By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist
“Barkley Swept Here.”
That’s what a small wooden sign bragged in Clinton, the Hickman County seat in deep western Kentucky.
The sign is gone. So is Marvin College, the little Methodist school whose most famous graduate was Alben Barkley, a vice president, Senate majority and minority leader and a congressman from nearby Paducah.
The Clinton sign was a spoof on “Washington (as in George) slept here” claims from Revolutionary War-era homes and inns back east.
When he was a student at the college, Barkley “worked his way through by doing janitor work, giving rise to the phrase, ‘Barkley swept here,’” explains a state historical marker on U.S. highway 51 in front of the old boys’ dormitory, all that remains of the college, which closed in 1922.
The story of the sign is probably all but forgotten in Clinton but Vice President Barkley evidently got a kick out of it when he returned in 1950 to dedicate the town’s new hospital, now a nursing home.
The three-story, 1910-vintage brick residence hall, a private dwelling today, was a hotel when Barkley called in December, 1950.
“A sign on the Hotel Jewell here today read: ‘Barkley swept here,’” said an Associated Press story published in newspapers nationwide. “The hotel was at one time a dormitory of Marvin College where Vice President Alben Barkley attended school and served as janitor to pay his expenses.”
The marker says Barkley graduated from Marvin College in 1897, 20 years after he was born in adjoining Graves County. He lived near the Lowes community until 1891 when he moved with his family to a farm near Clinton, according to the Kentucky Encyclopedia.
Two of his teachers encouraged him to seek higher education, predicting he would wind up in the White House.
Barkley preserved their prognostications in That Reminds Me, his 1954 autobiography.
“Alas, for the predictions of these fine ladies, I did not quite make the presidency,” wrote Barkley, dubbed “The Veep” for his vice presidential tenure under President Harry Truman.
A famous stump orator, Barkley’s story bag was bottomless.
“A good story is like fine Kentucky bourbon, it improves with age and, if you don’t use it too much, it will never hurt anyone,” he said.
Barkley made it as a Marvin College janitor “after much maneuvering and negotiating” to convince President J.C. Speight “to bestow upon me the coveted janitor’s job,” he wrote.
The Veep added, “Years later I was pleased to award his son, Edmund Speight, one of my first Congressional appointments to Annapolis, and he made a fine record as a naval officer.”
Barkley said his custodial duties entailed sweeping, ringing the bell in the morning, dusting the benches, kindling fires, carrying water and “dozens of other chores.”
Barkley started his political career in Paducah. A Democrat, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1913-1927 and in the U.S. Senate from 1927-1949. He was majority leader in 1937-1947 and minority leader in 1947-1949.
Barkley was vice president from 1949 to 1953. He was reelected to the Senate in 1954 and died two years later at age 78.
Barkley succumbed to a massive heart attack while delivering the keynote address at Washington and Lee University’s mock presidential convention.
“I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty,” Barkley said, then collapsed and died.
He was buried in Paducah’s Mount Kenton Cemetery following services at Broadway Methodist Church attended by Truman and other dignitaries.
Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com