A Tribute To Harry M. Caudill

A Tribute To Harry M. Caudill May 3, 1922-November 29, 1990 Harry Caudill's death on November 29, 1990, sent shock waves through Southern Appalachia and beyond. Friends called one another just to talk— about Harry and about the mountains and who could take his place as an Appalachian spokesperson. He was eulogized in a half-dozen articles in The Mountain Eagle in his native Whitesburg. Stories appeared in the major dailies of the country and Charles Kuralt mentioned him in his CBS Sunday Morning program . He was the best-known Appalachian of the past three decades. Many eople adulated him; some despised im; others weren't sure they always 9 understood him. Harry Caudill was a complex man of many talents. He was best-known as an Appalachian prophet, in the mold of Jeremiah, and his prose and spoken rhetoric blistered the hides of those he assembled as wrongdoers: legislators in the pockets of special interests; strip miners and other mine operators with more interest in profits than in safety of the environment; educators who did not educate children to the best of their potential ; and the absentee owners who took away much more than they returned to the region. He was also a lawyer, legislator, and a university teacher of history. But there was another Harry Caudill who dearly loved a good story and told it with florid adjectives and powerful verbs. I remember being at the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington once when he came in and started to tell about the wondrous passenger pigeons, now extinct, that were once so plentiful in Eastern Kentucky. When he got into full cry, his eloquent but "mournful voice" (as someone called it) could be heard throughout the place, and soon doorways were filled with the heads of secretaries and poverty experts, and they were drawn irresistibly in a tight circle around him. He related several stories to the amazement, puzzlement, and delight of these earnest poverty warriors before going off to the White House to present President Johnson with a Kentucky rifle. There was yet another side of Harry, which concerned his misgivings about us natives of the region who had not responded to his calls for action or to other challenges. He feared that unprepossessing ancestors, a depressing environment, and selective migration had weakened our genes and that well-meaning welfare programs had sapped our resolve. He was criticized for blaming the victims of the evils he had so vividly described in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, but he persisted in blaming all parties for the persistent poverty of the region. Yet even as he scourged us, he did research on Appalachian heroes—those who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor or the Distinguished Service Cross—and speculated on why the mountains had spawned such heroes. He also delighted in the wonderful characters he had known in the mountains and whom he celebrated in two of his later books. Harry Caudill was like a lot of us mountain folks, except more so. He was independent, an individual who relied on his own opinions and notions. But he was an intellectual, always reading, and almost every time I saw him or talked with him on the phone, he had a new idea that he was anxious to discuss. He was the first to speak of colonialism. He was the first I heard to point out that radical reformers are usually sorry administrators , or that institutions decline and fail. Ron Eller has said that Harry was absolutely critical to the Appalachian generation coming of age in the 1960s— in raising their consciousness and their anger and riveting their commitment to improving the region. He was the only Appalachian in that era who had the talent, the courage, the insight, and the compelling voice to write a book like Night Comes to the Cumberlands and to get it published by such a national press as Atlantic Little-Brown in Boston. He was important to all of us, because he changed this region by changing the way people, including his enemies, think about it. This conference is dedicated to Harry Monroe Caudill, a hero in the battle for justice...