Fifty Years of DarknessBy John Cheves and Bill Estep

Harry M. Caudill

Chapter 1: Meet the man who focused the world on Eastern Kentucky's woesBy John Cheves and Bill Estep

jcheves@herald-leader.com bestep@herald-leader.comDecember 16, 2012 

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."

Among those stricken by the stories was President John F. Kennedy, who told his aides to read Night. Before he was assassinated in November 1963, he had been planning a trip to Eastern Kentucky. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, made the trip instead, declaring his War on Poverty in front of a tar-paper shack in Inez.

And lo, aid rolled into the mountains. Appalachia collected billions of dollars, much of it through the new Appalachian Regional Commission established by Congress. The money paid for — and still pays for — roads, schools, water lines, health care and welfare.

Caudill grew into a celebrated international spokesman for the plateau, author of nine books on the region and an Appalachian history professor at the University of Kentucky. He met with presidents of the United States who were moved to act by his words. He badgered bureaucrats and businessmen to do more to help, to be bolder.

"He was grateful that he had been able to call the attention of the nation to these problems," his widow, Anne Frye Caudill, said in an interview this year at her home in New Albany, Ind. "Night put together for the first time the history of the Cumberland Plateau and the forces from outside that had created the sad state of affairs there."

It made a difference.

From 1960 to 2000, spending by the Appalachian Regional Commission reduced Appalachian poverty by 7.6 percent relative to the country as a whole, according to a study by UK labor economist James Ziliak.

Coal mining was subjected to new taxes and new worker-safety and environmental laws. In the 1980s, Kentucky finally outlawed the "broad-form deed," a controversial legal device that allowed coal companies to strip-mine people's land against their will. Caudill had agitated against the broad-form deed for most of his adult life.

Conservation caught on as Caudill and others fought to defend natural treasures, including the Lilley Cornett Woods and Red River Gorge, from development. Young do-gooders flocked to Eastern Kentucky as anti-poverty volunteers. Many settled in Whitesburg, where Caudill lived. Some remain today as gray-haired civic elders. Night changed people's lives.

"Reading that book had a profound effect on me," said acclaimed writer Wendell Berry of Henry County, who was teaching in New York City when Night was published. "It showed me how a Kentuckian might accept responsibility for the land and the people."

As bad as things look for Eastern Kentucky today, they're better than when Caudill wrote his book, and in no small part because of it.

"It changed the prospects for Appalachia," said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg.

From outrage to bitterness

In something of a personal tragedy, Caudill never recognized this success. His outrage gradually devolved into disappointment and then bitterness.

Despite all the intervention, countless mountaineers remained poor and idle, he said. Strip mining continued to raze the land. He did not see that Appalachia advanced in important ways because of the light he shed.

"He acknowledged nothing — no progress, no reforms," said Al Smith, a friend and a former federal co-chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission. "Even after Kentucky passed education reform to finally put more money into the mountain school systems, he said it was just a sham and it wouldn't do anyone any good, anyway."

Ultimately, Caudill concluded that Appalachia could not be fixed because its people were broken, its gene pool hopelessly watered down by inbreeding among the "dullards" who wallowed in ignorance and "welfarism" in isolated hollows.

Having publicly blamed coal operators and crooked courthouse bosses for the region's troubles, Caudill privately told friends that he had "come full circle in my thinking and have reluctantly concluded that the poverty … is largely genetic in origin and is largely irreducible."

In 1974, Caudill brought to Whitesburg a controversial eugenicist, William Shockley, who notoriously proclaimed that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and that dumb people are out-breeding their intellectual superiors.

The two men, and several others with an interest in "race science," met for a weekend at Caudill's home. They proposed to study poor Eastern Kentuckians as part of a research project on inherited intelligence. Cash bonuses would be offered in exchange for sterilization. It was time for some ill-fated family lines to end, Caudill said.

Their project — never publicly disclosed — stalled for lack of money. But Caudill stuck to his belief that genetics are destiny. He admired Denmark, where, at least into the 1960s, citizens with low IQs and other "undesirable" characteristics underwent state-organized sterilization.

"Dad was not just associated with people like William Shockley on the spur of the moment. He fully agreed with the sentiment that three generations of imbeciles is enough," said Caudill's older son, James, who attended the meetings with Shockley. "His views of the underclass were not as sympathetic as many people think."

Writing to an acquaintance in Iowa in 1975, Harry Caudill said society "has a right and a duty to prevent people from reproducing when the prospects are overwhelmingly large that their children will be feeble-minded and chronically dependent on other people. This is not killing anybody; it is simply preventing the appearance on Earth of people who will have to burden other people in perpetuity."

Shortly before his death in 1990, Caudill sounded just as dour in a letter to Lexington lawyer Larry Forgy, a future Republican nominee for governor.

"The basic problem in Kentucky is not a lack of schools, libraries or other facilities, but rather is a deeply ingrained cultural resistance to the very idea of learning," he wrote.

Mostly forgotten now

Caudill's admirers wince at memories of his bitterness. They prefer that his legacy be advocacy of wise environmental stewardship and the courage to challenge long-entrenched powers, as a writer, a citizen-activist and a teacher.

"No one else at the time was saying the things that Harry was saying about the corruption in the relationships between business and government," said Ronald Eller, an Appalachian historian at UK and author of Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945.

Most of Caudill's battles, including the fight over surface mining, still are being waged, his friends say. When Gov. Steve Beshear indignantly demands that federal regulators "get off" the coal industry's back, it brings to mind Caudill's lament that Kentucky governors humor liberals by passing environmental laws, and they humor conservatives by never enforcing them.

Modern audiences can't appreciate the sheer physical courage that Caudill showed by confronting the coal industry a half-century ago while raising a family in the coalfields, his friends say. He walked among those he scolded in a place where dissent could lead to harassment, even violence.

In 1968, several sticks of dynamite were tossed at the Pike County home of anti-poverty activists Alan and Margaret McSurley, shattering windows and showering them and their infant son with debris. No one was arrested.

The offices of The Mountain Eagle, the scrappy Whitesburg newspaper for which Caudill wrote opinion pieces, were destroyed by a firebomb in 1974 after the paper took on local police corruption. A police officer was convicted in that bombing.

