The side-wheel steamboat Sultana was only a few miles above Memphis on the Mississippi River and headed north. Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse just two weeks before. More than 2,000 Union prisoners of war were headed home from Vicksburg, up the Mighty Mississippi River on the Sultana. The 260-foot-long Sultana was licensed to carry 356 passengers and crew.
When it pushed off from the Memphis wharf, the Sultana was carrying more than 2,300 passengers. The Sultana was top-heavy, too, because every deck was jammed full of soldiers. The Big Muddy was at flood stage. Houses, barns, and trees were submerged because the river overflowed its banks. The current was heavy and fast-moving. The Sultana had only one lifeboat.
At 2 a.m. one of the boat’s four steam boilers exploded, then another and another. Everything that could burn did. Half of the Sultana’s passengers and crew died that day from explosions, fires, or by drowning in the icy waters chilled by Spring thaws up north. Bodies continued to wash up downriver for weeks.
Who Was Boss Crump?
Tennessee is bordered by eight states.
Clockwise from noon are Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and a tiny little bit of the Missouri Bootheel. Tucked all the way down in the southwest corner of Tennessee is the city of Memphis. Did you know the Memphis city limits bump up against the Mississippi state line? Mississippi is across the street from South Memphis.
Did you know the western edge of the city of Memphis has what’s called a natural boundary?
The city sits on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River and the Arkansas cotton fields that run right up to it. Take I-40 west across the Hernando de Soto Bridge and you’re in West Memphis, Arkansas, where the Spanish explorer first crossed the Mississippi River. It’s not where he discovered the river because everyone from hundreds of miles around had known about it for many moons.
You can pick up cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, and brochures of everything the State of Arkansas has to offer at most establishments. Memphians snob on West Memphis, of course.
As you cross the bridge,
look for the dotted line down the middle of the river, dividing Arkansas and Tennessee for the nearly 300 miles from Blytheville to Eudora. Along this stretch, the river follows the New Madrid earthquake fault line.
Ten years after the Civil War ended, The Memphis Cotton Exchange opened for business.
Memphis was a great location for middlemen to buy from farmers and sell to other middlemen. The Mississippi River made it a natural regional hub, surrounded as it was by thousands and thousands of acres of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas cotton fields to the horizon and beyond. The Exchange set the standards for buying and selling cotton across the mid-South and recorded all the transactions.
Soon after, the U.S. Department of Agriculture adopted a set of standards for cotton.
The Department also provided classification services based on moisture content, contaminants, and such fiber characteristics as length, strength, age, air permeability, leaf, trash, and color. All of this was done by hand, prospective buyers pulling samples from the bales of cotton and testing it with their hands and fingers.
Bales of cotton weighed around 500 pounds each.
Black laborers loaded them on paddlewheel steamships that went upriver to St. Louis and points west. Some took a right at the Ohio River and went on to Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Others turned right at the Illinois River and followed it all the way to Chicago. Cotton went downriver, too, to the port of New Orleans to be loaded on oceangoing vessels and shipped to overseas markets.
The Mid-South is an unofficial and loosely defined region with Memphis at its center.
It includes portions of Western Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas, and Northern Mississippi. All three were slave states that sold not only cotton, but slaves, too. Memphis became a natural location for a slave trading center because wherever you found cotton in the Mid-South before the Civil War, you found slave labor. And all the cotton went through the Memphis Cotton Exchange.
Edward Hull Crump Jr. was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
He was the son of a cotton planter who had been a Confederate Army officer. Crump Sr. died during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. When he was 19, Junior moved to Memphis.
He married a rich girl whose daddy bought him a buggy and harness company.
It was in Memphis that he entered politics, first as a councilman. Crump worked his way up and was elected as Commissioner of Fire and Police, then County Treasurer. When he saw how much graft was going around, he was ready to run for mayor.
These were the days of actual political bandwagons.
Political candidates hired black bands to draw black and white crowds by playing from band wagons as they traveled around the city. Black bands playing for white audiences is a tradition on display in scenes from Animal House (Otis! My man!)
The leader of Crump’s band was a man named Handy.
In 1909, Handy wrote a political song for E.H. Crump’s campaign for Mayor of Memphis and called it Mr. Crump. The tune was so popular, he rewrote the lyrics and called it Memphis Blues. Handy liked to say “The best notes made the most votes.” He added that Beale Street was expected to deliver a lot of votes for Crump and it was up to the band to see that Beale Street came through.
And they did.
