In late 1974 or early 1975—no one remembers precisely when—a rising, young politician named Richard Fulton got a telephone call. Fulton was in Washington at the time, representing Nashville in Congress. A liberal Democrat elected to the U.S. House in 1962, he had cast gutsy votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. He had also done a good job tending to his political bases back home. While Nashville’s conservative business community may not have liked some of Fulton’s positions—particularly his close ties to labor—they respected his honesty and diligence.
The person calling Fulton that day was no stranger. It was Eddie Jones, a fellow East High School alum who was then head of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. Jones and Fulton had spent much of their adult lives in the political trenches. And because both were active in the public life of the city, their paths crossed frequently.
On this particular day, Jones was on a mission. Days earlier, a secret organization of Nashville businessmen had met to discuss who was going to be the city’s next mayor. Known as “Watauga,” the influential organization included the cream of Nashville’s most powerful citizens. The 15 to 20 members were the heads of the city’s locally owned banks, the CEOs of its most important companies, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University and a smattering of the city’s most powerful attorneys. Members met regularly, usually once a month. Over lunch or breakfast in a member’s boardroom, they would gather to discuss the direction of the city. During the course of its roughly two-decade lifespan, Watauga would leave a huge imprint on Nashville, ranging from politics to race relations to capital projects to the city’s nonprofit groups.
At the time Jones was placing his phone call to Fulton, he was tending to the latest Watauga undertaking. One of the most pressing concerns the city faced in 1974 was electing a successor to outgoing Mayor Beverly Briley. Metro Trustee Glenn Ferguson appeared to be gaining steam for a mayoral campaign, and The Tennessean was expected to endorse him at any time. But the prospect of Ferguson as mayor had set a number of the Watauga members on edge. As one member recalled recently, Ferguson was viewed by the business community as a “rat around the barn.”
At one of its meetings, Watauga set about finding its own candidate. Eventually, the idea of backing Fulton for the office gained steam. Before long, Watauga member Bill Weaver, the towering, garrulous head of National Life and Accident, the city’s huge insurance company and owner of the Grand Ole Opry, was deputized to convince Fulton to run for the job.
Weaver, however, did not know Fulton well. So Weaver called Jones to set up the meeting. The idea was to ask Fulton to drop by Weaver’s house on a Saturday; several other Watauga members would be there too.
“When I called Fulton, he said he wouldn’t mind going,” Jones recalls, “but he asked if they’d mind if he showed up in tennis shorts because he had a game that day. I said no, I didn’t think they’d mind. Then he asked, 'What’s this about?’ And I said, 'I have an idea what it’s about, and I’m not telling, but for your own benefit you should go.’ ”
And so, the Watauga delegation and Fulton gathered at Weaver’s gracious home on Jackson Boulevard in Belle Meade. Joining Weaver in his cozy sun room, which looked out over a nicely groomed boxwood garden, were two other Watauga members: David K. “Pat” Wilson, a behind-the-scenes powerbroker and chairman of Cherokee Equity Corp. who was also the finance chairman of the national Republican Party; and Jack Massey, a pharmacist who had made one fortune in Kentucky Fried Chicken and was about to make another in Hospital Corp. of America. The meeting was, in many ways, one of those pivotal moments when apparent political opposites unite for their mutual benefit. Fulton was an East Nashville native with a working-class pedigree and a liberal streak a mile wide; the three Watauga members, all of whom lived in Belle Meade, were wealthy, conservative and entirely unaccustomed to the rough-and-tumble of local ward politics.
Weaver and Massey are both deceased, but Wilson, who is retired, recalls the day clearly. “Fulton was unsure of his base, but we told him we’d support him and raise whatever money was necessary for him to run a campaign,” Wilson remembers. “None of us in Watauga was necessarily out there waving political flags, but we were interested in what was going on and wanted a good mayor for the city.”
Fulton, for his part, says the idea of running for mayor had not crossed his mind until he met with Watauga. “They told me they thought I would be good for the city, and they obviously felt like I was electable,” he says. “I was honored that they thought that way.”
When he looks back on that mayoral race, Fulton doesn’t remember huge sums of money coming from Watauga’s members. That may be, he says, because elections were so much less costly back then. What did come from Watauga, however, was influence, prestige and a very impressive list of supporters to place on his letterhead. And it was enough to scare off lots of opposition.
The rest, of course, is history. Richard Fulton served three terms as mayor, from 1975 to 1987. His legacy was largely the stuff of bricks and mortar, including the construction of Riverfront Park and the Nashville Convention Center. Relations with the business community, labor and the city’s minority communities were all positive during his tenure in office.
