Whittledycut

(See Cover)

Early on a hot, clear Sunday morning this week, members of the three families began to arrive at the mountain hamlet of Mayking, in Letcher County, Ky. They parked their cars around the schoolhouse and, laden with hampers and bulging boxes of food, made their way up the hogback ridge to the old cemetery. It was the annual reunion of three fertile and ancient mountain clans that go back to the beginnings of Kentucky, There, and throughout the nation, the alfresco political season was beginning. With the Fourth of July weekend the season would be in full swing.

The mountain mothers spread their olympian "dinner-on-the-ground" in the groves of scrub oaks around the graveyard. The kids darted among the weathered tombstones and their rednecked fathers gathered to smoke and discuss politics and family ties. The Adams clan was distinguished by red ribbons, the Webbs wore yellow, and green ribbons identified the Crafts. By high noon, 600 cousins were on hand.

Magic & Ballads. The program got under way at 10 a.m. at a wooden speaking platform under an enormous frame shelter. There was room for 300 fan-waving listeners under the shed, and a public-address system rigged to a station wagon kept the rest of the ridge informed. A magician performed for the small fry, and Pleaz Mobley, the Eighth District's Republican candidate for Congress, sang the old English ballads that the hillfolk love.

Because of political differences in the families (some Webbs are Democrats), the speeches were "nonpolitical."

The featured speaker of the day, the junior Senator from Kentucky, arrived late, after a chartered flight across the state and a hard drive up the mountainside. The day before, after a busy week in Washington, John Sherman Cooper had flown to Owensboro on the Ohio River for a busier day at the state VFW encampment. That night Republican Cooper and the Democrat who is running against him, grizzled old Alben Barkley, had spoken at a sweltering, shirtsleeve banquet (the 106-degree temperature, said a native, was not as hot as hell; it was as hot as hackydam --four miles below).

The Mayking reunion was tailored to Cooper's measure. As he mounted the platform he looked every inch the mountainman he is. His 14-minute speech was packed with platitudes ("I hope that in these times of trouble we can, like the ancient Greeks, draw upon the wisdom, the heart and soul, of those who went before us"), which the sophisticated Cooper could chuckle over later, still recognizing and reverently respecting their basic truth. Afterwards, Cooper drifted among the patches of family groups, diligently shaking hands. He ate a huge helping--fried chicken, cornbread sticks, deviled eggs, stringbeans and bacon, two kinds of cake, watermelon. Then he flew off again, for a brief look-in at a tobaccomen's convention in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., and a $100-a-plate campaign fund-raising dinner in Louisville. This week, after four days of duty at his Washington desk. Cooper will go back to Kentucky for another big weekend of campaigning and speeches.

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.

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.

As a high-school senior, John Sherman was captain of the military training unit, president of his class, commencement orator (his subject: "The German Spy System") and class poet. In 1918 he went off to Kentucky's football-famed Centre College, and a year later he entered Yale. At New Haven (class of '23) he was captain of the basketball team, and was tapped for the elite society, Skull and Bones.

After Yale, Cooper went on to Harvard Law School. In the summer of his first year his dying father called the family around his bedside and told them that John would be the head of the family.

Judge Cooper, his son found, had been caught in the economic recession of 1920.

Once worth at least $250,000, the old man was in serious debt at his death. John Sherman decided to assume all his father's obligations. After another year at Harvard, Cooper realized that he could not manage his family's affairs and pursue his law degree at the same time, and regretfully came home (he was admitted to the Kentucky bar, after an examination, in 1928).

Cooper liquidated his father's sawmills and timberland, sold the family mansion and moved into a modest frame house where his mother, a spry 76, still lives.

Mrs. Cooper got a job in the local public school. John Sherman paid off the debts, managed to send the other six children to college. His task took 25 years ("It didn't look like there was any end to it"), and he did not manage to get into the black until 1950.

Cheers for Father. Cooper had not been back in Pulaski County long before he began to drift into local politics. Following Kentucky custom, candidates for office announce themselves on "court day," when, after the grand jury is impaneled, the judge recesses the court for the day and turns the courtroom over to the candidates. When John Sherman Cooper announced that he was running on the Republican ticket for the state House of Representatives in 1927, the crowd cheered. "They weren't cheering for me," says Cooper. "They were cheering for my father." He won without opposition.

After two years in Frankfort, he went back to Pulaski County and tried for the local political plum: county judge. In the election of 1929 he won handily, and moved into the office his father and grandfather had occupied before him.

