Policy Cuts
Chap 8 Nashville
Historian Edd Parks described central Tennessee’s Nashville (population 118,000 in 1920) of this era as “Compared with Atlanta, Nashville seems an overgrown small town, with narrow and out-moded streets, grimy old buildings, and the settled placidly of middle age … allows baseball on Sundays, yet forbids movies; prides itself on culture but has no decent theatre, and is shunned even by road shows”.[1] Nashville in these years, was at best holding its own (in 1870 it was America’s 52nd largest city and in 1920, it was the 56th. Fast-growing Knoxville, down the road to the East was picking up a head of steam, but had not reached population level to directly challenge the state’s capital. Nestled within its borders, Nashville took proud ownership of several prestigious educational institutions, (Vanderbilt and Fisk Universities) and (after 1925) the “country music capital of the world”, and home of Andrew Jackson.
Between 1900 and 1910 the city grew by 37% (and Davidson County similarly), but then settled down to single digit increases. In the decade leading up to 1920, about 25,000 Afro-Americans left the city, reducing Afro-Americans to only 15% of the city’s population[2]. During the 1920’s, however, an estimated 31,000 Blacks moved in—bringing up the ratio to over 28% of the city.
Its economy was not fashioned around manufacturing, transportation or trade, but rather was the commercial center for its rich agricultural hinterland, the state capital and the “Athens of the South”. Nashville, as political a southern city could be, had adopted the commission form of government in 1913 and maintained it to 1921. Switching then to a city manager form, it abandoned that in 1923 in favor of a moderately-strong mayor-council. In 1928, its city council consisted of twenty-five ward councilmen. A dominant mayor, Hilary Howse, past mayor between 1909 and 1915, was reelected once again in 1925 and served until 1938. Economic development in Nashville assumed a more low-key priority, as evidenced by the Chamber’s (actually Commercial Club) 1920 signature initiative “Sell Nashville to Itself” campaign, complete with slogans posted on street corners, a “Know Nashville Day”. In 1926, in a further burst of self-pride local Boy Scouts handed out buttons reading “Smile with Nashville”, leftovers were mailed to residents.
Campaigns of this sort were far from unique in the South; in 1925 Birmingham conducted a “Know Birmingham Week”, Atlanta was always going on about the “Atlanta Spirit”, and Memphis did its thing along these lines as well. The Nashville Chamber conducted the standard attraction campaign to bring in outsiders, not missing an opportunity to lament that it did so because too many Nashville travelers apparently did not “carry Nashville’s story to the outside world”.[3] One senses that Nashville in these years was not exactly a New South Redeemer stronghold.
Southern Political Machines
[1] Edd Parks, “Southern Towns and Cities”, pp. 509-510 quoted in Blaine Brownell, the Urban Ethos in the South, op. cit., p. 24
[2] James Carroll Napier, a pre-1900 Nashville city council member became President of the National Negro Business League in 1903, and a register of the U.S. Treasury under President Taft. Henry Allen Boyd, secretary of the National Baptist Publishing Board and publisher of the Nashville Globe, was also President of the oldest black-owned bank in the nation.
[3] Blaine Brownell, the Urban Ethos in the South, op. cit., pp. 138
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Ron W. Coan 