In a mid-1990s political science monograph, nineteenth-century white intraracial violence in Kentucky provided a primordial explanation for a very current political trend. “Because of Kentucky’s history of dueling and feuds, its penchant for self-reliance, and its isolation, one would not be surprised to find that 95 percent of rural Kentucky households are armed; about half of the males in those areas, it is estimated, carry guns either on their person or in their vehicles. Given such powerful attitudes, it is also not surprising that the Kentucky General Assembly, strenuously lobbied by the National Rifle Association (NRA), in 1984 prohibited Kentucky localities from regulating the distribution of firearms.”118 By placing the origins of their supposed “powerful attitudes” about gun ownership into a past “beyond the polis” suggested by dueling and feuds, opposition to gun control was invalidated as acceptable political behavior (for that matter, the NRA’s lobbying power in the legislature was conflated with a popular affinity for guns as a causal factor, thus rendering the argument inconsistent and confused). This cast the gun control debate as a hierarchical relationship between a knowledgeable, benevolent urban elite and a rural populace ignorant of modern norms and obsessed with an unfortunate past defined by “regressive political tendencies.”119 Although Breathitt County was not individually mentioned, its history of since-depoliticized violence was integral in delegitimizing the ideology of late twentieth-century Kentuckians as well as distorting the temporal distance between the age of “dueling and feuds” and the late twentieth century’s “culture wars.”
In another scholarly engagement with the rural working class, an anthropologist studying gender and labor relations in western North Carolina used feud in a more nuanced fashion in a published moment of confession. The scene described a family quarrel over a matter of racial and regional identity politics (and involved the use of a racial epithet) that ended with one subject reminding another that their living in “the South” ultimately stifled the debate. “I have been loathe to offer this vignette because it presents mountain whites as ignorant, hate-mongering, and racist—a partial truth which invokes the Hatfields and McCoys [my emphasis]. Failing to note instances such as these, however, I unwittingly construct Appalachia as egalitarian, bucolic, and white [Anglin’s emphasis], echoes again of the local schema. It is equally important to note that this moment of virulent racism did not go unchallenged, but was refracted and relocated in the debate between Hazel and her father [Anglin’s subjects].”120 The vignette reflected an issue probably very common to researchers who harbor sympathy for their subjects. But the language the author used to reveal this is more telling than was probably intended. “Hatfields and McCoys,” the phrase that Americans use interchangeably with “feud,” was offhandedly linked with the “ignorant, hate-mongering, and racist” even though the ethnographic sketch in question had nothing to do with a familial vendetta or, for that matter, any act of violence. The anthropologist used the familiar surname pair as a surrogate for some mudsill of white American existence that could only be spoken of in the fictive form of mythologized historical figures and that is, unlike her previously idealized subjects, undeserving of her sympathy or “help.” It would seem that feud, or its synonyms, suggests not only a format for primordial violence but a racial and cultural presence that tests the limits of scholars’ belief in multiculturalism and “cultural pluralism or moral relativism.”
