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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show, where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. Today we are Talking to Drew McKevitt, a professor of history at Louisiana Tech and an expert in American culture and foreign relations in the second half of the 20th century. He's written a couple of books, most recently the book Gun Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America, which absolutely rocks. For context, I was only planning on reading a chapter or two for the research for today's episode, but instead I smashed through 300 pages of it last night because it's so good and it covers such a truly bananas historical phenomenon that I was just kind of sucked in by it. And it also has a notably good cover and really good art and images throughout, which is not always common in academic books. So congrats and welcome to the show. Professor McKevitt.
- [01:31]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Well, thank you so much, Claire. Thanks for having me. Thank you for reading the book. I mean, how many. How many people ever actually read the book? I'm so. I'm so impressed and happy to hear that. I'm glad it sucked you in like that. I can't take credit for the great artwork on the COVID That was all of the press. They did a really wonderful idea, really wonderful job. And anyway, yeah, I'm so happy to be here and talk about why I think somebody sucked.
- [01:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. Also, I know that maybe it's rare to read the book, and we'll probably say this in other episodes when we have other people on tell people to read the book, but really, they should read this book. It's so, so interesting. And, yeah, like I said, I was not expecting to be, like, as locked in on it as I was as soon as I started reading, but so much of it feels like almost like a Guy Ritchie movie montage of insanity where you're like, what do you mean, this happened? Then this happened, and these people did this, and this is how this builds American gun culture. So it's pretty amazing. And for any reader, readers, listeners, hopefully your readers, too, Any listeners out there, I really recommend reading it if you get the chance. And also, what a wild time in the world we're having to be talking about gun culture in America.
- [02:46]
Professor Drew McKevitt
I have no idea what you're talking about. Everything is fine and normal and not crazy and off the wall. Yeah. And, you know, in some ways, I'm sort of grateful that nobody's asked me to talk about guns in the last few weeks. Like, it's like the one thing it's, you know, that always sort of pops up on the radar. And like, as somebody who writes about this thing, you're like, please, I don't want anything to. I don't. I want to go back to writing about anime because nobody ever wants to talk about anime because nothing ever terrible happens when you write about anime. But, you know, terrible things happen with guns all the time. And we haven't quite seen anything yet, but, you know, it does. It does feel like a very tense moment in which lots of people are. Well, lots of people have been arming for the last couple decades. We could maybe talk about that. And you know, here we are in a country with more guns than people, a situation that has never existed in all of human history. And now we have a very new kind of administration. Yeah, yeah.
- [03:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I mean, you even mentioned this in the book, but since COVID people have been like, stocking up on weapons more than ever before, which is also wild. I did not realize how much of a shift there's even been just in the last five years.
- [04:07]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yeah, it's pretty incredible. You know, we probably add about anywhere from 5 to 8% of the entire stockpile, civilian stockpile in the United States each year over the last five or so years. You know, that's in a country that already had more guns than any other country's ever had in all of human history. You know, it's really hard to count guns. You can't, you can't count guns in the United States. Like, the federal government is legally prohibited from counting guns from having any kind of registration or anything like that. So as best we could tell, there might be, there's probably between 4 and 450 million guns in the United States. And since 2020, we've been adding 20 to 30 to 40 million a year on top of that already incredible stockpile. Yeah. So, you know, what are the long term social consequences of this? I have no idea. I'm a historian. I look backwards, not forwards, but it's probably not good. And maybe we have today's main character. I think in Some ways we have today's main character to thank for that.
- [05:10]
Dr. Claire Aubin
What a wonderful segue into the show itself. Let's get into it. Who are we going to be talking about today?
- [05:20]
Professor Drew McKevitt
So we're going to be talking about a man named Samuel Cummings. He's. He's not a. He's not a person that a lot of people hate because he's not a person that a lot of people know. Right. He's not a Hitler, he's not a Mao, he's not a Stalin. He's not one of the sort of the grand evil figures on the world stage in the 20th century. But I would argue he is one of the central figures in American gun culture of the last 250 years. He's one of the figures. Who's he? I think he is the most important figure in helping to build what we call gun culture today in a whole bunch of ways. And we can, we can talk about how he went about doing that.
- [06:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. So just for some context, he was alive from 1927 to 1998, and he really is a big sort of historical player without people knowing about him. From the second half of the 20th century, from around the early 1950s onward, is when he starts to be kind of a major player. Is that right?
