During the 1930s, the Derby continued to draw patrons to Louisville from across the country. While it retained its place among the most popular festivals on the American sports calendar, the Derby was not immune to the changing cultural conditions brought about by the Great Depression. Once celebrated as a cheerful place where the masses and society swells interacted amicably, Churchill Downs became a tense environment increasingly marred by conflicts between guards and patrons. But even in the worst economic environment in the nation’s history, both the rich and the regular folk continued to flock to the famous racetrack on Derby Day as the Derby continued its growth in national prestige and stature, securing its place as the greatest American horse race at a time when sports provided distraction and diversion for a society under unprecedented economic strain.
As portrayed in national print media, the conflicts and violence at the Derby in the 1930s would reinforce Kentucky’s dualistic identity in the American collective imagination that dated back to the first published portrayal of Daniel Boone 150 years earlier. During the Depression, newspapers described fashionable Derby-goers in language that evoked images of Kentucky colonels and belles reminiscent of the Old South while reports of lawlessness in the Derby infield brought to mind the gone-but-not-forgotten tales of feuds and violence in rural Kentucky that had captivated American readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contradictory images that emerged from the Kentucky Derby in the 1930s reinforced the long-held yet paradoxical notion that Kentucky was home to both lawlessness and refinement. Kentucky’s reputation as an unusual and alluring place continued to grow during the Great Depression, which in turn further secured the Derby’s prominent place in American popular culture.
From the beginning the Derby’s infield, with its wide range of people, helped to contribute to a carnival atmosphere that was interesting and appealing even to those who were not necessarily followers of horse racing. At the same time the presence of high society gave the event an aura of significance and helped to attract “regular folks” to the event in large numbers. Early Derby journalists praised the crowds as representative of an idealized American society in which people could comfortably mix regardless of social station. This amicable mélange of humanity continued to be celebrated in newspapers and to attract Derby visitors well into the twentieth century. In the 1920s the Chicago Tribune had described the Derby crowd as “the great human family in happy holiday mood, all class distinctions lost in the camaraderie which causes millionaires to talk with stable boys, to exchange opinions on the chances of the horses, and to feel, for the day at least, a brotherhood not known in any other sport.” The Derby was a place where “millionaire horsemen and society leaders mingled with the great, jostling, good natured crowd.”1 The New York Times claimed that the Derby “thrilled millionaires in the clubhouse boxes no less than the ragamuffins clinging to stable roofs and trees.”2
The Derby had attracted America’s rich and powerful for years, including leaders of business, politics, stage, screen, and athletics. But no one drew more attention in the early years of celebrity worship at the Derby than Edward Stanley, the seventeenth Earl of Derby, who attended the event in 1930. As the birthplace of Thoroughbred racing, Great Britain was the guardian of the sport’s history. Lord Derby’s attendance thus reinforced Americans’ belief that the Kentucky Derby was a major event worthy of worldwide attention, lending the Derby and American racing increased stature. Lord Derby’s postrace comments were broadcast by NBC radio to a national audience. He engaged in good-natured debate over the correct pronunciation of the race (durby or dahrby), and praised Kentucky’s version as “fine stuff.”3
While Lord Derby’s presence at the 1930 Derby made headlines, the performance on that rainy afternoon by Gallant Fox was impressive in its own right as he seized the lead at the top of the backstretch and never relinquished it, winning easily by two lengths. Winning jockey Earl Sande had won the Kentucky Derby twice previously, in 1923 and 1925. He had largely retired from the sport but, hit hard by the stock market crash of 1929, he was amenable to an invitation from Gallant Fox’s owner William Woodward Sr. to return to riding. Sande’s three Derby wins matched the record then held by Isaac Murphy.
The following year Twenty Grand knocked a whopping one and three-fifths seconds off Old Rosebud’s record time in winning the fifty-seventh Run for the Roses for Greentree Stable. Helen Hay Whitney, the daughter of former secretary of state John Milton Hay and widow of multimillionaire W. Payne Whitney, had taken over Greentree upon her husband’s death in 1927. With Twenty Grand’s win she joined her brother-in-law Harry P. Whitney, who won in 1915 with Regret and again in 1927 with Whiskery, in the ranks of Derby-winning owners. Interestingly, Twenty Grand’s trainer was James Rowe Jr., the son of Regret’s trainer.
