Magonista

At the turn of the 20th century, Mexico was ruled by an elderly dictator named Porfirio Diaz, who enriched himself and his compatriots via seeking foreign investment to modernize Mexico while giving not even a single shit about the country’s poor.  Tiring of such crap, more left leaning members of the body politic formed the Mexican Liberal Party, which united a wide swath of left leaning groups under the common cause of demanding free elections.  One of the earliest members of this party was Ricardo Magon, a radical anarchist who ran what today would be considered a far left newspaper through which he called for the violent overthrow of Diaz.  Not being a fan of this particular periodical, Diaz declared it illegal in 1904, forcing Ricardo to flee to the United States.  He soon after began publishing his paper again, smuggling it south into Mexico.  However, feeling that the broader Mexican Liberal Party was too full of moderate pussies, he and a few other radical liberal exiles created their own more hardcore anarchist party, which they still called the Mexican Liberal Party, because why the fuck not.

In 1906, the new Mexican Liberal Party released a manifesto of demands; which sounded completely nuts at the time, but not so much today.  The demands included an eight hour work day, free education for children, an end to child labor, a minimum wage, and compensation for people hurt while working.  With the manifesto in hand, Ricardo moved to Los Angeles, where he made friends with the local branch of the American Socialist Party, which was a mish-mash of socialists, communists, and anarchists.  Now at the time, a good part of the American Socialist Party was totally down with advocating for an all out labor revolt.  However, not having much luck in the United States, they instead began giving Ricardo money to train revolutionaries in the U.S. with which to invade Mexico.  Convinced that he had wide support south of the border, Ricardo launched his revolution in the fall of 1908.  Things went to shit pretty much immediately.  Except for a group in the southern part of Mexico, there was little internal revolt.  As for those invading from the U.S., they found themselves stymied by American officials, and those who did manage to enter Mexico were largely killed or captured.  Ricardo was arrested by police in Arizona, and imprisoned for violating the neutrality of the United States.

Ricardo remained in prison for a year and a half, during which time the dictator Diaz declared there would be open elections, before changing his mind at the last moment.  This royally pissed off pretty much everyone in Mexico, and by the end of 1910 the country had collapsed completely into civil war.  Not wanting to be left out of the action, Ricardo rushed back to Los Angeles to prepare for another invasion.  However, his time in prison had left him with much less influence south of the border.  Finding little support from his fellow revolutionaries, he instead turned to his old friends in the American Socialist Party, who in turn put him in touch with the local chapters of the International Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies.  The Wobblies were the first major intra-industrial union in the United States, made up of a wide collection of communists and socialists.  Ricardo convinced the Wobblies to back an invasion of the Baja Peninsula, so he could turn it into an anarchist libertarian republic.

In January of 1911, a mix of Mexican migrant laborers, Wobbly dockworkers, and various American barflies who had been promised 160 free acres of land, totaling some 400 men, invaded Baja, a pretty much useless area of desert which contained a few thousand people at best.  Crossing the border, they seized the town of Mexicali, the inhabitants of which mostly fled to the United States.  From there they took a few other small towns over the next few months.  The invasion force was largely led by Americans, Ricardo preferring to remain in Los Angeles where he published made up newspaper stories about his random batch of idiots with guns building libraries and all sorts of other nonsense.  In May, Diaz was overthrown in Mexico City and a treaty was signed promising free elections.  However, having completely lost touch with reality, Ricardo declared the treaty null and void and called for his so-called army to keep fighting.  Hearing this, most of the Mexican portion deserted and went home, leaving Ricardo with an army made up of almost only Wobblies.  Short on ammunition, the Wobblies were defeated in a small skirmish south of Tijuana and the revolt in Baja came to an end.  Ricardo was soon after arrested again on the same charges as last time.

Mexico held its first free elections in 27 years in November of 1911.  However, the new president proved to be little more popular than Diaz.  With both conservative and radical left parties in open rebellion, he was assassinated in a military coup led by General Vicoriano Huerta after only 14 months in office.  Huerta’s coup united the various political factions against him, though once he was ousted in 1914, they started attacking each other.  The Mexican Civil War did not end until 1920.  As for back in the U.S., the attempt to create an anarchist republic just south of California freaked the shit out of industrialists and land owners in the area, who of course responded with widespread rampant racism against the Hispanic population in the area.  The Wobblies and the American Socialist Party would be largely quashed by the U.S. government during the Red Scare of 1919.  As for Ricardo, he remained in prison until 1913, at which point he joined his brother on a small commune/ chicken farm in California.  There, he continued to write anarchist articles calling for a broad based labor revolt and later anti-war articles during World War I.  For these, he was arrested in 1918 for obstructing the war effort and sentenced to 20 years.  He died in prison in 1922 at the age of 48.

