Jefferson Davis’ life still holds lessons

He was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, grew up to be president and led his nation through a bitter Civil War.

No, not Abraham Lincoln.

The other guy: Jefferson Davis.

The 200th birthday of the only president of the Confederate States of America is Tuesday, and it will pass with little notice.

A few modest ceremonies and a historians’ symposium are planned this month, and there will be a festival next weekend at Davis’ hometown of Fairview in Todd County. That’s where a 351-foot concrete obelisk was built to his memory in the early 1900s by old men of the Lost Cause.

The commemorations are in stark contrast to the two-year national celebration that began in February to mark the bicentennial of Lincoln, who was born eight months later and 125 miles away, near Hodgenville in LaRue County.

Lincoln achieved mythic status after he died a martyr as the Civil War was ending. In the pantheon of American heroes, he’s right up there with George Washington.

Davis, on the other hand, is a man few now want to acknowledge, much less celebrate.

Before the Civil War, few would have predicted their fates.

Lincoln was homely and awkward. He educated himself while working as a frontier store clerk. His military career was modest. He married well by Lexington standards, but the Todds had little influence outside the Bluegrass.

After holding small political jobs, practicing law and serving in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln was elected to a single two-year term in Congress. He won the presidency in 1860 with not quite 40 percent of the vote in a four-way race that included John C. Breckinridge of Lexington. Lincoln was openly mocked, even by some in his own government. His emancipation of slaves was not a popular move.

Davis, on the other hand, was the handsome ideal of Southern manhood. He left Kentucky at an early age, as Lincoln did, but returned as the only Protestant pupil at a good Catholic school in Springfield. He studied at Transylvania, then one of the nation’s best colleges, before leaving Lexington to attend West Point.

He served twice in the military with distinction and married the daughter of his commander, the future President Zachary Taylor. She died of malaria three months after the wedding. He married well a second time, too, securing a comfortable place in Mississippi’s plantation aristocracy. He represented Mississippi in the U.S. House, served as secretary of war and was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Davis opposed secession, but when Mississippi left the union, he resigned his Senate seat and a month later was elected president of the Confederacy.

“In some ways, the elevation of Lincoln over Davis isn’t quite fair,” said Brian Dirck, a history professor at Anderson University in Indiana and author of Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865.

“Jefferson Davis was a talented man; before 1860, most people would have said he was more talented than Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “There are many people who felt (Davis) would have made a good president of the United States before the war.”

Davis did a remarkable job of holding together a confederacy founded on the principle that states’ rights supersede those of a central government. Throughout the war, he was constantly sparring with state courts and legislatures.

“I doubt anyone else could have done a better job, given the circumstances,” Dirck said.

“But here’s the thing: He lost. And by that I mean not only did he lose the war, he lost the battle for the Confederacy’s legacy, as well. After the war, he told anybody who would listen that the Confederacy was not about defending slavery, but rather the Constitution and states’ rights. He wrote a book to that effect - a really long, tedious book, I might add - and for a while people believed him.”

The Confederacy, of course, was all about slavery; the South’s wealth depended on it. Jefferson Davis led the fight for slavery and ended up as the poster boy for the most evil social institution in American history.

Davis’ view that slavery “was established by decree of Almighty God … it is sanctioned in the Bible” was conventional wisdom in the South of his day, where slavery had existed for 250 years. People used Scripture then to defend slavery the way others would use it later to deny equal rights to women and gay people.

The United States is great because it is a nation of values, and high on that list of values is equal rights. We really believe that stuff about all people being created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, our entire history has involved struggles to make those words reality. In many ways, we’re still working on it.

I’ve always been fascinated by historic figures such as Jefferson Davis, the man who stood for all of the popular things and is now pitied for it.

And it makes me wonder: When people look back on us a generation or a century or two from now, who will be our Jefferson Davises? Whom will people revere, and whom will they pity?

KY Notebook: The problem is Obama, not Appalachia

Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder has an excellent piece on the discussion about Barrack Obama’s “Appalachian problem.” It offers statistics showing that race is no more an issue in Appalachia than many other parts of the country, including New York. Bishop argues that Obama would get a lot more support in the mountains if he would simply show up and try. It worked for Jesse Jackson two decades ago.

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In the last Kentucky Notebook, I mentioned “retiree” blogs. Another interesting idea comes from Marty Solomon, a retired University of Kentucky education professor. Like many people, Solomon says he is frustrated that some stories he thinks are important don’t get much coverage by major new organizations. So he has created The Watchdog Post blog to draw attention to them.

