To know the story of the life and times of Judge Gilbert Merritt is to understand modern U.S. politics of the mid to late 20th century—how it came to be, and how it worked—particularly in the American South. Judge Gilbert Merritt and his circle of young lawyers and journalists in Nashville were among the South’s earliest Kennedy Democrats in the late 1950s. Their brash political strivings, though not always victorious at the polls, affected the shape of many things, including the rise of modern Nashville. As a young legal scholar in his twenties, Merritt was one of the nation’s...
To know the story of the life and times of Judge Gilbert Merritt is to understand modern U.S. politics of the mid to late 20th century—how it came t...
