As Tennesseans clamor for the death penalty, judges are caught in a political crossfire that threatens to upend the scales of justice

by Jack Neely

One century ago this Monday Knoxville's annual Street Fair and Carnival was in full swing, drawing 15,000 to 40,000 attendees daily to witness spectacles like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, starring seven buffalo, 580 horses, and 600 performers, including 60 Indians and, of course, Bill himself.

But the four-day festival's single most anticipated event was on the Courthouse lawn, where "a great mass of sandwiched humanity" crowded around an elaborately decorated platform. That morning saw three speakers: young Knoxville lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court justice Edward Terry Sanford; a mysterious ceremonial figure known as The Prophet of the Great Smokies, represented as a white-bearded Neptune with horns; and one bald middle-aged man with a handlebar mustache, the speaker these thousands really came to see.

His name was Robert Taylor, and he was the thrice-elected governor of Tennessee; we called him "Our Bob." The subject of his speech was Knoxville in 1997.

"I almost wish I could live through the coming century to witness the triumphs which await," he declared. "This great valley of East Tennessee will be a glittering chain of cities and splendid towns for 250 miles, and the sky at night will be red with the reflection of light from her furnaces and factories, and she will be the center of population and the richest country in the world. She will sit on her 700 hills, and Knoxville will be the hub of her glory. Gay Street will reach from Clinton to Maryville. The University of Tennessee will be the greatest institution of learning on the continent, and there will be a carnival every day...except the holy Sabbath."

He went on to declare that in 1997 the Knoxville Daily Tribune would have a circulation of one million. And if all that wasn't incredible enough, he predicted, "the women will vote..."

Taylor's predictions probably seemed perfectly believable to those who stood listening that October morning. The 1890s, following the landmark Chicago Exposition of 1893, was a credulous decade: the City Beautiful era, when American cities tried to seem as impressive as Paris and the greatest European cities.

Paris came up again a century later, when developer Chris Gettelfinger announced his plans for Infinity Park, comparing his proposed Infinity Tower to that Eiffel one.

In case you missed the paid 8-page insert in the News-Sentinel six weeks ago, Gettelfinger's idea is to dwarf the Sunsphere with a tower shaped like a giant lipstick which would be a permanent storehouse for peoples' memories of themselves and family members. Nearby would be a Memorial Lake, an Eternal Flame and Grotto, Infinity Rock and Fountains, and Project Comediana, a miniature theme park devoted to comedy.

"Knoxville could become the showcase of the South...the premier destination for global and national conventions," Gettelfinger declares. (Compared to Taylor's predictions, Gettelfinger's seems almost humble.)

The response to Gettelfinger's proposal, predictably, has gone somewhat beyond skepticism to shocked disbelief, shared by those who don't like the looks of it and those who are sure it can't happen.

Gettelfinger anticipates the response, likening himself to Walt Disney and Gustave Eiffel. "You can't be afraid to dream," he says.

Quite a few haven't been. For over two centuries, the Upper Tennessee Valley has been a sort of twilight zone in American history, a gloaming that's been conducive to dreams. Though the Knoxville area was "settled" relatively early in American history and is central to the oldest and still most populous third of the nation, the mountains and dense forests have kept much of it remote and undeveloped all those years. With its green hills and clean-looking rivers, abundant wildlife and vegetation, East Tennessee can still seem like a paradise. Its myths and mounded relics still breed visions, based more on imagination than evidence, of ancient civilizations and peaceful peoples living in harmony with nature and each other. It was, and remains, exactly the sort of place that gives Utopians big ideas.

Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that this area has been central to several Utopian projects over the decades.

Way back in 1736, a German idealist named Christian Gottlieb Priber lived among the Cherokee at Tellico and attempted to found a Kingdom of Paradise, where people of all races would share possessions and children alike. Priber's proto-communist state apparently sounded fine to the Cherokee, but the British colonial authorities had him jailed for subversive dreaming.

Over a century later, Swiss tailor Peter Staub became involved with a Swiss company that bought 20 square miles in Grundy County, about 100 miles southwest of Knoxville. Staub touted the community, to be called Gruetli, as a sylvan all-Swiss paradise, attracting about 300 Swiss immigrants to the settlement. But most of the innocents were disappointed with the extreme conditions in the mountains. Years later the survivors of Gruetli called Staub a "first-class swindler."

