Where Fact Overpowers Fiction
SRAGOW, MICHAEL
Where Fact Overpowers Fiction_ The Senator from Slaughter County By Harry M. Caudill Little, Brown. 308 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Michael Sragow Long before national politicians and the mass media...
...As chairman of the county's Democratic organization, he maintains a hold on every local officer of Federal agencies...
...The reigning Bonham, William, a lawyer, tells his kin that to sign such contracts is to sell out all their holdings, and they listen...
...Seven years later he enters politics, challenging Runyon Republicans and their mine-operator backers...
...their average earnings, according to the estimates of the Appalachian Movement, are about $2,000 a year...
...Forgetting his ancestors' adage?Take care of the land and it will take care of you"?he rips timber off his own property and spots his hills with coal tipples...
...The book's most readable parts are self-contained folk tales, describing how places like Fork's Finn or Rockhouse Creek got their names...
...When the Civil War breaks out, his descendants, who have become plantation owners, side with the rebels, while the Runyons A rival clan of small farmers and craftsmen?join the Union...
...Doc never again runs for elected office...
...Small farmers, similarly, continue to eke out a subsistence on depleted earth...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes President, the relief funds flow, and Doc Bonham the loyal county Democrat controls the dole...
...In 1960 this descendant of Kentucky pioneers wrote Night Comes to the Cumberlands, which remains one of the best exposes of the ravages wrought by the region's industrial predators...
...His 1968 sequel, My Land Is Dying, provided an updated account of the corruption and political snafus that have stymied the efforts of workers and environmentalists to bring about reforms...
...Coal companies still run their towns, and miners who strike are often dealt with bloodily...
...When the Depression arrives, the coal companies collapse and the Republicans are vilified...
...As for the offices of Federal help agencies, they have mainly become a source of patronage for local politicos who are in turn controlled by the large mining interests...
...Vowing vengeance, Tom's mother sends him to study medicine in Louisville...
...Whatever its fictional weaknesses, however, the novel's ostensibly factual account of life in Appalachia grips our interest...
...With the passage of time, he trades off his ideals in his wheeling and dealing...
...This leads to home-front feuds, but coal is the real fuel for post-bellum conflict...
...Caudill's painstaking reconstruction of a more or less typical county political machine shows us a dimension of the region's plight that is as riveting as it is depressing...
...he merely installs relatives in key Slaughter positions...
...The money-starved Runyons, though, participate in the county's industrialization...
...The Senator from Slaughter County is crude, rambling, uneven fiction...
...It is the politics of Appalachia that concerns Caudill in his second novel, The Senator from Slaughter County...
...Timber cutters denude and strip miners ream the land, causing slides and flash floods, but fail to repair the damage...
...His older brother becomes a judge, his wife the school superintendent, and so forth...
...Harlan County, for example, is as strife-ridden today as it was in the '30s, when the operators quashed all unions...
...Once he stood for a severance tax on coal companies, yet now he plumps for a sales tax when the mine operators come begging...
...After a potted old Senator dies, the Governor appoints Doc Bonham to his place...
...While television shows like The Waltons and movies like Where the Lilies Bloom focus attention on the region by exploiting the public's sentimental yearning for clannish-ness and pastorales, the picture Caudill paints of modern Appala-chia is hardly idyllic...
...He loses the race for the county judgeship, but the defeat proves illusory...
...Books like this do more than nag our consciences: They demand retribution for the victims of the evils they depict...
...Its prose is as inspired as a party tote sheet: Coal miners work in "Stygian pits," politicos are struck by "psychological lightning bolts...
...He returns home in the early '20s and begins his practice in a coal company hospital...
...Ultimately, William is assassinated in the presence of his son, Tom...
...As the novel ends, he is shaping the position he will take on national issues to support his new interests: He'll back law-and-order, oppose a severance tax, fight for "peace with honor" in Vietnam, and push for the reduction of national health and welfare programs (local doctors and officials, he tells himself, can best relieve the people...
...In the 1890s, Pennsylvania speculators arrive to persuade the people of Slaughter to lease their subsurface mineral rights to a Northern mining company...
...He goes on to become the first, and the wealthiest, strip miner in the county...
...The story spans five generations, beginning with John Bon-ham, the settler who founds the county, carves a 1,000-acre estate out of the virgin land, begets dozens of children by his wife and maidservants, and lives in a most un-Puritan style...
...Reviewed by Michael Sragow Long before national politicians and the mass media discovered Ap-palachia, Harry M. Caudill, a lawyer from Whitesburg, Kentucky, was crusading to save the land and improve the lot of its people...
...Doc Bonham An impressively conceived character with passionately mixed motives never grips us because Caudill sketches the effects, but not the processes, of his development...
...Even in Dark Hills to Westward, his fictional celebration of Kentucky's natural beauty and independent character, Caudill could not suppress his fear for his native state's imminent despoliation...
Vol. 57 • July 1974 • No. 15