Kentucky Notebook: Retirees and The New Yorker

Blogging software is one of my favorite new inventions. It allows anyone with a computer and Internet connection to easily express himself to a worldwide audience. One interesting genre is blogs written by retirees who use their expertise to report and comment on news and issues in their fields.

One of my favorites is Kentucky School News and Commentary, written by Richard Day, the retired principal of Cassidy Elementary School in Lexington. Day writes frequently on a variety of education topics, and flags relevant articles published elsewhere. What makes his blog especially interesting is that he does some original reporting, and not just commentary.

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A reader alerted me to an interesting article in last week’s New Yorker magazine that ends with a scene from John McCain’s recent campaign trip to Inez in Martin County. George Packer’s piece is called The Fall of Conservatism, and it traces America’s conservative movement from Barry Goldwater to George Bush. “It was interesting to hear big names like Buckley, Reagan, Nixon – characters in the great, big game of America – and end up unexpectedly in your own backyard,” said Matthew Clarke, a Kentuckian who now works in Manhattan.

Realizing the potential for downtown redevelopment

I first heard people fretting about the future of downtown Lexington when I was a kid and Turfland Mall had just opened.

Now, Turfland Mall is an almost-empty shell surrounded by big-box chain stores and restaurants. The mall’s biggest tenant, Dillard’s nee McAlpin’s, is wrapping up its going-out-of-business sale, fixtures and all.

Downtown Lexington, on the other hand, is on a roll that seems to be just beginning.

Old buildings around the new courthouse plaza that were once in the wrecking ball’s shadow have been reborn with such businesses as Giacamo’s Deli and Molly Brooke’s Irish Bar. Condos are sprouting up all over downtown, both in rehabbed old buildings such as the Kimball House and in new developments such as Main & Rose.

As big events always seem to do, the Alltech FEI 2010 World Equestrian Games has given Lexington a new sense of energy and urgency. It’s like your mother yelling, “Clean up your room — company’s coming!”

For many people, the debate over Dudley Webb’s proposed CentrePointe tower has helped change the tone of the downtown conversation from “any redevelopment will do” to “what’s the best redevelopment we can do?”

The Downtown Development Authority, which the city created six years ago, recognizes the new climate. The authority is now reviewing and updating its mission statement, goals and objectives to reflect it. A revised draft is likely to be discussed at the DDA’s July meeting.

The authority is looking to expand its sights to include a broader downtown footprint, such as the historic neighborhoods north of Fourth Street. It also is looking at broader, thematic issues, such as transportation and zoning and doing more to educate and involve the public in downtown redevelopment.

“I think it’s time to step back and look at the bigger picture,” said David Mohney, the authority’s new chairman and an architecture professor at the University of Kentucky.

Mohney is on the right track. The DDA must be seen as more than an arm of private developers — keeping their secrets and facilitating their individual plans. It must look at the bigger picture, and the broader public interest.

Part of the challenge is helping people in Lexington realize just how much potential is downtown.

Unlike many cities, Lexington a generation ago chose to have the interstate highways go around it rather than through it. That left the city’s historic neighborhoods and original design intact and easier to redevelop. And, because there were no big industrial sites downtown, there’s no post-industrial blight pockmarking the landscape.

With the University of Kentucky on the south side of downtown and Transylvania University to the north side, much more could be done to integrate campus life into the larger community. And those opportunities will increase when Bluegrass Community and Technical College consolidates its campus near downtown, to the Eastern State Hospital site on West Fourth Street.

If our goal is to make downtown Lexington a destination, rather than a place to drive through quickly, we must look for more and better public-transportation options, change some one-way streets back to two-way and make the streetscape more pedestrian-friendly.

And if we can preserve much of our historic architecture — or incorporate elements of it into high-quality contemporary buildings the way other cities have done — it will create an environment that’s uniquely Lexington, and not simply generic modern America.

If we create a downtown where locals want to go, tourists will also want to visit. And, perhaps most important, Lexington will have a better shot at attracting the diverse, intelligent workers of a 21st-century economy and the companies that want to employ them.

“We can create an A-plus downtown that’s equal to our A-plus rural area,” Vice Mayor Jim Gray told the Bluegrass Hospitality Association at a recent meeting. “The downtown is our touchstone … and it’s all about the economy.”

