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Once a front-running state, Kentucky fell behind the rest of the country. In 1840 it ranked sixth in population, with 13 Representatives in Congress. By this year it had declined to 21st in population, eight Congressmen. Illiteracy is high: one out of every six adult Kentuckians has less than five grades of education. The state ranks 46th in teachers' salaries (with a minimum of $900 a year). As recently as World War II, 14% of Old Kentucky's rural homes had no toilet facilities whatever, 83% had only outdoor privies. Per-capita income is the seventh lowest in the U.S.
But Kentucky has begun to catch up.
Since 1948, a half-billion-dollar influx of heavy industry has drastically changed the economy. Such projects as General Electric's spectacular new factory and the $3,000,000 Stauffer Chemical Co. in Louisville have brought new income and new citizens to the state; in 1952 manufacturing payrolls amounted to $490 million while farm income totaled $394 million.
The 15th state to enter the Union (in 1792) has rejoined the parade.
Mountain Dynasts. When Kentucky was becoming a state, a pair of tall, silent brothers from South Carolina crossed Daniel Boone's Wilderness Trail and settled in the foothills beyond Cumberland Gap. Ever since, the descendants of Malachi and Edward Cooper have been prominent in the affairs of Pulaski County.
By the time John Sherman Cooper was born in the big house overlooking the town of Somerset, six ancestors had been county judges, and two had been circuit judges; the Coopers were the wealthiest, most prominent family in the county.
John Sherman's father, old John Sherman Cooper, was Pulaski County's first school superintendent, a county judge, the founder of the Farmer's National Bank, and the owner of vast coal and timber land. True to his surname, he was also in the cooperage business, making staves for whisky kegs. Every Sunday he sat alone in his rear pew in the First Baptist Church (Mrs. Cooper always sat across the aisle with the ladies).
John Sherman Cooper the younger was born on a sultry August morning in 1901 and delivered by the family cook and midwife, Aunt Elvira Booker. He grew up in the protective bosom of Harvey's Hill and, with his brothers and sisters, attended Mrs. Anna Mourning's private school, an establishment maintained largely for young Coopers. (At one time five of Mrs. Mourning's seven pupils were Coopers.) Mother Cooper disagreed with her husband's ideas about private education, and one day, when Judge Cooper was off in Texas checking some oil properties, she sent John Sherman, neatly dressed in Buster Brown collar and knickerbockers and carrying an umbrella, off to the sixth grade at the public school. Within a week he had fought the school's two leading bullies to a dogged draw, and for some time thereafter he had to take on all comers.
Politics around the Cooper household was all-pervading, absorbed by osmosis from infancy, and Judge Cooper inculcated his children with an iron code of honor and a sense of unaffected friendliness for less fortunate neighbors. Often, when he sat down to a heaping dinner, the judge would dispatch one of the boys to a back-alley neighbor with a tray of food from his own table.