The presence of both aristocrats and regular folk at the Derby continued to fascinate journalists in the 1930s. In covering Twenty Grand’s victory, one reporter explained, “The Kentucky Derby is America’s unique annual sporting event. It cannot be considered merely in light of a race. It is a great hegira of multitudes to Churchill Downs, a coming together of many thousands, a gathering where all meet upon the same plane, made equal and joined together by admiration for the Thoroughbred horse.”4 The interaction that year was an unusually peaceful one—for the first time in forty-three years, the police failed to receive a single complaint of unruly behavior—but it would prove to be a calm before a storm of unrest that would be unleashed at the Derby in the years to come.5 Thirty-three detectives had been placed throughout the grounds to keep watch over a crowd that included U.S. vice president Charles Curtis. Curtis, seated in a special stand built the previous year for Lord Derby, reinforced the Derby’s status as one of America’s top sporting spectacles, and further added to the air of respectability that Lord Derby’s presence had brought the year before. Curtis claimed to have had a “positively wonderful time” at the Derby, remarking, “The real Kentucky spirit has been manifested throughout.”6
Helen Hay Whitney, owner of 1931 Derby winner Twenty Grand. (Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
The Derby had long been a place to show off fashion and wealth, but these displays took on a greater significance during the Depression. The fact that the Derby was a favorite destination of the nation’s elite was demonstrated by a 1932 petition circulated by a sophomore at Columbia University in Manhattan requesting that final exams be shifted to avoid a conflict with students’ Derby travel plans. “Appreciating that many of our body will want to attend the Kentucky Derby,” the petition stated, “we look with sadness at the triumph of bureaucracy which will prevent them from doing so without impairment to [their] scholastic standing.”7
Those who made the journey that year witnessed the easy five-length victory of Colonel E. R. Bradley’s Burgoo King over Economic and Stepenfetchit.8 The New York Times reported that despite the tough economic times, “the Derby is still the Derby with all its old glamour and gayety.”9 News from the racetrack the following day told a different story, however; a large group of young men had defied mounted police by rushing a gate on the backstretch in an attempt to avoid admission charges, leading to as many as two thousand unpaid entries.10 This embarrassment for Churchill Downs would lead to an increased security presence in the future.
The following year the action on the racetrack mirrored the clashes between patrons and officials. Rounding the final turn in the 1933 Derby, jockey Herb Fisher was in the lead aboard Head Play. Fisher brought the colt wide, forcing challengers to the outside and opening a clear path along the inside rail for Don Meade, wearing E. R. Bradley’s green and white silks aboard Broker’s Tip. The stretch drive between Head Play and Broker’s Tip would be one of the most dramatic and infamous in Derby history. Attempting to intimidate his rival, Fisher guided his horse left and to the inside, moving to within inches of Meade and Broker’s Tip. While charging down the homestretch, the pair of jockeys exchanged a series of tugs and blows as the finish line neared.
Broker’s Tip (pictured with jockey Don Meade) won the 1933 Kentucky Derby, which is better remembered for the “fighting finish” exchange between Meade and rival jockey Herb Fisher. (Morgan Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
From a trackside position lying on the ground near the wire, photographer Wallace Lowry captured one of the most famous images in American racing history. The photo, now popularly referred to as “The Fighting Finish,” shows Meade grabbing Fisher’s shoulder, and Fisher holding Meade’s saddlecloth. After the horses crossed the wire, Fisher knocked Meade across the face with his whip and lodged a claim of foul against his rival, which was disallowed by the stewards. Following the announcement of Broker’s Tip as the winner, a despondent Fisher broke into tears. Later, in the jockey’s quarters, he again attacked Meade, this time with a bootjack (a solid U-shaped device used to aid the removal of footwear). Newspapers and newsreels across the country carried images of the on-track fracas, and “The Fighting Finish” would become an iconic piece of Depression-era American sports photojournalism, capturing the desperation of a society in flux. Purchased the day before the Derby for $30,000, Head Play would go on to a successful racing career, including a win in the Preakness Stakes and over $100,000 in lifetime earnings, while the Derby would prove to be the only race Broker’s Tip would win in his entire racing career. But what a win it was. It was the second consecutive Derby win, and a then-record fourth overall, for owner E. R. Bradley.
As Derby Day approached in 1934, the first since the end of Prohibition, organizers prepared for what was expected to be Churchill Downs’s largest-ever crowd. Falling profits had forced the track to lower admission prices and reduce the race’s prize money. Organizers also hired detectives from cities around the country and installed units of mounted police in the infield to combat the growing problems of gatecrashers trying to enter the grounds without paying and attempting to access restricted areas. However, efforts to increase security, including a nine-foot wire fence to keep the masses out of the clubhouse area, were not enough to prevent thousands from gaining illegal entry.
On the racetrack that day, automobile heiress Isabel Dodge Sloane’s top colt Cavalcade caught A. G. Vanderbilt’s Discovery in deep stretch to win the Derby by a widening two-and-a-half-length margin. As the horses thundered toward the finish line, they were left with scarcely enough space to run by the horde of spectators that had jumped the outside rail separating the grandstand seats from the racetrack and recklessly swarmed toward the approaching field of Derby runners.
Boy caught red-handed with tools to help Derby-goers enter Churchill Downs illegally in 1935. (Photographic Archives, 1994.18.0923, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.)
