Cathedral Round-Up: The Forgotten History of Progressive Eugenics

David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford U

The first president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, was an ardent eugenecist. In 1910, he gave a speech at Harvard University titled The Blood of the Nations. The Crimson glowingly reported:

President David Starr Jordan, of Leland Stanford, Jr., University, will lecture on “The Blood of the Nations” in the Living Room of the Union next Tuesday evening at 8 o’clock. The lecture will be open only to members of the Union.

After receiving the degree of Master of Science at Cornell in 1872, President Jordan has held chairs in various collegiate institutions. In 1885 he became president of Indiana University, which position he held until assuming his present office in 1891.

President Jordan is one of the leading biologists and scientists of the country and his interest in everything that is progressive and humanitarian stamps him as one of the leaders in modern thought. He is prominently connected with the International Peace Movement. He was the founder and is the first president of Leland Stanford, Jr., University. His great success is shown by the fact that today that university is the leading educational institution of the West.

If you need any more proof of Jordan’s good progressive standing, the book version of his speech–The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit–was published in 1902 in Boston by the American Unitarian Association. It is a short book and you may find it useful to read it before continuing, but I will quote briefly for those who don’t:

In this paper I shall set forth two propositions: … The blood of a nation determines its history… The History of a nation determines its blood. …

“Send forth the best ye breed.” This is Kipling’s cynical advice to a nation which happily can never follow it. But could it be accepted literally and completely, the nation would in time breed only second-rate men. …

This word “progress” is, however, used with a double meaning, including the advancement of civilization as well as race improvement.

Or as Wikipedia put it:

Jordan promoted the concept of improving human genetics, through removal from the breeding pool of those deemed unworthy to reproduce,^[17] in his series of publications titled The Blood of the Nation. He then chaired the first Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeder’s Association, from which the California program of forced deportation and sterilization emerged.^[18] Jordan then went on to help found the Human Betterment Foundation as a trustee. The Human Betterment Foundation published “Sterilization for Human Betterment,” a text which formed a cornerstone of the Nazi eugenics program. The latter grew to involve not just forced sterilization but also killing, often via gas; this in turn inspired the Nazi genocide programs.

Jordan made a eugenics-based argument against warfare, contending that war was detrimental to the human species because it removed the strongest men from the gene pool. Jordan was president of the World Peace Foundation from 1910 to 1914 and president of the World Peace Conference in 1915, and opposed U.S. involvement in World War I.^[4]

Jordan also served as an expert witness in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. Today, people tend to think of the trial as spawned by “creationists” who opposed the teaching of scientific concepts on religious grounds–which indeed they did–but they also opposed it because they opposed eugenics. William Jennings Bryan, of the “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” populist frame, was lead counsel for the prosecution and an anti-eugenics activist, with special concern for the Nietzschian, might-makes-right version becoming popular in Germany post WWI.

But this was still before the discovery of Nazi gas chambers, and eugenics was therefore still the darling of progressive minds. As the Foundation for Economic Education puts it:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ordinary Americans may generally have been in the grips of ethnic prejudice of one sort or another. The Progressives of that time were not, however, ordinary men, and they knew it. Like their successors today, they dominated America’s universities. With some justification, they thought of themselves as an intellectual elite; and, with rare exceptions, they enthusiastically embraced eugenics and racial theory. …

Wilson, our first professorial president, was a case in point. He was the very model of a modern Progressive, and he was recognized as such. He prided himself on having pioneered the new science of rational administration, and he shared the conviction, dominant among his brethren, that African-Americans were racially inferior to whites.

With the dictates of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement in mind, in 1907, he campaigned in Indiana for the compulsory sterilization of criminals and the mentally retarded; and in 1911, while governor of New Jersey, he proudly signed into law just such a bill.

Woodrow Wilson also quite famously believed in the “self-determination of nations”–that is, the right of individual ethnic groups to democratically rule over their own countries–and was instrumental in founding the League of Nations. The ideas that different groups of people have their own biological characteristics which lead to the development of their own particular cultures and societies, that they have their own particular interests, and that they are the ones best positioned to pursue their own interests, are not incompatible and find expression in Wilson’s policies.

To return to David Starr Jordan, he feared that war and other violence had stolen the finest of Europe’s men, rendering them unable to contribute to the current generation:

Other influences which destroyed the best were social repression, religious intolerance, and the intolerance of irreligion and unscience. It was the atheist mob of Paris which destroyed Lavoisier, with the sneer that the new republic of reason had no use for savants. The old conservatism burned the heretic at the stake, banished the Huguenot, destroyed the lover of freedom, silenced the agitator. Its intolerance gave Cuvier and Agasiz to Switzerland, sent the Le Contes to America, the Jouberts to Holland, and furnished the backbone of the fierce democracy of the Transvaal.

While not all agitators are sane, and not all heretics right-minded, yet no nation can spare from its numbers those men who think for themselves and those who act for themselves. It cannot afford to drive away or destroy those who are filled with religious zeal, nor those whose religious zeal takes a form not approved by tradition nor by consent of the masses. All movements toward social and religious reform are signs of individual initiative and individual force. The country which stamps out individuality will soon live in the mass alone.

Leland Stanford, Sr. shaking hands (on the left) following the driving of the golden spike and completion of the first trans-continental railroad

You may be wondering what sort of man was Leland Stanford, Sr., to appoint a eugenicist to lead the university named for his deceased son. The elder Stanford was a colorful character–railroad tycoon, robber baron, philanthropist, driver of the “golden spike” that completed the trans-continental railroad. In today’s dollars, his net worth in the late 1800s was well over a billion; about a billion of this was donated to the university, for, as Leland told his wife, “The children of California shall be our children.”^[2]

Stanford was founded as a tuition-free, coeducational institution with no (formal) restrictions on race; the founding class included 12 international students, largely from Canada and Japan. In keeping with his vision of a university that served all of California’s children, not just the wealthy, Stanford’s first class included 147 “special” or probationary students (25% of the total.) The program was aimed at older, working students who had not had the opportunity to attend quality highschools and had not met the college’s minimum entrance requirements, but whom Mr. Stanford believed still deserved a chance to attend college.

From Jordan’s The Blood of the Nation:

Not long ago I visited the town of Novara, in northern Italy. There, in a wheat-field, the farmers have ploughed up skulls of men till they have piled up a pyramid ten or twelve feet high. … These were the skulls of young men of Savoy, Sardinia, and Austria–men of eighteen to thirty-five years of age, without physical blemish so far as may be… who met at Novara to kill each other over a matter in which they had very little concern. … here in thousands they died.

Further on, Frenchmen, Austrians, and Italians fell together at Magenta, in the same cause. You know the color that we call Magenta, the hue of the blood that flowed out under the olive-trees. Go over Italy as you will, there is scarcely a spot not crimsoned by the blood of France, scarcely a railway station without its pile of French skulls. You can trace them across to Egypt, t the foot of the Pyramids You will find them in Germany… You will find them in Russia, at Moscow; in Belgium, at Waterloo. “A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,” said Napoleon; and with the rest are the skulls of and bones of boys, “ere evening to be trodden like the grass.” …

Read the dreary record of the glory of France, the slaughter at Waterloo, the wretched failure of Moscow, the miserable deeds of Sedan, the waste of Algiers, the poison of Madagascar, the crimes of Indo-China, the hideous results of barrack vice and its entail of disease and sterility… The man who is left, the man whom glory cannot use, becomes the father of the future men of France. …

The final effect of each strife for empire has been the degradation or extinction of the nation which led in the struggle.

Whatever faults or sins Jordan had, I think he and William Jennings Bryan–who supported Woodrow Wilson’s presidential bid–would have agreed that the World Wars were horrific events.

Lewis Madison Terman

But let us turn to Stanford’s other famous eugenicist: Lewis Terman. Born in 1877, he joined the university as a professor of educational psychology in 1910 and remained until his death, in 1956.

In 1916, Lewis published the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale, which became the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, one of the world’s most respected IQ tests. Alfred Binet had originally begun work on the test to aid the French government–which had recently passed law mandating universal education–in placing “slow” children in special education programs rather than locking them away in asylums.

Neither Lewis nor Binet developed IQ tests because they wanted to prove that certain people were dumb–rather, they wanted an objective way to assess which students needed special help–or advanced programs–that wasn’t prone to the potential class prejudices or racial biases of teachers who would otherwise be judging the students. IQ tests were also developed in order to identify students who were intelligent but has not received the same educational opportunities as other students.

According to StateUniversity.com:

Terman viewed the widespread adoption of tests in the schools as a reflection of how testing could be of use to American society. It was to be the major means of achieving his vision of a meritocracy; a social order based on ranked levels of native ability.

This is consistent with Leland Stanford’s original vision of a free Stanford at which even students from poorer educational backgrounds could attend.

