David T. Hardy is a longtime Second Amendment attorney and author. This is the first in a series of posts about his research on Jack Miller, the defendant-respondent in the famous case of United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939).
We’re all familiar with United States v. Miller, the 1939 ruling that served as the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedent for 69 years. (As Brannon Denning has documented, passed for precedent might be a more accurate description of the Circuits’ treatment of the opinion). Yet very little is known of Jack Miller, the respondent. It is reported that he was a Cherokee member of a mostly-Irish bank robbery gang, that he and Frank Layton were arrested with an unregistered short-barrel shotgun, and that, while the appeal was pending, he was found murdered, with a partially-emptied .45 by his side. Beyond that, Jack Miller, as a person, remained a mystery.
That will soon change. Earlier this year I received a telephone call from Karen Hale Miller, great-granddaughter to Jackson “Jack” Miller. She had the family lore passed on by her grandmother, Alta, who was a teenage witness to many of the key events of Jack Miller’s life. Karen’s mother, Beverly, and her step-father, Warren, had preserved Alta’s “hope chest,” which contained Jack Miller’s letters home and press clippings relating to his legal affairs. Karen and I have decided to begin work on a book manuscript devoted to United States v. Miller and Jack Miller. On my first visit to the area we visited Claremore, OK, where Jack and Bessie lived, and are buried, and Siloam Springs, where he was arrested.
Jackson “Jack” Miller was indeed a Cherokee; indeed, his father had been a medicine man and holy man among them. He’d served in World War I, and in in 1922 the Red Cross published a fundraising ad citing his family. It said that Jack Miller had been discharged from the Army at Ft. Sill, but could find no work. He heard that there was plentiful employment at Chickashaw, OK, and he and his family set out to walk the 47 miles to that destination. He had told the Red Cross, “I have been honest and square, lady, all my life, but I can’t let my wife and babies starve! And they can’t wait until morning—they must have relief now! For God’s sake, save me from becoming a thief!” The ad reports that at Chickashaw he took work, showed he was “a skilled, industrious workman—and still honest,” and had paid back most of his Red Cross loan in sixty days.
His hard work paid off. By the mid-1930s, Jack and Bessie ran a couple of businesses in Claremore, OK. One was the Luna Club, a restaurant where Bessie’s peach cobbler was her specialty, and family lore has it that it was enjoyed by Will Rogers and Pretty Boy Floyd. The other was a roadside inn where Miller permitted discrete gambling and drinking in the back room.
Unfortunately, the Millers had a run-in with Sheriff Bill Flippin. In a corrupt time, Flippin stood out. The renegade sheriff ran a bootlegging gang, and had an extortion racket on the side. He was ultimately sent to prison for conspiracy to run liquor and for riot, after his gang attacked a band of their rivals. Jack Miller refused to pay Flippin protection money, and one night the inn mysteriously burned down. Witnesses reported seeing a car resembling one of Flippin’s patrol cars watching as the establishment burned.
After that, Jack Miller went to work for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, working on various public works projects in the state. His letters home to Bessie talked of his work and his love for his family.
(To be continued, with Jack Miller’s supposed status in a mostly-Irish bank robbery gang. It wasn’t mostly-Irish, he didn’t take part in its robberies, and he was found not guilty).