The Seth Meyers show does a pretty good job capturing the unapologetic racism of white supremacist candidates in America

A crucial bit of analysis is missing, however.

You might, like most rational people watching this video, wonder why someone saying “a public hanging, I’d be on the front row” (death penalty) suddenly pivots to throw out anti-abortion platitudes as their best defense against criticism. I mean on the one hand they’re saying lynchings are like their favorite spectator sport, while on the other hand they’re saying not a single life can be ended.

Isn’t this an obvious contradiction?

Alas, historic context explains the white supremacist perspective here, such as why they see no contradiction in carelessly taking lives while telling others lives can’t be taken under any circumstances.

Slavery was an industry of owning humans and birth was the means of production and enrichment for the slave owners. They did not give slaves any rights, let alone choices, when they demanded that children be born as quickly as possible to the detriment and death of those involved.

And then these same owners of humans also claimed to reserve the right to kill humans indiscriminately, murdering whomever they wanted, and brag about their desire for front row seating in any lynchings.

I’ve written about this before, and in particular how Abraham Lincoln described the situation in 1838 America:

Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. His story is very short; and is, perhaps, the most highly tragic, of any thing of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.

Such are the effects of mob law; and such are the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which, have even now grown too familiar, to attract any thing more, than an idle remark.

And hopefully that gives proper context and the analysis needed for a white supremacist candidate today saying “a public hanging, I’d be on the front row”.

The story gets worse, far worse, however. Several people have pointed out to me that very large silicon valley technology companies are funding these white supremacist platforms.

U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) was caught on tape “joking” about her willingness to attend a lynching at a campaign event in November. […] One corporation that apparently was unbothered by Hyde-Smith’s remarks: Google. On Tuesday, Google donated $5000 to Hyde-Smith’s campaign, according to documents filed with the FEC.

This is no joke. Google after a widely-discussed lynching statement threw campaign donations at a white supremacist candidate. One might be tempted to think this is a one-off, a strange coincidence. However, investigators already have pointed out that Google is funding an even more well known white supremacist candidate:

Google previously donated $10,000 to the Making America Prosperous PAC, the leadership PAC of Congressman Kevin Brady (R-TX). Making America Prosperous gave Congressman Steve King (R-IA) a cash infusion after other corporate donors abandoned him over his ties to white nationalism.

After other corporate donors had abandoned candidates with a white nationalism (Nazi) platform, and after a candidate made comments in favor of lynchings, Google apparently sent funds to help the white supremacists win.

Recently, as I met with many Chief Security Officers (CSO) to discuss cross-cloud security architectures, I heard several times from different leaders “do not mention Google in this room, they are not an option”. It seemed so harsh. And it came without detail, as If I already should know. I had to learn more, to find out what was driving the hard line eliminating the giant brand.

Turns out it is…ethics.

I had figred it related to the history of lying about privacy controls and failing to monitor staff abusing access to private data. That was bad, for sure, and Google hasn’t done the best job clearing their name. It also isn’t the sort of thing that writes off a brand entirely, as controls evolve and trust returns through operations monitoring.

However, that wasn’t the only issue. People sent me stories about Google continuing to fund campaigns even AFTER widespread condemnation. I mean Steve King…come on. This is an awkward timing issue for a brand claiming to be the most up-to-date source of knowledge.

And it gets worse again. Google now has been caught in further controversy after an attempt to claim ignorance and make a “we do not condone” explanation for their contribution.

Google claimed it made the donation on Nov. 2—the same day Hyde-Smith made her comments. “This contribution was made on November 2nd before Senator Hyde-Smith’s remarks became public on November 11th,” Google representatives said. “While we support candidates who promote pro-growth policies for business and technology, we do not condone these remarks and would not have made such a contribution had we known about them.” If Google’s claim were true, that would mean the Hyde-Smith campaign filed a false report. It would also mean the campaign failed to report on time. Federal law requires than any donations made within 20 days of an election be reported within 48 hours.

