Chapter 39
Heaven is a Kentucky of a place.
—from Kentucky in the American Guide Series
I ASKED a mild-mannered, perspicacious friend in Louisville, “Who runs Kentucky?” His answer was, “It doesn’t run—it limps.” I asked him what was its chief distinction, and he replied, “Braggadocio.” I mentioned that a recent Gallup poll showed that more Americans would prefer to live in Kentucky than anywhere else in the union, and he responded, “Of course—they don’t know that the reason we’re so backward is that Kentucky is infected with Kentucky.”
The authentic romance of America!—You have more of it packed into a tighter space in Kentucky than in any other state. Toll off a few words, names, images—Daniel Boone, Kentucky “colonels,” the gold in Fort Knox, and moonshine; Cumberland Gap, the Mammoth Cave, and Henry Clay; mint juleps, blood feuds, Churchill Downs, the Derby; the birthplace of both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (and both married Kentucky girls); Big Sandy, “My Old Kentucky Home,” and mountaineers who allegedly pronounce bear “bar” and can spit Burley juice ten yards in a crooked line.
But there are realities as well. Kentucky is par excellence a border state—and not merely the border between North and South, East and Middle West, but between fruity myth and brutal fact.
A Garland of Statistics
Recently a group known as the Committee for Kentucky was set up under the leadership of Harry W. Schacter, president of the Kentucky Merchant’s Association; one of its vice presidents is H. Fred Willkie, a distillery executive and Wendell’s brother. The committee includes some fifty member units, crossing the political gamut all the way from extreme Republican to extreme Democratic, and including Negro, university, labor and agricultural groups, with a total membership of 350,000. Some of its findings are the following:
42 per cent of Kentucky farms are not reached by improved roads of any kind.
Kentucky is the forty-seventh state in literacy; only one other state (Mississippi) has more illiterates.
42,000 Kentucky farms had no toilets or privies of any kind in 1940, and 97 per cent of all farms have no toilets inside the house. [Italics mine.]
Its population decreased 10 per cent between 1940 and 1943, and more than 25 per cent of its state-born citizens have left it.
Kentucky is the 46th state in death rate from tuberculosis, and in one area a single doctor serves 11,500 people. One hundred thousand Kentuckians have syphilis and there are fifty thousand gonorrhea cases per year.
34 per cent of all Kentucky farms are worth less than $300, only 25 per cent have electricity, and only 16 per cent have telephones.
The average farm income per agricultural family was $12 a week in 1940.
And more particularly in regard to education—
In 1932, 114,000 children started first grade; by 1944, when they should have reached twelfth grade, only 14,000 were still in school. Not less than 100,000 had to drop out, largely on account of bad roads, lack of transportation, and poverty.
37 per cent of Kentucky school children fail to finish elementary school.
The average number of days a pupil goes to school in Kentucky is 129 (as against 150 for the U.S. as a whole and as against 170 in Michigan, for instance).
In Kentucky, 78 per cent of children of school age are enrolled in school. (National rate is 84 per cent; that of Idaho 96.)
For each 1,000 children between 14 and 17, the number who go to school is 412 in Kentucky, 679 for the nation, 952 in the state of Washington.
Ideally, about 8 per cent of children enrolled in a twelve-grade school should graduate each year. The proportion for Kentucky is 2.5 per cent.
Average number of pupils enrolled per teacher is 32 in Kentucky, 29 in the nation, 17 in South Dakota.
Average teacher’s salary is $1,014 in Kentucky (as against $1,599 in the country as a whole, and $2,697 in New York).
Did the Bluegrass State rise in self-indignant shame on hearing these statistics, and attempt then to bestir itself? It did not. Instead the general comment was only too likely to be, “Why worry about being ‘progressive’?” The only two important organizations in the state that did not, by the way, join the Committee for Kentucky are the Kentucky Bankers Association and the Associated Industries of Kentucky, the local equivalent of the NAM. The committee held a big meeting recently to explain its work and findings. One hold-out corporation took an advertisement in the papers the next day, telling the committee “We’re all right, thank you,” and to shut its mouth.