Perhaps chastened, Staub chose to found an architectural paradise—a European-style opera house—on Gay Street. Staub's Theater was the region's standard for entertainment for decades. Swindler or not, we liked Staub. We elected him mayor of Knoxville twice.

East Tennessee's most famous utopia, of course, came still later. English author Thomas Hughes scouted the U.S. to find a "New Jerusalem" where unlanded gentry could make their own destinies, earning an honest living through manual labor, forming a model city for the corrupt world beyond. In 1880, Hughes began building Rugby, named after his old prep school, some 50 miles northwest of Knoxville, a place where civilized people would live in peace and harmony like nowhere else.

By the time Taylor spoke at Knoxville's courthouse lawn, Rugby was already failing.

We've known dozens of other dreamers over the years, like another Swiss-born Knoxvillian, Albert Chavannes of East Fourth Ave. His 1895 novel, In Brighter Climes, posited a "perfect" civilization without religion or marriage in an African nation called Socioland. It was set in the distant future of 1950.

Other utopians have focused their fantasies on Knoxville proper.

Dr. Nicholas Romayne was a controversial New York doctor and med-school professor whose battles with Columbia University, of which he was a trustee, were legendary. "He was a strange, interesting man," goes one description in a bicentennial history of Columbia: "erudite but emotional, calculating but rash, enormous but indefatigable, a 300-pound phenomenon with a light, precise step."

Romayne was also a close business associate of territorial Gov. William Blount, the man who had put the capital here and owned much of the land hereabouts. In 1795, the paradoxical Romayne was looking south, to the four-year-old territorial capital of Knoxville, to establish a New-World paradise.

It's unclear whether Dr. Romayne ever spent much time here, but something convinced Romayne that a new city in the area could be marketed as a haven for European immigrants.

Most of what we know about Romayne's dream comes from a letter Blount wrote on April 20, 1795, to his brother John in North Carolina. He describes Romayne's remarkable plan to "lay out a large city, two miles square," well over 1,000 acres, adjacent to Knoxville.

"This great city is to be called Palmyra and to be laid out upon some new and elegant plan and to be handsomely delineated," wrote Gov. Blount to his brother.

Blount had named Knoxville. Romayne apparently came up with the more-graceful Palmyra. That ancient Greek city, an oasis of sculptures and mosaics in the Syrian desert, was described in a popular 1753 survey called The Ruins of Palmyra. For decades, idealistic communities called Palmyra sprang up across America.

"But all this to yourself," Blount wrote to his brother, "for profound Secrecey [sic] is essential... for as yet I have not purchased all the Land for this City..."

Fully occupied, Palmyra's 6,000 one-fifth-acre lots would have been one of America's larger cities in 1795. Romayne expected to clear a net profit of $80,000—in 1795 dollars. "It's a Scheme that may afford Profits to us without the possibility of a Loss," wrote Blount.

Romayne tailored the plan to attract buyer-residents from Europe, a land-buying market Blount had been trying to crack for years. John Chisholm, Scottish tavern-keeper and Blount's next-door neighbor and sidekick, was to do a lot of the footwork on the project.

Unfortunately for historians, their "Secrecey" was a little too profound. References to Palmyra drop out of the Blounts' correspondence after 1795. We can guess why.

Blount was soon preoccupied with founding a new state. Then, in 1797, Blount, Romayne, and Chisholm alike were in big trouble for another, even bigger Scheme. Together, they masterminded a complex plot, not fully understood to this day, to forcefully colonize Spanish Louisiana and Florida for the British. By some accounts, Blount would be British governor of Louisiana in New Orleans while Romayne would reign over Natchez. How Palmyra might have folded into their plan for a British Louisiana is not recorded.

The tangled web remembered by historians as the Blount Conspiracy unraveled in 1797. Chisholm, serving the plot as a secret agent in England, was jailed there. Dr. Romayne was imprisoned in Philadelphia; upon his release in 1798, he exiled himself to Edinburgh, where he became the first American professor at the Royal College of Physicians. Blount abdicated his U.S. Senate seat and remained a fugitive from justice for almost three years, until March 1800 when he collapsed suddenly at his Blount Mansion piazza, and died.

Dr. Romayne returned to America after Blount's death and regained his reputation both for controversy and medical learning, founding the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

We can only guess about exactly where the lost city of Palmyra was to be. Blount owned land all over, but since this two-square-mile spread was to be adjacent to original Knoxville, we might assume Palmyra's boundaries are entirely within today's city limits.

In Halls, right off Emory Road, is one short street called Palmyra Drive. But don't go there looking for utopian history. Palmyra Drive is the entrance to a modern residential neighborhood called Palmer Hills. It apparently has a palm-tree theme.

The springs north of town inspired utopians of fundamentalist tendencies; since before the Civil War, what was called the Fountainhead attracted evangelical camp meetings where Baptists would go to sleep in tents, roam in the woods, and listen to lots of reviving sermons.

In 1885, as the era of camp meetings faded, gilded-age speculators built a very different version of the resort. Designed like a millionaire's chateau, the Fountain Head Hotel was an elaborate luxury spot with 50 rooms across its three stories, an Italian band playing in the evenings, hot and cold running water on each floor.

One Kentucky visitor, a Col. J.C. Woodward, was especially impressed—but he had even bigger ideas for it. He bought 431 acres around the hotel and built a heart-shaped pool at the springs. If the Fountainhead had lost its monastic simplicity, it retained a strain of revivalism about it.

Woodward moved here and marketed the Fountainhead area as a sort of Baptist utopia: "The new town will be a town where the saloon and whiskey grocery store will never be seen. We intend to make it a great educational center where the morals are as pure as the bracing atmosphere and the life-giving water."

In the early 1890s, the Fountainhead hosted band concerts, beauty contests, even hot-air balloon ascensions. A new college, Holbrook Normal, opened up in an impressive new building nearby, enrolling more than 100 students.

But financial pressures—and a few unfortunate fires that destroyed both the old hotel and the college—amended Woodward's dream of a new town with pure morals. By the 20th century, the Fountainhead was beginning to resemble the more-realistic—but still distinct—suburb we now know as Fountain City. There's not much Woodward-style utopian idealism left; but more than a century after the colonel envisioned his temperance paradise, Fountain City remains, in number of bars per capita, the driest section of Knoxville.

The late 19th century, when Gov. Taylor spoke at the courthouse, was a dreamy era. The 20th century was a fairly practical one. But by the '20s, after we'd won the War to End All Wars, people began musing again. What made the newer generation of utopians different from previous ones was meticulous planning.

The next idyll came not from a revivalist or lone dreamer or land speculator; it came, at least indirectly, from the City Council and electorate of Knoxville. A referendum in March 1923 dumped the whole office of Knoxville mayor, opting for the city-manager form of municipal government shown to accomplish great things in some progressive cities. The man picked was Louis Brownlow, a Missouri-born, nationally famous genius of public administration. Louis Brownlow had been for years a globetrotting journalist who'd once been on the staff of The Statesman of India. He'd seen the great cities of the world but had no connection with Knoxville before 1923—except that he'd once served the Knoxville Sentinel as a Washington correspondent. (Son of a Confederate soldier, Brownlow was only a distant cousin of Knoxville's own firebrand Unionist and Reconstruction-era Governor "Parson" Brownlow.) Brownlow had become fascinated with public policy and had most recently been city manager of Petersburg, Va.

Here Brownlow hired out-of-state professionals to run the city and invent a new Knoxville. Besides untangling a considerable fiscal mess, he and his staff saw an acute need for beautification through urban sculpture, tree planting, public parks, and architectural standards; for a cohesive center of government downtown; and for a newfangled thing called zoning. Brownlow also introduced the idea of urban planning to a skeptical populace, made law of several of his plans, including zoning, and founded Knoxville's first City Planning Commission.

He also proposed a 16 percent tax hike to pay for it all.

To some Knoxvillians, that was the key part of his proposal. A reaction led by Councilman Lee Monday and his South Knoxville constituency branded Brownlow "King Louis I" and stalled his programs in City Council. Several of Brownlow's supporters on City Council were voted out of office.

Frustration with some conservative elements here left him with a headache that some whispered was a nervous breakdown. He quit in 1926, after less than three years on the job, and several members of his staff left with him. His spirit didn't leave, at least not right away; it re-emerged years after his physical departure.

Perhaps inspired by Brownlow's efforts, one developer attempted to implement them, on a small scale, through the private sector.

Robert Foust was in his mid 40s, a competent planner with a conservative real-estate firm; he had dreams but, as yet, no outstandingly unusual accomplishments when he came up with an idea of establishing an idyllic planned community—a first for Knoxville—along the Tennessee River just west of town. Rather than just another residential subdivision, Talahi—Cherokee for "in the oaks"—would be a perfect community. Here, and only here, would people live in perfect accord with each other and with nature: "a natural loveliness adapted to a community life, often dreamed but seldom realized."

