Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in the Bluegrass, 1880-1917

1. Lexington in the Gilded Age: Public Voices

chapter one Lexington in the Gilded Age Public Voices She only requires to be more fully and correctly known to . . . become in every way the compeer of any inland city. —Lexington, the Central City, 1887 On 2 April 1879 George W. Ranck, educator, newspaper editor, and historian , stood before his audience in Morrison Chapel on the campus of Kentucky University in Lexington to deliver a historical address during the centennial celebration of the city’s founding. Reconstruction, and the federal military occupation of the South, had ended only two years before. Lexington and other Kentucky towns and cities had sustained some damage during the Civil War, but Kentucky had generally been spared the worst of the physical destruction and desolation visited on the South. Nevertheless, the war had left the state’s economy, infrastructure, political institutions, and social fabric in “a deplorable condition.”1 Few remained untouched by the war, and its “bitter legacy” left opinion and loyalty sharply divided and community solidarity badly damaged throughout the state. Lexington’s James Lane Allen dramatically expressed the situation in Kentucky when he wrote, “not while men are fighting their wars of conscience do they hate most, but after they have fought; and Southern and Union now hated to the bottom.” The perceived federal excesses during the Reconstruction years only added to the division and rancor . Although legislated racial segregation had not yet become thoroughly entrenched in the 1870s, white sentiment was reflected in the state legislature ’s refusal to ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and extending civil rights and suffrage to blacks—constitutional changes that Lexington attorney and historian Samuel Wilson still referred to in 1928 as “the three obnoxious 14  Taking the Town amendments.” Race relations between blacks and whites in Lexington, reflecting the situation throughout the emerging New South, were tense and could quickly turn violent. Four of the six known lynchings of black men in Kentucky in 1878, the year before Ranck’s centennial oration, had taken place in Fayette County.2 Though the bitter divisions of the war were still felt statewide, white sentiment, especially in the Bluegrass region, often favored the South. Moreover, the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy had become enshrined and memorialized in monuments in Lexington as elsewhere, and ex-Confederates had come to dominate state politics through their control of the Democratic Party. There seems to have been much truth in the assertion by one author that Kentucky “waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union.” The political situation in Kentucky paralleled the Democratic “redemption” of one southern state after another in the postwar period. In Kentucky, the Democratic “redeemers” were themselves divided into two factions: the Louisville-based “New Departure” Democrats, who favored accommodation with, and modeling of, the industrialized North, and the more conservative, Bluegrass-centered “Bourbon” Democrats, who sought to maintain their vision of traditional southern ways. Nevertheless, both factions joined in a successful coalition against the Republicans, and “the vanquished ruled the victors” in Kentucky in the years after the war.3 Yet no more than a hint of these turbulent social and political conditions found its way into the text of Ranck’s centennial address at Morrison Chapel. Rather, employing only acclamatory rhetoric, he insisted that his auditors must congratulate themselves on their “liberal, enterprising and appreciative spirit” and their civilized attention to “sacred duty.” Furthermore, he assured them, they had laid aside “political divisions, religious dissensions , and prejudices of nationality and race” to gather as “one harmonious brotherhood . . . to honor the memory of the virtuous and the brave.” Invoking “that mysterious hand which marks the eras and the ages on the dial plate of time,” Ranck recounted in summary fashion and glowing terms the early history of the founding and settling of Lexington, a city he called “the literary and intellectual centre” of the region. Ranck’s address was given during the historical period often referred to as the Gilded Age, a term derived from the title of an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Historian Charles Calhoun succinctly summed up the Gilded Age as the Lexington in the Gilded Age  15 period in which “the central fact of American Life was the evolution of the nation from a largely agricultural, rural, isolated, localized, and traditional society to one that was becoming industrialized, urban, integrated, national , and modern.” Perhaps...