Tennessee History

HISTORY OF TENNESSEE

The Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and World War II

*WWI turned the world upside down. Millions of men were dead, Europe was devastated, half its governments had been overthrown, and Russia had collapsed into a communist revolution. Thank you, Gavrilo Princip.

*In 1920, Warren G. Harding campaigned for the presidency on the promise of a ‘return to normalcy,’ and won, in large part with the support of America’s women, in a backlash against the Democratic Party (who had gotten American into WWI).

*In Tennessee, Governor A. H. Roberts also suffered from this backlash, and from resentment over his support for women’s suffrage (which angered conservatives) and his willingness to use the power of the state government against labour unions out of fear of Communism (which angered liberals).

*He had even angered farmers, though a well-intended, but poorly planned, tax reform. He had placed taxes on a sliding scale based on the real worth of both real estate and intangible property such as stocks. Previously, land had often been taxed below its value, and so had many businesses the government supported; Roberts had hoped this would let land-owners pay less by sharing the burden with big city investors. The problem was that many stock-owners hid the value of their assets, while farmers could not hide how much land they owned. Farmers saw a 260% increase in their tax burden and even city property taxes went up by 140%.

*Initially the Democrats, led by Luke Lea (owner of the Nashville Tennessean) split on the issue, but they finally decided to back Roberts. The Republicans turned to an old favourite, Alfred Taylor, who once again ran on his hound-dog stories and his fiddle playing, but also on attacking Roberts’ tax plan. He was elected 32 years after he ran against his brother in the War of the Roses, but he did not accomplish much in office, and was defeated in the election of 1922.

*Tennessee in the 1920s was full of colourful politicians: Boss Crump ran Memphis; Nashville had Hilliary Howse, former Governor Malcolm Patterson (who had been caught in a brothel raid in 1913, got religion, and became a prohibitionist), and Luke Lea, owner of the Tennessean and a major real-estate developer; East Tennessee had old Alf Taylor and was generally split by Democratic-Republican rivalries hardly seen elsewhere in the state. Tennessee in the 1920s was full of colourful politicians—Austin Peay was not one of them.

*Austin Peay was boring, hard-working, quiet man, a successful lawyer who promised to reform government, cutting out many unnecessary jobs and promoting good roads and good schools. He was a progressive, but a ‘business progressive,’ more interested in economic improvement than in moral suasion. In his election campaign he named specific government departments he would cut down and even specific government officials he would fire if elected. He was elected by the people of the cities, who wanted the economy improved and government cleaned up, but he ended up doing even more for the countryside, and the rural people of Tennessee became his greatest supporters.

*Among Peay’s first actions was a consolidation of the government. At the time of his election, 64 different agencies ran the state’s business and reported to the General Assembly. In the Administration Reorganization Bill, passed in 1923, all these were consolidated into eight agencies that reported to the governor. This made government more efficient, also made the office of governor itself much more powerful—more power than ever before in Tennessee’ history. Peay used this power, including the patronage power of appointing men to these newly organized agencies—to get support for his other reforms.

*In 1920, Tennessee had about 500 miles of paved roads in the entire state. Although the Tennessee State Highway Commission was formed in 1915, it had not done much, nor had previous governors or legislatures. In 1920, Tennessee paid more money in pensions to Confederate veterans than for highway construction.

*The Tennessee Good Roads Association lobbied for better roads, warning that people would start avoiding Tennessee if our transportation system was too bad—thus giving up Tennessee’s historic position as a place that was convenient to travel through. The TGRA supported a bond issue to pay for paved roads, using the slogan ‘Lift Tennessee Out of the Mud,’ but rural voters figured that state officials would just waste the money (and all the bond interest would go to city investors), and voted against the bond.

*Peay suggested that highways instead be funded with a gasoline tax and vehicle registration fees, thus placing the burden of building highways on the people who actually used them, back in a day when automobiles were still largely seen as toys for the rich, or at least fairly well-to-do. He also supported small, short-term bond issues, and vetoed plans to give more control over roads to urban areas.

*The TGRA opposed Peay’s plan, and Peay himself, in the 1924 election, but Peay won, and began highway construction statewide, employing hundreds of people. By 1930, Tennessee would have over 6,000 miles of highways. Peay’s plan would cost $75 million, but it would not create any significant long-term debt, and even to-day, Tennessee’s roads (funded by our gasoline tax) are among the best in the nation. All this won Peay support in the countryside, but his refusal to issue bonds hurt him in the cities.

