00:00:05 Speaker 1: Of course darkfied tobacco. That was the cash crop. But you had mostly subsistence farmers that raised what they ate, raised a lot of to some extent what they wore all this on the farm. But they needed cash, need cash paid for the farm. They cashed it by groceries. They didn't raise. They he cashed, the clothed the children, and they cashed by mama and new calico dress for Easter. They needed cash by plow points and need cashed to maintain their farming operation. How they're gonna make it, They're gonna go tobacco. 00:00:37 Speaker 2: On this episode, we're gonna hear the true story the night Rider Tobacco War in Kentucky and Tennessee, when farmers stood up against America's goliath tobacco monopoly in a five year reign of strategic terror. But in the Ruckus divided states, communities, and even families, and the most continuous violent unrest in America between the Civil War and the race riots of the nineteen sixties. But I think you might have a hard time deciding between the bad guys and the good ones, or at least history has. If you ask people what they're afraid of, there would be a long and varied list, but what should be at the top of that list are the things that divide us, because divisive things make people do some crazy stuff. We're gonna interview author and former Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, tobacco expert doctor Lloyd Murdoch, and hear an archival interview from the nineteen eighties from the. 00:01:41 Speaker 3: Last Living Night Writer. 00:01:44 Speaker 2: I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease pod Cast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. 00:02:31 Speaker 1: You know, it was an interesting thing about Kentucky. You know what ourmanto is, you know, and we stand divided, we fall. There's never been a more divided fracture state in the Union than Kentucky. Civil War divided, politics, divided, night Writer, movement divided, divided, divide Even today, this county was divided. 00:02:55 Speaker 2: The things that divide us are always really interesting to me. Is an ancient point of psychological leverage that can turn ordinary men into savages and weak men into powerful monsters. Division is a core tenant inside of most clandestine organizations, where people rally against an enemy. This sits across some ideological divide, But ironically, what this does is create a deep sense of unity amongst the oppressors. And it seems to be no secret that unity is the key to accomplishing goals and moving mountains. You hear it in sports, politics, religion, inside of families and businesses, and even inside of personal relationships. But the undeniable thread that unites all humanity together is that we're really good at using division as a weapon. The voice she just heard was lawyer, author, and former Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham from Katahwakan. He'll start the story by telling us about a man he met back in the nineteen eighties. And remember, this is the story about the things that divide us. 00:04:13 Speaker 1: Joe's got like I said, when I went out there to do his will, I knew Joe he'd been on a grand jury. Good guy, I mean, no jovial guy. He called me one day. He said, Bill, I want you to do my will. I said, okay, Joe, when you want to come in, I'm not coming in. You're coming out here. And he's the guy guy, Yes, sir, when can I come out there? I went out to his house and his wife. He sat there the kitchen, dangary and tell me I took all the information and you wrote that book on that night Rider, didn't you. I said, yeah, Joe, I did. If I can tell you some things about night Riders and he started talking. She kept hitting him like this. He was just dying to talk about it. I got up and left and went back out to execute the will. Took my secretary and another witness to witness. He started, you, I made a few stories, boy, about that book by about the night Writer, and he just started smiling it all out. 00:05:08 Speaker 2: In the mid nineteen eighties, Bill Cunningham and a friend went and interviewed the last known living night writer, Joe Scott, in Lyon County, Kentucky. This interview aired on a local television station in the nineteen eighties, but hasn't been seen since. This is some stuff crammed deep in the cracks of history. Joe Scott was born in eighteen eighty nine. But why at the age of ninety seven years old? Yep, he was ninety seven years old in this interview. Was he finally ready to talk? It was because everyone else was dead. 00:05:47 Speaker 1: Wrong. Were you a part of this organization? 00:05:51 Speaker 3: How long were you a knight writer? 00:05:54 Speaker 4: Well? 00:05:54 Speaker 5: I joined in nineteen before nineteen hundred and seventy. I guess longer to live. How many raids did you go on? 00:06:06 Speaker 3: And I guess, well. 00:06:08 Speaker 5: I went to Hopkins and went to his raid, and at the end of them, then I went to Bennett's raid. I no befool raid threefold. 