Ring-Tailed Tooter

(See Cover)

It was Cotton Carnival time in Memphis. Skyrockets whooshed into the muddy Mississippi; searchlights glared above crowds along the riverfront. There were street dances, the crash of band music, the clack and jangle of noisemakers. Bunting was everywhere.

It was, as Memphis newspapers proudly pointed out, the biggest celebration in the Carnival's 75-year history. Warmed with blended bourbon, many a Memphian decided that in this year of peace & plenty it was even better than New Orleans' historic Mardi gras. Despite occasional rain, the city echoed to the sound of countless parades; of parties and balls at which Carnival satraps made glittering entrances. The Cotton King and his Queen were regal with crowns, scepters, robes and brocades. Memphis' secret organizations (Osiris, Ra-Met, Scarabs, Sphinx, etc.) had princes & princesses of their own, dressed them almost as brightly. So did Memphis Negroes, for whom their first citizen--blues writer W. C. Handy--tootled a horn (see cut).

The Memphis of Carnival Week looked wonderful.

The river was down. Cotton was up (26.9-c- a lb.) and so was the city's population (approx. 375,000). Memphis was the world's greatest cotton market, the hub of ten railroads, three airlines, and a big and busy river port. It had boomed during the war, and it was booming still. Better yet, it was running just the way Edward Hull Crump--the most absolute political boss in the U.S.--wanted it to run.

For in Carnival Week, as in any week, the most spectacular figure in Memphis was still 71-year-old Mister Crump. When he passed, in a gleaming new Chrysler, sidewalk idlers gawked as if they had spied the Mad Mullah of Tud, nose ring and all, cracking pecans on the Hope Diamond. Ed Crump did not ignore them. As he rode on casual journeys through his domain he watched the pavements as sharply as a kingfisher hunting shiners; his pink face lighted at the first sign of recognition. If people turned, he snatched a wide-brimmed grey hat from his ear-long white locks, nodded majestically as if thousands cheered, and cranked down the car window with incredible dexterity to bawl, "Hiya, boy!"

"They Like Me." He beamed as voices lifted in startled salutation. "They like me," he said. "To have a friend, be a friend. Some say live and let live. I say, live and help live." He looked a little annoyed when a passer-by simply goggled without replying.

From time to time he noted defects--park grass which needed cutting or a building which needed paint--and scribbled manifestoes on a pad at his side. But the city boasted amazingly clean streets, dozens of parks and playgrounds, fine schools, libraries, one of the finest zoos in the U.S., a fairgrounds, an E. H. Crump Stadium, good hospitals, good health.

By virtue of Crump's irascibility toward the "interests," it owned its own power, gas, water systems. The streetcar company had been slugged into kicking through with 6% of its gross receipts. Utility rates and taxes were low.

In Memphis, once the toughest town along the Mississippi, there were no prostitutes, gamblers, policy games or gunmen. Crump had simply banished them. Beale Street Negroes could damage each other only by exercising some ingenuity. Crump's cops shook them down nightly for pistols, Arkansas toothpicks,* clubs, brass knucks, razors and ice picks. There was virtually no grafting--Crump forbade it. Officials who took money for themselves (as opposed to accepting contributions from liquor stores, business houses, jukebox and pinball operators for the Crump machine) were prosecuted.

The city was startlingly quiet. Hardly a citizen had tooted his automobile horn in the six years since Crump had banned traffic noise. Lawns were clipped and green; Crump wanted the city to be beautiful. Memphis "niggers" (40% of the population) were quiet; and whites, some of whom had Negro mistresses, could say contentedly: "No trouble here; no hifalutin' ideas."

Even Tennessee's criminals toiled for the greater glory of Crump. His judges sent many a state prisoner to the Shelby County Penal Farm, a self-supporting agricultural institution so lush, so green, so magnificently stocked with prize cattle, prize horses, prize hogs, prize mules and chickens that many a west Tennessee farmer scrubbed his eyes in disbelief at the sight of it.