“We do not condone” is not “we condemn”. Historians again are needed here, because context helps explain what’s really going on.

Mississippi had the highest rate of lynchings of African Americans, which of course was linked inexorably to economics.

Once black were given their freedom, many people felt that the freed blacks were getting away with too much freedom and felt they needed to be controlled. Mississippi had the highest lynchings from 1882-1968 with 581.

As you can see in the quoted writings of Lincoln above, citing mob law before the civil war, white supremacist candidates always have and always are positioning lynchings as “pro-growth policies for business and technology”. It is more plainly described here:

March 1892, a white mob lynched three black men — Thomas Moss, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell — and left their mangled bodies in a field a mile north of downtown Memphis….their crime was their temerity. They dared to challenge white businessmen accustomed to having a monopoly on economic activity.

A Google inability to straightforwardly condemn such a statement about public hangings (see the redemption train video above), while further endorsing white nationalists as being pro-business and technology…should be more in the news. At least I know a wide group of CSOs are monitoring the situation, as a function of deciding how and when to trust a cloud service provider.

File this lawsuit news under things that anyone with a history degree could have predicted:

The suit alleges that e-scooter companies knew their riders were injuring pedestrians and –– by failing to stop the collisions from occurring –– assisted and encouraged scooter riders as they committed “assaults.”

The suit also states that both companies’ scooters contain defective electronics and mechanical parts, as well inadequate safety instructions for riders and that they have “a wanton disregard for the safety of others.” The risks posed by the devices, the suit states, “were known and/or knowable” based on “professional knowledge” known within the transportation community.

Scooters weren’t going to magically become safe, by increasing their supply and decreasing barriers to abuse (i.e. powered to a quick and high top speed at no cost to rider).

Another way of looking at this is to consider how Vespa was born out of WWII and became wildly successful, was banned, and then returned again.

Conversion of Italian warplane engineering to civilian mobility in war-ravaged Europe birthed the famous aeronautical-looking scooters of the 1950s. They were cheap and convenient for rebuilding markets after war, so the concept boomed.

Fast-forward to the 1970s and the scooters were being banned due to air quality concerns, in a large part related to their success. So many engines had been accumulating massive technical and healthcare debt, dumping toxins into the air without paying for consequences, legislation had to be passed:

Having returned to the US in 2000 after exiting the market in 1985 because of new emissions legislation that targeted two stroke engines, the Vespa was an immediate success all over again

And being a success all over again is a good thing, right? I believe that’s called innovation.

The birthplace of the Vespa has even banned 2-stroke engine versions for the same reason, air quality harms:

…environment assessor Italo Porcile is determined not to give in to the pressure.

‘I love the Vespino, I used to have one myself,’ he said. ‘But the ‘Euro 0′ (a model produced before 1999) pollutes terribly and public health is more important’.

Piaggio, which started off producing locomotives and then fighter planes, came up with the Vespa after the Second World War, when the country’s roads, severely damaged by bombing, were crying out for an alternative to cars for the masses.

With the 2-stroke air negligence version banned, scooter manufacturers are only now investing in superior engineering options:

Elettrica is propelled by an electric motor claiming peak output of 5.3 hp (with a continuous output of 2.7 hp) and more than 147.5 lb-ft. of torque, which Piaggio says is superior performance to a traditional 50cc gasoline-powered scooter

Scooters being dumped on sidewalks and running into pedestrians is literally the opposite of innovation. The lawsuit again negligent scooter manufacturers is an unfortunate start, though clearly what scooter developers really needed sooner was a regulatory wake-up to spur them into more innovative designs.

Lately I often have been asked about cloud counter-measures to rubber-hose risks, and as I begin to explain I get interrupted with “wait, hold on, but why is it called rubber-hose?”

It is a fair question and, as a historian, I am eager to indulge those willing to ask a “how did we get here from there” security question.

Rubber-hose implies a means a type of physical torture used to extract a secret without leaving evidence of torture.

