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

A Little Evil

The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 189 From that day on, Jacobs, a tavern owner and junk furniture dealer, was known as “Little Evil,” a nickname he spent a lot of his time trying to live up to. He sided with West on the Metro referendum, rivaling Stahlman and the Banner for the role of most vocal Metro opponent. Jacobs’ South Side neighborhood was plastered with signs and placards that warned that “Russia Has One Government” and “Castro Has Metro.” Jones, Jacobs, and the other West bosses delivered a credible 55 percent of the city vote against the charter. But turnout was small, less than 35 percent. Roberson’s combined county forces, meanwhile, turned out the vote in greater numbers, with a 72 percent landslide from the newly annexed suburbs. The Metro election was a disastrous personal defeat for Ben West, whose term expired the following year. He would never win another election. The county machine had done him in. He’d lost the mayor’s office the same way he’d gotten it eleven years before when Garner and the county machine turned on the incumbent Tom Cummings. By turning on West and abandoning their opposition to Metro, the Robinsons had handed the mayor’s office to Beverly Briley. Through Cousin Jimmy, they had launched another generation, forged a new progressive black-white voting coalition, and joined the new urban era of Nashville politics. Urban reformers maybe, but less than two months later the ghosts of the old Robinson allies, Boss Crump and Jake Sheridan, would again rise on the political landscape of Nashville in what would become known as the great vote fraud scandal of 1962. A Little Evil Nashville’s famed Hermitage congressional district seat had been filled by the likes of Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston. So it was no wonder that both the city and state were embarrassed in 1939 when A Little Evil James D. Squires 190 the incumbent representative Joe Byrns called the visiting King George VI and Queen Elizabeth “a couple of flat tires.” The next year the voters tossed Byrns out of office and replaced him with the distinguished J. Percy Priest in what for years was regarded as the meanest, hardest-fought election in the history of the district. In 1962, they finally had a meaner one. It was Priest’s death that necessitated the special executive committee election in 1956 that put J. Carlton Loser in office. Six years later, nearing age seventy, Loser looked so unbeatable that the highflying winners of the battle over Metro government didn’t even bother to challenge him with a candidate they believed could win. When Thomas H. Shriver, Jr., the son of a respected judge, wanted to test Loser in the Democratic party primary, he was told by the Briley faction to forget it. Their candidate would be a sacrificial lamb, State Senator Richard Fulton, who had already lost two bids for the seat and would surely be beaten a third time. About all he had going for him was the support of organized labor. Loser had recorded enough antilabor votes to be included on the list of targets that Teamster president James R. Hoffa had said should be purged in the 1962 elections. But Loser picked the city’s fastest-rising political and legal star, Z. T. “Tommy” Osborn, as his campaign manager. With Osborn’s name atop his campaign, Loser ran harder against Teamster boss Hoffa than against Fulton, charging that the Teamsters and other unions were financing the challenge against him. But in truth Loser did not believe he’d have to run hard at all. He was on the same ballot with incumbent governor Frank Clement, who was a heavy favorite to win nomination for his third term. So Loser shook a few hands, made a few campaign speeches, and depended on his incumbency and the West city machine to get him nominated. The Tennessean was supporting Fulton, as it had in 1960, but lukewarmly and as much out of dislike for Loser as anything else. The newspaper had opposed the congressman ever since 1947, when his brother Buck had been accused of misusing absentee ballots while trying to unseat Mayor Tom Cummings. To the newspaper’s new young leaders, Loser, like Mayor West and Governor Clement, was The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 191 simply another holdover from the days of Boss Crump and Jake...