Introductory Note: Wendell Berry died on August 31, 2026. To honor his life, the JSF offers our readers the following article which originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Progressive. It was reprinted with permission in the Spring 2012 (Vol. 28, No. 2) issue of the JSF Newsletter.
The still-characteristic American failure to know and respect economic landscapes for what they naturally are amounts to a national disease, perhaps a lethal one. This failure manifests itself most readily in ecologically vulnerable places such as the steep drainages of the Cumberland Plateau, but that is merely an extreme example of the colonial economics and industrial violence that now afflict the landscapes of agriculture and forestry, as well as mining, everywhere in our country. There are few people now living who are not complicit in this destruction, and nobody who is exempt from its effects.
I have known all my life the lower reaches of the Kentucky River, and for the last forty-five years I have lived beside it, thirteen miles from its entrance into the Ohio. The headwaters of this river lie partly in Harry Caudill’s native county, near the Virginia line. That this river and all who live in its watershed, my wife and I and our livestock included, are affected by the silt and pollutants that it has carried from the strip mines (among other sources) for the last half century is simply obvious. Its water is no longer safely swimmable and its fish are no longer safely edible. The native black willows are long gone from its low water line, and perhaps as a consequence, the erosion of the banks has worsened.
Of all this I have hardly been an innocent observer. Every time I have turned on a light switch, I have given my support to the coal economy and thus abetted and implicitly consented to the desecration of my home river.
Harry Caudill
And so from the time I read his great testimony, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, in the summer of 1963, Harry Caudill has spoken to me directly and personally. That book bore witness to the abuses inflicted upon his region and its people by the industrial colonialism chiefly of the coal companies.
In 1976, he published a sequel, Watches of the Night, in which he revealed unsurprisingly that, in the thirteen years intervening, conditions had become worse. Now that book has been reissued by the Jesse Stuart Foundation, with a new afterword by James K. Caudill, Harry’s son, and a note “about the author” by his widow Anne F. Caudill.
Harry Caudill was born in Letcher County, Kentucky, in 1922. Letcher County lies among the steep foldings of the Cumberland Plateau, which originally contained an unimagined wealth of coal and other minerals and one of the most diverse and abounding forest ecosystems in the world. Because of this wealth, throughout Harry’s life and increasingly until now, the land has been devastated and the people impoverished.
Harry joined the Army in 1941. In Italy, the following year, he was wounded in action. His wound, a severe injury to his left leg, kept him in hospitals for a long time, and he suffered from it until his death in 1990. It may be that this never-forgettable wound to himself in our greatest industrial war helped him to identify with his native region that was so severely wounded in our ongoing industrial war against the land.
After receiving his law degree in 1948, he set up his practice in Whitesburg, the county seat of Letcher County, and not as a corporation lawyer. He thus, from the start, made himself exceptional: a bright, young Kentuckian who brought his professional education home, to become not an exploiter of the land and people, but their advocate and defender.
In the last twenty-five years of Harry’s life, he and I were friends. I still, and will always, count myself his friend. In those years we, our wives, and sometimes our children saw a good deal of each other, in visits to each other’s homes, on long walks in the woods, at public gatherings at which Harry would be speaking. Friendships, of course, have many themes, but a major theme of ours was the immense fact, the immense dilemma and sorrow, of land destruction.
In his determined, capable, and passionate opposition to this destruction, Harry was what Thoreau called “a standard man.” I studied him with the attention and respect that a younger man pays to an exemplary older one, and I was aboundingly repaid. He was in every way rare.
Maybe one could reasonably have expected, given the relentlessness of his attack upon the despoilers, and the ardor of it, that Harry would have been one-dimensional, obsessed, and finally tedious. But he was none of that.
There was nothing of the fanatic about him. He was a sense-maker—a smart, informed, well-read, articulate, sensible man. A humorous, steady intelligence seemed to comprehend, and transcend, his other qualities.
He had a Shakespearian relish of human comedy, oddity, and outlandishness. His own experience and the gossip of county courthouses had filled his memory with stories, most of them funny. Once started, he would tell one after another, interrupting himself only to chuckle and pronounce judgment. “Oh, dear me!” I heard him tell many excellent stories, and never the same one twice. His face had the composure of settled endurance and determination, but relaxed and laughing it assumed a comely brightness and ease neither describable nor forgettable.