00:06:16 Speaker 1: And how many visits would you say you paid to. 00:06:21 Speaker 4: Individual? You don't know. 00:06:23 Speaker 5: I don't know when they'd say come and go. Never made two or three visits for whatever may down at all. 00:06:31 Speaker 3: Raids and visits, he said. 00:06:34 Speaker 2: Joe Scott joined the night Riders when he was eighteen years old in nineteen oh seven. And if you didn't get the gist of what the old man was saying, ninety seven years old, he basically declared that he was a night Rider for life. This organization built a strong sense of loyalty, which is given when a group takes meaningful action towards a cause, giving identity as a side benefit. The Night Riders were known for their masked nighttime horseback terror raids as the clandestine strong arm of the Tobacco Farmers Association, known for threatening, whipping, and beating people into membership, and at times even murder. In the late eighteen hundreds, tobacco farmers made good money growing tobacco as a cash crop, but the turn of the twentieth century in America brought market domination from the loosely regulated tobacco giants who drove down the price of tobacco, and in nineteen oh four, the Dark Tobacco District Planners Protection Association Yep, it's a mouthful, decided to boycott selling to American Tobacco, which was owned by the Duke Trust. So remember that name, Duke out of North Carolina. Yeah, like Christian Latner's Duke. And the farmers who wouldn't join the association and sold to the Duke Trust through American Tobacco go were punished and terrorized. Between nineteen oh four and nineteen oh nine. The Night Writers would not only terrorize individuals, but they'd be responsible for taking over entire cities and burning the Duke Trust tobacco barns to the ground, making their actions the most continuous violent unrest in America in the century after the Civil War. But the real thing you'll have to sort through is this. Were they the bad guys or were they a needed revolt from the people to smash a monstrous corporate monopoly. That's what we're here to decide. But to understand the Night Riders, we first have to understand tobacco in the region of the country that is to this day called the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee, which grows the finest dark fired tobacco in the world. 00:08:58 Speaker 1: It's like wine making in Germany and France. It takes generations to learn it and to refine it. You can go out on the front porch sometimes this time of year and smell it drifting in. But basically one of the reasons this is the best place in the world real guard fire to bake and to cure it is we have all this hickory in West Tennessee and West Kentucky is cured, but hickory wood strip the hickory wood to cut it, slats of it have the barns that are vented, and you go in and you basically dig trenches. This is the way that he used to do it. Now, my dad, my grand my dad, my grandfather. He dig trenches in the barn floor. You fill it up with the hickory wood, you set afire, and you smother as saudust, and then it comes up to the tobacco, which is house goes out and it prevents this special cure to it, and it comes in order. You'll hear that term coming in order. And coming in order means that you wait until it's cured out long enough and there's been enough rain and there's moistre in there. It's malleable. Otherwise, if you take it down too earlier, just crumble up the dusk. Here. You take it down when it comes in order and amountable, so you can strip it off the stalk and pack it without it breaking the piece. 00:10:18 Speaker 2: Coming into order, that's an interesting descriptor for a plant known for cheap fleeting pleasure that would cause more chaos and death than potentially any plant in history. What they call dark fired tobacco starts with growing dark tobacco, which is a cultivated variety of the tobacco plant cured under hickory smoke to give it a unique flavor. The Black Patch region of southwest Kentucky and northwest Tennessee covers thirty counties and is the best place in the world to grow it. Dark fired tobacco is typically used in chewing tobacco, but they also use the dark leaves to wrap cigars and to make some pipe tobacco and burley tobacco. A different cults of art is used for cigarettes. Did you know that tobacco is a completely American thing. It's native to North and South America and used by indigenous people here since time immemorial. The plant belongs to the genus Nicotinia, so all the ancient pipes found in other parts of the world, those guys were smoking something else. But apparently it was one of the first things that Europeans picked up from the native people, because by the mid fifteen hundreds, really not that long after the first Europeans got here, there was enough dark leaf tobacco being exported that it became a global craze. In sixteen oh four, King James, the first not Lebron of the Lakers, but shout out to Arkansas's Austin Reeves. King James declared, quote, tobacco was a nasty weed right from hell they bought the sea. It fouls the mouth and soils the clothes and makes a chimney of the nose. Apparently, like emin m, he liked to rhyme the truth. But by sixteen sixty four, the colonies were exporting twenty four million pounds of tobacco per year. And this brings up a timely point. Boys, I hope you don't think that any of the various ways someone might soak tobacco's voodoo into their bloodstream gets the Juju newcom or Beargary stamp of approval, because it doesn't. But in full disclosure, as a young fool, I dip some snuff behind Juju's back. But when I was nineteen, I believe that I heard the voice of God himself tell me to