Then and now

Thursday, March 25, 2004
"Just what the world needs," I wrote a few years ago. "Another Jesse James book!"

And the irony was, my conclusion was that, Yes, it did. The book in question, Ted Yeatman's "Frank and Jesse James," brought new information and new insights to a subject of timeless (certainly deathless) interest and significance. (Like it or not, Jesse James is one of the two best-known Americans worldwide, the other being Mickey Mouse.) Whether the world needed it or not, a year or two ago it got still another "Jesse James." This time, however, one's conclusions are more mixed.

Warned that T. J. Stiles had gone "politically-correct," I avoided his much-praised tome till it turned up on a remaindered list. Curiosity seemed worth a couple of bucks.

For years the Bushwhacker Museum has merchandised Stiles's earlier "Jesse James," a readable, straightforward telling of the tale, cursory and well-illustrated, designed primarily for young people, and put out by a comparatively smalltime publisher.

Not content with that, Stiles went on to turn out an all-new, 500-page "Jesse James" for the biggest of bigtime New York publishers. Its "political correctness" has earned it predictable plaudits from the usual suspects. Anyone who fancies we aren't fighting a culture war (actually the old Civil War, that never ended, and that settled little) should read Stiles.

Bad-guy Jesse James, according to Stiles, like every other iniquity in American society from the beginning down to today, was entirely the fault of slavery.

The Civil War wasn't a quarrel among Americans over differently interpreting the Constitution and the nature of government. It was a Manichean struggle over slavery. Period. The antagonists were the angels and the devils, and Stiles's assures us he's on the side of the angels. Jesse James (to wit his subtitle, "Last Rebel of the Civil War") was a devil.

The sad part is, Stiles writes well, and there's much of value in his book. I suppose, in 500 pages, a worthy tidbit or two was bound to creep in. Like Yeatman, he manages to turn up new information, and to place the James story in a larger historical context. But "political correctness" spoils it all.

It isn't only Stiles's essential bias, his heavyhanded taking of sides in the culture war. It's all-pervasive. For instance he makes much of the James family's slaveowning. Ah, but there are no "blacks" in the book (much less the "N-word"); only "African Americans." This lately-coined term can't help distracting the reader when used, over and over, of a day in which it was unheard. (Even today it makes as little sense as to call the rest of us "European Americans." Indeed, Africa is a far more alien place to American blacks than Europe to most whites.) And, lest we fear he might not be sexually "p.c." too, he's at pains to generalize people as female. E.g.: "If a traveler were to arrive in St. Louis, she would think …

As Churchill disgustedly told Lady Astor, "In grammar, as in love, the male embraces the female!" Languages from time immemorial have generalized via the masculine pronoun. Deliberately to substitute the feminine is to outrage custom just to make a political point.

"Language with all its defects," as C. S. Lewis points out, "contains a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on." And, adds Jacques Barzun, "It is hardly plausible to think that tinkering with words will do anything to enhance respect for women among people who do not feel any."

A catalog of instances of Stiles's cultural bias would overflow this newspaper. As a lone example: Adelbert Ames was the Reconstruction ("Carpetbagger") governor of Mississippi, who resigned under fire and fled to his family home in Northfield, Minn. His would-be tie to the Northfield bank seemingly was the James gang's reason for targeting it.

To Stiles, Ames is a hero, a New England "liberal" (as we'd now put it), an intellectual, a great soldier, a champion of good government and "equality" during his Southern tenure, as well as the son-in-law of a better-known worthy of that ilk, Benjamin "Beast" Butler.

Before "p.c." a leading authority on Reconstruction was Claud Bowers' "The Tragic Era" (1929). And the grim picture it paints of the post-Civil War South was confirmed years after by "The Angry Scar," the work of the impeccably-liberal Hodding Carter.

To Bowers, Ames was a "soldier of fortune," a dullard and a coward in the bargain, who as Mississippi military governor presided over riots of violence and corruption.

"Whatever may have been the intent of this deadly dull army officer, he lacked the courage and capacity to cope with the criminals around him. His own election had drawn the color line; blacks … controlled the Legislature, one of the most grotesque bodies that ever assembled. Nearly 40 former slaves, forced to make their mark, (were) enacting laws in the spirit of a lark."

Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever refuted Bowers and his school. The fashion among today's savants, such as Stiles, is simply to behave as if they never wrote.

Among the gems lost amid Stiles's dross are tantalizing allusions to our part of Missouri. He cites Clark Griffith, the baseball celebrity, a Vernon County native: "When I was growing up there was no such thing as money. The medium of exchange was apple butter" (!)

And who would have imagined that letters from "conservatives in Vernon County" were to be found among the papers of Pres. Andrew Johnson? They "castigated the fanatical Radical majority in Congress." "All attempts to elevate (the black man) to the level of the white man, by making him politically and socially his equal, we will resist," wrote pioneer merchant and landowner Robert W. McNeil, one of Nevada's most eminent and respected men.

Some will take the line that this is something for Nevadans to be ashamed of, and to say as little about as possible. But this is to commit the same historical error as Stiles, that's his big flaw. He proceeds wholly from the modern "liberal" cultural position (called "Radical" in Jesse James's day), and matter-of-factly projects it back on the world of 150 years ago.

He finds it surprising, not to say scandalous, that most whites of that time might actually have been hesitant to accept, instantly, as political and even social equals millions of largely ignorant, unprepared people just released, by murderous force, from centuries of bondage.

An honest disagreement over interpreting the Constitution and the nature of government? Don't make T.J. Stiles laugh! It was about slavery, slavery, slavery! And any who resisted this victor's interpretation was (is) a blackhearted traitor and, worse, a "racist."

And of course high on the list was Jesse James. Who despite many a T.J. Stiles remains, and likely long will remain, a figure of attractive fascination, even a folk-hero.