Much of his conversation was a sublime burlesque of legal and official rhetoric. If I called him on the phone, the dialogue would begin like this: “Harry, this is Wendell.”
“Why, Wendell Burry!” Harry would say, weighting the vowels in the local manner. “To what do I owe the signal honor of this communication?”
This was one of his ways of amusing himself. And he could make of self-amusement a way of dealing with hard fact.
Herb E. Smith, a native of Harry’s town of Whitesburg, and for many years now a filmmaker in that town, was once employed as a shoeshine boy in a local barbershop. One day Harry came in, took a seat on the shoeshine stand, and placed his feet on the footrests. The shoeshine boy was thus confronted by a most embarrassing dilemma, for Harry’s war wound had distorted the shape of his left foot, which required him to wear a shoe that was not at all normal looking. Herb E. was a boy of good upbringing, who knew that one should not gawk at other people’s afflictions. And so he shined mightily the normal shoe, and avoided any notice of the other one.
Harry, who of course was watching and somewhat delighted, finally said to him: “My dear boy, I see that my misshapen foot gives you pause. My leg, as perhaps you are not aware, was pierced by a missile in the second war of all the world. If I had foreseen the benefits that would accrue there from to a young man like yourself, I would have had them shoot me in the other leg. Go ahead and shine that shoe.”
He loved to carry on in such fashion as he walked a forest path, favoring his hurt leg, using some picked-up tree limb as a walking stick, translating everyday observations into highest eloquence, as if there were no other language.
But he loved also—you can feel this in his prose—to concentrate his mind upon an argument and work at it until he had given it his characteristic clarity and force.
Watches of the Night is not a book to make anybody happy. It comes straight from the heartbreak and anger of an eyewitness to the destruction of his region and people. To write it, one imagines, was nearly unbearable. It would be unbearable to read were it not for the fortitude, the blistering intelligence, the eloquence, and the affirming passion of this witness.
If you are a conservative in any respectable sense, you will be embarrassed by this history of a failure to conserve. If you are a liberal with a just sense of the particularity and complexity of problems, you will be embarrassed by the governmental inability to solve the multiple and burgeoning problems caused by the failure to conserve. But if you wish, as I do, to be hopeful about the future of land use, this book will show you what you are up against. You need to read it. Whether or not you agree with its author in everything, you will appreciate at least that he spoke his mind fearlessly and plainly. There was no kinship whatever between Harry Caudill and the quibblers, hedgers, double-talkers, and fanatic daydreamers who now infest the public life of our long-suffering land.
He attacked head-on “the industrial Neanderthals” who have imposed upon the Cumberland Plateau “a single-minded devotion to a single goal—the mining and the selling of coal.” The coal industry, he said with perfect truth, “held the title deeds to the future and devoured the land, people, and culture with a satanic appetite.”
He indicted strip mining as “man’s most thorough and total assault upon his planet.” He said correctly that “the blasting and bulldozing of grass, timber, topsoil, and rock strata…kill or put to flight every living creature, destroy every plant, and expose vast quantities of iron, sulfur, zinc, coppers, alumina, magnesium, manganese, and other trace minerals to follow spoilbank silt into the river channels and thence into the nation’s drinking water. The ill consequences of such water pollution alone are unforeseeable and probably irremediable.”
Such massive damage, of course, will cause a certain amount of political contention. But politicians quickly learned to pacify the liberals by passing laws and regulations which, to pacify the conservatives, would not be enforced. Watches of the Night reserves a precise and explicit contempt for political gutlessness and avarice: “Of all American politicians, the small-bore officials who run the states are the most greedy and least scrupulous, and the coal royalists learned early…how relatively paltry sums, if well placed, could bring the passage of helpful laws, the veto of harmful ones, and, in a pinch, the nullification of judicial opinions.”
When the industrial colonialists and the politicians agree to sacrifice a region to a single economic goal, they inevitably sacrifice the people, as well. The ruin of the land ruins the people, which leads to further ruin of the land, which further ruins the people. Round and round the devastation goes, worsening at every turn. The history of the Cumberland Plateau is the history of the destruction of the health of the land and the people. Neither can be damaged alone. Neither can be redeemed and healed alone.
And so this book like others by the same author, is obliged to confront the human damage that comes inescapably with damage to the land.
Unlimited industrial progress toward cheaper and cheaper “production” directly damages land and water. It damages the people perhaps even more profoundly and lastingly, as Harry saw, when it replaces with a succession of ever more “efficient” machines “fathers, sons, and even grandsons with their intricate and valuable skills so that they simultaneously lose their livelihoods and all claim to status and standing.”
