For a long time, historians have concerned themselves with separating fact from fiction. In the case of mythical figures, however, the claim to have discovered the “truth” about one of them is a little preposterous. As Stephen Tatum points out in his book, it would be better to take all the interpretations of the figure and, instead of discarding those that seem unlikely, analyze them all to discover the historical context of the time periods that believed them. Billy the Kid is one such legendary figure, as the record of his life is filled with question marks and blanks. The facts of Billy the Kid’s life story are hazy, and to some extent, we can never know for sure what is true, so, beyond rudimentary information gathering, time would better be spent analyzing the how and the why of the myth.

Legendary Americans, by their nature, have lives that are difficult to pin down. Various facts about their lives can be determined to be probably true, and certain stories can be interpreted as almost certainly not true, but there is no way of knowing for sure. This ambiguity holds true for other historical figures as well, but the degree of certainty historians can attain for a figure like George H. W. Bush is well beyond that of someone like Billy the Kid.

The definition of the Kid depends on the reliability of the sources used. A combination of solid source materials can lead historians to approach the so called ‘real’ Billy the Kid, but they will never be able to actually discover him. After a while, the search for the truth yields diminishing returns, and historians will have come as close as they are ever going to get to knowing who Billy the Kid was in his own time. Even the sources from the period, such as the newspaper accounts of his crimes, are suspect, and the “official” book that Pat Garrett authorized was so sensationalized that it “ensured the Kid’s life after death in legend” (Tatum 184). Despite the uncertainty created by this, however, historians can establish certain events of the Kid’s life as true. The Kid’s death, for instance, took place in Fort Sumner in Pete Maxwell’s house (Utley). The fringe movement that supports the theory that he lived in hiding until 1937 is holding on to false hopes, but their tenacious grasp gives some insight into the time period they come from (Paige). Ironically, deaths usually cause the most controversy in legendary figures, but Billy the Kid’s is rather clear cut compared to the rest of his life, particularly his alleged crimes.

Billy the Kid’s murder count is an example of a fact that is difficult to pinpoint and almost certainly not worth the effort. The colloquial legend is that the Kid killed a man for every year of his life, for a grand total of 21 men (Paige). This number varies, depending on who is doing the telling, from 4 to 40 (Paige). Looking at it objectively, however, the exact number seems unnecessary. Reliable sources tell us that Billy the Kid killed at least one man, and general historical consensus says that he had almost no effect on the state of New Mexico in terms of politics, so what difference does it make whether he killed 4, 14, or 40 men? We would be better off determining what effects the legend of the Kid had, since we can actually see the legend as it currently exists.

Scholars must be careful, as Tatum points out, not to make the same mistakes with the legend that they made with the Kid’s life. The legend by itself is no more useful that the number of men the Kid killed. It needs to be analyzed in a historical context to yield anything worth knowing, and to achieve an even more complete picture, the analyzer ought to include his own study in the equation (Tatum 180). As he says, “the interpreter of the Kid is not subservient to any data, but is rather a participant in the creation of his evidence” (176). Historians often count themselves as objective observers, as people who peruse the record and assemble a credible narrative from their findings. Tatum says that while they do this, they are in fact creating more history, since future historians will look back and analyze their actions, and they should take this into account.

Some opponents might say that facts are the basis of history, and to downplay them would undermine historical scholarship itself. This is true, to some extent, since a complete disregard for facts would lead to everyone floating in the middle of conjecture-land. At the same time, however, too much focus on hard details leads to drifting in the same place. What makes some historians sure that 4 is the proper number of killings to credit the Kid with? The conjecture that the recorded murders were the only ones the Kid committed. They cannot prove this, however, considering the events took place over one hundred years ago, and this guesswork adds nothing of interest to the conversation about the Kid. Therefore, it seems more useful to learn the rudimentary facts and spend time on more tangible things, such as his legend.

This legend remains, but the facts have long since evaporated. What’s left is only the interpretation of fact; the search for the real Billy the Kid is a fruitless struggle to discover the truth behind a legend that ultimately falls short of its goal. The pursuit of separating fact from fiction, while interesting, misses the larger issue of determining why certain time periods accept one version of events over others. So, to answer the question of what is true about Legendary Americans versus what is false, it isn’t really clear. Some things appear more factual than others, and some so much so that they should be taken as truth, but to distinguish between myth and reality ignores the fact that the two are intertwined, and the effort to shuck the myth from the history silences all those who believed the legend. Once we move on from such endeavors, we can finally begin to learn from our past.

Sources:

Page, Jake. “Was Billy the Kid a Superhero–or a Superscoundrel?” Smithsonian Feb. 1991: 137-49. Link.

Tatum, Stephen. Inventing Billy the Kid. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1982. Print.

Utley, Robert. “Billy the Kid Country.” American Heritage 42.2 (1991): 65-72. Link.

Though Andrew Jackson was viewed as both a man of the people and “King Andrew,” it seems that he was a man who took mandates from the people and enacted them with his authoritative ruling style and aggressive political behavior, much like a king might.

Looking at his response to crises such as the nullification situation, it seems as though Jackson knew what he wanted and would do anything necessary to achieve those goals. When South Carolina threatened to cancel the tariffs he was imposing, he swiftly let them know his displeasure and even ordered weapons to the state, in case he needed to fight the decision with force (Curtis 148). He attempted to solve the problem within the constraints of the American government through the several speeches, but he made it clear that he had no aversion to violence by introducing the Force Bill (Curtis 151). To be fair, he went through all this military posturing because he felt compelled to protect the interests of the majority, but it still displays his tendency to react harshly and perhaps even outside his jurisdiction to maintain his beliefs.

He did not care much what others thought of his actions, especially those inside his own party. Apparently, in pursuing his goals, he often neglected the wants of his own party and did not compromise as much as they would have liked (Wiley 204). This behavior indicates a tendency to rule rather than govern. Ruling indicates that there was not much room for argument or convincing, while governing suggests that he took all the side into consideration and tried to appease them all. Then there was the fact of the Indian removal. Whatever the prevailing opinions of the day, a true man of the people wouldn’t displace entire populations from their homelands. This is just another example of Jackson’s preoccupation with “majority rule,” something well established in the Constitution but imperfect in the world of public policy.

In a sense, Jackson was a man who took orders from the people and the Constitution, and then he enacted them without regard for dissent. Wiley notes that his critics said both grudgingly and critically, that “Jackson conquers everything” (206). Such a fierce spirit could have been dangerous in the White House, and indeed some say that his presidency was a complete mess, but in the end Jackson fought for the majority through whatever means necessary.

This week I thought I’d throw out some ideas for questions.

1. Billy the Kid filled a need in society every time his story became popular, sometimes filling more than one at once. What needs would he fill today? What needs do we even have today?

This question deals with our intended theme of needs in society. Along with looking at the history of Billy the Kid, it approaches the idea of legendaryness in modern times. Some of the needs I think we have in society are the need to stay powerful in a changing global climate and the need to reaffirm our identity after 9/11. I could see the Kid’s relationship with the Mexicans coming into play, but other than that I’m not sure how useful the Kid is in the present. Thinking about these needs might help the class pick out which figures are in the process of being canonized today, and why. We could also use it to transition to the question of whether we need legendary figures.

2. The Kid plays a role as an archive of the social needs of the past. How else might we have learned this information? What else causes him to be relevant to generation after generation?

This one looks to answer two of the goals in the class, which were “what can we learn by studying legendary Americans?” and “do we need to study legendary Americans?” We can learn information propagation techniques and social values as well the needs we discussed before. As for the second of those two questions, I think we need to study them in a manner that doesn’t continue the myths. They provide a very easy window into the past, allowing historians to find the proper context to interpret events through. However, if we eliminate them like a lot of the class wants to do, how will future historians get this information?

3. As his story evolved over time, Billy the Kid has oscillated between good and bad. How is this possible? What defines and what causes these shifts?

This question is designed to address the social construct of what we call good and evil. The shifts are possible because of changing social customs: we might even be able to draw some parallels back to The Honor Code. People’s views at the present define whether or not there was ever a “shift”. A society that views him as good will see a shift from bad to good around the 1930s. A society that sees him as bad will see a shift at the same time, but swinging the other way.

These could use a little more development, but I think they’re a good start.

As a nation, America has developed to the point where debunking legendary figures will not cause any real damage, and doing so would help the country prepare for the future.

Knocking myths off of their perches would cause some outrage at first, but there are not serious consequences to it. The motivations of Parson Weems’ storytelling are obsolete: America no longer needs myths to hold itself together; it has gained enough real history over time. The other cost would be depriving children of role models. The fear it, as Bruce Cole put it, “unless we have them, we don’t have anything” (Wineburg 2). The country’s colorful past, however, has provided other, factual characters to take the place of the myths that guided children in the past. Helen Keller, as Loewen argues, is many more times remarkable than people recognize, for her true achievements have been left out of the retelling of her story (10). Not only is she representative of perseverance and determination, but she also campaigned for her beliefs in an era when they were wildly unpopular. Teachers and authors can fill the void of role models without resorting to “heroification” by describing the remarkable aspects of a figure along with their shortcomings, and in the process they can explain the importance of perspective on history.

Moving away from legendary figures has several benefits, such as liberating the country from the constraints of long dead people and creating a more balanced outlook on the world in our youth. Propagating one-sided, continuously positive messages about American history and American heroes only handicaps students into later viewing the world in black and white. In reality, there will never be someone as infallible, wise, and virtuous as the mythical George Washington, and it is not really healthy for kids to think there is. As it is now, there is tremendous resistance to alter anything he or the rest of the Founding Fathers created, despite him being dead for several hundred years. Also, dismantling the canon of legendary figures would allow for more diverse heroes than we have now. As Frisch found in his unofficial study, people of all ages have a depressingly narrow set of famous people from before the Civil War, limited almost entirely to a set of twenty or so politicians and military figures (1138). By seeing fame as more than resulting from just political accomplishments, a wider variety of youth could find inspiration in their heroes.

With that said, history teachers should not be in charge of continuing legends in the classroom. They have the unique opportunity to teach the truth about the past, so it is important that they take advantage of it. By presenting a sterilized view of American history, teachers create students with unrealistic expectations of the country and of the world. They “keep students in intellectual immaturity” (Loewen 25). As a kid, I could remember wondering where the Roosevelts and the Edisons were today, great men with many successes and few mistakes did not seem to exist. All in all, dropping our unrealistic notions of what a person should be might encourage people to take a realistic approach to solving the problems at hand, leading to faster, more workable solutions.

This week I read the second half of Inventing Billy the Kid. Tatum talks about the Kid’s development from 1950 to 1980, and then concludes with some observations about the whole legend.

From 1955 to 1961, the Kid went from a vaguely sympathetic character to a full on tragic hero. He becomes a figure trapped by his time, “betrayed by himself and society; [and the] society. . .is betrayed by itself and the individual” (128). Tatum talks about The Left Handed Gun for a bit in this chapter, calling the Kid a “martyred Jesus-figure” and describing the film as a piece that scrapped the carefully cultivated idea of the self within society (131). Alienation played a new role in the Kid’s life, and many of the crimes he committed were paradoxically good and evil at the same time: they achieved worthy goals through repulsive means. One thing that wasn’t very clear in the chapter was why this shift happened. What need did Billy the Kid fill in this time period? Tatum suggests that after witnessing the horrible weaponry, economic depression, and the complete polarization of the Cold War, people adopted a pessimistic outlook, but this doesn’t fully explain it to me. Why would people popularize a bandit who was doomed by his own society?

In the 60s and 70s, the story of the Kid fleshes out the tragic genre by becoming enveloped in irony. Movies like Dirty Little Billy and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid had the Kid play an integral part in his own downfall. Tatum suggests a few reasons why this change happened. For one, people may have just wanted a better Billy the Kid story, and since most of the other angles had been covered, this was one of the few that remained historically viable (162). The story is still deeply unhappy though, perhaps appealing to the sense of sorrow and anger people felt seeing Vietnam and Watergate happening. The new generations that would be watching this might also see the irony as a way of coping with the messed up world they were living in.

Since this book was written in 1982, it obviously does not address modern interpretations of Billy the Kid. It might be good to ask the class what they think of the Kid and where they got those ideas from. We could then ask what needs these ideas filled, and, if people seem relatively apathetic about the whole thing, if it’s time to forget the whole myth.

The conclusion might is a good candidate for a reading, since it summarizes a lot of the book and makes several good points about the Kid’s malleability in the span of about 30 pages.

In the past half-century Elvis has become one of the most revered icons in the world. People, in their devotion to the man, end up attributing all sorts of their own prejudices and beliefs to him, especially on the point of race. He rose to fame by combining black music with white sensibilities, something that people on both sides of the race divide have noticed. The Elvis in Alice Walker’s story seemed remarkably aware of just how much he took from African American music and how much he owed them, but history suggests that this is a little exaggerated.

There are several different interpretations of the story. Some people, such as Bertrand, view the story as the tale of a swindle, or “modern-day trickster tale” as well as “a metaphor for the dominant culture” (73). I agree with the dominant culture aspect, but the story reads like a tragedy to me. The musician realizes how much he owes African Americans, and he attempts to repay it in all sorts of unnecessary and lavish gifts to the woman who made him famous. By the time he gave her his first meaningful gift, the chance to since her own song on national television, society no longer cared about who created it; they just loved Elvis. Through all this, the Elvis in the story clearly cares about how he became famous, and he seeks to make amends for his apparent theft. This fits with what many other authors say about him, but history was not quite as extreme.

Elvis stated that he owed his success to black musicians who came before him. He said in an interview that he could not sing rock and roll as well as blacks could (Bertrand 76). In his later years, he spent a lot of time asking why he had become famous and how he had gotten where he was, so the self-reflection that Walker’s Elvis displays is not out of place (Rosenbaum 63). It is unlikely, however, that he kept in contact with the songwriters that wrote his biggest hits, and even less likely that he would maintain a relationship like the one he maintains with Gracie May. He also moved away from his rock and roll over the course of his career, eventually settling on big ballads and a Las Vegas show (Rosenbaum 57). Therefore, though he owed his rise to fame to black musicians, he ended up making a good portion of his fortune on a different style entirely.

The overarching feeling Elvis has towards blacks in the story is pity: pity that he can do the exact same thing as them and yet become millions of times wealthier. The real Elvis, while admitting to borrowing from blacks, never seemed to display this overwhelming pathos. He certainly was not a racist or elitist as history has made him appear, but his overall attitude was one of quiet ambivalence.

In the next chapter of the book, Tatum follows the Kid’s legend in the time of gangsters and depression and war, from 1925 to 1950. In short, the Kid had a massive spike in popularity due to disillusionment with the times and rapidly changing culture.

The shift in perceptions of the Kid originated with an essay published by Harvey Fergusson in 1925 (85). Fergusson analyzed the Kid’s actions in the frontier society, not in an urban setting as previous writers had. He found that the Kid was not really so bad compared to his time, and almost an angel compared to the people of the present. He portrayed him a positive light, reshaping everything about the Kid’s legend in a positive light. The myth had cooled off in people’s memories by this point, but new social factors made him relevant once again. The corruption scandals of Harding’s administration and the obvious failure of Prohibition shook people’s faith in government (88). This new perspective led people to embrace the Kid as someone who lived in a time of corruption and ambiguity of the law rather than the hard criminal of the past. It also helped that Prohibition made many people “outlaws” in their own rights. This made them more sympathetic towards the Kid, as they understood how it felt to be pushed outside the limits of the law but still be within social boundaries. Tatum also suggests that the Kid became popular again because he wasn’t like the current gangsters (91). The criminals of the time were gunning each other down in ambushes and massacres, and they were behaving without honor. Authors and screenwriters of the time took the inklings of virtue that appeared in the earlier part of the century and whipped them up into a portrait of a brave, honorable man (91). They also had the Kid ridding the land of its evil elements, often by motivating his killings with revenge or desire for justice (101). In the end, the Kid became a tragic figure that the people of the time related to.

