Well-Regulated Militias

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. In 1787 more  than 2,000 armed farmers marched toward Boston to protest taxes. Despite their muskets they weren’t aiming for a shoot out.

WOODY HOLTON: Ironically, yeah you could say the threatening the use of a musket is a way to not have to punch somebody in the nose.

ED: Fast forward to 1921, in Blair Mountain, West Virginia. Some 10,000 coal miners armed with hunting rifles and shotguns staged the largest labor uprising in U.S history. Their leader’s battle cry?

MALE SPEAKER: You can only when your political rights with a high powered rifle.

ED: Today on BackStory we’ll explore an American tradition that spans the political spectrum, from the origins of the Ku Klux Klan to Latino Night Riders fighting US expansion in the Southwest. A history of armed resistance. Coming up on BackStory.

PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Welcome to BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers here with Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there Ed.

ED: And this week we’re joined by historian Nathan Connolly, filling in for Peter Onuf.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Hi Ed, good to be here.

BRIAN: We’re going to begin today in a remote part of the Pacific Northwest.

STEVE BEDA: There’s about, close to about a dozen man.

BRIAN: This is historian Steve Beda, and these men are blockading a state highway outside of Yreka near the California, Oregon border.

STEVE BEDA: They are holding hunting rifles and it looks like something out of a Western film. They are lever action rifles like John Wayne would carry. They are wearing cowboy boots and they are wearing Stetson hats.

BRIAN: They are ranchers. And they’re angry at the government. Sound familiar? Earlier this year armed militia men occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon. But this armed protest happened nearly 75 years ago.

STEVE BEDA: November 27, 1941, and they stop the motorists and they tell them you are now entering a new sovereign territory that no longer belongs to the states of Oregon and California. You are now entering the state of Jefferson.

BRIAN: Now you might assume this was a revolt against big government, but think again. Beda says in contrast to the militants who occupied the wildlife refuge, the state of Jefferson protesters wanted government intervention. You see, they felt cheated out of benefits promised to them by the New Deal.

STEVE BEDA: Farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers in Southern Oregon are still going to bed by gaslight lamp. So there’s no roads, there’s no dams, there’s no water for farmers.

BRIAN: Big federal projects like the Grand Coulee Dam brought water and electricity to major cities, but they did little to help ranchers, miners, and farmers in rural areas. So the protesters decided to take matters into their own hands and form a new state.

STEVE BEDA: There will be no big cities to control the way we use our rural resources, telling us where we can build a dam and where we can’t, telling us there’s not enough money for roads. They’re very much imagining a rural political paradise.

BRIAN: At first they called their rural paradise Mittlewestcoastia.

STEVE BEDA: It’s not middle, M-I-D-D it’s M-I-T-T-L-E westcoastia, so it’s all one weird word.

BRIAN: But then they realized that state of Jefferson had a little more gravitas.

STEVE BEDA: I think they also seize on Jefferson’s name because these guys are rural producers, they imagine themselves as the yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s imagination.

BRIAN: The state of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence read “until California and Oregon again build a road into the copper country, Jefferson, as a defense-minded state will be forced to rebel. Each Thursday.”

STEVE BEDA: Each Thursday. I love that language. This goes back to the tricky question of how serious were they about a new state? To what extent was this spectacle, to what extent was this showmanship, and to what extent was this a real political movement. And I kind of think it was both.

BRIAN: A reporter from San Francisco named Stanton Delaplane heard about the movement and rushed up to the border eager to cover the events. While he was there he gave the protesters some advice.

STEVE BEDA: Delaplane really encourages them to play up the cowboy hats and the cowboy boots. Definitely bring the guns along because he believes when his readers read about a rural protest movement they’re going to want to see cowboys.

BRIAN: Delaplane knew how to craft a good story. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for his state of Jefferson coverage. But in the end, the protest only lasted two Thursdays.

STEVE BEDA: And about a week and a half later is, of course, December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy.

RADIO: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.

STEVE BEDA: So as soon as Pearl Harbor happens everything changes, insofar as things can change overnight in history, things change quite dramatically in 1941.

BRIAN: One of the biggest changes was that the United States suddenly needed southern Oregon’s timber for the war effort.

STEVE BEDA: It also needs copper. So you see a little economic development. And that kind of, for a time, quells some of the anger and frustration.

BRIAN: Beda says it’s hard to compare the state of Jefferson protest with the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. There was no standoff with the FBI in 1941. And those guns? Well, they were mostly props. But Beda says both movements share a core element, they were rural protests.

STEVE BEDA: I think what they both understand, or what they both have in common, is that oftentimes for rural people to get heard in politics there has to be some drama there.

STEVE BEDA: And one sure fire way to attract attention is to grab a gun.

STEVE BEDA: Angry cowboys need a gun because that’s what westerns tell us, that’s what popular culture tells us, is that rural protest has to have a gun there.

BRIAN: So today on the show we’ll explore the wide spectrum of Americans who have resisted authority by taking up arms. We’ll hear about hooded horsemen in American southwest, to raged a clandestine war against ranchers and railroads. And speaking of hooded horsemen, it turns out the original Ku Klux Klan didn’t wear that iconic garb the 19th century, some wore women’s dresses. We’ll also explore the five day shooting war between West Virginia coal miners and mine operators, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. But before we get there, Ed’s going to take this to one of the very first armed protests the United States faced. In fact, it was just a few years after the American Revolution.

ED: On January 25, 1787 another group of armed rural men had staged a protest. This one in Springfield, Massachusetts. About 2,200 men led by Daniel Shays tried to seize the 7,000 muskets and 1,300 pounds of gunpowder housed in the US Army. They planned to march to Boston and burn it to the ground, seizing control of the government there. I sat down with Woody Holton, a professor at the University of South Carolina to talk about Shays’ Rebellion and its legacy. Woody, welcome to the show.

WOODY HOLTON: Hey man.

ED: So Woody, tell me this, who were these guys and were they so angry?

WOODY HOLTON: To a large extent, these guys who participated in Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 where the same guys who participated in that more famous rebellion, the American Revolution, in 1776. And George Washington didn’t have the money to pay his soldiers. So what he gave them instead of money was IOUs, promissory note, like today’s savings bonds. But the problem is for a soldier you can’t eat paper. And so they sold those bonds at a fraction of their face value to speculators.

And now spin forward to three years after the Paris peace treaty, that is 1786, those speculators want to turn those bonds into real money. And the only way to do that is to cash them in with the state government and the government can’t pay the speculator that money until they levy taxes. And guess who has to pay those taxes? It was people like Daniel Shays and these other farmers.

ED: So what did they feel compelled to take up arms? That seems like a pretty extreme action at this time.

WOODY HOLTON: Yeah. It’s a great question because there were actually annual elections in Massachusetts at the time and so elites said back to them, for instance governor James Bowdoin said hey, if you don’t like me, you don’t like the legislature, vote us out of office. But people had trouble organizing. Sort of one year one county would turn out to vote, and next year’s another county would turn out to vote, and so the electoral process had just not worked for them.

And so, they weren’t really trying to hurt anybody. They did use guns, what they did was close down the county courts. That was the real face of the government. They were really hoping though to sustain the thing by bluffing. From the farmers perspective, they thought that it would be adequate to use threats. They didn’t want to killed but they want to kill either.

ED: And since maybe having guns meant they wouldn’t have to beat up anybody either. It was a way of avoiding violence altogether.

WOODY HOLTON: Ironically yeah, I you could say that threatening the use of a musket is a way of not having to punch somebody in the nose, yes.

ED: So, you’ve got Shays’ men with these guns that they’re not actively using except for threats, they’re taking over the courthouses, they’re on their way to take over the armory, to restore justice. And yet they run into opposition, right?

WOODY HOLTON: That’s right Colonel William Shepard met them at the armory with canon. And first fired over their head, and I think as late as that point, they didn’t really think that he would wheel it down and fire into their ranks, but he did. And four of the Shaysites were killed. And then a short time later this army from Boston arrived of 4,000 soldiers.

ED: Wait wait wait I’m confused, if they don’t have enough money to pay the soldiers from the Revolution, who’s paying these militia now?

WOODY HOLTON: This is a great question because the US Congress initially voted to send an army to go put down Shays’ Rebellion. But it couldn’t come up with the money to fund that army. What Massachusetts did, Governor Bowdoin was governor of Massachusetts, and what he did was went around to the merchants of Boston and took up a collection from them. Because they were the targets of Shays’ Rebellion. There were the ones who owned the bonds, and the merchants also had huge debts owed to them from farmers. And so it was very much in the Boston merchants interest to put down this rebellion. So they lent the money to the government to go suppress Shays’ Rebellion.

ED: So who were the soldiers?

WOODY HOLTON: All the servants in Boston.

ED: It’s kind of working class against working class then?

WOODY HOLTON: Absolutely. And they finished putting down the rebellion, attacked them in the town of Petersham, Massachusetts early in February, 1787. And that was really the end of Shays’ Rebellion. But here’s the interesting thing about it is, remember I’d said that the farmers had had trouble organizing themselves to go to the polls and elect a new governor and a new legislature, that’s why they felt like they had to close the courts. But after their governor sent people to shoot them dead that really energized people to go vote in the next election in May of 1787, and that’s when they did vote governor Bowdoin out, they voted out something like half of the legislature. And they got tax relief.