Watauga left no trail. It claimed no credit. It issued no press releases. While it sat behind the wheel of the city, it hid, completely out of sight.
Watauga’s precise operations are hazy, in large measure because, with only a few exceptions, the organization kept no records. Keeping records, as a matter of fact, was discouraged, because that would have implied the group was focusing more on itself rather than what it was trying to accomplish.
“Successful leaders,” explains Watauga member Nelson Andrews, “never take credit for what they’re doing. The most successful, in fact, are never even known.”
And so, adhering to what members describe today as a credo of selflessness, Watauga operated anonymously. Members say they had only one goal: improving the city.
The organization was born in the latter half of the 1960s and continued operations through the early ’80s. During that time, almost every city issue had some involvement from Watauga. The group’s internal discussions ranged from the minutiae of Metropolitan Government—its budgets, pay scales and water systems—to big-picture discussions about what other large cities were doing to attract business. As well, Watauga actually set out to invent a number of things. Creation of the Metro Airport Authority, Leadership Nashville, Project Pencil, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and other civic endeavors could be traced to Watauga.
Members bore all the stereotypes of successful Southerners in that day and age—all were white men, and all but a few were Protestant. Beyond that, their demographics could be even more tightly defined. Many were on the board of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, the city’s preeminent board at the time. Many were also members of the Belle Meade Country Club, and were leading players in the cultural and social life of the city. Many were born here, had decided to live their lives here and were deeply committed to the place.
Originally, membership in Watauga was to be limited to people who were CEOs. That way, whenever an issue would come before Watauga, the group immediately could amass considerable amounts of power on behalf of a particular issue. Over time, however, the requirement that it be comprised of CEOs changed. As Wilson says, “It floated. People were in and out.”
Meetings were usually held in one or another member’s boardroom, quite often at one of the three locally owned banks—Commerce Union, First American or Third National. They were usually held at breakfast or lunch. Whoever was chairman at the time—the job rotated about once a year—ran the meeting. And for the course of an hour or so, members would talk about the important issues of the day, raise money for issues they wanted to affect and, when necessary, move the city by virtue of the sheer power its members could wield.
“The truth was we would fight all day and were friends at night,” says Andrew Benedict, who retired as chairman of First American Bank in 1979. “Watauga had a real strong group of guys, but the important thing was you had to submerge your interest to the community.”
Few things were asked of members, but two rules were inviolate. First, members were told that because Watauga required a selfless dedication to the city, no one would ever be allowed to try to boost their company, their finances or their egos, for that matter. Members were there to do what was best for the city, pure and simple. Any self-aggrandizement had to be checked at the door.
And second, anyone invited to join Watauga was told about the element of secrecy. No one—not anyone in the media, or around the workplace or over coffee after church—could be told about Watauga. Should a member appear too talkative around town, he would be dropped. “They weren’t fired or anything,” recalls Ken Roberts, the former CEO of First American Bank who is now president of the Frist Foundation. “They were just never asked back.”
For the course of its entire existence, Watauga managed to stay utterly secret, flying below the city’s radar, known only to a select few political and business leaders. Watauga was never mentioned in the city’s newspapers, or in any local television news programs or radio talk shows. Other than a brief mention in Town and Country magazine in 1985, in fact, there appears never to have been any mention of it at all. One Watauga member recalls another member once trying to take a photograph of the group after a meeting; members shot the idea down.
“We were trying to hide our tracks in the sand,” remembers Andrews, a core Watauga member who is the chairman of Brookside Properties, a real estate company, and who has studied issues of power and leadership in Nashville extensively over the last several decades. “If it’d gotten out, it would’ve destroyed it.” (Today, of course, members say it really doesn’t matter if the group’s identity is finally made public. Many of the members are retired or not actively involved in the city. A large number are deceased.)
In its heyday, even the original name of the group was designed to avoid notice. It was first called “The Group,” which members thought would be “the least of names,” according to Andrews, and symbolize the group’s disinclination toward publicity. But later, members say that Maxey Jarman, the late CEO of Genesco shoe company, decided to name the group after the agreement in self-government signed by the 18th century settlers in the Watauga region in upper East Tennessee. The so-called “Watauga Compact” was one of the first written documents in American frontier society for civil government. The document itself, which has not been preserved, also apparently bound its members to do what was best for the community. What also resonated with Jarman and the others was that the first significant influx of settlers to Nashville in 1780 had come from Watauga. The name, therefore, tied the organization to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the city’s settlement.
If all that was fairly high-minded, it is fair to say that beyond that, things were informal.
“There were no rules, only understandings,” Wilson says. “It was for the good of the community. Period. That was about the only understanding.”