A county judge, in the Kentucky sense, is the local law enforcer, political leader, friend in need of the political faithful, comptroller of patronage and state-relief funds, and father confessor to anyone with a problem. Cooper found that as many as 30 people crowded into his office every morning. His desk was in the corner of the room and the potbellied stove was in an adjacent corner. Cooper recalls what it was like on a cold day: "Early in the morning everybody would cluster close up around the stove until it got hot.

Then, as the stove got red, the heat pushed them back in a big circle that filled up the whole room"--until they pressed against John's desk. "When the circle closed up tight again, I'd know it was time to get up and put in more coal." Often, especially on Saturdays, when the countryfolk came to town, Cooper wrote little notes for them to carry to local restaurants. Each was a chit for a cheap meal, and Cooper, on --a $2,500 salary, picked them up later. People began to call on him at all hours of the day or night. Each morning a crowd gathered in front of his house to greet and accompany him to work. When he set out down Main Street on his way to lunch, he looked like an Old Testament prophet with his flock, and it sometimes took an hour to walk two blocks. Nowadays, when Senator Cooper is at home, a long line of cars stretches out in front of his house, and the parlor and kitchen are usually jammed with constituents.

Very few of Cooper's Republican senatorial colleagues have had a comparably thorough experience in grass-roots politics.

The Army Life. In 1942, after an unsuccessful try for the governorship. Cooper enlisted in the Army as a private.

Army life was rough for a man of his years (41 when he enlisted), but Cooper soon exercised his family capacity for leadership. On his first furlough back to Somerset, Private Cooper was followed off the train by a fierce-looking master sergeant, who deposited Cooper's barracks bag on the platform, bade him goodbye, and climbed back aboard. "John always gets everybody to work for him," says his sister Faustine Hardine. "It takes 15 people to run him." In the Army Cooper won a commission in OCS, became a specialist in military government and rode across Europe with General George Patton's Third Army (he still keeps Patton's photograph on the wall of his Senate office). He also met and married Evelyn Pfaff, a nurse. Evelyn came back to Somerset to live, but the marriage did not work out, and in 1949, Cooper divorced her, charging abandonment.

Nowadays he is one of the Senate's few single men,* and a reluctant target for Washington's eager hostesses.

In Europe Cooper won a Bronze Star for meritorious service, but his most distinguished work was after V-E day, when, as a military government officer, he reestablished Bavaria's court system. While he was still in Munich, some of Captain Cooper's friends back in Kentucky got him the nomination for circuit judge for Pulaski and the adjoining counties. He was unopposed. Arriving in Somerset in the midst of the postwar shortage of white shirts, he made his debut on the bench wearing a G.I. shirt.

In 1946 John Sherman felt he was ready for Washington. That year he won the Republican nomination for the Senate vacancy created by "Happy" Chandler's resignation. It was an audacious bid (only twice before in Kentucky's history had the voters sent a Republican to the Senate), and Cooper gave it all he had. Once again he tried his Pulaski County handshaking technique. The system is simple: Cooper drives to the edge of a town, gets out at one end of Main Street and walks up one sidewalk and down the other, in and out of shops, greeting everyone he encounters with a handshake and a simple statement: "I'm John Cooper. You know me. I'm running for the Senate, and I want you to vote for me." If anyone wants to talk, John Sherman is only too willing to pass the time of day. In this way Cooper can cover a town of 1,500 in less than an hour. The effect of the Cooper technique is measurable. In 1946 Kentucky sent him to the Senate by a 40,000 majority--a state record for a Republican.

Cooper probably knows more living Kentuckians than any man, estimates he will shake 50,000 hands in his 1954 campaign.

Cooper cast his first Senate vote--on the transfer of investigatory powers to Owen Brewsters special War Investigating Committee--against his party. He felt that the Brewster committee was a political device, and he made it the subject of his maiden speech in the Senate. "One of the most disturbing factors we have seen during the past 13 years," he said, "has been the ignoring of the rules of laws, and sometimes an actual contempt of those rules by some of those who were a part of the Government itself. For myself, I should like to uphold in this body, when I can, rules of law."

Spare That Oak. Cooper respects the oak of the law with druidical passion. He still bristles at the recollection of Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing plan or Harry Truman's use of "inherent power" to seize the steel mills. He is just as passionately opposed to attempts of his own party colleagues to rule by fiat or overlook the established law. Cooper was one of the first Senate Republicans to denounce Joe McCarthy openly. He is ferociously opposed to legislation permitting wiretapping by federal law-enforcement officers and to the removal of Fifth Amendment protection from reluctant witnesses. "These fundamental things," he says, "are the very substance of our Government." In his brief first term in Washington, Cooper earned the respect of the Senate's greybeards (notably the late Arthur Van-denberg). But in 1948 the Democratic tide was running too strong; Cooper was beaten. The next year he took a Truman appointment as a delegate to the U.N.

