The Secrets of the Hopewell Box:: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City's Coming of Age

As a boy, Squires rode on patrol with the grandfather he revered, Tennessee police sergeant Dave White, who doled out swift roadside justice and distributed bootleg whiskey. Only when Squires became a Nashville Tennessean reporter in the early 1960s did he perceive that White, Nashville city councilman Jake Sheridan, sheriff/undertaker Garner Robinson and their cronies were the hub of a political machine that, by this account, stole elections (including the swiping of a ballot box in the town of Hopewell) and collected tributes. Yet the author, ex-Chicago Tribune editor-in-chief, nevertheless credits this cabal with a ""self-serving political egalitarianism"" that brought many black voters into the electoral process. His richly textured narrative charts the Nashville machine's rupture with the state's top political boss, Edward Crump of Memphis, and traces the sweeping reforms that shattered rural white control of the state legislature. Squires dramatically reenacts the downfall of Nashville lawyer Tommy Osborne, convicted of jury tampering in 1964 after defending Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. He follows Nashville's transformation into a crucible of the civil rights movement in this stirring chronicle of the South's coming-of-age. Photos. (Mar.)