Enthusiastic reports of the return of alcohol to the Derby that year were tempered by widespread concern over the behavior of the infield crowd. People climbed ladders, dug holes, scaled roofs, trampled bushes and flower beds, and overran police to gain admission to Churchill Downs. The security forces used nightsticks and engaged in fisticuffs to keep the infielders in line. Disturbances were not limited to the infield, however, as “swank in the boxes clashed with shoddy on the rail,” according to one Louisville newspaper.11 Nor was the rambunctiousness limited to the racetrack. Time reported that the previous night “Derby guests continued their yearly romp, the less restrained firing the annual barrage of empty bottles into the court of the Brown Hotel despite the fact that Kentucky is now wet and liquor is sold by the glass.”12
Winning horse Cavalcade in the 1934 Derby winner’s circle, surrounded by the crowd that had swarmed onto the racetrack during the race. (Photographic Archives, 1994.18.180901, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.)
Newspapers published the names of the notable members of the crowd as usual, but the descriptions of the people populating the infield carried a tone of disapproval. Rather than celebrating the variety of sights and sounds in the infield as had previously been the norm, the Courier-Journal expressed disgust at the scene: “Spread newspapers—California blankets—littered the clean greensward, some relics of a night’s stay on the grounds,” the paper complained. “Men lay about, dozing: some drunk, some just tired. Many failed to see any race. Dice games and cards flourished in the oval during the interludes between races. . . . And the people!”13
Guards try to keep order at the 1935 Derby. (Photographic Archives, 1994.18.0907, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.)
As violent disruptions continued at the Derby, track officials responded with increased policing presence, including state troopers, militia, city police, and National Guardsmen. Readers across the country saw a particularly violent newspaper image in 1935 that depicted a group of National Guardsmen trying to contain a small mob of infielders that was using a wooden post as a battering ram in an attempt to break out of the confines of the infield.14 The guards were armed with clubs as they tried to keep the infielders, some of whom were wielding chairs as weapons, in their space. At least some of the infielders were attempting to access the covered grandstand to escape the rain. The battle between police forces and spectators continued all afternoon. Ultimately law enforcement prevailed, but not before “a few heads were cracked.”15
Security forces were not limited to the infield, as Downs officials also employed thirty-two sharpshooters to protect the pari-mutuel handle. The “grim group of men” charged with guarding the till were led by special Churchill Downs policeman George T. Kinnarney, whose orders to the marksmen were, “If anybody tries to get through those doors, don’t ask questions. Let them have it.”16 That armed guards would be hired to protect large amounts of cash at a major sporting event cannot be considered noteworthy. But the fact that journalists considered it a significant part of the Derby “story” underscores the heightened levels of tension present at the race during the 1930s.
In 1935 William Woodward Sr.’s Omaha joined his sire Gallant Fox as a Derby champion, taking the lead a half mile before the finish under jockey William “Smokey” Saunders and cruising to a one-and-a-half-length victory. During the trophy presentation, winning owner Woodward, a wealthy New York Republican, took the opportunity to declare his political sentiments in front of a national radio audience. Woodward caused the broadcast of the ceremony to be repeatedly shut down and restarted because of his verbal jabs at a member of the ceremony, Postmaster General James A. Farley, a prominent member of the Democratic Party. Referring to his horse’s pedigree, Woodward told Farley, “This is not a New Deal. It is an old deal, and it is a good solid deal—because thoroughbred bloodlines bring out champions when properly crossed.”17 In addition to his political views, Woodward’s comments suggested a distinction between those at the Derby who would appreciate a champion bloodline and those who would not. By implication this was a distinction between the well-to-do seated in dining rooms and boxes in the clubhouse and the masses in the infield.
Omaha, winner of the 1935 Triple Crown, with jockey William “Smokey” Saunders wearing the famous polka dot silks of William Woodward’s Belair Stud. (Cook Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
William Woodward Sr., master of Belair Stud and owner of Derby champions Gallant Fox and Omaha. (Cook Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
Ladies’ clothing storefront window showcasing Derby fashion, ca. 1930s. (Caulfield and Shook Collection, CS.216434, Photographic Archives, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.)
Louisville clothiers were ready for those who wished to conspicuously display their status through fashion on Derby Day. An advertisement for Stewart’s Department Store claimed that the store had the “correct fashion” for the Derby.18 There had been fashion ads in Louisville newspapers aimed at Derby-goers before, but the notion that there existed such a thing as the “correct” fashion was new. Ads for ladies’ dresses, including one called the “Dixie Belle,” and men’s hats and suits for the Derby continued to appear through the 1930s in Kentucky papers and in periodicals published as far away as Chicago. The advertisements for women’s Derby outfits in Louisville newspapers suggested that at the Derby it was necessary to look like “a lady.”
