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

The Hopewell Box

The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 59 Silliman Evans, Jake was guilty.And from that point on, Cummings was never comfortable with Jake as part of his political organization. By the time the 1945 primary rolled around, the discomfort had grown to an intense feud between the county and city factions of the Democratic party, with Jake at its center. In the January session of the legislature, Jake’s county group had forced a revision of the city charter, dividing the power of Mayor Cummings among five city commissioners. As was often the case, Jake had personally overreached by getting the legislature to create a special six-thousand-dollar job for himself as deputy commissioner of public works. Mayor Cummings, however, had gotten the city council to refuse to fund the position and was working to get the old charter restored. It was as part of this feud with Cummings that Jake Sheridan had held up the county machine decision on whom to field in the sheriff’s race. Although he had no intention of doing so, he threatened to run himself, in effect giving him the deciding vote. Big Bill Jones, unaccustomed to such outright rebellion, traveled to Memphis and laid the dispute at the feet of Crump himself, who quickly settled it. If Nashville expected any more help in the legislature, the Boss decreed, Garner Robinson had better be the sheriff and Jake Sheridan the chief deputy. Jake had always intended to support Garner, but by playing the recalcitrant, he had gotten himself a new job in the process. Jake immediately became Robinson’s behind-the-scenes campaign manager and his presence a bone of contention to be gnawed on by Silliman Evans’ Tennessean for years to come. The Hopewell Box On the morning of November 12, the Tennessean’s political writer, an eagle-eyed, bald-headed man named Joe Hatcher, whose words The Hopewell Box James D. Squires 60 carried the weight of the publisher’s opinion, issued a front-page warning to the citizens of Davidson County. In a column sandwiched between composer Jerome Kern’s obituary and a report of King George VI honoring England’s war dead, Hatcher explained that a vote for Garner Robinson and the county “gang” ticket would keep the city under the thumb of the machine. Which meant, he said, that county bosses would control the elections the following year when the city voted on its new charter and selected a new delegation to the state legislature—a disgraceful circumstance “that no thinking citizen condones.” Despite the presence of five other names on the ballot, the sheriff’s race had narrowed to a two-man contest between Garner and the city administration’s candidate,John Cole,a former city and county policeman who had served during the war in the merchant marine. In personally declaring his support for Cole, Mayor Tom Cummings had made it clear why he preferred him over Robinson. “John Cole,” he said,“is the candidate who has pledged that he will not seek to interfere with the city government.” There would be no such pledge from any candidate backed by Jake Sheridan, and Cummings knew it. The large number of candidates in the sheriff’s race was evidence in itself that the two machines had squared off. Machines do best when they hold down the vote and split the opposition forces, so each side had fielded phony candidates in an effort to draw votes away from the main opponents. While Garner ran positively on his record as a businessman and a soldier in World War II, Jake had recruited a former chief of the state highway patrol, Joe Boyd Williams, to campaign negatively against Cole by challenging his war record. Meanwhile, the Cummings crowd countered by pushing a fourth candidate, pear-shaped Raymond Cannon, a commissioned deputy sheriff who ran a private police and fire service in Garner’s East Nashville stronghold. Gentlemanly Walter Stokes, Jr., a leading reformer and head of an election watchdog group known as the Citizens Protective Association , was quoted by Hatcher as saying the sheriff’s race was so The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 61 close it might well be determined by how many people went to the polls. Less than twenty-six thousand, he said, would make it difficult to beat the machine. But a turnout of thirty-five thousand or more would certainly guarantee its defeat...