Robert Penn Warren Remembers Guthrie

The best writer from Kentucky and the best writer from Vanderbilt University are the same person. Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905, and grew up in Guthrie, Kentucky. In 1979, he returned to Todd County for ceremonies honoring Jefferson Davis, whose citizenship had been restored. He wrote an article for The New Yorker about this experience called "Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back," and in that article, he had this to say about his hometown:

{Guthrie} was, except in geography, anything but an old Southern town. The autochthonous little settlements in the region had been gradually absorbed when a Louisville & Nashville Railroad crossing started a small-scale realtor's dream: ground measured out and the map of a hypothetical town flung down on a pretty countryside of woodlots and woods, streams, ponds, pastures, and fields of corn or tobacco, with old farmsteads, some handsome, some with modest charm, and also -- it should be, in candor, noted -- a number of tumbledown shacks of tenantry, black and white.

By and large, Guthrie was a railroad town, without a sense of belonging in any particular place or having any particular history. No, it did have one fleeting brush with history. On September 24, 1904, Felix Grundy Ewing, of Glenraven, Tennessee, called a meeting at the Guthrie fairgrounds and race track to organize the Dark Tobacco Protective Association, later the Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Some five to six thousand growers responded, who with kin and on-lookers numbered, it was said in my childhood, some twenty-five thousand people. (I have an old photograph of the scene: buggies hub to hub, horsemen so packed together that legs were crushed between mounts -- as far as eye, or camera, could see.) The growers were being driven to desperation by a price-fixing conspiracy among the big companies. The association was in the right, but it developed, unofficially, a violent wing, the Night Riders, which, in its most adventurous exploit, in the middle of the night, with military precision, took the neighboring "big" town of Hopkinsville, cut all wires, occupied the railroad-telegraph office and the telephone office, and systematically dynamited all the warehouses of the companies. Before and after this, whippings, barn burnings, and killings were a commonplace, for violence in a "good" cause had led to mere violence. Then came martial law. One of my earliest recollections is of being held up in my father's arms to watch the National Guard set up an encampment in Guthrie, down by the railroad station. Peace was restored. And the courts, after the jog of violence, finally acted to break up the conspiracy to fix prices.
Warren's first novel, published in 1939, was entitled Night Rider.