In the interwar period, when Victorian notions of “proper” appearance and decorum for women were being challenged, the Derby existed on the margin of the old and the new. Though the sight of females venturing over to the infield was still rare, women freely wandered the spacious grounds on the grandstand side unescorted and were surrounded by the vices associated with the Derby, including drinking, smoking, and gambling, while remaining safely within view of the clubhouse and boxes, where traditional gender roles were still very much the norm. Men and women alike found themselves in an environment that encouraged a paradoxical mix of liberation and restraint.
An editorial in the Blood-Horse voiced the concern of racing “purists” that the Derby had become too commodified, warning, “No tradition ever survived being converted into a marketable commodity.” But for those racing fans who only wanted to “see the race and ‘avoid the Derby,’ ” the environment at Churchill Downs would only get worse.19
In that environment Louisville hotel managers were forced to combat a growing trend among the tourists of minor vandalism and “souvenir taking.” Although the Derby had become for some a forum to display status, there remained among many Derby fans a sense that they needed to access and participate in some of the elements of the Kentucky “experience” that ran in opposition to codes of gentility and sophistication. Broken glasses, bottles, and lamps, and guests masquerading as jockeys in sheets and towels were some of the scenes that hotel managers attempted to avoid with preventative measures. One hotel decided to issue complimentary cigarette cases to its guests, attempting to curb some of the unsanctioned requisitioning of hotel property in an early example of the commodification of the Derby experience.20
Garden area on the grounds of Churchill Downs on Derby Day, ca. 1930. (Photographic Archives, 1994.18.0874, Special Collections, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.)
Souvenir Kentucky Derby mint julep glasses were first made available at Churchill Downs in the late 1930s under similar circumstances. The glasses were introduced in an attempt to stem the rash of thefts of water glasses in the track’s dining rooms on Derby Day. In 1938 prices for lunch were raised by $.25 and guests were allowed to take their glasses home with them. The following year, Churchill Downs began producing what would evolve into the souvenir glasses that are still collected by thousands today. Though persons traveling to the Derby imagined themselves to be like ladies and gentlemen from the Old South, they were witnesses to scenes reminiscent of the lawless, violent characters in the stories about the mountainous region of eastern Kentucky and the frontier era. They would return home to find their names and descriptions of their Derby outfits in the local society pages, but they might impress their friends even more with their tales of wild experiences in “Old Kentucky,” or, perhaps, with a pilfered souvenir.
By the late 1930s the violence and disruptions at the Derby had largely dissipated. There were no more mounted police in the infield and National Guardsmen’s nightsticks had been replaced by relatively benign devices made of rubber hose. Physical changes to the infield also had a pacifying effect on the crowd. A tunnel running beneath the track to the infield from the grandstand side allowed spectators to go to and from the infield more easily, and heavier wire mesh fencing, securely fastened to thick posts set in concrete, was installed to help ensure that people remained where they were supposed to be. Infield entertainment regularly included a “Confederate” marching band that the New York Times claimed “did much to assuage insurgents with wire clippers.”21 After the tension and violence at the Derby during the Great Depression subsided, Churchill Downs would not again become a site of major conflict until the 1960s.
As Derby Day approached in 1937, Louisville was still drying out from a historically catastrophic January flood. Scores of human lives had been lost, and the monetary damage caused in the city was estimated to be in excess of $50 million in Depression-era dollars.22 But as spring returned, popular attention was once again focused on the big race. Samuel D. Riddle had the most celebrated three-year-old in the United States, just as he had with Man o’ War in 1920. Riddle’s prize colt in 1937 was a smallish son of Man o’ War named War Admiral. Riddle had chosen to bypass the Derby in 1920, but seventeen years later War Admiral became Riddle’s first Derby starter. Seventy thousand spectators watched the colt break from the rail and annihilate all but second-place finisher Pompoon in a field of twenty, collecting the winner’s share of more than $50,000. War Admiral would go on to capture the Preakness and Belmont Stakes that year, earning recognition as a Triple Crown winner and one of the top American racehorses of the twentieth century. Since 1920, when Riddle chose not to send Man o’ War to Louisville to compete in the Kentucky Derby, the Triple Crown had become the yardstick by which outstanding three-year-old Thoroughbreds were measured.
1937 Triple Crown winner War Admiral with Mrs. Samuel D. Riddle. (Cook Collection, Keeneland Library, Lexington, Kentucky.)
In the realm of sport, the term Triple Crown had first been used to describe three English horse races: the 2,000 Guineas, the Epsom Derby, and the St. Leger Stakes. American racetracks had attempted to establish racing series along the English model, but none achieved lasting national recognition. By 1930 the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, the Kentucky Derby, and the Belmont Stakes in New York had clearly risen above all other American races for three-year-olds. That year Gallant Fox captured all three events and was referred to by the New York Times as a “Triple Crown Hero.”23 Five years later, Gallant Fox’s son Omaha matched his father’s feat (and the pair remains the only father-son combo to win the American Triple Crown). Once the term entered the popular vocabulary of sports fans and journalists in the 1930s, Sir Barton was recognized after the fact as the first to accomplish the feat in 1919.