This imposed economy, operating without respect for ecological or moral limits, and without effective regulation by any government, limitlessly destroys what Aldo Leopold called “the land community,” and it threatens limitless destruction also to the human community. In an effort to remedy the damage to the people, which it might have prevented by protecting the land, the government has offered only welfare programs. These, in the absence of economic diversification, lead to permanent dependence on a “solution” that is both costly and, in the worst sense, artificial.
A proper economy, one finally must imagine, would rise up, more or less naturally, more or less culturally, from the land and its human inhabitants who best know the land and themselves. A proper economy would be conformed by local intelligence to the opportunities and limits of local topography and ecology as well as to the needs of local humans.
Harry Caudill had thought long of the possibility of so beneficent an economy for his region. All of his work was directed to that end. But he had thought long also of the dire diminishments of both land and people that he knew from his own observation. By 1976, the land had been abused disastrously and to some considerable extent irreparably. The remaining potential of the people, in the watches of the night, seemed to him a “tremendous imponderable.”
Until his final illness, Harry never stopped. He fully earned the praise that concludes both his widow’s remembrance of him and this new edition of Watches of the Night: “A man of courage constant to the end.”
Since I am a friend, bound by no rule of family modesty, I will go further. I doubt that any man of his time had more courage than Harry Caudill. Living in coal country, among reminders of its violent history, his law practice keeping him daily in view of the mining companies he attacked them unremittingly in state government, in the courts, in books, in magazine articles, in letters and articles in newspapers, in hundreds of speeches and interviews. He never quit and he never flinched.
I remember an evening at a friend’s house in Louisville when the conversation turned to the subject of writing and responsibility. Thinking perhaps of lines by William Butler Yeats, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” I said, “It would be a serious matter to write something that gets somebody killed.” And Harry said, “It would be a serious matter to write something that gets you killed.” His response came so promptly and with such emphasis as to leave no doubt: This was a thought that he was accustomed to. He had lived with it many years.
(Article by Wendell Berry originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Progressive. Reprinted here with permission. www.progressive.org)
Introductory Note: Wendell Berry died on August 31, 2026. To honor his life, the JSF offers our readers the following article which originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Progressive. It was reprinted with permission in the Spring 2012 (Vol. 28, No. 2) issue of the JSF Newsletter.
The still-characteristic American failure to know and respect economic landscapes for what they naturally are amounts to a national disease, perhaps a lethal one. This failure manifests itself most readily in ecologically vulnerable places such as the steep drainages of the Cumberland Plateau, but that is merely an extreme example of the colonial economics and industrial violence that now afflict the landscapes of agriculture and forestry, as well as mining, everywhere in our country. There are few people now living who are not complicit in this destruction, and nobody who is exempt from its effects.
I have known all my life the lower reaches of the Kentucky River, and for the last forty-five years I have lived beside it, thirteen miles from its entrance into the Ohio. The headwaters of this river lie partly in Harry Caudill’s native county, near the Virginia line. That this river and all who live in its watershed, my wife and I and our livestock included, are affected by the silt and pollutants that it has carried from the strip mines (among other sources) for the last half century is simply obvious. Its water is no longer safely swimmable and its fish are no longer safely edible. The native black willows are long gone from its low water line, and perhaps as a consequence, the erosion of the banks has worsened.
Of all this I have hardly been an innocent observer. Every time I have turned on a light switch, I have given my support to the coal economy and thus abetted and implicitly consented to the desecration of my home river.
And so from the time I read his great testimony, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, in the summer of 1963, Harry Caudill has spoken to me directly and personally. That book bore witness to the abuses inflicted upon his region and its people by the industrial colonialism chiefly of the coal companies.
Harry Caudill
In 1976, he published a sequel, Watches of the Night, in which he revealed unsurprisingly that, in the thirteen years intervening, conditions had become worse. Now that book has been reissued by the Jesse Stuart Foundation, with a new afterword by James K. Caudill, Harry’s son, and a note “about the author” by his widow Anne F. Caudill.
Harry Caudill was born in Letcher County, Kentucky, in 1922. Letcher County lies among the steep foldings of the Cumberland Plateau, which originally contained an unimagined wealth of coal and other minerals and one of the most diverse and abounding forest ecosystems in the world. Because of this wealth, throughout Harry’s life and increasingly until now, the land has been devastated and the people impoverished.
