Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Fictional accounts of mountain feuds in the first decades of the twentieth century also exploited the recent memory of the Hargis-Cockrell feud. A settlement schoolteacher’s fictional memoir used the town of Jackson and Breathitt County as its model and began the story line briefly after the cessation of a recent prolonged fracas between town politicians.151 The surnames Jett (as in Curtis Jett) and Valentine (the first name of one of the more famous Hatfields) were used as character names in a feud novel set in the story-bound town of Leeston.152

  Although fascinated by Breathitt County, John Fox Jr. never used it as a setting for one of his novels (he tended to avoid using explicitly real places for such), but the county was mentioned as a neighboring locale in two short stories and a novel (he used Marcum as a character’s name in one novel).153 His primary concern was establishing feud violence as something innate to the experience of the mountain white, not just a series of events between two families or factions. For that reason, the violent streets of Jackson and the bushwhacker-rife woods that surrounded it made for better subject matter than the finite vendettas of other Kentucky counties. In order to be interesting, feuds had to have historical (or ahistorical) longevity, and even though the length of other feuds was exaggerated for dramatic effect, Fox Jr.’s interest in authenticity led him to what he considered an inherently violent territory rather than simply a place that had played host to a feud or two. The inherency of violence came to replace the historical facts of feuds in the memory of Bloody Breathitt and the rest of eastern Kentucky.

  By the 1920s the only nationally available account of the Hargis-Cockrell feud that announced the facts of the conflict and made explicit use of full names (particularly Judge Hargis’s and Sheriff Callahan’s role in organizing James Marcum’s death of at the hands of Curtis Jett and Tom White) was a folk song of dubious composition. As late as 1920 song collectors discovered that Breathitt County’s native balladeers were reluctant to sing it, and its eventual musicological “recovery” took place in Texas a few years later. Though recorded numerous times, it never became a folk standard even when it was targeted at a “mainstream” audience; pop composer Johnny Mercer’s recording of “The Murder of J. B. Markham” was met with little response, violent or otherwise, in 1937.154

  By the high years of the New Deal, it was no longer politically advantageous for Breathitt County to be set off from the rest of Kentucky or the United States; instead it was brought into the same efforts at incorporation as the rest of the South. In the years that had passed since Edward Callahan’s shooting death (often considered the end of the “feudal era”), the county had become a prime target of reform efforts bent upon hookworm eradication, flood prevention, and other types of uplift.155 These Progressive efforts often restated eastern Kentucky’s long-standing reputation for isolation and deprivation for which feud violence had been blamed since the 1870s, but as the notorious Breathitt County came to be seen as one mountain county suffering from the same social and infrastructural ills as many others, its individual fame waned. In the 1930s the county was a frequent subject for photographer Marion Post Walcott as she collected the Farm Security Administration’s visual data.156 Rather than taking pictures of aging “feudists,” Walcott focused upon muddy roads and parched cornfields, images that made Breathitt County part of a larger regional whole rather than singling it out. In 1936 one pair of educators acknowledged the deleterious effects that Breathitt County’s being defined by the outside world had on its wellbeing: “the epithets which role so easily off the tongue—a ‘Kentucky feud,’ a ‘hillbilly song,’ ‘poor whites,’ and that telltale appellation which so many of the inhabitants would like to live down, ‘Bloody Breathitt.’ It is through these stock phrases that some of us have come to know this part of the South.”157 Given the need for cooperation between local elites and federal arrivals, politics was not acknowledged as the root cause of the county’s past horrors. An indictment of the Democratic Party of the past might have seemed like an indictment of present Democrats, especially considering that, save for a brief period after the Hargis-Callahan regime’s end, they had ruled the county perpetually (and, by the 1930s, “controlled everything”).158 And, in any case, a society disadvantaged on “the scale of cultural and social values” (a more advanced sociological version of “contemporary ancestors”) could not be blamed, considering that “in these days there is hardly any people competent to judge another.”159 It was now time for the county to reenter the rest of the region, even if it meant being part of what President Franklin Roosevelt would call “the Nation’s number one economic problem.”160