ED: So why does this matter than? If something didn’t really eventuate in much bloodshed. We tend to measure the consequence of things by how many people died, but that sounds like this is not really the right calculus for this.

WOODY HOLTON: Yeah there’s another way to measure which is if there hadn’t been a Shays’ Rebellion we wouldn’t have the United States Constitution today.

ED: Yikes. OK, that’s a pretty big consequence. Explain yourself.

WOODY HOLTON: Well, it was really Shays’ Rebellion that became the final argument among an elite group of Americans that they needed to create a powerful new national government. You needed to give the federal government taxing authority so that it could field an army to suppress rebellions, like Shays’ Rebellion, as well slave revolts. And you could really see this in the person of the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, George Washington. After witnessing Shays’ Rebellion he had said, we’ve got to make sure that this effort to strengthen the federal government succeeds, and I’m the guy to make sure that happens and so, yes I will go to the Constitutional Convention.

And here’s the thing, without George Washington there that federal convention never would have succeeded. About half of Americans opposed the Constitution when it was first adopted in 1787. And the one way, I’d say the single biggest factor that sold the Constitution, was everyone’s reassurance at A, George Washington supported it, and B, George Washington is going to be our first president so we can make sure that our first president is not going to turn himself into a King.

ED: So. You persuaded me, Shays’ Rebellion has a big impact on the Constitution. What impact does it have on the second amendment, the right to bear arms?

WOODY HOLTON: Well many of the people who had participated in Shays’ Rebellion, and there were rebellions like that in just about every state, tended to be people in the western part of the state, farmers rebelling against the merchants in the east, many of those same people were the ones who voted against the Constitution because they didn’t want to transfer all of this power to the federal government. In the same way that easterners wanted the federal government to be able to field army to suppress rebellions like this.

ED: Yeah, you don’t want to have to have a bake sale every time you need to put up a militia.

WOODY HOLTON: Exactly. But that’s exactly what the people in the west wanted. They wanted to be really hard for the federal government to come send troops to suppress them. And one of the way that the supporters of the Constitution reassured the people in the back country, in Western Massachusetts, in Western Pennsylvania and so forth, was the bill of rights. And that’s, of course, freedom of religion and freedom from unlawful search and seizure supposedly, and all that stuff but it’s also that second amendment which gives them the right to hold on to their guns so that they can rebel.

Now I gotta hasten to add as a modern American, that just because we’re all allowed to have guns doesn’t mean the government can’t regulate them. In fact, well regulated militia is part of that phrase. So, we could have the modern political debate but if you want to go to the realities of the writing of the Bill of Rights there was a desire on the part of Americans to leave open the door to revolution if the government ever became tyrannical.

ED: Woody Holton is a historian at the University of South Carolina, and author of “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution”. Earlier we heard from Steve Beda, a historian at the University of Oregon.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Listening to that interview on Shays’ Rebellion I couldn’t help but note how soon after the American Revolution pride in a new nation turned into resistance and armed struggle. So Ed, given that mixture and that tangle of poverty, grievance, and guns in the wake of the American Revolution, do you see a similar set of conditions that are setting the table for violent protests after the Civil War?

ED: The table is set, it’s interesting what happens instead. I think in the same way that the veterans in the American Revolution felt that they had earned American citizenship so did the African American soldiers who in many ways saved the United States in the American Civil War, the nearly 200,000 black men who fought in the second half of the American Civil War come out of this one saying, OK, this has been the standard by which Americans have established their citizenship, we are ready for ours.

And in fact citizenship does come as a result of all this, of bearing arms. If They had not fought against the white South they would not have had the same claim. And so what is won by service to your nation? My guess is that some of those things continue to echo throughout the 20th century, right guys?

BRIAN: Well Ed they echo, but things don’t always move forward in a direct line. In fact, if we think back to that D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation,” we’re talking about the birth of a white nation. And that white nation strips those arms in the military from African Americans. Denies them the right to fight during World War I.

ED: Yeah, and not just Africa Americas Brian, to really drive your point home, the villain of that movie is an African American union veteran, right? So there’s a pretty direct pivot there from the 19th to the 20th century.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: This is a really remarkable parallel in the sense that you have so many black veterans even if they didn’t fight on foreign soil abroad, their time in the military help politicize them and move them into raising very clear challenges to white supremacy in the South and elsewhere. And one of the often overlooked aspects of the 20th century America is that you have black and white veterans literally waging war on the home front over the question of civil rights.

One great example, of course, is Robert Williams in North Carolina who helps to train members of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina to defend their homes against the Klan. You have other examples in cases around the South where homes of African Americans who were trying to desegregate neighborhoods are being bombed by white veterans who have discernible munitions training, and their, kind of, chief antagonists or the people they’re fighting against a black veterans, who also have military training. And so this becomes a very important piece of the story. As one final point, even nonviolent protesters, someone who’d been in favor of registering voters peacefully, like Medgar Evers in Mississippi, was a veteran who had military background and understood the importance of the right to bear arms.

The person who shot Medgar Evers down in his own driveway, Byron De La Beckwith was also a veteran. There’s a long history of white resistance to black civil rights on the part of white veterans, not just in the ’20s or the ’30s, but really even after the Vietnam period and beyond. So it’s a very important part of American history to think about this relationship between military service in the US Government, and the way that shapes how nonviolent and violent protests in the United States plays out post-war.

ED: While we were working on this episode we received several questions on our website from our listeners, and here’s one of them.

BRIAN: Hey Ed, Nathan, we’ve got Evan from New York City on the line. Welcome Evan, what have you got for us today?

EVAN: The question I want to ask is, and it all kind of started because I was on Facebook one day, on social media, and I saw my uncle talking on Facebook about politics. And one of the things that he was talking about was the Vietnam War as it wouldn’t have changed, or things wouldn’t have changed, if it hadn’t been for people marching in the streets. So my question kind of is what is the history of anti-war protest in America? Did it ever turned to armed protests? And kind of just walk me through what the history of all that is if you can in our short segment.

BRIAN: So the question for us guys, is what is the history of protest, especially armed protest, against war. Ed why don’t you start us off?

ED: The first huge example we see this in wartime is in the American Civil War. And the biggest one happened right where you are, in New York City. What we call the New York City Draft Riots, but in many ways were the New York City Race Riots, and the two issues were so conflated. That one began to be violent. I mean, the intention all along was to shatter the machinery of the draft, but also very quickly became to shatter the homes of the wealthy who had bought their way out of the draft. And then, in sort of perverse logic, to attack the black people whom white Northerners blamed for the Civil War. And people were actually hanged from lamp posts and they burned an orphanage of all things. People often forget the troops had to be rushed from Gettysburg to New York City to put down this armed rebellion.

BRIAN: That’s incredible. I actually think that is bigger– Nathan what do you think? Bigger than anything that we got in the 20th century?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: I think that’s right. I mean, part of the issue is that you have a number of peaceful protests that then degenerate into some kind of armed conflict with the police department or with bystanders. So one the more famous ones in the 20th century obviously is the anti-war protesting going on outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in ’68.

BRIAN: Made for much better TV.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And so that conflict begins as something intend to simply shine a light on the Democratic Party and it’s roll in the Vietnam War and, by virtue of really heavy handed policing on the part of the daily machine in Chicago, that turns into a kind of armed protest.

BRIAN: Now what I will say, Evan, is there was something called fragging in Vietnam which was kind of a Civil War within a war.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Yeah so the term fragging, which was really popularized in the early 1970s, is a reference to the fragmentary grenades to attack commanding officers in your own division. In many instances troops would use grenades because you couldn’t trace them back to individual infantrymen. There were a number of incidents throughout the Vietnam War in particular in which disgruntled soldiers were killing their commanding officers in a form of protest against being thrown into a dangerous gunfights or other kinds of conflict, in some cases recklessly or unnecessarily. The frequency of fragging is one of the real subplots, I think, of the Vietnam story, in that you have, between the late ’60s and early ’70s, hundreds of these incidents that kill nearly 100 troops and injure 100 more. And so it’s a kind of armed resistance against the orders of your commanding officer.

BRIAN: And it tended to be directed, Evan, against officers who were particularly eager to pursue the war in an aggressive fashion, which of course the troops felt was not good for their health, to put it bluntly.

ED: An interesting inversion, nothing like that happens in the American Civil War. So it’s not just that violence decreased. it’s that the focus of violence shifted.

BRIAN: Evan we’re wondering just why it is, besides your affection for your uncle and Facebook, that you’re so interested in this question? And I will tell you right now we are not armed.

EVAN: The prevailing sentiment these days is that people are not happy with the way things are going. And I kind of wonder is it possible that we could see people, because they’re so seemingly dissatisfied with government at large, that we would have an armed resistance to any future conflict.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: I really love this question. Because it gets at what is a tension really, in terms of how Americans are believed to be acting politically. When they want the moral high ground you’re supposed to behave peacefully, and if you protest against the immorality of a war it seemingly makes perfect sense to engage only in non-violent protests. The irony, of course, is that for many Americans the only way that they feel heard, by what they consider to be an unresponsive government, is to raise the stakes by engaging in very direct forms of protests and, you know, insurgency, which sometimes then precipitates in violent outcomes, as was the case in Chicago in ’68.

