Lord, Mr. Ford

Political history is usually dull. Over the past thirty years, it has thankfully gone out of fashion in the academy. Since around 1980, professional historians have gradually turned away from chronicling the public performances of presidents and legislators—all without telling us what we really needed to know, that the public performances hid the private truth that presidents and legislators were serving not the public interest but moneyed interests—and have turned toward documenting the everyday people who actually do the work that keeps civilization going: women, artists, and the laboring classes (the three, of course, often overlap). As my mentor, Marcus W. Orr, used to say about ancient Egypt, “The pharaohs didn’t build those pyramids; engineers and architects and highly skilled craftsmen did.”

So when I began reading Otis Sanford’s new political history of Memphis, From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), I was prepared to be bored. I am happy to report that I was not. Somehow, Mr. Sanford has managed to pull off an entertaining, absorbing account—and a quite comprehensive one, too—of the political campaigns, elections, and administrations that made up twentieth-century Memphis.

I grew up in Memphis in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, with half of its story postdating the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike, reading the book was a trip down memory lane, reprising names I hadn’t heard or thought about in years: alphabetically, Andy Alissandratos, Wyeth Chandler, Mike Cody, Dick Hackett, Otis Higgs, Minerva Johnican, Dan Kuykendall, Danny Owens, J. O. Patterson, Maxine Smith, Pat Vander Schaaf. But the chief contribution of the book is to firmly situate the Ford family in the history of twentieth-century Memphis politics, beginning with the election to the US House of Representatives in 1974 of Harold Ford, then all of twenty-nine years old. (I still remember the day I met Harold Ford. I was in junior high, and for some reason I had been chosen to be among a group of students who met him at a luncheon in a hotel ballroom. His energy, his sincerity, his manner—he still remains the most exciting person I ever met.) It makes sense to begin and end the book with Mr. Crump and Dr. Herenton—the two most important Memphians of the last century. But the Ford family, at their best and at their worst, represents an equally significant episode of the story, one suitable for a political history in its own right.

How did race change Memphis politics? The answer seems to be that as blacks found ways to participate more and more in the political process, they determined more and more the outcomes of elections. A case in point, says Mr. Sanford, was the election in 1948 of the anti-Crump candidate Estes Kefauver to the US Senate. Thanks to the efforts of Joseph E. Walker, the owner of the Universal Life Insurance Company, black Memphians tipped the balance in favor of Kefauver.

One of Mr. Sanford’s themes is the repeated failure of white politicians to recognize the growing influence of the black vote. That became most obvious in 1991, when Memphians elected Dr. Herenton over the incumbent Dick Hackett. Just four years earlier, Hackett had received 20 percent of the black vote—the largest percentage for a successful mayoral candidate in a generation. Apparently, Hackett took black support for granted, politicking almost exclusively to white constituencies in the 1991 campaign. One might have forgotten just how close the election was—Herenton won by a mere 142 votes—and how much drama there was as election night wore on in accounting for 8,600 absentee votes and seven boxes of votes that came in late, with Harold Ford, a Herenton supporter, making repeated phone calls and visits to the election commissioner, O. C. Pleasant, at one point even interrupting a TV interview that Mr. Pleasant was giving (“O. C., what in the hell is going on?”). Mr. Sanford’s narrative captures the tense, anxious hours leading up to the historic announcement that the city had its first black mayor.

Mr. Sanford, a political columnist for the Commercial Appeal and a commentator for Local 24 News, introduces his book with a charming account of his boyhood and the attraction a city like Memphis had for a young man from a Panola County farm in northern Mississippi. “I was dazzled by Memphis’ streetlights, taxi cabs, bustling traffic, and fancy stores. . . . I delighted in just seeing the huge, red-cursive Kellogg’s sign at the cereal plant on Airways Boulevard in route to the fairgrounds.” Indeed, “my decades-long desire [to write From Boss Crump to King Willie] stems from the fact that I have loved Memphis for as long as I can remember.”

In an epilogue, Mr. Sanford writes, “My goal in writing this book was not to further divide the city that I love, but to help Memphians understand themselves and to learn the lessons of history.” Count me among one of those Memphians. Here’s to hoping there are many more.