Bøger af Bill Haltom

U.S. Senator Howard Baker from Tennessee led with strategic civility in the most contentious American arenas: courtrooms, political campaigns, Congress, and the White House.

On August 18, 1920, thirty-year-old State Representative Joseph Hanover of Memphis walked through the grand lobby of The Hermitage Hotel to be greeted by deafening cheers and jeers from women wearing yellow or red roses. Yellow roses symbolized their support for the proposed Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote; red roses opposed it. Joe Hanover had become the nation's leading male voice in the fight for woman suffrage. The most powerful forces in Tennessee politics opposed him. But Joe Hanover was not going to back away from the fight. Joe Hanover and his family had immigrated from Poland 25 years earlier to escape the Czar of Russia's tyranny. Joe asked: "Why can't Mother vote?"Pro-suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt summoned the freshman legislator to her suite in The Hermitage Hotel in Nashville on Aug. 8, 1920, to ask Joe Hanover to become the floor leader in the Tennessee House of Representatives. Hanover, a Jewish immigrant who won his election as an Independent, spoke passionately about his family's flight from oppression in Poland. He said he was a true conservative who believed deeply in the Bill of Rights and that the rights set forth therein should be afforded to all Americans. For this, he was threatened in phone calls and physically assaulted in a hotel elevator. Governor A.H. Roberts assigned Hanover a bodyguard. But Hanover was determined. He held together the pro-suffrage faction votes for woman suffrage when Tennessee became the Perfect 36, the last state that could possibly ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Hanover, Banks Turner of Yorkville and Harry Burn of Niota were the votes in the end that made the difference."Why Can't Mother Vote: Joseph Hanover and the Unfinished Business of Democracy" is a stirring account of the people who led the fight in Tennessee's pivotal vote to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote.

When it opened in 1927, Sears Crosstown, now Crosstown Concourse, was the southeastern regional warehouse and distribution center for the Sears Catalogue mail-order empire. Each day, more than forty-five thousand orders were processed by more than 1,500 workers. As a result, Sears Crosstown became known locally as the Wish Building. For more than half a century, the iconic building and its surrounding neighborhood flourished until the decline of Sears in the 1980s. For decades, the once dynamic destination for commerce was vacant and shuttered. Then a unique group of Memphians emerged to resurrect Sears Crosstown with a plan most thought was impossible. Bill Haltom, a native Memphian and writer, tells the story of the Wish Building--its past, present and future.