*Peay also oversaw the creation of Tennessee’s first parks, ensuring that people would have somewhere worth driving to. There had been some discussion for years of creating a national park in the southern Appalachians, but it had been held up for years by the timber companies.

*In the 1920s, city leaders in Knoxville began to seriously promote the creation of a national park nearby. In 1925, Congress passed laws authorizing a national park in the Smokies, but did not actually appropriate money to pay for one. Instead, the park would have to be made up of land donated by its owners or bought and then given to the government.

*Shortly afterwards, Austin Peay recommended that the state buy 76,500 acres to get things started right, but he could not get enough support until Knoxville paid for a trip for the General Assembly to see the proposed land, and offered to pay for 1/3 of the purchase price itself. Knoxville’s citizens raised $500,000, including $1,000 in pennies collected by Knoxville’s school children. Eventually, Tennessee and North Carolina bought more lands, and in the 1930s, the federal government took over, began buying land, and started to manage the park.

*Also in 1925, Peay began working to reform Tennessee’s schools. At the turn of the century, Tennessee’ schools were managed separately by the 95 counties. Although most of the cities had pretty good schools, most country schools were one-room buildings. The average school term was 96 days a year, and attendance was optional, so that the average student attended 47 days a year. 14% of the state’s population over the age of 10 could not read, and almost 22% of voting-age men could not read their ballots of sign their names.

*Some school reform had been attempted earlier. UT Professor Philander P. Claxton had begun a widely-respected and very successful teacher education programme at UT in 1902. The state had begun building normal schools, creating one for each Grand Division, an extra one in Nashville to educate black teachers. In 1911, the East Tennessee Normal School was founded, with Sidney G. Gilbreath as its first president. ETSU, MTSU, and Memphis University all come from the white normal schools, and Nashville’s black normal school is today Tennessee State University.

*By 1917, Tennessee had started to create county school boards, lengthened the school year, making attendance mandatory, requiring that teachers be certified, and requiring that every county had a high school. Still, by the time Austin Peay came along, there was still plenty to do.

*In 1925,Peay supported the General Education Bill, offering state aid to any county that would comply. If a county would offer a fifty-cent tax for schools, the state would make sure that county could support an 8-month school year (in part with money raised by a new tax on tobacco sales). Schools had to follow state curriculum guidelines, or lose their funding. Teachers also had a uniform pay scale established, and the University of Tennessee had its funding for teacher education increased. All this was placed under the control of a state superintendent of schools appointed by the governor.

*Austin Peay was re-elected in 1926, the first governor since Isham Harris to win three consecutive terms. However, he did not serve out much of his third term, dying in October 1927, shortly after his 51st birthday. Like James K. Polk, he was a boring, hard-working Tennessean, who made his state a better place, and then died young. He increased the power of the governor and managed to raise state expenditures from $15.6 million to $26.2 million without going into debt. Although he was elected as a businessman with the support of the cities, he won the love of the farmers by keeping land taxes low and bringing education and good roads to the country without significantly raising their taxes to do so. His third term was actually won despite the opposition of both Boss Crump and Hillary Howse, but they did make life hard for him once he was re-elected.

*Austin Peay is, thus far, the only Tennessee governor to die in office, and the governorship passed to the speaker of the senate, Henry Hollis Horton. (This had sort of happened when Sam Houston resigned, though.)

*The 1920s saw a tremendous drop in the price of farm products, partly because the end of WWI reduce the demand. The drove a lot of farmers off their land into the cities, and 1920 was the first census year in which more Americans lived in cities than on the farm, although Tennessee would not reach that point until 1960.

*Still, Tennesseans flooded into the cities, getting secretarial jobs, working in factories, shopping at Piggly Wiggly (a Tennessee creation, and the world’s first modern, self-serve, grocery store), and getting better educations than they had ever had before. They also encountered a much more worldly environment than they had ever seen before.

*Like any time of great change, this upset people, as they made the transition from an old life to a new one.

*Many people turned for comfort to their old-time music, and for the first time, music was mass-produced. Record players were still fairly new, and city people took advantage of them to listen to music like what they grew up with in the country. The first part of the 20th century, especially the 1920s, saw the birth and nation-wide popularization of what was then called ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ music, and is now called Country Music and the Blues.

*Among the great successes of early country music was the Carter Family, of Southwest Virginia, first discovered at a talent search in Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border. A.P, Sarah, and Maybelle Carter made songs like ‘Wildwood Flower,’ ‘Keep on the Sunny Side,’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ famous and popular nationwide. Maybelle and her daughters would eventually play for the Grand Ole Opry (which began in 1925, making it the oldest continually-broadcast radio programme in the US), and Maybelle Carter’s daughter June later married Johnny Cash.