Jackpot. Ed Crump holds no public or political office, but his Shelby County Democratic Organization is probably the smoothest, most efficient political mechanism in the U.S. In his 37 years of benign if iron despotism, he has given Memphis citizens almost everything but the right to vote for a candidate of their own choosing --a luxury he firmly believes that few but the maladjusted miss anyhow.

In those 37 years his machine ticked ceaselessly. It kept a card index on all voters, saw that every true believer paid a poll tax and cast a ballot, discouraged all heathen who could not be converted to the Crump gospel. If it had occasionally voted a few dead men, or juggled ballots in the sub-basement of the impressive Shelby County Courthouse, it did so piously and only as a minor emergency measure.

At its core was a drum-tight control of the Negro vote. For as Memphians reflect: "The nigger doesn't vote, he is voted." Thus, at any time, day or night, year in, year out, whenever Ed Crump pulled the lever of his political slot machine, he hit the jackpot--a clear majority of 40,000 to 60,000 votes, enough not only to inundate Memphis but to control Tennessee as well.

Tennessee's Governor, an ex-livestock auctioneer named Jim McCord, is a Crumpet; so is U.S. Senator Tom Stewart. Sick old spoilsman Senator Kenneth McKellar is beholden to Mister Crump. West Tennessee's Congressmen are his to command. He sways the state legislature. And in Memphis and Shelby County, politicians move like automatons at his bidding--running daily to his office for instructions.

Double Insurance. The office is a pleasant, airy room with polished brass desk ornaments, a gilded telephone, and a view of green Arkansas forests across the big river. It is not only a political nerve center but headquarters for one of the South's largest insurance and mortgage loan businesses. In 22 years, E. H. Crump & Co. has experienced a phenomenal growth; many a Memphis business man understandably believes that insurance with Crump has a double value. Crump's 54 years in Memphis have yielded him not only power, but wealth--cotton land in Mississippi, a fine brick house, part ownership in an exclusive hunting club, major holdings in the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of N.Y. But no man has ever disputed the old man's proudest brag: that he has never made a nickel through common political graft.

He has always lived by a selfstyled, self-drawn code of "correctness." It was an odd sort of code, amendable by circumstance, but in essence a fierce refusal to be dominated. It had allowed the Organization to accept contributions from prostitutes and gamblers in the old days, but had never countenanced sharing control in return. E. H. Crump had taken, but he had never been for sale.

From a Chamber of Commerce viewpoint, the Memphis of Ed Crump left little to be desired. But was it a part of free America? Tennessee's own Andy Jackson would not have thought so. Yet, as muckraker Lincoln Steffens discovered four decades ago, boss-ridden Memphis had followed the pattern of countless U.S. municipalities. In his way, Ed Crump was a classic American figure.

Poverty & Pretence. He was born at Holly Springs, Miss. (pop. 2,750) amid the grinding poverty, the hatred of carpetbaggers, the nostalgia for better days which shaped life in the South after the Civil War. His father, who had fought as a Confederate cavalry officer with General John H. Morgan's Raiders, died when he was only three, victim of the great yellow fever epidemic of 1878. His mother, daughter of a once wealthy North Carolina family, and a woman who had been educated in a select Philadelphia female academy, raised her brood of three children alone.

It was a day when many a Southerner strove to forget his shabbiness with genteel pretence. The Crump children often got no firecrackers for Christmas; they were urged instead to pop dried, inflated pig bladders saved from the autumn slaughtering. Their one-room school was never painted--elders murmured evasively that they were waiting for the nailheads to rust. But even as a skinny, redheaded boy, Ed Crump stared at the world with the discerning eyes of a realist.

He had a voracious instinct for opportunity. He hired out to plow the eroded red soil with oxen, sold peaches to passengers on the Illinois Central's cars, wangled a job as a printer's devil. When he was 16 he left home, headed for the rich black Delta lands downriver, became a bookkeeper in a country store at Lula, Miss. In 1892, at 17, he went to Memphis.

