February 2, 2006
Discovering the Real Jesse James: An Interview Posted by Allen Barra at 11:45 AM EST The writer T. J. Stiles’s 2002 book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (now a Vintage paperback, $16), took a truly fresh look at an American legend. It was the first book to place the outlaw’s life and legend in a modern context. Stiles was one of the consultants for the new PBS documentary American Experience: Jesse James, which airs nationwide this coming Monday, February 6. I spoke to him about what he’s learned about his extraordinary subject. Your book on Jesse James was a surprise success, and I say surprise because few would have thought there was any new approach to take, so much had been written over the years. What was particularly different about your perspective on him? There are two parts to my answer. First, I took Jesse James seriously as a historical figure. And in taking him seriously I found that he was actually more significant than most people, even well-informed outlaw buffs, ever realized. One of my favorite quotations is by the British historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote in The Making of the English Working Class that his mission was to rescue his subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” For historians, condescension is very attractive, because it seems inherently the most sophisticated position. In Jesse James’s case, this has led some scholars to conclude that the popular-culture myth was more significant than the flesh-and-blood man. I tried to examine the evidence with a clear eye, and I found that the reverse was true. He had a strong sense of mission on top of his obvious greed and violence, and he had a noteworthy impact on his times. The second part of the answer is that I removed Jesse James from the frontier, where we usually think of him, and placed him in an unexpected context: the Civil War and Reconstruction. On the wide spectrum of late-nineteenth-century violence in America, I found him to be closer to the Ku Klux Klan than to Billy the Kid (closer, though not the same). His story opens a window on deep conflicts in American history that still affect us to this day, the struggle over secession and slavery and the fights over emancipation and civil rights that followed. After a career as a Confederate guerrilla, James became an outlaw who was definitely interested in money, first and foremost, but what separated him from virtually every other criminal of his time was his attempt to portray himself in a political light, as both a martyr of and scourge to Radical Republicans. That role, with its overtones of terrorism, obviously speaks to the world we find ourselves in today. So the short answer is, I painted an unexpected portrait of an American icon—and instead of debunking him, I found him to be more important than most of us realized, as well as more relevant to our own time. Would it be fair to say that James became a folk hero largely because of his appeal to the unreconstructed South? Not entirely. There were actually two legends of Jesse James. One existed during his lifetime and was cultivated by the newspaper editor John Newman Edwards and James himself. The other arose very, very late in his life and drew its greatest strength far from his birthplace, through dime novels and ballads. The two legends shared some common traits. Jesse James was depicted as a good man driven outside the law by unjust forces larger than himself, a man whose cunning and skill with a gun outwitted the authorities time and again, who never robbed the average working man or woman but only corporations or the government. The first legend, the one that surrounded him during his lifetime, rested on his status as a Confederate hero in the face of radical Reconstruction. It brought him national attention, and without it the second legend never would have arisen. But Jesse James outlived his political role. When he returned to crime, in 1879, Reconstruction was over, and the Confederates had won. The second act in his bandit career, being devoid of politics, laid the foundation for the dime-novel Robin-Hood myth that is still the predominant image of Jesse James in American culture. Interestingly, his appeal during his lifetime was fairly specific to the border states, especially Missouri and Kentucky. The post-Civil War period in the border states was different from in the Deep South; the white population there was deeply divided. It was in that context that the legend of Jesse James flourished, as he battled local Unionists as well as federal authorities. When he moved to Nashville, in 1875, he felt the need to write letters to the local newspapers to explain his Confederate-hero status back in Missouri. When you read histories of the period, it sometimes seems that Jesse’s brother Frank and their partner Cole Younger were as prominent as Jesse. And Frank James and Cole Younger outlived Jesse by many years, even lending their names to a Wild West show. Yet today they are mere appendages to the Jesse James story. Why did this happen? Jesse James had two things going for him that his brother Frank and Cole Younger lacked: a flare for the dramatic and a high-profile death. In other respects they seem to have been equals. From what little evidence we have of the James-Younger gang’s internal deliberations, we can conclude that they were a small band of comrades in arms, with no operational commander who ruled the others. In addition, Frank and Cole both made statements in later years that show that they shared Jesse’s strong Confederate identity and loathing of Radical Republicans (at least during their outlaw years). But time and time again, Jesse James pushed himself forward, demanding public attention. He made himself the public face of the bushwhacker-bandits. He was the one who wrote letters to the press, who seems to have made dramatic pronouncements during robberies, who forged a particular alliance with the editor John Newman Edwards. When Edwards wrote a newspaper supplement on five of the outlaws, he devoted more than half of the 20 pages to Jesse. Frank was quieter and retreated from the outlaw life (or tried to) after the Northfield debacle in 1876. Jesse kept going and even announced himself by name at his last train robbery. And there’s no denying the incredible drama of his assassination, carried out by his last two gang members in league with the governor of Missouri. There legend cannot improve on the facts. Frank, on the other hand, lived quietly for three decades after his surrender and acquittal, and Cole Younger spent the same period in prison. In the public eye they faded out. Does the American Experience episode on James focus more on his life or on his legend? Or is one inseparable from the other? The film focuses on the flesh-and-blood Jesse James. It shows how much more brutal the real outlaw was than the legendary one, but it also makes clear that he was a product of his time and place, perhaps the most violent time and place in our history. But even the living Jesse was wrapped up in legend, and the film does a good job of sketching out the myths that surrounded him and how they related to his real life. It illustrates, for example, how he became a prisoner of the legend he and John Newman Edwards were creating for him, and turned into a man so hungry for attention that he couldn’t stop his string of high-profile robberies until he was killed. And it suggests how the later myth arose in an America tired of the hatreds of the Civil War, when the battle between populists and corporations had come to dominate the scene. The upcoming Jesse James film, with Brad Pitt, is made from a superb novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen. With luck it will be the best movie on James. There have been a couple of dozen movies about him. Do you have anything good to say about any of them? I do think the new movie has a good chance of being the best Jesse James film, and for precisely that reason. The question of realism is usually the one I get when it comes to James movies, and I don’t think it should even be asked. The movies have perpetuated an entire mythical universe that is its own thing, created with no desire to check it against the real world. It would be kind of strange to see a film version of James that had him killing unarmed people left and right in the Civil War, or that positioned the first bank robberies in the political turmoil of Missouri in 1866, or that showed Jesse as a media-savvy public figure writing letters and press releases. But do I have anything good to say about them? I did enjoy The Long Riders a great deal; I liked the way the two sets of brothers played off each other, even if they didn’t spend that much time together in actuality. And I’m fond of The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, in part because I like Robert Duvall so much, even as a crazy, over-the-top Jesse. But in terms of realism, none of them measures up.
|
