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

Epilogue

James D. Squires 284 juice, milk, and coffee. He had just settled back on a sofa at the funeral home to watch a morning talk show when he had a heart attack and died. His funeral,not unexpectedly,was the biggest,best-attended“no pay” funeral in the history of Phillips-Robinson. Flowers covered the place, and cars lined the side streets around the mortuary for blocks. His children made the arrangements and his friend Dick Jones, by then nearing ninety, handled the services. As a send-off, a recording was played of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” The Tennessean ran a long, flattering front-page obituary that did not mention the Sheridan-Robinson-Garfinkle machine until the forty-fourth paragraph, and then only matter-of-factly. The next day it ran a nice eight-paragraph editorial summing up Garner Robinson not as a political boss but as “a gentleman of resolve and forcefulness” whose success in life should gratify and comfort his mourners. Epilogue The Robinson family political legacy did not fall to the expected heir, Garner’s son, Gale, who ran often but finally gave up after losing his bid to become Nashville’s mayor in 1987. It fell instead to Gale’s sister Muriel, twelve years younger, a domestic relations court judge and now one of Nashville’s most popular politicians. Both Muriel and Gale had inherited their mother’s patrician good looks and outgoing personality. But while Gale got his father’s appetite for life and interest in people, he failed to get his superb sense of political timing. Like Muriel, Gale became a judge, which in Tennessee during his father’s era was defined as “a lawyer who knows the governor.” In Gale’s case, his judgeship came not through his father’s connections but through the lawyer that knew every governor —Jack Norman, who arranged for his appointment. But even Epilogue The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 285 that episode reflects a kind of missed beat that thwarted Gale’s natural inheritance. From the beginning, Gale’s problem was that his political style was that of his father’s generation. As a boy, he had ridden around in the ambulance with guys like Dave and his uncle Dayton who taught him to cuss, smoke, drink whiskey, and ogle girls. The only politicalcurrencyheeverknewwasbasedonpersonalfriendshipand favor swapping. Unfortunately, his political ambitions blossomed at precisely the moment in the late fifties and early sixties when the nature of politics began to change, when the combination of image and the most valuable tool for its construction—money—began to take over the election process. Wily Jake Sheridan, as steeped as he was in the old ways, had been among the first to see the potential value of television in an election. As early as 1952, when he was desperately trying to install the young patrol captain Oscar Capps as Garner’s successor as sheriff, Jake had bought live paid political announcements on the fledgling Nashville television station in which Capps stiffly introduced himself as “the only FBI-trained candidate for sheriff.” But for the most part the Robinsons relied on their friends, not their advertising, to do their image building. Gale always made his home on the east side of the Cumberland, and none of the Robinsons ever passed themselves off as anything other than what they were—a family of undertakers from Old Hickory good for at least thirty thousand votes in almost any election. But once beyond geographic and demographic boundaries, the power of personal friendships and favor swapping is limited. Without Jake’s election-fixing skills neither Garner, Gale, nor cousin Jimmy proved to be much of a vote-getter once they got south or west of the Cumberland River or up into the voting ranks of the rich and well-to-do. By the late sixties and early seventies the urban population boom had made good old boys like them and their personal political styles as obsolete as horse and buggy drivers. After Gale lost his race for county district attorney in 1966, Norman asked the new governor, Buford Ellington, to appoint the James D. Squires 286 younger Robinson to a vacancy in General Sessions Court.Norman was so politically stout that Ellington agreed. But the governor backed off when he discovered that Gale was out campaigning against his state senate floor leader, handing out soft drinks at the polls for his cousin...