The SAT has a similar history:

By the mid-1920s, the increasing use of IQ tests, such as the Army Alpha test administered to recruits in World War I, led the College Board to commission the development of the SAT. The commission, headed by Carl Brigham, argued that the test predicted success in higher education by identifying candidates primarily on the basis of intellectual promise rather than on specific accomplishment in high school subjects.^[45] In 1934, James Conant and Henry Chauncey used the SAT as a means to identify recipients for scholarships to Harvard University. Specifically, Conant wanted to find students, other than those from the traditional northeastern private schools, that could do well at Harvard. The success of the scholarship program and the advent of World War II led to the end of the College Board essay exams and to the SAT being used as the only admissions test for College Board member colleges.^[44]

The point of the SAT is to give colleges an objective measure of applicants’ intellectual abilities without any racial, class, or gender biases tainting the results.

Of course, Lewis Terman was a eugenicist who believed intelligence was hereditary. In 1921, he launched the Genetic Studies of Genius (now known as the Terman Study of the Gifted.) His goal (at which he succeeded) was to disprove the belief that gifted children were weak, sickly, and socially inept. According to Wikipedia:

Genetic Studies of Genius revealed that gifted and genius children were in at least as good as average health and had normal personalities. Few of them demonstrated the previously-held negative stereotypes of gifted children. … they were not weak and sickly social misfits, but in fact were generally taller, in better health, better developed physically, and better adapted socially than other children. … The gifted children thrived both socially and academically. In relationships, they were less likely to divorce.^[6] … Though many of the children reached exceptional heights in adulthood, not all did. Terman explored the causes of obvious talent not being realized, exploring personal obstacles, education, and lack of opportunity as causes.^[9]

Then came the Nazis. While they definitely did not like mentally disabled or low-IQ people, they also hated smart people:

The Nazi movement was overtly anti-rationalist, favoring appeals to emotion and cultural myths.^[90] It preferred such “non-intellectual” virtues as loyalty, patriotism, duty, purity, and blood, and allegedly produced a pervasive contempt for intellectuals.^[91] Both overt statements and propaganda in books favored sincere feeling over thought, because such feelings, stemming from nature, would be simple and direct.^[92] In Mein Kampf, Hitler complained of biased over-education, brainwashing, and a lack of instinct and will^[93] and in many other passages made his anti-intellectual bent clear.^[94] Intellectuals were frequently the butts of Hitler’s jokes.^[95] …

One popular Munich speaker, declaring biological research boring, called instead on racial emotions; their “healthy ethnic instincts” would reveal the quality of the Aryan type.^[99]

… Pure reason was attacked as a colorless thing, cut off from blood.^[102] Education Minister Rust ordered teachers training colleges to relocate from “too intellectual” university centers to the countryside, where they could be more readily indoctrinated and would also benefit from contact with the pure German peasantry.^[103]

An SS paper declared that IQ varied inversely with male infertility, and medical papers declared that the spread of educational pursuits had brought down the birth rate.^[104]

This frequently related to the blood and soil doctrines and an organic view of the German people.^[105] “Blood and soil” plays, for instance, depicted a woman rejecting her bookish fiance in order to marry an estate owner.^[106]

It also related to antisemitism, as Jews were often accused of being intellectual and having a destructive “critical spirit.”^[107] The book burnings were hailed by Goebbels as ending “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism.”^[107]

Wikipedia claims that the Nazis got their ideas from the Californians. But whatever Jordan and Terman’s faults–and their faults were many–I don’t think Nazi eugenics were their goals.

The past is a complicated place. The point is neither that Terman and Jordan were evil nor that they were good. But looking at how radically “progressive” morality has changed, let’s be careful about over-confidence in the latest moral fads of our own day–and perhaps we should also be careful about condemning the past:

Two Palo Alto middle schools named after leading advocates of eugenics will be renamed… Trustees voted 5-0 to rename Jordan Middle School… and Terman middle school, because it is named in part after Lewis Terman…

It is also named after Terman’s son, Frederick Terman, who is credited alongside William Shockley as the “Father of Silicon Valley,” which enjoys the world’s third highest per capita gdp.

Of course, Shockley was also a eugenecist.

…the district must incorporate a unit about California and Palo Alto’s role in the eugenics movement into the history curriculum of secondary schools by next year.

The cost of renaming the schools is estimated at $60,000. The article doesn’t say how much the new curriculum will cost.

“There’s been a lot of very moving testimony, and I found the testimony from those who felt personally excluded or discriminated against particularly powerful,” Collins said. “I think that is a very difficult and real burden to bear, and so I agree with that.” …

“To ask a student to walk into a building that is named after someone who fundamentally did not think they had the right to be there is not OK, and I don’t want to ask them to do that anymore,” DiBrienza said.

Jordan and Terman middle schools both perform substantially above the California average, (unsurprising, given the average IQs of Palo Alto’s residents,) so any student who can do well here would, by Jordan and Terman’s standards, “fundamentally have a right to be there.”

The past–and its morals–cannot be judged simply by our present standards. Should statues of Julius Caesar be torn down because he conquered Gaul, and act which no doubt killed many of the Gauls? Rename all you want, but it is still because of men like Jordan, Lewis and Frederick Terman, and Shockley that Stanford and Silicon Valley exist.

exist.

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Anthropology Friday: No Angel by Jay Dobyns, pt 3/3

Welcome to our final post on Jay Dobyns and Nils Johnson-Shelton‘s No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels. (The subtitle is a bit of an overstatement–while Dobyns does meet Sonny Barger, he’s never part of Sonny’s circle. The authors may not have had any control over the book’s title, though.) This has been an interesting, often intense book. I’ve not quoted as much as I usually do because the book is new, under copyright, and obviously the authors would like for you to buy a copy and read it yourself.

One of the themes running through the book is the intersection of crime, drugs, poverty, and innocents (children) caught in the middle. It’s a part of America where meth is rampant and lives are broken.

And how do the Hells Angels (and other motorcycle clubs) fit into this? Are they spontaneous order or disorder? For people who grew up neglected, abused, or merely on the outside of society, does the “brotherhood” of bikers provide an essential, tribal sense of belonging?

Indeed, one of the mysteries the book touches on repeatedly is that this “criminal” organization receives nigh unwavering support from the general public. When they go to clubs, they’re given an introduction over the loudspeaker (“Everyone, the Hells Angels are partying with us tonight!”) Women are thrown at them. (Dobyns, who is married, has to get another undercover police officer to fake being his girlfriend to explain why he isn’t having sex with any of the women throwing themselves at him.) All of the motorcycle clubs in the area, even the totally mundane ones, respect the HAs; there are HA “support” clubs scattered around the nation.

(In any area where the HA aren’t dominant and some other club is, people look up to and respect that club.) People buy Hells Angels t-shirts and as Dobyns notes, even some police officers form their own motorcycle clubs, at least somewhat modeled on the Outlaw clubs.

By contrast, while people do look out for and respect their local Mafia bosses and drug dealers, they don’t form gang fan clubs or wear Mafia-themed t-shirts.

Meanwhile, job demands were wearing on Dobyns (as usual, I’m using “” instead of blockquotes for readability):

“I was running ragged. The life of an undercover cop is not one of leisure. I was up every morning at seven, going over notes from the night before or transcribing audio from one of my recorders. the notes couldn’t be half-assed or glossed over, they had to be dead-nuts on. Then I’d do my expenditures, and those had to be to the penny… Then I’d contact the suspects–some of whom were occasionally crashed out in the living room while I did reports behind my bedroom’s locked door–and set up meetings and deals for the day or week. Then I’d call Slats and go over everything with him. Then I’d meet a task force agent to exchange notes and evidence. Then I’d start making my runs, seeing the boys, hitting the spots–just being seen is a job in itself. Then I’d make my scheduled meetings, do the buys I’d set up, Hit the club houses, and have conversations.

“Some days I’d ride from Phoenix to Bullhead and back … The sun would set, the heat would dissipate, and the nights would begin. I’d go out and, despite drinking, would try to stay lucid enough to be able to defend myself, JJ, Timmy, or Pop if any of us got made. The stress of being in near-constant mortal danger is what we were trained to endure, but undertaking it day after day is enough to fry anyone. I’d get home, cross myself, smoke cigarettes, down coffee, jot down notes and reminders, and then try to get a few hours sleep before doing t all over again the next day.”

EvX: According to Donnie Brasco, (The Way of the Wiseguy,) he didn’t set foot in an FBI office for the whole 6 years of his undercover operation. Obviously his phone and house were bugged, but it sounds like he didn’t have to check in with his supervisors or get most of his moves approved by anyone. Of course, that was in the 70s (and New York.) The FBI’s standard procedures have likely changed a bit since then (from the sounds of it, toward “more bureaucratic control and less liability” but ironically, “more likely to die from exhaustion while trying to ride a motorcycle at night.”)

Assassination of Sonny’s Successor?

“Daniel “Hoover” Seybert had been shot through the forehead on March 22. He’d been killed in the parking lot of Bridgette’s Last Laugh, a Phoenix bar, surrounded by his brothers, who conveniently–and ludicrously–didn’t see a thing. According to the Hells Angels witnesses, Hoover had just started his bike when he suddenly slumped over the bars. there was no exit wound. they didn’t hear a discharge. Some claimed that until they saw the wound in his forehead they thought he’d had a heart attack. … they were all convinced the shooter must have been a Mongol.