quit. I'm not joking, and so I did. Sorry, Juju, but tobacco is an interesting part of our history and of society today. But back to the hard hitting history. Here's why it became so important to these poor a Mayamerican farmers. This is doctor Lloyd Murdoch of Princeton Kentucky. He has a PhD in agronomy soils and happens to be tobacco expert. Well. 00:13:15 Speaker 4: Kentucky is probably the second largest tobacco state in the United States, and it's very traditional and it's very very important to Kentucky and has been. It was the best crop that one could have as far as when you were subsistence farming. You had your your hog that you killed every year, and you had your milk, and you had the beef but in your chickens, and so you could subsist, you know, and you didn't make much money. You'd settle hay or something like that, and maybe you would sell milk, you know, in town or to somebody and get the cream off, but you didn't make much money. And tobacco you could sell it and you could make some money. So it was the thing that's that sustained you as far as having something subsistence, and that was extremely important to tell a person in different people at that time. And if they didn't have that, you know, you have trouble by the car, you know, they have trouble any any of the things that would take you up one step in society. You know. It wasn't there. 00:14:19 Speaker 1: Of course, dark fired tobacco, that was the cash crop. But you had mostly subsistence farmers that raised what they ate, raised a lot of something extent what they wore, all this on the farm. But they needed cash, need cash pay for the farm, need cashing buy groceries. They didn't raise. They had any cash to clothe the children, and need cash to buy mama new calico dress for Easter. They need cash by plow points. They need cash to maintain their farming operation. How they're gonna make it, They're gonna go tobacco. 00:15:08 Speaker 2: Here's Bill Cunningham getting an answer of how important tobacco was in the early nineteen hundreds, straight from the horse's mouth, mister Joe Scott. Sometimes the recording is a little hard to understand, but just bear with him. 00:15:24 Speaker 1: The back, of course was your only cash crop. 00:15:27 Speaker 5: Was five o'bacca cross was a name call on the clock might as shall I say? 00:15:31 Speaker 1: And if you didn't make any money on every. 00:15:33 Speaker 5: Body couldn't have a hole, you know that trumpers couldn't have And the sure covers said it was a little hell holes on the place in art. 00:15:41 Speaker 2: So you didn't make it. 00:15:42 Speaker 1: The back you almost literally starved that if you. 00:15:46 Speaker 5: Couldn't, you couldn't. 00:15:47 Speaker 1: You couldn't you could get a job an it wore. 00:15:49 Speaker 5: If you didn't, if you didn't have a crop with what did you did? Work for three to five cents on days maybe something like that. Now you didn't get nothing to to work. 00:15:59 Speaker 2: He said the going rate for manual labor was twenty five cents a day, and a crop of tobacco would yield a lot more than that. 00:16:06 Speaker 3: We'll learn exactly how much. 00:16:09 Speaker 2: Doctor Murdoch said something interesting too, that tobacco allowed people to live quote above subsistence. And this is an important idea. It seems to be an inalienable human right to subsist, to just make it, but to get more than you need to simply survive. That's a plan filled that makes humans get crazy, greedy, ambitious, create divisions and start wars. Having more than just enough isn't just an American dream. It's the global dream. It's the ancient dream that pushed men across continents, mountain ranges, and oceans in search of riches. It's what makes people strategize and work hard, and some to steal and kill, like winemakers that have vineyard in Sicily. This region of Kentucky and Tennessee built a culture around tobacco, and in the black patch, the way for the common man to get ahead was by growing that dark fire tobacco. So how do you grow it? 00:17:11 Speaker 1: The Baca farmers started in February. He would take his tobacco seed and he'd find a nice place on the hill that gets a lot of sun. And they go out there and they clear the bacca bitch. I've heard my dad say many times. You know, in February we always get a big warm spell, perfect time to make our tobacco bitch. 00:17:35 Speaker 4: So what they would do would they would kind of work the ground a little bit and smooth it out in the oh late winter, put a lot of wood on top of that, set of the fire. And when you set it a fire, then you raise the temperature in the top several inches, say let's just say maybe three to four inches enough that you would all the seeds that were a live would perish. 00:18:02 Speaker 1: And they go out and clear the baca bed to make it real fine, and then they get the bacco seed and the planet the bca seeds very very small. In fact, you can get it. You'd buy it you could buy in pouches, you know, and almostly whole cup would be in a little pouch. It's so fine, and you throw it out and then you cover it with a canvas protect you from the cold. Weather's gonna go. And it grows and it grows tobacco plants. And when the weather warms up and the plants come into being about this high, you go out and draw your plants, transform the field and shut them out, and then hope, hope, for the best. And then it grows and you cultivate it and you hold it out. 00:18:43 Speaker 2: So tobacco plants have to be started in a protected seed bed, and once they grow to four to six inches, they're dug up by hand and replanted in the main tobacco field. 