Today, Tom Eblen provided a reminder of what that meant, courtesy of a 1944 report from the Committee for Kentucky. The committee's members were non-partisan public citizens - amazingly - none of whom were ever candidates for public office. They pointed out problems in a series of reports and encouraged the state to address them.
Kentucky was a mess.
One in four native Kentuckians had left the state in the early 1940s for jobs elsewhere. One in three Kentucky children received no education; seven of eight never graduated from high school. Kentucky had the nation's second-highest rate of illiteracy. Poverty and ill health were rampant...
... Kentucky in the early 1900s hadn't invested in education or in developing a modern economy and infrastructure. Like most other Southern states except North Carolina, Kentucky had looked backward rather than forward. There was a "clannish family society" and a lack of diversity in the work force.
Harry Schacter, the president of the now-defunct Louisville department store Kaufman-Straus wrote that,
Some powerful business interests didn't support the committee's work. "Those who were the beneficiaries of the status quo were not at all interested in any change," he wrote. "Those who were victims of the status quo were too apathetic to be much concerned about change."Tom asks if any of this sounds familiar.
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