Jesse James in fact and fiction
Well, almost apotheosis. If he hasn’t
become a god, he’s been pretty well sanctified or beatified since his death.
The Jesse James of popular understanding is a good man: or at the very least a
bad man with many saving graces. On the screen he has been a hero. It’s in many
ways curious that a sociopath, a young guerrilla fighter from a slave-owning
family who participated in atrocities and what today would be called war
crimes, a man who after the war turned to robbery and murder, a vain and
violent fellow, a plain bad egg in other words, should become the gallant
knight of myth and popular legend.
Jesse Woodson James (1847 - 1882)
As with the likes of Buffalo Bill and
Wild Bill Hickok, the process started while he was still pursuing his chosen
profession – in Jesse James’s case stealing from and killing innocent people. The
James Gang made the leap from local to national fame when they switched from
robbing local banks to holding up trains in 1873 to ‘74. Suddenly they were famous
in an altogether different way. A story was published as early as 1874 in the
New York World describing a gunfight
between the James gang and Pinkerton détectives.
In 1875 Augustus C Appler published The Guerrillas of the West, or the Life, Character and Daring Exploits of the Younger Brothers, in which Jesse and Frank figured, and two years later passionate James/Younger partisan JN
Edwards published his Noted Guerrillas, or the Warfare of the Border in
which he argued that Jesse and his comrades were a knightly warrior class
carrying on the Great Cause by other means (he did not call these means thieving
and killing). The James boys were ‘natural aristocrats’ and heroic fighters. Edwards
placed James and his accomplices within the Southern tradition of ‘honor’, with
the right to defend themselves, their homes and their beliefs with deadly force. James
wasn’t just a common criminal: he was the inheritor of the whole Southern tradition.
James partisan JN Edwards
In the wake of the Glendale robbery
(1879) there appeared The Life and
Adventures of Frank and Jesse James and the Younger Brothers by Joseph A
Dacus and this was frequently later revised and updated to include the later
criminal career of Jesse, including his assassination. Dacus was a believer in
the negative effects on the economy and on society of the great railroad
companies, and his Jesse became a hero of the little man battling against
corporate greed.
The James Gang hold up a train
In actual fact, Jesse James didn’t
target the railroads at all: he assaulted the express companies. It was a key
difference. Express companies oppressed no one, and Missouri farmers had little
if anything to do with them. The railroad companies generally ignored the
bandits, only really acting from 1881 at the urging of Governor Crittenden. It
was the express companies that paid the Pinkertons, and the state governors who obsessed
about ‘law and order’ for political reasons.
There was huge coverage of the James
Gang’s depredations in the press but hardly any mention at all of their
targeting railroads or other ‘big business’. The bandits were also perfectly
capable of robbing stage travelers, passengers on trains and small banks. The idea
of Jesse James as the cavalier fighting corporate America was a later
construct.
The Five Cent Wide Awake Library began publishing a series of popular stories in 1881 - while Jesse was still alive. Right after James’s assassination in
1882 a key book appeared: Frank Triplett’s Life,
Times and Treacherous Death of Jesse James. Triplett conferred with Frank James and Zerelda Samuel and his Jesse was a paragon
of his white race, trained in Quantrill’s school of “rough riders” (barbarous
guerrillas have become brave and skilled horsemen) and “Anglo-Norman Comanches”
(Jesse was no common Anglo-Saxon; he was of nobler stock). Jesse treats all
women chivalrously and at one point avenges the rape of a girl by Indians.
The ballad
The
Ballad of Jesse James also gained currency
extraordinarily fast after the outlaw’s death, story-songs being so popular and
such an effective way of making a legend ‘go viral’, as we would say today. The author of the song is not known for
certain but is often thought to be a certain Billy Gashade, and some versions
include a statement to that effect in one of the verses. In the song, Jesse was a Robin Hood:
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain.
Of course there is no evidence
whatsoever that he had such altruistic motives. We are told that “that dirty
little coward” Robert Ford “laid poor Jesse in his grave”. And indeed, the
manner of James’s demise earned him a lot of sympathy from those prepared to
overlook his past. TJ Stiles, in his fine biography of Jesse James, quotes the
diary of a Kansas City rabbi who called the killing of James “a stroke into the
face of morality and civilization.”