00:18:55 Speaker 4: I read an article one time. It would take like nine hundred hours or one acre. So you had fairly good sized families. The kids started working in tobacco when they were fairly young. You didn't have herbicides, you didn't have insecticides, you didn't have anything like that that was later on used. Didn't make tobacco farming much easier. So you had to walk the fields and look to see if there are any insects there. And if they were insects there, you had a little can that you threw it into and it had some little poison stuff in it. It would kill those insects. And so consequently you would take and you would go down the road, she'd pull the weeds out. 00:19:37 Speaker 1: Used to be you would you sucker it. I think they got defoliates now that sucker. The sucker comes like if you grow a garden with tomatoes, you sucker your domatoes. Yeah, same thing with the bat and then topping it when it goes late in the summer. He has a big bloom. Blooms on any plant. Make know your trees whatever. It sucks the energy out of the plant. Same way to bloom on off with dibico plant. He's really beautiful. I grow tobacca here sometime and so then you top it. And it's very very labor intenship. That's why my grandfather, my dad would want to grow four or five acres and you had to depend on family to grow it. 00:20:21 Speaker 4: So it was just continuous. It was the thing that they needed to take him up Annchal society. But it demanded a lot and it was a sacrifice to grow it. 00:20:33 Speaker 2: It's clear to see that this was more than a meaningful crop to these poor dirt farmers, but it was also important to some other people, especially the Duke family of North Carolina, and specifically James Buck Duke, who was a major player in this story. 00:20:50 Speaker 3: Though he never was physically involved. 00:20:53 Speaker 1: With James B. Duke, he grew up there three Bole with James, Rody and Ben. They grew up poor much in Durham area of North Carolina. James was born like eighteen fifty seven, he was old enough to remember, so he grew up pretty poor. But then after the Civil War tobacco. Up to that time tobacco was pretty much his hand roll, the invention of the cigarette maker and all this. And after the Civil War tobacco ust started moving north because during the Civil War there's a lot of economic intercourse between the two. They have a truce and a trade coffee for tobacco and cigarette smoking. Cigarette only came about. You won't see you don't see Civil War movies or Civil War general therap smoking a cigarette like you do. In World War Two, it didn't have it, but cigarette's consumption started to go up. 00:21:51 Speaker 2: According to Bill Cunningham's book on Bended knees about this night, writer, Tobacco War, which is where I learned all of this stuff. Civil War expanded tobacco use in America when Yankee soldiers started using Southern tobacco. But by eighteen sixty nine there were less than two million cigarettes being manufactured and sold in America. Two million, But by eighteen ninety there were two point one billion, with the b cigarettes made in America, and this became the heyday of American tobacco. Imagine the draw to smoking or chewing if there was almost no knowledge of the health risks, and combine that with the radically addictive nicotine, and as we're about to see, the strong arm of a new philosophy of capitalism and marketing, America blew up into a tobacco nation. In eighteen ninety, the state of Kentucky alone produced two hundred and twenty one million pounds, making it the leading tobacco producer in the country. Today, the leading state is North Carolina. But just after the Civil War, the Duke Trust Company started by the father Washington Duke, who when he started was a single mule tobacco farmer, but his new company was rapidly growing in the global tobacco trade. But in eighteen eighty nine, the middle son, James Buck Duke, started the American Tobacco Company, which was the beginning of an empire, but still part of this Duke. 00:23:22 Speaker 1: Trust, and the business took off and Washington. Duke and the three boys were devout Methodists, but James B. Duke wasn't as devout, and he was more of a capitalist. He saw the money making and he just took it from there, and the cigarette making machine really opened it up. James Buck Duke became the tycoon in Washington. Before he died, he was already feeling pain. So maybe we made it too big. Maybe some of the baco farmers were suffering. So he was kind of a conscience when he died. You know, he was kind of unbridled James B. 00:24:00 Speaker 6: That just. 00:24:02 Speaker 1: It's inborn. I'm convinced a successful entrepreneur's a lot of us DNA. Well, he's still got his money floating around today. I don't think James Duke was ever of the corrupt tycoon you see in movies. I don't think he ever potentially really, I think I never see any He was Ruth's and standpoint that he would buy out and didn't think too much about the impact. 