"Harry and I were at a friend's in Louisville one time, and we started talking about the responsibility that writers face," Berry said. "I said it would be a serious matter to have written something that got someone killed. And Harry said, ‘Yes, and it also would be a serious matter to write something that got you killed.' He said this so quickly that I realized it had been on his mind a lot over the years." Unfortunately, his admirers say, while Appalachia remains a popular cause for journalists and academics to rediscover every few years, Caudill is mostly forgotten now beyond the Letcher County public library, which bears his name.

He committed suicide in 1990. The only person to seriously attempt his biography — former Los Angeles Times reporter Rudy Abramson — died in 2008 before he could publish it. The manuscript rests with Abramson's grown children, who don't wish to discuss it.

"I'm not sure a lot of people today know who Harry Caudill is," said Loyal Jones, the former director of Berea College's Appalachian Center and author of Appalachia: A Self-Portrait.

"I mean, they do if they're involved in Appalachian studies. Other than that, no. He's been gone for a while," Jones said. "Unless you're an Appalachian scholar, I suppose you may wonder why you should be reading Night Comes to the Cumberlands at this point, though so much of it really is relevant today."

Chapter 2: The making of an angry book about an exploited AppalachiaBy John Cheves and Bill Estep

jcheves@herald-leader.com; bestep@herald-leader.comDecember 17, 2012 

Harry Caudill and his wife, Anne, at their home in Whitesburg in July 1963. His first book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, was published that month. BILLY DAVIS — The Courier-Journal

In 1963, Harry Caudill of Whitesburg published Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, which shined a spotlight on the plundering of the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. The book forever changed Appalachia. On the eve of the book’s 50th anniversary, the Lexington Herald-Leader examines the man behind the book.

Harry Caudill was born to write the book on Appalachia.

His roots were deep in Letcher County. His grandfather's grandfather James Caudill helped settle it in 1792. Generations later, Cro Carr Caudill, his father, had an arm ripped off at a coal tipple. Disabled, Cro entered politics for a living, holding county office and exposing young Harry to the deal-making and storytelling of the courthouse.

"My generation grew up in the 1930s," Caudill was to recall. "It was an activist time, the New Deal years. And many of us got the idea that government could make a difference, … that society didn't have to rot itself to death."

Caudill served in World War II as an Army infantryman. He was awarded the Purple Heart after shell fragments in Italy so badly mangled his left foot that he suffered for the rest of his life. He had to wear special orthopedic shoes to walk.

Returning home to "dear old Letcherous County" from the University of Kentucky law school in 1948, Caudill opened a one-man law practice to represent poor people. They arrived without appointments, filling his small waiting room, many with bodies or lands broken by mining.

Caudill rejected the lucrative career path of becoming a general counsel for coal companies, writer Wendell Berry observed in an essay last year.

"He thus from the start made himself exceptional: a bright young Kentuckian who brought his professional education home, to become not an exploiter of the land and people but their advocate and defender," Berry wrote for The Progressive.

About the same time, in the middle of the 20th century, Kentucky's coal industry was making a change that disturbed Caudill. Labor-intensive underground mines were losing out to highly mechanized surface mining that employed fewer men and caused more destruction. Massive machines transformed wooded hillsides into lunar landscapes. Unionized underground miners who had enjoyed good pay and benefits were discarded.

Caudill didn't oppose coal mining — in fact, he and his brother held business interests in Wayne Cannel Coal Co. in Letcher County — but strip mining seemed to put greed above any other consideration, said Caudill's older son, James.

"Having been in the coal business himself, he recognized that coal was a very valuable natural resource and it was going to be mined," James Caudill said in a recent interview. "The question for him was not whether to mine coal but how to mine coal. He did not think it advisable, or even proper, to do massive damage to the countryside to get it out."

Harry Caudill began to criticize the coal operators and called for an end to strip mining in the mountains. He thereby forfeited clients with ties to coal, which meant anyone with much money, former Gov. Edward "Ned" Breathitt said in a 1998 oral-history interview.

"He didn't have any real establishment clients," said Breathitt, a lifelong friend. "They would retaliate and say, 'Don't hire Harry Caudill.'"

'Damn near worthless'

Beginning in 1954, Caudill's neighbors elected him three times as a Democratic member of the state House of Representatives. In Frankfort, he led an investigation of dishonest and incompetent school officials. He sponsored the state's first rudimentary restrictions on strip mining.

However, when he saw his strip-mining law on the books, riddled with loopholes added along the way, he dismissed it as "damn near worthless." He left the state Capitol with a sour taste in his mouth. Frankfort could not be trusted to act honorably, he said.

"Of all American politicians, the small-bore officials who run the states are the most greedy and least scrupulous, and the coal royalists learned early … how relatively paltry sums, if well placed, could bring the passage of helpful laws, the veto of harmful ones and, in a pinch, the nullification of judicial opinions," Caudill later wrote in his 1976 book The Watches of the Night.

Caudill didn't respect the voters, either. In 1960, he anonymously published a scathing essay in Harper's Magazine titled "How an Election Was Bought and Sold," detailing for a national audience the venality of Letcher County politics. The byline that launched his writing career identified him only as "A Kentucky legislator."

"Last year I was elected to the Kentucky legislature after paying off citizens of my district with the money and whiskey they demanded in return for their votes," his essay began. "Many of the men who sit with me as legislators were elected in the same way. This is nothing new in Kentucky, but I think it is time that some politician, somewhere, tell the straight — and embarrassing — story of how a candidate may be compelled to pay for votes in this country if he is to be elected."

A voracious reader, Caudill spoke as he wrote, formally, with a rumbling eloquence that was equal parts Shakespeare, Old Testament and Letcher County. Much of his writing was dictated aloud by a pacing Caudill to his wife, Anne, who patiently took notes and later typed his letters and manuscripts.

Caudill answered his phone with a booming: "What an inspired surprise! To what do I owe the signal honor of this communication?"

If a client needed his attention, he begged off other commitments: "I have a shivering soul here whom I must save from the gallows!"

At public forums on surface mining, he decried "the mindless oafs who are destroying this world and the gleeful yahoos who abet them."

His gift for storytelling extended to exaggeration. That charmed listeners at his dinner table but got him in trouble years later, after he was established as a widely quoted academic historian, one who sometimes bungled facts and almost never included footnotes, endnotes or sources in his books.

"I think he overstated his case, but he had to to make his point. And his points were valid," Breathitt said in the 1998 oral-history interview.

"One time a national magazine sent David McCullough out to Whitesburg to interview Harry for a big profile story," said Loyal Jones, former director of Berea College's Appalachian Center.

"So McCullough goes out there for a couple of days. Then he comes back and sticks his head in my door and says, 'I've just been spending time with Harry Caudill. My God! Is everything that he told me true?'" Jones said,

laughing. "Well, I was hesitant to commit myself to a question like that, not knowing exactly what Harry had said. So I told him, 'You know, David, there are two kinds of truth.'"

Upset but inspired

Despite his qualifications — his roots, his eloquence, his outrage — Caudill did not intend to write a book. But he was upset by a scene he witnessed in the spring of 1960.

A coal-camp school on Millstone Creek, near Whitesburg, invited him to deliver a speech to its eighth-graders. Caudill described it:

"A shower sent a little torrent of water through the ancient roof onto one of the scarred desks. The worn windows rattled in their frames. … Outside, the grassless playground lay in the shadow of an immense slate dump and was fringed by a cluster of ramshackle houses. One of the graduates had been orphaned by a mining accident, and the father of another wheezed and gasped with silicosis. The fathers of three others were jobless."

The school ceremony opened with hollow-cheeked children singing America the Beautiful: "America, America, God shed His grace on thee, …"

Caudill "came home and got to telling me that he was just so saddened by that experience," his widow, Anne Caudill, said in an interview this year. "He started talking to me, talking about what had brought Eastern Kentucky to the state that it was in. The long history of the place. He was just thinking it through.

"I thought it was interesting enough that I wrote it down as he talked. If he had in mind that this would be published, he never said."

Eventually, Harry Caudill decided he must share this historical narrative in a book that would be called Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area.

Someone, he said, needed to tell the world about the mountaineers reduced to penury, fleeced by robber barons seizing their timber and coal for pennies an acre, suppressed by lickspittle politicians whose orders were to keep taxes low and workers pliant.

By April 1961, Caudill had enough pages to send a partial draft to his friends Barry and Mary Bingham, the well-connected owners of The Courier-Journal in Louisville. "It made Mary Bingham cry," Breathitt said.

"We both feel positive that you have a book emerging here," Mary Bingham quickly replied in a letter to Caudill. The Binghams forwarded the pages to their son-in-law A. Whitney Ellsworth, an editor in New York for The Atlantic, which was tied to publisher Little, Brown & Co.

Ellsworth was impressed enough that his magazine ran an excerpt in April 1962 titled "The Rape of the Appalachians." But Little, Brown & Co. wasn't sure whether a market existed for a sprawling 150,000-word treatise on the agonies of Kentucky's mountains.

Ellsworth prevailed. (His own great literary future was imminent. Within a year, he would found The New York Review of Books.) In June 1962, he sent Caudill a $1,000 advance and a telegram: "Book accepted with great enthusiasm."

The country lawyer had become an author. Everything would change.

Chapter 3: The world comes to Whitesburg to take Harry Caudill's 'poverty tour'By John Cheves and Bill Estep

jcheves@herald-leader.com bestep@herald-leader.comDecember 19, 2012 

Harry Caudill talked with Robert Kennedy when the then-senator from New York visited Eastern Kentucky in February 1968. Kennedy, who toured Appalachia to study its poverty, soon would declare himself a candidate for president. He was assassinated that June. Photo provided

In 1963, Harry Caudill of Whitesburg published Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, which shined a spotlight on the plundering of the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. The book forever changed Appalachia. On the eve of the book's 50th anniversary, the Lexington Herald-Leader examines the man behind the book.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area was published on July 9, 1963. U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall wrote the introduction, calling it "a story of land failure and the failure of men." The book established author Harry Caudill, then 41, as the voice of the beleaguered mountain people.

Caudill did not shrink from the role. Over the ensuing years, he would write scores of magazine and newspaper essays and eight more books, go on television, give countless interviews, lecture to universities and civic groups, and testify to Congress — all while he supported a family with his one-man law practice in Whitesburg.

Commercially, Night was a modest success. It earned positive reviews across the United States and immediately sold several thousand copies. A Hollywood filmmaker paid $500 for the movie option, although nothing came of it.

Culturally, Night was a bombshell, with an impact far beyond mere sales.

No Kentucky book ever brought the state more attention or more firmly established its image in the eyes of outsiders. It was a story of exploitation — of outside corporations buying Appalachian timber and coal for chump change from unwitting natives, extracting everything of value from the Cumberland Plateau and leaving a ravaged landscape and a penniless people.

"Tens of thousands of acres," Caudill wrote in its pages, "fell to the exploiters, from a people who, though they might fight each other with medieval brutality, at a business negotiation were as guileless as infants." For better or for worse, it made Appalachia look pitiful.

"The book was a pivotal moment. Harry articulately and openly challenged the system," said Ronald Eller, an Appalachian historian at the University of Kentucky. "The fact that so much about Night still rings true today is quite an indictment of the political culture of the commonwealth."

Night struck a chord with President John F. Kennedy, a rich man's son who was shocked by West Virginia poverty while campaigning there in 1960. Kennedy ordered his aides to read the book and plan a federal aid response. Although nothing in his life could have prepared him for the national spotlight, Caudill was not overwhelmed. He had hoped to start something big.

"If a man has a foremost duty, it is to pass this land and culture on to his child in better condition than he found it because the unborn can't defend themselves," Caudill told The Courier-Journal in Louisville about the time Night was published. "The waste in Eastern Kentucky is immoral. In a sense, we're destroying the home of people yet unborn."

'Ugly' Appalachia

In the optimistic, vigorous New Frontier of the early 1960s, Americans believed they could pay any price, bear any burden and meet any hardship. Other books were warning about environmental calamity (Rachel Carson's Silent Spring) and poverty amid plenty (Michael Harrington's The Other America). Night Comes to the Cumberlands slipped neatly onto the concerned citizen's bookshelf.

