Bloody Breathitt
Page 24
The revolt, however, was against the violent past, not necessarily the Democratic Party. Kentucky Democrats used the opportunity to cast out inner demons—and to demonize other party malefactors. “The ticket which will be declared elected in Louisville is no more a Democratic ticket than was the Hargis ticket in Breathitt,” reasoned the Lexington Herald. “It simply masqueraded under the name of Democracy, and if those who controlled it lived in a Republican state and a Republican city they would be Republicans. They are a type of men who claim the name and sieze the organization of the dominant party in the state in which they happen to live.”233 The Herald used Hargis’s defeat to defend its party while reaffirming that the party’s statewide advantage was a natural condition. Knowing his place, Wise Hagins concurred, calling the Hargis ticket “in no true sense a Democratic ticket, simply using the name because they had control of the Democratic organization.”234 By intimation, any Kentucky Democrats who had assisted or approved of the Breathitt courthouse ring were exonerated.
Hargis’s statewide power continued to crumble even as juries and judges absolved him in court. In October 1906, six men elected to the Democratic state central committee accused Hargis of arbitrarily denying them membership.235 The next month, with support from a Breathitt majority, Kentucky’s tenth congressional district elected its first Republican representative since the 1890s.236 Bluegrass Democrats, who suffered not at all from Bloody Breathitt shootings, were “red hot” with approval for the “Hargis-Callahan regime.” However, Breathitt County’s voters saw no gain from ongoing bloodshed in their streets, and for a time they revolted by voting Republican. The most dramatic injury was when William Howard Taft carried the county in 1908’s presidential election, Breathitt’s first non-Democratic presidential majority since William Henry Harrison’s 1840 victory—and the last one for exactly a century. The county’s traditional party identity had not changed, but its most recent political leaders were chastened by the largest voter turnout (just over 92 percent) in the county’s history.237
Even as Kentucky Democrats distanced themselves from Breathitt County, the murders of Bloody Breathitt still had statewide ramifications. As details of the various crimes came to light, Republicans charged the governor with joining Breathitt’s “assassination chiefs” to further “Gobelism, Redwineism and Hargisism,” and imposing “many indignities on Breathitt County’s peaceful majority” since 1900.238 In 1907 the “stinking bung-hole” of “Hargis-Beckhamism” helped narrow the Democrats’ legislative majority and give Kentucky its second Republican governor.239 When Beckham attempted to run for U.S. Senate a year later, four Democrats bolted and helped make William O. Bradley Kentucky’s second Republican U.S. senator. Beckham’s political wounds caused by his Breathitt connections were temporary, and he became Kentucky’s first popularly elected U.S. senator six years later.240 Kentucky never rejoined the Solid South (the state elected two more Republican U.S. senators and three Republican governors before World War II), but Democrats retained a manifest advantage for most of the twentieth century, especially on the local level (the Whig Gibraltar counties remaining a notable exception). It was scarcely noted that, as in the Solid South, this advantage came about through intimidation and murder. The more scarcely the better, said the state’s politicians; Augustus Willson, Kentucky’s second Republican governor who knew that “the one hope of Republican success [was] in Democratic support,” came to office promising “to eliminate the discussion of the Goebel murder trials and the Breathitt county feud cases.”241
Later candidates for Breathitt County public offices had to be clear as to what kind of Democrats they were, even after their party had recovered. “I want to say in the beginning before stating my platform that I have not now, or ever have had, any connection in any manner whatever with any of the so-called Breathitt county feuds, Kuklux or Red String bands, or any other secret organization that would mar the peace and happiness of an American citizen,” a candidate for school superintendent vowed in 1908.242 It was a plague on both of Bloody Breathitt’s political houses, and it failed to acknowledge that the most recent violence had been a one-sided, nonreciprocal affair; it had been more than ten years since Breathitt Republicans had fired guns, at least for political purposes—and even then it had never been they who controlled any governmental office. Now, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violences were both renounced, but the assumptions that comprised feud, its insistence of moral equivalency between the two, were affirmed. Further, as Kentucky Democrats disavowed Callahan and (especially) Hargis, they also distanced their party from the violence that had been used in its furtherance. Even with the Hargis courthouse removed, young men fled the county to avoid getting “mixed up in the feud troubles.”243 Yet again, Bloody Breathitt was depoliticized.