Crump acquired many good connections in the years he worked for the city. He was also backed by those involved in gambling, prostitution, and every other vice available in town. Call it protection money. You know, like the mob.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Crump promised voters he would clean up a city full of vice. In a way, he did but not by getting rid of gambling and whoring. Instead, he confined it to areas so black that few white people dared to go anywhere near them. Similar areas exist today.
Crump allowed illegal businesses to operate as long as they kept it confined to a small area and paid him every month for the privilege.
The Crump administration was aggressive with tax collections, civic improvements, and public works, but the bawdy houses, saloons and gambling continued unchecked. Laissez les bon temps ruler, the Cajun expression for “let the good times roll.”
Crump was as much a racist as most Southerners before the Civil War.
One writer said, “To Crump, Negroes were childish, useful for hard, physical labor under strict guidance, and easily given to tragedy and murder.”
Black citizens backed Crump because he was the only white man that did anything for them.
When election time came around, Crump had city police and firemen drive black voters in wagons to the polling places and tell them who to vote for. Most couldn’t read, so they were coached in how to recognize the name of Crump’s favored candidate. The least literate were given ballots that had already been filled out.
Seriously, no joke.
Those who voted as they were told were rewarded with fried chicken and watermelon for the wife and kiddies and whiskey for the men.
The poll tax was a strategy used in the South to prevent Negroes (period-correct) from voting.
Poor black voters were unable to pay, of course, and so couldn’t vote. Crump’s gang would either pay the poll tax or produce receipts showing the voter had already paid the tax.
Crump made room in his political machine for Republicans.
Tennessee elected only Democratic governors and senators for the 50 years from 1920 to 1970. The state was so solidly Democrat that Republicans had to work with Crump to get any of their bills approved.
Crump owned Memphis.
He organized competing cotton companies and got them to agree to fix prices. City inspectors wouldn’t approve new buildings unless they were insured by his company. He required all public employees buy their insurance from E.H. Crump and Company.
In 1946, Crump made the cover of Time magazine.
Time called him “a real ring-tailed tooter” at either a fight or a picnic. The writer recalled an incident in 1928 when all newspapermen were thrown into jail for the no-bail-allowed offense of “threatened breach of the peace.”
Time’s National Affairs Desk said Ed Crump is “a ruthless, rawhiding, ramrodding political boss, a dramatic figure in the fighting Tennessee tradition. Crump’s 37 years of benign despotism gave Memphis citizens almost everything but the right to vote for a candidate not hand-picked by Crump.”
How big was Boss Crump at his peak?
In or out of office made no difference. “Boss” Crump controlled the South’s most dominant political machine. He was known for shaping elections and delivering the vote. When Crump passed by in his always-new Chrysler, “sidewalk idlers gawked as if they had spied the Mad Mullah of Tud, nose ring and all, cracking pecans on the Hope Diamond.”
Estes Kefauver ran for one of Tennessee’s two Senate seats in 1948.
His opponent was E.H. Crump, mayor of Memphis and boss of Tennessee’s Democratic Party. In a newspaper attack ad, Crump accused Kefauver of being a pet raccoon for Communists. He said Estes Kefauver was “a darling of Communists and Communist sympathizers.” Ever colorful, Crump went on to say Kefauver reminded him of
“the pet (rac)coon that puts its foot in an open drawer in your room, but invariably turns its head while its foot is feeling around in the drawer. The coon hopes, through its cunning by turning its head, he will deceive any onlookers as to where his foot is and what it is into.”
Soon after, Kefauver spoke at a dinner at the downtown Memphis landmark Peabody Hotel, where I was a Lobby Bartender while a senior at Memphis State University (period-correct). Here’s part of his speech:
“The coon is all-American. Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and all our great men of that era in Tennessee history wore the familiar ring-tailed, coonskin cap. Mr. Crump defames me, but worse than that he defames the coon, the all-American animal. We coons can take care of ourselves.”
Kefauver’s campaign adopted a raccoon as its mascot, and speechwriters included as many raccoon references as they could.
After Crump accused Kefauver of being a raccoon-like communist sympathizer, Kefauver calmly donned a coonskin cap for his next speech and uttered his new campaign slogan,
“I may be a pet coon, but I’m not Boss Crump’s pet coon.”
After losing to Kefauver, Crump stopped running for office.
He had dominated state politics for 20 years and city politics for 50, the master puppeteer pulling the strings in Memphis and across Tennessee. Crump lost the rest of his power when he opposed Harry Truman’s election for United States president. This time, blacks voted for Truman, leaving Crump only crumbs.
Bonus
Ed Sullivan called W.C. Handy The Dean of Tin Pan Alley as he introduced him playing his famous St Louis Blues live before a studio audience in 1949. You can see and hear it here.
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