a permit recently to “Brewster’s Millions,” because it contains Jack Benny’s Rochester and the film as a whole “presents too much familiarity between the races.” Finally, Memphis life rests on the Mississippi. I took one look, and realized that the muddy Mississippi is really the Missouri here.
NASHVILLE (population 167,000), “the Dimple of the Universe,” has all manner of distinctions. For one thing the Hermitage, the home of General Jackson and one of the most perfect of all American shrines, is near by; for another Nashville (“Wall Street of the South”) is one of the largest primary bond centers in America, and like Louisville and Denver is stuffed with ancient money; for another, the “Athens of Dixie,” it has no fewer than ten universities and colleges. One is Vanderbilt, another is Fisk, one of the two or three best Negro universities in the country, and a third is Meharry, a well-known medical school for Negroes. Still another (white) is the Gupton-Jones College of Mortuary Science, one of the nation’s foremost embalming schools. Recently its undergraduates (many of whom are medical students who flunk elsewhere) went on strike; the slogan was GUPTON-JONES IS UNFAIR TO THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. Finally, Nashville—has any other American city so many nicknames?—is known as “the Protestant Vatican of the South.” No man can hold office in Tennessee unless he believes in God, by state law; the Baptists, Methodists, Campbellites, “Cumberland” Presbyterians and other sects are, it goes without saying, of great power politically. Nashville is one of the biggest publishing centers in the United States, because of the great number of religious tracts it prints.
Between CHATTANOOGA (population 128,000) and Knoxville (population 112,000), both in east Tennessee, there is considerable rivalry. Chattanooga (“the Dynamo of Dixie”) is a well-run town, full of history (Lookout Mountain), with a genuine social and intellectual distinction, and industry both long established and heavily expanding; it makes everything from ferrosilicon to stockings. And here, in a manner of speaking, the New York Times was born.
KNOXVILLE is the ugliest city I ever saw in America, with the possible exception of some mill towns in New England. Its main street is called Gay Street; this seemed to me to be a misnomer. A recent movie, “Ziegfeld Follies of 1946,” could only be shown in a cut version in Knoxville, because one sequence shows Lena Horne. Knoxville, an extremely puritanical town, serves no alcohol stronger than 3.6 per cent beer, and its more dignified taprooms close at 9:30 P.M.; Sunday movies are forbidden, and there is no Sunday baseball. Perhaps as a result, it is one of the least orderly cities in the South—Knoxville leads every other town in Tennessee in homicides, automobile thefts, and larceny.
Tennessee: a Word About Its Folklore
The Volunteer State, we have seen, produces some fragrant political invective; it comes by this honestly enough. In the 1860’s a famous Kentucky editor, George D. Prentice, disapproved to a degree of William
G. Brownlow, a local preacher and reconstruction governor of Tennessee, This is part of what Prentice said of him:
He never had mind enough to keep his body from rotting—consequently, he was always a mass of putrefaction…. All the little atom of sense he ever had—if he ever had an atom—has gone to the grave before him, but not much before him, it is to be hoped, for mankind’s sake. He is a loathsome fistula of the body politic … a foul bubble floating on the surface of a cesspool…. There has never been any more religion or decency in his sermons, or his exhortations, or his talk at death beds, than in the yelling of hyenas, the cursing of pirates, or the objurgations of harlots…. Heaven, earth, and even Hell, abhor him—though the latter will somehow manage to gulp him down.
A well-known statue in Nashville is that of John A. Murrell. He was a horse thief and slave thief, so tough that, on being branded once on the palm, he bit the brand out. Caught again, he was branded on the forehead, where his teeth would not reach. But why should the Tennessean community have erected a statue to a criminal who, it would seem, had none of the glamor of a man like Billy the Kid, none of the effective popular appeal of desperadoes like Jesse James? Murrell was little more than a savage; once, in the early days on the Cumberland Trail, he cut a woman’s child to pieces before her eyes. Nashville, like Louisville, was at one time the pit of a flaming political conflict over the railroads; Major E. C. Lewis, editor of the old Nashville American, led the antirailroad faction. When, years later, one of the railway promoters died, his friends built him a statue. Thereupon Lewis proclaimed, “If that blatherskite is to have a monument in Nashville, then, Heaven being my witness, John A. Murrell shall have one too!” Lewis was chairman of the city park board at the time, and so was able to put his threat into effect.
The biggest man ever known to medical science was a Tennessean, and also the biggest hog. The man, by name Miles Darden (1798-1857), was seven feet six inches high, and weighed 871 pounds in 1845; later his weight grew considerably greater. Up to 1853 (I am quoting a letter from Albert Williams, a noted Nashville authority on local lore) “he was quite active and lively, after which, his fat increasing, he was compelled to stay at home.” Previously, when traveling, it took a two-horse wagon to carry him; when he died, of strangulation caused by fat around the vocal cords, the side of the house had to be removed, in order to get the body out. The biggest hog ever known, by name Big Bill, lived in Lexington, Tennessee, and weighed 2,400 pounds. After some happy years spent reclining, it tried to rise one day, whereupon all its legs broke, and it died.
Tennessee, Its Colonizing Force
This is in a way the most remarkable single thing about Tennessee. The state has, practically since its admission to the union in 1796, produced pioneers who moved out, and in other domains gained stalwart renown—men like Admiral Farragut and Davy Crockett. When we reach Texas we shall find how, in a manner of speaking, that gigantic state is a kind of Tennessee colony; no fewer than seven members of a recent Texan congressional delegation were Tennessee born. Elsewhere, too, the Tennesseans have sent out fecund settlers; they have virtually taken over whole professions—for instance banking—throughout the Southwest.12
Tennessee claims three American presidents, as many as any state except Virginia, Ohio, and New York. They were Jackson, Polk, and Johnson; the legend is that Tennessee “ruled the nation from 1830 to 1850.” Oddly enough, however, these three all happened to have been born in the Carolinas, though they became indisputable Tennesseans later. Indeed Tennessee receives just as it transmits. Both Crump and McKellar, we have seen, were born outside.
Arkansas, the Wonder State
Arkansas is a highly curious and interesting community. It is one of the most impoverished of all American states, with an intermontane backwoods inaccessible and primitive in the extreme; yet it possesses the greatest reserves in the country of bauxite, the indispensable raw material from which aluminum is made; it contains such a notably fashionable resort as Hot Springs, cotton land as rich as the Mississippi Delta, gambling dens of almost Pompeian splendor, and a senator as good as young James William Fulbright.13
Arkansas yields to no other state in its local pride and friendly swagger. Some time ago, an article I wrote on Texas appeared in Harper’s Magazine and, in severely condensed form, in Reader’s Digest; I happened to mention erroneously, listing some Texas “firsts,” that the Lone Star State produced the biggest watermelons in the world. What a deluge of obloquy and odium descended on my head!—not from Texas, but from Arkansas. I got letters by the dozen; loyal Arkansans wrote me from all over the country, with the rebuke that I must be a miserable creature indeed not to be aware that, incontestably, by mammoth proof over and over demonstrated, a town called Hope, in Arkansas, is the watermelon center of the world, and habitually produces in illimitable profusion the best and biggest watermelons ever known. A recent specimen tipped the scales at 197 pounds.
A few chapters further on I shall mention a provocative pamphlet put out in Houston called Texas Brags, a copy of which Senator Tom Connally once gave me. The only similar pamphlet I know on an American state is on Arkansas, edited by Avantus Green of Little Rock, and called With This We Challenge, an Epitome of Arkansas. It is full of rare and fascinating gems, under the motto “Let restraint be damned!” Arkansas has the oldest national park in America, it is the first strawberry-producing state, and it has chinchilla farms. It contains the “duckshooting capital of the world,” and within its borders may be found five hundred different varieties of wild flower, including 27 kinds of orchid; 109 different minerals, including diamonds; 61 varieties of “blossoming trees,” and though it is two hundred miles from the Gulf, one of the largest oyster-shell beds in the world, with deposits of seven million cubic yards.
An Arkansas farmer and writer named C. L. Edson wrote a pungent essay about his state in the Nation some years ago, of which the following is a sample:
Arkansas has its own popular motto and it is this: “I’ve never seen nothin’, I don’t know nothin’, I hain’t got nothin’, and I don’t want nothin’.” … It (Arkansas) just grew out of seepage. … A belt of mud prevented Arkansas from having a port and denied to her a metropolis, a civilization, and a history. A people who were willing to foot it a hundred miles through the muck to get nowhere founded Arkansas and achieved their aim…. No stream can rise higher than its source, and Arkansas has proved it. … Few can read in Arkansas, and those who can, do not.
In Americana I find these nuggets. A Little Rock paper reported once:
Warden Evans announced that all electrocutions conducted under his regime would be held strictly according to the law. “People get the idea,” he said, “that electrocutions are social gatherings, but none of this kind will be held while I am warden. An execution is a serious matter.”
In a back-country town a new ordinance includes these two provisions:
1. Hereafter, it shall be unlawful for any man and woman, male or female, to be guilty of committing the act of sexual intercourse between themselves at any place within the corporate limits …
2. This shall not apply to married persons, as between themselves, and their husband and wife [sic !] unless of a grossly improper and lascivious nature.
Arkansas is, like Tennessee, packed with folklore, and everybody knows the ancient saga, “On a Slow Train Through Arkansas.” Once some miscreants rhymed Arkansas with Kansas instead of saying Arkansaw. An Arkansas representative rose promptly in the halls of Congress:
Mr. Speaker, you blue-bellied rascal! I have for the last thirty minutes been trying to get your attention, and each time I have caught your eye, you have wormed, twisted and squirmed like a dog with a flea in his hide, damn you!
Gentlemen, you may desecrate the grave of Washington, haul down the Stars and Stripes, curse the Goddess of Liberty … but your crime would in no wise compare in enormity with what you propose to do when you would change the name of Arkansas! Hell fire, no!
Compare the lily of the valley to the gorgeous sunrise; the discordant croak of the bullfrog to the melodious tones of the nightingale; the classic strains of Mozart to the death bray of an apoplectic mule; the puny arm of a Peruvian prince to the muscles of a Roman gladiator—but NEVER change the name of Arkansas!
Mr. Green’s pamphlet contains some other specimens of pictorial braggadocio:
Arkansas chiggers are red-speckled. They are small, about the size of a common Fifth Avenue flea. Anatomically speaking they are composed of nine sets of sharp teeth, a drilling tool, and a brain trained to identify men from north of the Ohio River. Though strictly carnivorous, their habitat is tree foliage, short vegetation, and reclining Yankees.
The Missouri Pacific Railway put a temporary halt to the growing of the really big Hope melons when they refused, at the outset of the war, to consign a flat car for transporting the county prize melon from farm to market. Left on the vine, it soured and last year burst, killing vegetation and animal life over a seven square mile area.
Little Rock, the capital, is a modern-looking town today, with an admirably comfortable hotel (the Friederica), a newspaper (the Arkansas Gazette) that has been continuously published under the same masthead for 126 years, and about 90,000 people. Originally it was a French trading post. The most impressive building today gives a hint about the community; it is the Albert Pike Memorial Temple, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Free Masonry.
Arkansas falls geographically and culturally into two distinct areas; the line of the Missouri Pacific more or less divides them. The state is, I heard it put, both the “West of the Pony” and the “South of the Piazza.” The west, a region of open plains, is cow country, and resembles Texas; the Ozark area in the north seems to be a carry-over from Missouri, with small truck and chicken farms and a 100 per cent Anglo-Saxon population, very poor and thrifty. The other great division is the Delta region along the Mississippi, which is pure “old South”—a district of huge plantations (you scarcely count as a cotton farmer unless you have 10,000 acres), and a social system still mostly feudal. Near towns like Wilson, entrepreneurs bought swamp land for fifty cents an acre, drained it, and became millionaires almost overnight. Look at the Negro work hands here, under road bosses, and you will see Uncle Tom’s Cabin come to life.
The white peasantry—not merely in the Delta but almost everywhere in Arkansas—is not much better off. It was here, some years ago, that American sharecroppers sought to organize for the first time; today, an organization called the National Farm Labor Union is hard at work trying to build an effective labor movement among the poorest of poor whites. But antilabor sentiment in Arkansas is vehement and extreme. As far back as 1944, the state voted on a constitutional amendment to forbid the closed shop; recently a Veterans Industrial Association was set up, with scarcely concealed vigilante aims,14 and the area was an early stronghold of the Christian American Association, founded by Vance Muse of Texas (whom we shall encounter later on) which forced a bill through the Arkansas legislature providing that even a threat of violence by a member of a labor union was a felony, i.e., a penitentiary offense.
