January 2011

George Churchill Keimey is one of America’s most distinguished military men. A career Air Force officer who enlisted as a private and rose through the ranks, he was at the end of World War II Commanding General of the Allied Air Forces in the Pacific; later he headed the Strategic Air Command for two years hefore retiring in 1951 as a four-star general.

Suddenly the broad highways grow empty, crack apart, and return to winding trails and woodlands. The cities shrink, the pace grows slower, and, before our eyes, the spinning world, with its galaxies of nations and peoples and its infinity of events, swells large again. The great banished monarch Distance, the enemy and friend against whom man has striven since the first hunter bestrode a horse or sought to make a raft, stumbles back toward his shaky throne. Pressing our journey backward through the long corridors of the decades, leaving behind us the crash of war and the upheaval of social change, we arrive, over a century ago, in a strange, far country; but not as explorers. For if the scene is sometimes baffling, sometimes outrageous, it also tugs at our hearts and mists our eyes. We have been here before.

Afar as anyone knows, the first white man to settle in Letcher County, Kentucky, was a North Carolinian by the name of James Caudill, who came over the Pine Mountain in 1792, raised a cabin near the headwaters of the Kentucky River, and became, as a state historical marker near the site now proclaims, “progenitor of a large, widespread mountain family.”

The March rain appeared to be nothing more than the cold, cheerless, unrelenting rain of any winter. But time and place gave it a singular importance: Washington, D.C., the day before the inauguration of a new Republican President, former Governor General of the Philippines and Secretary of War, William Howard Taft. During the past two weeks skeletal scaffolding for seats had materialized all along Pennsylvania Avenue, the route of the Inauguration Day parade. The severity of the weather rendered pathetic and desolate these structures, which one Democratic observer dismissed as “crude and unsightly.” Decorations—flags, bunting, floral baskets—were drenched, desecrated by a savage east wind, their festive purpose defeated.

“Mr. Francis, the superintendent of public buildings, brought me a small vial of gunpowder found in one of the privies with twine and cord wound about it; to increase the exploding, a small roll of paper was stuck in the cork by way of match,” wrote the Reverend Edward Everett, new president of Harvard, in his diary for 1846. He recorded in the same year:

Awe for the gods inspired the great sculptors of ancient Greece, and piety the medieval worker in stone. In America in early times, sheer practicality—with a strong clash of patriotism and moments of rough humor—brought forth as our first sculptural artist the humble carver. No one who loves folk art can fail to respond to this pleasant heritage, or to what little of it has come clown to us after escaping the ravages of weather, fire, and that other destructive force called Progress.