Ends, Means and Memphis

...They accompanied the Boss of Memphis' reputation as one of the last of the big bad city bosses of the Democratic party...

...With enthusiasm, without hedges or hesitation, he was for Wilson, for Cox, for Al Smith (and against the Klan), and for FDR to the end...

...His relationship with Memphis Negroes was traditional and paternalistic...

...All over America, political organizations have risen up to create order out of chaos and primitivism...

...Crump controlled the votes of Shelby County in West Tennessee with an organization less interested in the color of a man's skin than that he pay his poll tax (or permit it to be paid for him...

...He was one of the first "modem" urban bosses-but in a rural state...

...Still, Crump used his power carefully and, Miller argues, more often for good than not...

...More of a transitional figure than John Nance Garner, less so than Sam Rayburn, he bridged many of the gaps between the old South in time, the mid-South in region, and the new South in time again...

...In Memphis, the Negroes' loyalty to Crump (some would say subservience) even won them a share in the pork barrel, for Crump fought through a number of park, school and hospital projects for them-strictly according to the segregated ghetto formula, to be sure...

...The question for every statewide candidate whom Crump supported was whether, after the votes were all in, he had won only with Shelby's help and would therefore be beholden to Crump, or whether his margin was safely larger than the 20-30,000 votes Shelby regularly delivered...

...His efficient organization of the Negro wards, however, was only one base for the machine that enabled him to deliver eight-to-one margins for chosen candidates in the years he ran Shelby County, roughly from 1920-48...

...of the New Deal's use of existing relationships between farm and town, Washington and Memphis, reform and power, to create new relationships...

...but from the early '20s on, the mayor of Memphis, city and county officeholders, and Shelby state legislative and Congressional delegations spoke as he ordered...

...Yet Ed Crump was no Bilbo, no Hague...

...Garner urged Roosevelt to support anti-lynching bills and like Crump, recognized the usefulness of Negroes voting...

...A recorder of virtuous aphorisms, he wrote before he died in 1954, "I do not believe in the doctrine that we may do evil that good may come...

...Perhaps more important, he offers a fascinating case study of the New Deal dynamics in the provinces...

...Rayburn wound up as regular a labor and civil rights supporter as any Northern urban Democrat, but he was a national figure...

...Yet by 1948 his organization was red-baiting Congressman Estes Kefauver for voting with Vito Marcantonio, "the oxblood red Communist of New York City...

...He invites the reader to conclude that Crump was for the poll tax not as an instrument of political discrimination, but as an instrument of political organization...

...The fight won, he returned to Memphis in 1934...

...always reformers have risen to clean up the machinery of order...

...Crump began to speak in reactionary and bigoted terms after the War, as he neared 80 and his career came to an end...

...William D. Miller, who has taught in Memphis and written about it before, has produced after seven years of research a very competently written biography...

...A series of associations also combined to heighten the unsavoriness of that reputation: In the '30s and '40s, Crump along with other strong Roosevelt supporters like Ed Kelly of Chicago and Frank Hague of Jersey City, became en masse a focus for liberal reformers' attacks...

...He only rarely held office, serving as mayor from 1910 until the power trust and the local prohibitionists forced him out in 1916...

...That meant Shelby County took the same positions...

...From the start he saw the usefulness of building a coalition that included minority groups-Memphis' Jews, Catholics and Negroes-instead of using demagogic bigotry to build a WASP regime...

...Later, Crump easily adapted himself to Albert Gore's defeat of his old ally, the tired reactionary MeKellar, and supported Stevenson and attacked Eisenhower for opposing TVA...

...pork-barrel they were, nonetheless they helped build Memphis and bring prosperity to surrounding farm land...

...Miller argues that what Memphis gained from Crump's rule in progressive government was worth the price-that only a tyrannical political organization could have brought the power trust to bay and cleaned up the city...

...He reflects in the length of his career and the style of his politics a cluster of varied social and political strains fused into one remarkable man in one remarkable locale...

...the CIO'S Political Action Committee, FEPC and A. Phillip Randolph did...

...He used his considerable influence with Roosevelt as well as with the late Senator Kenneth McKellar to get Federal projects for Shelby County...

...and calling Truman's civil rights program a "scheming, cold-blooded effort to outdo Henry Wallace and Governor Dewey...

...SNCC and CORE would have appalled him...

...He was, however, one of the more genuinely progressive orderers-as FDR, who respected Crump's sense as well as his power, saw...

...Negroes voted in Memphis, and the way Crump told them to...

...blasting Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the President he had rhapsodically eulogized three years before, for "frogging around with her Communist associates...

...always they have cut corners to do so...

...He was a boss who used his organization for many progressive purposes...

...He preferred to mouth homilies, which he clearly believed, about his desire to "help" Memphis...

...In 1954, he supported Kefauver over a McCarthyite challenger in the primaries...

...Crump could not go that far...

...The strident voices of bigotry in the postwar South were generally lumped together, though, so it was frequently forgotten that despite their alliance against FEPC, there were important differences between "poor-white" pro-New Deal radicals like John Rankin of Mississippi, urban New Deal progrcssives like Crump, and agrarian reactionaries like Gene Talmadge...

...for the Negro vote...

...Miller goes perhaps too far...

...He fought the Tennessee private utility barons for 30 years and beat them, securing low power rates and strong local regulatory measures...

...Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY Contributor, London "Sunday Times," New York "Times Book Review" The politician's wide, toothy, bogus smile, the fat face adorned with the Bobby Clark glasses, the puffs of hair over the ears and out under the Panama hat were the familiar comic trademarks of the late Ed Crump's appearance...

...In 1930, he put himself into Congress to supervise what evolved as the fight to save Muscle Shoals and build TVA...

...Miller's impressive demonstration is that if Crump did not believe in this doctrine, he practiced it with skill and dedication...

...Self-righteous in all his fights, he deplored Truman's association with Prendergast, and his pardon of James Michael Curley...

...He rejects the argument of liberal journalists like the late Tom Stokes that Crump was a flannel-mouth Mussolini, running the trains on time and murdering democracy...

...What was reprehensible about one or another of them rubbed off on the whole breed...

...The "white primary" never took hold there as it did throughout the South in the years after Reconstruction, and in the wake of the Populists' attempts to ally with Negroes against the Democratic oligarchies...

...Being self-righteous and as blind to his own failings and sins and compromises as Harold Ickes himself, Crump could never accept such a frank juxtaposition of ends and means as Miller's-that what he did for Memphis justified what he did to it...

...No one can make Crump a hero...

...Of all the bosses who backed FDR, he had been the most fervent New Dealer of the lot, largely because of his passion for the Tennessee Valley Authority...