Ensuing events went even further to suggest that, even if there was no ongoing feud in Breathitt County, the place seemed to be fraught with a preternatural penchant for violence. During Judge Hargis’s trials, his oldest son, Beech, began bristling up the crest of his youth, often disappearing from Jackson only to be later retrieved besotted from Lexington brothels and Cincinnati jails.244 Enraged by Beech’s most recent highly publicized escapade, the disgraced former judge beat his son almost to the point of unconsciousness in February 1908.245 A few days later Beech came to his father’s store and shot him to death, and then attempted suicide by swallowing morphine. Judge Hargis’s death at his son’s hand appeared a “natural sequel” to recent events—patricide, after all, seemed a likely component of a “family feud.”246 It could also be seen as a reproduction of a historical truism: children of powerful, corrupt men often inherit a capacity for committing horrible acts, but without their fathers’ cunning and restraint.
On trial for murder, Beech Hargis was represented by his father’s old ally David Redwine and, surprisingly, Senator-elect William Bradley. It was difficult to avoid a life of sin, they argued, with a father who turned the home into “the rendezvous of a band of murderers,” and in this light, the younger Hargis had acted in self-defense.247 The bipartisan legal team also charged the Republican judge with political prejudice, leading to a second trial in which their young client was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.248 After he was paroled in 1916, he left to join the Canadian army and was never heard from again.249
After his former partner’s death, Edward Callahan gradually withdrew from politics, but not without first being implicated in Breathitt County’s worst election-related riot since 1878 (Republican governor Willson responded, less reluctantly than his Democratic predecessors, with yet another militia occupation of Jackson in 1909). David Redwine, unsullied by recent history, returned to the circuit bench as Breathitt returned to the “Democratic column” and “back to Hargisism,” but Callahan felt his life in danger.250 Over the next few years he grew increasingly paranoid, avoiding Jackson and building a protective bunker around his Crockettsville home (he was sometimes seen running frantically between there and his nearby store). On the seventh anniversary of James Marcum’s assassination, a hidden rifleman fired at Callahan as he stood at a window in his house, wounding him in the groin.251 When John Fox Jr. visited him forty days later, the author found him in comfortable convalescence, wearing a pair of bullet-punctured trousers. Asked if he thought it wise to leave Crockettsville, he insisted that “they would say I was a coward” were he to leave his home and business interests.252 A little over a year later, however, he put his home up for sale and prepared to leave the county to “escape assassination.”253
Beech Hargis shot Judge James Hargis to death and then tried to use his father’s ill fame to get an acquittal on grounds of self-defense. Judge Hargis’s funeral was well attended even after the crumbling of his political empire and the bad reputation he had revisited upon his home county. By dying at his own son’s hand, the judge punctuated the façade of kinship over politics he had used years beforehand; the phrase family feud suggested that the intricacies of Bloody Breathitt need not b
e explored too deeply. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)
Callahan never got around to moving. On the ninth anniversary, May 3, 1912, a rifle shot fired in precisely the same manner killed Callahan just as he was concluding a telephone conversation with his old adversary Wise Hagins. His shooting death seemed to confirm the existence of ongoing, permanent “feudal warfare” in Bloody Breathitt regardless of the county’s recent advancements; the telephone, the “most useful invention of modern times,” which gave his “feud-ridden county” the “opportunity of communicating with the outside world,” played a role in Callahan’s murder, just as it had in Dr. Braxton Cox’s death (which Callahan may have directed) a decade before.254 While the timing of Callahan’s murder suggested a motive of revenge for Marcum’s death, the “noted feudist” had amassed too many enemies, both personal and political, for there to be a definite motive or suspect.255 As much as he had lived by the sword, most of the blood he had spilled was for the tangible modern goals of power and party. Still, one obituary ridiculously attributed Callahan’s crimes to “the old feud spirit of his ancestors.”256 The more evidence accrued showing the political nature of Bloody Breathitt, the more writers seemed bound and determined to say otherwise.