Harry joined the Army in 1941. In Italy, the following year, he was wounded in action. His wound, a severe injury to his left leg, kept him in hospitals for a long time, and he suffered from it until his death in 1990. It may be that this never-forgettable wound to himself in our greatest industrial war helped him to identify with his native region that was so severely wounded in our ongoing industrial war against the land.
After receiving his law degree in 1948, he set up his practice in Whitesburg, the county seat of Letcher County, and not as a corporation lawyer. He thus, from the start, made himself exceptional: a bright, young Kentuckian who brought his professional education home, to become not an exploiter of the land and people, but their advocate and defender.
In the last twenty-five years of Harry’s life, he and I were friends. I still, and will always, count myself his friend. In those years we, our wives, and sometimes our children saw a good deal of each other, in visits to each other’s homes, on long walks in the woods, at public gatherings at which Harry would be speaking. Friendships, of course, have many themes, but a major theme of ours was the immense fact, the immense dilemma and sorrow, of land destruction.
In his determined, capable, and passionate opposition to this destruction, Harry was what Thoreau called “a standard man.” I studied him with the attention and respect that a younger man pays to an exemplary older one, and I was aboundingly repaid. He was in every way rare.
Maybe one could reasonably have expected, given the relentlessness of his attack upon the despoilers, and the ardor of it, that Harry would have been one-dimensional, obsessed, and finally tedious. But he was none of that.
There was nothing of the fanatic about him. He was a sense-maker—a smart, informed, well-read, articulate, sensible man. A humorous, steady intelligence seemed to comprehend, and transcend, his other qualities.
He had a Shakespearian relish of human comedy, oddity, and outlandishness. His own experience and the gossip of county courthouses had filled his memory with stories, most of them funny. Once started, he would tell one after another, interrupting himself only to chuckle and pronounce judgment. “Oh, dear me!” I heard him tell many excellent stories, and never the same one twice. His face had the composure of settled endurance and determination, but relaxed and laughing it assumed a comely brightness and ease neither describable nor forgettable.
Much of his conversation was a sublime burlesque of legal and official rhetoric. If I called him on the phone, the dialogue would begin like this: “Harry, this is Wendell.”
“Why, Wendell Burry!” Harry would say, weighting the vowels in the local manner. “To what do I owe the signal honor of this communication?”
This was one of his ways of amusing himself. And he could make of self-amusement a way of dealing with hard fact.
Herb E. Smith, a native of Harry’s town of Whitesburg, and for many years now a filmmaker in that town, was once employed as a shoeshine boy in a local barbershop. One day Harry came in, took a seat on the shoeshine stand, and placed his feet on the footrests. The shoeshine boy was thus confronted by a most embarrassing dilemma, for Harry’s war wound had distorted the shape of his left foot, which required him to wear a shoe that was not at all normal looking. Herb E. was a boy of good upbringing, who knew that one should not gawk at other people’s afflictions. And so he shined mightily the normal shoe, and avoided any notice of the other one.
Harry, who of course was watching and somewhat delighted, finally said to him: “My dear boy, I see that my misshapen foot gives you pause. My leg, as perhaps you are not aware, was pierced by a missile in the second war of all the world. If I had foreseen the benefits that would accrue there from to a young man like yourself, I would have had them shoot me in the other leg. Go ahead and shine that shoe.”
He loved to carry on in such fashion as he walked a forest path, favoring his hurt leg, using some picked-up tree limb as a walking stick, translating everyday observations into highest eloquence, as if there were no other language.
But he loved also—you can feel this in his prose—to concentrate his mind upon an argument and work at it until he had given it his characteristic clarity and force.
Watches of the Night is not a book to make anybody happy. It comes straight from the heartbreak and anger of an eyewitness to the destruction of his region and people. To write it, one imagines, was nearly unbearable. It would be unbearable to read were it not for the fortitude, the blistering intelligence, the eloquence, and the affirming passion of this witness.
If you are a conservative in any respectable sense, you will be embarrassed by this history of a failure to conserve. If you are a liberal with a just sense of the particularity and complexity of problems, you will be embarrassed by the governmental inability to solve the multiple and burgeoning problems caused by the failure to conserve. But if you wish, as I do, to be hopeful about the future of land use, this book will show you what you are up against. You need to read it. Whether or not you agree with its author in everything, you will appreciate at least that he spoke his mind fearlessly and plainly. There was no kinship whatever between Harry Caudill and the quibblers, hedgers, double-talkers, and fanatic daydreamers who now infest the public life of our long-suffering land.