Physical Torture to Break American Cryptography

To understand why this phrase is so commonly used in America, we have to remember first that slave rebellions in 1830s led to a reign of brutal white-supremacist terror escalating until they started a full Civil War in 1861.

New York abolished slavery in 1827, around the same time many countries around the world were doing the same. Abolition and/or laws prohibiting slavery spread quickly:
1824 – Mexico
1831 – Bolivia
1831 – Brazil
1833 – England
1835 – France
1836 – Portugal

An important footnote here is that the Mexican abolitionist movement greatly angered white immigrants to Mexico. These settlers to the “wild” Texas territory demanded they be allowed to keep slaves.

This came to a head at the Alamo in 1836 when violent secession formed a new nation for slavery. That is right, every time you hear someone say “Remember the Alamo” think of white supremacists expressing pride at preserving slavery while globally it was condemned.

This fits a pattern more widespread, that between 1831 and 1861 many US slaveholders thought a “reign of terror” was their best method of preserving white power.

In case you are wondering, encryption was very present in America during the next 30 years, and needed key management that could withstand physical torture by those who did not want slavery to end.

Had the US not declared independence from the King of England, slavery arguably would have ended in the US by 1834 if not earlier.

Alas, this was not to be the case under a pro-slavery President Jackson who had been elected in 1829. By 1835, around the time of Texas seceding to preserve slavery, Jackson was harshly criminalizing speech in order to prevent even the discussion of abolition (his federal Postmaster General Kendall was ordered to intercept and inspect mail).

As you can imagine, encryption becomes very useful for those working towards freedom under a white supremacist President inspecting all mail.

The punishment for anyone discussing abolition was severe. Abraham Lincoln famously gave a speech in 1838 condemning the surveillance and torture methods used upon Americans who believed in the kind of freedom found in other nations:

Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. His story is very short; and is, perhaps, the most highly tragic, of any thing of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.

Such are the effects of mob law; and such are the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which, have even now grown too familiar, to attract any thing more, than an idle remark.

Sadly a great many Americans, from large plantation owner to poor white laborers, aspired to dreams of sudden wealth by harming others. America, long after the rest of the world was moving in a better direction, continued to think of an expansion of slavery practices as their get-rich-quick scheme.

Certain American men, as well as their enablers, kept arguing that the Constitution “enriched” whites by giving them the exclusive right to torture and murder without penalty as long as they were preserving their right to leisure time and preference for avoiding work by playing golf instead. There is a simple reason why many golf courses to this day market themselves by highlighting pro-slavery terrorists:

When Southwick G.C. in Graham, North Carolina first opened in 1969, it was known as Confederate Acres G.C. for no apparent reason other than to appeal to golfers who might be [pro-slavery].

Mountaintop G. & Lake C. in Cashiers, North Carolina one of the newest members of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses, has in its clubhouse suites named in honor of Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby, all of whom fought [to preserve slavery] alongside early Cashiers resident General Wade Hampton

Yes, golf courses around America are out in the open about being pro-slavery, as if it is comforting to golfers if they can celebrate men who tortured and murdered Americans to enrich themselves. But I digress…

Managing secrets in the 1840s context of Americans surviving torture and murder by violent pro-slavery militants, even Edgar Allen Poe by 1843 entered the fray, publishing instructions in a story set in South Carolina to help increase the use of cryptograms. It was his most popular story during his lifetime.

In 1844 President Adams was elected and overturned the Jackson ban on free speech, but torture and murder by pro-slavery terrorists continued to rise. Although Texas agreed to annexation by the US in 1845 they came with the stated hard requirement that slavery remain legal (foreshadowing their second secession, remembering the Alamo by declaring a war on abolitionists again in 1861).

It was because John Brown witnessed the wholesale torture and murder of abolitionists at this time that he became compelled to answer with force the literally burning question “are we free or are we slaves under Southern mob law?” His forceful attempts ended with his execution in 1859. And his demise was thought by slaveholders in 1860 as a great victory; sort of a proof at the highest federal levels that brutally murdering abolitionists and slaves carried no consequences, while resistance to slavery would continue to be fatal.

