Slender Is The Thread by Harry M. Caudill

Author:Harry M. Caudill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

7. Politics Kentucky Style

NEARLY ALL LAWYERS DABBLE in politics at one time or another. The electorate labors under a delusion that lawyers are uniquely qualified to make laws and hold public offices, whereas Thomas Jefferson warned people to elect their poets and sages. He thought barristers are made cynical by their early exposure to the dark and sinister underside of life. Be that as it may, there is a chronic shortage of both poets and sages in the Bluegrass state so that, of necessity, people turn to lawyers for their legislators and administrators. All judges must be lawyers. Then there are the county and commonwealth attorneys and their assistants. Consequently courthouses are filled with diligent-looking, blue-suited, briefcase-toting counselors on their way to deal with the weighty affairs entrusted to them by their clients or by the voters.

Americans are litigious people and keep lawyers busy, mostly with trivial matters. Rare is the lawyer who has not entertained political ambitions or, more likely, ventured into the political waters in the hope of securing legal fees to be dispensed by his cronies. Consequently, many law offices are centers of political intrigue where candidates are groomed, campaign funds are solicited and dispensed, strategies are mapped, and political speeches and platforms are drafted.

Most lawyers come from political families and have heard much talk of elections and political spoils. Thus their professional lives may be extensions and fulfillments of early political ambitions. This was true to some extent in my own case, though by my mid-thirties I had concluded that politics was too costly a game and should be abandoned so some money could be saved.

The Bell County town of Middlesboro near Cumberland Gap was built by an English corporation in the 1890s. Among the “furriners” who came there was a Scot from Glasgow, Cro Carr. My grandfather admired him so much that when my father was born on December 9, 1892, he was given the unusual Gaelic name of Cro Carr Caudill.

My father lost his left arm in an accident at a Consolidation Coal Company tipple during the bitterly cold winter of 1917. In 1925, and again in 1929, he was elected county court clerk of Letcher County as a Democrat, and that at a time when three-fourths of the voters in the county were hard-to-sway Republicans. Letcher County lies at the headwaters of the Big Sandy, Kentucky, and Cumberland rivers and is walled in by the Pine and Big Black mountains. Its granitic adherence to the Grand Old Party was a living legacy of “the War.” In the history of the county to that time few Democrats had managed to poll a majority for any county-wide office.

My father was inventive and played on the mountaineer’s tendency to sympathize with the unfortunate and the handicapped. He hired an old woodcarver named Ed Thomas to turn out hundreds of wooden statuettes. The figure, painted white, was a crow with an outstretched right wing. The left wing was missing, a poignant reminder to coal miners, moonshiners, farmers, and housewives that he could not fly or scratch like other birds.

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