Harry M. Claudill > Quotes

“As the more intelligent and ambitious people moved out of the plateau the percentage of mental defectives relative to the total population rose sharply. Their low intelligence added to their employment woes, but their votes were as potent as those of the wealthiest merchants in the county seats. The doctors and Welfare workers were sympathetic to them—and it is difficult for one to be otherwise. When a man and his wife are unemployed and unemployable, public assistance is the only alternative to cold and starvation and they inevitably wind up on the relief rolls.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“The migration into the virgin Kentucky mountain wilderness continued at a steady pace for about twenty-five years after 1787. Steadily, the fresh valleys filled with people until about 1812, when the flow of newcomers began to decline. At that time the country was by no means filled with people, in any modern sense of the word; but over most of the region the backwoodsman could find neighbors within five or ten miles of his cabin. Though the influx from the east diminished, it did not cease, but continued sporadically until about 1830. By that year all the parent stock of the basic population had arrived, and few settlers came into the region after that date.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“In the forty-five years since “the War” the public schools had slowly but steadily multiplied. Most communities had a log schoolhouse within “walking distance of the scholars” (this phrase was applied to an area within a radius of four or five miles). Though statutes required all children to attend school for at least eight years, few bothered to do so and it is doubtful whether more than half the children had ever darkened a schoolhouse door. The school term continued to be three or four months; many of the teachers were coarse near-illiterates who sought to instill knowledge into the child’s head by constant application of a stick to his back.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“The wellspring of these folk churches was a stern Calvinism which the Scotch element of the population had carried with it from the dour highlands. Without competition from other religious ideas or doctrines it slowly pervaded the whole populace, and eventually became deeply rooted in their mores, so widely and unquestionably accepted as to constitute unwritten law. And while its adherents might split into a myriad of disputing minor sects, they were to remain steadfastly loyal to its basic tenets. One of these was a hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope as nothing less than arms of Satan. Another was confession of sins “before men,” and a third was the requirement of baptism. Still another was an immutable principle that no preacher or minister be compensated in any way for his time or work. Their Biblical hero was John the Baptist, and each church was fiercely proud to call itself “Baptist,” the members insisting that they alone were true followers of the methods and doctrines of the prophet.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“The Antebellum South was filled with romantic legends in which handsome young men left baronial halls and came to the New World to establish spacious manor houses of their own and to preserve the chivalry and gallantry of Sir Walter Scott’s fantastic novels. Coats of arms were duly supplied to bolster these outlandish claims, and they hang today on thousands of walls, attesting to the hereditary splendor of imaginary ancestors. But, alas, in contrast the Southern mountaineer is by his very name fenced off from such pretensions, for his cognomen has come down with him from his first outcast ancestors on these shores and marks him indelibly as the son of a penniless laborer whose forebears, in turn, had been, more often than not, simply serfs.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“But technology advanced. The steam shovel grew into a mighty mechanism and was replaced by gasoline and diesel-powered successors. “Dozers” and other efficient excavators were perfected. Ever cheaper and safer explosives came from the laboratories. These marvelous new tools enabled men to change the earth, abolishing its natural features and reshaping them as whim or necessity might require. And as these developments made possible a radically new application of the privileges granted in the yellowed mineral deeds, the courts kept pace. Year by year they subjected the mountaineer to each innovation in tools and techniques the technologists were able to dream up. First, it was decided that the purchase of coal automatically granted the “usual and ordinary” mining rights; and then that the usual mining rights included authority to cut down enough of the trees on the surface to supply props for the underground workings. This subjected thousands of acres to cutting for which the owners were uncompensated. It gave the companies an immensely valuable property right for which they had neither bargained nor paid.