And yet the situation worsened further, with abolition demands of course growing. By 1861 the white mobs who had for three decades been torturing and murdering fellow Americans raised their violence even further and declared an all-out war to preserve slavery.

At this point I just want to mention key management in American history continues to be documented. Now it is soldiers in the US Army talking about fighting to preserve the Union, deploying encryption that has to withstand attacks by people who would torture anyone just to continue slavery practices.

Here’s an example from “The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States: an Exposition of Ancient and Modern Means of Communication, and of the Federal and Confederate Cipher System” by code-breaker Captain William R. Plum

Fast Forward to the Rubber Hose Years

With the 1860s encryption in mind, we need to skip 100 years ahead to the 1960s. The American south still had white supremacists infiltrating departments of authority such as the police as a means to perpetuate their unjust power over non-whites, through violent means including torture.

Freedom riders gives a good snapshot of the situation at hand, no pun intended:

Freedom Riders is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws in order to test and challenge a segregated interstate travel system, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.

Those savage beatings were with rubber-hoses, as well as with phone-books and other soft materials that caused maximum pain with minimum evidence.

Cyber-security-historian protip: we won’t ever say phone-book cryptanalysis to refer to physical torture methods because that becomes confused with logical brute force techniques (use of the contents of a phonebook to reveal secrets).

Thus one can read about torture techniques used by white supremacists during the 1950s and find exact reference to the rubber hose method as a subset of “third degree” questioning. For example, in a History of Torture text, you can read about US police methods used to force confessions and reveal secrets:

There you have it. The rubber hose is an American torture method commonly used in attempts to gain access to secrets without being held accountable. Cryptography withstanding a rubber-hose really refers to politics of torture in America from the mid-1800s resurfacing in the mid-1900s as rubber hoses became a common product.

Bringing It Back to Cryptanalysis Today

This is not just about the past, unfortunately, as I implied at the start of this post. People considering cloud computing are asking daily lately about the rubber-hose. There still is a real threat of torture. World Affairs vividly explains this situation in a political analysis of American traditions:

Decent people and decent countries do not engage in [torture] under any circumstances, whatever the consequences, and that’s really all there is to it.

[…]

Ideals are one thing, the reality of American history quite another. There is, in fact, a well-established American tradition of torture. The definitive text on it is Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali, himself an opponent of torture. He sees “a long, unbroken, though largely forgotten history of torture in democracies at home and abroad.” What the torture techniques of democracies have in common is that they leave no lasting marks on the victims, no proof. Rejali calls this “clean torture.”

Electroshock began in democracies, and it was in the United States that interrogators first used rubber hoses to administer beatings that left no bruises. Sleep deprivation and stress positions (the “third degree”) were once common practices of American police.

It’s not only the police who have tortured or used other harsh methods. The U.S. military has, too. During the war in the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century, American troops employed the “water cure,” a forerunner of waterboarding. During the Vietnam War, torture was probably even more extensive. Whatever its professed ideals, the United States has tortured in the past. It has tortured in the near-present. And should needs arise and circumstances dictate, it will probably torture in the future.

My only addition to this analysis is that “water cure” was treated as a war crime by the US and cited in its court cases against the Japanese during WWII. I spoke about this in my RSAC presentation “Security Humanitarianism: Extraordinary Examples of Tech Improving Lives”

It is a sad footnote to history that war crime cases before 1945 and prosecuted in 1946 were sealed after WWII and the US then began engaging in the exact practices they earlier had argued were a clear violation of human rights. As the quote above warns: “ideals are one thing, the reality of American history are quite another.”

If you seek a more contemporary example, November 2003 was when the US Army tortured to death an Iraq army general who had served under Saddam Hussein. General Abed Hamed Mowhoush died aged 56, beaten and then suffocated to death by Americans using methods including a rubber hose to forcibly extract secrets. Case details were revealed in 2005 court-martial proceedings for two men, without getting into details of government agencies giving orders.