“We weren’t so sure. The medical examiner concluded that the wound was from a small-caliber, close-range shot. … Hoover was revered and respected nationally and internationally by friend and foes–he’d been groomed as Sonny’s replacement… His death devastated the club and drove their paranoia to new heights. …

“There was plenty of internal tension among the Angels in those days, centering on which way the club was headed, what they’d symbolize as they continued their wild ride through American cultural history. … Generally, younger members felt as though they’d joined the Hells Angels to raise hell, to do what they wanted to, when they wanted to, and not be told otherwise. Older members–members, it should be said, who’d lived this freer, hell0-raising lifestyle in decades past,–preferred to rest on their laurels, doing whatever they could not to attract attention from the law. These Angels were content with being old-time kings of the hill and selling T-shirts at motorcycle rallies.”

EvX: Again, this gets back to the question of what the organization is. The HAs got their reputation by being violent, but once you’ve got that reputation, why not sit back and enjoy it? Crime is dangerous and can lead to getting arrested; partying is fun. But the younger members have different ideas of fun. They don’t want to avoid trouble; they want to go out and raise hell.

Back to Dobyns:

“Time passed in a blur. Back in Phoenix, on the eight, I worked out with Dan… the crazy musclehead Angel I’d met when our Solo Angeles crew came to town back in January. He pumped his iron, vein in his neck bulging, and waxed hopeful about the end of his parole… JJ and I went with Bobby on the ninth to set up a T-shirt booth at a run. He intimidated the guy in charge into giving us free passes and the best booth location. Bobby said he was going to run the Americans Motorcycle Club out of there if he saw them. He and Teddy bitched about how they hadn’t been giving the Angels their due respect and that they were going to force the Americans out of the area, maybe even the state…

[They get news of a possible conflict with another club and get called in:]

“He addressed us. ‘Expect to kill tonight. Expect to shoot. Expect to die, go to jail, or skip country.’ …

“Teddy and Bobby looked on as Joby loaded the Jeep with the shotgun a box of shells, a sap, an ax handle and three or four knives. Teddy looked distraught. …

“He spoke, contemplating the ground. ‘I”m not happy about this, but this is what we do. I’m proud of ya and I’m proud of the Hells Angels. Ya be there for them, and they’ll be there for ya. Do what ya gotta do, but I want y’all to come back alive.’ He gave each of us a big hug.

WWII Soldiers on Harley Davidsons

“Bobby hugged us too. As he finished with me he grabbed my shoulders and said, ‘Remember, Bird–a Hells Angel may not always be right, but he is always you bother.’

“Teddy spoke again. ‘Half of what’s mine is yours. Don’t forget that either.’

“Their words made sense. Even though I’d sworn an oath to fight guy like these, I’d bought into some of their credo. I knew that any of these guys, and more than a few others across the state, wold gladly take a bullet for me. In that instant I believed in some of what the Hell Angels stood for. I was genuinely touched.”

EvX: Luckily, based on Dobyns’ and the other undercover cops’ information, the police intercept the guys they were going to potentially fight and no violence occurs.

The Wild Pigs:

“The Williams run was easy. … I wandered around with Bobby, acting as his bodyguard.

“We came across a group of bikers who called themselves the Wild Pigs. One of their guys walked up to us, his hand extended to Bobby. He wore a big shit-eating smile. He said, ‘Hey, pleasure to meet you.’

“Bobby raised his sunglasses and looked at him intently. He did not offer his hand in return. ‘Get fucked.’ …

“The Wild Pigs were cops, guys with badges who paraded around on weekends like a One Percenter club. In my mind, as in Bobby’s, they were a fucking abomination.”

EvX: Dobyns is running into a problem. He has documented plenty of illegal gun and drug sales, but nothing really new or incriminating for the organization as a whole. He’s still on the outside, a member of the “Solo Angeles” club that just rides a lot with the Hells Angels. He wants to become a full member, but prospecting for a club takes time. There are rules, they’re strict, and they don’t let a lot of people in. Meanwhile, his bosses are getting tired of the operation; it’s a lot of expense, hassle, and stress to pay him to go drinking and riding motorcycles if he’s not getting any information they don’t already have.

So Dobyns tries to expedite the prospecting process by proposing a hit job. He’ll show his devotion to the HAs by going down to Mexico and killing one of the Mongols, the HA’s rivals. He is essentially given the club’s blessings to do this, but I note that it was Dobyns‘s idea, not the club’s.

So, if you’re ever in a club that the FBI might be infiltrating, and some guy is proposing something violent or illegal, it’s best to say no.

The Hit:

“He handed me the pistol, I checked the safety and stuck it in my back pocket. I said I had to go, that I’d be in touch, and that I’d be back in a few days.

“He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me close, hugging me tight, slapping my back hard. He pushed me back, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘I want you to come home. All of you.’

“Don’t worry, bro, we will. We will.”

[Obviously, Dobyns does not actually kill anyone. They stage a photograph to make it look like they killed the dude.]

“But I was no Angel. The Mongol murder was not as simple as it appeared. …

“The fire at Joby’s camp had smelled like lamb chops for a good reason. The blood, skin, and brain that spattered out of the Mongol’s clothes had belonged to a lamb, not a man.”

It almost works, but the Hells Angels, they’ve got rules:

“On the thirtieth, Timmy, JJ, and I went to Skull Valley to talk things over. … We were told that we weren’t going to get patched [that is, receive their Hells Angels patches], even though the local shot-callers had sided with us. The problem went back to Laughlin… when some Angels had been fast-patched after the riot. This pissed off the European Angels. Those guys were over there fighting their rivals with RPGs, blowing up entire clubhouses, and none them got patched early. We were told that Europe simply outnumbered the United States and none of our guys wanted to step on their European counterparts’ toes.”

EvX: Two interesting things here. One, people did get fast-patched after the Laughlin (River Run) Riot. So violence on behalf of the club is definitely rewarded. The other interesting thing is that the European Angels sound like they are getting into a lot more violence than the American ones.

But this leaves Dobyns in the lurch. With no fast patch, the FBI decides to stop the operation. Dobyns has come far–he’s apparently considered a member of his local club even if the HA international says he needs more time–but not far enough. He’s pulled out and essentially disappears.

The case’s search warrants get executed on July 8:

“Staci, Bobby’s girlfriend, called after we started knocking the Angels down and left a frantic message, saying, ‘Bird [Dobyns’s alias], it’s Staci. I don’t know where you are, but wherever it is, stay there. They’re coming for the guys. It looks like they’re coming for all the guys. I don’t know what the fuck is going on Hopefully I’ll see you soon…’

“She wouldn’t.

“What was going on was predawn SRT and SWAT raids, conducted in Arizona, Nevada, California, Washington, and Colorado. The total haul was impressive. More than 1,600 pieces of evidence were collected: over 650 guns, eight of which were machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and other prohibited weapons; dozens of silencers; explosives, including pipe-bombs, napalm, blasting caps, dynamite, and grenades; and over 30,000 rounds of live ammunition. …

“Owing to lack of evidence, Ralph “Sonny” Barger was left untouched. …

“By the summer of 2004 the Hells Angels had issued two death threats against my family and me. Over the following years they would issue three more. …

“ATF didn’t take the threats seriously. … My paranoia grew, and was only made worse by ATF’s refusal to recognize what I knew was a mortal situation. They belittled my concerns and downplayed my accomplishments… It was a dreary business, but heart-breaking and eye-opening. I’d expected to be betrayed by the Hells Angels, but not by the people I’d worked so incredibly hard for.”

EvX: Obviously we’re reading this through Dobyns’ POV. Maybe his superiors have a completely different version of things.

But there’s a lot of betrayal here. Dobyns betrayed men he’d called “brother” and had called him “brother.” Yes, many of these men were criminals, but they also would have taken a bullet for him. Even after Dobyns completely disappeared without warning or goodbye, people in the midst of life-destroying SWAT raids (raids Dobyns caused) tried to warn and protect him.

And in the meanwhile, the organization that was supposed to have Dobyns’s back and protect him didn’t.

Operation Black Biscuit [the codename for the case] ultimately failed:

“Sadly, disputes over evidence and tensions between ATF and the U.S. attorneys killed our case. Most of the serious charges were dismissed in early 2006, and as a result, hardly any of the guys who were charged with RICO violations saw the inside of a courtroom. …

“Those were dark days. The press and the defense attorneys, not privy to the turf battles fought between the case agents and the prosecutors, hung the blame on the undercover operation. We were called rogue actors, reckless and impulsive, and the Hells Angels’ legal representation publicly yoked us, confident the case would never go before a jury…

“In the beginning I thought of the Black Biscuit case as a classic Good-versus-Evil struggle. I knew the brutality and intimidation brought by the Hells Angels was real. Violence was their way of life. … Our team of elite investigators was an ideal adversary to the Hells Angels, and everyone on the task force was proud to throw themselves into taking down such an evil organization.

“But as we’ve seen, things aren’t always so cut-and-dried. I went in deep and realized that the Hells Angels weren’t all bad–and I wasn’t all good.”