ED: That’s a great point Nathan. I think another thing to think about to answer Evan’s question is what’s the commonality between the two great episodes of violence, the Civil War and Vietnam, is the draft. My own take to answer your question is that there’s plenty of room for people to protest without feeling that they have to be armed until basically their own lives are directly involved.

BRIAN: Evan I want to thank you and your entire extended family for joining us today on BackStory, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you.

EVAN: It’s an honor to be here, thanks.

ED: Thanks Evan.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Thank you.

BRIAN: If you have a question about our upcoming episodes head over to our website backstoryradio.org. We’ve got shows in the works on the history of local power, and another on the history of testing. While you’re there you can listen to Nathan Connolly’s conversation with a listener about the Black Panther Party.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: We’re going to turn now to one organization that might not seem like a resistance group, the Ku Klux Klan. They’re better known as an American hate group.

ED: But historian Elaine Frantz Parsons says that’s the second iteration of the Klan. It spread nationwide after the release of the 1915 blockbuster film “The Birth of a Nation”. The original Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by six former Confederate army officers in Tennessee.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Parsons says, during Reconstruction southern white Democrats watched in horror as black and white Republicans gained political office. This was only possible because of the presence of federal troops.

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Klan people thought of themselves as a way to exercise power in competition with what they saw now as the illegitimate power. They started thinking of themselves as a rebellion.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Within Just a couple of years, Klan chapters had spread like a cancer throughout the former Confederacy. Their goal was to overthrow Republican state and local governments. These armed rebels had a very distinct appearance. We’re not talking white robes and tall pointed hoods, that’s the uniform of the 20th century KKK. Parsons says the earlier 19th century version of the Klan looked very different.

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Some people wear their wives dresses, that’s very common, some people get animal skins, other kinds of parts of animals, animal horns, and make them into costumes. Some people just take a burlap sack and put it over their head and paint eyes and a mouth on it, cut out some holes, right? So they would attempt to keep their identities secret. This was a time when the South was occupied and people could not afford to be seen or be known publicly to have committed these acts of violence.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And what did that violence look like? What forms of violence did the Klan partake in?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Some common forms of Klan violence would be political assassinations, simply targeting black elected leaders or powerful black speakers and organizers, right? There was a great amount of sexual violence, largely against black women, some people were hanged. So they were whippings, there were threats, and there was a huge amount of theft of property of new freed people, especially those freed people who happened to be successful at accumulating resources were very much at risk of having their crops taken. And actually the Klan would always take their weapons, their guns, and that they thought of that as– we think about that as disarming them, but that was also a theft, something which was worth money. So theft, depriving people of the resources, was a really important part of what the Klan was doing.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So part of white armed protest through the Klan was actually about preempting the possibility of black armed protest.

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Yeah, no that’s right. And it was about cutting off any means through which black people could organize and demand politically equality or economic equality. And part of that was in a disarming them. But part of that was also just doing whatever they could to interrupt and disrupt their organizations. To push back against black competitors for power.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And if there was a federal pushback would did it look like?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: So when the federal government tried to stop the Klan or counter the Klan, they don’t do a real good job infiltrating the Klan. Because the Klan is so disorganized often it’s very informal, like a bunch of people getting together and deciding to do a specific raid. And a lot of Klan groups only existed for a month or only for a night. Very brief. So they didn’t have much in the way of organization, and yet it was organization that the federal government was most interested in uncovering. Right?

But at the same time a huge number of people throughout the Klan period denied that there was a Klan. So no matter how many people, hundreds of people being killed, raped. People have captured Klan costumes and arrested Klansmen, and still it’s often written off as comic. Right? That yes, maybe there were some people who were dressed as Klansmen, but they’re just dressed in these silly costumes. You shouldn’t really be afraid of because they’re just playing pranks. So there’s this huge public resistance to punishing Klansmen, and part of this is because so many people up north and never really take Klan violence seriously.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: As you explain in your book Elaine, the first iteration of the Klan practically evaporated by the early 1870s. What happened then? Why they start to fail?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Well there were a couple reasons why it started to disappear in the 1870s. The biggest reason was that the federal government went in and in 1870, 1871, made a whole bunch of arrests. Hundreds of people, right? And I think they often arrested the wrong people. Because that’s the thing about an insurgency is that the federal government doesn’t have, as you think about terrorism now, the problem is you don’t have reliable local information. So they would arrest a lot of people, and whether they got the right people or the wrong people, this threw the community into disarray, and caused the community to pressure the people who were involved with the Klan to stop. So that was part of what happened.

But the other thing that happened was that already by this period Democrats were starting to get much more legitimate power. They were starting to sort of worm their way back into legitimate sources of power and offices. And once they have control over the local governments they don’t want a bunch of young men you know who are somehow affiliated with them politically to be making their own decisions about how to use violence. They want to reclaim the monopoly on violence again. So part of what happened is that sort of the Klan won. Their side started to just pick up the power again.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So it sounds like you’re suggesting that the armed protests of 1860s helped to hasten the legitimacy of the Democratic party in the South by the 1870s, that there’s a relationship there. I think I am. I think that part of what was happening with the Klan was it was a mobilization of the southern white democratic public. And they ultimately caused enough problems that they pushed back the federal government and started to develop real lasting legitimate authority through that.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So you’re describing how the politics of the Klan enter the mainstream of the Democratic party. Do their forms of violence also become part of the mainstream?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Yes, and what you start with with Klan violence is, sort of, small groups of people who have to disguise themselves to go out and commit violence against their black or white Republican victims. But what’s going to happen very soon after the end of the Klan when power comes back the Democrats, is that groups of people who want to add to the violence of the state, who want to go past what even the new democratic state is going to do, those people are going to be able to come out into the broad sunlight in huge numbers to lynch their victims without fear of reprisal. They’ll be no need for any sort of costumes, you don’t need a mask. Once you get into the 1880s, 1890s ’90s armed resistance didn’t have to be secretive any longer because there was nobody there who would challenge it.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Elaine Frantz Parsons is a historian Duquesne University, and the author of “Ku Klux, the Birth of the Klan in the Reconstruction Era United States”

BRIAN: We’re going to turn now to the mountains of West Virginia in 1921. In August of that year some 10,000 coal miners picked up guns and headed to southern West Virginia. They were marching in support of striking union miners there. But on the way they encountered several thousand local police, National Guardsmen, and private mine guards. A five day shoot out ensued. It’s known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. Blair Mountain was the culmination of the string of violent strikes and reprisals between West Virginia workers and owners. A conflict known as the Mine Wars.

LOU MARTIN: The carnage of the coal industry was really unparalleled at the time.

BRIAN: This is historian Lou Martin. He’s co-founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars museum in Matewan, West Virginia. He says the clashes between miners and mine owners we’re stoked by dangerous working conditions in the coal mines, and by what was happening above ground. Specifically, life in company towns.

LOU MARTIN: These were towns that were wholly owned by the companies. And that included the housing, the store, the church, the school. And the coal operators intentionally recruited a diverse workforce to keep them divided. They wanted, what they called, a judicious mixture of African Americans from the South, immigrants from eastern and Southern Europe, as well as native born West Virginians. And they were patrolled by mine guards. These were armed men that were employed by the company, ostensibly to keep law and order, but in reality they turned into an anti-union force.

BRIAN: And I gathered that guns were plentiful on both sides at all times.

LOU MARTIN: Pretty much. Supposedly a coal operator said that you can’t mine coal without machine guns. Whether somebody actually said that or not it seems to be the case, because the operators routinely purchased firearms. And they also hired a private detective agency, the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, to supply armed men to the camps.

BRIAN: But what about the workers? It sounds like they carried guns with them a lot of the time too.

LOU MARTIN: That’s right. Miners in southern West Virginia often came from nearby hills and hollows where they had grown up hunting, and so they would have had shotguns and hunting rifles to be sure. This was a place where lots of people had fire arms.

BRIAN: Well let’s talk about that battle at Blair Mountain. Why don’t you tell me what provoked it and how 10,000 men came to be marching.

LOU MARTIN: Well, first I would say that this was really a response to two decades or more of a system of abuse and exploitation. And all of the avenues for peaceful social change had been closed off. But probably the event that most people would say sparked the march on Blair Mountain, and eventually the battle, was the killing the chief of police of Matewan, West Virginia, Sid Hatfield. He and his deputy we’re going to a neighboring county to be tried for some alleged crimes, that’s when he was assassinated on the courthouse steps.

But, really they were being put on trial because they had supported the miners drive for unionization in their county, Mingo county. So the United Mine Workers district 17 president was Frank Keeney. He once said you can only win your political rights with a high powered rifle. He and the other officers of district 17 helped to organize the march, but it was really, a lot of people would say, almost a spontaneous uprising. Miners were ready to rebel.

BRIAN: So don’t keep me hanging, what happens?

LOU MARTIN: They started in Marmet, West Virginia, just south of Charleston, and they hope to go down through Logan county to Mingo county where Sid Hatfield had been the chief of police. Some of the people said that their goal was to kill Don Chafin, the Sheriff of Logan county, who was paid by the coal operators, and burn down the Logan county courthouse.

