So why has he become a left-wing hero? and why should we sing his
song. (This is not to justify "the dirty little coward who shot Mr.
Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave" who was even more dispicable,
killing James for blood money.)
By the way, I love the song and have been singing it since the
1960s. But really, is Jesse James defensible from a left viewpoint?
Paul P
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/04/jesse-james-was-no-hero.html
April 29, 2006
Trouble in the Heartland
Like many men of my age and geography, I will purchase just about
anything Bruce Springsteen sells, and that includes his strange and raucous
new release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, nominally a tribute to
octogenerian folksinger Pete Seeger, but more broadly another small piece
in Springsteen's ongoing reinterpretation of American culture. The record
covers traditional folk material - no originals. It sounds entirely live,
recorded with a wide-ranging group of musicians, the errant tuba
occasionally reminiscent of Springsteen's whirling, precocious early sound.
Being both a careful producer and a careful liberal, Springsteen is
always controlling about both his musical releases and his statements. But
this record is sloppy, haphazard. So is the message, but the results are
less joyful. Because there in lineup is that old folk warhorse, the Ballad
of Jesse James - and because of it, the calliope crashes to the ground.
Everybody knows the song, and perhaps in its inherent long-standing
myth, there's an innocence that calls for forgiveness to actual history, at
least for aging rock musicians:
Jesse James was a man
And he killed many men
He robbed the Glendale train
And he took from the rich
And he gave that to the poorer
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain
History tells a different tale. Skip the heart - in history, Jesse
James had a hand, and a gun, and a brain - that brain belonged to the lost
cause of the Confederacy, to race hatred, and to revenge. And the gun
belonged to American terrorism.
Jesse James was terrorist who killed without compassion. The record on
that is clear. Oh, he wasn't the mastermind of a movement like Osama bin
Laden (that honor in the Border Wars belonged to the hate killers Bill
Anderson and William Quantrill), but he certainly was of the ilk of killers
like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdelkarim Hussein Mohammed al-Nasser, and others
on the U.S. most wanted list of international terrorists. And the U.S.
government, on behalf of its terrorized civilian population in Kansas and
Missouri and the midwest, hunted Jesse and his brother Frank and the rest
of their gang with at least the relentless passion we now employ against
killer hiding in Pakistani provinces.
Author T.J. Stiles wrote a brilliant revisionist book a few years back
that tore the cover off the James myth (created largely in the 20th
century, long after his death at the hands of bounty hunter Robert Ford).
Jesse James : Last Rebel of the Civil War is a terrific page-turner, but
it's also terrifying to those who believe in the ancient values of the
American heartland, who go for the Disney view of the Civil War's
aftermath, western expansion, and the deadly growth pains of our nation.
It's surprising that Springsteen hasn't read it, and that musicians like
Seeger and Van Morrison (who also prominently covered the ballad) don't
have a clue as to the real story.
Under a greater "lost cause" movement led by Quantrill after the
Confederacy to punish pro-Union supporters in Missouri, James and his ilk
engaged in ritual torture, murder, scalping, dismemberment, attacks on
unarmed civilians, destruction of property, and general violent mayhem.
They also lined their own pockets. But James is remembered primarily
because of his canny use of the media of the day, mainly pro-Southern
newspaper publishers who created in him a Robin Hood figure for the lost
cause of the South. "In his political consciousness and close alliance with
a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with
his crimes," wrote Stiles. "Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern
terrorist."
There is nothing but religion and modern munitions technology to
seperate the Quantrill/James movement of the midwest from the al-Qaeda of
today. Yet, when Stiles' book reached the Amazon best-seller list a few
years ago, some reviewers attacked it as "anti-southern." In an instant,
you could see the distant, historic connection between the defeat of the
Confederacy and its violent aftermath and the successful "Southern
Strategy" of Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, which leveraged the chip on
the South's historic shoulder to provide stunning electoral success - and
reward the very political party that Southerners once believed had ravaged
their culture forever. Steve Gillard writes about this quite often, under
the banner of not letting the GOP off the hook (and I think, under the hope
that the strategy is on its last legs in 2006). He has another good post on
the traditional Reagan-based Stars and Bars strategem; here's a piece:
There are two Confederacys, one of history and one of imagination.
The one we deal with today is of imagination.
The one of rebel flags and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
the cult of the dead rebels.
It has little to do with reality.
The real Confederacy was closer to Biafra than Nazi Germany. A
poor, break away Republic destined to be crushed by the larger neighbor.
The reason you get people like Jim Webb playing cute and George
Allen praising the Confederacy has to do with how the Confederacy was
resurrected in the postwar period. It was about race and integration, not
history.
He is exactly correct. And it's really not such a Southern Strategy
any more - as Steve has said, it's a dissatisfied, disenfranchised whites
strategy nowadays, going far beyond the borders of the Southern states. But
it's showing its age and fraying at the edges as well, mainly because the
economic reality for so many middle class white people is so starkly
disadvantaged when compared to the wealth of those who actually run the
Republican Party. These days, the civil rights battles of the old South
make for good tourism in the new South. I've been the Birmingham and
Montgomery recently - civil rights history is bringing the tourists in.
Still, this love of Confederate myth - the glorious lost cause -
persists. A few years back, I was in Charleston on business and a friend
and I took a walking tour of the old part of the city. Fascinating and
beautiful. But in the old church downtown, there's a memorial to the
martyred sons of "the nation" - and it's ain't the United States they're
talking about. My friend was horrified, and vilified the local guide - who
calmly described the pre-Civil War Charleston as a city in a golden age
when African-American slaves had it pretty good. We passed on the Bobby Lee
statues in the gift shop and decided on a self-guided tour from that point on.
Bruce Springsteen should know better. This pining away for the
Confederate past and its post-war terrorist followers shouldn't make his
latest record - no matter how traditional the tune is. The hero myth should
die.
In Kearney, Missouri they still hold their Jesse James Festival every
year - paid for partly with municipal funds - and the official history of
the town on the Web still rails against the cruelty of "the Federals." A
group of citizens gives tours at the nonprofit Jesse James Farm Museum, and
raises money to preserve the hallowed ground.
Tourism, I guess - maybe someday there'll be a similar set-up in the
mountains of Afghanistan.