It was a rough, roistering city, where the oldest and newest forces in the South seethed and mingled. Cotton still came to Memphis levees on high-stacked steamboats, but many a planter had moved to town to be a businessman. Memphis nights were noisy with roistering male voices and the jangle of sporting-house pianos. Gunmen, loggers, sunburned planters, rivermen from all the channels between St. Louis and New Orleans fought, gambled, drank and consorted with brigades of painted Memphis whores.

The Red Snapper. Lean, red-thatched Ed Crump surveyed it all with a calculating and untroubled eye. He had come to conquer. He got a job with a harness firm; eight years later he bought the owners out. He was elected to the city council, picked up a nickname, "The Red Snapper," and was known as a "real ring-tailed tooter" at either a fight or a frolic.

In 1909 he ran for mayor. It was a rough, wild-eyed campaign. The ring-tailed tooter tooted against the "interlocking, circling, double-back, double-crossing interests." When thugs charged his meetings, he and the boys battled back. He was elected by 79 votes. From that day on he was the boss of Memphis.

As mayor (for two terms), as county trustee (for eight years), and then as just a plain political boss, he slugged and beat and charmed his way to power. Always, he fought the "interests." When the Frisco and N.C. & St.L. railroads failed to agree with his interpretation of their franchises, he marched out with a crowbar, tore up their tracks, and stationed police over his handiwork.

Once Pinkerton agents swarmed Memphis, searched his office for evidence of graft. One night he was shot at. Once the courts ousted him from office. But he always stayed on top.

In the 1920s he moved into state politics, fought one last struggle for political power against huge and ruthless Luke Lea, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, won, and then controlled the state.

Eatin' on the Hog. In the years of political wars the Organization had grown stronger and resistance had diminished. Critics of the boss were never free of the fear that they might find themselves in court--before a Crump judge. There was always the chance of being beaned with a beer bottle at a nightclub, of getting beaten up in a mysterious street fight or simply being slugged by Memphis police, as were two overenthusiastic C.I.O. organizers in 1937. Memphis newspapermen did not forget one election night in 1928, when every reporter in sight was thrown into jail for threatened breach of the peace, a handily unbailable offense in Memphis.

There were more subtle ways of convincing dissenters. Crump policemen once trailed funeral processions of a recalcitrant undertaker, traffic slips ready. In 1940, they stood outside the door of a Memphis druggist who made the mistake of supporting Willkie, and searched all his customers for "narcotics." Or a businessman could have his assessments raised.

A member of the Organization who showed the slightest signs of disloyalty was through in politics. Most retired. Some, like former Governor Gordon Browning, were persuaded. Browning, a big, forceful Huntingdon attorney, got 60,000 votes in Shelby County in 1936 by virtue of the Organization's backing. But after he took office he "began to eat too high on the hog." Cried Crump: "Gordon Browning is the kind of a man who would milk his neighbor's cow through a crack in the fence. In the art galleries of Paris there are 27 pictures of Judas Iscariot--none look alike but they all resemble Gordon Browning." In 1938, when Browning had the temerity to run for reelection, he was beaten; he lost Shelby County by 60,000 votes. No Tennessee politician missed the lesson.

The Surrealist. By last week Crump's power was so complete, so zealously guarded, that opposition and disloyalty were rare. Few Memphis citizens ever spoke out against him. Sensible men who wished to enter politics visited the boss, asked his permission, accepted the inevitable quietly if he refused. His chief lieutenants, like Mayor Walter Chandler and District Attorney William Gerber, passed on Crump doctrine without the slightest deviation.

At 71, like many another aging dictator, Crump considers himself a humanitarian and public benefactor, prefers not to remember the boisterous past. He loves to discuss the glories of Memphis, and is as sensitive as a surrealist painter to the slightest criticism.