Conclusion

Rubber-hose cryptanalysis is rooted (pun not intended) in American traditions of torture to disclose secrets and preserve power. Despite white supremacists losing their war of aggression against own country, their history of torture methods still seems nowhere near being abolished. And perhaps most dangerously, despite being proven ineffective, some groups may still see themselves as maintaining or gaining power with old “reign of terror” practices.

Hopefully now you can see how we got here from there. This is why when helping with key management solutions for cloud workloads running in America, I increasingly hear requests from people to discuss models that address threats like rubber-hose cryptanalysis techniques.

Ondřej Matějka, the deputy director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) provides a fascinating interview on the 80th anniversary of the infamous Munich Agreement:

…the problem wasn’t that the Czechoslovak state couldn’t hold the borders. The problem was more within the society living there, where the pressure from the Sudetendeutsche Partei towards our citizens and people who were sympathetic towards other political parties, especially social democrats and communists, was big. I think the Sudetenland is an extraordinary example of the making of a totalitarian society, where one power, through terror and social pressure, is taking over power in the society

The agreement led to annexation of Czechoslovakian border territory by an expansionist Nazi regime, and the designation of this area as “Sudetenland”.

It also setback plans to overthrow the fascist dictator of Nazi Germany.

Opponents of the Nazi regime leader, such as the head of the German Army, perceived the Munich agreement as foreign states having weak appetite for more permanently ending the Nazi terror and social pressure.

Multiple news outlets are reporting the US Regime’s rush to setup and expand concentration camps, based on a hurried policy of enacting forced mass detention to scare people from coming to the US, has killed a girl through a painfully slow and tortured process that started with inadequate health care.

VICE

One week after arriving at Dilley, Mariee developed a cough, congestion, and a fever of over 104 degrees. During the next two weeks of her confinement, Yazmin felt powerless as her daughter got sicker, rebounded, and got sick again, battling a virus that started with a common cold.

[…]

But Mariee did ultimately die from an infection that was first detected at Dilley, which has a history of complaints of inadequate medical care for children. In July, two doctors contracted by the Department of Homeland Security released a review of care in facilities including Dilley over the last four years. The doctors found a host of problems and called the practice of family detention “an exploitation and an assault on the dignity and health of children and families.”

[…]

The administration is planning to expand its capacity to hold migrant families by constructing more facilities like Dilley. In June, ICE requested space to hold 15,000 more people in family detention, cementing the policy into the future.

…medical experts and advocates have long stressed that conditions in ICE facilities can be risky for sick children. Detention puts children at higher risk of contracting disease, and crowded, stressful conditions make it harder to recover.

“Those stresses are real; they affect the child’s abilities to fight an infection and illness and win,” said Brian Blaisch, a pediatrician in Oakland, California, who has experience working in immigrant detention centers.

AZ Central:

…medical staff at the Texas detention center failed to provide Mariee Juarez with adequate medical care after the healthy girl became sick inside the facility. As a result, the girl died after a treatable respiratory infection turned into pneumonia, according to the legal notice.

Mariee Juarez died on May 10, after “six agonizing weeks in hospitalization and extensive medical interventions,” the legal claim says.

NPR:

When Juárez raised concerns about her daughter’s deteriorating condition, [law firm] alleges, she wasn’t taken seriously. “The medical care that Mariee received in Dilley was neglectful and substandard”…

KRISTV:

At the detention facility, Mariee became sick with a severe respiratory infection that went “woefully under-treated for nearly a month,” according to the law firm. Juárez continually sought attention from medical staff but she was prescribed medications that did not improve the child’s condition and Mariee continued to get worse…

ABC

Mariee’s symptoms worsened over the coming days and Yazmin Juarez “sought medical attention for Mariee multiple times but was often left waiting for many hours, including at least two instances where she was turned away and told to wait for an appointment on a later day,” according to the claim.