By fall 1963, the whole world was coming to Whitesburg to share a meal with Harry and Anne Caudill in their modest, book-lined home and take his "poverty tour" of shattered mountains and shantytowns. Harry Caudill, an outdoorsman, also loved to take visitors hiking through the Lilley Cornett Woods, a rare old-growth forest in Letcher County. The woods — about 450 acres — had been bought and protected by a cantankerous coal miner who slammed his door in the faces of timber buyers waving money at him, Caudill said.

The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, CBS News and others sent reporters to document conditions, all of them finding things as bad as Caudill described. Academics, church groups and government officials followed to study the problems and offer aid. College students arrived in search of a cause to which they could devote their energy.

"There was a constant stream of people coming in and out of our home, which was a great joy, but it certainly made it a busy time in our lives," Anne Frye Caudill recalled in an interview this year. Many thousands of people signed their guest book, she said.

Word spread of "ugly, poverty-ridden" Appalachia, as The New York Times's book review of Night put it. Harry Caudill wryly described the response: Americans cleaned out their closets and shipped tons of old clothes to Eastern Kentucky; threadbare suits cut for 1940s fashions dominated the mountains for years. A charitable wholesaler sent 12,000 pairs of children's shoes. Other donations were less thoughtful.

"The town of Harlan was blessed with an entire carload of cabbages for several days on a side track while the cargo rotted, and the Louisville and Nashville — which touts itself as 'Old Reliable' — promptly discarded it on a riverbank," Caudill wrote. "The ten tons of decaying vegetables sent an odoriferous pall to plague the county seat and raise serious doubts about the whole idea of Christian charity." Many Americans contacted Caudill directly, having read about him in news stories. Marie Swope of Lathrop, Mo., asked for his help adopting an Appalachian baby girl so she could give the child a decent home. "Those children of Kentucky need a chance to survive," Swope wrote.

A frustrated Olga Nagy of Belmont, Mass., wrote Caudill because donated cartons of household goods kept getting returned to her by the post office. Nagy mailed them to vague addresses based on names she saw in news reports. She sent one to "Dr. Fox, Woman Doctor of Leslie County, Kentuckey." It didn't get to whoever that was.

"They sure are lazy in Kentucky, even the postal clerks, just waiting for a handout as usual and find it a little difficult to go beyond the call of duty," Nagy complained. Caudill graciously thanked Nagy for her generosity and gave her the exact postal address of a religious charity in the area for which he could vouch.

In early November 1963, President Kennedy told incoming Gov. Edward "Ned" Breathitt that he was arranging a visit to Eastern Kentucky to announce aid for the impoverished region, Breathitt said in a 1998 oral-history interview.

The New York Times — required reading at the White House — had just published a series of front-page stories from Appalachia that confirmed Caudill's descriptions in Night. In fact, Caudill had befriended the Times reporter and escorted him around.

Then history interceded: Kennedy was shot to death Nov. 22 in Dallas. But his successor, Lyndon Johnson, assumed Kennedy's agenda as his own. In 1964, Johnson took the tour Kennedy planned, dropping into Martin County by helicopter to declare his War on Poverty and shake the hands of startled mountaineers on their front porches.

Billions of dollars

Caudill welcomed federal intervention. The last chapter of Night called for a Southern Mountain Authority, based on the Tennessee Valley Authority that brought electricity to much of the rural South during the 1930s. Caudill wanted counties consolidated; entrenched political bosses swept from office; most of the scattered rural population relocated to a few built-up towns or pushed out of the plateau entirely, to outside cities where they could find employment; and a huge public investment made in education and infrastructure, such as dams and lakes to provide recreation, tourism jobs and cheap hydroelectric power.

More than anything, he said, Appalachia needed employers independent of coal.

It was a hugely ambitious agenda. And it didn't happen.

Instead, Congress established the Appalachian Regional Commission, or ARC, in 1965 as a fairly traditional public works project. Billions of dollars in federal aid would go to counties designated as "Appalachia," predominantly for road construction, with other projects sharing smaller sums.

Appalachia ended up much bigger than Caudill imagined. Thirteen states would share in the ARC's munificence, from New York to Mississippi. (In Kentucky, Appalachia as Congress defines it extends through Lexington's suburbs to just outside Bowling Green in the western half of the state.) That sprawling map satisfied pork-hungry members of Congress whose districts could cash in while siphoning resources from the area Caudill intended: West Virginia and rugged, adjoining sections of Kentucky and Virginia.

Caudill dismissed the ARC as an uncoordinated boondoggle. He said it didn't end the region's dependence on coal, improve schools or break up political cliques. By 1985, it had spent $656 million in Kentucky, two-thirds of it on roads that — Caudill said — swiftly were pounded into dust by overweight coal trucks no governor would allow the state police to ticket, for fear of antagonizing coal operators. "I think the ARC ought to be put to work or abolished," he told Forbes magazine.

Caudill never got his rural revolution, said Loyal Jones, former director of Berea College's Appalachian Center.

"None of these agencies would do exactly what Caudill wanted them to do, what he thought they should do, so he got disgusted with them," Jones said.

"Some of his ideas were terribly ambitious, but they weren't going to happen," Jones said. "Things like nationalization of the coal industry — that wasn't going to happen. There was just too much wealth against it. You couldn't do that even during the liberal years."

Mixed reviews

Caudill gave mixed reviews to other federal efforts.

He traveled to Washington at President Jimmy Carter's invitation for the signing of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. It was the first major step toward regulating strip mining. Caudill liked the law but said Kentucky governors undermined it with lax enforcement at the state level to appease their donors in the coal industry.

Medicare and Medicaid, created by Johnson, provided health care for the old and poor, which was much of Appalachia. That was good, Caudill said. On the other hand, each new handout encouraged malingering by the lazy, he said. Free access to medicine let pill addicts claim "bad nerves" and stay doped up all day — a prescient criticism given the prescription drug abuse currently afflicting Eastern Kentucky.

Caudill was impressed by activists who moved to Appalachia to improve things, often as part of federal programs. But he wrote in his 1976 book The Watches of the Night that these young people were tolerated only when they busied themselves with harmless tasks — painting old schools, picking up trash. More militant activists who registered voters or protested strip-mining were seen as a threat by coal operators and county officials, so they were harassed until they fled.