“When we do right, nobody remembers. When we do wrong, nobody forgets.” — HA motto

Guest Post: SFC Ton on The Motorcycle Mindset

Hey everyone, we have a guest post today from SFC Ton on the motorcycle–and especially outlaw–mindset. (Note: MC stands for motorcycle club. 81 and HA stand for Hells Angels. 1% refers to members of outlaw clubs like the HAs):

It goes sort of like this

Rich urban bikers/ motorcyclists are about pretending to be something they ain’t. Mostly pretending to be wild and free at heart… best I can figure. Strange dudes from my reckoning

For us serious saddle tramps, bikes are about freedom, adrenaline and exploration. Bitches you ain’t banged, bars you ain’t drank in, towns you ain’t seen, stars you ain’t slept under, curves you ain’t carved yet type of thing

The MC life is about brother hood, respect and often enough some version of charity work. Think of them like the Lions Club but in this case the lions ain’t neutered. Keeping the rules is keeping the brotherhood alive and well. Keeping the traditions alive is keeping brother hood. You earn respect by keeping the rules, traditions and brotherhood. All 3 play into and build on each other Most of these crews were formed by vets, many of whom fought the japs way back when which is why you see the American bike only rules in the older MC’s.

The 1% crews about BROTHERHOOD and RESPECT. I grew up in the 81 sphere of influence and a lot has changed. The best way to under stand a 1% out fit is to have been in an infantry platoon during some real deep shit, which is why MC members tend to be vets. That bond can be addictive. Second best but still a pale version of understanding would be to read Jack Donavan’s “Way of Men”. Most are extremely patriotic as it reflects the MC’s/ 1%’ers old school working class White man morals….. Which also explains why Pat Buchanan then Trump cleaned up the biker vote.

The 1% crews are/ can be extremely sophisticated organizations and as such have been targeted by the various government agencies. More recently Obama etc all were under the opinion White veterans in MC’s were the biggest threat to national security around because they don’t like to bend the knee. The law gets shitty with more main stream MC’s all the time, probably because its safer for them. Any rate they are still standing. Not despite the law fucking with them over all matters large and small but because the law fucks with them large and small.

When Did Black People Evolve?

In previous posts, we discussed the evolution of Whites and Asians, so today we’re taking a look at people from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Modern humans only left Africa about 100,000 to 70,000 yeas ago, and split into Asians and Caucasians around 40,000 years ago. Their modern appearances came later–white skin, light hair and light eyes, for example, only evolved in the past 20,000 and possibly within the past 10,000 years.

What about the Africans, or specifically, Sub-Saharans? (North Africans, like Tunisians and Moroccans, are in the Caucasian clade.) When did their phenotypes evolve?

The Sahara, an enormous desert about the size of the United States, is one of the world’s biggest, most ancient barriers to human travel. The genetic split between SSAs and non-SSAs, therefore, is one of the oldest and most substantial among human populations. But there are even older splits within Africa–some of the ancestors of today’s Pygmies and Bushmen may have split off from other Africans 200,000-300,000 years ago. We’re not sure, because the study of archaic African DNA is still in its infancy.

Some anthropologists refer to Bushmen as “gracile,” which means they are a little shorter than average Europeans and not stockily built

The Bushmen present an interesting case, because their skin is quite light (for Africans.) I prefer to call it golden. The nearby Damara of Namibia, by contrast, are one of the world’s darkest peoples. (The peoples of South Sudan, eg Malik Agar, may be darker, though.) The Pygmies are the world’s shortest peoples; the peoples of South Sudan, such as the Dinka and Shiluk, are among the world’s tallest.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s ethnic groups can be grouped, very broadly, into Bushmen, Pygmies, Bantus (aka Niger-Congo), Nilotics, and Afro-Asiatics. Bushmen and Pygmies are extremely small groups, while Bantus dominate the continent–about 85% of Sub Saharan Africans speak a language from the Niger-Congo family. The Afro-Asiatic groups, as their name implies, have had extensive contact with North Africa and the Middle East.

Most of America’s black population hails from West Africa–that is, the primarily Bantu region. The Bantus and similar-looking groups among the Nilotics and Afro-Asiatics (like the Hausa) are, therefore, have both Africa’s most iconic and most common phenotypes.

For the sake of this post, we are not interested in the evolution of traits common to all humans, such as bipedalism. We are only interested in those traits generally shared by most Sub-Saharans and generally not shared by people outside of Africa.

detailed map of African and Middle Eastern ethnicities in Haaks et al’s dataset

One striking trait is black hair: it is distinctively “curly” or “frizzy.” Chimps and gorrilas do not have curly hair. Neither do whites and Asians. (Whites and Asians, therefore, more closely resemble chimps in this regard.) Only Africans and a smattering of other equatorial peoples like Melanesians have frizzy hair.

Black skin is similarly distinct. Chimps, who live in the shaded forest and have fur, do not have high levels of melanin all over their bodies. While chimps naturally vary in skin tone, an unfortunate, hairless chimp is practically “white.”

Humans therefore probably evolved both black skin and frizzy hair at about the same time–when we came out of the shady forests and began running around on the much sunnier savannahs. Frizzy hair seems well-adapted to cooling–by standing on end, it lets air flow between the follicles–and of course melanin is protective from the sun’s rays. (And apparently, many of the lighter-skinned Bushmen suffer from skin cancer.)

Steatopygia also comes to mind, though I don’t know if anyone has studied its origins.

According to Wikipedia, additional traits common to Sub-Saharan Africans include:

In modern craniofacial anthropometry, Negroid describes features that typify skulls of black people. These include a broad and round nasal cavity; no dam or nasal sill; Quonset hut-shaped nasal bones; notable facial projection in the jaw and mouth area (prognathism); a rectangular-shaped palate; a square or rectangular eye orbit shape;^[21] a large interorbital distance; a more undulating supraorbital ridge;^[22] and large, megadontic teeth.^{[23] …}

Modern cross-analysis of osteological variables and genome-wide SNPs has identified specific genes, which control this craniofacial development. Of these genes, DCHS2, RUNX2, GLI3, PAX1 and PAX3 were found to determine nasal morphology, whereas EDAR impacts chin protrusion.^{[27] …}

Ashley Montagu lists “neotenous structural traits in which…Negroids [generally] differ from Caucasoids… flattish nose, flat root of the nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure of premaxillarysutures, less hairy, longer eyelashes, [and] cruciform pattern of second and third molars.”^[28]

The Wikipedia page on Dark Skin states:

As hominids gradually lost their fur (between 4.5 and 2 million years ago) to allow for better cooling through sweating, their naked and lightly pigmented skin was exposed to sunlight. In the tropics, natural selection favoured dark-skinned human populations as high levels of skin pigmentation protected against the harmful effects of sunlight. Indigenous populations’ skin reflectance (the amount of sunlight the skin reflects) and the actual UV radiation in a particular geographic area is highly correlated, which supports this idea. Genetic evidence also supports this notion, demonstrating that around 1.2 million years ago there was a strong evolutionary pressure which acted on the development of dark skin pigmentation in early members of the genus Homo.^[25]…

About 7 million years ago human and chimpanzee lineages diverged, and between 4.5 and 2 million years ago early humans moved out of rainforests to the savannas of East Africa.^[23][28] They not only had to cope with more intense sunlight but had to develop a better cooling system. …

Skin colour is a polygenic trait, which means that several different genes are involved in determining a specific phenotype. …

Data collected from studies on MC1R gene has shown that there is a lack of diversity in dark-skinned African samples in the allele of the gene compared to non-African populations. This is remarkable given that the number of polymorphisms for almost all genes in the human gene pool is greater in African samples than in any other geographic region. So, while the MC1Rf gene does not significantly contribute to variation in skin colour around the world, the allele found in high levels in African populations probably protects against UV radiation and was probably important in the evolution of dark skin.^[57][58]

Skin colour seems to vary mostly due to variations in a number of genes of large effect as well as several other genes of small effect (TYR, TYRP1, OCA2, SLC45A2, SLC24A5, MC1R, KITLG and SLC24A4). This does not take into account the effects of epistasis, which would probably increase the number of related genes.^[59] Variations in the SLC24A5 gene account for 20–25% of the variation between dark and light skinned populations of Africa,^[60] and appear to have arisen as recently as within the last 10,000 years.^[61] The Ala111Thr or rs1426654 polymorphism in the coding region of the SLC24A5 gene reaches fixation in Europe, and is also common among populations in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.^[62][63][64]

That’s rather interesting about MC1R. It could imply that the difference in skin tone between SSAs and non-SSAs is due to active selection in Blacks for dark skin and relaxed selection in non-Blacks, rather than active selection for light skin in non-Blacks.

The page on MC1R states:

MC1R is one of the key proteins involved in regulating mammalianskin and hair color. …It works by controlling the type of melanin being produced, and its activation causes the melanocyte to switch from generating the yellow or red phaeomelanin by default to the brown or black eumelanin in replacement. …

This is consistent with active selection being necessary to produce dark skin, and relaxed selection producing lighter tones.

Studies show the MC1R Arg163Gln allele has a high frequency in East Asia and may be part of the evolution of light skin in East Asian populations.^[40] No evidence is known for positive selection of MC1R alleles in Europe^[41] and there is no evidence of an association between MC1R and the evolution of light skin in European populations.^[42] The lightening of skin color in Europeans and East Asians is an example of convergent evolution.

