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HARRY CAUDILL IN THE CUMBERLANDS

On July 15, 1965, a friend then living in Hazard gave me my first look at the strip mines of eastern Kentucky. The strip miners at that time were less “regulated” than they are now, and under the auspices of the notorious “broad form deed” they frequently mined without compensation to the surface owners. The result was wreckage on an unprecedented scale: the “overburden” was simply pushed off the coal seam onto the mountainside to go wherever gravity would take it; houses with their families still in them were carried down the slopes by landslides, wells polluted by acid from the exposed coal seams, streams poisoned and choked with rubble; and the whole establishment of the people on the land was treated simply as so much more “overburden.” There could have been no better demonstration of the motives and the moral character of the business of energy.

That night we attended a meeting of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People in the courthouse at Hindman. The occasion of the meeting was the arrest the day before of Dan Gibson, a respected farmer and lay preacher who had gone onto the mountain with a gun and turned back the strip miners’ bulldozers. He was acting on behalf of a younger member of his family then in the service; he was past eighty years old, he said, and had nothing to lose by dying. Thirteen state police, a sheriff, and two deputies had been sent to rescue the thus-threatened free enterprise system, and a shooting was averted only by the intervention of several members of the Group, who persuaded the police to allow them to take the old man before the local magistrate. The magistrate, an employee of the mining company, placed Mr. Gibson under a bond of $2,000. He did not stay long in jail, but the whole affair was so clearly an outrage as to give a vivid sense of injury, identity, and purpose to the assemblage in the Knott County courtroom the following night.

Review of Harry M. Caudill, The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord, The University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

The meeting was called to order, the events of the preceding day were described by various witnesses, and then Harry Caudill was called upon and came to the front of the room. I had read Night Comes to the Cumberlands perhaps two years before, and was full of respect for it, but until then I had never seen its author. I do not expect to forget him as I saw and heard him that night. He spoke with the eloquence of resolute intelligence and with the moral passion of a lawyer who understood and venerated the traditions of justice.

They are destroying our land under our very households, he said. They are going to drive us out as the white men drove out the Indians. And they have prepared no reservation to send us to. The law has been viciously used against us, and it must be changed. We have been made fools of for sixty years, and now at last maybe we are going to do something about it. And he spoke of “the gleeful yahoos who are destroying the world, and the mindless oafs who abet them.” It was a statement in the great tradition that includes the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. And it was a statement, moreover, to which Harry Caudill had dedicated his life; he had outlined it fully in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and in the coming years he would elaborate it in other books, in many speeches, articles, and public letters. The statement—the indictment, the plea for justice—has, I think, remained essentially the same, but the case has been relentlessly enlarged by the gathering of evidence, by thought, reading, and research. For twenty years his has been an able public voice recalling us to what, after all, we claim as “our” principles.

In that same twenty years, hundreds of spokesmen in the same cause have come and gone, hundreds of protests have flared and burned out, hundreds of “concerned” officials have made wages or made hay and gone on. Harry Caudill is one of the few who have endured. As recently as January 5, 1981, a long letter to the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal set his argument yet again before the people of his native state. A few quotations from it will suggest the quality both of the argument and of the man.

First, the indictment:

The state taxes coal in the ground at the rate of 1/10 cent per $100 of value—a mere 315th part of the rate levied on houses and farms. The severance tax is 4½ percent as compared to rates ranging from 12½ percent to 30 percent in the western fields, and most of it returns to the coalfields to build and repair coal roads. The coal industry enjoys low taxes, public esteem, political power, and immense profits. The people generally carry all the burdens growing out of ruined roads, silted rivers and lakes, polluted water, inadequate housing, poor schools, and low health standards.

And then he calls the roll of the beneficiaries of this curious welfare state:

. . . Kentucky River Coal, Occidental Oil, Gulf Oil, Ford Motor, Neufinanze AG (of Lichtenstein), KyCoGo Corporation, Stearns Coal and Lumber, U.S. Steel, Royal Dutch Shell, National Steel, Koppers Corporation, Columbia Gas, Equitable Gas, Big Sandy Corporation, Tennessee Valley Authority, Harvard University, Southern Railway, Diamond Shamrock, International Harvester, Howell Oil Company . . .

And he concludes with the obvious question:

Why should Kentucky be the nation’s leading coal-producing state if all we get out of it is crippled and dead miners, silted streams and lakes, torn up roads, uprooted forests and holes in the ground?