For example, in 1967, the Pike County sheriff raided the home of Joe and Karen Mulloy of the Appalachian Volunteers, which organized poor people against strip mining. The county prosecutor charged the Mulloys with sedition — plotting "the violent and forceful overthrow of the government of Pike County." The Mulloys spent years fighting the case in court. Meanwhile, the Appalachian Volunteers was defunded and shut down. By the late 1970s, when a young Atlanta woman asked Caudill about jobs in Appalachia that would let her help people, he warned her: "The Appalachian Mountains have worn out generations of people who have wanted to be helpful. It is increasingly difficult to find a suitable situation."

'Get to work'

Not everyone walked away discouraged.

Bill Richardson, a graduate student in architecture at Yale University, first came to Eastern Kentucky in 1966 with a passion to tackle the region's poverty.

Richardson was inspired by Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Getting to meet Caudill was thrilling, he said recently.

"He was a true visionary," Richardson said. "He thought of big things. He thought of things that could really make a difference."

Richardson and partners designed a community center and affordable housing. Later, Richardson got a grant to set up the Appalachian Film Workshop in Whitesburg, Caudill's town, as a non-profit media center that would train local residents to make movies and create their own images of their home.

The name soon changed to Appalshop. Forty years on, it is a wide-ranging arts and education center that includes a radio station, record company, theater troupe, gallery, annual music festival and classes on how to produce many kinds of media. In 2011, Appalshop reported $1.7 million in revenue and 32 employees, making it a significant economic force in Letcher County.

Caudill "made us feel more able to do anything," Richardson said, "and that we should get to work, start doing something."

Chapter 4: Disillusioned, Harry Caudill blames 'genetic decline' in Eastern KentuckyBy John Cheves and Bill Estep

jcheves@herald-leader.com bestep@herald-leader.comDecember 21, 2012 

Harry Caudill talked with an interviewer in his office in 1983. A portion of Caudill's vast library about Appalachia is at the right. Photo by John C. Wyatt.

For a while, in the immediate wake of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Harry Caudill thought his book would help him save Appalachia. He had credibility and the nation's attention. Surely he could use that to build something great, something permanent.

"How long can the American taxpayers afford to pump $200 million annually into the Kentucky mountains in various forms of welfare aid without achieving any significant improvement in the region's economy?" Caudill said while testifying to Congress in 1964. "We ask only an investment in our future as part of the nation's future."

Ultimately, although conditions in the mountains improved, the salvation Caudill wanted never materialized. The poor remained legion.

That embittered Caudill. He came to blame his neighbors for being hopeless, for having "weak genes." And that led him to draw up a sterilization scenario for Eastern Kentucky, working in secret with William Shockley, a notorious eugenicist of the era.

"This region is a laboratory for the study of genetic decline," Caudill wrote in 1974, making a pitch to Shockley for intelligence testing of Appalachian children and possible vasectomies for their fathers. Caudill had soured after years of fruitless reform efforts.

In 1966, Caudill helped organize the Congress for Appalachian Development, "to restore self-government in the Appalachian Mountains." About 250 people attended its inaugural session. They planned mighty enterprises — dams to generate public power, model towns that would be wonderful places to live. But the group found no financing. It evaporated the next year.

Then he established a smaller, more focused group, Our Common Heritage. It sought to connect expatriated Eastern Kentuckians laboring in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. It wanted to publish a list of these Kentuckians with vocational skills who could be induced to return home if factories opened there. Again, though, there was no money to launch the project.

"We had a great deal of enthusiasm, but we ended up mothballing it after 10 months," said Lowell Reese, who was executive director of Our Common Heritage.

At a Louisville party in 1965, the owner of a men's shirt company told Caudill that he would be willing to open a factory in Letcher County if only the locals were capable of operating modern equipment.

Taking the man at his word, Caudill spent months writing to U.S. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, U.S. Rep. Carl Perkins, D-Hindman, and others in Washington. He asked for federal funding for worker training. No, they said, that was a state responsibility. In Frankfort, state officials told him no, it was a federal responsibility. Letcher County didn't get the shirt factory.

Caudill pestered old and new friends in government and business. He suggested the creation of a furniture industry in Eastern Kentucky using native hardwoods; a bottled-water industry using mountain springs; and a revival of Appalachian farming, using crushed limestone to replenish mining-depleted soil. Appalachians once raised their own food, he liked to remind people.

"We have everything we need here, including enough agricultural land, to feed many, many people," he told one interviewer. "You take the Big Sandy Valley. It's unbelievably rich for potatoes, berries and so on. And water? At a time when water is very precious in many parts of the world, we have 55 inches of rain a year."

Eastern Kentucky desperately needs jobs outside of coal, Caudill told everyone. Mining wrecks the land, water and air, he said. It's given to boom-and-bust cycles that regularly drive local economies to their knees. Everyone thanked Caudill for his counsel and then turned away. He got the message.

"I think we'll mine (this place) into a desert," he lamented in the mid-1970s. "We'll dig until every lump of coal is taken out of these hills."

'The trash element'

By then, a decade after Night Comes to the Cumberlands was published, Caudill feared that Eastern Kentucky had missed its chance. Despite unprecedented levels of public and private aid, mountaineers still did not stand on their own feet, he said.

"He was not overly optimistic about fixing places once they're messed up," James Caudill, the oldest of Caudill's three children, said in a recent interview. "It's not just bad things happening to the land; it's bad things happening to the people, and it's hard to come back from that."

About that time, a despairing Caudill discovered the theories of William Bradford Shockley Jr., a controversial scientist at Stanford University in California.

Shockley was a brilliant physicist who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor. Then he veered far out of his field by espousing the doctrine of "dysgenics," arguing that stupid people, for a variety of reasons, breed faster than intelligent people, thereby weakening the genes of a race over time. (Shockley insisted that his own genes were of the highest quality, tracing his lineage to the Mayflower passengers of 1620.)

Dysgenics was the opposite of evolution's survival of the fittest. It was dominance of the dumbest.

Shockley used his dysgenics idea to make a number of startling claims. He said blacks were, on average, less intelligent than whites; the federal government should consider restricting reproduction by less intelligent people through sterilization and liberalized abortion and birth-control policies; and intelligence tests should be given to establish whose genes are worth passing down. Not everyone deserves to be here, Shockley said.