Churchill Downs had moved the Derby from its traditional place on the opening day card to the second Saturday of the meet in 1923 in order to avoid a conflict with the Preakness, which was held the week prior. This arrangement continued until 1932, when the Derby was moved to the first Saturday in May, where it has remained, with two exceptions, ever since. The Derby was popular before the Triple Crown was even recognized. It could have survived with or without the Triple Crown. However, the association with the most important series of races in the country certainly raised the prestige of each of the races, including the Derby.
Matt Winn recognized the potential for a national Triple Crown series consisting of the Derby, Preakness, and Belmont and was an early proponent of a bonus to be presented to the winner of all three races, but the racetracks that hosted the events failed to cooperate. In fact, at least as early as 1919 Winn had proposed a Triple Crown modeled after the English version but consisting of three races run exclusively in Kentucky: the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, the Latonia Derby near Cincinnati, and a third race to be created at the Kentucky Association track in Lexington.24 The Kentucky Triple Crown never came to fruition, but the Kentucky Derby was certainly a beneficiary of the increase in media attention paid to the American Triple Crown series beginning in the 1930s. That acknowledgment of the American Triple Crown gave the three races, including the Derby, a small connection to the history and prestige of the English version on which the American Triple Crown was based.
In 1935 the City of Louisville attempted to capitalize upon its connection to the Derby and assert some control over its public image by organizing the first Derby Week Festival. The festival included a pageant celebrating Kentucky’s rich history as well as a series of parades, balls, and sporting events capped off by a dinner hosted by the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.
The inaugural festival was a success: local hotels were booked the entire week and “traditional” Kentucky hospitality was extended to visitors from across the country. The main ball crowned a king and queen of the festival, and their royal court consisted of “knights and ladies.” Over 150,000 people witnessed the parade, which included five thousand marchers and thirty-five floats. The overall tone of the festival projected an image of romance, gentility, and hospitality that matched visitors’ expectations of Kentucky. More than anything else, the festival strengthened links between the Derby and the past, and emphasized that the Derby had itself become an American tradition, a fact not lost on 1930s journalists.
“The Kentucky Derby has long since ceased to be merely a horse race,” one Florida newspaper explained during the festival. “In the 60 years since Aristides won the first Derby, it has accumulated a tradition which makes it a fixture in the national life, an event to stir the imagination even of those who have no interest in racing otherwise. There has been in recent years in America a revaluing of our traditions, a new feeling for those things in our lives which are linked to the romantic past.”25 This first attempt at the creation of a Derby Festival would last only three years, but it would be revived in 1956. In the interim the Kentucky Colonels’ Dinner would survive and prosper, attracting celebrities and garnering attention for the organization and the Derby, as well as perpetuating an element of Kentucky iconography.
Besides Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, no Kentucky colonel made better use of the title than Colonel Matt Winn. His name alone was fantastic publicity for the Derby, as it connected the event to all the imagery and romance of Old Kentucky that was so attractive to Americans in the early twentieth century. Winn always had a quote for journalists, and his name appeared in newspapers across the country each year. Having a “Kentucky colonel” as the face of the Kentucky Derby would be akin to a major event in Texas having a spokesman named “Tex” who wore a cowboy hat and a bolo tie and drove a large white sedan with longhorns as a hood ornament. For those reading about the Derby, or experiencing it through newsreels or radio, it did not require too much creativity to imagine the Kentucky Derby as a unique event.
The colonel icon evoked much of the romance of Old Kentucky, specifically that part of Kentucky’s identity that had become associated with the genteel elements of the Old South and the Confederacy. The Kentucky colonel is an emblem of a time and place that never really existed, but that could nonetheless be celebrated in Louisville at Derby time. Historian Gerald Carson summed up the attractiveness of the Kentucky colonel image quite articulately: “We cannot do without Kentucky Colonels. They provide us with humor and a touch of poetry. They liberate us from things as they are, make it plausible that there is yet a crossing into a Kentucky of the imagination, where the dogwood blossoms all year around, taxes are low, the whiskey always prime and all men are as they’d like to be.”26 The harsh realities of life in the Great Depression made the fantasy land that was Louisville at Derby time all the more attractive to Americans in the 1930s.
