Appalachian Figures
On a summer night in 1964, the United States House of Representatives rushed through a joint resolution that would change the course of the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution sailed through the chamber with a recorded vote of 416 to 0. Yet the roll call did not tell the whole story. One congressman from the Kentucky mountains had quietly arranged to be “paired against” the resolution so that his opposition would be noted even though he was absent from the vote.
That man was Eugene Edward Siler Sr. of Williamsburg in Whitley County. A decorated veteran of two world wars, a strict Baptist lay preacher, and a rock-ribbed Republican, he was also the only member of the House to formally oppose the measure that opened the door to full scale American intervention in Vietnam.
Siler liked to call himself a “Kentucky hillbilly,” and he meant it as a badge of loyalty to the Cumberland River country that raised him. His life stitched together strands that outsiders rarely connect: mountain Republicanism, fundamentalist piety, support for key civil rights measures, and a stubborn suspicion of foreign wars.
A Whitley County Lawyer’s Son
Eugene Edward Siler was born on June 26, 1900, in Williamsburg, the county seat of Whitley County. He grew up in a family whose name already carried weight in the region. His father, Adam Troy Siler, was a local attorney whose 1953 obituary in the Park City Daily News emphasized his legal reputation and community standing, while his mother Minnie Chandler Siler came from another established local family.
The younger Siler came of age in a corner of Kentucky that had backed the Union during the Civil War and stayed loyally Republican long after the rest of the state drifted toward the Democratic Party. That partisan identity was bound up with a particular mountain Protestant culture and with memories of wartime loyalties. Later in life Siler would joke that in his part of southeastern Kentucky “everybody was born a Republican and a Baptist,” and his own path did little to contradict that stereotype.
After attending local schools he enrolled at Cumberland College in Williamsburg, graduating in 1920, then moved on to the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where he earned a degree in 1922. For law school he headed to Columbia University in New York and also studied at the University of Kentucky College of Law before returning home to open a practice in Williamsburg. By 1923 he was admitted to the bar and had begun the small-town law career that would anchor the rest of his life.
Like many young men of his generation, Siler’s early adulthood included military service. He served in the United States Navy during the First World War and then, two decades later, as an Army captain during World War II. Those experiences left him, in historian David Beito’s words, deeply skeptical of calls to “send American troops into harm’s way.” That skepticism would shape the rest of his political career.
Deacon, Lay Preacher, And “Bible Crusader”
Back in Williamsburg, Siler built what contemporaries described as a squeaky clean law practice. He was a devout Baptist who did not drink, smoke, or swear, and who refused to take cases involving divorces or alcohol-related crimes. His spiritual home was First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, where church histories and later newspaper profiles remember him as a long time deacon and Sunday School teacher.
Chester Raymond Young’s congregational history, To Win the Prize: The Story of the First Baptist Church at Williamsburg, Kentucky, 1883–1983, devotes a section to Siler’s work as a lay leader, noting his teaching, his role in church governance, and his ties to Cumberland College just a few blocks away. In later decades First Baptist would name a men’s Bible class after him, a reminder that his influence in the congregation outlived his political career by many years.
The same plainspoken religiosity that marked his church life soon spilled into politics. In 1945, after World War II service, Siler was elected to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, then the state’s highest court. He quickly drew attention by refusing his monthly expense allowance of one hundred and fifty dollars and diverting that money into a scholarship fund for students, a story repeated in both later biographies and oral histories.
On the bench he was known for quoting scripture in written opinions and oral remarks. When he gave up the judgeship to run for governor in 1951, newspapers outside the mountains eyed this Bible-quoting Republican judge with a mix of curiosity and alarm. The Kingsport Times-News described him as a “modern-day Bible crusader” chosen to “battle” the Democrats, a phrase that would stick to him throughout the campaign.
Siler lost that race to Democratic governor Lawrence Wetherby, who carried about fifty five percent of the vote, but the campaign elevated his profile across the state. Western Kentucky University’s special collections hold a campaign broadside titled “What People Over the State Say About Judge Eugene Siler,” full of clipped endorsements and testimonials from that year, a small printed window into how supporters framed his mix of religious conviction and anti corruption rhetoric.
From Cumberland College To Congress
Defeat in Frankfort did not end Siler’s public life. In 1954 he successfully ran for Congress in Kentucky’s Eighth District and took his seat in January 1955. After a round of reapportionment he represented the Fifth District, but for a full decade his base remained the counties of southeastern Kentucky that hugged the Tennessee line.
The official House biography lists him as a trustee of Cumberland College and a director of both the Bank of Williamsburg and the Kingsport Grocery Company. A Kentucky Historical Society marker for Cumberland College points to Siler among the school’s notable alumni, placing his name alongside governors like Bert Combs and Earle Clements and naval officers who went on to national careers.
On campus his legacy became literal brick and mortar. By the mid nineteen eighties college publications and the Baptist paper Western Recorder were highlighting “Eugene Siler Hall,” a men’s residence hall named in his honor and described as one of several major buildings that symbolized the growth of the school.
Siler’s own recollections and those of his neighbors, preserved in oral histories and in Trevor Sherman’s “Eugene Siler, a life revisited” series in The News Journal, emphasize how closely he remained tied to Williamsburg even while serving in Washington. Constituents remembered him speaking at the First Baptist Church Men’s Brotherhood, visiting local schools, and hosting student delegations at the Capitol for photographs beneath the dome.
“Us Or Laos?” – An Appalachian Critique Of Foreign Aid
One of the richest primary windows into Siler’s thinking is the Congressional Record. On July 13, 1956, he secured an extension of remarks that praised veterans and urged Congress not to “forget the boys” who had fought in World War II, a theme that echoed his own service and his district’s heavy military participation.
An even more revealing set of remarks came on September 5, 1959, under the provocative title “Us or Laos?” In that speech Siler noted that the United States had spent roughly two hundred twenty five million dollars on aid to Laos since 1955 and complained that this investment had neither secured the small Southeast Asian nation nor kept it out of “the vest pocket of communism.”
What makes the piece distinctively Appalachian is what he proposed instead. Siler essentially asked his colleagues to imagine what that money could have done if it had been spent “up the creeks and into the hollows” of the United States. Drawing on his experience in flood-prone, underfunded mountain counties, he argued that such funds might have built adequate school buildings in every district in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia or financed badly needed flood-control projects in those same regions. The speech ended with a punning plea to think of “us, not Laos” and a rebuke to policymakers who treated the American taxpayer “as a louse.”
This blend of hard-line anti communism, skepticism about foreign aid, and insistence on domestic investment in Appalachia foreshadowed later debates over the War on Poverty. It also helps explain why Siler could be fiercely conservative on many issues while still aligning with civil rights advocates on key votes.
Civil Rights Votes From A Mountain Republican
Although Siler was often grouped with the emerging Christian conservative wing of the Republican Party, his voting record on civil rights looks different from that of many Southern politicians of his era. He declined to sign the 1956 “Southern Manifesto,” which denounced the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.
On June 18, 1957, he voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights law since Reconstruction. GovTrack and other legislative trackers classify him with the Republican majority that backed the bill while many Southern Democrats opposed it. Three years later, as Congress revisited voting safeguards in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, Siler again voted with the pro-rights bloc to strengthen federal oversight of voter registration abuses.
When Congress sent the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the states to abolish the poll tax in federal elections, Siler voted for the resolution, aligning himself with efforts to remove economic barriers to voting.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 presents a more complicated picture. Siler did not vote on final House passage of H.R. 7152, but the House pairing records and later analyses note that he was officially “paired for” the bill, meaning that he had arranged to have his support registered even though he was absent. Contemporary conservative analysts and the later HNN article on his career both describe him as generally supportive of federal civil rights legislation, even while he remained a staunch opponent of what he saw as federal overreach in other areas.
Taken together, those votes place Siler alongside a set of mid-century Republican lawmakers whose continued commitment to the party’s Reconstruction-era civil rights heritage stood in tension with their resistance to the expanding New Deal state. For a mountain district where Black residents were a small minority but memories of Union loyalty ran deep, that pattern made political sense.
The Lone House Opposition To The Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution
If civil rights votes showed Siler’s continuity with an older Republican tradition, his stance on Vietnam set him apart. The August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized the president to take “all necessary measures” in Southeast Asia. In the House, the recorded tally was unanimous, yet behind that unanimous figure sat the arcane practice of pairing.
As Beito and Beito explain in their essay “The Christian Conservative Who Opposed the Vietnam War,” Siler had already decided not to run for reelection in 1964, freeing him from many of the usual political pressures. According to their reconstruction and to later reference works, he arranged to be “paired against” the resolution. That meant that another member who favored the measure agreed not to vote so that Siler’s absence would effectively count as a negative vote, a practice used when members could not be physically present but wished their position to be known.
Behind that parliamentary maneuver lay a deeper distrust of open-ended war powers. Earlier that summer Siler had joked that he ought to run for president on a one-day platform that promised only to bring the troops home from Vietnam and then resign. He reportedly referred to the Tonkin resolution as a “buck-passing” device that would silence later congressional criticism by granting the president broad authority at the outset.
Siler’s Vietnam stance was not an isolated quirk. The HNN article notes that he had already voted against John F. Kennedy’s call up of reserves during the Berlin crisis and that he consistently opposed foreign aid and military interventions he saw as unnecessary. His own war service, the Appalachian families who sent sons to the military, and the region’s economic needs all shaped a worldview in which blood and treasure spent overseas were resources not spent on roads, schools, and flood control at home.
A 1951 press photograph, preserved in the Historic Images collection, shows a smiling Siler during his gubernatorial campaign. The back of that photo carries later notations about his Tonkin stance, a visual reminder that he and his supporters understood that lonely opposition as central to his legacy.