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Certainly the family is the indestructible cornerstone of social organization, and within its confines must be nurtured, if they are to arise at all, those magnificent qualities we call honor, integrity and pride. Under the parental roof the child first gains experience of the world and acquires almost instinctively the passions”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“So it came to pass that the influx to the Blue Ridge was composed almost entirely of the unskilled or the little-skilled. They were men and women who, with rare exception, had known little or no experience with artfully wrought things of beauty. They had not owned or lounged upon skillfully carved chairs or beds and, as a generality, they were not people who had ever been called upon to maintain or create graceful or attractive things.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Caudill’s book is a story of land failure and the failure of men. It is reminiscent of such earlier works as Sinclair’s The Jungle, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Not all persons who came to the New World under such circumstances were brought legally, even by the loose standards prevailing at the time. Not all children who found themselves in a ship’s hold outward bound for Charleston were orphans. Gangs of thieves prospered in the sordid business of stealing or “nabbing” children for the plantations. In the parlance of their day they were called “kidnabbers,” a term later converted by Cockney English to “kidnapers.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Since 1948 conservatives and liberals in Congress have given unstinted support to “anti-communist” governments around the world. Men whose revolutionary forebears died for the slogan “Death to tyrants!” have voted vast slush funds for Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy and one of the few lands where human chattel slavery is still legal. Predictably, much of the money—including some from the ragged pockets of Kentucky coal miners—was lavished on palaces and concubines. Even Marshall Tito, when he became restive under Russian pressure, found fifteen hundred million American dollars flowing into his coffers. The question may then be fairly asked, “If we can afford to subsidize autocratic medieval kings, a communist dictator whose expressed ideology is a detestation of our liberties, and every conceivable shade of political and economic thinking in between, can we fail to spare the funds and efforts required to convert an island of destitution within our own country into a working, self-sustaining partner in the nation’s freedom and progress?”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“The nation has siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of its resources while returning little of lasting value. For all practical purposes the plateau has long constituted a colonial appendage of the industrial East and Middle West, rather than an integral part of the nation generally. The decades of exploitation have in large measure drained the region. Its timber wealth is exhausted and if its hillsides ever again produce arrow-straight white oaks, tulip poplars and hemlocks new crops of trees will first have to be planted and allowed to mature. Hundreds of ridges which once bulged with thick seams of high-quality coal have been emptied of all that lay in their vitals and their surfaces have been fragmented for the pitiful remnants in the outcrop. While billions of tons still remain undisturbed they lie in inferior seams and are of poorer quality.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“The purpose of this work is to trace the social, economic and political forces which produced the vast “depressed area” of eastern Kentucky.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Condescending charity in any form is harmful to the moral fiber of a people. If persisted in long enough, it sees pride and self-respect drain away to be replaced by cynicism, arrogance and wheedling dependence.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“The illiterate son of illiterate ancestors, cast loose in an immense wilderness without basic mechanical or agricultural skills, without the refining, comforting and disciplining influence of an organized religious order, in a vast land wholly unrestrained by social organization or effective laws, compelled to acquire skills quickly in order to survive, and with a Stone Age savage as his principal teacher.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Knott County was riven by the terrible “Knott County War,” which raged for many years between the followers of “Cap” Hays and Clabe Jones. Hays had been a cavalry captain in the Confederate army and Jones a pro-Union, guerilla leader. When these two strong willed men resumed the war in Knott County most of the population enlisted in one faction or the other and in a pitched battle at McPherson Post Office (which later became Hindman, the county seat) a half-dozen men were shot to death. Old Clabe Jones was renowned in song as a “booger,” little less evil than the devil himself. When he was not feuding with the followers of “Cap” Hays he warred with “Bad John” Wright, his neighbor in Letcher County. This mountain baron was an ex-Confederate who was captured during the war and imprisoned in Ohio. He escaped and thereafter acquired a small fortune by repeatedly enlisting in the Union Army for the bounties which were paid. With his roll of “Yankee greenbacks” he returned to his Rebel unit, where he remained until the war ended. He and Hays were eventually able to decimate the Jones crowd and bring this war, at least, to a close.”
― Harry M. Claudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area