However, we should also note:

Dark-skinned people living in low sunlight environments have been recorded to be very susceptible to vitamin D deficiency due to reduced vitamin D synthesis. A dark-skinned person requires about six times as much UVB than lightly pigmented persons.

PCA graph and map of sampling locations. Modern people are indicated with gray circles.

Unfortunately, most of the work on human skin tones has been done among Europeans (and, oddly, zebra fish,) limiting our knowledge about the evolution of African skin tones, which is why this post has been sitting in my draft file for months. Luckily, though, two recent studies–Loci Associated with Skin Pigmentation Identified in African Populations and Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure–have shed new light on African evolution.

In Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure, Skoglund et al assembled genetic data from 16 prehistoric Africans and compared them to DNA from nearby present-day Africans. They found:

1. The ancestors of the Bushmen (aka the San/KhoiSan) once occupied a much wider area.
2. They contributed about 2/3s of the ancestry of ancient Malawi hunter-gatherers (around 8,100-2,500 YA)
3. Contributed about 1/3 of the ancestry of ancient Tanzanian hunter-gatherers (around 1,400 YA)
4. Farmers (Bantus) spread from west Africa, completely replacing hunter-gatherers in some areas
5. Modern Malawians are almost entirely Bantu.
6. A Tanzanian pastoralist population from 3,100 YA spread out across east Africa and into southern Africa
7. Bushmen ancestry was not found in modern Hadza, even though they are hunter-gatherers and speak a click language like the Bushmen.
8. The Hadza more likely derive most of their ancestry from ancient Ethiopians
9. Modern Bantu-speakers in Kenya derive from a mix between western Africans and Nilotics around 800-400 years ago.
10. Middle Eastern (Levant) ancestry is found across eastern Africa from an admixture event that occurred around 3,000 YA, or around the same time as the Bronze Age Collapse.
11. A small amount of Iranian DNA arrived more recently in the Horn of Africa
12. Ancient Bushmen were more closely related to modern eastern Africans like the Dinka (Nilotics) and Hadza than to modern west Africans (Bantus),
13. This suggests either complex relationships between the groups or that some Bantus may have had ancestors from an unknown group of humans more ancient than the Bushmen.
14. Modern Bushmen have been evolving darker skins
15. Pygmies have been evolving shorter stature

Automated clustering of ancient and modern populations (moderns in gray)

I missed #12-13 on my previous post about this paper, though I did note that the more data we get on ancient African groups, the more likely I think we are to find ancient admixture events. If humans can mix with Neanderthals and Denisovans, then surely our ancestors could have mixed with Ergaster, Erectus, or whomever else was wandering around.

Distribution of ancient Bushmen and Ethiopian DNA in south and east Africa

#15 is interesting, and consistent with the claim that Bushmen suffer from a lot of skin cancer–before the Bantu expansion, they lived in far more forgiving climates than the Kalahari desert. But since Bushmen are already lighter than their neighbors, this begs the question of how light their ancestors–who had no Levantine admixture–were. Could the Bantus’ and Nilotics’ darker skins have evolved after the Bushmen/everyone else split?

Meanwhile, in Loci Associated with Skin Pigmentation Identified in African Populations, Crawford et al used genetic samples from 1,570 people from across Africa to find six genetic areas–SLC24A5, MFSD12, DDB1, TMEM138, OCA2 and HERC2–which account for almost 30% of the local variation in skin color.

Bantu (green) and Levantine/pastoralist DNA in modern peoples

SLC24A5 is a light pigment introduced to east Africa from the Levant, probably around 3,000 years ago. Today, it is common in Ethiopia and Tanzania.

Interestingly, according to the article, “At all other loci, variants associated with dark pigmentation in Africans are identical by descent in southern Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations.”

These are the world’s other darkest peoples, such as the Jarawas of the Andaman Islands or the Melanesians of Bougainville, PNG. (And, I assume, some groups from India such as the Tamils.) This implies that these groups 1. had dark skin already when they left Africa, and 2. Never lost it on their way to their current homes. (If they had gotten lighter during their journey and then darkened again upon arrival, they likely would have different skin color variants than their African cousins.)

This implies that even if the Bushmen split off (around 200,000-300,000 YA) before dark skin evolved, it had evolved by the time people left Africa and headed toward Australia (around 100,000-70,000 YA.) This gives us a minimum threshold: it most likely evolved before 70,000 YA.

(But as always, we should be careful because perhaps there are even more skin color variant that we don’t know about yet in these populations.)

MFSD12 is common among Nilotics and is related to darker skin.

And according to the abstract, which Razib Khan posted:

Further, the alleles associated with skin pigmentation at all loci but SLC24A5 are ancient, predating the origin of modern humans. The ancestral alleles at the majority of predicted causal SNPs are associated with light skin, raising the possibility that the ancestors of modern humans could have had relatively light skin color, as is observed in the San population today.

The full article is not out yet, so I still don’t know when all of these light and dark alleles emerged, but the order is absolutely intriguing. For now, it looks like this mystery will still have to wait.

 

Anthropology Friday: No Angel by Jay Dobyns, pt 2

Welcome back to Anthropology Friday: No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels, by Jay Dobyns and Nils Johnson-Shelton. Today we’re going to start with some background on the Hells Angels, but if you’re really unfamiliar with American motorcycle culture, I recommend starting with my previous post, Do Biker Lives Matter? Harleys, Exit, and Thedic Signaling. As usual, I’ll be using “” instead of blockquotes for readability.

Some History:

Harley Davidson flaring shovel chopper

“For those who don’t know, [Ralph “Sonny” Barger] was the man–the legend, really–who molded the Hells Angels into what they are. it’s not a stretch to say that Sonny Barger is a visionary who essentially created the image of the outlaw biker as we know it. He had help, to be sure, and the names of his cohorts dating back to the late fifties through the present are legendary in the biker world… these men created the image–the leather, the hair, the grime, the hardness, the silence, the impenetrability, the bikes–everything that constitute an outlaw biker. …

“Without the Hells Angels we wouldn’t have floor-model Harleys that look like stripped-down scream machines. No ape hangers… no bitch bar, no spool wheels, no front-end extenders. … The HA were obsessed with going fast, and without this obsession bikes would be slower. They were relentless in stripping their bikes of all but the barest essentials. The formula was simple: less weight plus bigger engines equaled more speed. Every pound they shed gained them two miles per hour. Thus “choppers”–chopped-down motorcycles. What they did was mimicked by everyone who wanted to be a Hells Angel but couldn’t be.”

EvX: When you get down to it, the motorcycle is a machine. A car is also a machine, but a car is a machine with a lot of metal between you and the engine. A chopper is a machine that has minimized the amount of metal between you and the engine. The motorcycle is about the closest you can get to just riding on an engine, riding straight down the highway on pure power.

Wikipedia has an interesting account of the HAs:

The club became prominent within, and established its notoriety as part of the 1960s counterculture movement in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, playing a part at many of the movement’s seminal events. Members were directly connected to many of the counterculture’s primary leaders, such as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Mick Farren and Tom Wolfe. The club launched the career of “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson.^{[22][23][24][25]}

Hells Angels International:
“[Berger] saw that the Angels could go international, that though American in origin, they needn’t be limited to America’s borders. As I’ve said before, I believe that the Hells Angels, and to a lesser extent all American-style biker gangs, are this country’s only organized-crime export.”

According to Wikipedia:

Numerous police and international intelligence agencies classify the Hells Angels as one of the “big four” motorcycle gangs, along with the Pagans, Outlaws, and Bandidos, and contend that members carry out widespread violent crime and organized crime, including drug dealing, trafficking in stolen goods, and extortion, and are involved in prostitution.^[27][28] Members of the organization have continuously asserted that they are only a group of motorcycle enthusiasts who have joined to ride motorcycles together, to organize social events such as group road trips, fundraisers, parties, and motorcycle rallies, and that any crimes are the responsibility of the individuals who carried them out and not the club as a whole.^[29][30] …

The HAMC acknowledges more than one hundred chapters spread over 29 countries. The Hells Angels motorcycle club founded a chapter in Auckland, New Zealand in 1961 and has since taken over gangs in Wanganui. New Zealand had the first chapter of the Hells Angels outside the United States.^[53] Europe did not become widely home to the Hells Angels until 1969 when two London chapters were formed. The Beatles‘ George Harrison invited some members of the HAMC San Francisco to stay at Apple Records in London in 1968.^[54][55] … Two charters were issued on July 30, 1969; one for “South London”—the re-imagined chapter renewing the already existing 1950 South London chapter—and the other for “East London” …The London Angels provided security at a number of UK Underground festivals including Phun City in 1970 organized by Mick Farren. They awarded Farren an “approval patch” in 1970 for use on his first solo album Mona, which also featured Steve Peregrin Took (who was credited as “Shagrat the Vagrant”).^[57]

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a major expansion of the club into Canada. The Quebec Biker war was a violent turf war that began in 1994 and continued until late 2002 in Montreal. The war began as the Hells Angels in Quebec began to make a push to establish a monopoly on street-level drug sales in the province. A number of drug dealers and crime families resisted and established groups such as the “Alliance to fight the Angels”. The war resulted in the bombings of many establishments and murders on both sides. It has claimed more than 150 lives^[58] and led to the incarceration of over 100 bikers.^[59] …

A list of acknowledged chapters can be found on the HAMC’s official website.^[61]

Dobyns writes:

“These contradictions fascinate me. The Hells Angels are separate from society, but they’re rooted in it. They’re nonconformists, but they all look the same; they’re a secret society, but also flamboyant exhibitionists; they flout the laws of the land, but they’re governed by a strict code; their name and their Death Head logo represent freedom, individualism, toughness, and lawlessness, but both name and logo are protected by legal trademarks.”