General Assembly--the first of six consecutive State Department jobs (three missions to the U.N., three as Dean Acheson's special assistant).

In 1952, after the death of Virgil Chapman, the man who defeated him in 1948, Cooper got an opportunity for another try at the Senate--again for a short two-year term. The Republican National Committee preferred to concentrate on states where the party seemed to have a better chance.

When Candidate Ike Eisenhower invaded Louisville, he forgot to make any mention of Cooper in his big speech until after he sat down. He corrected his omission by jumping up to the microphone with a perfunctory endorsement. Cooper labored diligently, and when the final tally was in, Ike had lost Kentucky by 700 votes, and John Sherman Cooper had carried the state with a solid 29,000 majority.

In Washington for his second tour, Cooper opposed the Bricker amendment, the tidelands bill and the Benson farm program. His main legislative achievement belongs to Cooper the practical politician rather than to Cooper the high-minded statesman. He got through an amendment fixing tobacco supports rigidly at 90% of parity, a triumph that endeared him to many of his tobacco-grower constituents.

He voted so often with the Democrats that the A.D.A. in 1953 voted him the most liberal Republican in the Senate.

Despite this dubious endorsement and his differences with the Administration, he is a White House favorite, and it was no accident that the President's first political tour of 1954 was to Kentucky, on behalf of John Sherman Cooper.

In Washington, Cooper labors unsystematically but tirelessly seven days a week, on an average of eleven hours a day. He lives in the elegant Cosmos Club, and resolutely fends off hostesses, keeping his social engagements down to a maximum of three a week. As always, his office swarms with constituents, and John Cooper frequently begins his day with breakfast surrounded by visiting friends. So hectic is the pace that his administrative assistant, Bill Macomber, finds it necessary to pick up the Senator and drive him to the office each morning in order to confer privately and get the Cooper calendar straight.

"As long as the car is moving," says Macomber, "he can't get away."

A Question of Age. At 52, Cooper is in the pink of condition. He stands 6 ft. 11n., weighs a strapping 185 Ibs. Two years ago Cooper was ordered to bed by his doctor with what seemed to be an alarming heart condition. It later turned out that the doctor's electrocardiograph and not Cooper's heart was faulty, but the untrue rumor that Cooper had heart trouble has persisted. He smokes a rare cigarette, drinks an occasional bourbon highball, and dresses soberly. He has a horror of loud ties, and when he is tempted to substitute one with a touch of color for his favorite dark blue knit, he sometimes appeals to Macomber to tell him whether the new tie is too loud. Assured that it is not, Cooper is still likely to whip the blue tie out of his pocket and change.

The matter of age and health is bound to be an issue in the Cooper-Barkley campaign. Although the durable old Veep is in vigorous health, the indisputable fact that he is 24 years older than his opponent will weigh heavily against him with many voters. He is only a few pounds overweight (190 Ibs.), but, as he rumbles, "I always gain weight on campaigns. Out visiting these people, they put on the table Kentucky ham, fried chicken, turnip greens, boiled potatoes, three-story cake and the other good eats. It's hard for a healthy man to resist." Barkley recognizes in Cooper a formidable opponent, and he realizes that it has been six years since he last campaigned for himself--a long time away from the hustings.

It will be a clean race. "There'll be no mudslinging." says Barkley. The issues will be clear. Without undue emphasis on party labels. Cooper will campaign for the Eisenhower program and the need for his own vote in the Senate to carry it through. Barkley will bear down on unemployment in Kentucky. Each will trade heavily on his own immense popularity, and for many a Kentucky voter the choice will be difficult. In the words of a Penny-royalist," It'll be 'whittledycut' "--which in Kentucky means a real fine horse race.

-- In unromantic fact the bluegrass is no bluer than the Danube. It is an intense green most of the year. When the grass is in bloom, a faint bluish haze can be detected over the meadows but only with the aid of a strong imagination and a frosty julep or two.

-f Kentucky produces almost two-thirds of the nation's distilled spirits, but, with 83 dry counties out of a total of 120, the state consumes only 1.4%. Once a year Kentuckians get outside help on their drinking statistics. In Louisville's Brown Hotel Bar on the eve of the 1954 Kentucky Derby, 1,750 mint juleps were downed, mostly by visitors who hardly knew a frosted glass from a frozen custard. # The others: Bachelors Richard Russell, Theodore Green, Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson: Widowers Allen Ellender, Hugh Butler and James Murray.

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