*Many Tennesseans also turned to their old-time religion. The early 20th century had already seen something of a religious revival, as many country people turned against fancy churches and highly-educated ministers, which were sometimes seen as being too wrapped up in social lives and politics to be truly spiritual—one many claimed that he didn’t go to church because he had promised his mother that he would ‘never attend places of fashionable amusement on Sunday.’ This effort to get back to the basics of spiritual Christianity inspired the creation in Tennesse of the Churches of Christ (out of the more formal Disciples of Christ) in 1906, while the Holiness Movement, made up of people seeking sanctification—a second blessing after salvation that would make them spiritually whole—created, among other new denominations, the Church of God (now the second-largest Pentecostal denomination in America), which by 1907 had its headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, while the Church of God in Christ, the strongest black Pentecostal church in the world, established its headquarters in Memphis.

*Nationwide, there was a drive among some Christians to return to the fundamentals of the faith, based on the Bible, which they said was inerrant, and had to be taken literally. This was a reaction in part against Darwinism in particular, but more so against a growing trend in mainstream Christianity at the time to look at the Bible more and more as a work of symbolic truth and great spiritual value, but not actually as literal history. This movement, aimed at returning to fundamental beliefs, earned the name Fundamentalism.

*In an effort to fight modernism, fundamentalists (or at least legislators wanting fundamentalist votes) introduced what came to be known as the Butler Act in the General Assembly, and it was passed in 1925. The Butler Act made it illegal to teach ‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man descended from a lower order of animals.’

*Most Christian churches in Tennessee supported the Butler Act, particularly the Baptists, but some—particularly Methodists--did say that the state legislators were making monkeys out of themselves. Austin Peay did not think the law would ever really be enforced, but he supported the symbolism behind it, just as he supported the mandatory reading of Bible verses in schools every day.

*The Butler Act got national attention, and the ACLU, formed in 1920, vowed to fight it, promising to fund the legal actions of any Tennessee teacher who would oppose it. The city of Dayton took them up on it.

*After an argument at a drugstore soda fountain, in which some teachers said it was impossible to teach biology without teaching evolution implicitly, the city leaders of Dayton decided to make an issue of it, in order to put Dayton on the map. They got John Scopes, a young teacher who did not normally teach biology (but who had helped some students review the subject), to agree to go on trial, despite the fact that he wasn’t sure he had ever mentioned evolution in class or not.

*It did put Dayton on the map. The ACLU supported Scopes, hiring the most famous defence lawyer in the country, Clarence Darrow, to defend him, while the prosecution brought in William Jennings Bryan, a four-time Democratic nominee for the presidency, former secretary of state, and recently a national speaker against evolution. There were also innumerable scholars, theologians, and linguists. Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible, which he proved the he wasn’t. It was a circus, and, ultimately, an embarrassment to the state, as its people were characterized in the national press as ignorant hillbillies and hicks.

*Scopes was convicted, as his students testified that he had taught evolution. He was fined $100, which Bryan offered to pay. This was later overturned on a technicality, as Tennessee judges could not at that time set fines above $50. However, the validity of the law was upheld until it was repealed in 1967 as a constraint upon free speech. The stress of the trial itself was too much for the elderly Bryan, and he died five days later. Bryan College, in Dayton, was named in his honour.

*Sadly, for some people, the fear of modernity resulted in violence. The attraction of the cities had pulled in many blacks as well, often working on new roads, railroads, and in new factories, and they were not treated well. In Knoxville, a black man accused of shooting a white woman in an attempted robbery was the cause of a race riot in 1919. The man himself was transferred to Chattanooga, but mobs broke into the prison, freed all the white prisoners, and liberated all the illegal liquor the sheriff had confiscated. They then tore down the jail and the sheriff’s house, and rampaged through the black neighbourhoods of the city, killing several people. The Tennessee National Guard was called out to keep order, but joined in the mob activity.

*From 1919 through the end of the 1920s, many blacks left the South in what was called the Great Migration, heading north to the great factory cities. Those who stayed in Tennessee did increasingly live in the cities, where some were protected by big political bosses in return for their support. Boss Crump, in Memphis, was particularly famous for paying blacks’ poll taxes, taking them to the polls, and then telling them how to vote. In return, he gave them some of the best schools and other services that blacks got almost anywhere in the South in the 1920s.

