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

5. "This City's Never Dull": Public Culture in Progressive Era Lexington

chapter five “This City’s Never Dull” Public Culture in Progressive Era Lexington There still remains a part essential to a proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe. . . . It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little actions which go to make up life. In any community . . . it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life. —W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 “Where does the dust come from, and who raises it?” is one of the questions which the street cleaning committee of the Clean City Club is beginning to take up actively, and [it] will make a study of . . . efficient street cleaning methods. —“Civic Club Will Fight Dust and Dirt in Lexington,” Lexington Leader, 29 April 1915 Lexington’s collegiate literary societies retreated from the community’s cultural stage and from the campus spotlight during a period when the Bluegrass city was rapidly evolving from a Victorian to a “progressive” city. Yet all the while, it remained firmly rooted in the New South—a vibrant, ambitious , optimistic, reformist, fervidly intellectual and yet virulently racist and often quite violent cultural climate. On the night of 10 January 1917, forty-nine-year-old Governor A. O. (Augustus Owsley) Stanley and three friends left Louisville hurriedly aboard a chartered train to travel overnight toward Murray in far western Kentucky. A successful, “progressive” politician and a widely respected orator, Stanley had put his literary society days at State College and Centre College far behind him. He had served twelve years as a Democrat in the U.S. House 144  Taking the Town of Representatives before being elected Kentucky’s thirty-eighth governor in 1915. However, during that long night aboard the speeding train, one can only wonder whether his mind drifted back to the youthful pleasures and glories attending those halcyon days as a student orator as he prepared himself for one of the most difficult and pivotal public addresses he would ever make. Governor Stanley, impelled by oath, inclination, and circumstance to uphold and defend centralized, bureaucratic, governmental, and judicial authority against any threat posed by civilian enforcement of community will, was traveling to Murray to face and rebuke an angry mob. Enraged by the murder of a white policeman, this mob was seemingly bent on lynching not only the black alleged murderer but also the white judge and prosecutor attempting to shield the accused.1 Stanley arrived in Murray on the morning of 11 January 1917. He bravely faced the angry crowds on the streets, gave an impassioned speech in a packed courtroom that dispersed the mob, took the judge and prosecutor aboard his train to ensure their safety, and ordered the continued safekeeping of the accused murderer at another location until he could be duly tried in court. The Lexington press followed the incident in western Kentucky closely and tended to emphasize Stanley’s bravery (he had gone to Murray with no guards or security forces), his determination to uphold the rule of law, and his powerful oratorical abilities, which “turned armed men from thoughts of vengeance and sent them away from the court house in tears.” In addition, the Lexington papers noted or reprinted other press accounts of the national acclaim Stanley won from black leaders, who praised his defense of the black man’s rights, and from those who saw his actions as setting “a splendid example to those States where lawlessness too often is permitted to have its way.” Other, more recent accounts of the incident have highlighted (1) the irony attending the praise by blacks, for Stanley was no racial egalitarian; (2) the governor’s dogged and sincere determination to uphold his oath of office; and (3) the political ambitions that may have motivated his dramatic behavior (Stanley aspired to be a U.S. senator). Stanley’s courtroom speech was published in full by the Lexington Leader on 12 January 1917, and it is worth examining because embedded in it are images highly suggestive of the cultural climate in Kentucky at that time.2 Stanley’s address to the mob at Murray was praised in the Boston Transcript , and that article was reprinted in the Lexington Leader. The Boston “This City’s Never Dull”  145 article noted that although “oratory of the...