A student of Native American mythology, Foust sought to combine Cherokee symbols with English architecture and voguish Egyptian-influenced art-deco stylings in cast-stone monuments—a Panther Fountain and obelisk, a Sunhouse Fountain, a walled enclosure for small children called Papoose Park—to be the centerpieces and symbols of the new community.

He outlined his plan in a rhapsodic promotional book, with illustrations of a Tudor-style commercial center called Council Points. Strict rules mandated English-style architecture for all houses; natural features, hilly slopes, most trees, and even the neighborhood's distinctive stone outcroppings, would be kept as close to their natural state as possible. "In TALAHI'S virgin forest," Foust's brochure read, "nature rules supreme. Its charm has not been subject to ruinous exploitation. On the contrary, the creators of this community have preserved for all time its natural beauty, adding to it only splendid adaptations of the landscape architect. Nothing has been done ruthlessly, not a tree has been disturbed nor a branch cut without forethought for the finished picture. Such is the setting of TALAHI—surpassed in natural charm by no other location in America..."

One passage in Foust's brochure sounds socialistic enough to give a good Republican the heebie-jeebies: "Greater beauty could remain in allowing each lot to conform to the natural contour of the ground... Each lot remains a part of one vast park where one's neighbor's property becomes a part of one's own—a succession of home locations long dreamed of by men, but seldom found."

Foust insisted that "Each home must necessarily improve and never detract from the development of the whole community.... Even business with its bustle must conform in Council Points to the touch of the artistic, to the grandeur of the forest..."

If Talahi was to be a shared-land commune, it was a commune strictly for the wealthy. In May 1929, lots went up for sale at $4,000 to $10,000, the steepest prices in Knoxville at the time.

Whether because of the price tag or skepticism about the new idea, it wasn't an instant success. Only one lot sold that summer. (Foust himself stayed put in his UT-area home.) That October, the Crash came. The whole venture collapsed. Talahi was absorbed into a more conventional neighborhood called Sequoyah Hills.

In his Market Street office, four years later, Foust shot himself. The cast-stone monuments that didn't succeed in attracting buyers in 1929 are now only appealing oddities along Cherokee Boulevard and Talahi, the street named for Foust's dream.

Meanwhile, even with Manager Brownlow long gone, some of the machines he'd set in motion kept churning out interesting proposals. In September 1929, his City Planning Commission signed an astonishing document: A Comprehensive City Plan for Knoxville.

With idealism, ambition, and confidence rarely seen since—plus striking photographs, fold-out maps, and stylish graphics, the Plan made the well-planned Knoxville of the Future look like a gleaming citadel. "Through the adequate treatment of its public building group," planners declared, "Knoxville may establish herself as the leader of the entire South in the expression of civic consciousness."

Still, the plan looked hard at Knoxville's shortcomings. Many of its recommendations are eerily prophetic:

• "The Tennessee River, which divides the city, is lined with picturesque bluffs rising on both sides of its course. Much of the waterfront is as yet unspoiled. The region is teeming with possibilities. Knoxville has but to develop the natural resources at hand to become an outstanding American city...Plans for the reclamation of this great asset to the city should be carried out..." Riverfront parks are suggested.
  
• Noting that without protective zoning, older neighborhoods central to the city were already losing their better-heeled residents who, "having lost confidence, start a panic like a run on a bank," moving to more distant subdivisions, the Plan scolded: "Expensive services of water, gas, electricity, sewers, and transportation are maintained at a greater cost in order to get...to the more distant and newly fashionable location. The total economic cost is enormous, and this loss and the risk of it are paid by the people..."
  
• "Billboards existing in many parts of the city are...extremely unattractive," the Plan warned. "The eventual elimination of these nuisances will add to property values and enhance the appearance of the city."
  
• "Certain parts of Knoxville present particularly barren and unattractive appearances because of the absence of trees bordering the streets. Tree planting should be carried on by the city in much the same manner as other street improvements."
  
• "In respect to parks, Knoxville might aptly be called, 'The city of neglected opportunities.' Considering...the city is unsurpassed for sheer natural beauty, the failure to take advantage of the existing assets is indeed surprising."
  
• "Considering the historical background of the city, Knoxville is greatly lacking in monuments...no cognizance has been taken of the intensely interesting persons and events that helped make the early history of Knoxville."
  
