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

Stickmen and High Rollers

121 Stickmen and High Rollers Tennessean publisher Silliman Evans was anything but a selfrighteous moralist concerned about corruption of his community by unscrupulous underworld gamblers. When he bought the newspaper, it was housed in the old Southern Turf building on Fourth Avenue, previously the city’s most famous downtown gambling house. It had expensive frescoed walls and ermine toiletseat covers and shook like an earthquake every time the presses ran. Gambling, he knew well, was as integral a part of the city’s life as whiskey was of his own. The newspaper’s attorney, Jack Norman, was no antigambling crusader either. As lawyer for the leading distributor of onearm bandits, he had obtained one of the illegal slot machines as a present for Evans’ youngest son, Amon Carter. The favor had cemented his relationship with the publisher and resulted in the newspaper’s becoming his client. But both Evans and Norman understood the advantage of the moral high ground,and they seized it frequently in their long struggle to evict the election thief Jake Sheridan from the public square.Evans realized that to the Bible-thumping fundamentalists who dominated Nashville’s pulpits, gambling walked hand in hand with whiskey and whores.This was a three-headed evil against which voter fury could be whipped up. Simply branding a man a gambler left him with a stigma that was hard to shake. They would hang illegal gambling around the necks of Sheridan, Robinson, and Garfinkle and flog them in the public square to the amens of churchgoing voters. On the books at least, Tennessee was hard on sinners, with laws on whiskey, gambling, and sex tough enough to please the most righteous of the rural fundamentalists and moralists who dominated the state legislature. A dry state from 1909 to 1939, Tennessee passed laws in 1917 levying even suffer penalties than those of the national Prohibition. Yet the successful urban politicians of the Stickmen and High Rollers James D. Squires 122 time—machine bosses like Crump and Howse—were those who quietly promised to wink at any laws attempting to legislate morality, the same way the whole country was winking at Prohibition. Howse first won election on a pledge not to enforce Prohibition and was returned to office by the voters for nearly three decades. His success set in stone the resulting political commandment: Leave the bootleggers and gamblers alone. They will appreciate it. And unless there is a huge turnout of voters, the coalition of gamblers, bootleggers, honky-tonkers, and police will be enough to carry Election Day. From the minute he won the sheriff’s office in 1946, Garner Robinson, like his predecessors in law enforcement, stood on the gallows of this hypocrisy. And over the years he was given enough rope to hang himself. A few days after taking office, his nickel-plated, engraved inaugura­ tion pistol in his pocket, Sheriff Garner Robinson knocked on a locked door at the Orange Inn on Dickerson Road. A peephole opened, revealing the big, kind eye of card player James F. “Slo” Barnes. “Well, well. It’s the new sheriff, boys,” said Slo, fumbling with the lock. “Come on in, Garner.” Garner marched in, took one look at the cards and money on the table, and arrested Slo and his three friends. “Slo, what in the hell were you thinking?” Barnes’s partner wanted to know. “Why didn’t you wait until they got the money off the table before you unlocked the door? That is the dumbest goddamn thing I ever heard of.” Barnes was called “Slo” because of the pace of his feet, not his brain. He had been completely surprised, not by the visit so much as by the arrest.And who could have blamed him? It may have been the first time in years that one of the city’s big-time gamblers was visited by the police without advance warning. And it would not happen again for many more years to come. For, as Dave always said about Garner, “he knew when he had stepped on his pecker.” The raid had not been an act of law enforcement as much as one The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 123 of political necessity. Earlier that day, four of Garner’s new deputies, trying to serve a warrant on a man for carrying a pistol, had stumbled upon a nickel-dime poker game with nineteen dollars in...