*A desire for the good old days, and a fear of the modern world and of black mobility particularly manifested itself in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. This was partly inspired by the blockbuster movie The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, which glorified the Klan’s activities in protected the South during Reconstruction. Seeing an opportunity, a few Southern salesmen resurrected the Klan, and began selling memberships as a pyramid scheme, with a cut of new members’ dues going to the people who recruited them.

*In the 1920s, though, the Klan (again) moved from being a rather silly fraternity into a violent and politically active group. However, the second Klan was new and improved: it didn’t just hate blacks any more, it also hated Jews, Catholics, Communists, immigrants, and atheists, and promoted itself as a group in support of traditional values. It was 100% American, or at least what many Americans thought of themselves as being. It actually had a great deal of support in the American mid-west, not against blacks, but against immigrants and modernists.

*In Tennessee, where blacks were already kept down by segregation laws, and where Jews and Catholics were not too numerous, the Klan had to find other things to do. The Klan supported prohibition, so it fought stills, broke them up, and publicly whipped the moonshiners. The Klan broke up brothels, hauled prostitutes to the authorities, and harassed divorced women and loose women. In Tennessee, the Klan most appealed to working class whites, who felt their livelihood threatened by black workers, especially in East Tennessee and the Memphis area.

*Boss Crump always claimed to have been against the Klan from the start, although that was as much because it opposed him politically as for any other reason. This meant that few important Tennesseans joined the Klan, as they didn’t dare have Crump against them. Still, anti-Catholicism like that of the Klan would mean that in 1928 Tennessee would vote for a Republican president, Herbert Hoover, over the Democratic (and Catholic) Al Smith. Tennessee had only twice before voted for a Republican: Grant in 1868 when Brownlow made sure it happened, and Harding in 1920 as a backlash against the Democrats.

*When Austin Peay died in 1927, Henry Horton became governor, and didn’t know what to do with it. He turned to Luke Lea for help, and ended up getting so much advice that Lea essentially ran the state.

*Lea was a successful businessman, owning the Nashville Tennessean, a number of banks, and a large real-estate business. Lea also had a business partner named Rogers Caldwell, owning banks, department stores, any number of industrial firms, and the Nashville Volunteers baseball team. Once they got Horton re-elected in 1928, they convinced him to give state contracts to Caldwell and Company without competitive bidding, until the state government was essentially a subsidiary of Caldwell and Company.

*Through a crooked bond issue, banks owned by Caldwell and Lea held millions of dollars for their own use, and they even used their power to cut a deal with Boss Crump, who had long been Lea’s political enemy, to get Horton re-elected in 1830. The national economy was collapsing into the Great Depression, however, and three days after the 1830 election, Caldwell and Company failed and all the money they held for Tennessee vanished, a total of about $7 million dollars.

*Crump jumped ship at this point, and began a drive for Horton’s impeachment. Luke Lea had the decency to support Horton to the utmost, and convinced the state that Crump was more of a danger than Horton was, and Horton got to serve out his term. Caldwell lost most of his property, but avoided jail. Lea himself bore most of the public hatred, and he and his son were convinced in 1931 for fraud in North Carolina. They took the case to the Supreme Court, lost it there, and ran off and hid in the mountains, evading state police for over two years until they finally surrendered in 1934. At long last, Crump was the undisputed political power in the state, but even he was overshadowed by the new president, Franklin Roosevelt.

*It took the Great Depression over a year to get to Tennessee from New York, not really hitting the state until 1930. The failure of Caldwell’s banks impoverished many Tennesseans, and those who did not lose their money with Caldwell and Company often went to withdraw it from their own banks, driving them out of business, too. Businessmen across the state committed suicide, factories closed, and thousands were out of work. Bread lines and soup kitchens opened up in all of Tennessee’s cities.

*Crump protected Memphis as well as he could. He went to the Union Planter’s Bank personally to assure account holders that the bank was secure, and advised the bank owners to put all their money out where people could see it, so they would know it was true. Crump also tried to put people to work on all levels, even supplying apples to people to sell on the streets. As a transportation hub, Memphis survived better than many cities in the nation, but it still lost 1/3 of its manufacturing jobs.

*Still, private charities and even local political machines could not do enough for Tennesseans, who had already been suffering (at least in the country) for a decade from low farm prices, but things did get worse even for them in the 1930s. Still, at least they could provide food for themselves, and many of the sons and daughters they had sent to the cities returned to the farm during the Depression. Regardless, social workers in the state reported wide-spread malnutrition.