  Feuds were now an event thankfully stuck in the past and absent in a county with access to federal aid and centralized planning. But as Breathitt County was the historical home of the feud country, its past of factional violence could not be completely forgotten, especially considering that its rate of violent crime was still relatively high as late as 1940. “Even though the county may have one or two well-broadcasted murders every year—for a killing in Breathitt always seems to be big news—educational facilities, better roads, in short, greater contact with modern forces have corroded the feudal spirit,” said one 1941 local history published by the Works Progress Administration. Feuds were understandable in their day because of environmental factors beyond the control of the mountain pioneer. The “hilly country where ridges and creeks tended to mark off one clan and its supporting faction from another, and where Mother nature was hostile and niggardly” contributed to the development of “feudal ties between men.” To observers from the outside world, common criminal violence was even less legitimate than feuds, but recent unnamed troubles, readers were reassured, had “not assumed the proportions of a feud.”161 Even if Breathitt Countians supposedly retained a customarily nonchalant attitude toward murder, “life was cheap” now because “the hills were stripped, the timber business expired, floods washed the topsoil off the farms.”162 Violence in Bloody Breathitt was no longer a product of the residents’ temporal dissonance from the Bluegrass and the rest of the outside world but was now the outcome of very current economic problems. Although crime had supplanted feud, violence of either sort was still useful. More than ten years later, even the county’s reputation for “unrestrained lawlessness” was, by itself, admissible evidence in a corporation’s 1953 lawsuit against a striking labor union.163

  Long after John Fox Jr.’s death, Breathitt County garnered at least one more fictional sketch in two of James Jones’s World War II novels. In his debut, From Here to Eternity (1951), Jones featured Sergeant Fatso Judson, Schofield Barracks’ sadistic stockade guard who is mentioned in passing as having Breathitt County origins. Judson is eventually punished for his cruelty to prisoners when he is killed by Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (himself from Harlan County, a locale with far more notoriety than Breathitt by 1951; a third character is similarly from Hazard, Kentucky).164 A “small, thin, Breathitt County Kentucky boy” named Private Witt was prominent in Jones’s The Thin Red Line (1962), this time in a combat setting. Like Prewitt, Witt is an exceptional fighter (with shades of Alvin York, gaining his flawless sharpshooting from having “shot squirrel all of his life”) and ceaselessly loyal to his comrades. He shared the same independence and antinomian worldview attributed to various Fox Jr. protagonists, although, unlike them, Witt could never assimilate to the forces of modernity (in this case the army’s self-defeating chain of command during the battle of Guadalcanal). “He was free, white and twenty-one,” in Jones’s description, “and had never taken no shit off nobody and never would, and as the prospect of action got closer and closer he could feel himself tightening all up inside with excitement, exactly like he used to do in the [nonhistorical] coal strikes back in Bloody Breathitt.”165 Judson, Witt, and Jones’s other eastern Kentucky soldiers shared an inherent aptitude for violence, while Breathitt was only one place-name among many; as a fictional character’s casually mentioned place of birth in an early 1960s novel, Breathitt County had j
oined “Harlan” and “Hazard” as synonyms for labor struggle rather than feud, the prefix “bloody” assumed to be from the famously deadly coalfield battles for unionization. For Jones (a native of southern Illinois), Bloody Breathitt represented a segment of the American population living in the twentieth century against its will and able to exist in the unwelcome present only because of its valuable (at least in a time of war) propensity for hurting and killing.