More recently, feud had a particularly egregious mishandling in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). In trying to trace the variety of unstudied factors that contribute to various types of human “success,” Gladwell appropriated Harlan County’s Howard-Turner feud of the 1880s as an example of the omnipresence of “cultural legacies.”121 In doing so, he displayed as “little obligation to [historical] veracity” as J. Stoddard Johnston, John Fox Jr., T. C. Crawford, or any of the other local-color writers who interpreted eastern Kentucky’s history of white intraracial violence for their own ends.122 As detailed in an earlier chapter, the so-called Howard-Turner feud not only involved men of more than two surnames, it had far more to do with one county’s two-party system than familial hatred.123 In Gladwell’s telling, Harlan County was “a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it,” founded in 1819 by “eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles.”124 He then skipped ahead many years to the obscure livestock-related feud origins (in the 1880s) without mentioning any other specific dates, the better to demonstrate its primordialism. The “Scotch-Irish,” “steeped in violence” in the Old World, brought their proclivities with them to Appalachia but, although Gladwell argued that “one of the world’s most ferocious cultures of honor” took root throughout the southern highlands, he neglected to explain why the four feuds he named all happened within one discrete corner of Kentucky rather than all over Appalachia (or, for that matter, any parts of the United States with substantial “Scotch-Irish” populations but no history of notable violence).125
Gladwell’s use of Harlan County, Kentucky, shows that cultural continuities and social inherencies still hold popular currency when it comes to explaining human behavior. To demonstrate this he quotes historian David Hackett Fischer (for whom the feud phenomenon was only part of a larger ahistorical thesis on British inherency and primordialism) and journalist John Ed Pearce, while leaving out the more thorough work of Altina Waller, Kathleen Blee, and Dwight Billings. In fact, it would seem that Gladwell selected the relatively obscure Howard-Turner feud in order to avoid their books due to their dedication to detail and emphasis on contingency and historical context—attributes that do not support Gladwell’s point. The origins of the “feudists’ ” dialogue he uses is uncited. Outliers was a humble middlebrow suggestion that, although continuities provide satisfying answers, change does happen, and therefore contingency should receive more attention. Gladwell’s chapter on Harlan County suggests precisely the opposite. His selection of the Howard-Turner feud and his employment of apocryphal sources rather than more thorough ones comprised a purposeful, gratuitous disservice to understanding violence.126
Gladwell’s poor handling of feuds has deep roots, namely, an abiding refusal among educated people to acknowledge complexity within what they hold to be “simple societies.”127 During the worst days of troubles in Rowan, Perry, Harlan, Pike, or Breathitt counties (or any number of other smaller incidents the Gilded Age press labeled a “feud”), the number of newspaper correspondents was always low. Reportage of events often gave way to innuendo and unfounded assumptions. Throughout the nineteenth century discussions of feuds had always been more associated with fancy than with fact, but this was when the concept was almost purely within the fantasy. When feud was applied to factual violent deaths during Reconstruction and afterward, it meant the belittlement of killing.
This was partly a timeworn war correspondent’s syndrome, an urban outsider’s tendency to “explain violence as a product of marginality and relative deprivation, or even [evoke] simple theories of violence as a phenomenon of the frontier.”128 Attributing violence to environmental “otherness” (“They are simply not like us”) has always been easier than delving into bare facts, especially when men with guns stand in front of these bare facts. But the refusal of writers to strive to find the origins of feud violence is also a tool for delegitimizing its practitioners and even its victims, as is the primeval social atmosphere suggested by kinship, temporality, and the various other attributes applied to eastern Kentucky by the outside world.
Breathitt County, the place that John Fox Jr. considered the Kentucky/mountain feud’s alpha and omega, was not interpreted exclusively by the outside world.129 “Bloody Breathitt” was recorded and created according to a combination of the wants and needs of outsiders as well as those of the county’s own inhabitants. But the end results were analogous to that of the Hatfield-McCoy feud or the Harlan County War. In due course, it was decided to be in virtually everyone’s interests for the ca
usality of political divisions to be subordinated to the language of feud.