The fictional Old South from which the Kentucky colonel emerged was best depicted in the 1930s in the immensely popular novel Gone with the Wind and the even more popular film by the same title. According to the film’s prologue, this Old South was “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.” Gone with the Wind was set in Georgia, but Kentucky was the setting of another popular Depression-era cinematic portrayal of the romantic Old South: The Little Colonel, starring Shirley Temple, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, and Hattie McDaniel. Though the film’s depiction of Kentucky does not begin to approach any semblance of reality, it demonstrates that Depression-era audiences were willing to accept the notion that Kentucky was a place in which memories of the Old South remained alive. This moonlight-and-magnolia imagery associated with the romanticized South that contributed to the popularity of Depression-era films like Gone with the Wind and The Little Colonel was a part of the experience of the Kentucky Derby for many.
Based on a series of immensely popular novels written by Anne Fellows Johnson in the late 1800s and early 1900s, The Little Colonel is set in Kentucky in the 1870s and tells the story of a gruff, unreconstructed Confederate colonel (played by Lionel Barrymore) whose heart melts when his six-year-old granddaughter (Shirley Temple) returns to Kentucky with her mother, who had broken the heart of her father the colonel when she eloped with a Yankee veteran six years earlier. The colonel’s Kentucky plantation and mansion look like they belong somewhere much farther south than Kentucky and are populated by a group of singing, dancing black servants and a pair of black children the colonel calls “pickaninnies,” one of whom is named Henry Clay after the famous nineteenth-century Kentucky statesman. The film is set in the years after emancipation, yet the white characters treat the blacks very much like slaves. When the servants are not providing loyal service with a smile, they busy themselves with tap dancing to the melodies of Stephen Foster. The treatment of black servants by the white characters in the film helped to reinforce the connection between Kentucky and the Old South still very much alive in the 1930s and embodied in the Kentucky colonel caricature.
Any portrayal of a Kentucky colonel would be incomplete without a glass of Kentucky bourbon in his hand. The connection between the Derby and Kentucky bourbon dates to the event’s early years, including a famous story of Lutie Clark delighting world-famous Polish actress Helena Modjeska, in Louisville to perform Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, with her first mint julep at a pre-Derby breakfast. Whiskey making in Kentucky began with the first European settlement, and the name bourbon probably comes from the name of the Kentucky county that was home to many early distilleries and Kentucky’s leading Ohio River port, Limestone (later called Maysville) in the late 1700s. Bourbon is a type of whiskey that is distilled from mash consisting of at least 51 percent corn and lesser parts of rye, wheat, and barley, but much of its unique flavor comes from being aged in charred barrels. In 1964 Congress recognized bourbon as a distinctively American product, but more than 90 percent of all bourbon is produced in Kentucky.27 The first advertisement for Kentucky bourbon appeared in newspapers at least as early as 1820, and by the beginning of the Civil War Kentucky was nationally recognized for its distinctive intoxicant. Bourbon figures heavily in the Derby experience; the mint julep has become the traditional drink of the Kentucky Derby and the most celebrated bourbon-based cocktail in the world.28 Mint juleps had been served at Churchill Downs from the beginning, but were not available in the now-famous souvenir glasses until the late 1930s.
The following poetic description of the mint julep was written by Lexington lawyer J. Soule Smith in the late nineteenth century and published as a small book in 1949, almost half a century after his death. This tribute to Derby-goers’ favorite drink demonstrates the evocative capabilities of the mint julep and the significance of its attachment to the Kentucky Derby. The poem begins, “It is the very dream of drinks, the vision of sweet quaffings. The Bourbon and the mint are lovers. In the same land they live, on the same food are fostered.” This ode to bourbon rambles on for pages in a similar fashion, ending with an invitation to the reader: “Sip it and dream—you cannot dream amiss. No other land can give so sweet a solace for your cares; no other liquor soothes you so in melancholy days. Sip it and say there is no solace for the soul, no tonic for the body like Old Bourbon whiskey.”29
This advertisement for Crab Orchard bourbon appeared in the November 17, 1937, issue of Collier’s. It exemplifies the link between Kentucky and the Old South in the minds of consumers that advertisers tried to exploit.
