Word: crumps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
...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...