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The red-white-and-blue campaigning that Cooper and Barkley are giving the voters this summer is nothing new in Kentucky. At outdoor political rallies a hundred years ago, during the bitter presidential campaign between Native Son Henry Clay and Tennessee's James Knox Polk, countrywomen daubed their babies' cheeks with clay or stained them with pokeberry juice to show their political preferences. Seventy years ago, when elections lasted three days, Kentucky custom demanded that each serious candidate bring along a barrel of whisky, with his name burned on the side, to the polling places. The barrels were set up in the shade with a bouquet of mint, a few pounds of brown sugar and a supply of tin cups, and the oratory flowed, improved by free juleps for all.
Four Kentuckies. In the summer of 1954 Cooper and Barkley will not have to bring their own mint juleps (though they will doubtless down a few). They will be expected, however, to wage a brisk campaign ; Kentucky, which the Indians called Dark and Bloody Ground, has always loved a good fight.
There are four Kentuckies: 1) the eastern mountains, a stronghold of moonshiners, miners, the Hatfield-hating McCoys, bloody Harlan County, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and John Sherman Cooper; 2) the Bluegrass, fabled preserve of race horses and colonels and, periodically, (in Covington and Newport) of wide-open-gambling, in the north and central uplands; 3) the Pennyroyal ("Penny-rile"), named for the common roadside herb that grows there in abundance, to the west and south of the Bluegrass—; 4) the Purchase (so called because it was purchased for $300,000 from the Chickasaw Indians and added to the state in 1818), the home of Engineer Casey Jones (named Cayce, for his home town), Judge Priest and the Veep, in the extreme southwestern part of the state. Between the Blue-grass and the Pennyroyal lies a less definite area of bumpy foothills called the Knobs.
Politically, the state divides along regional lines. The mountains are a Republican fastness, broken here and there by Democratic aeries in a few mining districts. The Pennyroyal is oriented toward the South, and solidly Democratic. The Bluegrass and the Purchase are usually Democratic, but both are border regions, and have tended more and more in recent years to meander toward the G.O.P.
Irvin S. Cobb, the Paducah humorist, once observed that Kentucky is shaped like a camel lying down. The camel rests solidly on a limestone foundation that imparts a special flavor (Kentuckians say) to Kentucky's bourbon whisky.t The limestone is pocked with some famous holes, e.g., Mammoth Cave, the gold vaults at Fort Knox, and Crystal Cavern, where the artfully embalmed remains of Floyd Collins, in a bronze coffin, are still a major attraction for the cash-paying public.