The war shook things up. From being a backwater, Arkansas found itself with 400 million dollars worth of war production orders. Labor became somewhat stronger as a result since, as we well know, and as even Arkansas came to learn, industrialization isn’t possible without a labor movement. The companies working the tremendous bauxite deposits (97 per cent of all the aluminum in America is found in Arkansas) are of course Alcoa and its lively competitor, Reynolds Metals. Both these companies are absentee owned; most of the wealth from bauxite goes outside the state, except local wages. An interesting potential development is the discovery recently of titanium deposits near Eureka Springs. This ore contains considerable portions of both thorium and uranium—which may mean that Arkansas will in time be a great contributor to the use of atomic power.
Next to the Delta farmers and such familiar agencies as the Baptist church, the biggest political force is the Arkansas Power & Light Company, a subsidiary of Electric Bond & Share; nowhere in the union has a utility such influence on a state as in Arkansas. Its boss for years was the late Senator Joe Robinson, a notable vassal of the power company; one recent governor attained office mostly because of resentment at the influence of Arkansas Power & Light on his predecessor. (Americans, when aroused, do move.) The general technique of the company is to watch closely for the rise of any bright young man, a lawyer say and then, quite legitimately, to hire him. Arkansas Power was run for years by a fabulous nabob named Harvey Couch; his regent on the local scene was C. Hamilton Moses, a Baptist who became secretary to various governors and then Couch’s attorney. One story is that Arkansas, not Tennessee, might have had a valley development like TVA (in the form of an AVA); but Senator Robinson, who was majority leader at the time, and a very close friend of Couch’s, told Roosevelt that the state didn’t want it. Arkansas Power & Light is of course absentee owned; I have given in Chapter 43 a typical sample of its rates. Not long ago, it was ordered by the Federal Power Commission to show within a stipulated brief interval why it should not mark off 17 million dollars in its “book value,” which is one reason why its rates are high.
Arkansas had a vivid and successful veterans’ revolt in 1946 almost exactly corresponding to the one in Tennessee. Combining factors were resentment at big gambling in the neighborhood, the savage poverty of the poor farmers, and contamination of the community by a debauched political machine.
In Arkansas, unlike Tennessee, the white primary is a bigger issue than the poll tax. The situation passes the borderline of the fantastic; in 1946 the state had four separate and distinct primaries, following passage of a law that segregates federal from state elections, in order to evade implications of the Supreme Court’s white primary decision, and to continue exclusion of Negroes from state polls.
1 Of course not to be confused with the Shelby in North Carolina.
2 Mr. Carmack’s father was a famous Tennessee editor, who was murdered in Nashville in 1908 by a political opponent. The tradition of political violence in Tennessee is, as in Kentucky, never far away.
3 See a series of columns by Thomas L. Stokes in the Scripps-Howard papers, July, 1946.
4 One of these letters began, “Your stupidity at times defeats the cold cruelty and cunning evil with which you seek to inject [sic] in your news articles and editorials.” Meeman replied by printing it. The other Memphis paper, the Commercial Appeal, is more cautious in its attitude to Crump. Incidentally Memphis is the only American city in which Scripps-Howard, owning both papers, is a monopoly. The Commercial Appeal is, however, the only Scripps-Howard paper that does not use the organization’s lighthouse insignia on its masthead.
5 He wanted to give the mayoralty to a congressman friend who had not been able to run because Crump had asked him to stay in Congress long enough to vote on neutrality legislation then impending.
6 This story is told in full detail in Democracy Begins at Home: the Tennessee Fight on the Poll Tax by Jennings Perry.
7 Congressional Record, August 12, 1946.
8 Congressional Record, July 16, 1946.
9 A celebrated member of the early New Deal brain trust, when still in close favor with Roosevelt, once tried to get a job for a relative in TVA. Lilienthal turned him down, and of course has never been forgiven.
10 Serving Johnson City and Kingsport in Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia.
11 One county, Sevier, is as solidly Republican as anything in Vermont.
12 Boss Crump, mentioning this phenomenon to me, also pointed out the astonishing fact that, at one time, eight United States se~ators were born in l\lississ.ippiincluding men representing Arkansas, Nevada (PIttman), Oregon, and Washmgton (Poindexter) .
13 Of course I should balance this chapter with a section on Fulbright, one of the ablest and most levelheaded progressives in Washington, of equal length to that on McKellar above. A whole long essay might be written on the contrasts between them. But space does not permit.
14 Cf. Harold B. Hinton in the New York Times, August 26, 1946.