Rushmore

In 1923, some history loving schmuck named Doane Robinson decided that South Dakota had a bit of a problem, namely that nobody gave a shit about South Dakota.  Wanting his state to get its hands on some of those sweet ass tourist dollars, which were just beginning to become all the rage, Doane decided the best way to attract in the gaping public was to blast a couple faces into a mountainside; namely Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux.  Not being the type to just sit on his ass, Doane met with his state’s senior senator and convinced him to sneak in some federal funding for the building of a colossal monument in the middle of nowhere.

With his funding secured, Doane than sought out to hire somebody to turn his dream into reality.  The man he chose was the son of a Danish polygamist who married two sisters, a fellow by the ridiculous name of Gutzon Borglum.  It was lucky break for Gutzon, given that he had been recently fired from his previous job, carving the faces of Confederate generals into the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia.  Gutzon’s employer for the project had been the Daughters of the Confederacy, a racist group that funded the building of many Confederate monuments across the South and had close ties to the Ku Klux Klan.  Gutzon didn’t give a shit about any of this because he was staunchly anti-immigrant, which totally makes sense when you’re the son of a polygamist immigrant.  Gutzon was fired because he was a royal pain in the ass to work with.  His racist employers actually so sick of his shit that they dynamited the work he had completed so the new sculptor could start from scratch.  The Daughters of the Confederacy are still active today.

Anyways, with both money and sculptor in hand, Doane next started looking for a site to start carving away at, eventually deciding on the Black Hills.  This was a bit problematic, not just because it was remote as hell, but also because it was on land originally granted to the Lakota Sioux by a treaty in 1868, only to be forcibly seized by the U.S. government a few years later when gold was discovered.  Still not too happy with this turn of events fifty years later, the Sioux had just sued the federal government to get their land back.  This was when Doane and Gutzman entered the picture, the pair basically giving the tribe a list of possible sites and asking them to rank them based upon how sacred they were.  Everyone eventually settled on a granite mountain the Lakota called the Five Grandfathers, which was soon after renamed Mount Rushmore after some rich New York City jackass who donated money to the project.

Construction initially began in 1927 with a few hundred workers blasting away with dynamite and drills.  Gutzon quickly asserted himself over Doane as head of the project.  His first change was to instead carve the faces of four presidents since he thought nobody would drive hundreds of miles to see the originally planned faces.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were chosen for their importance in the nation’s history.  Teddy Roosevelt was thrown in because President Calvin Coolidge insisted that a second Republican be included.  They later declared it was because of national parks or something like that.  The carving of the faces was a feat of artistic engineering that took twelve years.  After the faces were completed, Gutzman began working to create bodies for the presidents, and a crazy ass vault where he envisioned all of the country’s important documents being stored even though nobody asked him to build it.  However, he never had a chance to complete his vision, dying in 1941 from a brain aneurism likely brought on by him constantly yelling at people.  Further expansion to the project was soon after abandoned, leaving the sculptor forever half finished with a big pile of loose rock beneath it.

Rather mad about one of their sacred mountains being blown up by shitty white people, a group of Lakota decided to blow up a different sacred mountain to create a sculptor of Chief Crazy Horse.  The sculptor was started in 1948 and remains unfinished to this day.  Taking a different tact, members of the American Indian Movement, a native activist group, climbed to the top of Mount Rushmore in 1971 and refused to leave.  Most were arrested by park rangers twelve hours later.  Nine years later, in 1980, after over sixty years of litigation, the Supreme Court agreed that the U.S. government had broken the treaty it made with the Lakota some 112 years earlier.  The government was ordered to pay for the value of the land and resources taken, plus interest.  Not wanting to give up their claim on the land, the Lakota refused to take the money.  Today the U.S. government is holding some $1.5 billion still owed to the tribe.

The majority of the workers who built Mount Rushmore died younger than expected due to breathing in tiny flakes of granite during the construction.  Mount Rushmore attracts two million tourists annually to the middle of nowhere.  It’s considered one of the major drivers of the South Dakota’s economy.

