A Liberal Dose, April 21, 2022 "A History of Upper Cumberland Violence and Its Effects"

 A Liberal Dose

April 21, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“A History of Upper Cumberland Violence”

 

I’m currently working on a project that includes, among other sub-topics, violent crime in Appalachia. I am reminded of my topic, as if I could escape it, as I drive around the county and see all the campaign signs for the coming local elections, which include that of county sheriff. Candidates for office -and not only for the office of sheriff -regularly pledge they will be the one who curbs crime in the area. And crime is, and always has been, a problem in our county and our region. For generations, illicit stills in the Upper Cumberland woods were among the most productive in the nation (my grandfather operated one, and went to prison twice -once for making it and once for running it). For decades after that, this region produced a disproportionately large amount of marijuana. Twenty years ago, it was meth and oxycontin, now it is opioids, especially heroin and fentanyl.

And there has been violence. White County has had four law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, three of them in the same year (1924) and the fourth just a few years later (1931). If you know your history, you will recognize that those dates fall within the range of Prohibition (1920-1933), when it was against the law to make or sell alcohol (so of course there was a huge demand for it). I’ve written here before about Chief Sergeant Hugh Lowery, of the Bon Air Police Department -there is a historical marker about him on Hwy 70 as you get to the top of the mountain. He was gunned down after stopping a car whose passengers included a man who had just been drunkenly discharging firearms in the mining town, no doubt obtained from a moonshiner. That was April 23, 1924. Three months earlier, Deputy Sheriff William Welch was shot and killed while part of a raid on a moonshiner’s house (also on the mountain). That November, Deputy Sheriff Edward I. Gore was killed on Gumspring Mountain while pursuing a fugitive moonshiner. Finally, in 1931, Deputy Sheriff Harkless Grundy Kirby was shot and killed from ambush while destroying a still.

Surrounding counties all have their similar stories, most taking place either during the Moonshine Wars (1870s to 1890s, when the newly established Internal Revenue Service first started efforts to suppress untaxed liquor -those infernal Revenuers!) or Prohibition. Casualties included one of my own ancestors, who was a Gainseboro constable in the 1860s. While these are the sort of tales that get romanticized in movies, they were not that romantic for those involved -much less the drug-related crimes in the decades since.

But why is it that, for 150 years, illicit drug and alcohol manufacture and distribution have been so prevalent here? Is it because, as author J.D. Vance has made a fortune claiming, there is something intrinsically wrong with our culture? Is it because people of the Upper Cumberland and Appalachia in general are naturally less moral than people in other parts of the country?

No.

It is because the Upper Cumberland and Appalachia in general are traditionally economic depressed regions, among the most depressed in the nation. While there is no excuse or justification for crime, there is an explanation for it -poverty, and lack of opportunities to advance in life, lead some people to desperate acts… and lead other people to look for a temporary way to escape the bleak reality around them, creating a loop. Treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease is never going to work in the long run.

What actually is the cause for that economic depression, and how can it be treated? I’ll address that next time. For today I want to close by saying that the ultimate problem is beyond the scope of any sheriff to fix. But a sheriff can sure as heck make it worse. I’m glad we finally have one who doesn’t.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, April 14, 2022 "This Land Was Made for You and Me"

 

A Liberal Dose

April 14, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“This Land Was Made for You and Me”

 

Last week, in my basic U.S. History course, we came to one of my favorite things to lecture about: popular culture during the Great Depression. It gives me a chance to talk about several things I enjoy, but discuss them on a deeper level, helping students see how those things reflect the feelings of people at the time. For example, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges -and even Bugs Bunny -were agents of chaos, going into the world of the upper classes and turning everything upside down. Gangster movies (and real-life gangsters, too) became hugely popular because they were “sticking it to the man.” Pulp fiction and comic book superheroes took the country’s youth by storm, because a Depression and a brewing World War helped make empowerment fantasies extremely important to kids entering puberty.

We also discussed folk entertainers like those great Oklahomans Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie. The students had never heard of either one of them, but they all knew Guthrie’s most famous song: “This Land is Your Land.” I asked them what the song is about. “How great America is,” they answered. I informed them that, when they learned this song, they were never played THE WHOLE THING. There is a part at the end that is almost always left off. I played it for them, with the lyrics cast on the screen. I’m going to paraphrase most of it here.

First there was a verse where the singer sees a No Trespassing sign. The other side doesn’t say anything: THAT side is made for you and me.

The next verse describes a line of people, in the shadow of a church, at the unemployment office. This makes him ask, “IS this land made for you and me?”