00:24:33 Speaker 2: James Buck Duke may not have been overtly corrupt, but showed an insatiable desire for money, power, and success in a time in America when this was becoming something attainable. He was in his early twenties when he started working for the business, and at age thirty two he started this American tobacco company. 00:24:52 Speaker 3: It was said that he. 00:24:53 Speaker 2: Believed sleep and leisure were the enemies of man. He was charismatic, cunning, and a business wizard. According to Bill Cunningham, this company would be the first to give free samples, use billboard advertising, and use personal endorsements of celebrities and athletes to promote their product. In many ways, America learned full throttle capitalism from tobacco companies, but with the rise of the Duke Trust, tobacco Empire, and even monopoly, tobacco farmers got less and less for their crops. Here's Josh Spilmaker asking doctor Murdoch a question. 00:25:32 Speaker 3: Get ready for some math. 00:25:36 Speaker 6: What would be a typical yield for an acre of tobacco? 00:25:40 Speaker 4: Probably about four thousand pounds somewhere along four. 00:25:43 Speaker 6: Thousand pounds, So quick, math, do you have any idea of what the going rate would have been kind of before the Duke Trust kind of started pushing prices down. 00:25:54 Speaker 4: Probably before they started pushing prices down, it was probably seven eight nine cents a pound. 00:26:00 Speaker 6: Okay, so you have three hundred and fifty to four hundred dollars per acre, which would have been pretty substantial. 00:26:06 Speaker 4: That's a lot of money. Then you know, I got to work all day for a dollar. 00:26:10 Speaker 6: Right, but the I think the cost to produce was about six cents is what that's probably right. Yeah, So you know they're making anywhere from two to four cents per pound per acre, which was significant. 00:26:26 Speaker 2: To summarize that, in the late eighteen hundreds, a farmer was making one hundred and twenty dollars profit per acre on tobacco, and the average farmer was only growing about two acres. But that's two hundred and forty dollars a year, So nine hundred man hours per acre works out to an hourly rate of thirteen cents per hour. Another way to look at this is if a family as a whole could raise two acres and the father could work making a dollar a day, elsewhere, a family could almost double their yearly income of raising two acres of tobacco. But that was before the Duke's American Tobacco Empire showed up, because after that the prices would plummet, even down to farmers producing tobacco at a deficit, sometime only making two to three cents per pound. 00:27:19 Speaker 3: This destroyed the farmer's way of life. 00:27:22 Speaker 2: And I bet you see that this is building into a story that got some people really upset. 00:27:30 Speaker 1: But so it was a cash crop and if anything happened with their cash crop, they really put a oral hurt. So what happened when you monopolize the buyer then come and take, give you a take or leave it price? And it was costing the tobacco farmers six cents a pound to row tobacco, and they were being off three cents a pound. So they began to struggle and getting angry. And this being a cash crop, and that itself to this antamossi of anger between farmers because if the farmer who didn't go along with the association sold his tobacco to the trust because they had up the price with him, but there wasn't the others, then they they Mama got the calico dressed, their kids had the good shoes for school, and it's caused a lot of resentment. This is when I got so violent tobacco. Felix show and out of Robertson County, Tennessee. He was a big plantation on it. There grew a lot of tobacco. He organized them and said, list former association. He was the brains, the Moses of the black patch, that's what he's called. He was the brains. So they held a meeting over in Guthrie, Kentucky, in September nineteen oh fourth. See what can we do? And he said, we can form association. If they monopolized the buying, wood monopolize the selling, we'll establish warehouses and sell or to buy the tobacco up to the prices go up. 00:29:02 Speaker 2: They were going to monopolize the selling to cause tobacco prices to go up. But what I haven't told you is that the Duke Trust started paying more money to buyers who weren't members of the Tobacco Association. Did you hear that they penalized the association members And this became a massive point of division. 00:29:24 Speaker 1: It was a good concept, but when the American Buyer Company kind of countered by raising it would go out and try to lure the farmers not into buying it and giving them a little bit more. So a lot of indefendant farmers didn't buy into it and the resentment, and so a year later in nineteen o five when they met, the numbers went up from five thousand farmers gathered to ten thousand, and they were getting angry. 00:29:51 Speaker 2: So the original Dark Tobacco Planners Protection Association meeting, led by Felix Ewing this Moses of the Black Patch, had five thousand farmers show up in support to join that first year, but a year later ten thousand showed. 00:30:06 Speaker 3: Up and joined. 00:30:07 Speaker 2: The movement against the tobacco Giant was gaining momentum. 