But ultimately what they wanted to do was to clean the corruption out of the system, and they wanted to start by helping their union brothers organize. So they marched 50 miles south to Blair Mountain, which is a 20 mile long ridge that separated the miners from the nonunion fields further south. And Don Chafin had a small army of 3,000 or 4,000 men entrenched on the ridge, and they fought for five days. Ultimately the governor called on the President of the United States to send the US Army. And when the US Army arrive the miners surrendered.

BRIAN: Boy those were the days. The Feds show up and opposition just melts away. What was it about the federal troops they made these miners give up so easily?

LOU MARTIN: There are reports that the miners were cheering upon hearing that the US Army was coming, which would suggest that they thought that the US Army was going to intervene on their behalf. There’s some people that had just gotten out of the Army for World War I, they weren’t willing to fight the US Army that they had just been part.

BRIAN: Right, I didn’t think of

LOU MARTIN: That. And some people just said, you can’t fight Uncle Sam.

BRIAN: They understood that even if they initially won there would only be more and more federal troops.

LOU MARTIN: I think so. And I think there was just acknowledgement that this had gotten beyond a place where they could reasonably expect to win.

ED: Martin says that, in many ways, the battle Blair Mountain backfired for the miners. Conditions in the coal mines and company towns remained largely unchanged, union membership plummeted, and union leaders left the state. Real change will come more than a decade later in 1933. That’s when a new federal law guaranteed Americans the right to join a union. United mine worker organizers returned to West Virginia, and within a month added over 70,000 miners to the Union roles. That swift success allowed UMW leaders, some of whom had fought at Blair Mountain, to launch union drives in other industries.

BRIAN: Blair mountain played a part in that successful organizing, Martin says, but maybe not the most important one.

LOU MARTIN: For two or three generations you had people saying, let’s never forget what we faced, what our ancestors faced before there were unions. I sometimes say that people in West Virginia remember Blair mountain more than they remember, say their father or grandfather going to a lot of meetings and signing the first contract.

BRIAN: Right drinking a lot of coffee.

LOU MARTIN: Right.

BRIAN: Lou Martin is co-founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars museum in Matewan, West Virginia.

ED: We’re going to end today’s show in New Mexico in the 1880s. In many parts of the territory, subsistence farmers and ranchers lived on vast tracts called land grants. These parcels of land had been given the Spanish settlers as far back as the 1600s. Each family owned a private plot for their house and garden, but the rest of the property was communally owned. Grazing, water, and timber resources were shared. This arrangement remained in place even after New Mexico became a US territory in 1848.

BRIAN: But in the late 1800s the landscape was upended by the arrival of two things, the railroad and barbed wire. As industrial ranchers and Anglo American settlers flooded in the New Mexican region of Las Vegas, Hispanic farmers and ranchers were suddenly fenced off from their communal lands. They fought back, armed with wire cutters and axis. The clandestine group called itself Las Gorras Blancas, or the White Caps. Reporter Lucia Duncan has the story.

LUCIA DUNCAN: In the spring of 1889 hooded night riders began crisscrossing the Las Vegas land grant, dismantling barbed wire fences.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: They would cut the strands and just leave them as scraps, maybe just four to eight foot pieces where you just couldn’t pick up and use them again. And they would literally cut the fence post with their axes. This is Anselmo Arriano, a retired historian who lives in the town of Los Vegas. He said sometimes the Gorras Blancas gave advanced warning to their targets. They left this note in Spanish for an English cattle baron named Wilson Wattingham who had fenced in 12,000 acres on the land grant.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: Sir, this notice is with the object of requesting you to coil up your wire as soon as possible from the north and south sides. They are fences which are damaging the unhappy people, and if you do not do it you will suffer the consequences from us. Your servants, the White Caps.

ROCK ULIBARRI: All of this was all Los Vegas land grant we’re in now.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Rock Ulibarri’s ancestors were among the original Spanish settlers here. We’re driving to feed his horses through expansive grasslands and Ponderosa pine forests, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

ROCK ULIBARRI: So the Gallinas canyon goes left that way and this is the Porvea canyon. So all this to the left and right was all family land so now this my cousin that lives there, another cousin lives here. So they’re all relatives, even though it’s been divided up family wise no one has ever sold.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Ulibarri’s great, great uncles were the founders of the Gorras Blancas. Gazing around, he’s amazed they could communicate across such large distances.

ROCK ULIBARRI: People lived so far away from each other on their little ranchitos throughout all these mountains, and yet 150-200 men on horseback would show up at a certain point in the middle of these mountains coming from all different directions.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Ulibarri says recruitment wasn’t a problem for the Gorras Blancas. Their loss of communal land with incentive enough. When the Mexican American War ended in 1848, the US government agreed to honor the Spanish land grants. But for decades afterwards it stalled on issuing land titles to the Hispanic farmers and ranchers. Without these new titles, boundaries an ownership weren’t clear cut. Meanwhile, the courts opened up the possibility that communal land grants could be privatized and sold. David Correa teaches American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He says all this opened the door for corrupt lawyers and investors to make a fortune off land sales.

DAVID CORREA: This is like a credible chaotic period of what we could only describe as a land fraud. Even the territorial Governor Ross didn’t have a lot of sympathy for these investors.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Who flocked to the territory from Boston, New York, and as far away as Europe.

DAVID CORREA: And suddenly in the span of a decade there’s barbed wire everywhere. And when you go from a few thousand cattle on the ranges to millions of cattle on the ranges. And they’re just flooding in from all over. And so it’s a complete and total transformation.

LUCIA DUNCAN: And that’s when the Gorras Blancas begin to mobilize. They were lead by three brothers who never publicly admitted involvement. There was Juan Jose, who people called El Capitan, because he’d been a captain in the Union Army, Pablo, who later ran political office, and the youngest, Nicanor. The three returned to Los Vegas after working in the Colorado coal mines and as union organizers for the Knights of Labor. The Herrera brothers resisted on two fronts, by night they cut fences, by day they organized Hispanic workers, demanding they be paid the same as Anglo workers. Rock Ulibarri says that in many cases, members of the Gorras Blancas worked for the same people they were fighting.

ROCK ULIBARRI: They built fences for ranchers. And they’d get paid by the ranchers for building hundreds of miles of fence, so then when it came time to go out and tear down fences they knew the terrain, they knew where they were at, they knew where they’re being erected, and they’d just got out and chop them up and cut them down.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Over the course of 1889 their attacks escalated. The group begin targeting timber operations and railroads. One night, 300 masked and armed night riders ripped up 6,000 railroad ties. They exchanged shots with the railroad manager. Territorial and federal officials struck back. In the fall of 1889 the Los Vegas district attorney indicted 47 men, including the Herrera brothers on fence cutting charges. But crowds of supporters surrounded the jail. The Sheriff telegraphed the governor, pleading for rifles and ammunition in case of an attack. After three days all the suspects were released on bail.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: And in the majority 99% of these people were poor, so some of the wealthier individuals in this area are the ones that posted bond for them.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Anselmo Arriano suspects that even Lorenso Lopez, the county Sheriff, may have contributed.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: Because the majority of the community did support the Gorras Blancas and what they were doing, you know. Because the bottom line was that they were all protecting the interest of the majority of the population in this county and the land grant.

LUCIA DUNCAN: The following spring when the trial came around, the Sheriff couldn’t find the grand jury witnesses. The charges against the 47 men were dropped. David Correa says the authorities feared the Gorras Blancas had de facto immunity. Some even speculated the group had killed the witnesses.

DAVID CORREA: It was a united front that really frightened economic elites all the way to Washington DC, where the president is involved in conversations to try to stop Gorras Blancas.

LUCIA DUNCAN: By the fall of 1890, a little more than a year after the Gorras Blancas began riding, every single fence that had enclosed the Las Vegas land grant commons had been cut. The night riding and fence cutting stopped, and for a time, so to commercial cattle ranching in this part of New Mexico. Today the Las Vegas land grant is a fraction of its original size. But some families, like Rock Ulibarri’s, have held on to their land. In Ulibarri’s opinion this wouldn’t have been possible without the Gorras Blancas.

ROCK ULIBARRI: In Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico we still have land grants with boards. And nowhere else, from Texas to California, do they still exist. So they didn’t get any land back, but they brought the land stealing to a standstill. It stopped. So what we still had we’ve retained.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Ulibarri points to the cabin where his father was born.

ROCK ULIBARRI: My sons out a new roof on it, new windows, and outside shower and toilet so they can move back on to the ranch.

LUCIA DUNCAN: His son will be the eighth generation of Ulibarris to live on this land.

BRIAN: Reporter Lucia Duncan brought us that story.

ED: That’s going to do it for today, but head over to our website to let us know what you thought of the show. You’ll find this at backstoryradio.org. And while you’re there, send us your questions about our upcoming episodes. We have a great show in the works about local power in America. You know sheriffs, mayors, mafia, and more. And on the history of testing. You can also reach out with email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our engineer and Diana Williams is our digital editor. Our researcher is Melissa Gismondi, and we have additional help from Brianna Azar. Special thanks this week to James Green and Hal Gorby. And thanks to the American Backstory hosts for having me on board.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by Shia Khan foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

BRIAN: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. In 1787 more  than 2,000 armed farmers marched toward Boston to protest taxes. Despite their muskets they weren’t aiming for a shoot out.

