What is it about the Kentucky Derby? Why does it thrill people who will not see another horse race all year, who otherwise pay no attention to an anachronistic sport whose heyday appears to be long past? Each year a quarter million people file into Churchill Downs in Louisville on Derby weekend, and hundreds of thousands more attend festivities around the city in the two weeks leading up to the big race. The Kentucky Derby is not the fastest, longest, or most monetarily valuable horse race in the United States. It was not the first race—or even the first derby—to be run in America. Each year it is only one of dozens of derbies contested throughout the world. Why, then, does the cultural phenomenon that is the Kentucky Derby annually capture the attention of millions, while most American racetracks struggle to survive in the face of steady declines in the popularity of horse racing?
The term derby generally signifies a race for three-year-old horses, and its origins go back to eighteenth-century England and Edward Stanley, twelfth Earl of Derby, who cofounded the Derby Stakes in 1780.1 Thus, it is not the derby element of the Kentucky Derby that makes the event unique; rather, the traditions and imagery associated with the Kentuckian roots of the event are responsible for its distinct flavor. These include, most notably, the singing of “My Old Kentucky Home,” the blanket of roses ceremonially draped upon the winning horse, mint juleps, ladies dressed as “southern belles,” and the wild cacophony of the infield that contrasts so markedly with the civility and refinement in the clubhouse. These aspects of the Kentucky Derby experience all have their roots in Kentucky’s unique and ever-changing identity within American popular culture: it is Kentucky—and its associated history, imagery, and mythology—that gives the Kentucky Derby its distinct character and has allowed the event to remain culturally relevant despite myriad changes in American society since the race was first contested over 135 years ago. Throughout these years, regardless of what the prevailing mood of the nation has been, the quicksilver nature of Kentucky’s place in the minds of Americans has attracted Derby fans to the Bluegrass State—and given them something to celebrate once they arrive.
Kentucky’s special spot in American popular culture can be traced back to the 1784 publication of John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke.2 First published in Delaware, and eventually translated into French and German, Kentucke was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Filson described the landscape, climate, and natural resources of what are now the central and eastern parts of the state. The book was an important (and self-serving) promotional tool, as Filson was a land speculator with sizeable Kentucky holdings. With his words, Filson painted a picture of a land of abundance blessed with bountiful wildlife, fertile soil, rich mineral deposits, and a pleasant climate. Filson’s description of the area as a latter-day Eden ensured that Kentucky entered the American popular consciousness as an immensely attractive place, forming a foundation for the idea popularized in the nineteenth century that Kentucky was a uniquely suitable area for raising top-class race horses.3
It was the book’s appendix—written by Filson to sound like an autobiographical sketch of early Kentucky settler Daniel Boone—that would have the most far-reaching impact on Kentucky’s long-term identity, however.4 Filson’s Boone, a quasi-mythical—though very much historically “real”—character, was a living paradox: he was portrayed as both a rugged woodsman and a civilizing agent who tamed the wilderness and brought European values to the savage natives; he was an Indian fighter, yet a man who lived peacefully with the natives; he was both a trailblazer for civilization and an Enlightenment-era “Man of Nature” escaping from civilization. Filson’s early descriptions of Boone firmly established the figure of the romantic American pioneer in the American imagination, forging aspects of Kentucky’s identity that would eventually become crucial elements of the appeal of the Kentucky Derby: both the Kentucky hillbilly and the Kentucky colonel caricatures that would heavily influence Kentucky’s place in twentieth-century American popular culture can be traced back to Filson’s characterization of Boone.5
Filson’s early descriptions of Kentucky and Boone created the notion that Kentucky was an untamed yet civilized place (a description that could apply to the modern Kentucky Derby, with its visible dichotomy between the uninhibited environment of the infield and the more refined, restrained air of the boxes and suites in the exclusive “Millionaires’ Row” section of the clubhouse). Filson’s Kentucky was a land of contradiction and paradox. During the antebellum era, the state attained a status as a place in the South, but not of the South. Kentucky was a slave state, but was widely believed to practice a more “benign” or “civilized” form of slavery than that in the deeper South. Proponents of that perception pointed to the relatively short growing seasons of Kentucky’s staple crops, hemp and tobacco, which resulted in more “downtime” for laborers, including slaves.6 This idea was popularized by novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who in Uncle Tom’s Cabin described Kentucky as home to “perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery.”7
Stephen Collins Foster reinforced these images of antebellum Kentucky in his song “My Old Kentucky Home,” first published in 1853. Though the lyrics were officially “sanitized” in 1986 by the Kentucky legislature, which replaced the word “darkies” with “people,” the song originally referred to the sale of a slave downriver from his Kentucky home, where “the birds make music all the day.” Foster may have been motivated to write the song after reading Stowe’s novel, as an original draft of “My Old Kentucky Home” included the line “poor Uncle Tom goodnight.”8 Despite the references in “My Old Kentucky Home” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the prevalence of the brutal southward-moving slave trade in Kentucky, the state managed to keep its reputation as a place where oxymoronic “benevolent slavery” existed. For reasons that will be examined later, the song has brought tears to the eyes of Derby-goers for almost a century during the annual prerace ceremonial performance as the equine contestants make their way onto the Churchill Downs racing surface.
