Crossing the Aisle

Keel Hunt

Description

The latter third of the twentieth century was a time of fundamental political transition across the South as increasing numbers of voters began to choose Republican candidates over Democrats. Yet in the 1980s and '90s, reform-focused policymaking—from better schools to improved highways and health care—flourished in Tennessee. This was the work of moderate leaders from both parties who had a capacity to work together "across the aisle."

The Tennessee story, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham observes in his foreword to this book, offers striking examples of bipartisan cooperation on many policy fronts—and a mode of governing that provides lessons for America in this frustrating era of partisan stalemate.

For more on Crossing the Aisle and author Keel Hunt, visit KeelHunt.com.

Sujets

• American Government
• Political Science
• State
• History of the United States
• Region
• Politics
• Regional
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826522412
• Langue: English

Extrait

CROSSING THE AISLE
CROSSING THE AISLE

How Bipartisanship Brought
Tennessee to the Twenty-First Century
and Could Save America

by Keel Hunt
Vanderbilt University Press Nashville
© 2018 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2018
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LC control number 2018034571
LC classification number F440 .H863 2018
Dewey classification number 306.209768/0904
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2018034571
ISBN 978-0-8265-2239-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2241-2 (ebook)
For Lewis
Politics is a beautiful word to me. Politics builds roads and bridges. Politics educates our children and helps handicapped children walk.
—State Senator Anna Belle Clement O’Brien 1984
And if we cannot be civil to one another, and if we stop dealing with those with whom we disagree, or that we don’t like, we would soon stop functioning altogether.
—Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. 1998
While we yet hold and do not yield our opposing beliefs, there is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America and we put country before party.
—Vice President Al Gore 2000
This history is largely lost.
—Congressman Jim Cooper 2015
C ONTENTS
      Foreword by Jon Meacham
      Introduction: The In-Between Time
   1 Wild Ride to Washington
   2 The Six-Hour Boot Camp
   3 Blue State Turning Red
   4 Picking Up the Pieces
   5 Lamar and Ned
   6 Political Family Trees
   7 Strange Bedfellows
   8 Jobs for Memphis
   9 The Phone Call That Changed Everything
10 Nissan Arrives
11 Megatrends Tennessee
12 Ground Zero Knoxville 1982
13 Mothers and Babies
14 Chattanooga: From Dirtiest to All-American City
15 The Fight for Better Schools
16 Landing Saturn
17 The Roads to Better Jobs
18 The Homecoming
19 The Prison Problem
20 The Game Changer
21 Nashville and the “Civic Furniture”
22 Hockey Skates In
23 How the NFL Came to Tennessee
24 History and Handoffs
25 Fast Forward
      Timeline 1978–2002
      The Interviews
      Bibliography and Recommended Reading
      Acknowledgments
      Index
F OREWORD
I GREW UP ON Missionary Ridge, the Civil War battlefield overlooking Chattanooga; in my childhood we could still find Minié balls from the battle in which a young Union soldier, Arthur MacArthur, the father of Douglas, received the Congressional Medal of Honor. The war’s relics were real and tangible—I still have a few on my desk as I write—as was much of the complex American story. Braxton Bragg had been headquartered a few hundred yards from my house, and as children we would play baseball on the grounds of his camp. A few miles in the other direction sat the house of Chief John Ross of the Cherokee Nation. My contemporaries and I were sometimes taken to feed the ducks in a small pond there.
For Tennesseans, therefore, as for so many other Southerners, history is neither clinical nor remote, but real and present. And not just the ancient history: Chattanooga, like the state itself, reinvented itself in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, building first an industrial economy and then, as the world changed, created an ethos that enabled it to thrive in the Information Age. Old times here may not be totally forgot, but they have also never been constricting.
How the Tennessee of today—a prosperous and congenial island of civility in a nation of division—came to be is the subject of the following pages. In this fascinating and constructive new study, Keel Hunt has given readers here and beyond an invaluable guidebook to confronting and overcoming the most difficult of civic challenges. Anyone interested in creating jobs, building communities, solving problems, and moving forward with what Franklin Roosevelt once called “strong and active faith” will find Hunt’s thoughtful explanation of the Tennessee story illuminating and even inspirational.
Even more so than many of its neighbors in the perennially perplexing South, Tennessee is a study of contrasts. It’s in our DNA. Taken as a whole, for instance, the state was always ambivalent about the Confederacy. In February 1861 a majority of the state’s voters opposed a proposed secession convention. Union sentiment was particularly strong in the more mountainous eastern region of the state, with Confederate sympathy growing as one moved west, toward Memphis and the Mississippi.
Then came Fort Sumter, the federal call for militia to fight the secessionists, and Middle and West Tennessee carried the day at last, taking the state out of the Union.
By the end of the war, 120,000 Tennesseans had fought for the Confederacy, but a significant number, 31,000, took up arms for the Union. As historians have noted, that meant Tennessee alone provided the Federal forces with more soldiers than all other seceded states combined. Tennessee was the last state to secede and the first to rejoin the Union—a purplish state in the days before we spoke in terms of red and blue.
The state’s complicated geography and politics has made it an intriguing case study in how to govern. And so Hunt’s central theme is intriguing, too: the ways and means by which a series of transformative leaders have successfully transcended traditional political labels and divisions to create a place that welcomes pilgrims and strangers who quickly become neighbors and friends.
We make music and cars; we take care of the sick; we educate and we farm, even now. And we’re able to do all of those things in no small measure because of the stories Hunt tells here—stories of political leaders from both sides of the aisle who kept their eye on the big picture, not the small fights. In 1978, when Lamar Alexander was running for governor (a biblical forty years ago, a fact I don’t think he loves my mentioning, so I mention it a lot), he invited Tennesseans to “Come On Along”—along to a brighter future. Here’s the story of that unfolding journey.
Jon Meacham
Nashville, 2018
INTRODUCTION
The In-Between Time
I N THE SPRING of 2014, after my book Coup had been out for ten months, I was still enjoying the interviews, lectures, and book talks that will come an author’s way. One evening, near the end of one book club gathering in south Nashville, a gentleman in the rear of the room raised his hand and, referring to the decade of the 1970s, asked me this:
“So why was Tennessee so Democratic then and it’s so Republican now?”
Good question. It had been a long day, and this particular event had already run well over an hour. The man’s question was simple, but the answer was not. The truthful reply would take more time than any of us had to give on that waning evening.

