http://www.dnj.com/article/20111030/NEWS01/110300328/Remembering-Rutherford-Republicans-fight-while-taxpayers-protestRemembering Rutherford: Republicans fight while taxpayers protest
11:00 PM, Oct. 29, 2011
MURFREESBORO — The Rutherford County Republican Party committee meeting opened with a fist fight and several arrests. Meanwhile, other Rutherford voters were holding "mass meetings" to protest the "terrible tax burden" imposed by city and county governments during hard economic times.
It was 1932 and Rutherford County, like the rest of the country, was slipping ever deeper into the Great Depression. It was also an election year, and the unemployed and hungry were hopeful for a change. The loyal Republicans, however, fearful of the prospects that might come with a "socialist" Democratic administration, were standing firm with incumbent-President Herbert Hoover.
The Republican Party was not a significant factor in local politics in 1932, but there was a fairly substantial minority of potential voters who favored the "party of Lincoln." Since the Emancipation, the former slaves and their descendants identified with the Republican Party and voted accordingly — when they voted. Active participation in partisan politics, however, was limited to the more affluent and more educated. (This partisan allegiance began to erode and shift with the social programs of the New Deal.) snip
On the day after the meeting, a Nashville newspaper reported that "the fight and arrests were framed in order to prevent the negro being elected chairman." Party leadership immediately denied this report and its attribution. On Monday, however, The Daily News Journal reported that the "G.O.P. row" occurred "when one faction attempted to elect Henry Isham, colored, chairman of the executive committee."
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