WOODY HOLTON: Ironically, yeah you could say the threatening the use of a musket is a way to not have to punch somebody in the nose.

ED: Fast forward to 1921, in Blair Mountain, West Virginia. Some 10,000 coal miners armed with hunting rifles and shotguns staged the largest labor uprising in U.S history. Their leader’s battle cry?

MALE SPEAKER: You can only when your political rights with a high powered rifle.

ED: Today on BackStory we’ll explore an American tradition that spans the political spectrum, from the origins of the Ku Klux Klan to Latino Night Riders fighting US expansion in the Southwest. A history of armed resistance. Coming up on BackStory.

PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Welcome to BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers here with Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there Ed.

ED: And this week we’re joined by historian Nathan Connolly, filling in for Peter Onuf.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Hi Ed, good to be here.

BRIAN: We’re going to begin today in a remote part of the Pacific Northwest.

STEVE BEDA: There’s about, close to about a dozen man.

BRIAN: This is historian Steve Beda, and these men are blockading a state highway outside of Yreka near the California, Oregon border.

STEVE BEDA: They are holding hunting rifles and it looks like something out of a Western film. They are lever action rifles like John Wayne would carry. They are wearing cowboy boots and they are wearing Stetson hats.

BRIAN: They are ranchers. And they’re angry at the government. Sound familiar? Earlier this year armed militia men occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon. But this armed protest happened nearly 75 years ago.

STEVE BEDA: November 27, 1941, and they stop the motorists and they tell them you are now entering a new sovereign territory that no longer belongs to the states of Oregon and California. You are now entering the state of Jefferson.

BRIAN: Now you might assume this was a revolt against big government, but think again. Beda says in contrast to the militants who occupied the wildlife refuge, the state of Jefferson protesters wanted government intervention. You see, they felt cheated out of benefits promised to them by the New Deal.

STEVE BEDA: Farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers in Southern Oregon are still going to bed by gaslight lamp. So there’s no roads, there’s no dams, there’s no water for farmers.

BRIAN: Big federal projects like the Grand Coulee Dam brought water and electricity to major cities, but they did little to help ranchers, miners, and farmers in rural areas. So the protesters decided to take matters into their own hands and form a new state.

STEVE BEDA: There will be no big cities to control the way we use our rural resources, telling us where we can build a dam and where we can’t, telling us there’s not enough money for roads. They’re very much imagining a rural political paradise.

BRIAN: At first they called their rural paradise Mittlewestcoastia.

STEVE BEDA: It’s not middle, M-I-D-D it’s M-I-T-T-L-E westcoastia, so it’s all one weird word.

BRIAN: But then they realized that state of Jefferson had a little more gravitas.

STEVE BEDA: I think they also seize on Jefferson’s name because these guys are rural producers, they imagine themselves as the yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s imagination.

BRIAN: The state of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence read “until California and Oregon again build a road into the copper country, Jefferson, as a defense-minded state will be forced to rebel. Each Thursday.”

STEVE BEDA: Each Thursday. I love that language. This goes back to the tricky question of how serious were they about a new state? To what extent was this spectacle, to what extent was this showmanship, and to what extent was this a real political movement. And I kind of think it was both.

BRIAN: A reporter from San Francisco named Stanton Delaplane heard about the movement and rushed up to the border eager to cover the events. While he was there he gave the protesters some advice.

STEVE BEDA: Delaplane really encourages them to play up the cowboy hats and the cowboy boots. Definitely bring the guns along because he believes when his readers read about a rural protest movement they’re going to want to see cowboys.

BRIAN: Delaplane knew how to craft a good story. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for his state of Jefferson coverage. But in the end, the protest only lasted two Thursdays.

STEVE BEDA: And about a week and a half later is, of course, December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy.

RADIO: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.

STEVE BEDA: So as soon as Pearl Harbor happens everything changes, insofar as things can change overnight in history, things change quite dramatically in 1941.

BRIAN: One of the biggest changes was that the United States suddenly needed southern Oregon’s timber for the war effort.

STEVE BEDA: It also needs copper. So you see a little economic development. And that kind of, for a time, quells some of the anger and frustration.

BRIAN: Beda says it’s hard to compare the state of Jefferson protest with the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. There was no standoff with the FBI in 1941. And those guns? Well, they were mostly props. But Beda says both movements share a core element, they were rural protests.

STEVE BEDA: I think what they both understand, or what they both have in common, is that oftentimes for rural people to get heard in politics there has to be some drama there.

STEVE BEDA: And one sure fire way to attract attention is to grab a gun.

STEVE BEDA: Angry cowboys need a gun because that’s what westerns tell us, that’s what popular culture tells us, is that rural protest has to have a gun there.

BRIAN: So today on the show we’ll explore the wide spectrum of Americans who have resisted authority by taking up arms. We’ll hear about hooded horsemen in American southwest, to raged a clandestine war against ranchers and railroads. And speaking of hooded horsemen, it turns out the original Ku Klux Klan didn’t wear that iconic garb the 19th century, some wore women’s dresses. We’ll also explore the five day shooting war between West Virginia coal miners and mine operators, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. But before we get there, Ed’s going to take this to one of the very first armed protests the United States faced. In fact, it was just a few years after the American Revolution.

ED: On January 25, 1787 another group of armed rural men had staged a protest. This one in Springfield, Massachusetts. About 2,200 men led by Daniel Shays tried to seize the 7,000 muskets and 1,300 pounds of gunpowder housed in the US Army. They planned to march to Boston and burn it to the ground, seizing control of the government there. I sat down with Woody Holton, a professor at the University of South Carolina to talk about Shays’ Rebellion and its legacy. Woody, welcome to the show.

WOODY HOLTON: Hey man.

ED: So Woody, tell me this, who were these guys and were they so angry?

WOODY HOLTON: To a large extent, these guys who participated in Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 where the same guys who participated in that more famous rebellion, the American Revolution, in 1776. And George Washington didn’t have the money to pay his soldiers. So what he gave them instead of money was IOUs, promissory note, like today’s savings bonds. But the problem is for a soldier you can’t eat paper. And so they sold those bonds at a fraction of their face value to speculators.

And now spin forward to three years after the Paris peace treaty, that is 1786, those speculators want to turn those bonds into real money. And the only way to do that is to cash them in with the state government and the government can’t pay the speculator that money until they levy taxes. And guess who has to pay those taxes? It was people like Daniel Shays and these other farmers.

ED: So what did they feel compelled to take up arms? That seems like a pretty extreme action at this time.

WOODY HOLTON: Yeah. It’s a great question because there were actually annual elections in Massachusetts at the time and so elites said back to them, for instance governor James Bowdoin said hey, if you don’t like me, you don’t like the legislature, vote us out of office. But people had trouble organizing. Sort of one year one county would turn out to vote, and next year’s another county would turn out to vote, and so the electoral process had just not worked for them.

And so, they weren’t really trying to hurt anybody. They did use guns, what they did was close down the county courts. That was the real face of the government. They were really hoping though to sustain the thing by bluffing. From the farmers perspective, they thought that it would be adequate to use threats. They didn’t want to killed but they want to kill either.

ED: And since maybe having guns meant they wouldn’t have to beat up anybody either. It was a way of avoiding violence altogether.

WOODY HOLTON: Ironically yeah, I you could say that threatening the use of a musket is a way of not having to punch somebody in the nose, yes.

ED: So, you’ve got Shays’ men with these guns that they’re not actively using except for threats, they’re taking over the courthouses, they’re on their way to take over the armory, to restore justice. And yet they run into opposition, right?

WOODY HOLTON: That’s right Colonel William Shepard met them at the armory with canon. And first fired over their head, and I think as late as that point, they didn’t really think that he would wheel it down and fire into their ranks, but he did. And four of the Shaysites were killed. And then a short time later this army from Boston arrived of 4,000 soldiers.

ED: Wait wait wait I’m confused, if they don’t have enough money to pay the soldiers from the Revolution, who’s paying these militia now?

WOODY HOLTON: This is a great question because the US Congress initially voted to send an army to go put down Shays’ Rebellion. But it couldn’t come up with the money to fund that army. What Massachusetts did, Governor Bowdoin was governor of Massachusetts, and what he did was went around to the merchants of Boston and took up a collection from them. Because they were the targets of Shays’ Rebellion. There were the ones who owned the bonds, and the merchants also had huge debts owed to them from farmers. And so it was very much in the Boston merchants interest to put down this rebellion. So they lent the money to the government to go suppress Shays’ Rebellion.

ED: So who were the soldiers?

WOODY HOLTON: All the servants in Boston.

ED: It’s kind of working class against working class then?

WOODY HOLTON: Absolutely. And they finished putting down the rebellion, attacked them in the town of Petersham, Massachusetts early in February, 1787. And that was really the end of Shays’ Rebellion. But here’s the interesting thing about it is, remember I’d said that the farmers had had trouble organizing themselves to go to the polls and elect a new governor and a new legislature, that’s why they felt like they had to close the courts. But after their governor sent people to shoot them dead that really energized people to go vote in the next election in May of 1787, and that’s when they did vote governor Bowdoin out, they voted out something like half of the legislature. And they got tax relief.

