The Secrets of the Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City's Coming of Age

Advancing the Art

The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 89 to the Colemere Club on an Easter Sunday afternoon. They watched while I played on the thick green grass with other boys in bow ties and long white pants and with snaggletoothed little girls in frilly lacy dresses that bobbed up and down and showed their underwear when they bent over to pick up the colored eggs. Garner’s pretty blond twins were the only kids there I knew, but they just smiled and ran off. All afternoon my granddaddy stood on the edge of the crowd talking to Garner and Jake, about President Truman, I suppose. And I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was the only kid there who knew they had guns under their coats. Advancing the Art Shortly after buying the Tennessean in 1937, Silliman Evans was invited by James G. Stahlman, who had succeeded his grandfather as publisher of the Banner, to attend the Sulphur Dell Club, a monthly dinner meeting of the town’s movers and shakers named after the old minor-league ball park. There Evans met round-faced, cigar-smoking Jack Norman, a crackerjack criminal defense lawyer, rising political power, and Skinny Neiderhauser Robinson’s first boyfriend. He would become the newspaper’s counsel and Evans’ confidant. Also among the guests introduced to Evans that day was dignified, courtly Walter Stokes, Jr., a man typical of the families who lived in stately mansions in the city’s West End and owned sprawling antebellum estates in the beautiful Tennessee countryside. He was from a family of lawyers Advancing the Art James D. Squires 90 whose wealth went so far back even the descendants had trouble pinpointing its beginnings. He dressed elegantly, carried himself rigidly in the manner of the well-to-do, and spoke with the soft, precise vowels of southern aristocracy. Both Stokes and Norman, a man of more modest beginnings from a section of South Nashville, were do-gooders, paragons of citizen concern about good government. Norman had worked his way to prominence and had courageously backed the campaigns of several reform-minded political candidates. Stokes had formed the Citizens Protective Association in the interest of preservation of a nearly extinct species—an honest Tennessee election. Liketheotherrich,well-educatedmenwhogatheredregularlyas the Sulphur Dell Club, Evans, Stahlman, Norman, and Stokes had high aspirations for the future of their city.Every day the Tennessean had a line under its masthead calling Nashville the “Inner Citadel of the Nation.” And in his afternoon Banner, Stahlman authored a regular front-page editorial called “From the Shoulder” in which he dispensed advice on how the city should conduct itself. Not unlike committed city fathers elsewhere, the Sulphur Dellers felt they should have the power to chart the direction of their town. The problem was they didn’t. The real decisions affecting the future of Nashville were not the prerogative of the well-intentioned businessmen of the Sulphur Dell Club. They belonged to the political wheeler-dealers on the public square. Ten years later, nothing had changed. Garner’s election as sheriff in 1946 had solidified the machine’s control of the county court. The old county judge Litton Hickman, who had opposed Garner’s election, had made a fatal mistake when he attempted to block the sheriff’s first budget appropriation. “There will be no compromise,” the judge declared. And there wasn’t. Between them, Jake, Garner, and Elkin had already lined up twenty-seven of the forty-seven magistrates behind their proposal. The appropriation passed, and from that day on Jake, Elkin, and Garner had firm control of the court. They later punished Hickman by throwing out his friend and Jake’s The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 91 old mentor, Big Bill Jones, as county party chief and replacing him with their own man, an East Nashville hardware dealer named W. Y. “Booty” Draper. Draper’s rise to prominence was typical of the way the trio worked. When Garner was running for sheriff, he had gotten a Nashville hardware supply executive to come out to the suburb of Madison where he lived to escort him to the local hardware store, which was operated by Draper and his brother. While Garner mingled with Draper’s customers, the supplier offered Draper a deal. “You and your brother know a lot of people out here on this side of town,” the supplier said. “If you help...