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A member of the Organization who showed the slightest signs of disloyalty was through in politics. Most retired. Some, like former Governor Gordon Browning, were persuaded. Browning, a big, forceful Huntingdon attorney, got 60,000 votes in Shelby County in 1936 by virtue of the Organization's backing. But after he took office he "began to eat too high on the hog." Cried Crump: "Gordon Browning is the kind of a man who would milk his neighbor's cow through a crack in the fence. In the art galleries of Paris there are 27 pictures of Judas Iscariot—none look alike but they all resemble Gordon Browning." In 1938, when Browning had the temerity to run for reelection, he was beaten; he lost Shelby County by 60,000 votes. No Tennessee politician missed the lesson.
The Surrealist. By last week Crump's power was so complete, so zealously guarded, that opposition and disloyalty were rare. Few Memphis citizens ever spoke out against him. Sensible men who wished to enter politics visited the boss, asked his permission, accepted the inevitable quietly if he refused. His chief lieutenants, like Mayor Walter Chandler and District Attorney William Gerber, passed on Crump doctrine without the slightest deviation.
At 71, like many another aging dictator, Crump considers himself a humanitarian and public benefactor, prefers not to remember the boisterous past. He loves to discuss the glories of Memphis, and is as sensitive as a surrealist painter to the slightest criticism.
Sometimes he prods Memphis businessmen and advertisers into protesting on his behalf. Sometimes public officials leap up to defend him. When Mrs. Agnes Meyer, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, compared him to Hitler last week, Senator Tom Stewart hurriedly took the floor of the Senate to cry: "Mrs. Meyer seeks to slander the South and its greatest leader. . . ."
Poison Press. But when really aroused, he scribbles counterdenunciations, buys big newspaper ads to blast his tormentors. Chief target of Crump's vituperative essays is a pudgy outlander, Silliman Evans, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean. One anti-Evans masterpiece contained the following observations:
"Liars will steal and rogues will murder, if necessary, to accomplish a nefarious purpose. . . . The honeymoon of this lying, corroding crowd of murderers of character is over. Their swill barrel is empty—they have scraped the bottom of the garbage can. . . . Evans intoxicated himself with megalomaniac dreams of power. ... He has tried bullwhipping, browbeating . . . common ordinary lying . . . but the canker of disappointment gnaws at his soul. . . ."
If these discharges of verbal grapeshot infuriate Crump's enemies, they charm and stimulate his admiring friends and followers. For Ed Crump, a ruthless, rawhiding, ramrodding political boss, is also a dramatic figure molded in the fighting Tennessee tradition of Andy Jackson, Sam Houston, and Nolichucky Jack Sevier—and thousands of Tennesseans love him.