"Our intellectuals won't think objectively about the poor illegitimate slum babies — both black and white — that come from parents without much foresight," Shockley told The Detroit News in 1974. "There is a very high probability that these children will get a bad shake from the unfairly loaded genetic dice of their parents. Statistically, they have little likelihood of being able to lead satisfactory, rewarding lives in our society."

Scientists trained in genetics have challenged the theory of dysgenics. On average, they noted, scores on intelligence tests increased over the 20th century, a phenomenon known as "the Flynn effect." As for racial differences, black children were likely to perform as well as white children if they had access to schools of equal quality, these scientists reported.

Many Americans were offended by Shockley. Protestors at his public appearances called him a racist, even a Nazi, a nod toward Adolf Hitler's eugenics obsession with breeding a superior Aryan race. By contrast, Caudill was enthralled. For months, he clipped Shockley's speeches, essays and interviews for his personal files.

As Caudill told friends and strangers alike, with the fervor of the newly converted, dysgenics explained so much about Appalachia. Smart and ambitious people fled the mountains to pursue opportunity in cities. This "brain drain" left behind a stagnating population of dullards. Multiply that over several generations — especially as relatives intermarry and introduce chromosomal abnormalities — and you've ruined the gene pool just as surely as strip mining poisons the drinking water, he said.

"The slobs continue to multiply," Caudill wrote to Time magazine in a 1975 letter that the editors in New York politely rejected and returned to him.

Back home, Caudill complained about "the trash element," his son Harry Frye Caudill said in a 1998 oral-history interview. The elder Caudill jauntily told reporters that the best federal anti-poverty program for Eastern Kentucky would be an Army base that could bring in outside sperm.

"My theory was that the soldiers would get the girls pregnant, to the everlasting benefit of the region as a whole," Caudill later wrote. "I still think the suggestion was sound."

The implication — that Appalachian women are slatternly, and anything would be an improvement over Appalachian men — understandably offended some of his brethren.

"Once he kind of drifted into 'Our women will mix with anybody and we need an Army base,' he conceded a lot of his standing," said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg. "He was no longer a hero. He was a guy who made a great contribution at an earlier time."

Whitesburg Conference

In summer 1974, Caudill sent a fan letter expressing admiration for Shockley's dysgenics doctrine and suggested they get together to discuss inbreeding and low intelligence among poor people in Eastern Kentucky.

Caudill sidestepped the question of race, writing: "I know absolutely nothing about the issue of white vs. black intelligence. We have few blacks in this area, and practically all of my observations have dealt with whites."

Shockley was intrigued. Defensive about being called a racist, he thought Appalachia would offer him an isolated pool of weak-minded whites for his research.

Caudill and Shockley scheduled a meeting — which they somewhat grandiosely called the "Whitesburg Conference" — for the final weekend of August 1974, to be held in Caudill's living room. Several of Shockley's dysgenics supporters also came. Always a gracious host, Caudill insisted on paying for the retinue's hotel rooms.

After the conference, a "position statement" circulated among its participants, based on the notes of Memphis attorney J.W. Kirkpatrick, who had attended. (Several years later, Kirkpatrick was publicly identified as a financier for the Ku Klux Klan, and he killed himself.) The group hoped to study the IQs — the intelligence quotient, a score derived from a standardized test — of 40 to 80 schoolchildren and their parents in Eastern Kentucky communities.

If the study revealed "human-quality problems" due to the families' bad breeding, it would be proof of dysgenics at work, the participants agreed. The findings could be used "for sound ameliorative policies and programs at all levels of government." This would include a reconsideration of how welfare is distributed in Appalachia and a "voluntary sterilization bonus plan." Caudill was asked to "cultivate connections for support at (the) local level."

"Maybe the sterilization plan will be an outgrowth of the pilot program and can be implemented at some point after the pilot program has been completed and evaluated," Kirkpatrick wrote. An Appalachian vasectomy clinic was one option on the table.

As the local expert, Caudill recommended studying children in Elliott, Clay and Leslie counties. Those counties were at the bottom of the barrel, he told the group. "Elliott County was pointed out to me several years ago by a bureaucrat in the state Department of Education as a county where the people are breeding down to idiocy," he wrote.

Caudill offered Shockley more counsel: Don't use the phrase "intelligence tests," he said. That could make parents suspicious and — worse — draw the attention of nosy newspaper reporters. Call the tests something like "skill potentials" or "aptitude measurements," which nobody in the communities would understand, Caudill advised Shockley.

Finally, the men decided to grease palms. Local school administrators would be more likely to give them unquestioned access to students if they were paid as "consultants," the men said.

Shockley, Caudill and the others spent the next few months fine-tuning their plans and searching for $10,000 to pay for the field work. Ultimately, as with many of Caudill's projects, money could not be found. The men stayed in touch but did not meet again.

(Notes and correspondence related to the Whitesburg Conference are on file with Caudill's other papers at the University of Kentucky Special Collections Library.)

"It never really got any traction, unfortunately," Reginald Orem, a retired educator and writer in College Park, Md., said in a recent interview.

Orem, now 81, attended the Whitesburg Conference as a protégé of Shockley, who died in 1989.

"Most of the people connected with that are gone now," Orem said. "There won't be another effort like it, I'm sure, because the government doesn't want people to know about racial intelligence and differences in group intelligence and inherited intelligence, even though I think it's pretty clear what some of the results would be."

Unfortunate obsession

Caudill never publicly disclosed his work with Shockley. Their plans for IQ testing and the possible sterilization of Caudill's neighbors did not become known to the world.

But as he aged, Caudill's pronouncements coarsened about "mass dullardism" in the mountains. "The stock's run out here," he told the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1976. "The IQ level has gone down, down, down."

Caudill's grumbling prompted some Appalachian scholars — people who had come up in his shadow — to shake their heads sadly at him, as if he was an embarrassing uncle. One dismissed his weak-genes theories with the quip, "Night comes to the chromosomes."

In fairness to Caudill, eugenics was taught as legitimate science at many American universities when he was a student in the 1940s, said Ronald Eller, an Appalachian historian at UK. That Caudill became so obsessed with it later in life is "unfortunate," but it shouldn't define him, Eller said.

Loyal Jones, former director of Berea College's Appalachian Center, is less forgiving. Shockley and Caudill's genetics theories were worse than offensive; they were completely incorrect, Jones said. Berea College has educated Appalachian youths since 1855, proving that they can be as intelligent as anyone, given an opportunity, Jones said.