- [06:20]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yeah, that's right. So for some context. So who's Samuel Cummings? He's actually born in Philadelphia. He's born in mainline Philadelphia, which is a place near and dear to my heart, kind of sort of. It's a place I also have a sort of love hate relationship with in the same way I have a love hate relationship with Samuel Cummings. I went to a university called as an undergrad, I went to St. Joseph's University and right across the street from St. Joseph's University, when I went there was something called Episcopal Academy. So I think it was an all boys school. And Samuel Cummings went there when he was a young kid. So he's born into a wealthy family in 1927, but then his family loses everything in the Great Depression. His father had never really worked a day in his life. And so suddenly his father has to work. And at least the way that Sam tells the story, his father eventually just. He can't handle working and all the stress from all of this and he dies, rather leaves Sam. Sam's maybe 6 years old when his father dies. And you know, Sam becomes fascinated with guns at a very young age, he claims. And you know, I should point this out too, like how historians think about the past. Like, not just like, what do we know about the past. What do we know about Sam Cummings, but how do we know what we know about Sam Cummings? We don't have a lot of good sources on Sam Cummings, at least from sort of primary, kind of primary sources that historians want, right? Like if we think about major figures in gun culture, like a Samuel Clark, we have lots of records from the Colt company in the 1800s that give us some insight into Colt. We don't have any records from Samuel Cummings Company, which was called Interarms. Interarms will become by the late 1950s, the largest private arms dealer in the world. And it'll be all entirely Sam Cummings doing. He will be the sole owner of the company. He calls himself the vice president of the company only because he was so young, he's only in his late 20s, that he didn't want to walk into business meetings and introduce himself as the president of the company. So he always implied that there was somebody older and wiser behind him. So at a very young age, he gets into guns. He claims when he's 5 years old that he gets a machine gun that's been sitting at an American Legion lodge outside of Philadelphia. And he takes apart this machine gun and puts it all back together. This is a world War era machine gun. And this gets him fascinated with guns. And so that's gonna be like sort of his aspiration in life is to work with guns, is to do things with guns. And so he goes to college. He goes to the George Washington University, I should say first, he's in the Army. He's inducted to the army at the very end of the Second World War. Never leaves the United States. He's involved in like, training basically because he's good with guns. He trains, he becomes a corporal, he trains recruits in how to use firearms, that kind of thing. After the war, he goes to college. He goes to the George Washington University. He has aspirations to be a lawyer, but he also wants to work with firearms. And there's this transformational moment for him when he goes to Europe while he's in College. It's 1948, I think it is. He takes a trip to Europe and he's traveling the continent and he sees. And this is all again, all we really have for this is what Sam Cummings has told us. And he's a great storyteller and he likes to tell his own story. And the story he tells is that he's traveling all over the continent and he sees a continent littered with the remnants of the Second World War. Tanks and firearms and just all of the trash left over from the war, which in a lot of cases like German armies just dropped their stuff and went home. And so he's thinking like there's this is a major supply of stuff here. What's going to happen to all this stuff? And so he's got that kind of in the back of his mind. And shortly after college he actually, he works for the CIA during the Korean War. He is recruited when the war breaks out to be an arms analyst. So basically he's just sitting in Washington looking at photographs taken on the battlefields in Korea and analyzing the firearms they see there. Is that a Russian made firearm? Is it a Chinese made firearm? And so forth. And then again he claims, he claims that partway through the war the CIA sends him to Europe to pretend to be a Hollywood producer and to undercover of being a Hollywood producer to buy lots of firearms, to claim that these are for war productions in Hollywood and instead to ship them to Nationalist Taiwan where the Nationalist government has run out of China in 1949. And the United States is supplying arms to the Chinese nationalists, but doesn't want to do so directly. Right. So they're getting European governments to ship those arms, to give those arms to Sam Cummings who is then sending them to Taiwan.
- [11:14]
Dr. Claire Aubin
These are all things that he's claiming about himself. So a lot of this is like kind of apocryphal and also is part of this sort of myth making that he likes self fashioning about a myth about himself, which is obviously as a historian, when you look at that, that already raises some red flags for how you think of a person. If you're seeing them actively trying to sort of craft a legacy or a myth around themselves while they're still alive in order to create a specific reputation.
- [11:46]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yeah, and that's key because I think what he does with that myth making is what's gonna come down the road is that Sam Cummings is not gonna be just this sort of international man of who's selling firearms. You know, his big company, Interarms, is selling firearms all around the world to Cold War actors everywhere. He becomes kind of a celebrity in Washington for this sort of thing. But I think for him that mythology masks the more mundane way he makes most of his money. So what he's going to do with that knowledge he gets from the CIA, from traveling all over Europe and buying these guns, from his years of being obsessed with guns, he's gonna set up his own business, Interarms, which opens in 1953. And that business is not just going to sell guns to countries around the world. His first big deal, the first thing where. First moment where he brings in a big chunk of capital as he sells like 10,000 war surplus rifles to Panama, he's also gonna sell them to Americans. And the American market is so much bigger than the world market. You know, this is. We often think about, when we think about the cold war and the United States and guns, we think the Americans are sending guns all over the world. We're sending them Vietnam, we're sending them to Central Asia, we're sending them Africa. All of that is true. But there is so much more money to be made by selling guns to Americans than there is selling guns to Panama and Costa Rica. Because you could sell 10,000 to Costa Rica, but that same year you could sell 250,000 to the United States, to Americans. Right? Because there's no market in the world like there is in the United States. And after the second world war, this is a moment of the post war economic boom. Americans have a lot of money, they have a lot of free time. They are living in the afterglow of this great victory over fascism and over imperial Japan, and they want to spend some money. And Sam Cummings says he sees that market there. He's like, I know Americans are really into guns, and I know Americans have a lot of money now, and I know there's a huge supply of cheap guns that I can pull over into the United States. Just sitting there in Europe, sitting on those battlefields, sitting in warehouses, waiting for me to go in there and pull those guns over to the United States and sell a lot of guns. And that's effectively what he does. And that's how interarms is going to make most of its money. So Sam Cummings, you know, when Sam Cummings pops up, like when people hear of Sam cummings in the 1950s and 60s, it's usually in the context of, like, this international intrigue. Congress will drag him in and ask him, like, what he knows about major conflicts around the world. Nobody really ever asks him what he's doing selling half a million guns a year to American buyers. I should say about 5 million from 1953 up until 1968, when the gun control act curtails his sales. He brings in about 5 million guns to the United States, which is just an incredible number of guns in the 1950s and 1960s, probably on the scale of about 10% of all the guns in the United States in the middle of the 20th century.
- [14:53]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And even with the idea, like, with the sort of, like, existing narrative around Interarms, and around just mid century arms dealers in general, when people are talking about sending like America and the CIA sending guns all over the world. Yes, but a lot of these guns are already sitting in warehouses after the war in Europe, elsewhere. So there's a lot of these things that are not flowing directly from the US to elsewhere so much as just being transported or directed from the US exactly.
- [15:23]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Because. Because the United States doesn't want to ship guns directly to like an anti communist insurgency. Right. That's seen as provocative in the Cold War. So like the best example is what Cummings claims he did in 1954 in Guatemala. So, so maybe listeners know 1954 and 19 in Guatemala, the democratically elected government, sort of left leaning socialist style government, is overthrown and a new right wing dictatorship comes to power. The CIA has its hands all over that and it's inspired by United Fruit. Otherwise as we know, Chiquita United Fruit as it was known at the time, United Fruit has its hands all over this. And so Cummings claims it's exactly what you're saying. Right? So there are lots of guns in Europe and there's a shipment of guns coming to the democratic government of Guatemala from Czechoslovakia. Because Cummings knows everything about all of these shipments going on all over the world. He knows this is coming in and he claims, he tells the CIA these guns are coming. You have to block the shipment of guns. They block the shipment of guns. Cummings takes the guns into his possession and then sells them to the new right wing dictatorship. And it's only like a few thousand guns, but in the context of like a coup and an internal sort of political civil war, like a few thousand guns makes a difference. A few thousand guns doesn't mean anything in the United States, but it can mean a lot in one of these small countries where you don't have a lot of arms or you don't have a lot of money and so forth. And he's in the midst of all that. And like you said, a lot of this is sort of myth making. We just, we just don't know, you know, like there's no CIA archive that we can go into. A lot of this stuff comes from Freedom of Information act requests and his name pops up occasionally in those. But there's no, no real smoking gun to confirm that he did a lot of these really crazy things he claimed to have done.
- [17:19]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And there's also sort of like now what we would think of as a kind of like classic arms dealer story, like taking apart and putting together machine guns because he gets a Maxim gun Right. And taking apart and putting together machine guns at age 5, which is also a wild thing to claim. But then he's in the military and then he works for the CIA. But then he's able to sort of like shape this CIA, CIA part of the narrative as being a lot more important than it actually is. Or at least that's how it's sort of typically held that he, his CIA, his era of being in the CIA is much more important than it actually is because he's actually just kind of like an analyst and then he starts his own business and then he's, you know, this self made arms dealer, gun runner guy. And, and that, that is the myth like that is now this archetype that exists.
- [18:10]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yeah. And you know, he, I mean so much so that like he moves to Monte Carlo, to Monaco. Like, I mean you just, if you had to like pick a city where like some like, like shady gun runner is going to live, who's like living, you know, this like jet setting life, it's going to be Monte Carlo. And he does that in part for like tax reasons, but also he claims and you know, he moves there as late as like, or as early as like 1957. He doesn't live in the United States again after 1957, which is pretty crazy. He's only like 30 years old at that point, but he's already the world's largest private arms dealer because he's the one who's gone into all these warehouses in Europe and he scooped up all these guns and he wants to do that because he's so much closer to his supply there. Like if, if, if he hears that like the Spanish government is ready to sell a million World War II rifles. Like he's got to get there before any of the competition can get there. He wants to be the first one to walk into that defense ministry with a suitcase full of cash and say, I'll take everything you've got. And so he wants, he's as close to the market as he can be. And so he lives in Monaco, he lives in Monte Carlo. Although he always claims he never has this, he never has that like jet setting lifestyle. Like he, he wouldn't, he said he'd never go to the casinos in Monte Carlo. He wouldn't. He never smoked or he rarely drank. He used to say like his, his favorite meal was his wife's hamburgers or something like that. So.
- [19:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And he rode the bus.
- [19:34]
Professor Drew McKevitt
That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like to go to the airport, he would ride the bus. And so he, you know, he would claim to kind of live this sort of austere lifestyle while also, you know, clearly like just packing in the money over the course of many decades.
- [19:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But like, for what reason at that point? Like, it's, it's, it's kind of confusing. This sort of like, acquisition of all this money and then living this lifestyle that's fairly like benign and boring, other than being in Monte Carlo, which is itself, you know, exciting. But it is, it is kind of strange.
- [20:12]
C
Hi there, this is Claire. If you, like me, are a fan of accessible history that's actually made by experts, why not consider investing in it? And by that I mean subscribing to our Patreon. It's only one tier and for less than the price of a smoothie at your weird local health store that you aren't sure if you even like.
- [20:27]
Dr. Claire Aubin
You'll get access to all of our.
- [20:28]
C
Episodes instead of just the bi weekly free episodes and they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get exclusive access to the full episode archive, bonus content, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head to this guy suck.com and join the honorary haters club.
- [20:47]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Normally here is where we would say let's transition into talking about why he sucks. But I think we're already on our way there so we can just keep going with this. I was looking at his sort of technique for buying post war, like leftover post war munitions. And he was buying guns especially like right after the war. And when he opens or starts his company, he was buying guns for less than a dollar a rifle, which is, you can get a lot of rifles.
- [21:22]
Professor Drew McKevitt
That way, that's for sure. That's what I mean. Like a few hundred thousand dollars will buy a country's entire stock of like Second World War firearms. And you know, this is because like, again, like to think about some context here, right? It's war. It's Europe after the war. Europe is completely devastated economically in terms of its industry. It's got warehouses full of guns. A warehouse full of guns is not just a warehouse full of guns. It's something you have to guard, right? You have to have. You can't just like let people walk in and grab the guns and so forth. And it's something like guns, guns, you know, if you're not taking care of them, if you're not maintaining them, they're going to rust, they're not going to be of any value anyway. And so it's, it's sort of Expensive just to maintain them. And then what a lot of governments were doing is, you know, they didn't want this stuff sitting around. And so they would just put them on ships and ship them out to the North Sea and dump them into the sea. Like hundreds of thousands of, maybe even millions of guns were just dumped into the North Sea after 1945. And Sam Cummings is like, this breaks my heart to know I got here too late to get all of these guns that ended up in the sea. But otherwise he's going to do his best to get as much as he can, as much as he thinks he can sell on the American market. Right. And so his, his way of doing it is like to find out like, you know, Finland is, has decided it wants to get rid of 100,000 guns or something like that. Or he'd just go into a defense ministry and say, I'll take anything you've got leftover laying left over after the war. And you know, because he's promising to like pack them up, he's promising to ship them off, he'll clean them up, all they gotta do is open the gates and let him take them. They're willing to let them go for as cheap as in some cases. Yeah, I think like the, the cheapest deals he got were like 69 or 79 cents each for a World War II era rifle. Right. And so the reason he's able to do that is because he's a really. Yes, I say like I, Sam Cumming sucks. Like Sam Cumming sucks for a lot of, you know, down the line reasons for the things he kind of like sets off and almost in some cases sort of willingly or wills into existence. But also again, have this kind of love hate relationship with him. He was kind of brilliant. He was a brilliant entrepreneur in the way that brilliant entrepreneurs can do things with capitalism that create terrible long term ramifications. And so what he does so well is he sets up a logistics network. So it's not just that first he has to have the money and he sets up, he's got bankers who are willing to loan him the money because he's proven that he knows what he's talking about with this stuff. He knows how to connect to the American market. He buys the guns and then he has a whole sort of small army of people in Europe who are cleaning them up. And the term he comes up with is they sporterize them, they turn these rifles made for warfare for battlefields that have often been used on battlefields. Right. And so you're thinking about something that's been smashed around, dropped and kicked and scratched and fired a whole bunch of times has to be cleaned up. So you can sell it to an American sportsman who walks into a gun store on the other side of the Atlantic, and then he's got the network to ship in there. He ends up buying several warehouses on the Alexandria waterfront. So his headquarters in the United States will be in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C. the ships that are often bringing these guns over are bringing things to the same kind of port there. Oftentimes his guns would be on the same ships that were bringing in the newsprint for the Washington Post, which had a warehouse right next door where it stored all of his newsprint. And so he's got the warehouses set up there. He can have hundreds of thousands of guns sitting in those warehouses. He goes before Congress once and he's like, yeah, I can arm a few army divisions just down the road. You guys don't even know that all of these guns are sitting there 12 miles away from us here at the Capitol. And so he's so brilliant in setting up that kind of network, and then that enables him to sell as many guns as he can so incredibly cheaply. And this is where he really runs afoul of a lot of people. Because if you wanted to buy like a brand new hunting rifle in, you know, say 1960 from a company like Winchester or Remington, you know, you're looking at 100, 150, maybe even $200 with all the bells and whistles, right? And today that's a lot of money. That's, you know, it's a couple thousand dollars. Today, Sam Cummings is selling a sporterized refurbished war surplus firearm for 10 bucks, which is just a tiny fraction of what it costs to buy a brand new rifle. And so if you're an executive at like Winchester or Remington and you're going to the pawn shops or the gun shop and you're seeing these things, you're like, how are we going to out compete this guy? And so they're the ones who sort of set off the first kind of round of gun control. Interestingly enough, it's the gun manufacturers in the late 1950s and early 1960s to try to do something about Sam Cummings, who's making so much money selling these cheap guns to American hunters who otherwise might not, you know, 150 bucks, that's a lot of money. But 10 bucks? Yeah, I'll buy a gun for 10 bucks and see where it goes and see if I like it. And Maybe I'll. I'll upgrade sometime down the road.
- [26:40]
C
Also, are you a big nerd?
- [26:42]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Cool.
- [26:43]
C
Me too. And not just the history kind. In fact, I am also the swords and wizards and elves kind. And boy has multitude got the podcast for me and maybe for you. Join the Party is an actual play podcast with tangible worlds, genre pushing, storytelling and collaborators who make each other and me laugh every week. Best DM in Podcasting Eric and players Amanda, Brandon and Julia welcome everyone to the table. From longtime TTRPG players to folks who've never touched a role playing game before, you can marathon any of their four completed stories or tune in for the brand new campaign starting on April 1st. Listen to join the Party wherever you go for podcasts.
- [27:21]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And There's a significant difference in quality in the kind of guns that you're getting for hunting. Like a hunting rifle versus World War II era sniper rifles or rifles that are military grade just in terms of the level of calibration that they have, the way that they're manufactured. Like there's a difference in quality here. And the difference if I'm, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure that the difference is that the military grade ones are better than the American manufactured hunting rifles are. So they're cheaper and better. Yeah, that's a problem.
- [27:54]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Because if you're a government and you want to manufacture rifles to use on a battlefield, you want them to work really well, right? They have to work under the most strenuous possible conditions human beings could be firing a gun. And so the demands are really high. Like a Mauser rifle manufactured in Germany, anywhere from, you know, the 1890s up to the 1940s, it's going to be of a really high quality, the highest industrial quality in the world. And that's something that might have cost, you know, the German government 50, 80, $100 to manufacture. But the German government's gone now. The German government doesn't own those things anymore. The German government is ready to get rid of all of them for pennies on the dollar. And it's Sam Cummings. And in some cases it's American consumers who are going to benefit from that because they're the one market where you could sell all these things, right? Like you can't go around France selling these guns for 10 bucks. Like France and Germany and England and Italy and lots of countries around the world are passing. They already have gun control laws on the books or they're passing new gun control laws in the post war era. And they also don't have any money. American shoppers have money. And so the one place you're gonna find a huge market for these really cheap guns is in the United States. And they're really high quality guns, right? Like you can, you can take that rifle out and, and shoot a deer with it. And it's gonna work just as well as something you might pay $150 from Winchester. And so that's a big selling point too. It's also why they become pretty significant collector's items and also why one of them happened to be used quite effectively to kill the President of the United States in 1963. The rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used. Whenever I say it, I get emails that Lee Harvey Oswald used to shoot John F. Kennedy was one of these rifles. It was manufactured In Italy in 1940, a Carcano rifle that he purchased, not from Sam Cummings. In fact, Sam Cummings says at one point, like, thank God I wasn't the guy who sold him that rifle. He purchased it from a Chicago dealer called Klein sporting goods for 19. He pays 1995 plus shipping and handling, which is pretty remarkable.
- [30:20]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But even if Sam Cummings isn't the person that he bought it from or the dealer that he bought it from, he is still the person that paves the way in order to make this possible. And I think one of the things that I noticed in terms of a first sign of there being a sort of lack of moral or ethical compulsion in a lot of this, not that that is, you know, first thing on the mind of a large scale arms dealer, but that there's no sort of moral ethical compulsion, is in some of the ads that are included in your book, they say things like the preferred gun of the Luftwaffe and stuff. Like they go out of their way to say this was a Nazi owned gun and it could be yours for 1280. And that's like a selling point for the gun.
- [31:06]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't know if you've ever been to a gun show, but like, even today you go to a gun show, there's a lot of Nazi shit. Like Nazi shit's everywhere. And that was a big thing after the Second World War too, right? It was seen as sort of like, on the one hand you have this kind of creepy, still continued white fascination with Nazism. There was like a, almost a sort of sexy appeal of Nazism and it's modernism and that sort of thing. But then on the other hand, there's also that, that appeal of like the conqueror. Like, these are the people we Conquered. So we should take all of their stuff and claim it as, as war trophies. Right? And so Cummings knew that, right? I think, I think he, he really kind of tapped into the psyche of the American man, the white American middle class man in the 1950s and the 1960s who wants to collect this stuff, who sees this as his, almost his reward for having fought and won the war. We defeated Nazism, we defeated Imperial Japan. We get all of the bounty from, from that sacrifice. And now that we have money, now that we're prosperous, we can afford those things. And so, you know, Cummings advertisements, as you say, they're, they're full of like the, they're trying to draw the reader's attention to like the exotic, like, novelty of these kinds of things. But also on the other hand, they're drawing attention to the bounty. Right? Like there's. He will, he will just pack an advertisement with as many guns in tiny little boxes as he can. The idea being like, he wants you to know he has everything. Early on, his ads would say things like, I spent $30 million collecting all the guns in the world or something like that. He would just make it. All these numbers were entirely made up, but the idea was to say that like, this is what prosperity means. This is, this is our, our reward for having won that war, including getting all of the weird, creepy Nazi shit.
- [33:03]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And also with the sort of Nazi gun thing and the German gun thing, there's very much an air of the, like, well, at least the trains ran on time kind of thing to it where it's like, well, they're, you know, there's German efficiency, the guns are German manufactured, so you can trust them, which is just like, obviously really gross and horrible. You also mention in the book another ad that's very clearly racist against Japanese people to a degree that's kind of mind blowing where the sort of language being used is to sort of orientalize and talk about these. The samurai that we took this gun from will not be committing, will have to commit seppuku with a sword now that we have his gun. Like there's, there's a very specific attempt to exoticize the guns in order to make them more appealing to the white American consumer who has started to see them as trophies, not just as utilitarian objects, but these things that can be consumed. And I think it seems like that's a big part of this shift and part of why Sam Cummings sucks so much. Like you said, it's not necessarily about his personality, but it's about the path that he PAVES in framing his business the way that he does.
- [34:21]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yes, you've hit the jackpot there with this language he uses to imply that Americans are entitled to all of this. We defeated the Japanese, the Japanese were inferior, and therefore the guns are ours. And now we are atop of the world. All the guns can come here. You live in the greatest country in the world where you can buy as many guns as you want, and there's no restriction on those kinds of things. And, yeah, the language he uses to describe a lot of these things, I always sort of wondered, I don't know who wrote the copy for those ads. You know, he had such a granular level of control over the company that I wouldn't be surprised if he himself was writing the cop. I mean, here he is running a business that's bringing in and moving tens of millions of dollars of guns and other even larger SOR. Weapons systems around the world by the late 1950s. And I wouldn't be surprised if he was the guy who was still writing that copy, because that copy did reflect his particular personality. And, you know, in some ways, it's not about him, but he did have a really kind of sardonic personality and almost a level of black humor about what he did. You know, he would. Because people did ask him these questions, right? Like, journalists would say, you know, you're such a big arms dealer. There's conflicts going on all around the world. They would never point to, like, violence in the United States and say, you, Sam Cummings, are responsible for violence in the United States. Right. Like today, how we often think, when we think about big gun manufacturers, they. We make that correlation. Instead, they would say, like, you know, you're moving guns all over the world. There's. There's guns moving into these conflict zones in Central America, in Central Africa and in Asia. Don't you feel any kind of responsibility for that? And, you know, he would. He had a number of responses to that. One of those responses was always like, why are you pointing the finger at me? Your government, The United States government does. I do a tiny, tiny fraction of business compared to what your government does when it's selling attack planes and warships and just things that are so astronomically expensive compared to the little man like me sometimes call himself the little man compared to governments that it's not even worth talking about what I'm doing because I'm just a fly on the wall here in a room full of giants that are battling with each other. You know, at other times, he would say things like, if I don't do it, someone else would do it, so why shouldn't I make some money off of it? Then he would pull out kind of the well trod lines of like the NRA today, which is things like, well, you know, you could drive a car around and hit somebody with it and kill them. But we're not looking to ban cars or we don't blame Henry Ford. He actually says this. You don't blame Henry Ford. When somebod gets in a car accident or somebody misuses a car, somebody drinks and gets in an accident, you don't blame Henry Ford. Why are you blaming me? When somebody uses a gun to kill somebody else, it's just a tool and so forth. And so yeah, I mean he did have, he thought a lot about that ethical aspect of it. When he died, the New York Times called him, I think something like the philosopher king of the international arms trade because he loved to talk to the press, right? He loved this myth making thing because the press never, the press never pushed him on the biggest part of his business, which was he made most of his money selling these cheap guns to Americans, right? The press wanted to know like what kind of arms are going into Vietnam, what kind of arms are going into Central America? And he was happy to sort of like kick back and muse about that and drop hints about the things he knew, but they were never asking him about like the hundreds of thousands of guns he was selling in the United States or you know, eventually manufacturing. He eventually opens up a couple of manufacturing plants in Alabama and Virginia. They never really asked him about that stuff because to them it was just, just like it was to Sam Cummings. It was just sort of normal and natural that Americans would gobble up this bounty of firearms because it's available that that demand was limitless and once the supply was there, all of those guns were, were going to end up in civilian hands.
- [38:23]
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- [39:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
One of the things that I found really interesting thinking through all of this, like now and last night when I was doing some of the research, this willingness to talk to the press and be really open and transparent is kind of like a big thing for him and for the business in general. And I think what's so interesting to me is that by doing so he really kind of rehabilitates the image of the sort of dirty, sneaky, seedy gun smuggler that we imagine dealing with like prohibition era mafia bosses and criminal gangs and meets you on the dock at midnight to sell you a shipment of guns. He's like, not doing that. Instead he's very open and transparent and jovial and likable and unabashed about it, which contributes to this American attitude that mass private ownership of guns to the degree that we own them, which far, far outstrips any other country in the world, is normal, rather than being a sort of global aberration, which it is. This is not for anywhere else in the world normal, but because we have arms dealers like Sam Cummings who begin to be extremely open and transparent about the belief that not only should Americans have guns, but these guns should not just be utilitarian. They should be things that you consume, that you collect not. And again, not just collect because they're expensive, but because you can have them because you are allowed to have them. You can and should have lots and lots of them. It transforms gun ownership and the idea of gun running, gun smuggling, arms dealing, all of that into this like more like shiny, happy, acceptable American thing, which is. Is so wild. How much just a willingness to be open about it. How much that is the catalyst for this change.
- [41:20]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yes. He wants you to see what he does as American as apple pie. Right? Like this, this is. And he does it all transparently. And he's so open and honest about that. Right? Because, you know, to him. And again, like, the mechanics of this, as a historian, I'm like, really interested in like the Office of munitions control in 1961 and like how the Nobody wants to know about this stuff, but it was really interesting to me, and it's always been really interesting to me, the mechanics of, like, how guns got into the country, right? So, like, he needed, if he bought, you know, his biggest, his biggest buy ever was In, I think, 1959, 1960. He buys like 2 million guns from the Spanish government. And this is a really complex deal that takes him a long time to do. But every single one of those guns to get into the United States has to have an import license, and he gets that from the State Department. So it's not that he's bringing all these guns into the United States and the United States government doesn't know about it. Every single gun has an import license to come into the United States. And so if he were going around the world and selling guns, you know, sort of smuggling guns and selling them illegally to insurgencies that might use them against the United States, he'd be in a lot of trouble legally. And so for him, it was like, that's not worth it. It's not worth selling a thousand guns to some insurgency in North Africa when I can sell a million guns to Americans openly and transparently on the market and do so with the sanction of the United States government, which, you know, I argue in book, like, that's actually American policy at one point to bring all these guns into the United States. It's kind of remarkable that, that, you know, so Cummings sets off this series of congressional hearings in the late 1950s because the, the, again, the gun manufacturers are like, we're getting killed here. This guy's bringing in all these guns. He's selling them real cheap where our sales are slumping. So they go to their congressional advocates, including a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, and they push them to do something to limit the import of war surplus weapons. And, you know, so Cummings is. He's not dragged before Congress, but he writes a letter to Congress. He's sort of explaining himself. And the idea here is that. So Congress also brings the State Department in, right, because they want to know, like, why are you giving Sam Cummings all of these import licenses? Isn't this bad for American business? And the State Department says, we don't care. That's not our. We're not tasked with, like, looking after American business. Our job is global security and American national interests overseas and at home and protecting that national interest. And to us, it is better that the world's guns come here than they go somewhere else. We would rather those 10,000 rifles go to American sportsmen than to an. A communist insurgency in Central America. So it is in our national interest to bring in as many guns to the United States as we can. And in that sense, Sam Cummings is Uncle Sam. He is waving the American flag and saying, I'm doing the work of God here. I am doing the work of American national security. And if anything, you should be thanking me for taking all these guns off the market so that they're not falling into the hands of America's enemies overseas. And he really knows how to sell that. And the response from, like, Winchester and Remington is like, well, what if we go to war against the Soviets? Who's gonna make the guns for you? And so they're each, like, waving the flag and saying, like, we are the most American here. And so for Cummings, it always makes sense to just do this stuff transparently because he makes so much money doing it, but he makes all that money under the radar. Nobody's really paying attention to how much money Sam Cummings is making until, like, the mid-1960s, when there is a, finally a surge to do something about guns in the United States. And Cummings will be one of the figures targeted. But more often they're going after these people who look more like and who behave more like those shady gun runners that, that you described.
- [45:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It seems very myopic, like, to sort of be like, well, you know, we've taken these, or we've saved these guns from the hands of the Communists. We're going to bring hundreds of thousands, millions of guns home and it's all going to be fine, and there will be no consequences down the road from this. Or if there are consequences, we can't foresee them, which is also wild because obviously the result of this is what we have now, essentially. That to me, seems like a very, very obvious result. But it's so interesting how part of this ability to subvert or rehabilitate the image of the arms dealer comes from the fact that the US Government essentially props him up and says, like, yeah, he should be doing this. We do want him to bring thousands and thousands of guns and have what they call the arsenal on the Potomac. We want him to do that because it helps us. And there's just no thought past that. Or the thought past that is like, well, we'll deal with it when we get there. Which is worrisome when you think about it.
- [46:42]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, there's no sort of. And, you know, to me, this is why Sam Cummings sucks. Right? Is Sam Cummings sets off a chain of events that I think he was encouraging which is mass consumer gun ownership. Right. And so those rifles that Sam Cummings brings in in 1957, 1958, they specifically are not a broader social and cultural problem. In some instances they are, you know like he's selling, at one point he's selling anti tank guns. It's kind of incredible to think that you could buy an anti tank gun before 1968. In one instance there's a series of bank robberies in upstate New York and then they cross the border into Canada using an anti tank gun that Sam Cummings had, had sold through the mail. It was a Finnish anti tank gun. I think it was like 50 caliber or something like that, which is really big, really powerful. And you could use that, you could use that to shoot through a bank like vault. Like it was that power because right, if you could, if you could break through like tank armor, you can get through a bank vault. And so like there were a whole bunch of robberies with one of his tanks. And you know there was one point where like a group of like 12 year old kids in New Jersey were like shooting these, shooting one of these anti tank guns into like abandoned homes and like the homes were just collapsing because this is incredibly powerful round going through them. So there, there were these cases where like Sam gun, Sam Cummings guns like actually went and did bad things. But what we're looking at is, is, is sort of like this is like that, that meme of like the dominoes, right? Like the tiny domino then knocks over the really big domino. Like Sam Cummings is setting off the tiny domino here which is that I'm going to offer to Americans as many guns as I possibly can for as cheap as I can because Americans have always been into guns. Like he doesn't invent American fascination with guns. That, that would be ridiculous. Right. We know the United States is some kind of gun country in the late 18th century and during the, you know, the Revolutionary era. There's the mythologies of guns on the frontier. The guns play a huge role in obviously the, the, the eradication of a native population in North America, the Wild west and so forth. Guns are, guns are already powerful myths in Americans minds by the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Sam Cummings wants to turn myth into material reality. He wants everybody armed and he's figured out how to do it. And you know, is he looking 50 years down the road when the 45 million guns in the United States in 1945 or you know, 80 years down the road when those 45 million guns become 450 million guns. I don't know. I don't know what Sam Cummings would make of our gun dystopia today where, where we have more guns than people. But certainly he had to know that whatever he was setting in motion was going to encourage greater and greater gun consumption, bring more people into the gun market, more consumers into the gun market. And he was, you know, he felt no, no guilt or shame about, about doing that, because again, his explanation is, if I don't do it, somebody else is going to do it. So why not, why not be me and I, you know, make a dollar doing it.
- [50:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And it was his patriotic duty actually to do that.
- [50:04]
Professor Drew McKevitt
That's right. That's right. He's a great, He's a good, He's a good Cold War citizen.
- [50:07]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, what really struck me in a lot of this was the realization of kind of what you just said, that what we think of right now as American gun culture didn't like the current iteration of it did not actually come baked into American society and is relatively recent. Like America, like you said, has always had this sort of fascination with guns and this interesting relationship with guns. The Second Amendment is really important. Like, this is not, that is not new. But this sort of switch away, like I said, from guns as primarily utilitarian objects, whether that utility is to kill people or defend yourself or whatever, this movement away from that and towards having sort of status as symbols of mass consumption is new. Like that was not a significant feature of American society unless it was just about collecting guns because you were very wealthy in general. The idea that every house just has a gun or several guns or whatever is relatively new. And I think within this sort of playing off of national myths, groups like the NRA and the sort of current modern gun lobby are able to project the current situation and the current circumstances of guns backwards and pretend that this is how it has always been and that this is because it's constitutionally protected, that people have always felt this way and guns have always been this ubiquitous. And that's simply not true. And so that is sort of the big domino here is the ubiquity of guns as a result of someone who thinks that their patriotic duty is to just give people as much access to as many guns as possible and then pretend that is a long held national value. I did not realize how recent this was. And reading this book, I was really taken aback by how truly how recent this shift is. I just assumed it had sort of long been part of American culture and it hadn't really?
- [52:15]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Yes, yes. You've got it. I mean, you got the. I'm so happy that I was able to write a book in a way that communicated that argument. And you've picked it up perfectly. Yes. You know, when, when the NRA today thinks, when they, they want you to go to the gun store and they want you to buy an AR15 and they want you to think you are directly connected to 1791 and the Second Amendment and the founders and a country that was founded on guns and gun owners and particularly gun ownership among white men who use them to protect their families and protect their communities and of course to defeat tyranny. And that kind of idea, that conflation of 2025, buying an AR 15 and 1791 and Second Amendment is quite literally erasing 250 something years of history. And that history that we're erasing is the history of how guns become something that accumulates materially. Right. They are very much mythical things for most Americans in the 1930s. They are out of reach. You pointed out, like today, I think, you know, I'm just sort of ballparking numbers here, but if I'm not mistaken, the average gun owner today, the median gun owner today in the United States owns Something like seven guns. That number has almost doubled in the last 30 or 40 years. Right. And that's because of the availability, the cheapness of guns too. It's not just that there are a lot of guns around now. Guns were really expensive things in the colonial era, so much so that the average person could not afford a gun because you had to have an actual gunsmith make that thing for you on order. Most people who own guns had guns that had been passed down from generation to generation. You know, we know that like the, the minutemem, the militias, when they rolled up to, to help George Washington in 1777, the guns they brought were crap. George Washington was complaining that these people are bringing these crappy, rusted squirrel guns that are useless. And so they needed guns from the French who were actually bringing like real military weapons. These people were bringing guns that were, had no military capabilities whatsoever. And so we don't really even get anything like a gun consumer market until the middle of the 19th century. And that's invented by people like Colt and Winchester and Remington and Browning and all these kind of major figures whose names all still persist in the gun industry today. And they began the trek, the march towards a truly mass consumer market. But they never reached the numbers that, that Sam Cummings would reach in the 1950s and the 1960s, again, like I, you know, I begin the book with those very simple numbers, right? 45 million guns in the United States in 1945, as best we can tell, because again, it's hard to count guns in the United states and today, 10 times as many guns. There's not 10 times as many people in the United States today. It's only about two and a half times as many people. So even if, if the United States was a gun country in 1945, it is quantitatively, if not qualitatively, a different gun country today in 2025, because guns have increased so exponentially in the hands of civilians as to remake the country into something that has never existed in all of human history. Right? If there's one gun for every three or four people in 1945, there's one and a half guns for every one person today in the United States. Two guns probably for every adult in the United States today. And no society in human history has, has ever looked like that before. The Second Amendment doesn't do that because the Second Amendment's around in 1791, it's around in 1865, it's around in 1945, and the country doesn't look like that. What happens after the Second World War to turn the United States into that country? I think Sam Cummings does that. I think he's the guy who says, the bounty is yours, the world is yours. You have the money. Now I'm gonna bring all these guns to you, collect as many as you can, stockpile as many as you can, because that is your right as an American. That is your prize for having won this tremendous conflict. And I think he's the one who sets those dominoes rolling that lead us up to today and, you know, 20, 30, 40 million guns sold every year in the United States.
- [56:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And he's also part of the group of people who historicize this and allow modern gun owners to link themselves back to 1791, like you said, and create a feeling of connection to the past, which is what makes it so difficult to go up against the gun lobby now. And I think, I mean, it's worth saying, like, I am actually like, not anti gun. Like I grew up in Oregon. Lots of people I knew had guns. I shot guns as a teenager. I'm not, I don't necessarily have hold particularly anti gun views, but I do think it's important to understand the sort of historical through lines here and how there is a very clear sort of cataclysm like this point where all of this stuff shifts and shoots off into a direction. Shoots off. Accidental pun, but it goes off in a direction that does not fit with sort of like the past and America's past relationship to gun ownership. And I also think things like military grade weaponry, which we now see as being normal, and you see it in things like mass shootings, that is also the sort of popular ownership of military grade weaponry comes out of the Second World War and comes out of Sam Cummings. So it's all of the dominoes. I see it, I see the vision. I understand how this all fits together now. I think you're right, and I think, think we have sort of done the thing that we need to do on the show, which is explain why on a world historical level, this guy totally sucks. I did my Master's and my PhD in the UK, and I think understanding the constant tension that exists when you live in a country where guns are so ubiquitous was not made clear to me until I moved to the uk. And I have a very specific memory of my first week in the uk, going and seeing a new movie that had just come out and sitting in the movie theater and thinking, where would I go if a shooter came in? Which is such a wild thing. But it was the thing that I thought, because there had just been a big mass shooting in the US and I looked around the theater and thought, where'd I go if a shooter came in? And then I thought, I don't have to worry about that because they don't have that here. And it was like, it was this breaking point in my mind where I was like, oh, my God, the rest of the world does not live the way that we live. Like, I, I, I lived for eight years in the UK and I never once worried about a mass shooter. Like, that's, and that's a thing that people think about here all the time now.
- [59:04]
Professor Drew McKevitt
And I think, you know, again, like, it, it's, it's a domino thing. I don't want to pin that entirely on Sam Cummings, but I think that is part of his legacy. Right? And I suspect you're a little bit younger than me, so you probably had that generational experience of growing up with like, the mass shooter drills in schools and that kind of thing, right? Like, Columbine happened my first year of college. So it, like just it as soon as I got out of high school, like, that kind of all sort of blew up. And, you know, that's in part because we are a country swimming in guns. Right? The solution is not get rid of guns. The solution is teach children how to at least give them the sense, the illusion that they can protect themselves when somebody walks in with an AR15 or something like that. And just one more way in which Sam Cummings some sucked and has this direct connection to today. Sam Cummings was the first overseas dealer for Armalite, Armalite being the company that produced the AR15 Sam Cummings shot. So Armalite's first model that they tried to sell to the military was called the AR10. Eventually they produced the AR10 too. Similar kind of gun, just a larger, larger caliber, 7.62 caliber, as opposed to the 5.56 that the, the AR15 ends up firing. And so Sam Cummings would bring this Armalite rifle everywhere he went around the world because he was so impressed with it that he would give it to like he was actually standing there and shooting these off with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Raul Castro in 1959, before the United States placed embargoes on Cuba. And so he was showing off the ARP10 and then the AR15 later all around the world, trying to sell these to militaries all around the world. So we also have Sam Cummings to thank for the ubiquity of the AR15, which, you know, becomes the M16 and so forth. And you know, also perhaps this kind of fetish for the military style firearms that are really that drive the industry today in ways that they, they didn't 20, 30, 40 years ago.
- [61:11]
Dr. Claire Aubin
You know, I go into every episode we record being like, wow, this guy sucks a lot. No guy will suck as much as him. But I went into this one really already knowing that this guy sucked. And I think what's important here that you've touched on a few times actually it's not necessarily about him as a person. Right? We have some people that we've talked about on the show that suck because they as a person sucked. For example, in a recent episode we talked about Jerry Lee Lewis and we're like, he did all of these horrible things. He treated his wives like this. It was him as a person that sucked. But we also have people like Sam Cummings who it's not about them as a person or their personal beliefs, their personal ideals, their treatment, their behavior. It's about what their individual relationship to power, to money, to capitalism, all of these things. What that then creates in the world and how it impacts culture and the consequences it has in the longer term for the world that we live in now. And so I think he is a very, very good example of that. He might have been really Funny. Some of the things I read were, like, quite funny. His ye olde hunter Persona that he was writing these ads, he might have been writing these ads from, is funny. But what it creates, the ripple effect that comes out of his decisions are why he sucks and why we need to talk about him in this way. I think we are. We've gotten there. I think we're. We're there. The argument is convincing enough, and I think you have thoroughly convinced me that he sucks.
- [62:42]
Professor Drew McKevitt
Well, it's such a. It's such a fascinating sort of thought exercise. Right. Like when you. When you asked me to do this and I was trying to think because there are people who, like, personally suck, like bad people, like, we could talk about. Right. Well, he's not dead yet, but we.
- [62:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Can, you know, so not him.
- [62:58]
Professor Drew McKevitt
I mean, there's somebody. There's somebody in the gun industry who, like, legitimately sucks. And I don't think we're getting any trouble for Saf. But, like, as a, you know, as a human being, like, yeah, Sam Cummings was kind of. He seems sort of funny and like, down to earth and like. But like, in a larger historical sense, like, what are the, as you said, the ripple effects down the road of what these people do and in some cases, knowingly do too. Right. And so, yeah, I thought this was a really kind of fascinating and fun historical exercise to think about why not just who sucks, but why somebody in particular sucks.
- [63:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so very much for coming on. For coming Cummings on. And this is enlightening for me. And it's always. I love talking about this stuff because, like, gossiping about people, but doing it as a sort of an academic gossip is great and it's very professional. Yeah, it's our job. For listeners at home, Drew McKevitt can be found on Twitter or X. I don't call it that, but on Twitter X. Drew McKevitt. And on BlueSkyrewMacKevitt as well. You can buy his book Gun country at the link in the episode description. And thank you again for coming on, Claire.
- [64:16]
Professor Drew McKevitt
This was wonderful. This is a lot of fun. Thanks so much for doing this and thanks for having me.
- [64:21]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked, a member of the Multitude Podcast collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Professor Drew McKevitt, and produced and edited by Tom Oman. All of our theme music was written and produced by the brilliant Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month. You can subscribe@patreon.com thisguysucked See you next week.