“A killing in Breathitt always seems to be big news”
In Jackson, Kentucky, the news of 1891’s peace between the Hatfields and McCoys was received as it was everywhere else: a telegraphed half column in the newspaper with references to the Middle Ages, gross exaggerations of the conflict’s length and death toll, and a general oversimplification of the facts. “The Hatfield-McCoy feud which has lasted nearly twenty years, and caused the death of 100 persons [in] Logan county W. Va., and Pike county Ky., has at last ended. Like the ‘War of the Roses’ it was terminated by a marriage. A truce was proclaimed, a Hatfield married a Miss McCoy, a peace congress was call and terms amicable to both parties were agreed upon. Thus ends one of the most bloody feudal wars of modern times not equaled in ferocity and fatality, perhaps, by the wars of the Scottish Highlanders.” John J. Dickey received the news with foreboding. Noting the recent heightened national attention on eastern Kentucky as a whole, Dickey dourly predicted that fact and fancy would become intermingled in written accounts of his adopted section’s “feuds.” “The feudal wars of Eastern Kentucky will no doubt be utilized in coming years by writers of fiction,” read a Jackson Hustler editorial. “It is in this form, perhaps, they will go down to posterity as no historian feels like chronicling the naked facts, and incorporating them into local history. Already two novels have been written to celebrate the deeds of the Hatfields and McCoys.”130
The missionary journalist’s concerns reflected a passion for historical accuracy that shone through the oral histories that filled hundreds of pages in his immense diary. Breathitt County was home not to one iconic famous feud but to a series of marginally well-known spates of lawlessness dating back to the war, making the truthful recording of its past a task so byzantine as to be almost impossible. Since his arrival Dickey had touted the county’s improvements over other eastern Kentucky trouble spots and protested what he considered unfair media misrepresentations.131 He had tried to be fair to Breathitt County in his own recording of its “naked facts,” and he was concerned that other writers would not. And he was correct; eastern Kentucky feud narratives almost always subordinated facts to colorful façade, and descriptions of events in Bloody Breathitt were no exception. A little over twenty years after Dickey made his prediction, one daft author placed “a family feud between the McCoys and the Hatfields” in Breathitt County.132
The Hatfield-McCoy feud’s end coincided with the Kentucky Union Railroad’s arrival in Breathitt County. The railroad’s eminence in the lives of Jackson’s residents represented an opportunity not afforded to the residents of the more isolated Tug River Valley to the northeast. It offered Breathitt an opportunity to divest itself of an image that dated back to the 1870s. If white intraracial violence was a product of isolation and “family feuds,” as had been said for years, the railroad was a sure cure. But just over a decade later, when James Marcum’s death reoriented national attention toward the county again, this assumption was disproven. “The Breathitt County feuds,” wrote the Courier-Journal soon after Marcum’s murder, “furnish a contradiction to the old adage that wherever newspapers, railroads, and colleges penetrate feuds are vanquished.”133 Bloody Breathitt seemed to embody the conception of feud, while also negating its most popular assumptions.
The same newspaper had begun Bloody Breathitt’s definition more than twenty-four years before, when the Kentucky militia’s Jackson occupation gained national press attention. But this was long before Bloody Breathitt became familiar to Americans outside Kentucky. The mountain Kentuckians’ alleged need for civilizing in the winter of 1878–79 (as detailed in a previous chapter) established what would become the feud belt’s essential premise. When Breathitt County once again received widespread media scrutiny, the mold for its interpretation had already been set in other eastern Kentucky counties. Because of the “feuds” of the 1880s and 1890s, it was arguable that Breathitt’s experience was an example of a greater whole. But Bloody Breathitt’s creation came about with contributions from a diverse, often conflicting array of forces, not all of whom agreed upon how the strange county should be defined. To an observer from the outside world with no prior knowledge of the county’s history or politics, it was an eastern Kentucky county little different than most others, beset by a racial or cultural tendency toward communal violence irrespective of county boundaries.
But at the same time, there was also an impulse to make Breathitt seem strange even among its neighbors and within eastern Kentucky’s larger feud mythos, a viewpoint more likely to be espoused by the mountain white’s self-proclaimed defenders. Whenever the “outbreak of another feud in ‘bloody Breathitt’ ” was reported, “the world infer[ed] that battle, murder, and sudden death are commonplaces in Appalachia,” travel writer Horace Kephart complained from his North Carolina hermitage in 1913.134 Relatively orderly feuds were carried out in surrounding counties, opined a fictional character in 1922, “not laywaying and ambushing and sech, like in Breathitt, whar the wrong man gets kilt often as not.”135
But Bloody Breathitt’s seemingly inherent violence did not encourage greater attention to be paid to possible political causes. The conception of “Bloody Breathitt” was very different than the Hatfield-McCoy feud or any of the other feuds or “wars” that were reported in other eastern Kentucky counties. A feud was an event, or a series of events, with a beginning (albeit an often obscure or unimportant one) and an ending. To a degree, it was determined by clear contingency. But for there to be a series of relatively self-contained feuds within the confines of one county, as was the case with Breathitt, violence would have to be a permanent product of the terrain rather than of human agency, and therefore inherent in the culture for reasons beyond direct comprehension; Harlan County, Kentucky’s renaming as “bloody Harlan” during the coal strike violence of the 1930s was a product of a similar rhetorical turn.136 This was why the persistence of the Hargis-Cockrell feud was exaggerated and said to continue “despite the fact that most of its actors have been laid low by bullets.”137 By suggesting that the late feud lasted past the deaths of most of the political actors who acted as instigators or victims, feud was suggested to be a localized ontology of violence rather than a historically finite event or series of events. Whether Bloody Breathitt was part of the feud belt or singularly perverse, its violent history was decidedly inherent, irrespective of what went on in the outside world. No matter what was revealed about the political stratagem that led to James Marcum’s murder, it was ever after considered something as intrinsic to a place as flora and fauna.