• "Too little attention has been paid in the past to proper setting of public buildings..."
  
• "A new city jail and municipal courts building is of pressing importance."

The text goes on to make its most astonishing proposal: a "Civic Center in City Hall Park." As described and drawn in 1929, it was to be a large, campus-style civic complex, five large buildings sprawling across four blocks in strikingly beautiful art-moderne architecture; the central building would have a tall, cathedral-like tower. Included would be separate city and county government buildings, a grassy park, an "Art and Historical Museum," and a "combined municipal and county jail and court" building. They didn't happen to use the phrase Justice Center.

"If such a plan is not followed," the text warned, "it is probable that fully as much or more money will be spent in purchasing sites and carrying out individual projects as expediency might direct, and the final results would be much less satisfactory."

The site recommended for the complex was an inexpensive 14-acre area bounded by Henley, Wall, Walnut, and old Vine; the original Main Street/riverfront site presented too many problems. But if the old Main Street courthouse site were kept, planners urged that the municipal center include "a terraced riverfront park between the public building group and the river."

In passing, the Plan also praised the new Talahi project. Both victims of the Depression, forgotten when the Depression was over. Some aspects of the Plan were put into effect, most notably the widening of Henley Street, the avenue that was to serve the new civic campus; but the Plan's most ambitious project, and most of its esthetic beautification recommendations, were ignored.

Over the next 60 years, little park land was added to the city. Billboard restrictions remained loose. The riverfront was eventually paved over. Residents fled the city for the suburbs in even greater numbers. And sixteen years after the Plan was proposed and rejected, author John Gunther visited, working on what would be an international bestseller called Inside U.S.A. In it, he called 1945 Knoxville "the ugliest city...in America."

If there's a lesson here, it's not to ignore Utopians. We may forget that some wild plans have actually succeeded, at least in some form. If the World's Fair hadn't gotten off the ground in the early '80s, it would be included in this survey. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park—a place where ordinary people could get away from the smoky cities and hike and camp under the stars and breathe fresh air—must have seemed like a pipe dream to some when it was first discussed before World War I. The federal government clearly wasn't ready for such a huge purchase, and the mountaineers and the lumber industry wouldn't think of giving up that much land without a fight. Knoxville's well-heeled dreamers had their way with that fantasy.

And there's the Tennessee Valley Authority. In its early years, TVA was arguably the most utopian scheme ever hatched by the federal government: little less than an attempt to rebuild civilization from scratch, and maybe get it right this time. Knoxville became its brain center, mainly because of the city's proximity to the planned dam-building town of Norris, which was to be the crucible of a new socioeconomic ideal. Arthur Morgan, TVA's first chairman, saw his chief role as engineer of this model community, overlord of this New Deal Shangri-La, where everyone would live in esthetic harmony. To show his faith, Morgan moved there.

Morgan was fired, and over the years, his utopian ideals dwindled. But even after 64 years TVA is, at this writing at least, still a very unusual utility company in that it has a major "nonpower" component. Nonpower TVA has had a significant influence on the economic and cultural life of Knoxville for more than six decades.

It almost goes without saying, when you're talking about human beings: The reality always falls short of the ideal. But often, the post-ideal reality is at least better than the pre-ideal reality was.

If it has lost its hotel and college, Fountain City still has its heart-shaped pond and is a more pleasant place to visit than it would have been without the fundamentalist utopians of a century ago. Leftover Talahi monuments make Sequoyah Hills a more interesting neighborhood than most upscale suburbs are. Throw in Arthur Morgan's Norris and it's clear that several of the area's most distinctive residential communities are places that were meant to be much more than they are.

Volunteer Landing and the riverfront Holston and Lakeshore Parks might be recognizable to the City Planning Commission of 1929 as a partial realization of their ideals. The Metropolitan Planning Commission itself, spiritual descendant of Louis Brownlow's City Planning Commission, still comes up with provocative proposals about what might still be possible in this city.

What these precedents might mean for Gettelfinger's Infinity Park remains to be seen, of course. Those who like it will support it, those who hate it will oppose it. All we can bet on is that the eventual reality will almost certainly be very different from the pictures in that News-Sentinel insert.

Unrealistic, high-minded and doomed though they may be, Utopians throw unknown variables into our daily routine, leave us perplexed and restless and sometimes inspired. And they often leave interesting rubble for our kids to climb on.