Blueprint of Bluegrass
Look at Kentucky on a map; it is shaped, as that celebrated Kentuckian Irvin S. Cobb once said, like a camel lying down. It isn’t very big geographically, but seven other states adjoin it (and look at a map again to see of how many other American states this may be said), and an immense amount of variety is squeezed into its area; to take just one instance, no fewer than twenty different railways cross it, and it has more miles of navigable river than any state.
Where did Kentucky come from? Mostly from Virginia; in fact in its early days it was a kind of Virginian satrapy; later of course came crossfires of immigration, up from the south, and across the Ohio river from the north. Its proud history began early, and Kentucky calls itself, not a state, but a “Commonwealth”; for a time it wanted to be an independent republic, and it was the second state to enter the union after the original thirteen, as well as the first to be created beyond the mountains. It has always had a vivid sectarianism; for instance it did not vote for Lincoln even though he was a native son. The legend is that it was neutral in the Civil War; this is not quite true, since what really happened was that the Bluegrass State fought on both sides, and fought well.
Today there are, by customary definition, three different Kentuckys. and none of the three is apt to agree on anything, except the glory of Kentucky. First, reading right to left, is the eastern or mountain section; second, the Bluegrass region centering on Lexington; finally, the river country to the west. The state is, so far as I know, the only one in the union where one small segment, cut off by a loop of the Mississippi, is not territorially adjacent to the rest. You have to go from Kentucky to Kentucky through Missouri or Tennessee, as in former days you had to cross Polish territory between Germany proper and East Prussia. But in the United States, there are, luckily, no Polish corridors.
Actually Kentucky could be subdivided into more than merely three distinct provinces. For instance the Louisville Courier-Journal, one of the best newspapers in the country, issues six different Kentucky editions (as well as one for Indiana across the river). And its Louisville edition in turn subdivides state news into six or seven grand divisions, and prints a “Kentucky All Over” section too. This in a state with a population of less than three million!
South of Louisville, and stretching out westward, is what is known as the Pennyrile, named for a species of wild mint. It is a “pastoral land cut through by deep winding streams,”1 merging to the north with the Western Coal Field, and to the west with the Jackson Purchase, called usually just the Purchase, a flat region bought originally from the Indians, and closed in by three giant rivers, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee.
The most “typical” Kentucky region is, of course, that generally described as Bluegrass. No two local zealots agree on its precise frontiers, though it is partially enclosed by hills known as the Knobs; it is called “blue” because the rich grass has a bluish cast in spring. “Underneath this Bluegrass turf” (I quote the Kentucky Guide) “is a layer of rare Ordovician limestone, a shell deposit laid down millions of years ago when the region was an ocean floor”; this gives the soil its very high content of calcium and phosphorus. The Bluegrass grows good tobacco, the commonwealth’s most important crop next to corn, and superb race horses, which are its most spectacular pride. Some thirty million dollars are invested in horse farms of the Bluegrass country. Most Kentuckians who are not residents of the Bluegrass are jealous of it, because of its wealth; on the contrary all patriotic Kentuckians spurn the idea of being jealous of the similar Bluegrass region in Tennessee, which is even richer.
The curse of Kentucky is backwoodsism, and its gritty mountaineers in the east form a narrow provincial world all their own. They are of the most poor and primitive type of Anglo-Saxon stock; they adhere closely to their isolated mines, stills, and mountains; they have, by and large, both the meanness of the typical peasant and the suspiciousness of the mountaineer; above all, they are fantastically inbred. One famous mountain center is “Bloody” Harlan, where a coal strike was viciously crushed in the 1930’s after years of intermittent strong-armism by company guards, violence, and terrorism.
In The Kentucky by Thomas D. Clark,2 is the following nuggety passage. A man named Haggin of Breathitt County, to support his candidacy for county jailer, adduced that “among those to whom I am related by blood and marriage are the … Bachs, Lovelys, Allens, McQuinns, Pattons, Landrums, Stampers, Watts, Watkins, Manus, Crafts, Calhouns, and Nichols,” while his wife, a Crawford, has relatives in such clans as “the Jetts, Johnsons, Combs, Griffiths, Terrys, Amburgys, Bowmans, Heralds, Spences, Lawsons, Capes, Hargises, Days, Haddixes, Evans, and many more.” Indeed the politics of Kentucky are apt to be a family affair.