Kentucky had long been known as a center of whiskey production, and Kentucky bourbon whiskey had been tied to the Derby experience for years, but in 1919 the imminent arrival of Prohibition was for many in Louisville (a city once called the “whiskey capital” of the United States) a cause for concern. One journalist lamented, “While the forty-fifth Kentucky Derby will long be remembered for many reasons, it will always be remembered as the last Derby when that most delectable of drinks, Kentucky’s own concoction, the famous Mint Julep, was available to take the sting from defeat and give edge to victory. No longer can our native poet sing of us ‘The corn is full of kernels and the colonel’s full of corn.’ Morturi te salutamus [“In death we salute you”].”30 Another expressed similar sadness when he described the first Prohibition-era Derby in 1920: “Well-bred nostrils sniffed disdainfully as ‘Kentucky’s finest’ thrust them deep into goblets of foaming soda water and other denatured drinks in toasting the winner of the Kentucky Derby Saturday night. The aristocracy of the Bluegrass state mourned most the loss of the third of Kentucky’s famous pre-prohibition trinity of attractions. Its beautiful women and incomparable horses were there but. . . .—tis sad but true!”31
Despite the concerns, Kentucky’s reputation as a producer of booze was, surprisingly, enhanced by Prohibition. Kentucky moonshine temporarily replaced bourbon in the 1920s as the state’s most famous distilled spirit, spread across the country by bootleggers, including Al Capone. A 1923 article in the Louisville Times revealed that the association between the Derby and liquor had not ceased: “The annual whiskey robbery preceding the running of the Kentucky Derby in Louisville was committed Friday night at the distillery warehouse of the old H. Southerland Co . . . and the stolen liquor, it is believed, eventually will be peddled by bootleggers among the crowd attending the race meeting.”32 The perception of Kentucky as a place where booze could be readily obtained during Prohibition had only increased the Derby’s allure in the Roaring Twenties.
After the end of Prohibition in 1933, the return of newspaper ads for Kentucky bourbon often included imagery evocative of the Old South. By the mid-1930s, ads that cast Kentucky in a “southern” light often contained the image of a genteel, white-haired Kentucky colonel or a servile “Negro.” Beginning in 1935 newspapers across the country carried a particularly interesting ad for Crab Orchard whiskey in which an elderly black waiter, dressed in a tuxedo and wearing a white-lipped smile, offered the reader a bottle of Crab Orchard placed on a serving platter in the shape of the state of Kentucky.33 This ad explicitly tied Kentucky to an Old South image that included happy, servile blacks. One distillery skipped the process of attempting to subtly or abstractly attach its product to Kentucky or the Derby by simply naming its product Kentucky Derby Whiskey. In addition to national ad campaigns promoting their products, Kentucky distilleries advertised tours of their facilities during Derby Week, some even offering free bus rides to the plants.
Though Depression-era print ads for Kentucky whiskey most often used images of Kentucky colonels and their happy servants or horse racing scenes to market their product, a few brands chose instead to focus on the flip side of Kentucky identity: the rural Kentucky mountaineer. At least one, Mattingly & Moore Distilleries, used both sets of imagery, and indeed both remained quite salient with the American public in the 1930s.
Other distillers tied their product to Old Kentucky with advertisements that included coonskin cap–wearing frontiersmen reminiscent of Daniel Boone. During the Great Depression Boone’s status in American popular culture rose appreciably. His portrait graced a U.S. half dollar minted from 1934 to 1938 in commemoration of the bicentennial of his birth, and Boone was also the subject of a major motion picture in 1936 and a major biography published in 1939. The Boone image of the 1930s was a celebration of American spirit, the spirit that had led Boone to overcome all obstacles in bringing civilization and “American-ness” to the untamed wilderness. To Americans dealing with their own obstacles during the Depression he was a role model, an American hero who served as a reminder of the possibility of emerging from the dark woods of hard times to triumph over adversity.
Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon evoked Boone during the 1934 Derby trophy presentation to the winning connections, which included owner Isabel Dodge Sloane. The stuttering governor said that it gave him “inexpress—, inexp—unexplainable pleasure to present the cup.” He then addressed the crowd, urging everyone to return to Kentucky that Labor Day to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of “that great friend of horses,” Daniel Boone.34 Though Boone had died decades before the first Derby and had no particular connection to organized horse racing, Laffoon’s reference to Boone underscores the significance of Boone-related mythology to Kentucky’s identity and, indirectly, to the appeal of the Derby.
The often contradictory attributes of the mythical Boone allowed for broad appeal of the Boone character (much like that of Kentucky and its Derby). Successful capitalists and the downtrodden unemployed alike could hold Boone as a hero, because he simultaneously represented the march of American progress and its antithesis, a relationship with nature and a suspicion of modernity. Boone as an icon combined elements of the Old South and of the mountains to form an ideal composite stereotypical Kentuckian. He was violent and he was civilized. He comfortably interacted with Indians, yet he was completely “white.” He was a “man of nature,” but he came from the settled East. In the 1930s, when both the Kentucky hillbilly and the Kentucky colonel icons were ubiquitous, the mythical Boone existed somewhere in the middle, and the image helped to raise the stature and mystique of Kentucky.
The tenor of a 1934 New York Times article suggests that the dualistic imagery the United States associated with Kentucky had spilled over into the popular memory and understanding of the historical Daniel Boone. The article described a scene in Lexington as the Commonwealth of Kentucky celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of Boone’s birth: “Even the eternal pioneer [Boone], who could not breathe freely when he had an ordinary neighbor nearer than ten miles, or a Yankee neighbor within a hundred, would thrill at this tribute to the man who conquered the once ‘Dark and Bloody Ground’ for white settlement.”35 There is no reason to assume that Boone would have felt any more resentment toward a “Yankee” neighbor than any other one, but the journalist’s belief underscores how Kentucky had become inextricably associated with the Old South in American popular memory.