Sally

Once upon a time, there was a lonely old widower by the name of John Wayles, who was very sad because over the years he had buried three wives due to it being the old timey days when women tended to die giving birth like all the fricking time.  Rather put off by the whole marriage thing, but not yet willing to give up on the more physical aspects of marriage given he was only 24 years old, he took to his bed a buxom 26 year old woman by the name of Betty Hemings, by which I mean he told the slave that he owned that she was now his concubine no ifs and or buts.  What?  You thought this was going to be some kind of romantic story?  Betty was actually half white, her father being an English sea captain who later unsuccessfully tried to buy her and her mother, but according to the laws of the day any child born to a Black woman and a White man was automatically a slave.  Strangely this law didn’t go the other way, with the fate of the children born to a Black man and White woman decided more on an ad hoc basis, because racism mixed with sexism just results in all sorts of stupid shit.  Anyways, the asshat John knocked up Mary six times over the next twelve years, before dropping dead in 1773.  The majority of his estate, including Betty and her six children, was inherited by his eldest daughter Martha, who just so happened to be married to some guy named Thomas Jefferson.

Now one might think it would be a little weird to have the woman your father basically raped by the standards of today and your six resulting half siblings living with you, especially given all of them were also your slaves, but this didn’t bother Martha one bit.  This is how normal that shit was back then.  Instead of in anyway feeling like shit, or even at the very least weird about the situation, Martha thought so little of it that she specifically had all of her half siblings trained to work in the house as servants, meaning she’d see them all the damn time.  While this was overall seen as better than working in the fields, even this decision wasn’t thanks to some tenderness in Martha’s heart.  No, it was just because the children were three quarters white, which according to the shitty racist beliefs of the day meant they were viewed as smarter and more trustworthy than other slaves.  Are you sick to your stomach yet?  Too bad, we’re just getting started.

Now Martha died in 1782 at the age of 33, leaving her husband Thomas Jefferson so bereft that a few years later he took a job as envoy to France just to get away for a while.  After three years of grieving, he sent for his nine year old daughter to join him, and since you can’t have a nine year old going to France on her own, a young slave named Sally Hemings, youngest child of Beatty Hemings and half-sister of Martha, was sent to keep an eye on her.  Upon arriving in France, young Sally caught the lonely Jefferson’s eye, and regardless of how people might try to make it seem better than it was, what happened next was undeniably fucked up.  Fun fact, when you’re a slave and the person who owns you says they’re going to have sex with you, there isn’t really an option involving you saying no.  To add another layer to how screwed up this all was, Sally was 14 at the time and Jefferson was 44.

Jefferson was in France until 1789, at which time he decided to return to America for reasons that don’t really matter in this narrative.  By this time Sally was pregnant and facing a choice.  In France, Sally was technically a free woman since the slavery had been outlawed in the country earlier that year.  She could return to the United States and be a slave, or stay in France and be free but have no guarantee of surviving and never see her family again.  Reportedly, she chose to return with Jefferson after convincing him to let her children go free when they came of age.  Her first child died soon after birth, but over the next two decades Jefferson had his way with her numerous more times, resulting in the birth of six children, four of whom survived to adulthood.  Jefferson, who tracked the pedigree of all of his slaves in big book, because asshats like him basically saw slaves the same as livestock, did not note down a father for Sally’s children, because not saying anything is considered different than lying for some reason.

Anyways, we will never know exactly what the dynamic was between Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  People didn’t talk about that kind of shit back then even though everyone knew it was going on.  However, no matter what kind of emotions might be involved in a twenty year relationship, its undeniable that Sally and her children were slaves and Jefferson had the right to do whatever he wanted with them, including selling them to different people, meaning that even under the best of possible circumstances it involved a screwed up power dynamic.  To Jefferson’s credit, he kept his word to Sally regarding her children.  Though they were slaves, they did very little work beyond the occasional errand, all were taught trades, and all were either allowed to escape or were freed under some pretense by the time they reached the age of twenty-one.  Being seven-eighths white, some moved far away and disappeared into white society, while others remained in Virginia as free people of color.  Jefferson died in 1826, but Sally was never freed, though she was allowed to live out her days with her children.  This was not an uncommon practice at the time, seen as similar to putting an old horse out to pasture, because even at the end this is still a fucked up story.  She died in 1835 at the age of 62, at the very least knowing her children were free.  Though rumors circulated as early as the 1790’s, Sally’s descendants weren’t recognized as descendants of Thomas Jefferson until DNA testing in 1998, but some people continue to deny it to this day.