ED: So why does this matter than? If something didn’t really eventuate in much bloodshed. We tend to measure the consequence of things by how many people died, but that sounds like this is not really the right calculus for this.

WOODY HOLTON: Yeah there’s another way to measure which is if there hadn’t been a Shays’ Rebellion we wouldn’t have the United States Constitution today.

ED: Yikes. OK, that’s a pretty big consequence. Explain yourself.

WOODY HOLTON: Well, it was really Shays’ Rebellion that became the final argument among an elite group of Americans that they needed to create a powerful new national government. You needed to give the federal government taxing authority so that it could field an army to suppress rebellions, like Shays’ Rebellion, as well slave revolts. And you could really see this in the person of the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, George Washington. After witnessing Shays’ Rebellion he had said, we’ve got to make sure that this effort to strengthen the federal government succeeds, and I’m the guy to make sure that happens and so, yes I will go to the Constitutional Convention.

And here’s the thing, without George Washington there that federal convention never would have succeeded. About half of Americans opposed the Constitution when it was first adopted in 1787. And the one way, I’d say the single biggest factor that sold the Constitution, was everyone’s reassurance at A, George Washington supported it, and B, George Washington is going to be our first president so we can make sure that our first president is not going to turn himself into a King.

ED: So. You persuaded me, Shays’ Rebellion has a big impact on the Constitution. What impact does it have on the second amendment, the right to bear arms?

WOODY HOLTON: Well many of the people who had participated in Shays’ Rebellion, and there were rebellions like that in just about every state, tended to be people in the western part of the state, farmers rebelling against the merchants in the east, many of those same people were the ones who voted against the Constitution because they didn’t want to transfer all of this power to the federal government. In the same way that easterners wanted the federal government to be able to field army to suppress rebellions like this.

ED: Yeah, you don’t want to have to have a bake sale every time you need to put up a militia.

WOODY HOLTON: Exactly. But that’s exactly what the people in the west wanted. They wanted to be really hard for the federal government to come send troops to suppress them. And one of the way that the supporters of the Constitution reassured the people in the back country, in Western Massachusetts, in Western Pennsylvania and so forth, was the bill of rights. And that’s, of course, freedom of religion and freedom from unlawful search and seizure supposedly, and all that stuff but it’s also that second amendment which gives them the right to hold on to their guns so that they can rebel.

Now I gotta hasten to add as a modern American, that just because we’re all allowed to have guns doesn’t mean the government can’t regulate them. In fact, well regulated militia is part of that phrase. So, we could have the modern political debate but if you want to go to the realities of the writing of the Bill of Rights there was a desire on the part of Americans to leave open the door to revolution if the government ever became tyrannical.

ED: Woody Holton is a historian at the University of South Carolina, and author of “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution”. Earlier we heard from Steve Beda, a historian at the University of Oregon.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Listening to that interview on Shays’ Rebellion I couldn’t help but note how soon after the American Revolution pride in a new nation turned into resistance and armed struggle. So Ed, given that mixture and that tangle of poverty, grievance, and guns in the wake of the American Revolution, do you see a similar set of conditions that are setting the table for violent protests after the Civil War?

ED: The table is set, it’s interesting what happens instead. I think in the same way that the veterans in the American Revolution felt that they had earned American citizenship so did the African American soldiers who in many ways saved the United States in the American Civil War, the nearly 200,000 black men who fought in the second half of the American Civil War come out of this one saying, OK, this has been the standard by which Americans have established their citizenship, we are ready for ours.

And in fact citizenship does come as a result of all this, of bearing arms. If They had not fought against the white South they would not have had the same claim. And so what is won by service to your nation? My guess is that some of those things continue to echo throughout the 20th century, right guys?

BRIAN: Well Ed they echo, but things don’t always move forward in a direct line. In fact, if we think back to that D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation,” we’re talking about the birth of a white nation. And that white nation strips those arms in the military from African Americans. Denies them the right to fight during World War I.

ED: Yeah, and not just Africa Americas Brian, to really drive your point home, the villain of that movie is an African American union veteran, right? So there’s a pretty direct pivot there from the 19th to the 20th century.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: This is a really remarkable parallel in the sense that you have so many black veterans even if they didn’t fight on foreign soil abroad, their time in the military help politicize them and move them into raising very clear challenges to white supremacy in the South and elsewhere. And one of the often overlooked aspects of the 20th century America is that you have black and white veterans literally waging war on the home front over the question of civil rights.

One great example, of course, is Robert Williams in North Carolina who helps to train members of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina to defend their homes against the Klan. You have other examples in cases around the South where homes of African Americans who were trying to desegregate neighborhoods are being bombed by white veterans who have discernible munitions training, and their, kind of, chief antagonists or the people they’re fighting against a black veterans, who also have military training. And so this becomes a very important piece of the story. As one final point, even nonviolent protesters, someone who’d been in favor of registering voters peacefully, like Medgar Evers in Mississippi, was a veteran who had military background and understood the importance of the right to bear arms.

The person who shot Medgar Evers down in his own driveway, Byron De La Beckwith was also a veteran. There’s a long history of white resistance to black civil rights on the part of white veterans, not just in the ’20s or the ’30s, but really even after the Vietnam period and beyond. So it’s a very important part of American history to think about this relationship between military service in the US Government, and the way that shapes how nonviolent and violent protests in the United States plays out post-war.

ED: While we were working on this episode we received several questions on our website from our listeners, and here’s one of them.

BRIAN: Hey Ed, Nathan, we’ve got Evan from New York City on the line. Welcome Evan, what have you got for us today?

EVAN: The question I want to ask is, and it all kind of started because I was on Facebook one day, on social media, and I saw my uncle talking on Facebook about politics. And one of the things that he was talking about was the Vietnam War as it wouldn’t have changed, or things wouldn’t have changed, if it hadn’t been for people marching in the streets. So my question kind of is what is the history of anti-war protest in America? Did it ever turned to armed protests? And kind of just walk me through what the history of all that is if you can in our short segment.

BRIAN: So the question for us guys, is what is the history of protest, especially armed protest, against war. Ed why don’t you start us off?

ED: The first huge example we see this in wartime is in the American Civil War. And the biggest one happened right where you are, in New York City. What we call the New York City Draft Riots, but in many ways were the New York City Race Riots, and the two issues were so conflated. That one began to be violent. I mean, the intention all along was to shatter the machinery of the draft, but also very quickly became to shatter the homes of the wealthy who had bought their way out of the draft. And then, in sort of perverse logic, to attack the black people whom white Northerners blamed for the Civil War. And people were actually hanged from lamp posts and they burned an orphanage of all things. People often forget the troops had to be rushed from Gettysburg to New York City to put down this armed rebellion.

BRIAN: That’s incredible. I actually think that is bigger– Nathan what do you think? Bigger than anything that we got in the 20th century?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: I think that’s right. I mean, part of the issue is that you have a number of peaceful protests that then degenerate into some kind of armed conflict with the police department or with bystanders. So one the more famous ones in the 20th century obviously is the anti-war protesting going on outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in ’68.

BRIAN: Made for much better TV.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And so that conflict begins as something intend to simply shine a light on the Democratic Party and it’s roll in the Vietnam War and, by virtue of really heavy handed policing on the part of the daily machine in Chicago, that turns into a kind of armed protest.

BRIAN: Now what I will say, Evan, is there was something called fragging in Vietnam which was kind of a Civil War within a war.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Yeah so the term fragging, which was really popularized in the early 1970s, is a reference to the fragmentary grenades to attack commanding officers in your own division. In many instances troops would use grenades because you couldn’t trace them back to individual infantrymen. There were a number of incidents throughout the Vietnam War in particular in which disgruntled soldiers were killing their commanding officers in a form of protest against being thrown into a dangerous gunfights or other kinds of conflict, in some cases recklessly or unnecessarily. The frequency of fragging is one of the real subplots, I think, of the Vietnam story, in that you have, between the late ’60s and early ’70s, hundreds of these incidents that kill nearly 100 troops and injure 100 more. And so it’s a kind of armed resistance against the orders of your commanding officer.

BRIAN: And it tended to be directed, Evan, against officers who were particularly eager to pursue the war in an aggressive fashion, which of course the troops felt was not good for their health, to put it bluntly.

ED: An interesting inversion, nothing like that happens in the American Civil War. So it’s not just that violence decreased. it’s that the focus of violence shifted.

BRIAN: Evan we’re wondering just why it is, besides your affection for your uncle and Facebook, that you’re so interested in this question? And I will tell you right now we are not armed.

EVAN: The prevailing sentiment these days is that people are not happy with the way things are going. And I kind of wonder is it possible that we could see people, because they’re so seemingly dissatisfied with government at large, that we would have an armed resistance to any future conflict.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: I really love this question. Because it gets at what is a tension really, in terms of how Americans are believed to be acting politically. When they want the moral high ground you’re supposed to behave peacefully, and if you protest against the immorality of a war it seemingly makes perfect sense to engage only in non-violent protests. The irony, of course, is that for many Americans the only way that they feel heard, by what they consider to be an unresponsive government, is to raise the stakes by engaging in very direct forms of protests and, you know, insurgency, which sometimes then precipitates in violent outcomes, as was the case in Chicago in ’68.