About one-quarter of the state’s present legislature is mountaineer. Some members still carry arms, and guns were pulled in the chamber seven times during one robust debate, over the sales tax, during the governorship of “Happy” Chandler. An ambitious governor like the immortal Laffoon can go a long way toward control of the legislature by giving jobs to the mountain members (also of course to nonmountain members). The mountaineers particularly love getting extra pay as “penitentiary guards,” which also means that they can carry arms unconcealed.
Politics in the Bluegrass Commonwealth
The song birds are the sweetest
in Kentucky;
The thoroughbreds are the fleetest
in Kentucky;
Mountains tower proudest,
Thunder peals the loudest,
The landscape is the grandest,
And politics the damnedest,
in Kentucky.
—Song by Judge James H. Mulligan
Fred Vinson, the eminent Kentuckian who seemed for a time to be holding practically all big federal jobs and who is now chief justice of the Supreme Court, told me a little story the other day. He once asked a prominent Kentucky politician whom he was going to support in a primary election a few weeks off. Answer: “I don’t know yet. I’m waiting to see what the opposition does, so I can take the other side.”
Paul Porter, formerly chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and then head of the truncated OPA, strove to find out from the late Desha Breckinridge, editor of the Lexington Herald, what line he would take on an impending local issue. The answer came, “Haven’t made up my mind. But when I do, you can count on it we’ll be damned bitter about it!”
Another Kentucky worthy, who will prefer to be nameless, told me in Louisville, “If Jesus Christ were running for sheriff here, he’d get opposition.”
In 1900 occurred an episode obstreperous even for Kentucky. Two men claimed to have been elected governor. One, William Goebel, had waged a tremendous campaign against the so-called moneyed interests and especially the Louisville & Nashville Railroad; he was shot while the last votes were being counted. He managed to keep alive until the legislature declared him elected; the oath of office was then administered and he died. Previously Goebel himself had shot and killed a political opponent. The disaffection and estrangement following these two murders led to what such a sober authority as the Dictionary of American Biography calls “the verge of civil war.” For a time there were two acrimonious rival governors and two “governments.” And this, let it be remembered in our prosaic era, took place only forty-six short years ago.3
Kentucky is basically and normally Democratic (assisted by a bit of gerrymandering) but many mountaineers are Republican, and most election results are mixed. The present governor, Simeon Willis, is a Republican; but his legislature is powerfully Democratic. The present mayor of Louisville, successor to the admirable Wilson Wyatt, is Democratic (he got in by exactly 205 votes out of 93,000); but his board of aldermen is Republican. Moreover politics never stop. The gubernatorial and mayoralty elections take place in odd-numbered years, and hence do not correspond with national elections; Kentucky is one of the few places (New Jersey also) where this is true. There’s never a dull moment—in Kentucky. Incidentally it was the first state to make FDR’s birthday, January 30, a legal holiday.
The commonwealth boasts that Louisville was the first city in the country to introduce the Australian ballot, and an Honest Election Committee composed of 217 nonpartisan volunteers watches every vote, but politics in Kentucky at large have been fabulously corrupt; Thomas L. Stokes of Scripps-Howard won a well-deserved Pulitzer prize for his report on the Barkley-Chandler primary in 1938. The most outrageous thing about the report of the special committee that made a subsequent investigation—and which showed outrageous corruption—was that nobody in Kentucky was outraged. In the fat old days the bosses did not bother with anything so crass or rudimentary as mere stuffing of ballot boxes, precinct captains did not rummage around in the cemeteries or fabricate single names. They simply certified as cast, en bloc, the grand total of votes they needed! Today, as a result, a new electoral law is in force. Votes are not counted in precincts at all, but instead are sent to a central courthouse under triple lock, where they are opened publicly, one at a time, and then publicly tabulated. Kentucky is, in consequence, usually the last state nowadays to report electoral results; if a race has been close, it may be four or five days before anybody knows who won.
