T.H. Alexander
Southern Columnist
By: Hudson Alexander III
The following biographical sketch of T.H. Alexander
was originally written in December of 1997. It was
featured in the Williamson County Historical Society Journal,
published in Journal Number 29; 1998.
If there was ever an American journalist who had a front row seat to developments in the South during the first three decades of the twentieth century- both as a spectator and as a participant- it was T.H. Alexander.
Truman Hudson Alexander was born at Birmingham, Alabama on October 20, 1891, the son of William Brooks Alexander and the former Miss Nannie Narcissa Hudson. Both of Alexander's parents were natives of South Carolina, but had moved to the new south city of Birmingham in about 1880. In his early years, Alexander received his primary education in the Birmingham schools.
After the famous "Phosphate Boom" struck in nearby Maury County, the Alexander family moved to Mount Pleasant in 1899. It was there that his father went into the phosphate mining business with Oscar Dortch, who would later open Dortch Stoveworks at Franklin, Tennessee. T.H. Alexander set about the task of completing his secondary education at the old Howard Institute under the guidance of Professor J.A. Bostick, who was one of the noted educators in Middle Tennessee.
Alexander began writing at an early age, at first pecking out short stories from an ancient Smith Premier typewriter at his father's business office during the hours after school. By 1904, at age 13, Alexander had won first prize in a national essay contest conducted by a New York magazine. Four years later, he began his work with newspapers and thus launched a career that would span the rest of his life. In a special piece written for officials at Vanderbilt University, Alexander described his earliest days as a journalist:
"My first newspaper job was with the Mt. Pleasant Record, a twice-a-week paper with a circulation of about 2,000. I bore the gorgeous title of news editor and I wrote everything for the harassed printer-publisher, M.B. Young, but the editorials. These were written by a local lawyer named Ed Gregory. One summer Messrs. Young and Gregory took a western trip when I wrote the editorials, also. While they were gone the circulation of the paper went up by leaps and bounds. In fact, harassed citizens waited at the post office for it in eager anticipation. Robert Burns' line about a 'chief amang ye taking notes' was nothing. Some of them felt a young hyena was among them taking notes, for I had launched a violent attack upon the city administration- had begun to clean out the county administration, had already denounced the Governor of the state and was advancing on Washington with savage growls. It was a great clean-up while it lasted and Messrs. Young and Gregory read their editorial page upon their return with pain and amazement, but good sportsmanship. I was then seventeen years of age..."
The next year, to help pay his way through Vanderbilt, Alexander taught school at a one-room schoolhouse. This old log structure had been built on the site made famous by the camp meetings at Mount Joy- a small community located about four miles from Mt. Pleasant- during the days of the Great Revival movement in the early 1800's. In this ancient and historic old structure, Alexander taught students from primer through the eighth grades.
In 1909, Alexander entered Vanderbilt University, where his freshman English professor- L.G. Painter- noted his literary talent and predicted for him a long and distinguished career in journalism. Although he came along during a period just prior to the arrival of most of the Fugitive Poets at Vanderbilt, Alexander did establish a life-long friendship with one of those distinguished writers, Donald Davidson. Alexander and Davidson were members of the same freshman English class at Vandy.
After completing his studies at Vanderbilt, Alexander went with The Tennessean and Nashville American in the latter part of 1912. Its owner, Colonel Luke Lea, was then in the United States Senate. Its editor had been the late Edward Ward Carmack. Its first sports editor had been Grantland Rice. According to Alexander, " There was a glamour and fascination about its editorial rooms that held me. I cubbed for four months at a salary of nothing flat and then attained affluence with a salary of $40 per month."
During those early years with the paper, Alexander roamed the old Maxwell House Hotel, mostly covering political stories involving candidates for Governor, the United States Senate, and various other offices. According to Alexander, " I was uproariously happy and worked often eighteen hours a day. It was the last days of the era in Tennessee when it was said that Tennesseans preferred politics to a vocation and business as an avocation. I was denounced by opposition candidates from the platform and once challenged to a duel in a courtroom over a story about a brawl in the court on the previous day, which my paper had told me to write as I saw it."
In 1914, Alexander was married to the former Miss Helen Elizabeth Almon, who came from a prominent family of lawyers, judges, and politicians at Decatur, Alabama. From 1916 to 1922, Alexander moved his residence to Decatur, where he served briefly as Postmaster and then was named editor of the Decatur Daily newspaper. However, he moved back to Nashville in February of 1922, and rejoined the staff at The Nashville Tennessean.
Upon his return to the paper, Alexander traveled the state with Austin Peay and covered each of his three terms as governor. Back in those days, the governor had no press secretary, as they have today. Instead, the governor would call upon the assistance of an entrusted journalist to handle his daily chores with the press. Alexander was chosen to work in this capacity for Governor Peay. He wrote all of the governor's press releases, accompanied him to all state functions, was on the governor's personal staff, and even helped to round up members of the legislature when the governor would call for a special session of the Tennessee legislature. Several years later, as Governor Peay lay on his deathbed at the Executive Mansion on West End Avenue in 1927, he summoned Alexander to his bedside to join other family members as he lurked in the shadows. And it was after the governor's death that Peay's wife, Sallie, requested that Alexander write his official biography, which was featured along with his state papers in a large volume published in 1929.
During much of his career, Alexander- known to his newspaper associates as "Alex"- was the chief political writer at The Nashville Tennessean. Beginning in April of 1922, he wrote a column for the morning edition called "By The Way," which dealt mainly with Tennessee politics. In addition to this column, Alex also wrote most of the political publicity pieces and frequently covered major news stories contained within the paper.
