Chattanooga’s Ward Crutchfield didn’t originate the term “a smoke-filled back room.”
The term gained prominence with a press account from 1920 describing a cigar-chomping meeting of power brokers negotiating the nomination of Warren G. Harding as the Republican candidate for president despite Harding’s poor showing in the primaries.
But Crutchfield – the likable, cigar-chomping, prototypical politician and longtime Tennessee senator and majority leader – certainly epitomized it.
He was a giant in state and local politics and, as Times Free Press reporter Andy Sher noted on Monday’s front page, “he will be remembered as a wily politician who fought hard to build up his city and his state until his career ended in a 2005 bribery scandal.”
Crutchfield, who died Sunday at age 87, had been in and out of state politics since he was about 28. He was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1956.
Despite his stunning fall from grace when he was caught up in the FBI sting code-named Tennessee Waltz with four other current and former state lawmakers, he continued to have quiet political respect for his immense political experience and know-how.
“Ward was a political and historical icon,” said Stuart James, a fellow attorney, longtime Democratic activist and former Hamilton County Democratic Party chairman. “His legacy will be unmatched. He rose to the pinnacle of political power in this state. He also had one of the greatest falls from the height of political greatness. He represents everything good and bad about politics. He deserves a place in political history, as his accomplishments far outweigh his fall from grace.”
Crutchfield was a politician who knew when to be partisan, when to compromise, when to collaborate – and when to evolve.
Other local political observers recalled that in his early political years, Crutchfield was aligned with a segregationist politician who made an unsuccessful bid for governor.
Later, however, Crutchfield became a champion of African-American causes and helped bring the late Chattanooga educator C.B. Robinson to the Tennessee House of Representatives.
Yet, no one is perfect. Crutchfield and several other state lawmakers were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of taking payoffs from an FBI front company called E-Cycle Management, supposedly involved in recycling electronic equipment.
In 2007 Crutchfield pleaded guilty to bribery, admitting he took $3,000 in FBI money during the statewide corruption investigation. In return for the plea, federal prosecutors dropped a more serious charge of extortion. Crutchfield was sentenced to two years but allowed to serve six months of home confinement because of his age and health. He also paid a $3,000 fine.
But, as a descendant of other longtime Chattanooga power brokers and politicians, he cared deeply about Chattanooga and about Tennessee – especially about matters of education and quality of life here.
In many respects, it is a terrible shame that in the past decade Crutchfield could not continue to herd the cats in our state capitol. They sorely need herding. But perhaps the better angels of Sen. Crutchfield’s good legacies will live on in the memories of his colleagues there now.