Word: crumps
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...political art of invective and abuse still flowers in Tennessee. So does Memphis' Boss Ed Crump...
Last week, Boss Ed was up to his eyebrows in a shouting contest with the Crump-hating Nashville Tennessean. He was annoyed beyond his limited endurance by the Tennessean's insistent labeling of Memphis as "Crumptown," and even more annoyed by its fight against the poll tax, which helps to keep bosses in power. Snapped Boss Ed: "This trio of mangy bubonic rats are conscienceless liars . . . cowards at heart, yellow to the core. . . . There is not one of them who, either singly or all together, would meet us on the street . . . and say the things to our faces that...
Sniffs & Snarls. Boss Crump is adept at pitching epithets without catching libel suits. He had his 1,700 words of vituperation-in which the word "rat" appeared 14 times, "liar" 20 times-read aloud in both houses of the Tennessee Legislature, a cleansing process by which slander becomes legally privileged. Then he sent the whole caboodle to the Tennessean by messenger...
...Tennessean calmly printed the entire tirade-adding that it had not corrected "errors of grammar or syntax." The Tennessean also published pictures of two animals and one human being, correctly identifying them: "This is Ed Crump. . . . This is a Quagga. . . . This is a Wanderoo...
...editorial, the Tennessean's Jennings Perry rated Boss Crump low as an invective hurler. Said the Tennessean: the South once "bred original and talented artificers in insult. ... Its present practitioners are no more than mere name callers, repetitiously stumbling through the same comminations . . . mumbling a string of bawdy epithets." Trying its own hand, the Tennessean did a little better, but not much. Crump, wrote Editorialist Perry, is a "foulmouthed old boss . . . ugly and snarling ... a contemptible relic of the barbarous past...