Once that’s done, then perhaps we can turn our attention to Turfland Mall, Lexington Mall and some other once-vibrant parts of Lexington that have fallen out of favor. Like downtown, they also could be better than they are now, if we’re willing to use some imagination.

NRA’s slippery slope full of holes

As expected, I heard an earful about my column last week on a new gun group that opposes the National Rifle Association’s hard-line views and allegiance to the Republican Party.

NRA loyalists from around the country sent me e-mails echoing the organization’s claim that a small rival, the American Hunters & Shooters Association, is just a “front” for gun-control activists. They said that anything that weakens absolute Second Amendment freedom is a slippery slope that will lead to the nation being disarmed.

I believe just the opposite is true — and I think many gun owners realize it.

There’s a lot of money and power to be had by representing gun enthusiasts. Nobody knows that better than the NRA and its many competitors. With guns in nearly half of all American households, these organizations know that fear — “sneaky liberals want to take away your guns!” — is a powerful recruiting tool.

Both Democrats and Republicans love to exploit wedge issues that will energize their base. Republicans have become masters of the technique, courting factions that feel so passionately about hot-button topics — guns, gay rights, abortion, prayer in schools — that it has become difficult to find common ground on many important issues in American life.

I don’t know whether the American Hunters & Shooters Association is a good organization or a bad one. What I found interesting was its willingness to say what many “pro-gun” Kentuckians like me think about this endless debate: that we need some intelligent compromises to protect responsible gun ownership and make communities safer.

Many law-abiding Kentuckians want guns for self-defense or farm use, or because they enjoy shooting, hunting or collecting. Or they believe that America would be less safe if responsible, law-abiding citizens were disarmed. Members of the NRA and similar groups are generally the most responsible gun owners and shooters out there.

Guns were an important part of the frontier heritage that helped make America great. And Kentucky, after all, was the nation’s first frontier.

But gun violence and crime are serious problems. The no-compromise crowd has kept law enforcement agencies from having some tools they need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people. And that has led to some over-reaching, such as when police in New Orleans illegally seized hundreds of guns after Hurricane Katrina.

Without some intelligent compromises, each new tragedy, like the Virginia Tech or Columbine massacres, will prompt more emotional calls for banning guns. All guns. There are zealots on both sides.

The NRA and other gun groups could learn something from the horse industry.

High-profile deaths of horses in Thoroughbred racing and eventing have created some public backlash against those sports. Rather than stonewall, though, horse industry leaders are aggressively working to make their sports safer. They love horses, sure, but they also realize that their sports could live or die with public opinion.

As society becomes more diverse, we must regain the lost art of compromise. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to deal with complex problems in ways that protect everyone’s rights. Polarization may be good for special-interest groups and political parties, but it’s bad for America.

If Second Amendment absolutists keep standing up and daring others to pry their guns from their “cold, dead fingers,” eventually somebody’s going to do it.

Horsey Hundred attracts 1,700 cyclists

About 1,700 cyclists from across the eastern United States are attending the 31st annual Horsey Hundred bicycle ride Saturday and Sunday. The ride, sponsored by the Bluegrass Cycling Club and based at Georgetown College, offers rides of between 34 miles and 104 miles through Scott, Woodford, Fayette and Bourbon counties. Bethel Presbyterian Church, above, was a rest stop for some of the routes. Below, cyclists coast down a small hill on Falcon Wood Way. Photos/Tom Eblen

A reliable ride for 84 years

Cy Hanks made a stop Friday afternoon at The Country Store at Spears in southeast Fayette County. He parked his 1924 Ford Model T truck across the road.

Hanks said the truck was bought new in Nicholasville by two sisters who lived along Brannon Road. They owned it until 1947, using it to haul eggs and produce to market. Hanks bought the truck about 15 years ago to play with.

It looks great and runs well, despite little restoration work. Hanks found an old moonshine still and some stone jugs for the truck bed because he thought it added a nice touch. The truck gets about 24 miles to the gallon.

New Hope for Kentucky’s recovering addicts

Drew Thomas isn’t what most people visualize when they think of a homeless alcoholic and drug addict.

Captain of his high school football team, scholarship athlete at Eastern Kentucky University, semi-pro player in Arizona. On the outside, Thomas seemed to be successful.

Inside, he was a mess.