ED: That’s a great point Nathan. I think another thing to think about to answer Evan’s question is what’s the commonality between the two great episodes of violence, the Civil War and Vietnam, is the draft. My own take to answer your question is that there’s plenty of room for people to protest without feeling that they have to be armed until basically their own lives are directly involved.

BRIAN: Evan I want to thank you and your entire extended family for joining us today on BackStory, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you.

EVAN: It’s an honor to be here, thanks.

ED: Thanks Evan.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Thank you.

BRIAN: If you have a question about our upcoming episodes head over to our website backstoryradio.org. We’ve got shows in the works on the history of local power, and another on the history of testing. While you’re there you can listen to Nathan Connolly’s conversation with a listener about the Black Panther Party.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: We’re going to turn now to one organization that might not seem like a resistance group, the Ku Klux Klan. They’re better known as an American hate group.

ED: But historian Elaine Frantz Parsons says that’s the second iteration of the Klan. It spread nationwide after the release of the 1915 blockbuster film “The Birth of a Nation”. The original Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by six former Confederate army officers in Tennessee.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Parsons says, during Reconstruction southern white Democrats watched in horror as black and white Republicans gained political office. This was only possible because of the presence of federal troops.

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Klan people thought of themselves as a way to exercise power in competition with what they saw now as the illegitimate power. They started thinking of themselves as a rebellion.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Within Just a couple of years, Klan chapters had spread like a cancer throughout the former Confederacy. Their goal was to overthrow Republican state and local governments. These armed rebels had a very distinct appearance. We’re not talking white robes and tall pointed hoods, that’s the uniform of the 20th century KKK. Parsons says the earlier 19th century version of the Klan looked very different.

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Some people wear their wives dresses, that’s very common, some people get animal skins, other kinds of parts of animals, animal horns, and make them into costumes. Some people just take a burlap sack and put it over their head and paint eyes and a mouth on it, cut out some holes, right? So they would attempt to keep their identities secret. This was a time when the South was occupied and people could not afford to be seen or be known publicly to have committed these acts of violence.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And what did that violence look like? What forms of violence did the Klan partake in?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Some common forms of Klan violence would be political assassinations, simply targeting black elected leaders or powerful black speakers and organizers, right? There was a great amount of sexual violence, largely against black women, some people were hanged. So they were whippings, there were threats, and there was a huge amount of theft of property of new freed people, especially those freed people who happened to be successful at accumulating resources were very much at risk of having their crops taken. And actually the Klan would always take their weapons, their guns, and that they thought of that as– we think about that as disarming them, but that was also a theft, something which was worth money. So theft, depriving people of the resources, was a really important part of what the Klan was doing.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So part of white armed protest through the Klan was actually about preempting the possibility of black armed protest.

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Yeah, no that’s right. And it was about cutting off any means through which black people could organize and demand politically equality or economic equality. And part of that was in a disarming them. But part of that was also just doing whatever they could to interrupt and disrupt their organizations. To push back against black competitors for power.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And if there was a federal pushback would did it look like?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: So when the federal government tried to stop the Klan or counter the Klan, they don’t do a real good job infiltrating the Klan. Because the Klan is so disorganized often it’s very informal, like a bunch of people getting together and deciding to do a specific raid. And a lot of Klan groups only existed for a month or only for a night. Very brief. So they didn’t have much in the way of organization, and yet it was organization that the federal government was most interested in uncovering. Right?

But at the same time a huge number of people throughout the Klan period denied that there was a Klan. So no matter how many people, hundreds of people being killed, raped. People have captured Klan costumes and arrested Klansmen, and still it’s often written off as comic. Right? That yes, maybe there were some people who were dressed as Klansmen, but they’re just dressed in these silly costumes. You shouldn’t really be afraid of because they’re just playing pranks. So there’s this huge public resistance to punishing Klansmen, and part of this is because so many people up north and never really take Klan violence seriously.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: As you explain in your book Elaine, the first iteration of the Klan practically evaporated by the early 1870s. What happened then? Why they start to fail?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Well there were a couple reasons why it started to disappear in the 1870s. The biggest reason was that the federal government went in and in 1870, 1871, made a whole bunch of arrests. Hundreds of people, right? And I think they often arrested the wrong people. Because that’s the thing about an insurgency is that the federal government doesn’t have, as you think about terrorism now, the problem is you don’t have reliable local information. So they would arrest a lot of people, and whether they got the right people or the wrong people, this threw the community into disarray, and caused the community to pressure the people who were involved with the Klan to stop. So that was part of what happened.

But the other thing that happened was that already by this period Democrats were starting to get much more legitimate power. They were starting to sort of worm their way back into legitimate sources of power and offices. And once they have control over the local governments they don’t want a bunch of young men you know who are somehow affiliated with them politically to be making their own decisions about how to use violence. They want to reclaim the monopoly on violence again. So part of what happened is that sort of the Klan won. Their side started to just pick up the power again.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So it sounds like you’re suggesting that the armed protests of 1860s helped to hasten the legitimacy of the Democratic party in the South by the 1870s, that there’s a relationship there. I think I am. I think that part of what was happening with the Klan was it was a mobilization of the southern white democratic public. And they ultimately caused enough problems that they pushed back the federal government and started to develop real lasting legitimate authority through that.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So you’re describing how the politics of the Klan enter the mainstream of the Democratic party. Do their forms of violence also become part of the mainstream?

ELAINE FRANTZ PARSONS: Yes, and what you start with with Klan violence is, sort of, small groups of people who have to disguise themselves to go out and commit violence against their black or white Republican victims. But what’s going to happen very soon after the end of the Klan when power comes back the Democrats, is that groups of people who want to add to the violence of the state, who want to go past what even the new democratic state is going to do, those people are going to be able to come out into the broad sunlight in huge numbers to lynch their victims without fear of reprisal. They’ll be no need for any sort of costumes, you don’t need a mask. Once you get into the 1880s, 1890s ’90s armed resistance didn’t have to be secretive any longer because there was nobody there who would challenge it.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Elaine Frantz Parsons is a historian Duquesne University, and the author of “Ku Klux, the Birth of the Klan in the Reconstruction Era United States”

BRIAN: We’re going to turn now to the mountains of West Virginia in 1921. In August of that year some 10,000 coal miners picked up guns and headed to southern West Virginia. They were marching in support of striking union miners there. But on the way they encountered several thousand local police, National Guardsmen, and private mine guards. A five day shoot out ensued. It’s known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. Blair Mountain was the culmination of the string of violent strikes and reprisals between West Virginia workers and owners. A conflict known as the Mine Wars.

LOU MARTIN: The carnage of the coal industry was really unparalleled at the time.

BRIAN: This is historian Lou Martin. He’s co-founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars museum in Matewan, West Virginia. He says the clashes between miners and mine owners we’re stoked by dangerous working conditions in the coal mines, and by what was happening above ground. Specifically, life in company towns.

LOU MARTIN: These were towns that were wholly owned by the companies. And that included the housing, the store, the church, the school. And the coal operators intentionally recruited a diverse workforce to keep them divided. They wanted, what they called, a judicious mixture of African Americans from the South, immigrants from eastern and Southern Europe, as well as native born West Virginians. And they were patrolled by mine guards. These were armed men that were employed by the company, ostensibly to keep law and order, but in reality they turned into an anti-union force.

BRIAN: And I gathered that guns were plentiful on both sides at all times.

LOU MARTIN: Pretty much. Supposedly a coal operator said that you can’t mine coal without machine guns. Whether somebody actually said that or not it seems to be the case, because the operators routinely purchased firearms. And they also hired a private detective agency, the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, to supply armed men to the camps.

BRIAN: But what about the workers? It sounds like they carried guns with them a lot of the time too.

LOU MARTIN: That’s right. Miners in southern West Virginia often came from nearby hills and hollows where they had grown up hunting, and so they would have had shotguns and hunting rifles to be sure. This was a place where lots of people had fire arms.

BRIAN: Well let’s talk about that battle at Blair Mountain. Why don’t you tell me what provoked it and how 10,000 men came to be marching.

LOU MARTIN: Well, first I would say that this was really a response to two decades or more of a system of abuse and exploitation. And all of the avenues for peaceful social change had been closed off. But probably the event that most people would say sparked the march on Blair Mountain, and eventually the battle, was the killing the chief of police of Matewan, West Virginia, Sid Hatfield. He and his deputy we’re going to a neighboring county to be tried for some alleged crimes, that’s when he was assassinated on the courthouse steps.

But, really they were being put on trial because they had supported the miners drive for unionization in their county, Mingo county. So the United Mine Workers district 17 president was Frank Keeney. He once said you can only win your political rights with a high powered rifle. He and the other officers of district 17 helped to organize the march, but it was really, a lot of people would say, almost a spontaneous uprising. Miners were ready to rebel.

BRIAN: So don’t keep me hanging, what happens?

LOU MARTIN: They started in Marmet, West Virginia, just south of Charleston, and they hope to go down through Logan county to Mingo county where Sid Hatfield had been the chief of police. Some of the people said that their goal was to kill Don Chafin, the Sheriff of Logan county, who was paid by the coal operators, and burn down the Logan county courthouse.