"I've known many people who came out of terrible situations, impoverished homes, parents on welfare, and yet they went on to earn college degrees and establish very successful careers," Jones said. "I tend to discount theories about gene pools. The truth is, people will amaze you."

Chapter 5: Harry Caudill inspired the War on Poverty, but gloom darkens his legacyBy John Cheves and Bill Estep

jcheves@herald-leader.com bestep@herald-leader.comDecember 23, 2012 

Harry Caudill, right, accepted an honorary degree at the University of Kentucky in 1971. In 1977, Caudill was appointed a full professor at UK. UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

As 1977 dawned, Harry Caudill got a surprise — a job offer.

Otis Singletary, the University of Kentucky's outsized president, asked Caudill to accept a tenured history professorship at his alma mater to teach about the paradox of Appalachia, the wealth of its land contrasted with the poverty of its people.

Singletary first noticed Caudill in the mid-1960s while directing the federal Job Corps program under President Lyndon Johnson. Everyone in Washington's liberal circles buzzed about Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands, an angry book about the plight of Kentucky's mountaineers.

"All the Harvards and Yalies and policy advisers, all of them had read it," Singletary recalled in a 1998 oral-history interview. "It was a very influential book, maybe in ways that even the author didn't realize."

Singletary's job offer seemed like a no-brainer.

At the time, Appalachia was a popular subject for students influenced by the environmental, people-power and back-to-the-land movements. Those movements, in turn, were inspired by the populist outrage of books such as Caudill's. Who better to teach a class on the troubles of Appalachia?

On the other hand, Caudill was an autodidact, a country lawyer who taught himself history by reading and writing books and essays. He had no relevant graduate degree or teaching certificate, no experience with lesson plans. He was, in fact, a loud critic of "pedagogues" and the teaching colleges that manufactured them.

Singletary knew that appointing such a man to a full professorship would irritate junior faculty at UK, young men with Ph.D.s awaiting their own shots at tenure. He did not particularly worry about their hurt feelings.

The problem for Singletary was the incoming chairman of the UK Board of Trustees: William Sturgill, a rich Eastern Kentucky coal operator and generous donor whom Caudill long had criticized. Sturgill did not want his nemesis hired at UK on his watch, and certainly not to take shots at the coal industry from inside a classroom.

"Sturgill had been the target of Harry's writings," Singletary said in the oral-history interview. "The safest way to put it is, I persuaded Bill Sturgill not to make a public issue out of it. Because one, I thought he would lose. And two, I didn't think it would help the university."

On Feb. 7, 1977, conceding his own doubts about his qualifications, Caudill nonetheless wrote Singletary gratefully to accept the job. Caudill said he was "burned out" after three decades of practicing law. Now 54 years old, he wanted to try something new.

That fall, Harry and Anne Caudill shuttered their Whitesburg home, rented a Lexington place and started an eight-year career as a faculty couple.

Caudill on campus

There weren't yet Appalachian history textbooks, so Caudill cobbled together a reading list of relevant books, articles and government reports, much of it photocopied from his personal library.

Caudill wasn't entirely impressed by UK. He found faculty and students to be insular; he told a friend that few of his colleagues were familiar with the state beyond Lexington's city limits. To remedy that, he organized field trips to Eastern Kentucky for his students and anyone else who wanted to come. The groups toured coal mines, hiked mountains and sat on porches to ask locals about the arc of their lives. Tanya Pullin of Greenup County was one of Caudill's students.

"I honestly don't remember much about the specifics of what he told us in class. But I remember that he was involved — deeply involved in events, in improving his community, in traveling, in meeting important people," Pullin said. She is now, as Caudill once had been, an Eastern Kentucky lawyer and a Democratic state representative.

"I left that class convinced that a person who grew up in small-town Kentucky and who talked like I did could have an effect on what happened in the world rather than just stay home and have things happen to them," Pullin said. "That was an important lesson."

Having juggled a law practice and a writing career, Caudill took advantage of the more relaxed scholarly atmosphere. He took several years and traveled to England to research his next book, Theirs Be the Power: The Moguls of Eastern Kentucky. It identified by name the businessmen who had controlled Appalachia by accumulating — ruthlessly, in many cases — its land, timber and coal, while avoiding responsibility for taxes; pollution; and sickened, injured and killed miners and their families.

Sturgill, the UK board chairman, took another drubbing in Theirs Be the Power. So Caudill was aggrieved but not truly surprised when the University Press of Kentucky, which published several of his earlier books, passed on this one. The University of Illinois Press released it instead in 1983. Some reviewers called it his best book.

"What Harry represented could not have been entirely comfortable for the University of Kentucky," said writer Wendell Berry, a friend of Caudill and a former creative writing professor at UK. "He was a dissenter, and a dissenter is a pariah there. This business about leading a free discussion on important issues in search of the truth is a genteel fiction at UK."

Sturgill, now 88, did not return calls seeking an interview for this story.

Not precisely right

Other problems bedeviled Caudill during the 1980s.

Now that he was an academic historian, not just a lawyer sharing tales of rascality, his work was freshly scrutinized for accuracy — and sometimes found wanting.

In the April 1981 issue of Kentucky Coal Journal, journalist Alice Cornett wrote a lengthy critique of Caudill's books, essays and quotes over his career. She found errors, some fairly harmless, others significant.

For example: More than once, Caudill unfavorably compared safety rates for Eastern Kentucky coal mines to those for undersea Dutch coal mines. He lectured Kentucky coal operators to imitate their more careful, compassionate European counterparts. However, Cornett wrote, Holland did not mine coal under the ocean. Caudill invented that practice out of his imagination. In fact, she said, Holland had stopped mining on land well before the years Caudill cited in his writings.

Another misstep: Caudill said 4 million people left Central Appalachia during the middle of the 20th century, evidence of the region's dire circumstances. But population experts put the era's out-migration at no more than 3 million, Cornett wrote.

"But if you are dealing in overstatement, as Caudill often does, what is a million people more or less?" Cornett asked.

Responding in an opinion piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Caudill acknowledged that he possibly made minor errors or relied on outdated or faulty information in his research.