  By the time the War on Poverty was initiated, Breathitt County was an oft-advertised exemplary of Appalachia’s unsolved economic problems. When Kentucky’s red-baiting Republican governor Louis Nunn vetoed federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) funds for a Jackson-based development council in 1969, the ensuing war of words became the “Nunn-Howell feud” (so named for the council’s Democratic chairwoman Treva Turner Howell).166 Newly hired OEO assistant Dick Cheney went to Breathitt County to investigate and found none of the irregularities Nunn (who had been southern campaign chairman for Cheney’s boss, Richard Nixon, in 1968) had alleged. The upheaval discomfited Nixon and OEO chief Donald Rumsfeld, and tousled the president’s “southern strategy.” More important, it shortened the life of the OEO; complaints of Howell’s corruption (which neither J. Edgar Hoover nor John Ehrlichman could uncover) gave Nixon an excuse to dissolve the program after his reelection. The “Feud in the Hills,” as Time magazine called it (echoing the Louisville Courier-Journal’s “Breathitt Feud” headline) was a crippling blow to the Great Society as well as another embarrassment for Breathitt County—caused, once again, by local machine politics (Howell’s Turner forbears began amassing influence in Breathitt not many years after the end came to the Hargis courthouse, though more incrementally and with less dependence upon counterrevolutionary murder).167 As always, the feud narrative (or, as Rumsfeld minimized the kerfuffle forty-two years later, “an old-fashioned Southern political blood feud”) added its emblematic element of deception, suggesting the elite parties’ victimless warring when, in fact, the victims were the Breathitt citizens the OEO had benefited.168

  From John Fox Jr.’s Progressive Era novels to Donald Rumsfeld’s 2011 apologia, Bloody Breathitt was largely the creation of outside observers who were heedless or ignorant of the exigencies of life in the county, be it the violence of the past or the poverty of the present. Breathitt County seemed to be one exemplar of the larger eastern Kentucky feud phenomenon but, at the same time, seemed to stand out from the others as well. In Cincinnati newspaper editor Harold Coates’s Stories of Kentucky Feuds (1942), “true and accurate descriptions of the various Kentucky Feuds” (an anthology of stories published individually in pamphlet form in the 1920s), three of the twelve vignettes were dedicated to Breathitt, from William Strong’s 1874 courthouse capture to the death of Edward Callahan in 1912.169 Rather than protesting, twentieth-century Breathitt Countians avoided discussions of conflicts over power, and instead tried to place violence as far into the past as possible. They, too, contributed to the mythology of Bloody Breathitt.

  “We know that, from the first, the wilderness was their teacher”

  Judge James Hargis was quite successful in using the cover of feud to protect himself from criminal conviction, and was probably unbothered by his subsequent magazine portrayal as a “Middle Ages character” a few months before his death.170 A large part of his success depended upon how ingrained the feud narrative already was in eastern Kentucky, so ingrained that even his greatest detractor, the Breathitt County News, casually described “feuds” in other mountain counties while Hargis was still in office.171 Those from Breathitt County who were able to make their voices heard, mainly Jackson’s commercially interested elite, echoed the language of the outside world, and the four-letter word was not avoided once it was widely popular.

  For one thing, they believed in race and all it entailed. Language employing the racial politics of the day was just as popular in Breathitt County as it was among the anthropologists and local-color writers. The aforementioned booster who anonymously begged for the Bluegrass’s investment in 1884 attributed past violence to the Scots and the Irish.172 Breathitt’s Anglo-Saxon families presented such a numerical fight against “race suicide,” the Courier-Journal snarked in 1904, that “President Roosevelt’s heart would be gladdened by a sight of Jackson” (Roosevelt was a well-known proponent of Nordic monumentalism).173 Once word of their unadulterated, superior Anglo-Saxon blood was a widely known fact, white Kentuckians in and around the county clung fiercely to the ethnic badge that they probably had never doubted was theirs in the first place, even if it did implicitly suggest an innate tendency toward modern savagery. Upon reading of a 1905 lecture that suggested that the “Kentucky mountaineer” was the progeny of Indians and “white slaves” (the lecturer presumably meant seventeenth-century indentured servants), a Perry county resident protested:

  There is not one family out of a thousand of the present inhabitants of the Cumberlands whose parentage may be traced either to the Indians or to those white slaves who had been freed by the Virginia planters. They are descendants of families who had been prominent in the Revolutionary struggles, and those people have known almost no intermingling of other blood from the time of their immigration to the present. The allegation that these bold, generous, hospitable, strong-minded neighbors about us in Breathitt, Perry and Leslie counties are a new class of humanity and descendants of Indians and white Virginia slaves is a slander which we repel.174