A crippling item in Bluegrass political life is the old constitution, which has been in force since 1891. It is, like constitutions in so many states, almost completely out of date today; one proviso, as an example, is that anyone running for state or even municipal office must swear that he has never fought a duel. This constitution imposed a top limit of five thousand dollars on salaries for public officials in the state, except the governor; five thousand dollars was a lot of money in the 1890’s, but it isn’t so much now, and as a result it has been difficult to get anybody good to run for office. Despite great pressure, there are two groups today that resist any attempt to modernize the constitution: (a) the lawyers, who thrive on its extreme complexity; (b) the rural areas generally, which fear that rewriting it will give more strength to the towns.
A vivid rivalry between town and countryside is, in fact, a permanent factor in Kentucky politics. Louisville contains about 12 per cent of the total vote, but the hinterland makes it fairly difficult for a Louisville man to win state or federal office.
Who and What Run Kentucky?
Against this background, what, then, are the dominant forces in the political and economic life of the state? In rough summary, one may mention at least seven:
(1) The great swashbuckling days of the Louisville & Nashville are gone forever, but this railroad interlaces the commonwealth so tightly that it still remains a considerable factor. For instance (like the railroads in Tennessee) it fights the truck companies, and the resultant trucking issue is a chief preoccupation of Kentucky politics. The railroads (including others beside the L & N) forced a bill through the legislature severely limiting the amount of freight the competing truck lines may carry; the limit is eighteen thousand pounds, much less than that in states adjoining, and hence the truckers must either unload and redistribute their cargoes at the Kentucky line, or drive scores of miles out of the way.4 The trucking lobby plays politics on its side too. For instance it made big contributions to the campaign fund of a Democratic candidate for governor some years ago; the Courier-Journal published photostats of checks he had received, although he had denied getting any. The affair was, of course, irregular, since the truckers are regulated by a public agency, and for any party to receive a contribution from a corporation doing business with the state is against the law. There was, however, no prosecution because of the statute of limitations. But the resultant scandal split the Democratic party, and so a Republican got the governorship by a tidy margin.
The L & N is, by the way, no longer owned by Kentucky capital but by the Atlantic Coast Line, which is in turn a Wall Street railroad. So once more we come across economic absenteeism and its sundry phenomena.
(2) The race track and all the racing interests—in other words the Jockey Club. Matt Winn, the youngest man of eighty-four anybody ever met, is the great spirit behind the Kentucky Derby and Churchill Downs, and the magnitude of his success is such that the racing people don’t have to play much politics any more. In older days, during a long fight over pari-mutuel, and when anti-race track agitation was pronounced, the Jockey Club maintained a potent lobby; for years every candidate for governor, Republican and Democratic alike, was its man. The lobby does go into action nowadays if any tax bill threatens it, like a recent proposal to put a 5 per cent tax on pari-mutuels. The race tracks contribute to state revenue of course, but the contribution is pretty small. The Jockey Club has exclusive gambling privileges at every track in Kentucky; handbooks are forbidden, and there is no other legal gambling.
(3) The liquor interests. Liquor, though absentee owned for the most part, is big business in Kentucky; indeed the commonwealth manufactures 40 per cent of all the whisky produced in the United States. But the distillers are less powerful a direct political force than is generally believed, and they are split. One wing, the “Bottle and Bond” people, produces. only straight whisky; the other, including firms like Seagram’s,5 makes blends. In the old days even to suggest that a stanch Kentuckian should so much as sniff a drop of blended whisky at a distance would, of course, have been an insult more mortal than impugning the honor of his grandmother; but times, as they say, change. The blenders have to buy straight whisky in considerable quantities, and so the two wings, though rivals, get along. Blended whisky is not so strong as straight; hence some temperance interests, if forced to a choice, favor the blended side. Strangely enough there is a very marked prohibitionist element in Kentucky, mostly in the rural areas; the figures may seem incredible, but 88 counties out of the state’s 120 are dry by local option. The Bible-belters are bone dry on moral grounds, and mountaineers in a few localities make a profit on illegal moonshine and would make a killing if prohibition were ever to return. Many citizens of course drink wet but vote dry, for complex theological-political reasons; this phenomenon, far from being peculiar to Kentucky, is something we shall find almost everywhere in the South.