Then he gracelessly added, putting himself in lofty company: "Even Darwin and the Holy Bible are under attack."

Cornett's broadside started a thorny debate over how much of Caudill's books were true.

One could agree or not with his conclusions about strip mining's ecological devastation. But Caudill buttressed his arguments with folksy anecdotes. He cited unidentified places and companies and quoted unnamed people. "I discussed a huge stripping operation with the engineer who was directing it," he wrote in Night Comes to the Cumberlands. And: "In one county, a huge loading ramp was built at a cost of $70,000." And: "A mountaineer claimed that a company had plowed up his mountainsides." Proper names could be scarce.

Since much of his writing would be impossible for anyone else to fact-check, any known errors raised questions about the unknowable parts.

Also, Caudill's weak-genes theories — his references to "fertile and amoral females" who breed with "dullards" in Eastern Kentucky — and his relentless gloom about the Cumberland Plateau were wearing raw on the rising Appalachian scholars he initially inspired. They were natives, too, but proud of mountain culture. Their books were serious and scholarly, often neutral in tone, meticulously sourced. So they did not rush to defend him.

John Stephenson, then director of UK's Appalachian Center, making him one of Caudill's colleagues, said he was surprised that nobody had "challenged some of his generalizations before. Mr. Caudill is not one to give himself to the normal kind of scholarly reporting that others do routinely. He leaves himself open to that kind of criticism."

Steve Fisher, an Appalachian activist, chided Caudill for his "slipshod and poorly documented research" in the spring 1984 issue of Appalachian Journal.

Even supporters ceded ground while defending him. Caudill was essentially right, they said, not precisely right.

"To criticize Harry Caudill on accuracy is about like saying that Thomas Wolfe's portrait of his mother was not precisely accurate. Harry speaks to sway people and to get at a kind of truth that is beyond facts and figures," Loyal Jones, then director of Berea College's Appalachian Center, said during the controversy.

Once the dust settled, Caudill no longer was the voice of authority on Appalachia. The conversation, in part, had moved past him.

"I think in some ways that pissed him off," said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg.

Rubbing salt in the wound, the UK history department sent Caudill a short note around Christmas 1983 to inform him that "student interest in Appalachian studies on campus has declined." Henceforth, his two Appalachian history classes would be cut to one.

Worst of all, Caudill suffered increasing physical pain.

Caudill's old war injury, his mangled foot, hurt worse than ever. Passing his 60th birthday, having to stand in the front of classrooms and tread on concrete campus sidewalks, Caudill complained that he could find no relief.

Additionally, he soon would struggle with Parkinson's disease, a debilitating brain disorder that plays havoc with motor functions, including walking.

Caudill wrote to Singletary in March 1985, thanking him for the chance to teach at UK but expressing a desire to return home to Whitesburg when the term ended.

Singletary, who died in 2003, told an interviewer that he felt vindicated in hiring Caudill. "I don't think he was ever truly comfortable in the professor's role," Singletary said, but many of Caudill's former students approached him to say how much they enjoyed and learned from the course.

25 years later

Caudill returned to UK in 1986, this time to speak at a conference on the state of Appalachia 25 years after he began writing Night.

It wasn't much of a celebration. More than 100 participants, including scholars and state politicians, "gave bleak prospects" for Appalachia even though "$15 billion in aid poured into the impoverished eastern mountains since the publication of Mr. Caudill's best-selling book," The New York Times reported from Lexington.

The attendees credited the Appalachian Regional Commission with building highways, reducing the area's isolation. They said families were kept alive by the social safety net woven with food stamps, Medicaid, public housing and other welfare.

However, Appalachia still had few good jobs outside of the boom-and-bust cycle of coal mining, they said. The mountains' brightest high school graduates left for opportunities in the cities. (By that point, Harry and Anne

Caudill's three children had done so, too.) One of Caudill's best friends, Tom Gish, editor of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, spoke of mountain counties in which "virtually no one is now working."

Caudill himself had begun referring to Appalachia as a "welfare reservation," where the government deliberately left poor whites to rot while the rest of the nation prospered, just as blacks were abandoned in urban ghettos and Native Americans in Western deserts.

In his final years, Caudill complained that Eastern Kentucky was hopeless regardless of how much taxpayers spent to prop it up. His gloom obscured even the brightest days.

Although he once protested the miserly salaries paid to mountain teachers and their decrepit one-room schoolhouses, he dismissed the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, which increased state funding for rural schools. Caudill told reporters that "money alone" couldn't fix an ignorant rural culture that wouldn't bother itself to learn.

"It would be a great thing indeed if the people of Kentucky and the Old South could develop some real ambition concerning their future and do the work necessary to make that future come to pass," Caudill wrote to a man in California shortly before KERA passed. "I do not expect that to happen, however, because the culture is wrong."

KERA supporters, including former Gov. Bert Combs, a friend of Caudill and a fellow mountaineer, had assumed he would side with them. His cynicism infuriated them. At a post-KERA dinner, Combs would not stop angrily cussing at the mention of Caudill's name.

'A force for change'

The end came Nov. 29, 1990.

At home in Whitesburg, Caudill waited until Anne drove into town to do her shopping. Then he walked to a hemlock tree in his front yard, faced his beloved Pine Mountain and shot himself in the head with a .38-caliber handgun.

"He did it in typical Harry style. He was looking at the mountains," Edison Banks Jr., a Letcher County prosecutor and one of Caudill's former students, told reporters.

Harry Monroe Caudill was pronounced dead a few hours later at age 68. He left behind a legacy of undimmed outrage and a two-page note expressing his love for Anne and explaining that he did not want his declining health to burden her.

He was famous one last time. His obituary ran in newspapers from coast to coast. They called him "Appalachia's proud apologist," which wasn't really true, and "an inspiration for the War on Poverty," which was.

"He wasn't satisfied," former Gov. Edward "Ned" Breathitt, a lifelong friend, explained a decade later. "But that's the attitude of the critic. That's the definition of the critic or the gadfly. If you ever get satisfied, then you get comfortable, and then you're no longer a force for change."

Charles Kuralt, an old journalist friend memorializing him on CBS Sunday Morning, said simply: "Harry Caudill spent his whole life trying to call attention to poverty and injustice in Eastern Kentucky. If you want to get angry, read Night Comes to the Cumberlands."