Legend has it that Pretty Boy Floyd, and to a lesser extent Jesse James were Robin Hood figures, that is they stole from rich banks, or railroad companies, or what have you, and distributed their booty to the poor. Floyd did this by tearing up unrecorded mortages. And, even more hard to believe, he would buy groceries and presents for the poor at Christmastime. The locals were so grateful they supposedly hid him from the law.
Similarly The Ballad of Jesse James states:
And he took from the richer
And he gave that to the poorer
He’d a hand and a heart and a brain
Is there any evidence beside myth and legend that any of this occured, even once? None of the books cite even one verifiable source. Just myths. And if not, why is it accepted as fact? And had Floyd really torn up unrecorded mortgages would this have done any good? I mean, wouldn’t they just draw up new mortgages?
From the Woody Guthrie song “Pretty Boy Floyd”:
*Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.*
That doesn’t refer to any gifts to the poor; just contrasts his robberies of rich banks to what they were doing to the common people of the area.
Well, if you consider Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall as a robber, they were known to give jobs and Christmas turkeys to the poor in NYC, one of the reasons why Tammany was a power in the city for almost 150 years.
The James-Younger gang was the last guerrilla unit of the Confederate States of America; they started as an irregular unit in Missouri, a state which was rather heavily divided between Rebel and Yankee sympathizers. After fighting fellow Missourians for a few years, they apparently decided to stick it to the Man in the form of the new Union; the target of their famous (in Northfield) failed raid in Northfield, MN was chosen at least partly by political considerations and was certainly outside their normal operating range. Only rarely did they target “civilians”, and there are reports of them checking the hands of their victims the few times they robbed train passengers directly (instead of just the safe) in order to not steal from laborers. At very least, the founder of the Kansas City Times, John Newman Edwards, who had served in the Confederate army, openly glorified them and may have created much of the legend surrounding the gang’s activity.
Thus it makes perfect sense for southerners to feel sympathetic to them; poor northern farmers likely would as well.
The root of the story in Floyd’s case would be that he grew up in rural Oklahoma, and when things got too hot he returned there to hide out. He basically bribed the farmers around the area to keep their mouths shut. The poor farm families weren’t terribly disposed to cooperate with the cops in the first place, and the money undoubtedly came in handy. Floyd’s legend grew in the telling after that.
I grew up listening to Woody Guthrie and love his work, but he didn’t do the world any great favors in making Pretty Boy Floyd into a folk hero. Guthrie claimed that Floyd was stealing money from banks on behalf of people in Oklahoma who’d lost their homes during the depression and “redistributing” the money back to the community. He also wrote that Floyd was forced to go on the run after a rogue cop “insulted” his wife. None of that is true. Floyd was a violent criminal accused of murdering a half dozen policemen/FBI agents, and his string of bank robberies was just about funding his gang’s criminal ventures.
The legend of Jesse James being a Robin Hood type character is also a complete fabrication.
Many Depression era gangsters were admired not because they gave to the poor, but because they were poor and robbed banks, who were seen as rich and were foreclosing on people who couldn’t pay their mortgages.
In circumstances like that, it is hard to avoid schadenfreude when someone else is seen as Sticking It to the Man. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense - Bonnie and Clyde robbed mostly places like lunch counters and local stores, and stole cars owned by local people.
I think at least one gangster of the time - Pretty Boy Floyd, IIRC, but I have no cite - would make a show of burning mortgage records when he robbed a bank, so no one would have a record to foreclose on. And Dillinger remarked once that 'I have robbed none but moneyed men". It was a lie - his first stretch was served when he robbed a grocery store owner for the $18 in the till.
It was the Depression. People wanted heroes, and it was easier to glamorize the life of an outlaw and pretend it was all exciting and beautiful molls and plenty of money. The reality was mostly driving around on dusty two lane roads looking for another store to rob because you needed the money for gas.
Goes with the territory for balladeers. I think Guthrie stretched a good bit more than Dylan did for “Hurricane”, but possibly less than he did for “Joey” on the same album, which was utterly ludicrous - Joey Gallo was a vicious Mafia thug, even if he did read Camus and write poetry.
Nobody wants to hear a folk song about Melvin Purvis.
If there is any real person behind the Robin Hood myth, that person being a Robin Hood type character is also (almost certainly) a complete fabrication. There is something romantic about the rogue living outside the rules, sticking it to The Man and standing up for the little guy. It seems like a natural folklore trope. See also: pirates.
There was supposedly some element of Robin Hood-style redistribution of wealth to poor ghettoized blacks by Andre Stander and/or “The Stander Gang” in the Republic of South Africa in the late 1970’s and early '80’s – or at least such was suggested by the biopic – but I have no idea how accurate the film was on that score. The Wiki article simply doesn’t address this aspect of Stander’s activities.
Any South African Dopers care to elaborate on the Stander case?