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135 Chapter 13 The Cosmos of the Lieutenant Governor Let the senate be the senate. —­­­­­­­­­­­­­­John S. Wilder He was the longest-serving lieutenant governor in America, a lawyer by training and a cotton gin owner, lender, farmer, and pilot also. Yet to most who knew John Wilder—politicians, journalists, and friends—he was, underneath it all, an enigma. His law office was on the town square in Somerville, Tennessee, east of Memphis, but the farm where he lived, which had been in his family since the 1880s, was in an unincorporated community called Longtown. This home, together with the Braden Methodist Church, up the road, where he taught Sunday school for fifty years, was the true center of his life outside of politics. In Longtown, Wilder lived with his beloved family: his wife, Marcelle, and his sons, Shelton and David. Here, on land he owned, stretching over six thousand acres, he managed a cotton gin and farm supply business. At one time, Wilder’s Longtown Supply Company, founded in 1887, was the largest cotton gin in Tennessee. Wilder was a quiet, courtly, deliberate man. He was sparing and measured in his words and at times could also seem cryptic in his statements. Jim Travis, a television news reporter and former anchor for the ABC affiliate in Nashville, recalled Wilder’s speaking style—simple declarative sentences , in measured cadences—and remembered he often referred to himself as “the speaker” rather than “I” in the customary first-person. “He would say, ‘the speaker feels,’ or ‘the speaker believes,’ referring to himself,” Travis told me. “I was always taught to never trust a politician who refers to himself in the third person, like they were disembodied from their own actions.” Wilder was also a private man. He was reserved with details about his own life, even with his family, according to his son Shelton. He had served in 136 COUP the US Army during World War II, but the son told me he did not remember his father ever telling stories from his military service. “He never really talked much about the army. When the war was over, he came home and ran the cotton gin, the farm, and the lending business, financing people to make their crops. He started law school, at the University of Memphis, the day my brother, David, was born, in 1947. He went to school at night, for ten years, and passed the bar in 1958.” He called himself a “Jeffersonian Democrat,” even kept collections of Thomas Jefferson quotes on his desk, and his politics was fiercely local. One of the Jefferson quotes that Wilder saved at his desk and shared with visitors: “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” He reared his sons to appreciate an honest day’s work. “Our dad was how you saw him,” Shelton Wilder remembered. “He was what he was—not a lot of pretense about him. He expected his children to work hard, and he required it. When I was ten years old, they put me in the field to chop hay in the pasture. Dad always felt everybody had to contribute and do what they could. He taught my brother and me that we were expected to work. He was a good father.” Over his long political career, Wilder won and held office in his home district without any apparent alignment with the major statewide machines of his day. His family and closest political allies confirm that he had no connections to, or benefits from, the vestiges of the old Crump-­ McKellar machine and its Clement-Ellington heirs, nor of the KefauverBrowning progressives. He remained independent of all these and charted his own course. In Nashville, Wilder survived in his leadership office by keeping a generally low profile, by maintaining a conservative voting record on issues, and when leadership votes came up every other January, by cutting deals with his core of senate allies. The Wilder allies in the thirty-three-member state senate were a hybrid coalition of Democrats and Republican members. By assembling at least seventeen of these every two years—employing a rewards system using his power to appoint the chairs of all standing committees—Wilder was able to hang on to his speakership longer than any other state legislator in America. Paul G. Summers was a native of Wilder’s Fayette County and a lawyer in Somerville. At...

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