00:30:13 Speaker 1: So about two weeks after that meeting, they had a little meeting at a little Stainback schoolhouse and a group of about thirty farmers got together there and started talking about what we're going to do about these independent farmers, and they came out with the Stainback resolution was basically, so we're gonna go visit these people at night because they worked during the day, and we're gonna go visit with them and see if we can't talk them into joining. And a lot of implications there and take whatever, do whatever it takes to get them to join. So when that happened, it just throw fuel on the fire. They go at night. Farmers are independent cousts anyway. You know, you don't tell me what to do. And so you had that clag You had this navally feeling where we want to get to get and help each other. And then you had the other independent feeling, You're not gonna tell me what I'm gonna do. So founce broke out, you spread like wildfire. 00:31:10 Speaker 2: This Steinbeck resolution branded the Duke Trust as a criminal organization. So the Tobacco Association's mission was fighting this corporate criminal. This was a righteous mission. It's interesting but this original group of men in nineteen oh five sent to convince the Independence to join the Association weren't supposed to be violent, and they were actually called possum hunters. You should remember that because that's likely gonna be on a bear grease render quiz. But these possum hunters, who did all their work at night, turned into the night writers, which was a name that would stick. And this produced a real conundrum inside this region, a real division, and that's what this story's about. The majority of tobacco farmers and the black patch, as much as seventy percent became members of the association, and interestingly included a very high number of African American tobacco farmers, many of which were sharecroppers. 00:32:15 Speaker 3: Yep. 00:32:16 Speaker 2: But thirty percent of tobacco farmers, for whatever reason, rejected the selling boycott and were rewarded by American tobacco. The people who sold to them were seen as traders and sellouts and ironically were labeled as hillbillies. 00:32:34 Speaker 3: That's right. 00:32:34 Speaker 2: The people who sold to the trust were known in Kentucky and Tennessee as hillbillies. Even old Joe Scott still called them hillbillies in the nineteen eighties. This is a good place to slow down for a minute and think about what you would do. 00:32:56 Speaker 3: Here's doctor Murdoch. 00:32:58 Speaker 4: We talked about how impoor I was and so so we're just talking about ourselves being putting ourselves in that time. You know, my neighbor, we all have to get together and get this price up. You know, we've got to do something. And so we decide. Most of the people come together and they volunteer and they say, let's let's do it. And so we've got a big majority, and we feel like we have almost everybody, and so if we don't do this, we can't we can't do it. You know, we're going to be down to nothing as far as living and you know close for kids too, that's important. And so but these people aren't cooperating, you know, so you plead with them to do this, and if just a few do it and cooperate with the with the trust, you're okay. But you've have almost everybody and they refuse to do it, and so you talk to them and well, maybe they just need to be moreminded, and so you take that next step if all what I'm trying to say, And then that requires another step because they become defiant also against your in your your position, and so all of a sudden, it's kind of like a war. You know, you find yourself in something that you didn't ever expect to be when you stuck it to them here and how far do you go? And what do you do? And so who was it faulled? What was the injustice? You know, in which ones had it? And it becomes very concuism. 00:34:34 Speaker 3: It became very confusing. 00:34:36 Speaker 2: If you joined the association, you're basically hurting your family's immediate financial future for a hope that the plan would work and the monopolized selling would drive the prices back up. But on the hillbilly side, those who sold to the trust, maybe they thought it wasn't going to work at all. Maybe it was futile to stand up against a giant, and you could sell your crop at a higher price today. Take care of your family, which was your primary obligation. Are you more committed to your family or are you more committed to your community? 00:35:09 Speaker 3: What would you do? Who were the bad guys? 00:35:13 Speaker 4: But I can see I can understand one of the person that had ten kids and was just making barely a living, just subsistence and didn't want to send their kids to school with no shoes or clothes with holes in them or something like that. I can understand why that would be really important to them and why they might take that next step, you know, and go a little bit further than they probably should have. But then the other people, you know, he's on the other side, They were down there with what these people were talking about that took this stand. But now they had an opportunity to sell because the trust was trying to break the Tobacco Association. So I think I'll do that because you know they need shoes, they need you can understand why they might want to do it, and so it's a difficult, difficult thing. I think that there was a lot of consternation. I think there was a lot of people that didn't sleep at night because they were wondering if they were right or wrong, or if they took the wrong step, and that they felt because you're you're harming your neighbor, the guy that next door that you know you've barred the tractor from, or you know he came over and he got your wagon for a while, and that's hard. 00:36:33 Speaker 3: That is hard. Would you have joined the association? 