Fifty Years After "Night"

I used to think you couldn't know anything about Kentucky until you'd read Harry Caudill's classic "Night Comes to the Cumberlands."

Now I think you can't know anything about the world the plutocrats are trying to create throughout the country until you read Harry Caudill's classic "Night Comes to the Cumberlands."

Because it's all there: the arrogance of the rich; their contempt for workers; the government corruption; the feudal society justified by fundamentalist religion; the poverty, exploitation and despair.

Harry had it nailed in 1962.

John Cheves and Bill Estep at the Herald:

Fifty years ago, lanky, loquacious Harry Monroe Caudill of Letcher County climbed onto the national stage and tapped the microphone.

For the April 1962 issue of The Atlantic, Caudill wrote an essay none too subtly titled The Rape of the Appalachians. He told of his native Eastern Kentucky mountains and the out-of-state corporations decapitating them for coal through strip mining. An accompanying photograph showed the rubble of a demolished hillside.

"During the last 15 years, coal-mine operators have systematically destroyed a broad mountainous region lying within five states — Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Alabama," he wrote. "By a process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being ripped to shreds."

Few Americans had given much thought to Appalachia. Almost none had heard of Harry Caudill, small-town lawyer and father of three. That was about to change.

The next year, Caudill's essay begat his first book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, about "the helplessness and hopelessness" of Southern mountaineers. That begat extensive news coverage of Appalachian despair, which begat sympathy for this "whipped, dispirited" corner of America.

"The mountains have become a vast ghetto of unemployables," reporter Homer Bigart wrote from Whitesburg that October in a story on the front page of The New York Times. "Crowds of listless, defeated men hang around the county courthouses of the region."

Bigart, whom Caudill had led around, told of malnourished Kentucky children plagued by intestinal parasites, so sick and starving they ate dirt. Caudill was quoted as saying, "This is what happens to a great industrial population when you abandon it, give it just enough food to keep it alive and tell it to go to hell."

 "This is what happens to a great industrial population when you abandon it, give it just enough food to keep it alive and tell it to go to hell."

You could use the same words today to describe Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Akron, Buffalo - the very booming cities to which unemployed miners and their families fled in the '50s and '60s and thrived for a time, only to see their children and grandchildren exploited, exposed and abandoned by the same forces.

The Herald's stories begin a year-long series. Much more at the link.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/16/2442971/chapter-1-he-brought-the-world.html#storylink=cpy