After the Hargis-Cockrell feud, the international feud analogies continued in the press, forecasting that “Breathitt” was on its way to argot status. “The feuds of Breathitt County and of the mountains,” concluded one activist, grew out of the “code of morals which belong to the old Scotch Highlanders.”138 Newspapers in Frankfort and Chicago agreed that the events of 1902 through 1908 rivaled “the worst stories that have come out of Corsica and Sicily.”139 Sources that acknowledged political impetus used temporal exaggerations to make the feud’s electoral origins seem more distant in time than they actually were. Even when the “official position and political influence” of modern politicians was recognized, they were still considered only aggravating factors in “feud wars” that had “raged since the Kentucky mountains were first settled by white men,” or at least were “older than [the] War.”140 A children’s novel published less than six years after James Hargis’s death (and a year before Sheriff Callahan’s) recounted the feud lasting “for generations” after “some election for a county judge.”141 “The Breathitt folks live in the Eighteenth century; you might almost say in the Seventeenth,” said the New York Sun via telegraph from Jackson in 1903. “They have not changed much since the Revolution” and “know little and care less about the opinions of the world beyond the mountains.”142 Republican Kentucky newspapers, usually less willing to separate Bloody Bre
athitt from the state’s political present than the Democratic opposition, still could not resist comparing the Hargis courthouse’s corruption to the conditions of the “the middle ages.”143 In the interest of being au courant, Louisville’s Evening Post ran cartoons associating Bloody Breathitt with Russia’s ongoing invasion of Manchuria as well as the recent slaughter of Bessarabian Jews.144 Breathitt County existed in the United States of the present, but it was easier to dismiss its implications if it was placed as far away in space and time as possible—nowhere served that purpose better than tsarist Russia.
In 1903, Louisville’s Evening Post lampooned Breathitt County’s murders in several zany cartoons, some making snide comparisons with contemporary events abroad. (Louisville Evening Post, May 13 and 29, 1903)
After 1903, “Breathitt,” bloody or unmodified, briefly became a glib metaphor. After the grisly murder of Serbia’s King Alexander I (involving disembowelment followed by defenestration) just weeks after James Marcum’s death, a Life editor compared it to “habits in Breathitt” (a Chicago newspaperman compared Alexander’s successor King Peter I’s chances of assassination to that of a Breathitt County prosecuting attorney).145 A Memphis newspaper included “Breathitt County fandangos” in a list of civilization’s woes Arctic explorer Frederick Cook had left behind him.146 In the humor magazine Puck, a grizzled westerner named “Tarantula Tom” told about “Crimson Gulch,” a rowdy mining camp left pacified after “a feller come along from Breathitt county, Kentucky, an’ we felt so much like amateurs that the boys all quit tryin’ to show off.”147 Seven years later the same magazine hoped “some beneficent, heedless, rakehelly, irresponsible, light-hearted cyclone, earthquake, avalanche, conflagration, tidal wave, comet, pestilence, or plague would arise and smite, overwhelm, wipe out, submerge, consume, chew-up-and-spit-out, devour, emasculate, or destroy” Breathitt County and other recent trouble areas.148 In a reverse of the old Mediterranean metaphor, a character in an American novel about Sicily exclaimed that the island’s vendetta habit was “worse than Breathitt County, Kentucky,” with no further explication needed.149 When a Virginia courthouse massacre made national news in 1912, one commentator branded it “an echo of the Breathitt County feud.”150
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