*In 1932, Tennessee and most of the rest of the nation elected Franklin Roosevelt as president of the United States, only the third Democrat since the Civil War. Roosevelt immediately created a New Deal to offer relief to every part of the nation. Tennessee benefited from this even more than most states. This was partly because Tennessee did have enough Republicans that it could, in theory, vote against Roosevelt in future elections (after all, we had voted for Harding and Hoover).

*Tennesseans also had a number of prominent government offices. Joseph Byrns was Speaker of the House early in Roosevelt’s administration, Cordell Hull became Secretary of State, and Senator Kenneth McKellar was a powerful force in the US Senate. Roosevelt was also perfectly willing to work with existing Democratic powers in the state, including Boss Crump, who managed the New Deal projects in Memphis with a remarkably low level of corruption. The New Deal’s policy of working with existing local leaders, though, meant that blacks did not see much change in their political status, although the economic improvements that the New Deal brought did help them, too, so that blacks began to vote Democrat for the first time in American history.

*In Tennessee, the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration built post offices, roads, power lines, airports, parks, schools, and government office buildings, even re-modeling the State Capitol. The WPA also gave work to artist and college students, who created works of public art, and also transcribed old records, interviewed former slaves, and created a vast body of public information that is still used to-day.

*The Civilian Conservation Corps was created to make outdoor work for young men, who lived in army-style barracks, and built national park facilities and much of the Appalachian Trail.

*Part of the purpose of the CCC and WPA in the South was to get farmers off the farm and into modern work. There were too many farmers producing too much food in the 1920s and 30s, which kept prices down. They also, especially in the South, tended not to use modern methods. The New Deal proposed to teach these to the South, and did so, but it changed farming much more through the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

*The AAA introduced nation-wide farm subsidies, in which farmers were paid not to plant crops (and in its first year of operation, it even paid them to destroy their produce). This made tobacco profitable and stable for the first time in years, and eventually helped cotton prices improve, too. However, the drive for efficiency and central planning meant that many tenant farmers were no longer profitable, either for themselves or their landowners, and many lost their livelihoods and left the state, or at least the countryside.

*Some tenant farmers tried to fight this—some, both white and black, even joined the Southern Tennant Farmers’ Union (headquartered first in Arkansas, then in Memphis), and organized sit-down strikes in the cotton fields in 1935, but this did not work, and Roosevelt largely ignored the tenant farmers. The New Deal made agriculture profitable again, but mostly for big business farmers, not the small farmers who had been the backbone of Tennessee since the 1770s.

*Overall, Roosevelt was more supportive of unions than his Republican predecessors had been. The South was not heavily unionized, but unions did grow in the late 20s and the 1930s. In Elizabethton, workers at the city’s rayon plants, most of them young women, walked out of work in 1929, demanding higher pay and better treatment (women got less pay for their 56-hour weeks than men did). The city was embarrassed, but many local businessmen and farmers supported them—the rayon plants were owned by big businesses, not local men (in fact, they were subsidiaries of German companies, and would be seized by the US Government during WWII and sold off to an American company later).

*Governor Horton sent in the National Guard, but many of the local men resigned rather than have to shoot women they had known their whole lives. Striking women blocked off the city streets, while men with dynamite blew up the houses of scabs who crossed the picket lines, and even blew up the Elizabethton water main. Eventually the strike ended without much being resolved, but the strikers joined up with the United Textile Workers, and formed the largest rayon-workers local in the nation.

*There were other union battles in Tennessee, too, with real fighting and gun battles in Fentress County at the coal mines and in the Richmond Hosiery Mills in Soddy-Daisy.

*The greatest thing the New Deal did for Tennessee, however, was create the Tennessee Valley Authority. Previously, most of Tennessee outside the cities did not enjoy electricity, and the cities often had to pay a lot for it.

*The Aluminum Company of America had already built hydroelectric dams to power its plant at Alcoa, Tennessee, and during WWI, the Army Corps of Engineers built Wilson Dam along Muscle Shoals to power a gunpowder mill. With the Depression, many people came to felt that similar dams, built and run by the government, could provide power for people all over the nation.

*The biggest national supporter of publicly-owned utilities was George Norris, a senator from Kansas. He and FDR visited Muscle Shoals in 1933, and later that year Congress created TVA to provide flood control and cheap electricity. Its headquarters is in Knoxville.

