“I don’t know how to tell you of its indescribable beauty.”
40 Acres and No Mule
“HEAVEN MUST BE a Kentucky sort of place.” Legend has put the words in the mouth of that trapping man, Daniel Boone. Let it stand.
But Kentucky was a fable. It was the land we hadn’t come to yet — that far place of dreams where meadows were fair, forests were noble, streams were overflowing. It was always the land beyond — over another mountain, across another rolling river. It was the land God made just right and put in exactly the right place.
It was the Bluegrass and the Cumberland, the Belle Rivière and the Chenoa. It was the wide Missouri and the Sweetwater, the High Plains of Nebraska and the Grand Tetons. It was Oregon and the golden horn of Yerba Buena. It was San Xavier and the City of Angels. All of it was Kentucky, dream-haunted, fabulous, utopian. If we could only get there, it would be the Garden of Eden.
The swells of the Pacific brought the dreams to an end. They said Kentucky is not a place. It cannot be found. Kentucky must be built. It must begin with man in harmony with nature, and man at home in the human community.
Very well. Begin with a piece of country shaped like that eternal symbol of work — the moldboard plow. Make it a natural reservoir with mountains on the east and a broad water highway on the north. Let the basin be fertile and rich, so that it will grow bluegrass and golden tobacco and tall corn and fat cattle. Let the plow go to work.
Then spill over the mountains and down the water highway into the great basin and heartland every kind and type of man. Stir and mix them all together. In the bluegrass land lay out broad streets and build a college called Transylvania and call the town the Athens of the West — Lexington.
In the middle of the rich basin, in a double log cabin, call ten statehood conventions and birth a state. Call it Kentucky. Build another college and call it Centre. And call the town of the double log cabin Danville.
On the lovely Chenoa, lay out another town. Put the state capital there. In its jeweled cup of hills and bending river it will look like a vineyard town in the Belgian Ardennes, but call it Frankfort.
Begin with the land and the great diversification of men. Add the plow. Add education and law and order and the legislative process. Join with fourteen other states to form a more perfect union. Add churches and homes.
And for a long, long time the result was very nearly the Kentucky of fable. The great basin and heartland breathed with the seasons and produced richly, intellectually, physically and materially. The people lived by the rhythms of the land, and there was a time, and there was a rich warp and woof to life.
Even when the rest of America was jolted by the industrial revolution at the turn of the century into a faster and faster pace, the heartland of Kentucky — from Somerset to Shelbyville, from Winchester to Bowling Green — continued to live by the rhythms of the land. It stayed unhurried, rich, fertile, and the inner clocks of its people remained geared to the pulse and beat of the land.
Then something happened and there began to be a shift in mood and a change in rhythm. There was another war, a different war, a bigger war, which began to bring a shift in mood and a change in rhythm. There was another war, a different war, a bigger war, which ended with the Bomb and Hiroshima. And when it was over, time seemed to be running out, and the breathing of this great heartland was suddenly too slow and its people had a rhythm that was too slow.
Suddenly the emphasis was no longer on the land. The great tobacco belt, the fine bluegrass land, the land of corn and fat cattle must step up, must make progress, must grow and expand and become bigger and bigger. It must catch up, it must keep up, it mustn’t fall behind. It was all very well for Switzerland to be the jewel of Europe; Kentucky could not afford to be the jewel of America. It must not be last of the fifty states.
Almost overnight Progress was no longer related to the richness of human life and the stature of men in the human community. We forgot that Progress is an unthinkingly accepting notion that can sanctify crime if necessary, and we let Progress become industry and big business and superhighways and more and more construction, and we geared education to pressures.
We have this now in the heartland. We have great industrial complexes that sprawl and belch, and the people, with their inner rhythms disturbed, can now stand at an assembly line. Every little town and city in the area has its industry, small or big, to boast about, and fights for more. Close out the farms and move the people into industry. Progress.
We have the broad ribbons of superhighways, and more and more are yelled for. People who no longer know the rhythms of any land must be always to-ing and fro-ing, going nowhere in particular, but going, and they always go faster and faster. Planned death. Progress.
We have dams and lakes and soon there will be no living water left. Some of them are wise and useful, for the storage of water in a land that has unwisely diminished its water sources. But some of them are pure pork barrel. Close out the farms and put the people on water skis.
We in Kentucky are out of rhythm. We have lost the beat to which our inner clocks were geared and have not yet found another to which we can step confidently.
History proves that man is greatest when all his capacities are developed harmoniously. Our greatest problem in the heartland of Kentucky is to rediscover the old dream of a Kentucky sort of place. We must build, but we must do it providently, carefully, thoughtfully, and we must keep the harmony and the rhythm of man in his total environment as its central purpose.
(This chapter was printed originally as a special feature in the Louisville Courier Journal.)