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

A Jockey for Gallahadion

The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 205 lawyer Hooker, and their army of ragtag kid journalists were on a mission, a steamroll for right, justice, and a better America. Or so it seemed to us at the time—and undoubtedly to those who got in our way. A Jockey for Gallahadion If there was anyone in Nashville who looked like he belonged in Camelot, it was attorney Tommy Osborn. He was a tall, grandlooking man with sandy hair, an easy, affable manner, a quick smile, and kind, laughing eyes. On Osborn, horn-rimmed glasses looked debonair, the way a mustache did on Clark Gable. He could have been a model for intelligence gracing the cover of Fortune magazine or the Harvard Business Review. Yet he was completely unpretentious, the kind of man who would represent the son of his barber for free,or bring a class action suit on behalf of uninsured fire victims. Befriending an elevator operator in his office building or addressing a jury,Tommy Osborn radiated honesty and sincerity. Around the courthouse, they all said that Tommy Osborn could talk a vine out of climbing a wall. And they were beginning to speak of him in the same breath as the legendary Seth Walker. But unlike Walker, who was a man of both wealth and social standing, Osborn had been a nobody, the son of a poor itinerant Kentucky preacher, a night-school lawyer who had worked his way through the lightly regarded Nashville YMCA Law School. Young lawyers knew Nashville as a “son-in-law town” where the best jobs in the best firms were reserved for the Vanderbilt graduates who married the daughters of senior partners or rich clients. Osborn’s wife, Dottie, was charming, but she was from Oklahoma and without local connections. As a result his road to prominence had been A Jockey for Gallahadion James D. Squires 206 full of potholes. After passing the bar at age twenty-one, Osborn had hung out his shingle in Old Hickory, where he did various jobs for the Robinsons and got divorces for Dave White’s wives. After the war he joined a law firm that was friendly with U.S. Senator K. D. McKellar, an associate of Boss Crump. That had led to an appointment as an assistant U.S. attorney, a political debt he had repaid by working for McKellar in his losing 1948 campaign.Then the Old Hickory and Crump connections led him to Jake Sheridan and Elkin Garfinkle, who recruited him for Ben West. After leaving West’s administration to return to the courtroom, Osborn had caught the eye of Jack Norman, who had worshiped and emulated Seth Walker. Because Norman thought Osborn was made of the same stuff, he became Osborn’s sponsor in the Democratic party. Meanwhile, through Garfinkle, Osborn had maintained his contacts with the Robinsons, and among those who shared his breakfast table every day at Stumb’s, a tiny eatery in the building where he and Garfinkle had law offices, were Garner’s daughter Maude and her cousin Jim Roberson, who was rapidly assuming Jake’s role as a strategist and spokesman for the family. The law firms Osborn had passed through had been small and obscure. His income had been modest. But by the spring of 1962 none of that mattered. He had overcome every obstacle. With a combination of style and talent, he had become the city’s most celebrated lawyer. Osborn had doggedly pursued his beloved Baker v. Carr re­ apportionment case since 1955. Hardly a morning passed that he did not bounce his latest court strategy off his legal mentor Gar­ finkle.The old man with the bushy eyebrows and the photographic mind didn’t particularly like the idea of reapportionment. He and Jake had never found the rural domination of the legislature much of an impediment to political success. But he was fascinated with the constitutional underpinnings of the case and wanted to see Tommy Osborn get it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, Osborn did. And on March 26, 1962, all his work paid off. The Court agreed with Osborn that federal courts had the right to The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 207 intervene in state reapportionment cases. Further, the Court mandated that the test should be a one-man, one-vote principle, assuring urban residents their first equitable representation in state government. In his maiden...