(4) The Louisville Courier-Journal, the dominant newspaper in the state and a splendid liberal force. This is “Marse Henry” Watterson’s old paper, and under Barry Bingham, the present owner, and Mark Ethridge, the publisher, its valiant tradition is vigorously carried on.
(5) The coal operators and, outside of Louisville, the Kentucky Utilities Company. But the coal people are less powerful than in former years, first because coal itself is not so important in the economy of the commonwealth, and because the operators, within the industry, are not so strong vis-à-vis their own miners. Labor (predominantly AF of L) is fairly strong.
(6) There are some miscellaneous forces. For instance the country doctors and lawyers, who are in the main dependent for livelihood on the railways, are an important conservative factor; correspondingly, a liberal factor is the Kentucky Education Association, with seventeen thousand members. It stands, like all genuine education lobbies, for more public expenditure and hence more taxes; thus it is usually opposed by business interests which want to keep taxes down, in a pattern adumbrated in this book many times.
(7) Religious influences. Here too, as in the matter of prohibition, we are getting close to the South, and religious factors in general may better be discussed later. In Kentucky the Baptists and Methodists, though perhaps declining in strength, still dominate the rural areas together with those offshoots known as Disciples of Christ and Campbellites. Sectarianism is tremendous; there are, for instance, no fewer than five different subdivisions among the Presbyterians. In Louisville, Roman Catholicism is strong; next to New Orleans, it is the chief Catholic city south of the Mason and Dixon’s line.
Finally, a word on people. Next to Vinson, the most conspicuous Kentuckian in national life is Senator Alben W. Barkley, former majority leader and an able and useful citizen. One man to watch is a provocative youngster, Edward F. Prichard Jr., who, of all the brilliant secretaries that Felix Frankfurter ever had, is probably the most brilliant; Prichard, shot through with politics in every ounce of his 250 pounds, was successively the astute and unquenchable assistant to Attorney General Biddle, Jimmy Byrnes, and Vinson; he is at present counsel to the Democratic National Committee.
One Kentucky congressman is John Robsion, from the mountaineer country; he is slightly more isolationist than the Chicago Tribune. Another, Virgil Chapman, elected from the Bluegrass year after year, watches tobacco with vigilance, and is apparently interested in little else. And of course Kentucky is the home state of Congressman Andrew J. May, the wretched homunculus who, early in 1946, found himself involved in the Garsson scandals. But long before this May and his characteristics were well known to political connoisseurs. He was probably the most prolific cliché maker in the entire House, no mean honor; his career is a standing reminder of the extreme necessity of reforming Congress so that seniority alone shall not decide the chairmanship of a committee.6
From Laffoon to Buffoon
I have mentioned the remarkable “Happy” Chandler, the ex-governor and ex-senator who succeeded Judge Kenesaw M. Landis as “czar” of baseball. His history is illuminating. When he finally quit the Senate for active duty at the baseball commissionership (he held both jobs, salaries ten thousand and fifty thousand dollars respectively, for an intervening six months), the Courier-Journal, in tolerant mood, spoke as follows:
The imprint of Albert Benjamin Chandler upon Kentucky politics had a pattern so personal, familiar and sharp that it is hard to believe it first was stamped only fifteen years ago, and that Happy Chandler, departing from the scene, himself is only 46 … Neither the local scene nor perhaps the United States Senate will be quite the same, now that Happy Chandler has chosen to leave one game for another.