By March 15, Mariee had lost 2 pounds — nearly 8 percent of her body weight — and her symptoms were worse, according to the claim. Mariee was examined at the detention facility’s clinic several more times as her symptoms worsened. Her fever remained high and she was unable to keep down medication or food, according to the claim.

[…]

Mariee died on May 10 after experiencing a catastrophic hemorrhage and “irreversible brain and organ damage with no hope of survival,” the claim states; her cause of death was bronchiectasis, pulmonitis, and a collapsed lung.

Time

The statement also included comments from Dr. Benard Dreyer, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician at New York University Langone Health, who reviewed Mariee’s medical records from her time at Dilley. He said it was clear ICE medical staff failed to meet the “basic standard of care” and that the medical staff engaged in “troubling practices,” including the use of unsupervised non-physicians to provide pediatric care over a long period of time.

“If signs of persistent and severe illness are present in a young child, the standard of care is to seek emergency care,” Dreyer said. “ICE staff did not seek emergency care for Mariee, nor did they arrange for intravenous antibiotics when Mariee was unable to keep oral antibiotics down. These are just a few of the alarming examples of how ICE medical staff failed to provide proper medical treatment to this little girl.”

All of this comes after US federal courts already clarified in 2014 “under the Flores settlement, families couldn’t be kept in detention for longer than 20 days”.

While I know this is a sad and tragic story, full stop, there also is an important broader national security subtext here. Being unprepared is the exact opposite of what the US needs to be doing with communicable diseases. And this story emphasizes that the camp conditions themselves dramatically increase likelihood of spreading disease not only because proximity, also because stress and anxiety factors lowering immunity.

The latest research is showing that the girl died because the concentration camp experience itself lowered her ability to survive disease present in the camp.

If the border is meant to process humans safely to enter, or even turn them around to leave for that matter, it has to maintain levels of preparedness to eliminate disease spreading.

Even if the defense in this lawsuit trots out an army of doctors to say they would have done nothing different and ignored symptoms until too late, this actually would demonstrate the US is unprepared and basic humanity of disease control is not being taken seriously. It reminds me of when huge companies went offline from NotPetya because they hadn’t cared enough to help patch/remedy one little machine inside huge global networks.

A new documentary has been released called “Bisbee ’17” about American life under President Wilson after his successful 1916 “America First” campaign. NPR gives us the synopsis of the Bisbee Deportation story:

The event itself has become known as the Bisbee Deportation. On July 12, 1917, roughly 1,200 copper miners, who’d been striking for better wages and safer working conditions, were rounded up at gunpoint, some by their own relatives, and sent via cattle car to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to die.

[…]

People to this day in the town believe that the deportation was correct and right. And they sympathize with the people who carried it out, particularly people who are descendants of people who had a hand in it.

[…]

When you go through that list of deputies, you see that there is one Slavic name. Everybody else is an Anglo-Saxon. So my conclusion – after all of this research, the deportation was not a response to a labor action. It was that to a limited extent, but it was also in the nature of an ethnic cleansing.

What the documentary, and NPR for that matter, do not reveal is why ethnic cleansing would be so topical in 1916. In short, Woodrow Wilson effectively restarted the KKK in 1915 after it had all but disappeared, and Bisbee is a reflection of that sentiment.

What caused the KKK decline and why did Wilson bring it back?

I will try to briefly explain. It starts with President Grant signing into law the creation of a Department of Justice (DoJ) in order to aid in the prosecution of white supremacists, since they were refusing after the Civil War to accept blacks as citizens. Grant wanted to use non-military measures to protect 13, 14 and 15 Amendments to the Constitution from domestic terror threats.

The DoJ itself buries these civil rights foundations of its origin in this rather bland retelling on their official website:

By 1870, after the end of the Civil War, the increase in the amount of litigation involving the United States had required the very expensive retention of a large number of private attorneys to handle the workload. A concerned Congress passed the Act to Establish the Department of Justice (ch. 150, 16 Stat. 162), creating “an executive department of the government of the United States” with the Attorney General as its head.