“I kind of always knew I had a problem,” he said. “But it took me a long time to come to the realization that I couldn’t control my addictions.”

Thomas, 31, began drinking in high school. He got hooked on painkillers after a knee injury, then took up crystal meth. He was dismissed from his semi-pro team after failing a random drug test.

Back in Kentucky, alcohol and drugs consumed his life. His parents kicked him out, then his girlfriend kicked him out.

Thomas ended up at the Hope Center’s emergency shelter and, last October, entered its addiction recovery program. His goal is to complete the center’s recovery program as 800 men and 300 women have done since 1996.

“They saved my life,” Thomas said of the shelter.

The Hope Center will be able to save many more lives now that it has the George Privett Recovery Center, a 96-bed facility at 250 W. Loudon Avenue. The center will greatly expand the men’s recovery program while freeing much-needed space at the shelter down the street.

The Hope Center also operates a 40-unit transitional apartment complex, a women’s recovery center and recovery programs for men and women at the Fayette County Detention Center.

Gov. Steve Beshear used the new building’s dedication Thursday to sign an executive order creating a task force to advise him on the Recovery Kentucky initiative.

After signing an executive order creating the Recovery Kentucky Task Force, Gov. Steve Beshear shakes hands with state Finance Secretary Jonathan Miller, who will be the task force’s vice chairman. Dr. George Privett stands at left beside John Y. Brown III. Photos/Tom Eblen

Recovery Kentucky is building 10 addiction treatment facilities around the state that will accommodate 1,000 people and use programs modeled after those at the Hope Center and The Healing Place in Louisville. But the new facilities will only begin to meet the demand.

“The numbers we deal with in Kentucky are staggering,” Beshear said.

Experts say that more than 375,000 Kentuckians need drug or alcohol treatment. But it is a good investment: for every $1 spent on treatment, $7 is saved in health care and criminal justice costs.

Recovery programs are key to the Hope Center’s mission, because more than 70 percent of the homeless men who come there are addicts.

The new building is named for Dr. George Privett, a Hope Center board member who owns Lexington Diagnostic Center. Privett is an active donor and volunteer in many local charity and arts organizations. Earlier this year, he received a humanitarian award from the Kentucky Conference for Community and Justice.

“There’s nothing that I can think of better to do in life than to give someone the tools to help him get out of the death spiral of addiction,” Privett told more than 200 people who attended the center’s dedication ceremony.

Privett gave $300,000 toward the center’s construction, but it was truly a community effort. Other private donations totaled $600,000; Lexmark gave the land; the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati donated $1 million; Central Bank provided financial services; and construction was handled at cost by Barkham Inc., the non-profit unit of Ball Homes. That company’s founders, Don and Mira Ball, are big supporters of the 28-year-old Hope Center.

Many other Lexington individuals and businesses donated furniture, equipment and even art for the walls. The value of the finished facility is about $3.5 million.

Earlier this week, I got a tour from staff members Kolan Morelock and Walter May, who were obviously proud of the building and the programs it will house.

The recovery program takes in addicts from the Hope Center shelter as well as some who are released from prison or are referred by judges. More than six in 10 participants succeed.

The program requires individuals to take responsibility for their behavior - and be held accountable by their peers. Participants must go through Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous programs, and do the chores necessary to keep the center and shelter running. In later stages of recovery, they also must get outside jobs.

As men advance through the program, they will move to progressively nicer dormitory rooms at the new center. “It reinforces the idea that what I am doing is making my life better,” May said.

Drew Thomas, the former football player, still has a long way to go in his recovery. But he said the Hope Center’s impact on his life already has been profound.

“I know that my attitude has changed 100 percent,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of personal relationships back with my family. Through my addictions, I had harmed them, stole things from them, done a lot of bad things to them.”

Thomas said he has learned humility for the first time in his life, and he has found a relationship with God.

“It sounds corny, because when I first got here, to be honest with you, I was real skeptical about the whole deal,” he said. “But looking back today, I owe them my life.”

A ceremonial ribbon-cutting Thursday marked the opening of the Hope Center’s George Privett Recovery Center. From left, Luther Deaton of Central Bank, Mira and Don Ball of Ball Homes, Bonnie Quantrell, Hope Center Chair Randy Breeding, Gov. Steve Beshear and Cecil Dunn, the Hope Center’s executive director.

