The Secrets of Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics and a City’s Coming of Age, by James D. Squires (Times Books)
After the success of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction account of scandal and intrigue in Savannah, Ga., Random House approached the author about writing a follow-up set in another town. Berendt declined, saying he wasn’t ready to immerse himself in another city’s history. He did, however, say that he thought Nashville would be the ideal setting for a similar book. Random House agreed and took the idea to another author on its roster, James D. Squires.
A Nashville native and former editor of the Chicago Tribune, Squires is best known for his foray into politics as the media advisor for Ross Perot’s failed 1994 presidential bid. When contacted by Random House, he told them he knew a story about Nashville’s past that had everything the publisher could hope for.
Recently published by Times Books, a Random House imprint, The Secrets of Hopewell Box is Squires’ account of the political careers of Garner Robinson, Jake Sheridan and Elkin Garfinkle. The three men were the masterminds of the “Old Hickory Gang,” a political machine that altered the course of Nashville’s development from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. Squires knows the subject well: His grandfather, Dave White, was a highway patrolman and Robinson’s closest friend.
“If you went through the pages of Nashville newspapers,” Squires said in a recent interview, “you would find [this] group of politiciansÉportrayed as a corrupt bunch of election thieves who basically ran the government, elected people, and used the government then to reward their friends.”
Squires remembers tagging along in his grandfather’s patrol car as a little boy, and until his days as a budding reporter for The Tennessean, he was privy to the inner workings of the machine. Later, while a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1971, he drew upon these experiences to write a series of stories that caught the eye of a Boston publisher, who asked him to write a book. After spending the evening celebrating with a friend, Squires decided to return the advance to the publisher. His buddy had convinced him to decline the offer and save the stories until he could do them justice as a better writer. Years later, when Random House offered Squires a second chance, he leapt at it. As he saw it, the book gave him the opportunity to set the record straight.
Squires contends that the Old Hickory Gang was never as powerful or as corrupt as Boss Crump’s machine in Memphis—but it had its moments. During the Democratic primary for sheriff in 1946, Robinson, Sheridan and Garfinkle schemed to get Robinson elected sheriff so the trio could control the state Legislature.
“In those days,” Squires says, “the most sought-after job was sheriff because the county form of governmentÉhad the powers to tax, and it had the powers of law enforcement on a wider jurisdiction. In those days, the county government and the sheriff’s office were the political offices to hold. If you controlled those offices, then you could control electionsÉ. That’s what Boss Crump’s machine was based on in Memphis.”
As the election returns came in, Robinson lagged further and further behind his chief opponent, John Cole. Cole’s supporters were already celebrating when Robinson started gaining ground as his home-district tallies started to come in. Finally, the fourth precinct, Hopewell, reported giving Robinson enough votes to win—even though there were more votes than Hopewell had residents. Although Cole contested, many members of the election commission were also members of the Old Hickory Gang, and so the outcome stood.
But there’s more to the story, Squires reasons, and that’s why he wrote the book. He says that the Old Hickory Gang was revolutionary in its inclusion of blacks and poor whites. “They were doing really important things that changed this country. They did away with the poll tax. They had black voter drives andÉthen they passed a lawÉin 1947Éthat created the first single-member districts that allowed [Robert] Lillard and [Z. Alexander] Looby to be elected.”
The machine was also integral in the establishment of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision. Z. T. “Tommy” Osborn, whom Squires describes as a Garfinkle protégé, drafted Baker vs. Carr, the 1962 U.S. Supreme Court decision that confirmed the principle of one-man, one-vote and strengthened urban representation in government. Once it became law, Squires says, elections and other civic matters became more egalitarian, since power was more evenly distributed. Prior to the passing of the law, unit rule was the way of the Democratic party, which meant that “a white, rural Southerner’s vote counted a lot more than [that of] a white urban person, or a black’s any place,” Squires explains. “Baker vs. Carr changed that. It made the Civil Rights Bill work. [That bill] would have been of no value without Baker vs. Carr. It’s a piece of history that hadn’t been told.”
Some Nashvillians, however, would rather that the story had not been retold—at least not the way Squires has written it. A recent Nashville Banner article reported that some of Robinson’s descendants found accounts of their father’s escapades less than accurate.
“I don’t know why the descendants of Garner Robinson would find anything in that book that they would be ashamed to be connected with,” Squires counters. “I think Garner Robinson, in this book, is an admirable figure. I thought he was a wonderful man, and I didn’t say a bad thing about him, or anything about him that I thought he would have been offended by. I think he was a first-rate politician of that era, who basically did what he thought the people who put him in office wanted him to do.”
Squires maintains that both Robinson and his own grandfather would have been pleased with the book. “In my grandfather’s case, the fact that he was mentioned in a book at all, and chronicled in any way, is a big achievementÉ even if it was written by his grandson.”