In the final verse, he says “Nobody living can ever stop me as I go walking that freedom highway. Nobody living can make me turn back. This land is made for you and me.”

I was watching them while they watched the screen. Several had widened eyes and dropped jaws when we came to the last part of it… because they were realizing that this song did not mean what they had always thought it did. Guthrie wasn’t JUST talking about how great America is -he was also talking about the ways it fell short. There are authorities making rules designed to inhibit your freedom, while not doing enough to help you make your way. Nonetheless, he expresses determination to be free nonetheless.

I then showed them the famous speech at the end of “The Grapes of Wrath,” where the Okie Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda) says that maybe we aren’t a bunch of individual souls -maybe we’re all little parts of a big soul, and when one person suffers we all do. I pointed out that the words of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck (through his character Tom Joad) were reflections of a lot of New Deal Democrats and people on the left in general during the Depression.

The Guthrie song, I said, reminded me of another song 50 years later by Bruce Springsteen (who did a whole album called “The Ghost of Tom Joad”). I asked how many of them were familiar with “Born in the USA” -almost all were. What is it about? “How great America is.” So we listened. Jaws dropped once more when they realized the song was about a working-class Vietnam veteran who couldn’t find a job, or any help, and wound up in prison. The chorus was a sarcastic condemnation of the failure of the “American Dream.”

Here is my point, for them and for you. This is what history is. Taking something you never thought about deeply before, and thought you understood, and looking more closely to see what it really meant.

That practice, like those songs, ultimately IS patriotic, after all. They’re about how great America SHOULD be.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

 

A Liberal Dose, April 7, 2022 "You Can't Teach History Without Being Honest"

 

(Note: the title may seem obvious... but so should a lot of things)

A Liberal Dose

April 7, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“You Can’t Teach the Truth Without Being Honest”

 

I talked last week about the legislative bill that bans “divisive concepts” such as privilege, unconscious bias, structural racism, and other terms from higher education classes. This includes what the bill calls “sexual or racial scapegoating,” which might mean saying things like “in western civilization, men established and have maintained a patriarchy” or “white people enslaved Africans.”  It also specifically forbids claiming that the legal system was set up to protect the interests of one racial group over another.

I earned my history PhD at the University of Illinois in 2011 (after six years of work). My dissertation was titled “Race, Slavery, and Nation in Indian Territory.” My doctoral focus was U.S. History, and the two fields of expertise I was examined on were the histories of race and ethnicity in the United States, and the history of the American South. I say all that merely to show that the history of race, how the concept was developed, and how it works are things I have spent a lot of time thinking about, studying, writing about, and teaching. I am going to give you two examples of things I talk about in class that would be impossible to discuss in a frank, honest, and accurate manner while following the restrictions the Tennessee government is putting on higher education classrooms (which are supposed to be a site where adults -not children -gather for a free exchange of ideas and to be challenged).

Perhaps you have heard of the seminal supreme court case Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which called for the end of segregation in public schools and was the beginning of the end for racial segregation in general. This overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which had ruled racial segregation constitutional as long as the facilities were “separate but equal.” In Brown, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall (who was later the first black Supreme Court justice) offered as evidence the research of two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark (a married couple). This included the now famous Clark Baby Doll Experiment.

Children were presented with an array of baby dolls, which came in a variety of skin tones -from very dark brown to very “white.” They were asked which doll was smartest, and which was dumbest; which was laziest and which worked hardest; which was honest and which dishonest; which was good and which was bad. The children always picked the darkest brown baby for the negative categories, and the whitest one for the positive ones. This was despite the fact that the children themselves were African American. Now, those little girls’ parents did not sit them down as pre-schoolers and tell them that they were dumb, evil, or lazy because they were black. So where did they get that idea at such a young age? From the world around them. No one taught them specifically, they absorbed it. This, Marshall argued, proved that segregation was harmful, and helped win the case. That study was repeated a couple of times in the last decade or so, by the way, with the very same results (and with a variety of racial groups tested, not just little black girls). THAT indicates that the problem is not just segregation, because it ended long ago -the problem is the unconscious bias implicitly produced in our culture.

What I just said is apparently about to become illegal to say. I guess they just want us to say the Court ended segregation without saying why.

The other example is the whole class I am currently teaching, American Indian Law, which is about federal policies toward Native Americans. Those policies were designed to take away Natives’ lands, limit their rights, and limit their tribal sovereignty -and still are. Oops, I did it again.

I did not study for years to teach you what you already think and want to keep hearing. I did it to teach you history.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

  A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE