A forgotten U.S. war & the 120-year-old scrapbook that proves it happened
- an interview with Jim Rumford
One of the most common questions I get asked when visiting journalism classes is: Where do you get your story ideas from?
After so many years writing, the answer is often: the stories find me, not the other way around. Sometimes that happens when a friend reaches out, saying: I have someone you have to meet.
This was the case with Jim Rumford, a successful and self-made businessman from just outside Dayton, Ohio, whom I was told had a very cool scrapbook I needed to see.
Turns out, the book was a clothing catalog, roughly 120 years old, from a general store. Over the course of several years in the late 1800’s / early 1900’s, Jim’s Great Grandfather Kinney (“Mr. Kinney,” as Jim calls him) had pasted hundreds of newspaper clippings onto every page in the book, front and back, about a long-forgotten historical event that those who know about it call “The Tobacco Wars.”
The short story is that the Wars were actually a series of major battles between two different factions of tobacco farmers: those who wanted to sell to the “Tobacco Trust” (basically, a monopoly controlled by one man, Buck Duke - the eventual namesake of Duke University), and those who felt the tobacco farmers should all band together and force Duke to buy their tobacco at a better price. When the former group refused to yield, the latter group (later named “The Night Riders”) began violently pressuring them, using tactics learned from none other than the KKK (showing up with torches at farmers’ homes in the night; tying the farmers to trees and horse-whipping them; burning down their barns full of tobacco so they couldn’t sell to Buck Duke - the list goes on).
The story made such a major impression on Jim, and was such a huge part of his life (Mr. Kinney had chosen to sell to Buck Duke but Jim’s other Grandfather, George Washington Jett, was a Night Rider who once showed up at Kinney’s house to “persuade” him to stop) that he wrote a book about it - Tobacco, Trusts and Trump - and took the story several steps further, comparing what happened with the trusts and monopolies back then to what’s been happening with monopolies today.
I was fascinated by all of it - especially the fact that, though tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people across multiple states had been involved in these wars, the entire event was pretty much absent from history textbooks nationwide. I went on to write an article about the wars, the scrapbook and the way Jim’s family history is so intricately tied to it all, but I knew when I started this podcast that I wanted Jim to come on and tell the story in his own words.
Without further ado - Jim Rumford. I hope you’re as captivated by his story as I was!