English Only Ringleader Eric Crafton Is Driven More by Ideals Than Politics—Which May Be Worse

Kasar Abdulla speaks English, though it is not her native tongue. A Kurdish refugee, she still remembers the day her aunt and uncle were buried in her homeland. Felled by Saddam's poison gas, they were laid to rest in the hard soil of the mountain pass that would eventually deliver the rest of her family to safety.

Fargo had been their right, the home the U.S. government gave them. But Nashville was where they chose to live. They drove down in a caravan when Kasar was 14 years old. Years later, when she heard about a Nashville man who said he wanted to help the city's immigrant population, she decided to attend one of his meetings.

When it was her turn to speak, Kasar stood up. She told the man how proud she was to have learned his native tongue. She told him what English meant to her family—its rightful place as the language of freedom. The language of the "dream nation."

If she expected some recognition of how far she and her family had come, that's not what she got. His response was more like a slap. It was every person's duty, he said, the minute they stepped on American soil, to acclimate. Circumstances didn't matter. His message was clear: Learn English, or else.

Kasar left the meeting with tears in her eyes.

"He just shattered the image I had of the United States," she says. "Especially the image I had of Tennessee."

And yet, when you meet Eric Crafton for the first time, it's hard not to think something along the lines of: He sure doesn't seem like a monster. Granted, he's sitting somewhere he feels comfortable: his favorite meat-and-three in Bellevue, where the waitresses act as if he has a tab. But it's hard to reconcile the public image of the thrice-elected District 22 Metro Council member—who's been vilified, justly or not, as a Bible-thumpin' bumpkin—with the doughy beige windbreaker sitting across the table.

Crafton's base expression is one of cautious serenity. Half-lidded eyes and a round face devoid of angles give off a sense of peaceful immovability, both in belief and in spirit. Picture an Easter Island statue come to life. Yet many years ago, before he was accused of being Nashville's answer to Hitler, Eric Crafton was, like Kasar Abdulla, a stranger in a strange land who didn't speak the language.

So why is this guy the staunch proponent of the most divisive and confrontational piece of immigration legislation in the city's history—the notorious "English Only" ordinance, which would force Metro to conduct all city business in English, from registry of deeds to driver's licenses?

It was 1990 in Jacksonville, Fla. Crafton was a 22-year-old ensign on his first assignment. Six months removed from graduation at Vanderbilt and, more recently, war college in Rhode Island, Crafton was settling into his new life when he found out everything would be changing. His boat, the U.S.S. Mobile Bay, was being restationed to Japan.

Cribbing from books-on-tape and for-dummies manuals he'd grabbed before shipping out, Crafton armed himself with stacks of 3x5 flash cards. In between tweaking the Bay's guidance system, his duty as electrical engineer on the ship, Crafton studied on a bottom bunk in the Swamp, the shoulder-to-shoulder cubby where the youngest officers made their home. While others passed the time with poker and VHS tapes, Crafton acclimated himself to the reality he'd face upon landfall: a new world of sounds and characters that were utterly foreign.

By the time the Bay reached Panama's shortcut, Crafton had the basics down. After reaching land six weeks later, he felt comfortable enough walking into the port town of Yokosuka on his own. It was only then, Crafton says, that the real learning began.

"When I went to the water company to pay my bill, electric company to pay my bill, wherever, guess what language that was done in?" he asks. "I learned pretty quickly because I had to."

Crafton returned to the States four years later with a combat medal, a fluent grasp of Japanese and having met his future wife. He'd taken what for some might have been a short-lived detour in an unfamiliar culture and found a way not only to incorporate it into his own life but use it to his advantage. He also came back with a hardened view of how the world works and how it doesn't.

These views would manifest themselves more than a decade later. Now Crafton—the magna cum laude bilingual success story—has become the perfect front man for what was, and remains, Nashville's most unpopular idea.

Assuming a lawsuit doesn't derail it first, the English Only matter is scheduled for a costly, controversial special election Jan. 22. And neither outcome, pass or fail, seems to portend the end of the issue. Already it represents something of a victory for Crafton, who was clearly underestimated by the mayor's office. It tried to sandbag the issue on a technicality, only to have the stubborn Crafton bull on through with a public petition.