Kentucky’s reputation as unique among the states continued to grow immediately before and during the American Civil War. In the fiercely competitive presidential election of 1860, Kentucky voters rejected not one but two native sons, Abraham Lincoln and John Breckinridge; Tennessee’s John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party carried the state. Though Kentucky was belligerently neutral at the beginning of the war, thousands of Kentuckians went to the killing fields on both sides of the conflict. The term “brother against brother” had significant meaning for many of Kentucky’s soldiers during the Civil War. Thus, it was appropriate that the presidents of both the Union and the Confederacy were born in the Bluegrass State.
After the last shot in the Civil War was fired, Kentucky remained a place where northerners and foreigners could easily access “the South.” Kentucky had been a slave state and remained a racially segregated society after emancipation, but the Commonwealth also retained its reputation of being more racially tolerant and progressive than the deeper South. This reputation for relative racial harmony, born in the nineteenth century, would continue into the twentieth century and would prove to be an asset to promoters of the Kentucky Derby.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Kentucky embodied a constellation of longings and fears that lay at the root of America’s emergent national identity. In the American popular imagination, Kentucky was home to both the mountaineer of the eastern Kentucky highlands and the gentleman farmer of the central lowlands. The mountain folk were castigated in the print media as violent, lawless, ignorant, and dangerous people and simultaneously celebrated as a modern link to a racially pure American past. The Kentucky gentleman, on the other hand, was a more refined yet fearless and independent über-republican yeoman. It would not be until the backward, violent stereotype of the Kentucky hillbilly had been overshadowed in American popular culture by a neo-Confederate “Kentucky colonel” icon during the early twentieth century that the Derby would begin to emerge as a culturally significant event on a national level, when many Americans, faced with changing social structures and the uncertainty of modernity, would seek to access a simpler, more stable time that Kentucky seemed to represent. The Derby would give them an opportunity to experience some of the history, myth, and romance of “Old Kentucky” without having to venture too far out of their comfort zone geographically, culturally, or politically.9
There are few events in the world at which such conspicuous displays of wealth and luxury coexisting with hedonistic bacchanalia can be seen as at the Kentucky Derby. The relationship between the elite and the masses at the Derby has been part of its identity and attraction since the early years. The dichotomy between the drunken lawlessness in the Derby infield and the splendor and refinement in the clubhouse today mirrors the two elements of Kentucky’s identity that helped give rise to the popularity of the event in the first place. Reminiscent of the earlier dichotomy between the Kentucky hillbilly and Kentucky colonel icons, this dual identity remains one of the defining aspects of the Kentucky Derby experience. Despite the overall decline in the popularity of horse racing in the United States, the Kentucky Derby remains one of the premier sporting events in America, and Kentucky continues to evoke sets of contradictory imagery in the minds of Americans. Born from this imagery, the Derby now plays a significant part in perpetuating it.
The modern Thoroughbred industry has much to learn from the story of the Kentucky Derby’s rise, survival, and enduring prosperity as a new generation of industry leaders tries to return horse racing to its former place of prominence within American sports culture. Events like the Derby cannot simply be conjured up out of thin air, but elements of the attraction that have made the Derby successful can be exploited in other arenas. The Derby did not become a popular and transcendent event merely because it was promoted (as many have claimed). It was what was being promoted that made the difference, and made the Derby. The racetracks and race meets that have been able to survive and even thrive within the modern American sports landscape have been able to draw patrons from outside the ranks of hardcore horse racing fans. To appeal to “regular” folk, promoters of racing must be able to provide context for the sport—a reason for watching what would otherwise be a herd of pretty animals being ridden around a large oval.
The Kentucky Derby today exists as a kind of mediator between Kentucky’s mythic past and modern society, as the pageantry of the Derby evokes elements of Kentucky’s rich history. The Derby is not the only such mediator in American culture but, due to its popularity and visibility, it is certainly one of the most significant. The race’s popularity and longevity can be at least partly attributed to the pageantry that helps Derby fans to experience Kentucky and to make meaning of themselves as Americans.
At its essence, the Kentucky Derby is a celebration of a place, enhanced by specific associated traditions, icons, and images—notably the mint julep, roses, hats, and “My Old Kentucky Home.” Other transcendent sporting events like the Masters, Wimbledon, and the Tour de France follow this same model, as do successful American Thoroughbred race meets at Saratoga, Del Mar, and Keeneland. The Derby, then, is not unique as a celebration of the past, or of a place. But exactly what is being celebrated, experienced, and remembered at the Derby, and how that has changed over the course of its long history, is unique. The Derby is more than just a horse race. And that is the subject of this book.