At the New York Times, Reid J. Epstein reports in Noem’s Use of Private Money to Deploy Guard Troops Raises Questions:
South Dakota taxpayers have subsidized the state National Guard’s operations in world wars, the Middle East, Panama and the Caribbean. Now Gov. Kristi Noem has come up with a novel way of paying for it.
Ms. Noem, a Republican, announced Tuesday that she would deploy up to 50 of the state’s 3,100 Guard members to Texas, where they will help “secure the border between the United States and Mexico.” But unlike other Republican governors, who have dispatched troops to secure both the border and photo-ops for themselves, Ms. Noem found a private donor to provide the money for the deployment. . . .
“It’s basically money laundering, and it’s turning the state National Guard into a mercenary force,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer who is a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. “She’s using troops there that are a resource and have been paid for by taxpayers that are being used for a political show by a high-powered donor because the governor thought it was a good idea.”
Private funding of state National Guard troops was common in the 19th century, when mining companies subsidized military deployments to crush labor uprisings during the Industrial Revolution. A dedicated federal funding stream for the National Guard was created with what is often known as the Dick Act of 1903, named for the Ohio congressman who was chairman of the House Militia Affairs Committee. . . .
We're not sure of the 19th Century private corporate funding of the National Guard, but the Times' story brought the Ludlow Massacre to our mind. The Zinn Education Project explains in April 20, 1914: Ludlow Massacre:
Shortly after Woodrow Wilson took office there began in Colorado one of the most bitter and violent struggles between workers and corporate capital in the history of the country.
This was the Colorado coal strike that began in September 1913 and culminated in the “Ludlow Massacre” of April 1914. Eleven thousand miners in southern Colorado … worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies. …
When the strike began, the miners were immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and carried on the strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies.
The gunmen hired by the Rockefeller interests—the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—using Gatling guns and rifles, raided the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they hung on, drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out strikebreakers. With the miners resisting, refusing to give in, the mines not able to operate, the Colorado governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as ‘our little cowboy governor’) called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers supplying the Guard’s wages.
The miners at first thought the Guard was sent to protect them, and greeted its arrival with flags and cheers. They soon found out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought strikebreakers in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat miners, arrested them by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades of women in the streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And still the miners refused to give in. When they lasted through the cold winter of 1913-1914, it became clear that extraordinary measures would be needed to break the strike.
In April 1914, two National Guard companies were stationed in the hills overlooking the largest tent colony of strikers, the one at Ludlow, housing a thousand men, women, children. On the morning of April 20, a machine gun attack began on the tents. The miners fired back. Their leader, …, was lured up into the hills to discuss a truce, then shot to death by a company of National Guardsmen. The women and children dug pits beneath the tents to escape the gunfire. At dusk, the Guard moved down from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents, and the families fled into the hills; thirteen people were killed by gunfire.
The following day, a telephone linesman going through the ruins of the Ludlow tent colony lifted an iron cot covering a pit in one of the tents and found the charred, twisted bodies of eleven children and two women. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre. . . .
Of course, in Noem's brave new world of positive pants American history, who would know about the Rockefellers paying the National Guard's wages and those dead children?
Photo: A Colorado National Guardsman is shown training one of the machine guns on the Ludlow miner's tent camp. Ludlow Centennial Commission, via 100th anniversary of Ludlow Massacre nears in the Loveland (CO) Reporter Herald.
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