Night Comes to the Cumberlands Quotes

“Kentucky as a whole has lagged behind the rest of the nation in almost every field of government and public service, primarily because the fiercely independent and uncooperative mentality of the frontier hunter-farmer has remained so deeply and tenaciously embedded in the mass psyche.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“What I have written is drawn from experience — from seeing, hearing and working with mountaineers. In a land with few books and pens many tales are transmitted from father and mother to son and daughter.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“The tragedy of Central Appalachia is that it is becoming more marginalized in American life just when the country needs more than ever what it has to offer. At a time when the bonds of community and family are visibly failing and people feel more alone than ever, and as they are bombarded from all sides with more demands, and with more "data" that they can possibly digest, Appalachia offers a model for a less frenetic and more measured way of life. People of Appalachian descent elsewhere in the nation-and they number many millions-still feel deep ties to some Appalachian hamlet or hollow as to an ancestral homeland, though they may never have even visited it. As they make their way in the big world of getting and spending they know that something valuable has been lost for all they may have gained. That less frenetic way of life is deeply embedded in Appalachian culture, which has proved incredibly tough and enduring. Yet Appalachia has now been so thoroughly bypassed and forgotten that it cannot give, because the rest of America will not take, what could be it's greatest gift.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“Here John Shell and his numerous clan of brothers and sisters lived far past the century mark while flagrantly violating the sacred tenets of modern medicine. This leathery old mountaineer loved fat pork and its artery-clogging cholesterol. He smoked and chewed tobacco from daylight to dark, without incurring a trace of lung or throat cancer. He lived in a drafty log cabin and bathed only when it suited him. Yet he managed to live to the ripe old age of a century and a quarter. Of his somewhat less fortunate brothers and sisters who shared his mode of living the shortest-lived of them reached only eighty-nine.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“A unionist who had borne the brunt of the organizing battles in Harlan County once showed me a blue steel Smith and Wesson pistol which, with a twinkle, he referred to as a "John L. Lewis peacemaker." When I asked him if the union had issued the firearm to him he smiled slyly but made no reply except to puff on his pipe.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“Thus the land was sowed with bitterness, from which crops of bloodshed were to be harvested for generations to come.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“Her girlhood was spent in graceless toil and crowned by an early marriage. Wasted by a quarter-century of childbearing, she saw a row of graves dug for her children. Often she survived as a widow to fend for the remainder of her brood. She could rarely influence the impetuous decisions of her husband and sons, and, never far from the family graveyard, mourned through long years the results of their errors.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“It is unthinkable that a rich and enlightened society should permit its unfortunate members to starve in the midst of plenty; but once the justifications are admitted the difficulties still stand undiminished.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“could expect to receive $1.50 for a ten-hour day. By 1927 they were earning $4.00 for 8 hours.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Such ambitions for their children as most people entertained were reserved for their sons, because it was assumed that the “girls will get married and won’t need to know much anyway.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“In the plateau the able-bodied unemployed workmen are supported by a combination of cash and commodity doles for which they render no service. Thus, being able to work, they do not. They live in idleness on government largesse while around them on every hand lie countless tasks whose doing the national welfare urgently requires. A public policy is scarcely sane when it supports idleness in the midst of a region which desperately needs public improvements. If the taxpayer is going to pay men who are jobless through no fault of their own, every element of common sense requires that he pay them for working rather than for not working. The men would benefit morally, physically and spiritually from constructive employment. 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. It undermines good citizenship and contributes toward the thing a democracy can least afford — a class of unproductive and dependent citizens. At the present time practically every skilled man in the plateau has regular employment. The few genuinely competent carpenters, masons, mechanics, metal workers and electricians find regular work for their hands. They have jobs at good wages with mining companies and at other essential building and maintenance tasks. While the tiny corps of skilled men are energetically at work, the great army of their unskilled fellows drift about in dejected idleness. Irrefutable logic requires that work be found for their hands and energies also.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“powerful were”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“Here the mountains were like the walls of a great jail which shut in the combatants. After Appomattox it was as though mortal enemies had been locked in the same prison without taking away the deadly weapons they knew so well how to use. Perhaps in no other region of the United States except the Southern mountains were the lives and property of a great number of pro-Union civilians lost in the war. In Pennsylvania, Kansas and a few other border areas the people were subjected to occasional Confederate forays, but those areas were comparatively rich and the losses were soon restored. But in the highlands much of the modest and slowly-built-up accumulations of three generations were destroyed, impoverishing virtually the entire population.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“However, it is doubtless true that in a vague way some of these poorer mountaineers, fiercely independent as they were, found something abhorrent in the ownership of one person by another.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands