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.