Billy the Kid also filled some needs in this time period. He was a manifestation of American’s desire to get back to a simpler time (108). People trapped in the loose morals of the roaring twenties or the economic hardships of the thirties looked back on the time of the Kid with a manufactured nostalgia. He also reaffirmed the American dream. He was a rags to riches story, coming from a poor family, but more importantly, he was killed as a result of his crimes: the justice system prevailed. Finally, as I already discussed, he symbolized people’s distrust of the justice system. This time period showed much more sympathy for the Kid than before; he became a tragic hero, forced outside the law and then brought down by fate.

Authors effected all these transformations by picking and choosing elements of the story that fit their needs. Once they had an image of the Kid in mind, they silenced all the conflicting facts until he became what they intended. It would be interesting to read some of the formative texts: Hough’s articles from ~1903 or Barn’s Saga of Billy the Kid. Written strictly for entertainment and monetary purposes, I think these still count as civic texts because of the way they tried to influence the public’s opinion about the Kid, and by extension, everything the Kid represented.

I hope to finish the book for next week and see how Tatum ties everything together.

Stephen, Tatum. Inventing Billy the Kid. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1982. Print.

This week I read half of Stephen Tatum’s Inventing Billy the Kid. In the book, he describes how Billy the Kid was perceived at different times and why. In the chapters I read, he discusses the initial formation of the legend, and then he tracks it up until 1950 or so. There are a lot of good points, but overall he says that Billy the Kid lasts so long because he is always able to fill a need of the population at the time.

The first era Tatum talks about is the period from 1881-1925. At the time, people were happy to see the Kid dead. Newspapers and dime novelists of the time made it into “the end of lawlessness” in the frontier (39). He was not popular, mostly because people were tired of the killings and rustling that went on For the first few years after his death, the majority of the Kid’s appearances were in classical romances, not as the hero as one might expect, but as the villain. This is the origin of his legendary aim and horse riding skills: authors needed him to be extremely adept and dangerous to make the final confrontation with the hero more dramatic (48). These dime novelists did not make him the hero because they did not know how to reconcile his violence and lawlessness with the values that make a hero popular (48). Eventually, however, during the early 1900s, authors began to add some inklings of virtue. They made the people he killed evil, so he was almost doing a service to society; they focused on his friendships and his generosity, to make him less like a monster, and they gave him a makeover, scrapping the hellspawn image of previous writers for a more human and even handsome appearance (51). These observations back up the Rivera article I read last week. They agree that the Kid was demonized by writers immediately after his death, and they both say that writers used him to disparage certain groups: they made him look like an Indian, or they had him associate with and act like Mexicans, or they said he was born in Ireland.

The reason he stayed in their memory at all, however, was that things were moving fast at the time, and people wanted order (58). McKinley and Garfield were assassinated, the US got involved in two different wars, and Congress was passing all sorts of radical legislation like Prohibition. Billy the Kid represented the unrestrained individual, and Garrett was the community. Tatum makes the point by shooting down the Kid, Pat Garrett actually strengthened the social contract (65). Garrett’s victory over the Kid symbolized that civilization would conquer the wildness of the continent, and this message of security was what people at the time needed to hear.

continued in second post

The readings this week did a good job of explaining how criminals like the Billy the Kid became popular at the time. I think it’s safe to say that the Kid fits into the social bandit mold that White describes. He clearly benefited from the confused social structures of the time, and he has the three groups of support that define such social bandits. We will have to look into what makes the Kid different than the other gangs White talks about, and why he in particular became as famous as he did.

