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

Jake and Sillyman

104 Jake and Sillyman One piece of Elkin Garfinkle’s advice that Jake persistently ignored was that he try to make peace with Silliman Evans and his Tennessean. Jake knew that doing so would entail trying to charm the old publisher, which he figured was useless. Jake was right. A man of small stature, Evans was, according to his rival Stahlman, “small of brain, too, sometimes.” But he had giant selfconfidence and a lifelong immunity to the charm of politicians, as Big Jim Folsom, the colorful giant who served as governor of Alabama in the late forties, would attest. Folsom was six foot eight, weighed 250 pounds, and wore a size-fifteen shoe. He had a correspondingly sized ego and appetites of similar proportion for sex and bourbon, which he indulged to the extreme one night at a party aboard Evans’ yacht, the Tennessean Lady. As the boat chugged down the Tennessee River somewhere in the wilds of north Alabama, the little publisher finally had enough of the big governor. “Pull up to the bank and put the sonofabitch off,”Evans ordered. The startled crew began scrambling around to determine the nearest town. One scanned the bank with a searchlight looking for a landing but illuminated only a dense forest. “Where are we?” he wanted to know. “Looks like Treeville to me,” said one of Evans’ front-page columnists, who was only a few sheets in the wind behind Folsom. “That’ll do. Put him off there in Treeville,” the publisher ordered. And they did, along with his Alabama highway patrol escort. Later in his life Folsom remembered Evans as a “high-tempered little bantam rooster always looking for a fight.” In those days, wagering on fights to death with roosters was common in the South. And in between the fatalities, the more faint of heart could play a less Jake and Sillyman The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 105 exciting game of chance called “Rooster Bingo” in which a single cock ambled about nonviolently in a wire coop suspended above a numbered board, with betting conducted on which number would catch the next plop of excrement. The most vulgar and memorable features of both games were often the hallmarks of the other main recreational pursuit of the time—politics. Nowhere was this more evident than in the two-decade-long power struggle between Silliman Evans’ Tennessean and Jake Sheridan’s political machine. Jake’s double cross of the new county judge Beverly Briley at the fall 1950 meeting of the quarterly court sent Silliman Evans into orbit. On a Thursday morning, October 30, Mayor Cummings went on a matter of considerable urgency to Jake’s office two doors away. Jake wasn’t there, so the mayor asked his secretary, Mrs. Elizabeth Iverson,about the progress of the property inventory Jake had been hired three years earlier to complete. It was two years overdue, he told her. Mrs. Iverson said she believed the inventory was near completion and would soon be filed. When Jake came back that afternoon,he telephoned the mayor’s office and Cummings returned. This time he found Jake huddled with Elkin and Booty Draper, city councilman, court officer, and party executive committee chairman. Politely, as was his style, Cummings asked when the property inventory would be ready. “I don’t have it yet,” replied Jake in a loud voice, which was uncharacteristic. “And I’m not going to be in any hurry about finishing it.” One word led to another, with Jake finally offering to quit “if you write me a letter asking me for my resignation.” Cummings went back to his office and wrote a letter of dismissal, which he released to the Tennessean. “Dear Sir,” wrote the mayor.“Differences of opinion have come up between us concerning the policy of this administration, which are impossible of solution. In view of this, I consider it for the good of the service that you be relieved of your duties as director of public property of the City of Nashville. “This is, therefore, to advise you that effective Nov. 1, 1950, your James D. Squires 106 services as director of public property of the City of Nashville will terminate.” The Tennessean splashed the story all over the front page. Sheridan’s firing, the story claimed, was a surprise to political observers. The paper predicted that “with his ouster he is certain to lose command of...