EvX: It sounds to me like they aren’t so much “non conformists” in the abstract as “non conformists” relative to a particular society. How many of these guys would succeed and be happy in the corporate world? People who think cars–which I regard as terrifying 2-ton death traps hurtling at 60 miles an hour down the road–as “cages” and want to take their chances with getting their flesh grounds straight onto the road do not strike me as people who’d be inclined to sit still in a cubicle all day.

Rather, the HAs and similar groups have opted out of mainstream society and formed their own, alternative society–a tribe of their own, replete with its own initiation rituals, tribal dress, symbolic brotherhood (the members of real tribes are usually quite closely related,) their own history and lore, and even their own army. By doing so, they leave the world in which they are at the bottom, and create a world where they are at the top.

But they still live in our society, and ironically, they definitely will sue you if you use their logos:

In March 2007 the Hells Angels filed suit against the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group alleging that the film entitled Wild Hogs used both the name and distinctive logo of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation without permission.^[35] …

In October 2010 the Hells Angels filed a lawsuit against Alexander McQueen for “misusing its trademark winged death heads symbol”^[38] in several items from its Autumn/Winter 2010 collection. The lawsuit is also aimed at Saks Fifth Avenue and Zappos.com, which stock the jacquard box dress and knuckle duster ring that bear the symbol, which has been used since at least 1948 and is protected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.^[39] … “This isn’t just about money, it’s about membership. If you’ve got one of these rings on, a member might get really upset that you’re an impostor.”^[41] …

In fall 2012 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, Hells Angels sued Toys “R” Us for trademark infringement, unfair competition, and dilution in relation to the sale of yo-yos manufactured by Yomega Corporation, a co-defendant, which allegedly bear the “Death Head” logo…

As of December 2013, the Hells Angels sells its branded merchandise at a retail store in Toronto, Canada.^[48]

Some final notes from Wikipedia on who can and can’t become a Hells Angel:

In order to become a Hells Angels prospect, candidates must have a valid driver’s license, a motorcycle over 750cc, and have the right combination of personal qualities. It is said the club excludes child molesters and individuals who have applied to become police or prison officers.^[49]

They might be outlaws, but they have standards.

To become a full member, the prospect must be voted on unanimously by the rest of the full club members.^[51] Prior to votes being cast, a prospect usually travels to every chapter in the sponsoring chapter’s geographic jurisdiction (state/province/territory) and introduces himself to every Full-Patch member. This process allows each voting member to become familiar with the subject and to ask any questions of concern prior to the vote. Some form of formal induction follows, wherein the prospect affirms his loyalty to the club and its members. The final logo patch (top “Hells Angels” rocker) is then awarded at this initiation ceremony. The step of attaining full membership can be referred to as “being patched”. …

The club claims not to be a racially segregated organization,^[62][63] although at least one chapter allegedly requires that a candidate be a white male,^[64] and Sonny Barger stated in a BBC interview in 2000 that “The club, as a whole, is not racist but we probably have enough racist members that no black guy is going to get in it”.^[51] At that time the club had no black members.^[51]

…Wooley [a black guy] became an associate of the Hells Angels Montreal chapter^[66] in the 1990s and later tried uniting street gangs in Quebec after Boucher was imprisoned.^[67]

In another interview with leader Sonny Barger in 2000 he remarked “if you’re a motorcycle rider and you’re white, you want to join the Hell’s Angels. If you black, you want to join the Dragons. …We don’t have no blacks and they don’t have no whites.”^[68] …Tobie Levingston who formed the black motorcycle club East Bay Dragons MC wrote in his book that he and Sonny Barger have a long-lasting friendship and that the Hells Angels and Dragons have a mutual friendship and hang out and ride together.^[69]

In a 1966 article about motorcycle rebels in the African-American community magazine Ebony, the Chosen Few MC stated that they see no racial animosity in the Hells Angels and that when they come into Chosen Few territory they all get together and just party.^[70] A Hells Angel member interviewed for the magazine insisted there was no racial prejudice in any of their clubs and stated “we don’t have any negro members” but maintained there have not been any blacks who have sought membership.^[70] At one point in the 1970s the Hells Angels were looking to consolidate the different motorcycle clubs and offered every member of the Chosen Few MC a Hells Angel badge, but the Chosen Few turned down the offer.^[71]

We should of course be skeptical about what people tell reporters–people don’t always want to admit in writing that they hate other people and might want to kill them. But we can contrast this against the HA’s attitude toward the Mongols, who are frequent subjects of ire in the book and whom the HA got in a shootout with back in 2002.

Meanwhile, Dobyns’ undercover persona is so good, the local police go after him:

“On the way home, on a dark side street deliberately taken to avoid a confrontation, we were pulled over for a traffic stop. …

Typically, when a mixed-club group of bikers is stopped, and Hells Angel are among those present, they get the most thorough attention. Everyone knows the Angels are the ones to be wary of, and that given an inch they will take it a mile. They must be attended to first.

“But they weren’t….

“An officer approached JJ and me from behind. When he got about ten feet from us, he racked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun…

“I didn’t appreciate the sound of that shotgun…

“Over the bullhorn a young, angry voice said, “Bird, [Dobyns’ undercover name] do not let go of your handlebars until ordered to do so. Do you understand?” I nodded yes. I held the bars with a death grip….

“The Angels were told to remain on their bikes. …

“I was led to the curb and told to kneel. I was led at the barrel of a loaded and charged shotgun. …

“The guys were cuffed and lined up curbside. No one but me had to kneel. No one but me had a gun drawn on them. The Angels couldn’t believe it, but as far as these cops were concerned, I was more dangerous than they were. …

“Meanwhile, Officer Shotgun talked to me. … He said, “You gotta move on, Bird, you gotta get the fuck out of my town.” “Meanwhile, Officer Shotgun talked to me.

“I said, ‘You can arrest me or lecture me, but I won’t take both, so make up your mind.’ “

EvX: Note Dobyns’s persona is demanding respect. He doesn’t get it from the police, but it was important for the observing Angels.

“He didn’t like that. He put his boot in between my shoulder blades and pushed me to the ground. Since I was cuffed I caught the pavement with my cheek. He kneeled, leaned in close, and whispered into my ear: “Motherfucker, if I ever see you in this town again I will fucking bury you in the desert where no one will ever fucking find you.”

“My recorder was going. I thought, Not good, dude. Not good for you. I knew this guy desperately wanted me out of his town and I knew he wasn’t using approved methods. I wanted to tell him what I was, but I couldn’t. It would be months until he learned how close he’d come to ruining his career that night.”

EvX: I once took a self-defense class taught by a retired police officer who claimed to have taken criminals out to the Everglades Swamp and left them for the alligators.

On the one hand, sometimes the justice system has trouble getting convictions against people who are actually violent criminals, and then you wonder if things wouldn’t be better if the police did more vigilante violence.

And then there are cases like this, where the police are dead wrong.

Respect, body language, and some interesting characters:

“On the thirty-first we waltzed into the Pioneer Saloon in Cave Creek and got a full introduction over the PA. …

“Everyone was there, and I mean everyone. Sonny, Johnny Angel, Hoover, Smitty, Joby, Bob, Fang–every guy who had any kind of influence in the state.

“Sonny came up and greeted each one of us, and in one of the greatest moments in bike investigator history, we got a group shot with him: Just Sonny Barger and Johnny Angel in the middle of a row of Sol Angeles, aka cops…

“As we left the side room I bumped into a short, roided out live wire with a shaved head. He looked like my shorter, wider twin. …

“The live wire asked, ‘What the fuck? You’re fucking Bird, aren’t you?’ He stabbed his finger at me, tapping me hard right were the bullet had come out of my chest.

“‘Yeah. that’s right.’

“‘Shit! I’m fucking Dirty Dan. And I need to talk to you. Come with me.’ … ‘I heard all about you, Bird. You’re some kind of crazy fucking cowboy, ain’t you? Shit, brother, I love that.’ …

“He asked about Mexico. I said I went to Mexico often. He said he’d heard there were Mongols down there. I said there were, but not too many. He said that as soon as his parole was up, he’d like to come with me, see if we could find some. I said great. He said find some and then kill ’em. I said awesome. He said we’d be a two-man massacre crew. I said, “Dirty Dan, you’re the kind of Hell Angel I’ve been waiting to meet.” He said that he liked the way I carried myself, that the club needed more guys like me. …

“After several minutes we parted company just as abruptly as we’d come together. We agreed to met and work out at the gym. He yelled, ‘All right! Later, Bird.’