The same could be said for other men connected to the Hargis courthouse ring, although most came to ends unrelated to it. After opening a Lexington tavern named the Mountaineer, Tom Cockrell lived peacefully for a few years until he was killed in a railroad accident in 1908.257 Judge David Redwine, always on the periphery of controversy, managed a peaceful passing and a posthumous reputation untarnished by feud. Even his role in the Music Hall Convention was largely forgotten.258 Fulton French, who was probably personally responsible for more murders than any other single person in Kentucky, succumbed to asthma “in his chair” in 1915.259 Mose Feltner was killed by a federal revenue officer in 1916. His only role in the Hargis-Cockrell feud had been trying to prevent further killing by announcing Judge Hargis’s culpability; nonetheless, he was eulogized as a “noted feudist.”260 After Curtis Jett’s release from prison he published a Christian bekenntnis about the deliverance of a “one time feudist” and became an evangelist.261 He later divided his time between the Bluegrass and the eastern coalfields, alternating between preaching Methodism and acting as a strikebreaking “gun thug” in Harlan County. After two divorces and a denominational swap to Baptism, he died in 1946 at the improbably ripe old age of seventy-seven.262 Abrelia Marcum remarried and eventually left Kentucky for Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she died in 1953.
“If such a state of affairs constitutes a ‘feud,’ it is, as regards active participation, a solitaire game”
Political consequences for politically motivated homicides: all of the horrible events contained within the Hargis-Cockrell feud had the potential to challenge most early twentieth-century Americans’ preconceptions about eastern Kentucky. During Jett’s and White’s trials, a Louisvillian insisted to a New York newspaper that, despite most newspapers’ “editorials, squibs and cartoons,” there was “no family feud in Breathitt” but instead “one powerful, bold, bad man, served by minions and ruffians among them officers of the law, who lords it over his neighbors in the fashion of a mediaeval baron.”263 As a home-missions campaigner observed a few years later, Judge Hargis “was neither poor nor ignorant, and had had no little contact with public affairs in the larger world of men.”264 Feuding, it seemed, did not quite describe a machine politician’s dispassionate use of underling-wielded deadly force to eliminate electoral and legal challengers. There seemed to be something else, something far more modern, at work.
In its extended coverage of Abrelia Marcum’s 1904 lawsuit, Louisville’s Courier-Journal wrote detailed local genealogy describing the manner in which almost everyone involved in the Hargis-Cockrell feud—Marcums, Hargises, Callahans and (in spirit), Strongs—was related by blood or by marriage, suggesting a kinship-based narrative going back to the pioneer generations. “Factional strife in Breathitt County is equivalent to family dissension. Internal warfare is waged not against aliens, but against one’s own flesh and blood. The kinship of the people whose names have been prominently mentioned in connection with the troubles here is very close in instances, and it appears links of blood relation ought to tend to bind them together.”265 Owing as always to its policy of New Departure moderation, Henry Watterson’s flagship could admit both premodern “feudal” behavior and the political motives that were quite clear to many Kentuckians as equal dynamics in the disreputable county.
The following month the same paper printed what amounted to a mixed concession to its familial explanation, although it did not phrase it as such, acknowledging what Republican newspapers had long insisted: a definitive political element to the county’s troubles based upon its peculiarly Democratic voting history. “As a rule, the Kentucky mountain counties are Republican, but Breathitt is unique in that, almost without exception, it has ever been found in the Democratic column. There has always been the bitterest political feeling in the county, and politics has been more or less directly responsible for every one of the feuds, and is to-day the cause of the terrible state of affairs there.”266 As always, Watterson felt that he—and Kentucky—could have it both ways.
