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6. "There has always been the bitterest political feeling in the county": A Courthouse Ring in the Age of Assassination
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6 “there has always been the bitterest PolitiCal feeling in the County” A Courthouse Ring in the Age of Assassination So it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men’s minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers his benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or misjudgment, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him. Violence must be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. . . . And it is to be observed, men are either to be flattered and indulged or utterly destroyed—because for small offences they do usually revenge themselves, but for great ones they cannot—so that injury is to be done in such a manner as not to fear any revenge. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532) “Republicanism,” Henry Watterson envisioned in late 1888, “is simply an epidemic. Like Federalism, cholera, Know-Nothingism and yellow fever, when it has run its course, it will pass away.”1 It was an oddly sanguine appraisal of incumbent Grover Cleveland’s recent electoral defeat (Benjamin Harrison had narrowly lost the popular vote while winning the Electoral College) and Republican congressional gains. Marse Henry’s lifelong raison d’être was to rally his party, even in hard times. Nevertheless, it was a pecu153 154 Bloody Breathitt liar time to predict the Grand Old Party’s imminent demise, even from the northernmost edge of the Solid South. As far as Kentucky’s near future went, Watterson was not so much overly optimistic as he was absolutely wrong. The 1888 death of vive voce and the adoption of a secret ballot benefited Republicans all over the state as well as the western counties’ tobacco-belt Populist insurgency.2 Just as it had once been caught between North and South, Kentucky was again wedged between the state’s agrarian past and its industrial future—an advantageous position for Republicans. In 1895 (the first year the secret ballot was used statewide) they captured the state’s House of Representatives and elected William O. Bradley, “the Kentuckian who broke the ‘Solid South,’” its first Republican governor.3 As they watched the rest of the South circle the wagons of Jim Crow, Democrats were appalled by what they called Bradley’s “mongrel ideas of mixed schools and similar vicious principles.”4 His plea to repeal the state’s “separate coach law” was met with white jeers (and the aforementioned chaos of 1896), and his summoning of militia to Frankfort during a prolonged legislative conflict angered both factions.5 Even after such heavy-handedness, Bradley’s party slowly flourished as Democrats “left the party in its hour of need.”6 William McKinley’s razor-thin 142-vote advantage over William Jennings Bryan, and the appointment of the state’s first Republican U.S. senator, amounted to “a bitter morsel in the mouth of Kentucky Democracy.”7 “It’s goodbye solid South,” a western Kentucky Democrat lamented as Bryan’s defeat was confirmed.8 Even with vigorous, honest, two-party competition, Democrats refused to accept Bradley’s legitimacy, especially given his vetoes of any and all regulation over the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) “Railway Emperor” and its everincreasing freight prices.9 Distrust of Bradley and the L&N fueled the career of one of the South’s most unlikely firebrand politicians, Democrat William Goebel.10 The Pennsylvania-born Union army veteran’s son, a watchmaker’s apprentice turned lawyer, represented the urban minority of a rural state still electing Confederate veterans as governors (a wizened James McCreary returned to the office in 1911 after a thirty-two-year intermission).11 For a time, “control by the conservative well-to-do, aristocratic, ex-Confederates of the [Democratic] party was passing,” while politicians like Goebel, “more demagogic, more radical, more willing to please tenant farmers and labor were taking control” in many southern states.12 What set him apart from a Comer, Blease, Aycock, or Vardaman was his express openness to black voters (most of whom received him coolly).13 Goebel confronted not only [3.235.46.191] Project MUSE (2024-03...