Sometimes he prods Memphis businessmen and advertisers into protesting on his behalf. Sometimes public officials leap up to defend him. When Mrs. Agnes Meyer, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, compared him to Hitler last week, Senator Tom Stewart hurriedly took the floor of the Senate to cry: "Mrs. Meyer seeks to slander the South and its greatest leader. . . ."

Poison Press. But when really aroused, he scribbles counterdenunciations, buys big newspaper ads to blast his tormentors. Chief target of Crump's vituperative essays is a pudgy outlander, Silliman Evans, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean. One anti-Evans masterpiece contained the following observations:

"Liars will steal and rogues will murder, if necessary, to accomplish a nefarious purpose. . . . The honeymoon of this lying, corroding crowd of murderers of character is over. Their swill barrel is empty--they have scraped the bottom of the garbage can. . . . Evans intoxicated himself with megalomaniac dreams of power. ... He has tried bullwhipping, browbeating . . . common ordinary lying . . . but the canker of disappointment gnaws at his soul. . . ."

If these discharges of verbal grapeshot infuriate Crump's enemies, they charm and stimulate his admiring friends and followers. For Ed Crump, a ruthless, rawhiding, ramrodding political boss, is also a dramatic figure molded in the fighting Tennessee tradition of Andy Jackson, Sam Houston, and Nolichucky Jack Sevier--and thousands of Tennesseans love him.

Thank You Mister Crump. There are other reasons for his popularity. Life under Crump is seldom dull. Many a Memphis citizen still sighs reminiscently at the memory of E. H. Crump Day at the fairgrounds in 1938. There were free rides, free lemonade, free cigars, free music, and free lapel streamers which bore the legend: "Thank You Mister Crump." Every year Crump hires the river steamboat Island Queen, loads it with cripples, shut-ins and orphans, leads a band aboard in person for a cruise on the Mississippi. The Crump charity football game at E. H. Crump Stadium is always an exciting autumn sport event.

Crump is now against gambling, for the masses. Once he grew so incensed at the fact that some Memphians were playing games of chance in Mississippi that he caused a signboard to be erected. It read: "Down the Road in Miss, are Gambling Dens & Dives. They Rob You. They Slug You. They Get Your Money." But Crump loves horse racing, seldom misses a Kentucky Derby or a meeting at Hot Springs' Oaklawn Park.

There are other conflicting aspects of the Crump character which fascinate his subjects. Despite his gift of vituperation he never swears. Neither does he smoke, chew, eat meat, or use coffee. His favorite tipple is Bulgarian buttermilk. He is widely traveled, can draw from his elephantine and well-compartmented memory odd information about any state in the union and almost any nation. He reads the New York Times daily.

He is often preoccupied with the mysteries of the solar system, trees, the habits of snakes and the villainy of Japanese beetles. His deep concern for birds (except pigeons, which have aroused his enmity by dirtying up Memphis) keeps the Organization in a recurring tizzy. Six years ago Crump announced with some nervousness that he had been looking around for bluebirds and had not seen any. Mayor Chandler and other prominent citizens promptly organized the E. H. Crump Audubon Society, took newspaper ads asking citizens to "protect our sadly diminishing birds." In 1943 Crump had another spell of worrying about birds; a little later County Commissioner Francis Andrews was discovered trapping tomcats in his backyard.

Mulling all this, many an anti-Crump man in middle and east Tennessee began to conclude that the Boss of Memphis was getting soft. In Nashville his enemies passed the word: "Old Man Crump is reading the Bible on street corners." A new hope began to take shape in the minds of those who dreamed of his downfall. Perhaps returning servicemen (who could vote without paying a poll tax) would like a dictatorship at home ass little as they liked it abroad.

But last week they knew they had just been dreaming. A poker-faced spokesman tor the Organization announced that five Shelby County officers had decided with amazing self-effacement not to seek reelection. Five new Organization men would run instead. The new men were all veterans of World War II.

* A deadly pocketknife which Beale Street cocks for instant opening by inserting a match beneath the blade.

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