That “increase in the amount of litigation involving the United States” means white supremacists.

In other words, Grant greatly expanded the Attorney General role from Judiciary Act origins of 1789, basically a one-man advisory concept, to a systematic government arm to protect the Union against domestic threats. This new much broader departmental remit with branches was resourced to fight white supremacists nationally. President Grant basically pushed out a peace-time organization specifically to fight pro-slavery militants who continued to refuse to lay down their arms after he had forced their official surrender in war. This is what caused the KKK to decline.

Why was General Grant, now President Grant, faced with this problem?

Sadly in 1866 just a year after Lincoln’s assassination, President “this is a country for white men” Johnson was repeatedly trying to block blacks getting rights. Despite Johnson’s efforts the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1866 abolishing slavery, which pro-slavery militants considered an assault on their “economic freedom” to be a white supremacist:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction

The failure of Johnson to block civil rights legislation angered violent white supremacist militants and they rebelled again to prevent peace. Despite decisively losing the Civil War to General Grant, pro-slavery militants after the assassination of President Lincoln created the KKK under President Johnson to use veil of night and disguise to continue terror campaigns against Americans abolishing slavery. Within two years by 1868 the KKK was running numerous violent terror campaigns to prevent reconciliation, murder blacks and sabotage Thirteenth Amendment labor rights.

This is why President “Let Us Have Peace” Grant’s election in 1868, and his creation of the first real DoJ in America in July of 1870, were seminal moments in the fight against white supremacists. The candidate Grant ran against had a campaign slogan, like President Johnson’s reputation, of “This is a White Man’s Country. Let White Men Rule.”

Grant had won the war, now he won the Presidency and was about to take down the same people for the same reasons, this time with non-violent means. A month after DoJ was created, August of 1870, a Federal Grand Jury declared the KKK a terrorist organisation. President Grant then further established remedies for these domestic terrorists in 1871 by signing an Enforcement Act, which made it illegal for private conspiracies (e.g. KKK) to deny civil rights of others. He pursued in peace the same anti-American forces he already had decisively beaten in war, and again he brilliantly led the country away from its violently racist detractors.

While it is tempting to frame the sad white supremacist chapters of American history entirely in terms of Civil War and slavery, we can not overlook the broader picture of the late 1800s and how the KKK was a symptom:

• 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles where hundreds of armed whites entered “Negro Alley” to murder its Chinese residents.
• 1885 the white supremacist “Knights of Labor” group was involved in fomenting a Rock Springs massacre that left dozens of Chinese miners dead
• 1887 white “schoolboys” tortured and murdered thirty-four Chinese miners in Oregon
• 1897 Lattimer massacre saw Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German miners killed by being shot in the back; a sheriff decided to end a labor protest by murdering the protesters

Grant’s focus on enforcing civil rights was meant as an end to slave labor that the white supremacists fought so hard to preserve. The story of white supremacists in American using terror tactics really has a broader topic of wage disputes and labor rights with non-whites. But the reason the KKK in particular is significant to the Bisbee story is Grant’s strong leadership meant the KKK made less of a name for itself over the subsequent decades until things changed in 1915.

That is when “the 20th Century KKK” was initiated, infamously associated with President Wilson’s screening of a white supremacist propaganda and isolationist views of the world/immigration. It is the timing of a second KKK that should be noted as backdrop to this movie.

While the original KKK formation under President Johnson had used domestic terror to undermine the Thirteenth Amendment and deny freed slaves their civil rights, this recast formation was a “labor-oriented” terror organization targeting immigrants and their religions, which is how the “America First” campaign of President Wilson brought back the KKK that President Grant had ended.

The Bisbee story thus is a clear reflection of the KKK second rise, a “reaction” to civil rights being granted to non-whites such as Irish, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Catholics…. All of these groups were targeted under the guise of “labor-oriented” action by the KKK during President Wilson’s administration, just as blacks had been murdered by the KKK under President Johnson’s administration.