00:36:36 Speaker 2: And if you're tempted to jump into quickly into whichever side you think was righteous, it might help to hear a story from someone who was there. Let's listen to what The Last Living Night writer Joe Scott said when he was asked why he joined. 00:36:52 Speaker 3: This might put it into perspective. 00:36:56 Speaker 4: Then I didn't. 00:36:57 Speaker 5: I didn't go into it about my obtainion. Nineteen seven. 00:37:01 Speaker 7: Let's that's that's year. That's year I might have this nineteen seven. 00:37:05 Speaker 1: Why did you join? Why did I joy. 00:37:09 Speaker 5: I stuck a gun my face and asked, God, when you go? 00:37:13 Speaker 4: Huh? I didn't want to. 00:37:15 Speaker 6: I didn't want to where long will? 00:37:17 Speaker 5: The old man said this, you better be there when they came and told you that. 00:37:24 Speaker 4: You made a man. 00:37:25 Speaker 5: Why you lad another man come here daytime and looked at and told you that he told the night we'd have a mask on. 00:37:31 Speaker 6: And he said, you don't know who. 00:37:32 Speaker 3: You told him? 00:37:34 Speaker 5: What there is from Trade County, Lyon County. Hurry from them. 00:37:38 Speaker 3: So so they threatened you, and that's why you enjoyed. 00:37:42 Speaker 7: A lot of them had the certain lot of them didn't have to. 00:37:45 Speaker 5: But I told her, I said, I said. 00:37:47 Speaker 4: I'm a young fella. I ain't got nothing. I don't need to go. 00:37:50 Speaker 5: Yeh if you could go when we need we need to know, we need more men. 00:37:56 Speaker 2: He said, they came at night with masks on and threatened him, forcing him to join. He was just eighteen years old, and he did what most men in the black patch did. You See, it wasn't just tobacco farmers that joined, but people from all walks of the community. Because a cash crop affects everybody, store owners, doctors, cities collecting taxes. This wasn't just about farmers. It's about farming communities. And this is where it makes sense to introduce an unsuspecting, charismatic, militant leader and potential villain, the medical doctor David Amos. He would become a key player in this story that delivered a deep sense of mission to the night Writers and would become the arch nemesis of James buck Duke. 00:38:48 Speaker 1: And then David AMers, a little country doctor or gob service these people. He knew their misery, he knew their area, and he have I don't know what we're having to it. I was able to go through doctor Amos's account book and a lot of fields weren't not paid, and a lot of them paid with cams chickens. This that he was kind of a frustrated army general. He grew up. He think he was born in nine fifty seven. He grew up here. This is something were going to take this on. Joined the association, and I'm convinced. Although I never failed any hard conference that was in direct conference with Felix Hue and photixs Hoan always kept the nut writers you know, like this. But I think the night Rider activity, David Amis activity was probably at least got tested approval from the association, and AA became the militant arm and organized started doing their visits on farmers and reading Princeton and warehouses and trying to make a difference. 00:39:53 Speaker 2: So the Night Writer's connection to the Dark Tobacco Planners Protection Association wasn't official. Wasn't official, but there was little doubt who these night Riders worked for. These guys were always masked and no one really knew who they were. But doctor Amos was an unlikely villain, and to most people in Kentucky even today, he's not a villain at all. He was born in eighteen fifty seven in Cobb, Kentucky. His father was a compassionate, well respected doctor known for treating the recently emancipated black patients without charge. David Amos attended a military high school, but in eighteen eighty, at the age of twenty three, he became a doctor. 00:40:35 Speaker 3: Following the footsteps of his father. 00:40:37 Speaker 2: Long before being a doctor was financially lucrative, the profession was primarily connected to service. His piercing blue eyes and a trendy handlebar mustache gave him some charm, and he had charisma to boot. He lived horses, pistol, shooting, the military, and service to his country community in Cobb. He didn't even grow tobacco, but he cared for There are a lot of people who did so. Around nineteen oh five, doctor David Amos became the unofficial, under the radar, militant minded leader commanding a branch of the Tobacco Association that would become known as the Night Writers. He was a night writer by night and country doctor by day. This is the same group that old Joe Scott eighty years later still pledged his allegiance to, and the night Writer's sole job was to convince people to join the association and punish those who didn't. I wonder if Joe Scott ever met doctor Amosamus. What kind of fell about doctor Amos. 00:41:42 Speaker 5: I don't know much about dog famers. I met him with one time, but no, dawg famous was a now he is a smart man. Now he hadn't a had a lot of since he did. He had Hawkins just asking me to take this thing here. He's arche checkerboard and. 00:42:01 Speaker 7: Every man that he had a He had his men, ever. 00:42:05 Speaker 5: Fella squads, ever fella had a captain. 