This week I found a short journal article called “Miguel Antonio Otero II, Billy the Kid’s Body, and the Fight for New Mexican Manhood” by John-Michael Rivera. Otero was the only Mexican American man to govern New Mexico, and he wrote a biography of Billy the Kid that sought to challenge the prevailing discriminations against Mexicans at the time (48).

As the frontier closed in 1893, many whites made marginalizing the new American citizens from the Southwest, mostly Mexican and Native Americans, a priority. One way they did this was by taking Billy the Kid and applying many of his attributes to the Mexicans he sometimes rode with (51). Rivera implies that for the decades after the Kid’s death, he was actually portrayed in a negative light by dime novelists across the country. On author, named Emerson Hough, said that Pat Garrett’s killing of the Kid showed that “the Anglo-Saxon civilization was destined to overrun this half-Spanish civilization” (51). Within these novels, writers would make the Kid indistinguishable from Mexicans, and readers across America came to associate them with the Kid’s murderous, barbaric ways. These were all white authors, of course, and Otero felt that the lack of literature from the other point of view was leaving Mexicans silenced forever.

After discovering this, Siringo’s book about Billy the Kid in 1920 seems like an attempt to rescue him from a terrible reputation. While it seemed straightforward to me, at the time of publication it may have been a revolutionary insight into a facet of the Kid’s personality the public had not yet seen. It provides some motivation for him to release a book about a criminal that died thirty years prior.

Otero himself tried to spin the Kid the other way, making him out to be a tragic hero who fought for Mexicans’ land. Billy the Kid then became a battleground of sorts, with each side trying to appropriate him for their own ends (55). As we’ve seen before, legendary Americans become legendary partly based on their ability to be appropriated for many different causes, but we’ve never seen two sides trying to use one at the same time. Rivera argues that Otero succeeded in redefining New Mexican manhood to be more accepting of Mexicans, at least a little, with his biography.

Also, a book called “Inventing Billy the Kid” by Stephen Tatum is apparently a great resource that tracks the Kid’s transformations over time, so I want to check that out for next week.

Rivera, John-Michael. “Miguel Antonio Otero II, Billy the Kid’s Body, and the Fight for New Mexican Manhood.” Western American Literature 35.1 (2000): 47-57. Print.

Since the issues of states’ rights and autonomy had been settled for the most part by the Civil War, the government was expanding. The authorities in many parts of new territories were corrupt and self-serving. Outlaws of the time show that the country was in turmoil as a new police force struggled for legitimacy in a lawless environment, and the expanding government was unpopular in many areas.

In the late 19th century, the people of the West were still struggling to accept the resident authorities. Before that time, it was up to each man to protect his own property, but the arriving powers took it upon themselves to establish order. The outlaws of the time, or at least the ones that live on in current memory, were what James White calls social bandits (387). These were men pushed into the fringes of society by the letter of the law, not the spirit of the community (White 389). He argues that these people gained the support of the community mostly because they still embodied the values of the area, such as masculinity and bravery (White 403). This contrast between law and practice shows that the populace did not really consent to the expanding government. As bad as it seemed during the roving gang period of the 1880s and 90s, the unhappiness would manifest itself even more clearly in the Depression era bandits.

Criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde were the next hurdle governments had to clear in establishing control in their areas. These characters were immensely popular among the general population for a variety of reasons: they were free to do as they liked; they stole from “deserving targets” like banks (Gorn 171-172). The ability of people to look past the horrific violence of Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, and support them, shows how much their defiance meant (Cott 223). The victory over such criminals was not just about restoring order, it was “part of a larger vision of a new centralized state” (Gorn 168). All these criminals were dead by 1935, however.

Perhaps the resistance to federal authority came from the natural retaliation against changes to the status quo, but it also may have been a sign of deep rooted unhappiness with the government. As said before, consent is a major issue in American society. In a way, governments ensured the complicity of the people by removing those who refused to play by the rules.