No single member of Watauga alive today remembers its first meeting. But they do remember the man behind it.
Pat Wilson became chairman of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce in 1967. It was an odd role for a man who mostly liked to remain behind the scenes. Giving speeches made Wilson nervous, and being in front of anything was not his style.
Behind the scenes, however, Wilson was one of the more powerful individuals to cross Nashville’s stage in the last half of the 20th century. Enriched by virtue of his marriage to a member of the Potter family, which owned a huge stake in Commerce Union Bank, Wilson later became a highly influential board member at First American Bank. Today, at 82, he is still chairman of Cherokee Securities, his longtime investment company, and a member of various boards including the Vanderbilt Board of Trust. If Watauga was any one person’s idea, most agree, it was Wilson’s.
When Wilson assumed the presidency of the chamber, he saw how little could be accomplished because the position only lasted one year. “The chamber was a year-to-year thing,” says Andrews, a close friend and associate of Wilson’s through the years who himself became Chamber president in 1970. “There was no continuity. No long-range planning. So it was herky-jerky. That’s ultimately why Watauga was started, to provide some long-range planning. You really couldn’t do anything in a year’s time. You’d have a very activist chamber president, and then along would come a president who’d just cut ribbons.”
Ken Roberts recalls Wilson, meanwhile, as not being one to sit around. He was “an extremely activist chamber president,” Roberts says. “He tried to get the city off the dime on racial issues. He toured Capitol Hill, met with black leaders. He also pushed regional planning.”
With its eyes on the long haul, Watauga was hatched as an organization that would focus on the longer-term interests of the city. As well, it would have close ties to the chamber, but not be part of it. Regardless, that meant the chamber’s Eddie Jones found himself in the middle of it.
Jones had become executive vice president of the chamber—the top staff member of the organization—in 1968, one year after Wilson was the organization’s rotating president. After Wilson’s term ended, there was discussion of Jones joining Watauga, he remembers. But a decision was made to leave him out of it. “The chamber in that era was viewed as an elitist, WASP, rich, white man business group. It would have compounded those image problems had I become a member of Watauga,” Jones says.
But he remained even more important to Watauga by staying on the outside. In fact, he became what he describes as “the organization’s invisible staff member, if you will.” That is to say, whenever Watauga needed research done, or a report written, or a meeting with a politician, Jones was the person the group turned to. All the minutes of meetings—on the rare occasions when minutes were, in fact, taken—were sent to him. Over the years, Jones’ influence would grow to such an extent that he was usually the individual through whom Watauga interfaced with the city.
“If after a meeting they wanted a report or something, or they wanted a meeting with Fulton, I would get it done,” Jones says. “They also relied on me for feedback. It was not too hard to convince them, for instance, that minority relations were awful.”
While it is true they had power, Watauga members often did not circulate well throughout the city. They did not know the Metro Council members—nor did they probably care to. Jones, on the other hand, knew the ins and outs of local government, the mayor’s office and where the bodies were buried. A former reporter for the Nashville Banner and longtime press secretary to former Gov. Frank Clement, he crossed many worlds that the wealthy Wataugans simply didn’t enter.
“We all had such confidence in Eddie,” Wilson remembers. “We had all worked with him at the chamber in one way or the other. And he was much more politically astute than we were.” Roberts describes Jones’ role this way: “He was the mortar between the bricks.”
And so, as its completely anonymous staff director, Jones was entrusted to do many things. In one of the few written records evidencing the group’s early existence, for instance, Jones responds to a request to come up with a list of issues Watauga should be following.
“Local government fundings and budgets,” he listed dryly, followed by “the planning and implementation process for growth in the area, a contact group for selected new business and industry prospects, and an evaluation group for new community and civic programs.” Lastly, Jones wrote, “Whatever you do, don’t call it Watauga.” It was one of the few times they didn’t follow his advice.
When it began, members recall that Watauga was not supposed to endorse things in any formal way. Rather, members were to listen to issues being discussed, and then depart from a meeting with a sense of whether they wanted to endorse something individually. Over time, however, it jumped into projects wholeheartedly.
It would not be correct to say that Watauga ran the city; it left that to the mayor, the Metro Council and the paid apparatus of the city government. Nor did it control the dialogue of the city—The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner had their fingers in every part of the city’s pie. But what Watauga did do was establish a vision of the things that needed to happen. It then set about accomplishing the vision.
The most practical thing about Watauga, members recall, was that it could affect change so quickly and efficiently. With the city’s business leaders gathered around one table, with no one preening for a TV camera and everyone able to contribute large sums of money, an agenda could be rapidly executed.