But ultimately what they wanted to do was to clean the corruption out of the system, and they wanted to start by helping their union brothers organize. So they marched 50 miles south to Blair Mountain, which is a 20 mile long ridge that separated the miners from the nonunion fields further south. And Don Chafin had a small army of 3,000 or 4,000 men entrenched on the ridge, and they fought for five days. Ultimately the governor called on the President of the United States to send the US Army. And when the US Army arrive the miners surrendered.

BRIAN: Boy those were the days. The Feds show up and opposition just melts away. What was it about the federal troops they made these miners give up so easily?

LOU MARTIN: There are reports that the miners were cheering upon hearing that the US Army was coming, which would suggest that they thought that the US Army was going to intervene on their behalf. There’s some people that had just gotten out of the Army for World War I, they weren’t willing to fight the US Army that they had just been part.

BRIAN: Right, I didn’t think of

LOU MARTIN: That. And some people just said, you can’t fight Uncle Sam.

BRIAN: They understood that even if they initially won there would only be more and more federal troops.

LOU MARTIN: I think so. And I think there was just acknowledgement that this had gotten beyond a place where they could reasonably expect to win.

ED: Martin says that, in many ways, the battle Blair Mountain backfired for the miners. Conditions in the coal mines and company towns remained largely unchanged, union membership plummeted, and union leaders left the state. Real change will come more than a decade later in 1933. That’s when a new federal law guaranteed Americans the right to join a union. United mine worker organizers returned to West Virginia, and within a month added over 70,000 miners to the Union roles. That swift success allowed UMW leaders, some of whom had fought at Blair Mountain, to launch union drives in other industries.

BRIAN: Blair mountain played a part in that successful organizing, Martin says, but maybe not the most important one.

LOU MARTIN: For two or three generations you had people saying, let’s never forget what we faced, what our ancestors faced before there were unions. I sometimes say that people in West Virginia remember Blair mountain more than they remember, say their father or grandfather going to a lot of meetings and signing the first contract.

BRIAN: Right drinking a lot of coffee.

LOU MARTIN: Right.

BRIAN: Lou Martin is co-founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars museum in Matewan, West Virginia.

ED: We’re going to end today’s show in New Mexico in the 1880s. In many parts of the territory, subsistence farmers and ranchers lived on vast tracts called land grants. These parcels of land had been given the Spanish settlers as far back as the 1600s. Each family owned a private plot for their house and garden, but the rest of the property was communally owned. Grazing, water, and timber resources were shared. This arrangement remained in place even after New Mexico became a US territory in 1848.

BRIAN: But in the late 1800s the landscape was upended by the arrival of two things, the railroad and barbed wire. As industrial ranchers and Anglo American settlers flooded in the New Mexican region of Las Vegas, Hispanic farmers and ranchers were suddenly fenced off from their communal lands. They fought back, armed with wire cutters and axis. The clandestine group called itself Las Gorras Blancas, or the White Caps. Reporter Lucia Duncan has the story.

LUCIA DUNCAN: In the spring of 1889 hooded night riders began crisscrossing the Las Vegas land grant, dismantling barbed wire fences.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: They would cut the strands and just leave them as scraps, maybe just four to eight foot pieces where you just couldn’t pick up and use them again. And they would literally cut the fence post with their axes. This is Anselmo Arriano, a retired historian who lives in the town of Los Vegas. He said sometimes the Gorras Blancas gave advanced warning to their targets. They left this note in Spanish for an English cattle baron named Wilson Wattingham who had fenced in 12,000 acres on the land grant.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: Sir, this notice is with the object of requesting you to coil up your wire as soon as possible from the north and south sides. They are fences which are damaging the unhappy people, and if you do not do it you will suffer the consequences from us. Your servants, the White Caps.

ROCK ULIBARRI: All of this was all Los Vegas land grant we’re in now.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Rock Ulibarri’s ancestors were among the original Spanish settlers here. We’re driving to feed his horses through expansive grasslands and Ponderosa pine forests, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

ROCK ULIBARRI: So the Gallinas canyon goes left that way and this is the Porvea canyon. So all this to the left and right was all family land so now this my cousin that lives there, another cousin lives here. So they’re all relatives, even though it’s been divided up family wise no one has ever sold.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Ulibarri’s great, great uncles were the founders of the Gorras Blancas. Gazing around, he’s amazed they could communicate across such large distances.

ROCK ULIBARRI: People lived so far away from each other on their little ranchitos throughout all these mountains, and yet 150-200 men on horseback would show up at a certain point in the middle of these mountains coming from all different directions.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Ulibarri says recruitment wasn’t a problem for the Gorras Blancas. Their loss of communal land with incentive enough. When the Mexican American War ended in 1848, the US government agreed to honor the Spanish land grants. But for decades afterwards it stalled on issuing land titles to the Hispanic farmers and ranchers. Without these new titles, boundaries an ownership weren’t clear cut. Meanwhile, the courts opened up the possibility that communal land grants could be privatized and sold. David Correa teaches American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He says all this opened the door for corrupt lawyers and investors to make a fortune off land sales.

DAVID CORREA: This is like a credible chaotic period of what we could only describe as a land fraud. Even the territorial Governor Ross didn’t have a lot of sympathy for these investors.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Who flocked to the territory from Boston, New York, and as far away as Europe.

DAVID CORREA: And suddenly in the span of a decade there’s barbed wire everywhere. And when you go from a few thousand cattle on the ranges to millions of cattle on the ranges. And they’re just flooding in from all over. And so it’s a complete and total transformation.

LUCIA DUNCAN: And that’s when the Gorras Blancas begin to mobilize. They were lead by three brothers who never publicly admitted involvement. There was Juan Jose, who people called El Capitan, because he’d been a captain in the Union Army, Pablo, who later ran political office, and the youngest, Nicanor. The three returned to Los Vegas after working in the Colorado coal mines and as union organizers for the Knights of Labor. The Herrera brothers resisted on two fronts, by night they cut fences, by day they organized Hispanic workers, demanding they be paid the same as Anglo workers. Rock Ulibarri says that in many cases, members of the Gorras Blancas worked for the same people they were fighting.

ROCK ULIBARRI: They built fences for ranchers. And they’d get paid by the ranchers for building hundreds of miles of fence, so then when it came time to go out and tear down fences they knew the terrain, they knew where they were at, they knew where they’re being erected, and they’d just got out and chop them up and cut them down.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Over the course of 1889 their attacks escalated. The group begin targeting timber operations and railroads. One night, 300 masked and armed night riders ripped up 6,000 railroad ties. They exchanged shots with the railroad manager. Territorial and federal officials struck back. In the fall of 1889 the Los Vegas district attorney indicted 47 men, including the Herrera brothers on fence cutting charges. But crowds of supporters surrounded the jail. The Sheriff telegraphed the governor, pleading for rifles and ammunition in case of an attack. After three days all the suspects were released on bail.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: And in the majority 99% of these people were poor, so some of the wealthier individuals in this area are the ones that posted bond for them.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Anselmo Arriano suspects that even Lorenso Lopez, the county Sheriff, may have contributed.

ANSELMO ARRIANO: Because the majority of the community did support the Gorras Blancas and what they were doing, you know. Because the bottom line was that they were all protecting the interest of the majority of the population in this county and the land grant.

LUCIA DUNCAN: The following spring when the trial came around, the Sheriff couldn’t find the grand jury witnesses. The charges against the 47 men were dropped. David Correa says the authorities feared the Gorras Blancas had de facto immunity. Some even speculated the group had killed the witnesses.

DAVID CORREA: It was a united front that really frightened economic elites all the way to Washington DC, where the president is involved in conversations to try to stop Gorras Blancas.

LUCIA DUNCAN: By the fall of 1890, a little more than a year after the Gorras Blancas began riding, every single fence that had enclosed the Las Vegas land grant commons had been cut. The night riding and fence cutting stopped, and for a time, so to commercial cattle ranching in this part of New Mexico. Today the Las Vegas land grant is a fraction of its original size. But some families, like Rock Ulibarri’s, have held on to their land. In Ulibarri’s opinion this wouldn’t have been possible without the Gorras Blancas.

ROCK ULIBARRI: In Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico we still have land grants with boards. And nowhere else, from Texas to California, do they still exist. So they didn’t get any land back, but they brought the land stealing to a standstill. It stopped. So what we still had we’ve retained.

LUCIA DUNCAN: Ulibarri points to the cabin where his father was born.

ROCK ULIBARRI: My sons out a new roof on it, new windows, and outside shower and toilet so they can move back on to the ranch.

LUCIA DUNCAN: His son will be the eighth generation of Ulibarris to live on this land.

BRIAN: Reporter Lucia Duncan brought us that story.

ED: That’s going to do it for today, but head over to our website to let us know what you thought of the show. You’ll find this at backstoryradio.org. And while you’re there, send us your questions about our upcoming episodes. We have a great show in the works about local power in America. You know sheriffs, mayors, mafia, and more. And on the history of testing. You can also reach out with email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our engineer and Diana Williams is our digital editor. Our researcher is Melissa Gismondi, and we have additional help from Brianna Azar. Special thanks this week to James Green and Hal Gorby. And thanks to the American Backstory hosts for having me on board.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by Shia Khan foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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