“I yelled, ‘Later, Dirty Dan.’

“We’d been in a complete bubble. Hours after that, when were were winding down at the UC house, Gundo told me that when Dan and I started talking, all eyes turned to us. Our body language looked overly confrontational. Gundo said, ‘Man, I thought you two were gonna hit the deck. I was leaning against the bar with my hand on my gun… I thought we were about to be in the middle of an ass-beating shoot-out.’

“I laughed and said, ‘You kidding me? … I fucking loved that guy.’ …”

EvX: For the most part, the talk about killing Mongols sounds like a lot of talk, except during the 2002 River Run Riot, which occurred near the beginning of the book. Wikipedia summarizes:

The River Run Riot was a violent confrontation between the Hells Angels and the Mongols motorcycle clubs that occurred on April 27, 2002, in Laughlin, Nevada during the Laughlin River Run. The conflict began when members of the Hells Angels went to Harrah’s Laughlin to confront members of the Mongols who had allegedly harassed vendors that sold Hells Angels related merchandise. Mongol Anthony Barrera, 43, was stabbed to death, and two Hells Angels, Jeramie Bell, 27, and Robert Tumelty, 50, were shot to death.^[1]

Even by the end of the book, it was not clear what the essential nature of the Hells Angels really is. 1% clubs are ostensibly composed of criminals–that’s what the 1% means–but are they actually criminal organizations, or just organized criminals? The Angola Prison in in Louisiana, for example, publishes a newspaper, The Angolite, written by the prisoners. Obviously everyone who work on the paper is a criminal, but The Angolite isn’t a criminal organization, it’s just a newspaper. By contrast, the Mafia, while run by a set of related families from a particular ethnic background, obeying particular cultural codes, exists for the sole reason of committing crime. The Angolite is organized criminals; the Mafia is a criminal organization.

This may sound a bit existential, but for the police (and the HAs) it’s essential. If the HAs are just like-minded guys who want to ride motorcycles together, support their incarcerated brothers, hand out toys and bicycles to poor kids, and sell t-shirts, then they have every right to do that. Having once committed a crime does not preclude your right to hang out with other guys and ride motorcycles together. It doesn’t preclude your right to have a logo, copyright it, and sue Toys R Us if they violate it.

By contrast, if the HAs are actually using their  organization to commit crimes, then the police can shut them down and seize their assets (logos included.)

This distinction is essential for Dobyns. The police can prove that plenty of individual people have committed crimes. He’s purchased plenty of illegal guns, for example. The River Run Riot was caught on surveillance cameras, and at least some of the perpetrators were arrested and convicted of murder. But it takes more than that to prove that an organization is actively conspiring to commit crimes.

The government tried to charge the Hells Angels under RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) back in 1979, but couldn’t make it stick:

In 1979 the United States Federal Government went after Sonny Barger and several members and associates of the Oakland charter of the Hells Angels using RICO. In United States vs. Barger, the prosecution team attempted to demonstrate a pattern of behavior to convict Barger and other members of the club of RICO offenses related to guns and illegal drugs. The jury acquitted Barger on the RICO charges with a hung jury on the predicate acts: “There was no proof it was part of club policy, and as much as they tried, the government could not come up with any incriminating minutes from any of our meetings mentioning drugs and guns.“^[9][10]

More on this next Friday.

Two Exciting Papers on African Genetics

Nǃxau ǂToma, (aka Gcao Tekene Coma,) Bushman star of “The Gods Must be Crazy,” roughly 1944-2003

An interesting article on Clues to Africa’s Mysterious Past appeared recently in the NY Times:

It was only two years ago that researchers found the first ancient human genome in Africa: a skeleton in a cave in Ethiopia yielded DNA that turned out to be 4,500 years old.

On Thursday, an international team of scientists reported that they had recovered far older genes from bone fragments in Malawi dating back 8,100 years. The researchers also retrieved DNA from 15 other ancient people in eastern and southern Africa, and compared the genes to those of living Africans.

Let’s skip to the article, Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure by Skoglund et al:

We assembled genome-wide data from 16 prehistoric Africans. We show that the anciently divergent lineage that comprises the primary ancestry of the southern African San had a wider distribution in the past, contributing approximately two-thirds of the ancestry of Malawi hunter-gatherers ∼8,100–2,500 years ago and approximately one-third of the ancestry of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers ∼1,400 years ago.

Paths of the great Bantu Migration

The San are also known as the Bushmen, a famous group of recent hunter-gatherers from southern Africa.

We document how the spread of farmers from western Africa involved complete replacement of local hunter-gatherers in some regions…

This is most likely the Great Bantu Migration, which I wrote about in Into Africa: the Great Bantu Migration.

…and we track the spread of herders by showing that the population of a ∼3,100-year-old pastoralist from Tanzania contributed ancestry to people from northeastern to southern Africa, including a ∼1,200-year-old southern African pastoralist…

Whereas the two individuals buried in ∼2,000 BP hunter-gatherer contexts in South Africa share ancestry with southern African Khoe-San populations in the PCA, 11 of the 12 ancient individuals who lived in eastern and south-central Africa between ∼8,100 and ∼400 BP form a gradient of relatedness to the eastern African Hadza on the one hand and southern African Khoe-San on the other (Figure 1A).

The Hadza are a hunter-gatherer group from Tanzania who are not obviously related to any other people. Their language has traditionally been classed alongside the languages of the KhoiSan/Bushmen people because they all contain clicks, but the languages otherwise have very little in common and Hadza appears to be a language isolate, like Basque.

The genetic cline correlates to geography, running along a north-south axis with ancient individuals from Ethiopia (∼4,500 BP), Kenya (∼400 BP), Tanzania (both ∼1,400 BP), and Malawi (∼8,100–2,500 BP), showing increasing affinity to southern Africans (both ancient individuals and present-day Khoe-San). The seven individuals from Malawi show no clear heterogeneity, indicating a long-standing and distinctive population in ancient Malawi that persisted for at least ∼5,000 years (the minimum span of our radiocarbon dates) but which no longer exists today. …

We find that ancestry closely related to the ancient southern Africans was present much farther north and east in the past than is apparent today. This ancient southern African ancestry comprises up to 91% of the ancestry of Khoe-San groups today (Table S5), and also 31% ± 3% of the ancestry of Tanzania_Zanzibar_1400BP, 60% ± 6% of the ancestry of Malawi_Fingira_6100BP, and 65% ± 3% of the ancestry of Malawi_Fingira_2500BP (Figure 2A). …

Both unsupervised clustering (Figure 1B) and formal ancestry estimation (Figure 2B) suggest that individuals from the Hadza group in Tanzania can be modeled as deriving all their ancestry from a lineage related deeply to ancient eastern Africans such as the Ethiopia_4500BP individual …

So what’s up with the Tanzanian expansion mentioned in the summary?

Western-Eurasian-related ancestry is pervasive in eastern Africa today … and the timing of this admixture has been estimated to be ∼3,000 BP on average… We found that the ∼3,100 BP individual… associated with a Savanna Pastoral Neolithic archeological tradition, could be modeled as having 38% ± 1% of her ancestry related to the nearly 10,000-year-old pre-pottery farmers of the Levant … These results could be explained by migration into Africa from descendants of pre-pottery Levantine farmers or alternatively by a scenario in which both pre-pottery Levantine farmers and Tanzania_Luxmanda_3100BP descend from a common ancestral population that lived thousands of years earlier in Africa or the Near East. We fit the remaining approximately two-thirds of Tanzania_Luxmanda_3100BP as most closely related to the Ethiopia_4500BP…

…present-day Cushitic speakers such as the Somali cannot be fit simply as having Tanzania_Luxmanda_3100BP ancestry. The best fitting model for the Somali includes Tanzania_Luxmanda_3100BP ancestry, Dinka-related ancestry, and 16% ± 3% Iranian-Neolithic-related ancestry (p = 0.015). This suggests that ancestry related to the Iranian Neolithic appeared in eastern Africa after earlier gene flow related to Levant Neolithic populations, a scenario that is made more plausible by the genetic evidence of admixture of Iranian-Neolithic-related ancestry throughout the Levant by the time of the Bronze Age …and in ancient Egypt by the Iron Age …

There is then a discussion of possible models of ancient African population splits (were the Bushmen the first? How long have they been isolated?) I suspect the more ancient African DNA we uncover, the more complicated the tree will become, just as in Europe and Asia we’ve discovered Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture.

They also compared genomes to look for genetic adaptations and found evidence for selection for taste receptors and “response to radiation” in the Bushmen, which the authors note “could be due to exposure to sunlight associated with the life of the ‡Khomani and Ju|’hoan North people in the Kalahari Basin, which has become a refuge for hunter-gatherer populations in the last millenia due to encroachment by pastoralist and agriculturalist groups.”

(The Bushmen are lighter than Bantus, with a more golden or tan skin tone.)

They also found evidence of selection for short stature among the Pygmies (which isn’t really surprising to anyone, unless you thought they had acquired their heights by admixture with another very short group of people.)