The best book on Jesse James
And of course there came the dime
novels. Between 1881 and 1883 Frank Tousey
published a whole series of (wholly fictional) stories which followed the Deadwood Dick formula. The James Gang
are chivalrous heroes victimized by the law. Rapidly, Jesse James became the
leading hero of the dime novel genre, even more so than Deadwood Dick, in a way
that no other outlaw ever did.
Dime novel Jesse
Earlier Western figures of legend had
their origins in Cooper’s hero Hawkeye: they were brave Indian fighters, often
rescuing maidens from captivity. But from the Reconstruction period on, pulp
literary heroes were more often bold individuals battling for the rights of the
individual against corrupt law and greedy corporations. Jesse James’s story
could be easily adapted to that agenda. Again and again he was the brave
fighter in combat against the wicked and grasping railroad companies. The dime
novel industry was booming at the time and the ‘literary’ works were not only
read by the poor. All classes perused them eagerly – except of course the
illiterate, which included most African-Americans, deliberately deprived of
education.
There were also many lurid portrayals of the James and Younger gang's exploits on the stage. In 1882 and '83 Bob and Charlies Ford appeared in a play that purported to show how they had killed Jesse James. They badly misjudged the mood because they were reviled by the audiences. In the 1890s WI Swain's "Western spectacular" play Jesse James was very popular. The James Boys in Missouri by George Klimpt and Frank AP Gazzolo, in which Klimpt played Frank, was staged in Kansas City in 1902 and Frank tried legal measures to get it stopped, but the show went on.
Frank James and Cole Younger even put together a Wild West show, briefly, in 1903. They wanted to cash in. 1903 was, of course, the year of the first notable Western movie, or at least the first that started a craze in the nickelodeons.
There were also many lurid portrayals of the James and Younger gang's exploits on the stage. In 1882 and '83 Bob and Charlies Ford appeared in a play that purported to show how they had killed Jesse James. They badly misjudged the mood because they were reviled by the audiences. In the 1890s WI Swain's "Western spectacular" play Jesse James was very popular. The James Boys in Missouri by George Klimpt and Frank AP Gazzolo, in which Klimpt played Frank, was staged in Kansas City in 1902 and Frank tried legal measures to get it stopped, but the show went on.
Frank James and Cole Younger even put together a Wild West show, briefly, in 1903. They wanted to cash in. 1903 was, of course, the year of the first notable Western movie, or at least the first that started a craze in the nickelodeons.
And the Jesse James of myth was immediately taken up by the motion picture industry. There have been over a hundred
portrayals of the Missouri outlaw on the big and small screen from 1908 onwards
(many reviewed on this blog) and what used to be called Hollywood is still
producing them. None show the ‘true’ Jesse James;
all show to a greater or lesser degree the mythic one. The pattern was set by the silent movies: they showed a bold and brave Jesse, who often reformed in the last few scenes and became a model citizen. Tragically, nearly all the silent movies featuring Jesse James have been lost, even Paramount's big 1927 picture starring the famous Fred Thomson. But two survive: or rather, two silents were worked up into one picture, with music added and a commentary replacing the intertitle cards, relased in 1930 as Jesse James Under the Black Flag.
It was made by and starred Jesse James’s own son, Jesse Edwards James, and viewing it you would say that Jesse was a much-maligned, very good man, a true hero. As a Western movie, it's really bad but as a historical doument it's fascinating.
Little has fundamentally changed since in screen Jesses. Only Brad Pitt’s in 2007 really gave us a glimpse of what the real Jesse may have been like.
It was made by and starred Jesse James’s own son, Jesse Edwards James, and viewing it you would say that Jesse was a much-maligned, very good man, a true hero. As a Western movie, it's really bad but as a historical doument it's fascinating.
Little has fundamentally changed since in screen Jesses. Only Brad Pitt’s in 2007 really gave us a glimpse of what the real Jesse may have been like.