“Happy”—and one of his secrets is that, without any self-examination whatever, he is a happy person—first reached prominence in about 1935, when he was lieutenant governor, through a complex machination that eventually brought him the governorship. He waited until the fabulous Ruby Laffoon who created a thousand colonels, and who was governor at the time, was out of the state, became acting governor himself, and jammed through a change in the electoral law to favor himself. In 1939, when he was just finishing his own term as governor, Senator M. M. Logan conveniently died, and Chandler, resigning the governorship, was promptly appointed to the vacant seat. (The year before, running against Barkley, he had taken a terrific beating.) In 1942 he ran for the full Senate term, and won. And there are several people in the penitentiary today, convicted of frauds attending this election. Did this embarrass Happy? He has never been embarrassed in his life. The word for such a contretemps (even in reference to those still in jail) is, “Oh, it was just politics.” Then came another episode. Chandler was a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, and it became revealed that a Louisville contractor named Ben Collings had presented him with a swimming pool. This was at a time when steel, brass, and other materials used in swimming pools were supposed to be rationed for the use of the armed forces and the nation as a whole. At first, horror struck, Happy is reported to have exclaimed that he had never even heard of the swimming pool, though it was built on his own grounds at Versailles. In the immortal words of a Saturday Evening Post writer, “You could have knocked Happy over with the springboard.” Next, he protested plaintively that “the people of Kentucky aren’t going to get mad at me over a little old swimming pool.” Investigations began, counterinvestigations followed. At first the War Labor Board reported that construction of the pool did not violate priorities; then it reversed itself by saying that the use of “8,000 pounds of steel and considerable brass” had hampered and impaired the war effort. Finally, the Truman Committee itself, nothing less, whitewashed everybody concerned.
In the Senate he took as strong an antiadministration line as he dared, and he was an avowed and outspoken isolationist. In May, 1943, he made a speech urging that the war in Europe be called off, in effect, so that more aid could go to MacArthur, one of his great heroes. The New York Herald Tribune, which is not an administration organ, seldom flays a man without good reason, and only rarely does it advocate that a senator be shot. What it said on the occasion of this speech, under the heading “The Wrecker,” is worth repeating:
Senator A. B. (Happy) Chandler of Kentucky consumed three hours of the Senate’s supposedly valuable time … in what, by any rational standards, could only be regarded as an attempt to wreck the war plans, alienate the Allies, and give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States. What his motives were we do not know. … His performance, however, was of the kind for which in less enlightened states a person would be taken out and shot at the following sunrise.
Why did baseball choose the ineffable Happy to follow Landis? Because he is “colorful,” “popular,” and “in the know.” Baseball wanted somebody as unlike the rigid Landis as possible, someone who, by example, could bring recruits to the big leagues by encouraging the sport in every sand lot in the land.
Wilson Wyatt of Louisville
Now out of this hotchpotch of provincialism, fake glamor, and poverty of purse and spirit that has so often afflicted Kentucky has arisen a man. His name is Wilson Watkins Wyatt Jr.; he was born in 1906, and he served from 1941 to 1945 as mayor of Louisville. Early in 1946, Truman called him to the Washington scene as national housing expediter, one of the most difficult and important jobs in the country, and then as chairman of the National Housing Agency, from which he resigned in December, 1946.
Wyatt, one of the most attractive men I have met in American public life, gave Louisville a stunningly good administration. Like Harley Knox in San Diego, he is a phenomenon profoundly healthy, if comparatively rare—the citizen of merit who volunteers for public service, at great personal sacrifice, and attaches himself to whatever is most vital in his community.
Louisville has great charm—like all the river cities with considerable German populations—and a history of distinction. It was the first American city to have its own university, and in the old days its own packet ships sailed down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans and beyond; there was even a direct service Louisville-Liverpool.7 It became a stable city, not given to getting excited easily, half-southern, and in recent times fraying at the edges. The old society crumbled; and today, every once in a while, some last survivor of a family dies, leaving a fortune made in alcohol, horses, or tobacco, of whom the present generation has scarcely even heard.