T HE G REAT T RANSITION IN southern politics, which changed the South from deep blue to crimson red, like most important trends in American history did not have a single cause. Many currents shaped the new shoreline.
What we may remember now as the modern turning point for Tennessee, and for much of the South, was gradual and occurred on many levels over the final third of the twentieth century. Political shifts, economic progress, policy reforms, racial tensions and political responses to them, the rising up of leaders and also of demagogues—all these influenced the internal story of this fraught period in Tennessee. Part of the turn was a seismic political shift that had manifestations in election results across the nation’s broader politics. The change was brought on by personalities as well as events, both locally and nationally.

I N THE 1980S AND ’90S, Tennesseans found ourselves smack in the middle of two political eras. The first was the one-party rule of Democrats, which had lasted until the 1960s. The other would be the one-party Republican dynasty, which was firmly in place by the year 2012.
It was a complicated period of transition, and I call it the In-Between Time. It was a time when intense political competition flourished. With each election, offices would swing back and forth between the political parties. As competition usually does in many realms, this vigorous political sporting attracted talent and produced excellence.
From these contests rose political figures of national stature that included a vice president of the United States (Al Gore Jr.), several presidential candidates (Howard Baker, Gore, Lamar Alexander, Fred Thompson), members of presidential cabinets (Alexander, Bill Brock), majority leaders of the United States Senate (Baker, Bill Frist), congressional committee chairmen (Jo Byrns, Kenneth McKellar, Joe L. Evins, Jim Sasser, Alexander, Bob Corker), and U.S. ambassadors (Prentice Cooper, Sasser, Baker, Victor Ashe). This phenomenon was noticed outside Tennessee. But more importantly for Tennessee’s citizens, it sprang from and fed a rising competitiveness that attracted talented governors, mayors, and legislators who turned the political structure of the state upside down and inside out and began to chart a different, more ambitious course forward.
This book is about how this intense political competition and extraordinary infusion of political talent helped make the 1980s a turning point