  As the national debate over the teaching of evolution was building steam in 1922, a Breathitt County News editor fired off a similar salvo when his county’s state representative cast the deciding vote to strike down an anti-Darwinism bill.175 “The professors at the state university [in Lexington] may believe they are descended from apes and baboons, but let it be known that the good people of Breathitt are pure Anglo-Saxon.”176 Racially conscious Breathitt Countians were as aware as other white southerners that whiteness dealt as much, and perhaps more, with material and social attainment as it did with skin color. For a place and a people increasingly economically marginalized, and vilified in the media as something culturally or even biologically different than the white southerners they had once been, racial validation was crucial.

  Backtalk from Breathitt came in other forms as well. Louis Pilcher’s The Story of Jackson City (1914), the last in a series of promotional publications promoting eastern Kentucky towns, became Bloody Breathitt’s most all-inclusive written defense. Pilcher, a self-styled “literary free lance” from Lexington, wrote as if he were a Breathitt County native, peppering “brief biographies of prominent citizens” with ingratiating trivia about Jackson.177 For Pilcher, the story of “Bloody Breathitt” had already been told in fictional form and the more fictional it was, the better. “If the reader is seeking any light or information on the feuds of Breathitt County,” he warned, “this book will be a disappointment for I want to go back to the ‘City of Sudden Death’ [a nickname for Jackson], and I don’t like to write about feuds anyway.” Because, after all, “feuds and pistol toting are so vulgar and low flung.”178 Pilcher hoped that literary interest in Kentucky’s feuds would soon die down, lest it pollute young minds. “Just contemplate what a terrible nightmare such a book [collecting all of Kentucky’s feud stories] would produce on the plastic minds of the youth of Kentucky; a veritable chamber of horrors.”179 Jackson, the “inspiration of the new Kentucky,” had eliminated feuds through progressive social engineering: de facto zoning that kept disorder confined within spatial boundaries and class designators. The absence of licensed saloons helped to keep the peace, and the civically maintained enclosure of “Snake Valley,” the sin district along the river, kept the town quiet enough to require “only one policeman and but little for him to do except collect city taxes and electric light bills.”180

  Even if violence that took the feud form was in the past, Pilcher stood by his belief in the racial determinism that caused it. Although he shared others’ belief in Kentucky’s “purest Anglo-S
axon stock,” Pilcher put a greater emphasis on the sociology of race and saw the less adulterated eastern portion of the “two Kentuckys” as America’s last great white hope.181 “It is a well-known fact in sociology of Kentucky and the South that the Afro-American race has for long been the ‘escape valve’ in morality and immorality—there also being another division, unmorality. In certain sections of Kentucky—notably in the eastern part—the absence of Negroes has laid the heavy toll upon the white race, and hence there is more white immorality than in communities where Negroes abound, Central Kentucky and many Southern States having a greater number of Negroes than Caucassians.”182 “We [eastern Kentuckians] will not stand for miscegenation,” wrote Pilcher. “It is said that in Louisville and Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Chicago, that many depraved and degenerate white women have Negro husbands.”183

  But pure eastern Kentuckians’ massive childbirth rates guaranteed the unassisted survival of whiteness. “When fathers count their progeny from eight to a dozen, race-suicide is out of the question and the crusade for eugenics makes the healthy bucks that snuff the mountain air, smile in derision when the name is defined. It belongs to hot-house civilization and degenerating, neurotic practices” (he did not know that, less than ten years later, Breathitt County would have its own interracial cooperation committee and a $7,000 schoolhouse dedicated to colored education).184 Just as when Hiram Freeman and his sons opposed Breathitt County’s Democrats in the 1870s, black mountaineers were not to be mentioned. In 1912, with the prospect of “race-suicide” on many Americans’ minds, their invisibility was more crucial than ever in a place assumed to be racially uncontaminated.