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Double Insurance. The office is a pleasant, airy room with polished brass desk ornaments, a gilded telephone, and a view of green Arkansas forests across the big river. It is not only a political nerve center but headquarters for one of the South's largest insurance and mortgage loan businesses. In 22 years, E. H. Crump & Co. has experienced a phenomenal growth; many a Memphis business man understandably believes that insurance with Crump has a double value. Crump's 54 years in Memphis have yielded him not only power, but wealth—cotton land in Mississippi, a fine brick house, part ownership in an exclusive hunting club, major holdings in the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of N.Y. But no man has ever disputed the old man's proudest brag: that he has never made a nickel through common political graft.
He has always lived by a selfstyled, self-drawn code of "correctness." It was an odd sort of code, amendable by circumstance, but in essence a fierce refusal to be dominated. It had allowed the Organization to accept contributions from prostitutes and gamblers in the old days, but had never countenanced sharing control in return. E. H. Crump had taken, but he had never been for sale.
From a Chamber of Commerce viewpoint, the Memphis of Ed Crump left little to be desired. But was it a part of free America? Tennessee's own Andy Jackson would not have thought so. Yet, as muckraker Lincoln Steffens discovered four decades ago, boss-ridden Memphis had followed the pattern of countless U.S. municipalities. In his way, Ed Crump was a classic American figure.
Poverty & Pretence. He was born at Holly Springs, Miss. (pop. 2,750) amid the grinding poverty, the hatred of carpetbaggers, the nostalgia for better days which shaped life in the South after the Civil War. His father, who had fought as a Confederate cavalry officer with General John H. Morgan's Raiders, died when he was only three, victim of the great yellow fever epidemic of 1878. His mother, daughter of a once wealthy North Carolina family, and a woman who had been educated in a select Philadelphia female academy, raised her brood of three children alone.
It was a day when many a Southerner strove to forget his shabbiness with genteel pretence. The Crump children often got no firecrackers for Christmas; they were urged instead to pop dried, inflated pig bladders saved from the autumn slaughtering. Their one-room school was never painted—elders murmured evasively that they were waiting for the nailheads to rust. But even as a skinny, redheaded boy, Ed Crump stared at the world with the discerning eyes of a realist.
He had a voracious instinct for opportunity. He hired out to plow the eroded red soil with oxen, sold peaches to passengers on the Illinois Central's cars, wangled a job as a printer's devil. When he was 16 he left home, headed for the rich black Delta lands downriver, became a bookkeeper in a country store at Lula, Miss. In 1892, at 17, he went to Memphis.