“You could work it out right then and there,” Andrews says. Watauga, a modern-day oligarchy spouting beneficence, needed no consent from neighborhood groups, special interest lobbyists, the mayor, the council, labor unions, minority groups, whomever. “Shared leadership, of course, is a great thing,” Andrews says, “but it’s just harder than the Watauga model.”
“Today if you had such a group,” Jones says, “it would have to be very inclusive and very public and that would make it a target. For its time and place, Watauga worked and did good things.”
Perhaps the most far-reaching act Watauga ever undertook involved something it stopped rather than created. Had it not done what it did, this city might be an entirely different place.
In 1966, the city’s business community had two competing visions about what the city should become. The first, most frequently articulated by wealthy Nashville businessman John Bransford, was that Nashville should model itself after Atlanta. With his eyes focused southward, Bransford was impressed with a program called “Forward Atlanta,” which essentially encouraged businesses across the country to relocate there. The results had been startling; Atlanta was exploding. As the chamber president preceding Wilson, Bransford soon had Nashville writing its own marketing program. Called “Nashville Plus,” the program committed the chamber to buying advertising in publications around the country promoting the city as a business paradise.
Bransford was a Watauga member, but many other members did not share his gung-ho approach. “It was all bigger, bigger, bigger,” Wilson says of Bransford’s approach. “After I became the chamber head, I took the opposite position. John thought size was everything, and I did not.”
With Wilson leading one vision, and Bransford the other, Watauga dispatched several contingents to drive to Atlanta and take a firsthand look at the city. The first contingent, members recall, toured a great and bustling city without any look at the downside of growth. “It was all bells and whistles,” Andrews says of the upbeat nature of the first tour. The second trip included Andrews and fellow Watauga member Eugene New, a vice president of South Central Bell. “We didn’t want the public relations tour,” Andrews says. “The place was a mess.”
Even by today’s standards, Nashville Plus, the city’s Atlanta knockoff, was an aggressive marketing campaign. Nashville corporations had agreed to chip in $10,000 a year for three years running to fund it. The CEOs of the contributing corporations had become members of a “Nashville Plus Steering Committee,” which met every few months to discuss the program’s progress. There were even citywide competitions in the daily papers to describe what residents liked best about the city. These were then used to market the city’s competitive edge. (One of the more memorable was, “I like Nashville because it’s a long, long way from Detroit city.”)
But when Andrews and New returned from their trip, the die was cast. “Atlanta took anybody and everybody, and crime had shot up and the schools had gone to hell. It’s never caught up.”
In short order, Nashville Plus was killed. The city would not seriously market itself with the same amount of broad-based fanfare for nearly 25 years, until the introduction of a program called Partnership 2000. And, in the process, Nashville never became Atlanta.
Watauga touched on a number of issues of a more nuts-and-bolts variety. The establishment of the Metro Airport Authority was one such endeavor.
Interested in growing its airport, Watauga members understood that the city of Nashville itself didn’t have the wherewithal to fund airport improvements. But John Tune, a Nashville lawyer and Watauga member, understood that the airlines had huge financial credit and could be tapped to help finance the improvements. Tune wanted to use the contracts the airlines had with the airport as collateral for loans; the loans could then pay for the expansion.
The Airport Authority was then created to separate the airport from its Metro ownership. That way, the airlines’ contracts would only be collateralizing debt at the airport, and not all of Metro Government.
“This was precisely the kind of thing you could look at long range, see what needed to be done, figure out how to make it happen and do it,” Andrews says.
The idea of Leadership Nashville, the city’s leadership training institute for up-and-coming citizens, was presented to Watauga some time in the early ’70s. A prospective budget for the organization was presented, and members around the room were canvassed for how much they would be able to put in. Within a half hour, it was fully funded.
The Davidson Group was a response to apparent racial problems in the city in the late ’70s, and it was inspired by Watauga. In 1981, the group was created with 100 black and white people who were paired up with one another. Then they tried to establish meaningful relationships that would otherwise not have occurred.
Watauga assisted in the creation of the city’s minority purchasing council, an effort to lead Metro government purchases to minorities. Project Pencil, the city program that links particular businesses with public schools, can trace its original funding to the group. “I remember reviewing the Watauga membership list with Bronson [Ingram] to determine what everyone should give Project Pencil,” recalls Watauga member Ed Nelson, chairman of Nelson Capital Corp. “I believe everyone made a contribution, which was extremely satisfying.”
Watauga mightily assisted the construction of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC), an initiative undertaken by businesswoman Martha Ingram in the early ’70s. “I can remember talking to Pat Wilson and Bronson [Ingram] and Jack Massey, and they said I needed to come talk to the Watauga group,” Ingram recalls. “They told me they were trying to make sure the right things happened to Nashville in the right way. I met them at the Life and Casualty boardroom for lunch or breakfast, I can’t remember which.”
