It wasn’t all that long ago that “Republican” was a near four-letter word in Fancy Farm, Ky. You didn’t utter it because there just weren’t any – or hardly any of them – around.
“As a Republican, it’s not a very good place to go,” the late Republican Gov. Louie B. Nunn lamented in 1975 as the annual picnic that is known for its barbecue and political speaking drew near. “If one (Democrat) doesn’t get you, another will. … The news media write up how they (the crowd) hoot and holler and yell for the Democrats, and the Republicans are virtually ignored.”
But in many ways,the political speaking at St. Jerome Catholic Church’s summer picnichas become a Republican affair after beinga Democratic event for so long.
At last count, there were 14 politicians scheduled to speak this weekend, 10 of them Republican.
The state’s only two Democrats elected to statewide offices aren’t going.
As the state, particularly the western part of Kentucky, becomes more Republican, the folks at St. Jerome’s have begun to wonder about the future of the event, which has for the last four to five decades been the biggest political event in the state.
“We have had some thoughts on that,” said Mark Wilson, who organizes the political speaking at Fancy Farm. “But it is just something beyond our control.
“... We want our political forum to remain vibrant and relevant to politics in Kentucky,” he said. But as the politics of the region changes, “there’s nothing we can do as organizers.”
Fancy Farm emcee offers his preview
U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul will be there, as will Gov. Matt Bevin and all the state’s Republican constitutional officers. The only Democrat of statewide significance who is speaking is Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, his party’s nominee for Paul’s Senate seat.
Daniel Lowry, a spokesman for the Kentucky Democratic Party, said he doesn’t know what the future of Fancy Farm holds.
“I know that most of the speakers are Republicans, we’ve got a few Democrats this year,” Lowry said.
“But it’s definitely hard to judge the whole on just one year … It’s all cyclical and it’s yet to be seen what happens in the future,” he said.
State GOP spokesman Tres Watson agreed with Lowry that it’s too early to tell if Democrats will give up on Fancy Farm, but he argues that the fact that few Democratic politicians are going this year does a disservice to Western Kentucky, which often feels ignored by Frankfort.
“When the Republicans were getting whooped every year, we continued to go," Watson said.
The political speaking at Fancy Farm began nearly, if not more than, 100 years ago. The first mention in The Courier-Journal of politics at the “mammoth community picnic” came in July1927 when the newspaper reported that former Gov. J.C.W. Beckham planned to speak.
The event itself began with a picnic, barn dance and gander pulling in 1880.
By the time Beckham came, the tradition of political speech there was well-established. The paper said that year that the event was “always a mecca for candidates.”
At that time and through the late 1950s, the picnic was held on the Wednesday before the primary election and often drew Democrats to the heavily Democratic community. In 1958, the Kentucky General Assembly moved the primary to May, and the church repositioned the event as the kickoff to the fall election. It began to draw Republicans as well.
But still, it was a Democratic stronghold within what was known as the party’s “Rock of Gibraltar,” Kentucky’s 1st Congressional District, which until 1994 had never elected a Republican to Congress.
When Nunn talked about the inhospitable welcome there in 1975, the Fancy Farm precinct had 468 registered Democrats and eight registered Republicans, according to the CJ. The GOP was outnumbered 58.5 to 1.
“Definitely, the coin has flipped from where it used to be,” Wilson said.
Today, Democrats still outnumber Republicans 689-269 in Fancy Farm, Graves County Clerk Barry Kennemore said. And while he said that voters there –like all of Graves County – remain loyal Democrats at the local level, many are now voting Republican for state and federal offices.
“I think it’s the moral issues,” he said, citing wedge social issues like abortion and gay marriage.
The Fancy Farm Picnic has long been rowdy with hecklers tossing barbs at candidates.
There was even an incident in 1937 when former state Sen. O. H. “Houston” Brooks approached Gov. Happy Chandler, who was traveling with his highway commissioner at the time, flashing a knife.
Chandler told The Courier-Journal that Brooks, with whom he had served in the Senate, said to him “You are making a fine governor, but I haven’t got any use for that ----- with you.”
“I reached down and clutched his wrist and said, ‘Houston, what are you doing with that knife,’” Chandler told the paper, before a state patrolman wrested the knife away and arrested Brooks.
But as Nunn noted more than 40 years ago, the crowd was largely hooting and hollering for their candidate.
It really began to change into what it is today with almost incessant screaming in the late 1980s when U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell began shipping in busloads of Republicans.
Among them were college-aged Republicans who pulled stunts and added theatrics.
McConnell’s former state director, Larry Cox, said two years ago that by 1992the Democrats were fully engaged with stunts and shouting as well.
It’s a scene that’s downright inhospitable to speakers and, given the current state of Kentucky Democratic politics, is even more inhospitable to them.
Fancy Farm rules state that only officeholders who represent Graves County and candidates running for those positions are allowed to speak. As the county and the state have gone more and more Republican over the years, there really aren’t many Democrats remaining.
Both of Kentucky’s U.S. Senators and the 1st District representative are Republicans. The state senator and state representative representing Fancy Farm are Republican and five of the seven statewide constitutional officeholders– from governor down to agriculture commissioner – are Republican.
Almost all of them are coming this weekend.
The Democrats, not so much.
Attorney General Andy Beshear –whose father, former Gov. Steve Beshear, sometimes skipped Fancy Farm – will attend some of the Democratic events leading up to the picnic but will head home before the pork and mutton come off the pits.
“This weekend I’m dividing my time between the political events in west Kentucky and my family,” Beshear said in a statement. “Saturday I will attend my children’s first ever play. After the last two years running for AG, it’s important to spend the last weekend before school starts with my kids at their play.”
And Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes will make some of the preliminaries as well but plans to return to Lexington having spent a lot of time away from home in recent weeks, including at the Democratic National Convention.
“Unfortunately, I won't be able to be on the stage Saturday, as my husband Andrew is leaving for a long-term business trip," she said in a statement. "He's been very patient with me these past 6 years.”
If you go
Fancy FarmPicnic
Where: St. Jerome Catholic Church, 20 Ky. 339
Fancy FarmTimes: Pork and mutton barbecue dinner, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. CDT Saturday in the Knights of Columbus Hall. Political speaking begins at 2 p.m. and usually lasts about two hours.
Cost: Dinner is $15 for adults, $5 for children. Barbecue sandwiches are also available. There are carnival games, and the church is giving away a 2014 Jeep Wrangler 4X4.
Directions: From Louisville, take Interstate 65 to the Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway; take the parkway to Interstate 24 and go west toward Paducah. Take the Julian M. Carroll Purchase Parkway south toward Mayfield. Turn right onto Ky. 80 and follow it to Ky. 339. Travel time from downtown Louisville is just under four hours.