Jesse James Jr. played his dad on screen
In the 1950s the Jesse James ‘story’ got
a new boost from an unlikely source: the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm,
who wrote in Bandits (1959) about
what he called the ‘social bandit’, and specifically used Jesse as an example. Social
bandits, said Hobsbawm, are “peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as
criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their
people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even
leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and
supported.” James was a good example of the social bandit because he was the
victim of injustice; he righted wrongs; he stole from the rich and gave to the
poor; he killed only for just revenge or in self-defense. (It seems that
Hobsbawm had swallowed the pulp/Hollywood idea of Jesse James rather than the
historical one.)
Eric Hobsbawm
The thesis gained international currency
and soon all sorts of Wild West figures were being identified as social bandits,
but none more so than Jesse James. More recently the idea has received
criticism. The Western historian Richard White, for example, pointed out that
as there were no peasants in nineteenth century Missouri the theory was a
little flawed.
Jesse James was in many ways not a ‘Western’
outlaw at all, but a Southern one. The James Gang were Confederate heroes, even
more so after the war was over. Of course many ex-Confederates frowned on the
criminal activities of the James Gang, but almost all the gang's supporters (and
there were many, from all classes) were former rebels. As the Kansas City Journal of Commerce noted, “These
outlaws have been harbored and befriended … by men who harbored and befriended
them during the war, and by nobody else, and for no other reason.” James and
his cohorts thrived in a context of deep-seated white-supremacist racism, anger
at Reconstruction, and nostalgia for the ante-bellum way of life. Jesse James
did not stand up for the Missouri farmer against the big corporations: he stood
for certain Missouri farmers against those with Union sympathies. JN Edwards
wrote in his eulogy for Jesse James, “Would to God he were alive today to make
a righteous butchery of a few more of them.” James fans expressed their support
after his assassination by chanting “Hurrah for Jeff Davis.”
The real Jesse James: he was always a Confederate at heart
When Jesse James was killed he was
already an anachronism. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the re-emergence
of the Democrats, as the Civil War receded into the past, he was less and less
relevant, and was branded, by both sides, as just a common robber. The James Gang
had anyway been pretty well destroyed as a serious force in 1876 and James’s
late 1870s activities were a pale imitation of what he had done in the war and
immediately after.
Jesse's mother was a formidable woman and a huge influence
Jesse James always had an eye for
publicity and was a shrewd manipulator of the press, especially in partnership
with JN Edwards (for he was a partner of Edwards, not his puppet). He probably
got it from his mother, who played the crowd with such skill at the inquest on and
funeral of her son. Despite his moderate education, Jesse James was articulate,
well-read on current events, and he much enjoyed what we would today call his
celebrity status. He did have saving
graces: he was a loving husband and father, and he had a sharp sense of humor.
But those graces didn’t save much. He was really an unpleasant thug. Yet he is
worshiped as a hero. And if he is worshiped, well then, perhaps apotheosis is
the right word after all.
Tyrone Power as Hollywood Jesse in 1939
This is wonderful! Like you, I have always found the whitewash of James’ legacy to be deeply puzzling. At best, he was a punk and a crook; at worst, he was a blood simple hillbilly. As is usually the case, the causes for transformations like this are largely political and social.
ReplyDeleteI think the myth that James was a little guy pushed too far by corporations and an out-of-control law enforcement establishment (despite the lack of truth in this) has surprising longevity. That can only be because the American ‘little guy’ has felt victimized by these forces for more than a century; I’m surprised that there is not a new James film made with the sentiments of Occupy Wall Street.
The James brood really knew how to control the narrative and use PR. I don’t recall the exact words, but his mother had something like, “murdered by a traitor and a coward whose name is not worthy to appear here” – as if murder victims always put the names of their killers on their tombstone….
True story: I used to work at a major pharmaceutical company with a guy who was a descendant of Jesse James. (Cute guy, by the way.) To my amazement, he used to brag about this, and I chided him by saying that it was like bragging about being related to Ted Bundy.
Yes, and Jesse James's son himself used the name Edwards before 'Jesse James Jr.' became not only acceptable but bankable.
DeleteCertainly the Jameses were shrewd manipulators of the media of the day. They would have thrived on Twitter!
Jeff