But this most summative and accurate of media statements about Bloody Breathitt was lost amid the barrage of more flamboyant feud interpretations. By including the events of the Hargis-Cockrell feud into the longer lineage of “feuding” in the county, the origins of the most recent troubles in Bloody Breathitt were completely forgotten. Unlike in past years easy answers were not more attractive to observers of particular political opinions. Assassinations that encapsulated the statewide furor over William Goebel were ultimately nothing more than “the human nature’s daily feud.”267 Accordingly, any and all news from Breathitt County was related in some way to the existence of an extant feud; relying on wire reports, the Chicago Tribune reported a random knifing at a fiddle show outside of Jackson as “feud” related.268 When Judge Hargis’s nephew Matt Crawford was shot in 1910 his death was blithely recounted as part of “a feud which has long been carried on in Breathitt County,” even though Crawford had no part in his uncle’s political wranglings.269 Perhaps the most dramatic explication of the familial concealing the political appeared in a 1917 law review article in which James Marcum was characterized as a family, rather than an individual.270 “The Hargis-Cockrell feud was like nearly all the other mountain feuds,” Lewis Franklin Johnson thoughtlessly wrote in one of the first book-length efforts to catalogue Kentucky’s mountain feud phenomenon. “It was a family difficulty.”271 For many reasons this was the more attractive reading. The feud narrative required kinship and historical longevity as its driving forces, even if these themes were not borne out by facts. Even though the murders James Hargis directed eventually cost him his political office (the prize that had motivated murder in the first place), his strategy of casting Cox’s and Cockrell’s deaths within the context of an ongoing family feud was an overwhelming success.
The gunshots that killed Hargis, Callahan, and Feltner were the effect of any number of factors that helped to portray Breathitt County and eastern Kentucky as an environment of directionless “lawlessness.” With the possible exception of Callahan’s ambush (carried out in a fashion strikingly reminiscent of William Strong’s end, which Callahan was suspected to have directed fifteen years earlier), their deaths were not directly related to the feud that caused the three most famous murders of 1902 and 1903. In the course of a history of extrapolitical lawlessness, the huge amount of support from Kentucky Democrats for the Hargis courthouse ring was conveniently forgotten. Even John Fox Jr., who contributed to eastern Kentucky’s renown for familial vengeance more than virtually any writer of fiction or nonfiction, was obliged to recognize a broader (but still quite parochial) political motif at the heart of Breathitt County’s ill-gotten fame. “The outside world couldn’t very well omit Breathitt when it made law, and Breathitt accepted the gif
t with gratitude so far at least as it should serve the personal purpose of the man who held the law in the hollow of his hand. Not that there are not bitter complaints of lawlessness in Breathitt, and stern upholders of the law. There are: but I observed that the bitterest and the sternest were not allied with the party that happens just now to be in power.”272 Late in 1903, during the brief lull in public interest in Breathitt County that followed the convictions of Curtis Jett and Tom White, one of the bluntest accounts of recent troubles was composed, although probably not published.
For several months the gaze of the public press had been turned almost daily upon the little mountain town of Jackson, Kentucky, the county seat of “Bloody Breathitt” County the scene during the previous year of three assassinations of increasing boldness and atrocity, and occurring within a 100 steps of the business centre of the town. In the many newspaper accounts of the tragedies the word “feud” has been almost universally employed to denote the state of affairs in Jackson. “Feud” is a choice word for picturesque, romantic, and unique effects. It has a pleasant medieval sound, a distinct flavor of the antique, but in this instance it is misleading. An acquaintance of several years with the town and the people, including all these prominently connected with recent events in Jackson, leads me to think it necessary to look for other motives than those usually supposed to actuate participants in a family feud.