In 1924, it was Alexander who urged Managing Editor John H. Nye to bring to the paper his old college friend, Donald Davidson, to edit The Tennessean's Book Review and Literary Page. It was an idea immediately embraced by Nye and publisher Luke Lea, and led to some of the finest literary contributions ever made to a Southern paper by such writers as: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley, Robert Penn Warren, and others who would later become known- with Alex- as the "Southern Agrarians."
In 1925, Alexander was sent to Dayton, Tennessee to cover the famous Evolution Trial, which featured noted Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow on Scopes' defense team and the old fundamentalist lawyer and three-time Democratic nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan, at the table of the prosecution. It was Alexander who was granted an exclusive interview with Bryan on the night before the trial opened. Alex had been following developments in Dayton from the very beginning, and it was he who had made the bold declaration a month before the trial opened:
"There is grave danger that Tennessee may be misunderstood in the evolution trial, but there is no material harm to come out of it for either the future of the state or the future of the Christian religion. Religion is not such a perishable and fragile thing after all. It will not perish in the courthouse at Dayton, and if it does it will deserve its fate."
Just as Alex had predicted, the state was misunderstood by the many journalists sent down to cover the famous trial. One of the worst offenders, and one who constantly belittled the south with his daily dispatches, was H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Evening Sun. Alex became so infuriated with Mencken's antics at Dayton, that he launched an editorial attack against him through his "By The Way" column. In one of his editorials, critical of Mencken, Alexander stated:
"...When Mencken sticks to literary criticism he is a genius, I repeat. But when he wanders far afield into theology and kindred matters he becomes a common scold. He is an arrogant ass to boot and I am going against an old Spanish proverb when I discuss him. The proverb is: It's a waste of lather to shave an ass."
By 1927, at the urging of publisher Luke Lea, Alexander began a new column called "I Reckon So." It received its name from a distinguished jury composed of: Will Rogers; Meredith Nicholson, an Indiana writer; Irvin S. Cobb; Grantland Rice; and Dr. Edwin Mims, a noted scholar and Vanderbilt professor. This column became the first Southern newspaper column to go into syndication. It was featured in: The Nashville Tennessean, The Memphis Commercial-Appeal, The Knoxville Journal, The Chattanooga Times, The Atlanta Constitution, The Birmingham Age-Herald, The Montgomery Advertiser; The Arkansas Democrat, and a large number of small weekly newspapers all across the south.
It was during this time that all of Alexander's children became widely known through the column. They were: Dave Alexander, who was known as The Biggest Little Boy; T.H. (Huddy) Alexander, Jr., who was The Littlest Little Boy; and Helen Elizabeth Alexander (later Maupin), who was known as Baby Sister. When the Littlest Little Boy was stricken with Infantile Paralysis in 1930, he became the focal point in the column, as thousands of southerners would follow his weekly fight with the dread disease.
In 1932, Alexander purchased the late Jim Hodge place, which consisted of an old log cabin kitchen, a large antebellum home and about 140 acres on Liberty Pike just outside Franklin in Williamson County. This became his home for the remainder of his life, and is was here that he wrote about a variety of simple things unique to life in the south: farming, mules, cornbread, sorghum molasses, Southern beauty, and life in the place he loved-Williamson County.
There were several family crises that struck Alexander in 1937. The Great Depression had cut into his readership and income with the demise of a large chain of newspapers owned by Luke Lea and Rogers Caldwell, who was also a resident of Williamson County. In the ensuing shake-out, the Nashville Tennessean was sold out to the Silliman Evans family and the other papers of the empire were also sold off to other business interests. This left Alexander and his "I Reckon So" column with coverage only in the Nashville Tennessean, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and a small handful of southern weeklies.
Ironically, these events had taken a toll on Alexander's income at a crucial time when the Littlest Little Boy was in desperate need of expensive surgery to correct a curvature of his spine which had resulted from his bout with polio. It was an operation that could only be obtained at the New York Orthapedic Hospital. This situation appeared bleak until Captain Tom Henderson, a noted Franklin attorney and close personal friend to Alexander, came to the rescue. Henderson summoned Alexander to his Franklin law office and told him the details of how he, along with seven other Tennessee soldiers, had tried to kidnap German Kaiser Wilhelm in Holland at the close of World War I. With the details, Alexander sold the story to the Saturday Evening Post and the London Times and thus secured the funds for the Littlest Little Boy's operation- a proceedure that had saved his life.
In the latter years of his career, Alexander severed his ties with the Evans family at the Nashville Tennessean. But he continued to contribute to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and he took his writing career to new heights as a freelance writer with several national magazines. Among those were: The Saturday Evening Post; The Literary Digest; The Readers Digest; and Progressive Farmer. Thanks to his work on a national level, Alexander was included in the 1940-1941 edition of Who's Who In America.
In 1941, after several years of declining health, Alexander finally decided to take his "I Reckon So" column back into syndication. For several months, he traveled across the south signing up papers to carry the column. He had just begun this comeback and had signed up over 45 papers, including the Review-Appeal in his hometown of Franklin, when he suffered a massive heart attack.
Truman Hudson Alexander died in Franklin during the evening hours on September 1, 1941. He was only 49 years old. He was laid to rest at Mount Hope Cemetery, on the outskirts of Franklin.
In an special tribute to Alexander, written just days after his death, the editor of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal had this tribute:
"T.H. Alexander was a man of unusual talents. In his earlier days as a reporter and columnist he took part in some of the most bitter political controversies Tennessee ever saw and more than held his own as a partisan. While sarcasm and ridicule were elements he handled effectively, his natural taste was for humor and for the simple, homely folks and things he knew and loved, and for years past he had dealt in and with them. He could spin a tall tale with the best and make a fascinating yarn of the small happenings in and about his home. For many reasons he will be remembered and missed among the people for whom he added brightness and spice to their daily life."
Copyright, 1997. Hudson Alexander III.