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

The Public Square

51 The Public Square TheNashvillepublicsquarewaslaidoutonahighbluffoverlooking the Cumberland. It was there in its center, in the year after Garner Robinson won his first election, that the politicians, using money from FDR’s Public Works Administration, built themselves a new Neoclassical courthouse that looked like a big, fancy shoebox. The occasion of its opening was notable if for no other reason than it evoked a rare agreement on a matter of public policy by the city’s two daily newspapers. Both the owner of the afternoon Banner, Maj. E. B. Stahlman, and the rival owner and publisher of the morning Tennessean,Silliman Evans,newly arrived from Chicago, viewed the stunning nude murals done for the inside of the building by the New Deal artist as a vulgar affront to public morals. Nudes may have been okay for the ancient Greeks, the newspapers said, but they were not welcome in “the Athens of the South.” Not long after that, on January 2, 1938, the publishers agreed again—maybe for the last time ever—that the death of the city’s longtime mayor Hilary Ewing Howse was a step forward for the city. A former furniture dealer with little formal education, Howse had held office for twenty-nine years, mainly by closing his eyes to vice and aligning himself with the state’s evil political dictator, Edward H.“Boss” Crump of Memphis, and the rural county bosses who controlled the state legislature. By the time the thirty-two-year-old magistrate Garner Robinson and his buddies from Old Hickory showed up on the square in search of their piece of the political pie, Howse was a sick old man and his power was up for grabs. Rival city and county factions were forming, their outlines faintly visible in their choice of lunch spots. The square teemed with commerce. There were fruit stands, pawnshops, loan companies, drugstores, and one guy still selling The Public Square James D. Squires 52 harnesses. But none of it was more crucial to the conduct of public business than the two lunch emporiums, both located in the old city hall building across from the new courthouse. Named after their owners—on one side the Smith Brothers’ and on the other Frank Underwood’s—they were the politicians’ hangouts, where alliances were built and deals cut. Friends were made there—and enemies. Crump’s man W. T. “Big Bill” Jones, a leader of the county court and head of the local election commission, ate at Smith Brothers’ as did Garner’s political patron, Sheriff Bob Marshall. But city councilman Elkin Garfinkle, a former top Howse advisor who had broken away, now aligned himself with the new group of city reformers who gathered regularly at Underwood’s. Jake Winston Sheridan, another city councilman and friend to both Garfinkle and Big Bill, ate at both places. It was a time for flexibility, and nobody was more flexible than Jake. He was a quiet, rat-faced man who wore well-made double-breasted suits and colorful ties and combed his hair straight back like the movie star George Raft. For twelve years, Jake had labored in the shadows as the Howse machine’s man in the Nineteenth Ward. During the thirties he had earned his living in a job Crump had made possible, as custodian for the state capitol building complex on the hilltop around which Nashville grew. Recently, he had given up that post to accept an appointment as court process server and deputy to Sheriff Bob Marshall. With this new employment in the county faction and his continuing membership in the city council, Jake had a foot in each camp. And the betting around the courthouse was that if a third faction developed, Jake could grow another foot. His clearly rising influence stemmed mainly from his ability to get others elected, which was an asset rooted in being the protégé of the inveterate political scalawag Jones. As election commission chairman, Big Bill set election rules and counted the votes. He had been on the public payrolls for forty years, often holding six or seven jobs at a time. Once, after Jones had been indicted for vote fraud, Boss Crump had the legislature create a new Nashville criminal court and put on the bench a judge who would dismiss the charges. The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 53 Two decades after the vote fraud indictment, Jones still exercised power simply...