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It was a rough, roistering city, where the oldest and newest forces in the South seethed and mingled. Cotton still came to Memphis levees on high-stacked steamboats, but many a planter had moved to town to be a businessman. Memphis nights were noisy with roistering male voices and the jangle of sporting-house pianos. Gunmen, loggers, sunburned planters, rivermen from all the channels between St. Louis and New Orleans fought, gambled, drank and consorted with brigades of painted Memphis whores.
The Red Snapper. Lean, red-thatched Ed Crump surveyed it all with a calculating and untroubled eye. He had come to conquer. He got a job with a harness firm; eight years later he bought the owners out. He was elected to the city council, picked up a nickname, "The Red Snapper," and was known as a "real ring-tailed tooter" at either a fight or a frolic.
In 1909 he ran for mayor. It was a rough, wild-eyed campaign. The ring-tailed tooter tooted against the "interlocking, circling, double-back, double-crossing interests." When thugs charged his meetings, he and the boys battled back. He was elected by 79 votes. From that day on he was the boss of Memphis.
As mayor (for two terms), as county trustee (for eight years), and then as just a plain political boss, he slugged and beat and charmed his way to power. Always, he fought the "interests." When the Frisco and N.C. & St.L. railroads failed to agree with his interpretation of their franchises, he marched out with a crowbar, tore up their tracks, and stationed police over his handiwork.
Once Pinkerton agents swarmed Memphis, searched his office for evidence of graft. One night he was shot at. Once the courts ousted him from office. But he always stayed on top.
In the 1920s he moved into state politics, fought one last struggle for political power against huge and ruthless Luke Lea, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, won, and then controlled the state.
Eatin' on the Hog. In the years of political wars the Organization had grown stronger and resistance had diminished. Critics of the boss were never free of the fear that they might find themselves in court—before a Crump judge. There was always the chance of being beaned with a beer bottle at a nightclub, of getting beaten up in a mysterious street fight or simply being slugged by Memphis police, as were two overenthusiastic C.I.O. organizers in 1937. Memphis newspapermen did not forget one election night in 1928, when every reporter in sight was thrown into jail for threatened breach of the peace, a handily unbailable offense in Memphis.
There were more subtle ways of convincing dissenters. Crump policemen once trailed funeral processions of a recalcitrant undertaker, traffic slips ready. In 1940, they stood outside the door of a Memphis druggist who made the mistake of supporting Willkie, and searched all his customers for "narcotics." Or a businessman could have his assessments raised.