Before the 1960’s, there was no Republican Party in the old Confederate states. There was only the Democratic Party; future Republican Party members were known as conservative Democrats. So political fights revolved around factions of the Democratic Party.
The fights usually pitted rural interests against urban interests, conflicts that date back to the earliest days of the U.S. It’s baked into the Constitution which requires each state to send two people to the U.S. Senate. The original intent was to mitigate the risk of majoritarianism in the House of Representatives where states are allotted seats based on their population. Political parties quickly realized that they could get around these checks and balances through election shenanigans.
Election shenanigans in Tennessee from the 1930’s to the 1960’s were controlled by a crook from Memphis named Edward H. “Boss” Crump. He decided who got elected to county offices and the state legislature, who became governor, and who went to Washington.
Boss Crump took a cut of all the state’s crooked activities, from bootleg whisky sales to kickbacks on government contracts. Politicians got elected by turning a blind eye to the corruption of Boss and his boys. The few courageous enough to object were beaten up by Boss’s thugs. Or they were arrested on bogus criminal charges and trotted in front of a Crump-elected state judge who would fine them or jail them.
Edward H. “Boss” Crump
When Boss needed extra votes to swing an election, his goons would round up black adults who were too poor to pay the poll tax. The poll tax was a facially neutral law because poor whites were subject to it (they were never asked to pay it) that suppressed the black vote (who were forced to pay it if they wanted to vote). Boss Crump’s men would pay the poll tax for their “voters” and then help them complete their paper ballots. After voting, the black voters were carted back to their neighborhoods to be ignored until the next election needed to be stolen.
But Boss Crump and his boys were beginning to feel the heat from a group of reformers based in Nashville. The reformers had already achieved a few successes, like implementing a system for permanent voter registration. They also advocated the use of mechanical voting machines rather than paper ballots. Electronic voting eliminated stuffing the ballot box and stealing an election. (Today’s election “integrity” idiots want to bring back paper ballots.)
The reformers had also managed to eliminate the poll tax in some local elections. Their next challenge came in the 1946 election. The reformers planned to register World War II veterans as voters and select a few war heroes to run against Crump’s stooges.
Crump’s machine set about ensuring the result they wanted. That was easy since they controlled the state election commission. They moved the Democratic Party’s primary to November 1945 from the spring of 1946, hoping the reformers wouldn’t have time to organize.
In 1945, Davidson County and Nashville were two separate legal entities and a microcosm of the state’s rural voters squaring off against the big city. The rural Davidson County machine belonged to Boss Crump. The city machine accepted support from the reformers because they expected it to help their electoral prospects, not because they believed in reforming politics.
On the day of the primary, the hottest contest was for the office of Davidson County sheriff. When the polls closed at 7 pm, each precinct tallied their ballots and telephoned the county election commission with the final numbers. For most of the evening, the reformer’s candidate was in the lead.
The last precinct to report was Hopewell. Hopewell was a primarily black neighborhood near Old Hickory Village, across the river from Nashville on the east side of Davidson County. At 7 pm, the Hopewell ballot box had been collected by a couple of state troopers who worked for Boss Crump. They drove around for hours drinking whiskey and periodically telephoning the election commission (controlled by Boss’s men) to get an update on the vote count.
Finally, late into the night, the Hopewell results were received by the election commission. Boss Crump’s man had carried that precinct and won the primary. Some reformers noted that the voter turnout in Hopewell was suspiciously high, especially when compared to the overall low voter turnout.
That left the reformers with a dilemma. If they sued to set aside the fraudulent votes, they would disenfranchise the black voters of Hopewell who had been duped, bribed, or intimidated into voting for Boss Crump’s candidate. That would undo all their efforts fighting the Jim Crow voter suppression laws aimed at disenfranchising black voters.
Instead, the reformers sued claiming the results were invalid because the primary was held at the wrong time. Crump’s machine owned the election commission lawyers who argued that it was only the primary; nobody was elected to office yet. No harm, no foul. The Crump judge agreed, conveniently ignoring the fact that in a one-party state, winning the Democratic primary was the same as being elected.
The reformer’s candidate decided to run as an independent against Boss Crump’s man. Boss’s men weren’t about to let voters decide the outcome. In one precinct, the mechanical voting machines mysteriously failed and over 200 voters had to leave without voting to get to work. During the noon rush, electrical power failed for an hour and a half. These shenanigans ensured that Crump’s man became the Davidson County sheriff.
Today, the Hopewell community no longer exists. Boss Crump’s political machine was eventually taken down in a series of corruption trials brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1962, Davidson County and Nashville merged into one legal entity, Metro Nashville.
Boss Crump’s vote stealing methods are out of fashion. Today’s, election shenanigans revolve around gerrymandering in which political parties carve up their states’ voters into absurdly shaped districts to ensure their party perpetuates itself in power.
Tennessee is again a one-party state, now controlled by the Republican Party. The state consistently ranks among the lowest for voter registration and voter turnout.
This account of political corruption is based on, The Secrets of the Hopewell Box, by James D. Squires (2012). Mr. Squires grew up in a family aligned with the Old Hickory branch of Boss Crump’s machine. His book also describes the racial integration of Nashville in the early 1960’s, naming a veritable who’s who of the Civil Rights movement.