*There were people who opposed TVA, particularly the utility companies of Nashville and Memphis, but the Supreme Court upheld TVA’s right to produce and sell power, and end the end, many private companies sold their dams and power plants to TVA. However, there was enough opposition both locally and in Congress that no other part of the nation got a similar programme, although George Norris had always hoped that TVA would be a test for a nation-wide programme, with an A for ever V in the nation.

*TVA employed hundreds of southerners, built lakes which benefited the national park system, and provided cheap power to Tennessee and parts of the many states that border us. It brought rural households into the 20th century, as they bought lights, radios, and electric irons.

*Boss Crump prospered under the New Deal and the ascendancy of the national Democratic party. His control over Memphis’ votes was so secure, and gave him such control over state politics in general, that from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, barely a third of Tennesseans even bothered to go to the polls. He used this power, first and foremost, to keep his power in Memphis secure from state of Federal intervention.

*Crump was a complex character. He was personally honest, never stealing from the public till, although he easily could have. He loved parades, took children and old folks to the circus, kept Memphis clean, safe, and under control, and visited his mother every Sunday. He even opposed a state sales tax. He also crushed his opponents ruthlessly, taking out full-page ads in Memphis papers against them, and his political enemies were often mysteriously beaten up, although no-one could ever trace that to Crump.

*For the most part, people in Memphis (except the newspapers) liked Crump, and what he did for them. However, people in the rest of the state resented the power he had over state politics, partly because what they knew they mostly learnt from the newspapers, which hated him. Besides, he was from Memphis, well-known as a wicked and sinful city.

*Governor Horton was followed in 1932 and 1934 by Hill McAlister, Crump’s choice, but he was a weak governor.

*In 1936, Gordon Browning, a congressman from Carroll County who had commanded a Memphis National Guard artillery unit in WWI, ran for governor. He won, with the support of Shelby County, but with enough support elsewhere in the state that he felt he didn’t need Crump.

*He promised to clean up government, and he did, somewhat. His General Education Act lengthened the school year to 9 months, and raised teachers’ salaries. He also tried to cut down the state debt, which had gotten up to $129 million. He did so by raising existing taxes, and creating new ‘privilege taxes’ on restaurants, vending machines, and other luxuries. Along with New York financiers, he put together a plan to eliminate Tennessee’ debt, and the state’s credit rating improved tremendously.

*Crump supported Browning at first, but came to oppose him when Browning started appointing friends of Luke Lea to government offices. Some of Browning’s enemies also convinced Crump that Browning had not supported TVA when he was a congressman. Browning, on the other hand, thought Crump wanted too much control over state appointments.

*To fight back against Crump, Browning proposed a County Unit plan, whereby each county would get one vote in the Democratic primary elections, regardless of its population. Rural Tennesseans supported this, but Memphis (of course) did not). It ultimately failed (in a case before the Tennessee Supreme Court), and, despite the governor’s (failed) attempts to send the National Guard to Memphis to monitor voting, he lost by a large margin in 1938. Although Browning had been a good governor, he attacked Crump, and could not make it stick.

*However, Crump knew how close he had come, and began to tighten his grip on Memphis, especially as a new generation of blacks was less willing to play along with his patronage system. He retaliated by withholding city funds and services from black parts of town, and using the city tax system to harass black leaders. Crump’s political machine lost the support of the black community in Memphis in the late 1930s, but at this point, they did not think they needed it any more.

*On December 7, 1941 (a date which will live in infamy) the United States was attacked by the Empire of Japan, and went to war the next day. Factories re-opened all across the North, and many Tennesseans went to work in them, starting their own communities of in Northern cities, where they were discriminated against for their accents and their supposedly backwards ways.

*Factories opened in Tennessee, too, and thousands to Tennesseans were employed in war production.

*Tennessee’s most famous contribution to the war effort was secret at the time; in fact, Tennessee was chosen for the Manhattan project because the state was so far out of the way that no spy would ever expect an atom bomb to be built in our mountains. Besides, we had cheap power, thanks to TVA.

*In 1942, under General Leslie Groves, the US Government began building a top secret city that they named Oak Ridge in Anderson County, despite opposition from local farmers who felt their land was being stolen. By the end of the War, over 75,000 scientists, engineers, army officers, and other workers lived in the city, making it one of the largest in Tennessee at the time.

*Oak Ridge existed to produce enriched uranium (U-235) for the production of the atomic bomb dropped of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, basically ending WWII. In 1947, Oak Ridge was given to the peaceful Atomic Energy Commission, and it became a civilian town.