Harry Caudill’s frustration has been that this question has never been satisfactorily answered. His triumph is that he has kept asking it, has kept making the same good sense, invoking the same principles, measuring by the same high standards year after year. The passion of his intelligence has been to know what he is talking about, to condescend to no occasion, to indulge in none of the easy pangs of “disillusionment.” What has kept him going?

Not, I think, his sense of justice or his capacity for moral outrage—or not only those things. A sense of justice, though essential, grows pale and cynical when it stands too long alone in the face of overpowering injustice. And moral outrage, by itself, finally turns intelligence into rant. To explain the endurance of Harry Caudill, it is necessary to look deeper than his principles.

It is a fact, and an understandable one, I think, that many would-be defenders of the land and people of eastern Kentucky have felt both to be extremely uncongenial. The region is, after all, part of a “national sacrifice area,” and has been so considered and so treated by governments and corporations for well over half a century. The marks of the ruin of both land and people are everywhere evident, are inescapable, and to anyone at all disposed to regret them they tend to be depressing. The first article on strip mining I ever read began by saying how delighted the writer had been to leave Hazard, Kentucky, where he had served a protracted journalistic term of, I believe, one week. Harry Caudill, by contrast, can write: “I had the good fortune to be born in 1922 in Letcher County, Kentucky.” He did not come there, then, to serve justice. He has been there because he has belonged there; the land and people for whom he has spoken are his own. Because he got his law degree and went home with it, his mind has never made the expedient separation of knowledge from value that has enabled so much industrial pillage, but has known with feeling and so has served with devotion—a possibility long disregarded by modern educators, who believe despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that education alone, “objective knowledge,” can produce beneficent results.

Another thing. As anybody knows who ever got within earshot of this man, Harry Caudill is a superb storyteller. A lecture, public or private, on the industrialization of the coal fields is apt to be followed by a string of wonderful tales, each reminding him of another, all riding on a current of exuberant delight and laughter. And this telling and the accompanying laughter do not come, I think, as escape or relief from the oppressive realities of the lecture, but come from the same life, the same long concentration on the same region and people.

And so this book, The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord, which would be welcome enough by itself, is particularly welcome because it is a significant part, until now missing from the printed record, of Harry Caudill’s statement about his region. It is not “something different,” but belongs innately to the twenty years’ work that began with Night Comes to the Cumberlands and is a part of its explanation.

In the preface, valuable in itself as a remarkably compact, incisive historical essay on his region, Mr. Caudill tells how these stories came to him: “I practiced law within a mile of my birthplace for twenty-eight years and saw and talked to a daily procession of people . . . . I tried to afford them a good listener.” Or that is the way most of the stories came; elsewhere in the book he makes us aware that some of them, or some parts of them, were learned in the years of his childhood and youth. It is evident in places (and is nearly everywhere supposable) that the stories were not heard all together, as they stand here, but were collected in scraps from various other rememberers and tellers and pieced together over the years like quilts.

“These tales,” he writes, “are intended to show how the cultural layers were formed and a people fashioned.” And they do that, or help to do it. They show again and again, for example, how the parade of national history and power has impinged on the region: the frontier, the Civil War and its various successors, Prohibition and the continuing federal excitement over moonshine, corporations, unions, welfare, et cetera. They show also the influence of cultural inheritance, topography, geography, poor farming, and the oppressions of coal.

But they also do—and are—more than that. They spring, as perhaps the best stories always have, from the ancient fascination with human extremity, from the tendency, apparently native to us all, to remember and tell and tell again the extravagances of human vice and virtue, comedy and tragedy. This book contains a number of examples of the sort of outrageous wisdom that passes endlessly through the talk of rural communities:

One woman ain’t hardly enough fer a man if he is any account a-tall.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to need a pistol and not have it!

There are tales of justice, public and private, heartwarming or hair-raising. There are the inevitable chapters of the region’s history of violence. Best of all, to me, is “The Straight Shooter,” a political biography of one Fess Whitaker: I don’t know how it could be better told.

This book, I fear, is doomed to be classed by those who live by such classification as “folk” material. But they had better be careful. It is, for one thing, very much a lawyer’s book. Harry Caudill is master of an art of storytelling that I think could rightly be called “legal,” for it has been practiced by country lawyers for many generations. Its distinction and distinctive humor lie in the understanding of the tendency of legal rhetoric to overpower its occasions:

Thereupon he towered above Collins like a high priest at some holy rite and poured forth a generous libation of buttermilk upon the judge’s pate, shoulders, and other parts.

For another thing, these stories—though they have to do with people who by a certain destructive condescension have been called “folk”—are the native properties of an able, cultivated, accomplished, powerful, and decent mind.

1981