The Press: The Fighting Tennessean

While Texas-born Silliman Evans lived, the morning Nashville Tennessean (circ. 131)79?) was one of the most belligerent newspapers in the South. A hell-for-leather Democrat who left newspapering for a while to work for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Publisher Evans held that “no Republican is fit to hold public office.” He tried his editorial best to see that none did. He also rang the Tennessean like a fire gong, calling attention to corruption and evil wherever he saw it. Cops, ward heelers, city councilmen and even Tennessee’s late Political Boss Ed Crump, all bowed to Silliman Evans’ journalistic wrath. Then, in 1955, Evans died peacefully in his sleep,f leaving two sons and a characteristic injunction in his will: “Continue to oppose the political machine until it and all its evil works are exterminated.” Cautious Vapidity. But Silliman Evans Jr., who took over as publisher, seemed not to share his father’s fighting spirit.

He fired the paper’s hard-hitting editor, Coleman A. Harwell, and brought in Ed ward D. Ball, the Associated Press’s Nash ville bureau chief. Silliman Jr. absented himself frequently on extended tours. Ball focused on cutting costs. The paper turned pale and comatose. The Tennessean’s pub lisher was probably more embarrassed than pleased when Assistant City Editor John Seigenthaler published a 1956 series on teamster corruption in Tennessee that helped impeach Chattanooga Criminal Court Judge Ralston Schoolfield. As the school segregation issue shook the South, the Tennessean’s editorials were models of cautious vapidity. Dispirited staffers drifted away. Seigenthaler quit to work for Bobby Kennedy in Washington.

Last year Silliman Jr. died of a heart attack at 36, and five months ago, his younger brother, Amon Carter Evans, 29, came in as boss. Named after the late Amon Carter, Texas booster and sulphurous publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, young Amon had shown early flashes of the same punch that Pop learned as a cub reporter on the Star-Telegram. A vice president at 21, Amon preferred chasing police cars to issuing executive commands; once he threatened to break a chair over Seigenthaler’s head when assigned to yet another park-concert story. Now the Tennessean’s new publisher was determined to fan the paper back to life.

Seigenthaler, 35, was recalled from Washington and made editor. Without wasting a day, the Tennessean was off on a crusade. It plumped hard and loud for a proposal to roll the city and county governments into one, had the satisfaction of seeing voters in Nashville and surrounding Davidson County solidly agree. It put on more editorial flesh, sent a man to Cape Canaveral missile shoots, sent two more for a look at Russia, another man on a roving tour of Europe.

Down with Fraud. Last week, as a federal grand jury convened in Nashville, Publisher Amon Carter Evans could take the special pride of a son who has succeeded in filling his father’s shoes. The jurymen will hear testimony on an election fraud—uncovered by the fighting Nashville Tennessean after the Democratic primary last month. In the city’s seamy second ward, a political fief controlled by City Councilman Gene (“Little Evil”) Jacobs, Tennessean newsmen turned up documented evidence that dozens of the ward’s absentee ballots, which decided the outcome, had been turned over to the organization for marking.

t Evoking from one staffer this heartfelt trib ute: “Death wouldn’t attempt to tackle him when he was awake.”