Kentucky Notebook: What’s worth reading online

The World Wide Web is a gold mine for news and information junkies. The more I look, the more I find fascinating “content” that helps me understand the world and our little corner of it.

Today I’m beginning an occasional series of blog posts called Kentucky Notebook. I call it occasional, because I’ll do it whenever I find time and material worth calling to your attention. I call it Kentucky Notebook, because it will highlight online content relating to our state, people and culture. If you see articles worth highlighting, post a comment or send me an email.

Ron Eller, a University of Kentucky history professor who specializes in Appalachia, has a perceptive essay about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Appalachian voters. It was written before Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory over Obama in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary, but it helps explain why Obama received minuscule support in some Eastern Kentucky counties. The essay is accompanied by photos of Letcher County taken by photographer Andrew Stern this year and a half-century ago.

Eller’s essay also is a good excuse to highlight the online publication in which it appears. The Daily Yonder focuses on news and commentary about rural America. It is edited by two Kentuckians: Bill Bishop, a former Herald-Leader editorial columnist, and his wife, Julie Ardery. They now live in Austin, Texas. Bishop is also the author of a new book, The Big Sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart. It was reviewed Sunday in The New York Times.

Some gun owners resent NRA’s devotion to GOP

Last weekend’s National Rifle Association convention in Louisville could easily have been mistaken for a Republican campaign rally.

“If either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama is elected president, the rights of law-abiding gun owners will be at risk my friends - and have no doubt about it,” John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, told the crowd.

Former Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee also spoke, with Huckabee making - and later apologizing for - an attempt at a joke. When a chair fell over with a bang during his speech, Huckabee said it was Democratic candidate Barack Obama ducking because somebody aimed a gun at him.

Rounding out the NRA’s “American Values Leadership Forum” were Republican icons Karl Rove and Oliver North, who are now Fox News Channel commentators.

What you didn’t hear is that many gun enthusiasts balk at the NRA’s devotion to the Republican Party. They resent the NRA for appropriating their values, radicalizing their views and, perhaps, jeopardizing their ability to own guns in the future.

“In many circles, the NRA stands for the National Republican Association,” said Bob Ricker, executive director of the American Hunters & Shooters Association, which last month endorsed Obama for president.

The AHSA was started two years ago by Ricker, a former NRA assistant general counsel and longtime gun industry lobbyist, and Ray Schoenke, an avid hunter and former Washington Redskins lineman who ran unsuccessfully in 1998 for the Democratic nomination to be governor of Maryland.

“There wouldn’t be a need for the American Hunters & Shooters Association if the NRA was doing its job,” Ricker said in an interview. “We really feel like the vast majority of sportsmen are under-represented.”

The AHSA wants to preserve the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns for recreation and self-defense. But it also wants to curb gun violence and gun crime.

Ricker said the NRA’s focus on absolute gun-ownership rights has made communities less safe and led that organization to support some politicians who have bad records on environmental conservation, which is important to hunters.

The AHSA supports what Ricker called “common-sense” proposals such as the assault-weapons ban and requiring people who buy guns at gun shows to have the same criminal background checks required at gun stores.

He said the NRA’s resistance to those and other measures that would make guns safer and keep them out of the hands of criminals only further divides the nation between pro-gun and anti-gun factions. That division puts law-abiding gun owners at risk, especially when public opinion swings against guns in the wake of such tragedies as the Virginia Tech massacre.

Ricker said the AHSA endorsed Obama after reviewing all of the major candidates’ positions. Key to the decision was Obama’s vote for federal legislation that would prevent police from seizing legally held guns during emergencies, as happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Hillary Clinton voted against it.

McCain has had a rocky relationship with the NRA over the years, although he’s seeking its endorsement this time. “We just think McCain is the type of guy who is going to say anything to get elected,” Ricker said.

The AHSA has signed up about 25,000 dues-paying members over two years, Ricker said. That pales in comparison to the 4 million members of the NRA, which had a 135-year head start. But Ricker notes that the NRA’s 4 million is only a fraction of the nation’s estimated 60 million gun owners.

The NRA dismisses the AHSA as a front for gun-control activists, noting that it supports some restrictions and compromises advocated by such groups as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Ricker said that’s exactly the point.

The best way to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens to own and use firearms is to reduce gun violence and crime. And the best way to do that is to search for compromises that protect both constitutional rights and the public safety.

“You can’t solve it by stonewalling as the NRA has done,” Ricker said.