During the 1920s the backward mountaineer element of Kentucky’s identity had been overshadowed by depictions and images that connected the state and its inhabitants to the Old South. But by the 1930s and the onset of the Great Depression, this dormant element of the state’s identity reemerged as Americans tried to laugh at their collective unemployment and idleness.36 At the same time, some people sought to blame those who were adversely affected by the Depression, suggesting that there were some Americans—“hillbillies,” for example—who were just naturally lazy or inept and deserved their misfortune.
The use of the hillbilly icon in cartoons like Al Capp’s Li’l Abner and Paul Webb’s The Mountain Boys during the 1930s reflected the changing viewpoints and attitudes of American audiences, including the fear of economic and societal collapse and a need to explain the widespread poverty in the rural South. The hillbilly cartoons of the 1930s told audiences that conditions really were not as bad as they seemed, while at the same time suggesting that these rural white southerners deserved their plight because of their own laziness and ineptitude. In Depression-era popular culture Kentucky was associated with both the positive and negative aspects of the hillbilly icon.37 These cartoons fostered the idea of backwardness associated with the marginal rural South, but they also celebrated the hillbilly’s rejection of modern society, a society that seemed to be crumbling at its foundation. These popular cartoons suggested that the hillbillies were somehow different from “regular” Americans in their backwardness, a distinction that allowed audiences to laugh at “those” people while they simultaneously celebrated them.38
Though the hillbilly image was not directly associated with Louisville, it had been for many years associated with Kentucky, and Louisville had come to represent Kentucky as the home of the Kentucky Derby. As representatives of Kentucky, then, Louisville and the Derby inherited some of the latent popular perceptions of the state that had emerged in the nineteenth century. Depending on the particular needs of a given era or set of social conditions, the genteel southern imagery (as represented by the Kentucky colonel) and the violent, backward, and simple imagery (as represented by the Kentucky hillbilly) have been alternatively, and sometimes simultaneously, used in popular culture in connection with Kentucky. To illustrate, practically any merchant selling Kentucky souvenirs and paraphernalia today is likely to have plenty of items depicting the familiar hillbilly image alongside products imbued with images of idyllic horse farms, bourbon whiskey, and Colonel Sandersesque Kentucky gentlemen.
This dualistic identity, which helped to sell Kentucky bourbon in the years after the end of Prohibition, also helped to keep Kentucky—and, in turn, the Derby—in the American popular consciousness.39 During the 1930s, both the hillbilly and the colonel icons were attractive to Americans, allowing the state and its signature event to become further entrenched in American culture.
At times, Kentuckians themselves had difficulties choosing which elements of their state’s identity to market to the public. In the 1930s, Louisville newspapers regularly suggested destinations for Derby Week tourists. Confederate monuments, Civil War battlefields, and plantation-style mansions were especially popular, but advertisements also regularly encouraged trips to Daniel Boone’s grave, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s humble log cabin birthplace, and places of natural beauty like Mammoth Cave, furthering the notion of Kentucky as a place of intrigue and contradiction.
The return of the appeal of the hillbilly element of Kentucky’s identity in the 1930s recomplicated Kentucky’s place within American popular culture, but Kentucky’s status as a neo-Confederate state endured as the decade came to a close. In 1939 a Louisville journalist described the prerace scene at Churchill Downs as post-time favorite (and eventual winner) Johnstown made his way from the saddling paddock toward the track: “A Negro stable boy pulled his harmonica from his pocket to play a few bars of ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ before an official waved him into silence. But the silence couldn’t kill the memory of the melody. The memory seemed to linger in an unvoiced rhythm about sunny skies and fields of bluegrass. . . . It was about the shuffling of Negro feet on rough plank floors and in the soft earth of tobacco fields. ‘’Tis summer, the darkies are gay.’ ”40
During the early years of the Derby’s national popularity and significance, Old South imagery had been salient with national elites, who made room for the Derby on their collective social calendar. In the 1930s the cultural cachet of the Kentucky hillbilly reemerged, reemphasizing the dualistic nature of Kentucky’s identity within American culture. Like all enduring stereotypes, it was this dualism that helped to allow Kentucky—and, as a result, the Derby—to retain its special place of significance within American popular consciousness and culture, and to survive changes in the American political, social, and cultural landscape. Conflict was the recurring theme in and around the Derby in the 1930s, as discord was manifest on the racetrack, in the stands, and even in the ways in which Kentucky was portrayed within pop culture. But with America’s full entry into World War II in 1941, conflict would turn to consensus as Americans rallied around their flag and around American institutions like the Kentucky Derby.