Retirement, Death, And Ongoing Memory
Siler chose not to run for another term in the House in 1964. He returned to Williamsburg, where he resumed legal work, continued his involvement with Cumberland College, and remained active at First Baptist Church. The News Journal’s retrospective series pictures him teaching, attending deacons’ meetings, and helping with food pantry work long after his most famous votes were behind him.
He lived long enough to see his eldest son, Eugene Edward Siler Jr., become a federal judge and later a prominent figure in Kentucky Baptist life. Baptist Press coverage from the nineteen eighties and two thousands records the younger Siler’s election as president and later officer of the Kentucky Baptist Convention, extending the family’s blend of law and church leadership into another generation.
On December 5, 1987, Eugene Siler Sr. died at his daughter’s home in Louisville at the age of eighty seven. The Courier-Journal obituary described him as a former congressman, judge, and long time Republican voice from southeastern Kentucky and noted his burial in Highland Cemetery at Williamsburg. In Washington, Congressman Hal Rogers entered a tribute into the Congressional Record, referring to Siler as his “predecessor, once removed” and praising his service to the region.
Back in Williamsburg his name continued to echo in places that mattered most to him. Students moved into Eugene Siler Hall at what is now the University of the Cumberlands. Men gathered in the basement of First Baptist Church for the “Eugene Siler Men’s Bible Class,” listening to local teachers and occasionally to the son who bore his name.
Reading Eugene Siler In Appalachian History
For historians of Appalachia, Eugene Siler complicates any easy story about mid twentieth century mountain politics. Here was a man who campaigned as a “Bible crusader,” opposed liquor, denounced divorce, and championed public school prayer, yet who broke with much of the South to vote for major civil rights measures and to oppose a war that many conservative colleagues supported.
His life invites us to look more closely at the interplay between local loyalties and national issues. Siler’s insistence on “us, not Laos” in 1959 and his pairing against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 were not abstract gestures. They grew out of a Whitley County world where church basements doubled as civic halls, where flood-ruined farms and underfunded schools were everyday realities, and where families remembered sacrificing sons in two world wars.
When we place his speeches, votes, and memories alongside photographs of him with students on the Capitol steps or discussing unemployment with Small Business Administration officials, we see an Appalachian figure whose conservatism was grounded less in Cold War hawkishness than in a stubborn desire to protect the people of his home river valleys.
In an era when religious conservatives are often associated with unquestioning support for military intervention, Siler’s story reminds us that there have always been voices from the hills who loved their country, loved their Bible, and still felt called to say no when Congress rushed headlong toward war.
Sources & Further Reading
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “SILER, Eugene,” concise biography and career overview. House History Archives
“Interview with Eugene Edward Siler, Sr., October 26, 1982,” John Sherman Cooper Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky, describing his law practice, politics, and friendship with Senator Cooper. Nunn Center
Eugene Siler entries in English Wikipedia and Yoda Wiki, synthesizing scholarship on his campaigns, congressional service, Vietnam stance, and civil rights votes, with extensive reference lists to newspapers, GovTrack pages, and church histories. Wikipedia+1
David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “The Christian Conservative Who Opposed the Vietnam War,” History News Network, August 20, 2006, for analysis of Siler’s religious conservatism, fiscal views, and opposition to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. HNN
“Memorial to Judge William Lewis” and “Us or Laos?” extensions of remarks by Eugene Siler in the Congressional Record, September 5, 1959, accessed via GovInfo, for his critique of foreign aid and emphasis on Appalachian schools and flood control. GovInfo
Extensions of remarks by Representative Eugene Siler in the Congressional Record on July 13, 1956, and October 2, 1964, outlining his views on veterans, public morality, and his own record near the end of his congressional service. CQ Press Library+1
House and Senate roll-call data and legislative histories on the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as compiled by GovTrack, Voteview, and related reference works, documenting Siler’s pattern of support and pairings. Yoda Wiki+4Wikipedia+4Wikipedia+4
Chester Raymond Young, To Win the Prize: The Story of the First Baptist Church at Williamsburg, Kentucky, 1883–1983(First Baptist Church, 1983), along with Trevor Sherman’s “Eugene Siler, a life revisited” series in The News Journal, for Siler’s long service as deacon, teacher, and community leader. Doull Books+2The News Journal+2
Robert M. Rennick, “Whitley County – Post Offices,” County Histories of Kentucky series, Morehead State University, which draws on an interview with Siler for local postal history and further illustrates his role as a community informant. ScholarWorks
Lexington Herald-Leader and other newspaper photographs from the nineteen fifties showing Siler at church events and political gatherings, the Library of Congress portrait later sold as a framed print, and historic press photos reproduced by Historic Images documenting his 1951 campaign and later reputation as the lone House opponent of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Western Recorder coverage of Cumberland College and the naming of Eugene Siler Hall, together with the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg website describing the Eugene Siler Men’s Bible Class, for evidence of his ongoing memorialization in church and campus life. SBHLA Media+2TechDico+2