Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

Epilogue

ePilogue When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. —Randolph Bourne, “Unfinished Fragment on the State (Winter, 1918),” in Untimely Papers (1919) The offending old building was eventually torn down and replaced by the structure that serves as Breathitt County’s court building at this writing (designed by a Lexington architectural firm—fitting, since the men from the relatively distant Bluegrass city had long claimed a shepherding role in Jackson).1 But the source of its infamy was not completely erased. In the twenty-first century a marker near Breathitt County’s present courthouse in Jackson marks the spot of James Marcum’s “feudal” death. Not everyone in Breathitt County wanted history to be relegated to “legend.” Even if no one wished to recount the political details, these events, after all, did happen. But a larger marker nearby commemorates the county’s other celebrated distinction: its contribution to military service in World War I. Breathitt men had always contributed to American wars, and evidence almost suggests they began preparations for war in Europe years before the rest of the country. As early as 1914, Jackson’s army recruiting station had “more enlistments than at any station south of the Ohio River.”2 When the United States entered into the largest war in human history three years later, Breathitt County’s volunteers exceeded its 182-man quota. As a result, no draft notices were issued. It was not the only county to hold that distinction but, for one reason or another, the county—and “her patriotic ex-feudists”—caught national attention.3 From one perspective, the tremendous outpouring of Breathitt volunteers was political; an ever-Democratic county rallying to a Democratic president’s call to make the world “safe for democracy.” From another, it was the masculine “fighting spirit” that journalist Louis Pilcher had touted a few 255 256 Bloody Breathitt years earlier, evidenced by Breathitt-native Sergeant Willie Sandlin’s singlehandedbayonetingoftwenty -fourGermansoldiersatBoisdeForges,France, in 1918 (which earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor).4 From yet another, it was a patriotism born of the county’s natural environment. “The charge of ignorance to which they have been subjected for years is proved libelous by their knowledge of the European situation,” the Christian Science Monitor rhapsodized. “They are natural democrats. They are natural foes of aristocracy and autocracy.”5 Finally, the remarkable record of volunteers may have just as easily revealed a supposition familiar in all American wars: a young male population with few prospects and a collective eagerness to leave their rural home. In any case, this new distinction was widely celebrated. The history of intraracial white violence that had segregated Breathitt County from the United States was now balanced by a “sturdy Americanism” that incorpoThe “feud” marker in Jackson near the present-day courthouse. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) epilogue 257 rated it into the whole, a call to duty from an exogenous source to replace its damaged and unusable endogenous identity.6 “All honor to Breathitt county, long known to the world as ‘Bloody Breathitt’!” western Kentucky’s Hartford Republican announced in 1917. “All honor to the men there who, though they may sometimes have been guilty of mountain feuds and have sometimes fought with unpardonable fury, have heard the call of civilization to protect the women and children!”7 “Thus,” cheered another Kentuckian a year later, “does the outlaw mountain county of Kentucky vindicate herself in the eyes of the world, mocking those who would shame her with a record more fanciful than true.”8 The “fanciful” agreed; “We’ve killed too many of our own folks,” a short story character lamented. “Now this war gives us a chance to show the outside world that there’s more good than bad in us; that we can leave off fighting each other and use our lead on the Germans.”9 The subtext that lurked beneath the praise was that Breathitt County was a vessel of inherent violence that could now be harnessed by the outside world. When “the strange land and peculiar people” of the Kentucky mountains had been “discovered” nearly a half century earlier, their suspected tendency toward killing had been glorified as the prime mover of the American Revolution and westward...