He attacked head-on “the industrial Neanderthals” who have imposed upon the Cumberland Plateau “a single-minded devotion to a single goal—the mining and the selling of coal.” The coal industry, he said with perfect truth, “held the title deeds to the future and devoured the land, people, and culture with a satanic appetite.”
He indicted strip mining as “man’s most thorough and total assault upon his planet.” He said correctly that “the blasting and bulldozing of grass, timber, topsoil, and rock strata…kill or put to flight every living creature, destroy every plant, and expose vast quantities of iron, sulfur, zinc, coppers, alumina, magnesium, manganese, and other trace minerals to follow spoilbank silt into the river channels and thence into the nation’s drinking water. The ill consequences of such water pollution alone are unforeseeable and probably irremediable.”
Such massive damage, of course, will cause a certain amount of political contention. But politicians quickly learned to pacify the liberals by passing laws and regulations which, to pacify the conservatives, would not be enforced. Watches of the Night reserves a precise and explicit contempt for political gutlessness and avarice: “Of all American politicians, the small-bore officials who run the states are the most greedy and least scrupulous, and the coal royalists learned early…how relatively paltry sums, if well placed, could bring the passage of helpful laws, the veto of harmful ones, and, in a pinch, the nullification of judicial opinions.”
When the industrial colonialists and the politicians agree to sacrifice a region to a single economic goal, they inevitably sacrifice the people, as well. The ruin of the land ruins the people, which leads to further ruin of the land, which further ruins the people. Round and round the devastation goes, worsening at every turn. The history of the Cumberland Plateau is the history of the destruction of the health of the land and the people. Neither can be damaged alone. Neither can be redeemed and healed alone.
And so this book like others by the same author, is obliged to confront the human damage that comes inescapably with damage to the land.
Unlimited industrial progress toward cheaper and cheaper “production” directly damages land and water. It damages the people perhaps even more profoundly and lastingly, as Harry saw, when it replaces with a succession of ever more “efficient” machines “fathers, sons, and even grandsons with their intricate and valuable skills so that they simultaneously lose their livelihoods and all claim to status and standing.”
This imposed economy, operating without respect for ecological or moral limits, and without effective regulation by any government, limitlessly destroys what Aldo Leopold called “the land community,” and it threatens limitless destruction also to the human community. In an effort to remedy the damage to the people, which it might have prevented by protecting the land, the government has offered only welfare programs. These, in the absence of economic diversification, lead to permanent dependence on a “solution” that is both costly and, in the worst sense, artificial.
A proper economy, one finally must imagine, would rise up, more or less naturally, more or less culturally, from the land and its human inhabitants who best know the land and themselves. A proper economy would be conformed by local intelligence to the opportunities and limits of local topography and ecology as well as to the needs of local humans.
Harry Caudill had thought long of the possibility of so beneficent an economy for his region. All of his work was directed to that end. But he had thought long also of the dire diminishments of both land and people that he knew from his own observation. By 1976, the land had been abused disastrously and to some considerable extent irreparably. The remaining potential of the people, in the watches of the night, seemed to him a “tremendous imponderable.”
Until his final illness, Harry never stopped. He fully earned the praise that concludes both his widow’s remembrance of him and this new edition of Watches of the Night: “A man of courage constant to the end.”
Since I am a friend, bound by no rule of family modesty, I will go further. I doubt that any man of his time had more courage than Harry Caudill. Living in coal country, among reminders of its violent history, his law practice keeping him daily in view of the mining companies he attacked them unremittingly in state government, in the courts, in books, in magazine articles, in letters and articles in newspapers, in hundreds of speeches and interviews. He never quit and he never flinched.
I remember an evening at a friend’s house in Louisville when the conversation turned to the subject of writing and responsibility. Thinking perhaps of lines by William Butler Yeats, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” I said, “It would be a serious matter to write something that gets somebody killed.” And Harry said, “It would be a serious matter to write something that gets you killed.” His response came so promptly and with such emphasis as to leave no doubt: This was a thought that he was accustomed to. He had lived with it many years.
(Article by Wendell Berry originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Progressive. Reprinted here with permission. www.progressive.org)