Wyatt picked Louisville up by the scruff of its drowsy neck and shook it. He and the war came in together; together they revivified, resuscitated the town. From being an isolated and moribund city living largely on its reputation, it became the center of troop concentrations, wartime industry, middle western bustle. One of the first things Wyatt did was to help redress the balance between city and state. Louisville pays roughly 33 per cent of all Kentucky’s taxes (but gets back only 11 per cent); it supported the state, in effect, but it was seriously under-represented in the capitol. Wyatt sought to close ranks between city and hinterland, and to increase its representation in commonwealth affairs.
Wyatt is a lean, talkative, effervescent man of forty with a sharp nose, sharp ears, and one of the brightest smiles ever seen anywhere. He is a Presbyterian. He went to the public schools, fell in love, refused to marry until he was earning five thousand dollars a year, and promptly earned it as a lawyer, after studying at night and working as a railway clerk. He became a member or director of practically every organization in Louisville worth belonging to, and was on the way to becoming rich. He never ran for office until the mayoralty race in 1941, when he was elected by the largest majority in the history of Louisville.
At once he was called a traitor to his class. This was because he proceeded immediately to get entangled with what he likes to call “the vulture wing.” He had been an attorney for Louisville Gas and Electric (a subsidiary of Standard Gas and Electric and an intermediate Delaware holding company); promptly on becoming mayor, he set out to buy the company for the community. So, in Louisville as in a dozen cities we have mentioned, private power vs. public power became the dominant issue. Wyatt figured out that, if Louisville Gas and Electric were municipally owned, the advantage to the rate payer and taxpayer would be roughly twenty thousand dollars per day or almost one thousand dollars per hour. The original proposal for municipal ownership was first made by the board of aldermen on a nonpartisan basis, but it was bitterly fought later by the Republicans; during the last two years of his term, Wyatt was constantly at loggerheads with a new board with a strong Republican majority.
Wyatt came into office with a twelve-point program; all have been carried out. To go into them in detail is beyond the province of this chapter. Suffice it to say that they included a bond issue for a flood wall (to prevent recurrence of such a catastrophe as the Louisville flood of 1937), reduction in the streetcar fare, consolidation of city and county health and public service agencies (thus avoiding wasteful duplication), and equalization of salaries of Negro and white schoolteachers. Wyatt cheerfully worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, intermittently making direct reports to the people via radio, reports which are a model of their kind, and—an unorthodox touch—during all four years was never on time to an appointment.
I asked Wyatt once what had led him into public life. He could easily earn ten times his salary in private practice, and most of his savings have been spent. He answered that, living in Louisville, he became conscience stricken every time a new mayor was elected; he would say to himself, “They aren’t doing the job well enough! I’d like to have a shot at it myself.” And he was profoundly irritated by the prevalent American assumption that politics, particularly municipal politics, were not “respectable” as a profession. He felt that any American who sneered at politics per se was also sneering at democracy; and this he knew to be wrong. He wanted to get down to the level of the people themselves, and encourage their active participation in their own government; the failure to do this is the greatest misfortune in American public life.
Kentucky Miscellany
Kentucky is the state where a brother of John Keats was a bank director, and where ladies may enter the Pendennis Club, the chief meeting place of tycoons, only by a side entrance; where the WCTU demanded that bathrobes be draped on show window models in low-cut bathing suits, and where Man o’War is worth five thousand dollars per time at stud; it is the state where the first enameled bathtub in history was manufactured, where river towns like Covington give you a wonderful glimpse of sky’s-the-limit river life, and where roast opossum and raccoon are still great delicacies.
1 From Kentucky in the American Guide Series, p. 815.
2 Farrar and Rinehart, New York, 1942.
3 According to one authority the Goebel people so hated the Louisville & Nashville that they refused to have his body moved to its last resting place over its tracks; the funeral train took a roundabout way from Louisville to Covington instead. See The Kentucky, p. 357.
4 But in 1946 a new bill raised the limit to 42,000 pounds; this was one of the worst beatings the L & N has taken in the history of the state.
5 It was this house which printed widespread advertisements when the movie The Lost Weekend was released, urging some people not to drink.
6 May was defeated for re-election in November, 1946.
7 Cf. Five Cities, by George R. Leighton, p. 50.