Mayor Willie Herenton a dictator? Not even close.
I keep an unofficial indicator of Herenton’s popularity by reading the letters to
the editor in The Commercial Appeal. One day last
week, the mayor got a “perfect” score. There were five
letters, all anti-Herenton or anti-Memphis and all
written by enlightened correspondents from one or
another of our outlying meccas: Collierville,
Covington, Olive Branch, Arlington, and Germantown. Not
a Memphian in the lot.
Week after week, inspired by the latest
“outrage” from City Hall, the general thrust of the letters to
the CA is that Herenton is “power-hungry” and
“lousy.” This for a mayor who has been elected four
times, rarely raises his voice, has no control over county
government or the city or county school boards and
only modest influence in Nashville, and is lucky to get
his nominees for city director jobs past the City Council.
The last Memphis dictator died 50 years ago in
an oxygen tent at his home on Peabody Avenue in
Midtown. His name was Edward Hull Crump, known as either Mr. Crump to his admirers and loyal
subjects or Boss Crump to his detractors.
He ran for office, including mayor and
congressman, 23 times without a loss. And he took part in scores
of other elections, usually dictating the results, until
1948, when his candidates for key offices were defeated.
For half a century he ruled the roost, pulled
the strings, made the calls, controlled the black vote
and patronage jobs, empowered his friends, and ripped
his enemies with verbal invective that might be described as
colorful if only it weren’t so bullying and cruel.
He tried to “out” a brave Memphis newspaper
editor, Edward Meeman, as a homosexual by having
one of his minions — Mayor James J. Pleasants, no less
— read the charge into a city legislative proceeding so
it would be exempt from a libel suit.
He called a Senate candidate, Edward Carmack,
a “donkey” and a “vulture” who had “no more right
to public office than a skunk has to be foreman in a
perfume factory.”
He called the publisher of the Nashville
Tennessean, Silliman Evans, a man “with a foul mind and
a wicked heart,” a Tennessean editor “a venal and
licentious scribbler,” and a columnist a man with a
“low, filthy, diseased mind.”
A Tennessee governor Crump did not like,
Gordon Browning, turned Nashville into “a regular
Sodom and Gomorrah, a wicked capital, reeking with
sordid, vicious infamy.”
Estes Kefauver, a United States senator
from Tennessee and the Democratic vice-presidential
candidate in 1956, was “a pet coon” and “the darling
of the Communists.”
Even at a time when political bosses were not
uncommon in big cities, the rest of the country
noticed what was going on in Memphis. The Washington
Post wrote of Crump, “His violent tongue and
cynical mind held sway over the lives of the people of an
important city.”
Crump did not tolerate criticism. In his
book Memphis Since Crump, David Tucker writes that Crump
forced a company to fire an employee who had dared to write a
letter to the newspaper objecting to Crump-supported censorship
of books and movies. The company knuckled under because
it was a big vendor for one of Crump’s annual picnics.
In his heavy-handed way, Crump was effective, and
the population of Memphis increased from a little over 100,000
to nearly 400,000 during his career. When best-selling author
John Gunther visited Memphis to do research for his book
Inside U.S.A., published in 1947 (the year after Crump appeared
on the cover of Time), he was talked into interviewing Crump
by the great man himself. He later wrote, “He is a man of
considerable erudition and, when he wants to turn it on, of the
most persuasive and engaging charm.”
And Gunther was forced to admit that “the great majority of citizens feel no threat to
their liberties civil or otherwise; there is no atmosphere of
tension or reprisal; people, by and large, get along.”
Memphis was known as America’s Cleanest City and
America’s Quietest City. There were no motorcycles roaring up
and down Riverside Drive in Mr. Crump’s day and no
movies that didn’t meet the approval of a local board of
censors. Nightclubs and hotels were lucky to have a
dance permit, much less a liquor license.
Willie Herenton may be many things, but a dictator is not one of them.