In the course of the meeting, Ingram described her efforts to obtain state funding for the TPAC building. “They said [that] to have any chance to have something like this approved by the legislature, we needed a lobbyist. I wasn’t even sure a lobbyist sounded legal. Out of their pockets, or from their companies, we hired a lobbyist. I don’t remember any vote being taken, but they contributed.”
According to a copy of some rare minutes taken at a Dec. 5, 1972, Watauga meeting, then-chairman Bill Earthman, a prominent Nashville banker, discusses an undertaking to hire a highly paid state employee to oversee the state’s new Department of Economic and Community Development. The legislature has not appropriated enough money to hire the individual, Earthman reports, adding that Watauga members will soon be called on “not only for our share, but also to assist in this undertaking.”
At another meeting, Watauga discussed an upcoming presentation from Erik Jonsson, the former head of Texas Instruments and three-term mayor of Dallas, about activities in that city. At other times, it argued the fine print of Metro government, such as Nashville’s water and sewer system and whether to amend the Metro Charter to provide for an appointed, rather than elected, school board.
One day in the early ’80s, Wilson, Roberts and Andrews were having lunch. Watauga had not had a regularly scheduled meeting in over a month. Victor Johnson, the president of Aladdin Industries, was Watauga chairman at the time.
“We were wondering whether we should tell Victor to call a meeting,” Roberts recalls. “And we said, 'Nah.’ It died a natural death.”
Frankly, Watauga could no longer continue. “It became apparent that there were too many groups left out,” Andrews says. “You could see neighborhoods becoming more powerful. You could see blacks becoming more powerful. And we had no women. You have to give Victor Johnson credit. He just didn’t call a meeting. And it stopped.”
To say that the organization went away would be a mistake. The men who were a part of Watauga continued to play huge roles in the affairs of the city and the state, even if they were no longer meeting regularly and in secret.
“The legislature in 1983 would not pass my Better Schools Program, primarily because of the teachers’ union,” recalls former Republican Gov. Lamar Alexander. “So I started Tennesseans for Better Schools. We raised about half a million dollars around Tennessee to get support and take polls about whether people supported the plan.
“I remember Pat Wilson set up a breakfast meeting for me to help get the organization going. Bill Weaver ran the meeting, I recall. He said, 'Tell us what you’re doing, and tell us what you need,’” Alexander says. Watauga members say this particular meeting was held after Watauga had officially ended; but they acknowledge that it was just like old times. “They committed $200,000 right there for me. My sense of it was these were men looking beyond their interests and trying to help the state. These men provided the kind of network or backdrop that an elected official needs in order to sustain change. It’s kind of like what [Metro schools director] Pedro Garcia needs now.”
The aftereffects of Watauga were felt in other ways long after it faded, with offshoots of the organization spreading like marbles off a table into politics, local nonprofit groups and business ventures. Leadership Nashville is in many ways Watauga’s most linear descendant; Andrews is intimately involved there. Nashville’s Agenda, a civic improvement program that has established an action program for virtually ever aspect of the city—from housing to the arts to sports—is also a Watauga descendant. Roberts has helped ensure the program plenty of funding from the Frist Foundation.
“Nashville’s Agenda,” says Martha Ingram, its current chairman, “is much the same organization as Watauga. It’s, once again, people who just want Nashville to be the best it can be. It is certainly larger.”
To the best of anyone’s information, no secret organization of leaders exists in this city today. Seen from the perspective of history, many would find such a group to be anathema to today’s Nashville. Its secrecy would be problematic; its white, male composition would be abhorred. Hearing Watauga members speak, it is difficult not to believe they truly wanted to help the city. But the group may have produced some unintended negatives, and historians may one day have a field day trying to resolve the issues raised by its existence.
To what extent did Watauga ensure the preservation of its own members’ power in the city? To what extent was it a choke on democracy, preventing the voices of other, more diverse voices in the city from being heard? If Watauga was truly about the betterment of the city, are we talking about a city as seen by Watauga members themselves or a city as seen by the rest of us? The two cities, of course, would have been entirely different places. And in many ways, the average citizen might have found it an affront to have someone else presuming to act on his own behalf.
Power in today’s Nashville is no longer the provenance of a handful of men meeting under one tent. Instead, the number of people able to exert influence in this city numbers in the hundreds. They are men and women of all colors, persuasions and ideologies, from all parts of the city, from all walks of life.
Democracy can be a decidedly complex—and sometimes quite unruly—way of doing business. But then, Watauga knew that.