00:42:08 Speaker 4: He had so many men you. 00:42:09 Speaker 7: Undertown, however one of them them them them places are numbered, you say, the post office, telephone office, has ever business place where it was telephone and telephone. 00:42:21 Speaker 5: And he had all that number though, and here he gave a man. Uh, he had he had, he had a captain, so many men, and he gave him a place one of these. 00:42:33 Speaker 2: In the next episode we're going to get into the specifics of what the Night Writers actually did, the beatings and the organized city raids. But from Joe's description you see that this organization was militant and at times would take over entire cities with five hundred well organized men on horseback at the command of the generous Country Doctor, often with the horses hoofs wrapped with burlap sacks to make their approach quiet. That's some gangsters, but there was something much bigger at work on a national scale, something bigger than tobacco. Mister Cunning anim will now unveil a larger story happening in America. 00:43:13 Speaker 1: James Duke kind of he represented the capital interest of this country, and whereas David am was humble, Country Doctor represented the labor and this struggle of the Night Writers. It was labor versus capital, and this is going on all over the country. This was just a little microcosm of the labor movement in the railroad industry, in mining, in the factories. It was that time of our country when these clash between the labor and capital was becoming violent, hitting head on, and you had to develop the origins the Labor Union, the night Writers and the Association especially were basically the Gurian Union members. So each one of them led this. But that's been the both of this country, right, capitalism labor. But it's always been a tension between the two. And it could have very well, like during the Depression, it could have very well gone south like it did in Russia, like it did in a lot of other countries where the Toutarian government took over. 00:44:18 Speaker 2: It's easy to take for granted what has happened in history, not really thinking much about what could have happened. Mister Cunningham is saying that this same labor versus capital struggle happened in other countries and it turned out way different, way worse. I want to close this first episode with an interesting clip from Joe Scott when he was asked if he thought what he did was meaningful. 00:44:47 Speaker 1: Not writers did any good. 00:44:50 Speaker 5: Then this buncle wouldn't have been where it is today's. 00:44:54 Speaker 1: So I asked that. 00:44:55 Speaker 5: They said, well, would you do that again? This is all help when I says close everything he was. 00:45:00 Speaker 4: So I've said on that in my country and the. 00:45:03 Speaker 5: Poor people that I heard I was doing all, I do it again, and I do it how Wally I feel about. I don't believe home on anybody. 00:45:13 Speaker 1: In a way. 00:45:15 Speaker 7: There's just they. 00:45:16 Speaker 5: Didn't They didn't need something. This trust company didn't need all his money. And then starving the poor folks to death. 00:45:22 Speaker 2: You know, he said that trust company didn't need all that money and to starve them poor folks to death, that's what he said. 00:45:31 Speaker 3: And yes he would do it again. 00:45:33 Speaker 2: In the next episode, we're going to look exactly at what they did and its effect. And here's a question I'd like you to answer right now, and it's this. 00:45:43 Speaker 3: Do you think the. 00:45:44 Speaker 2: Tobacco Association's boycotted selling worked? Joe Scott sure thought it did. The stories of the common man fighting against a corporate giant are intriguing because they're the stories that still dominate and divide the American consciousness even today. The world of the hunter Gatherer didn't have to consider stuff like this. He was just too busy trying to subsist. This is a product of extreme prosperity, which overall we'd have to say is a really good thing, but it brings many cancerous pitfalls. After you hear what the Association and the night Writers did, you'll be able to decide who were the good guys and bad guys. And actually we'll get a judicial decision that reflected the temperature of these people, and it might surprise you the conclusion they came to. There's one more hot episode about these dang night Riders coming up, and I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. Our render schedule is slightly different right now because we did a render with CrossFit Master Jedi and Hunter Rich Froning, and that's going to come out next week, and then the second night Rider episode will come out, and then we're going to have a render where we discuss all this night Rider stuff. So between now and then, the wild Place is wild, and that's where the Bears live.

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