Metro Pulse/Secret History

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We didn't need them when voters kept political careers brief

by Jack Neely

Historians of Knoxville agree that the liveliest years in the city's history were right about a century ago, roughly 1870 to 1915, when the old town exploded in industry, in ambition, in confidence, in population. That much is obvious when you look at the lengthening maps, at the thickening city directories, at the hundreds of buildings that went up during that time. When we think about what's worth saving downtown in 2000, we're mainly talking about buildings that were built during that one period, less than a quarter of Knoxville's 209-year history. For much of this era, Knoxville had three daily newspapers and several more local weeklies, even though the city was much smaller—suggesting that there was a great deal of interest in local issues.

Another aspect of that time is a little subtler. City Council members were called aldermen back then. Scanning the list of aldermen during those boom-town years, you can't help but notice something odd: it wasn't the same bunch of guys every year. There were new faces each year, and a wide variety of them. No women, of course—they couldn't even vote—but several ethnic groups, including quite a few immigrants from Europe, some of whom hadn't lived in America for long and knew English only as a second language. (Of course, several civic leaders today speak English as if it were a second language; maybe that counts for diversity, too.)

Knoxville recently passed eight-year term limits for councilmen, and there's been a lot of grumbling about that. But when you look back, you can find only one Knoxville alderman of the late 19th century who would have been affected by an eight-year limit. He was Frank Hockenjos, the German-born cigar maker who served on council for 12 years. (His unusual tenure ended unnaturally; Hockenjos was one of several prominent Knoxvillians killed in the Flat Creek train wreck of 1889, on their way to survey the new industrial utopia of Middlesboro, Kentucky.)

Intrigued, I did a little homework on the subject. From the appendix of Heart of the Valley, the best resource book on Knoxville's history, I made a list of everybody who served on City Council from 1875 to 1900. I wrote them all down and counted them. During that one 25-year period from 1875 to 1900, a total of 147 individuals served on City Council.

I wondered how that would compare with an equivalent sample a century later. Getting the names of everybody who served on City Council since 1975, it turns out, is more difficult than getting those who served from 1875 to 1900. I had to dig through several years' worth of League of Women's Voters information pamphlets to remember everybody. But by my count, the total number of individuals who have served on City Council in the last 25 years comes to 27.

That seemed remarkable to me. In our time, fewer than a fifth as many people have made it their business to govern a city that's more than five times larger, one that now has a giant university and hosts the biggest utility in America. I'm no statistician—we might need to double-check with Russ Bebb on this—but it seems to me that, considering the fact that Knoxville's population in 1900 was less than one fifth of what it is today, the average Knoxvillian in the year 1900 was about 30 times more likely to serve on the city's governing body as they are today.

I don't claim to know what accounts for it. The sunny way to look at long terms is that it's a sign of satisfaction with our leadership; maybe we've just attained a political nirvana that they didn't know a century ago.

But it can also be a symptom of apathy. Politicians sometimes stay in office because nobody bothers to challenge them, and voters don't come to meetings often enough to notice whether they're on the ball. If you don't care to begin with, you don't care about throwing the rascals out. It seems likely that voters a century ago paid much closer attention to local politics; they'd have to, just to keep track of so many different players.

The population density was several times greater a century ago, and scholars have suggested that that density can have an impact on making a community lively. There's a good chance that in a city as dense as Knoxville in 1900, a typical citizen just going about his or her business on a typical day might encounter two or three aldermen on the sidewalk, maybe the mayor himself. Also, no one could plead inconvenience; civic meetings were within walking distance of most citizens' houses.

And it could be that the politics were different. Terms were just one year, and Knoxville in the late 19th century was a seething mass of rival parties, including a couple of vicious rival factions within the Republican Party, Democrats, populists, even a few socialists, that were always trying to knock each other off the top of the hill. (Politics during our boom-town years weren't idyllic, by a long shot. They had crooks, too, and some political blocs had ugly motives.)

And, of course, with explosive growth there were lots of new ethnic and economic factions coming into town, vying for power in a city that was new to most of the people who lived here.

Did the aldermen's high turnover rate have anything to do with Knoxville's dynamic growth during the same period? Did it just reflect it, or did it actually promote it, by working the city's democracy more vigorously?

Beats me. But the fact remains that that great variety of representation, with very short terms, coincided with a period when Knoxville was a vigorous, prosperous, proud city. It may seem a little sad that we have to force term limits on city representatives, but history seems to suggest that shorter terms might just mix things up enough restore something we're not used to seeing in local politics: interest.