Overall, this is a great paper and I encourage you to RTWT, especially the pictures/graphs.

Now, if that’s not enough African DNA for you, we also have Loci Associated with Skin Pigmentation Identified in African Populations, by Crawford et al:

Examining ethnically diverse African genomes, we identify variants in or near SLC24A5, MFSD12, DDB1, TMEM138, OCA2 and HERC2 that are significantly associated with skin pigmentation. Genetic evidence indicates that the light pigmentation variant at SLC24A5 was introduced into East Africa by gene flow from non-Africans. At all other loci, variants associated with dark pigmentation in Africans are identical by descent in southern Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations. Functional analyses indicate that MFSD12 encodes a lysosomal protein that affects melanogenesis in zebrafish and mice, and that mutations in melanocyte-specific regulatory regions near DDB1/TMEM138 correlate with expression of UV response genes under selection in Eurasians.

I’ve had an essay on the evolution of African skin tones sitting in my draft folder for ages because this research hadn’t been done. There’s plenty of research on European and Asian skin tones (skin appears to have significantly lightened around 10,000 years ago in Europeans,) but much less on Africans. Luckily for me, this paper fixes that.

Looks like SLC24A5 is related to that Levantine/Iranian back-migration into Africa documented in the first paper.

Anthropology Friday: No Angel by Jay Dobyns, pt 1

Today’s selection for Anthropology Friday is Jay Dobyns and Nils Shelton’s No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels. (If you aren’t familiar with American motorcycle culture, I recommend starting with my post, Do Biker Lives Matter? Harleys, Exit, and Thedic Signaling.)

From the Amazon blurb for No Angel:

Here, from Jay Dobyns, the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the outlaw Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, is the inside story of the twenty-one-month operation that almost cost him his family, his sanity, and his life.

Getting shot in the chest as a rookie agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 mph, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols…

Reminiscent of Donnie Brasco’s uncovering of the true Mafia, this is an eye-opening portrait of the world of bikers… one that fully describes the seductive lure criminal camaraderie has for men who would otherwise be powerless outsiders. Here is all the nihilism, hate, and intimidation, but also the freedom–and, yes, brotherhood–of the only truly American form of organized crime.

So what do all of these books on criminals have to do with anthropology? Traditional anthropology looks at pre-industrial societies such as Hadza hunter-gatherers or reindeer-herding Sami. With the rapid spread of industrialization, anthropologists feared that information about our own human past and the variety of forms societies can take would soon diseappear.

In more recent years, anthropologists have become interested in the forms different groups and sub-cultures take within industrialized societies. In Bury Me Standing: the Gypsies and their Journey, for example, Isabella Fonseca writes about the not-so-nomadic Gypsies of modern Europe; in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, Hugh Gusterson writes about nuclear scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

After our long look at Siberia, I wanted to find something different. If people can write about Gypsies, why not the poor of our own society?

I began this project thinking of criminals as aberrations, people in whom something had gone wrong or who had decided to abandon normal social norms. Now that I am at the end (typing up my notes,) I realize that many criminals as respected, integrated members of their societies whose behavior could be, under different circumstances, not only normal but beneficial. What is the difference, after all, between a criminal who sells illegal drugs and an honest business man who sells alcohol and tobacco? Between a gang member who kills a rival gangster for invading his turf and a soldier who kills an invading enemy?

Many thieves and violent criminals are kind and loving to their own families. Pablo Escobar, the notorious Colombian drug lord, had a devoted wife, loved his children, and gave away so much money to Colombia’s poor that 25,000 people attended his funeral. And even Mafia bosses, for all their crimes, have families and are treated with the respect in their own neighborhoods. (The fact that the locals often like or sympathize with the local criminals can interfere greatly in police efforts to track down and arrest those same criminals.)

Note: this is not all criminals. Drug dealers and serial killers have very different motives. Drug dealers want to make money. Serial killers want to kill people. Some criminals are, indeed, aberrant, psychotic people. Many are impulsive, low-IQ, or unable to succeed in life without resorting to crime. And most have a very low regard for the lives of others.

For obvious reasons, there aren’t a whole lot of ethnographies of criminals or criminal organizations, but Dobyns’s account of infiltrating the Hells Angels (no apostrophe) comes close.

Let’s begin with a bit of reflection about getting shot when he was a rookie cop (As usual, I’ll be using “” instead of blockquotes for readability):

“If anything, the shooting proved that my job, and therefore my life, was not glamorous in any way. Pathetically, I’d imagined that undercover life would be like Miami Vice–full of cigarette boats, fast cars, expensive clothe, and perfect tens in bikinis sitting in my lap while I negotiated with drug kingpins. Instead, I confronted toothless strippers and disgruntled Vietnam vets, and did deals with jonesing tweakers in trailer parks while getting shot by a broke-dick ex-con who lived with his mom. …

“In the years between the shooting and the summer of 2001, I’d done and seen things that citizen simply don’t do or see. I’d been in another shoot-out, I’d had an inhuman number of guns shoved in my face, I’d bought and sold tons of drugs, and I’d made hundreds of solid collars. I’d worked African-American gangbangers and Italian mobsters with Chris; the Aryan Brotherhood with Special Agent Louis Quinonez, and bikers from Georgia to Colorado with a bunch of different partners, including one of my ATF mentors, Vincent Cefalu.”

Bullhead City with Colorado River in foreground

On to his next assignment, in a city worth describing:

“Bullhead City is near the southern tip of Nevada, ten hours from where I lived in Tucson. It’s a broken-down town full of semi-employed mechanics who’ve shacked up with women who are–or were–“dancers.” It’s a meth capital teeming with high-school dropouts, and it’s all set down in a brown and tan valley that looks more like Mars than Earth. Across the brown Colorado River is Laughlin, Nevada, Bullhead’s dusty twin sister, with her winkling strip and brand-name outfits: Flamingo, Golden Nugget, Harrah’s. …

“By the end of the following week I was holed up in Bullhead at Gretchen’s Inn, a contemptible riverside hideaway off Route 95. From the outside it looked harmless, but from the inside it was something else. A fleabag meth flophouse, busted locks on the doors and windows that wouldn’t close, people screwing all day and night. I slept with my arms folded over my chest and one of my beloved Glock 19s in my hand.”

EvX: I’ve been a bit afraid of very cheap hotels ever since reading about a horrible crime that happened in one that I’m not going to link to because I don’t want to look it up again. So far I’ve managed to structure my life so that I can avoid bad neighborhoods, pretending more or less that they aren’t there when I’m not looking at them. But of course they are there, broken-down places full of drugs and broken dreams.

According to Wikipedia’s climate data, Bullhead City’s average high temperatures (average, not record) from June through September are 107.7, 112, 110, and 103.7 degrees F.

But back to the story, where our undercover cop needs to buy some guns:

“Sugarbear’s informant, Chuck, would take me to Mohave Firearms for some introductions…

“Here’s what I said:

“What’s up? This’s a nice place you got here, looks like you know your business. Yeah, Jay’s my name, but everyone calls me Bird … Yeah, I ride. You see a patch on my back? Well, then I’m not a One Percenter*, so quit asking… But listen, I got another business, maybe you can help me out? I need guns. Small ones, big ones, fast ones, slow ones. No papers. …

“The next day he sold me two .45s, no papers, no forms. All cash. It was too easy.

“Through the years I was often amused by how quickly suspects decided to trust me.”

EvX: Note: I cut a lot from this conversation. This just gives you some of the flavor. Dobyns needs to convince these guys that he’s a genuine buyer of illegal guns, not, oh, an undercover cop. And he does.

*A 1%, if you aren’t familiar with the term, is a member of an outlaw motorcycle club such as the Hells Angels.

Back to the story: working class Americans like their guns. Some of them really like them:

“Varvil proceeded to let us into his gun vault, a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room off the cluttered garage. Every wall of the room was lined with guns of every kind from damn near every decade of the twentieth century and probably two dozen countries.”

The Prison Run:

“Thousands of bikers stage up and slowly ride out to the prison complex in a massive pack of chrome, steel, leather, and denim to pay their respects to those unfortunate enough to be doing hard time. As the ragged column crawls past the yard, orange jumpsuited inmates caged behind thousands of feet of curlicued razor wire stand at parade rest while the bikers file past, saluting, hooting and hollering. To establish some semblance of order, the law comes out in a show of force. Helicopters, interpersonnel vehicles, cruisers, motorcycles, SUVs, paddy wagons–the whole fleet.”

EvX: Here are some great pictures of the Prison Run, and here is a great article:

“They talk about rehabilitation. They call it a “justice” system. But in reality this place is designed to destroy a man. The system has been designed to break, not to better a person. A man’s most valuable possession is his freedom. In this place they take that away. …

“For the last 24 years the Florence Prison Run has been a show of support by the Brothers still on the outside for all of the Brothers who are unfortunately under the care of the state on the inside. … The inspiration for the run was the incarceration of a brother. Running the prison was a way for the locked up Brother to feel and hear the presence outside and know, without a doubt, that he was remembered.”

Some background on why ATF wanted to infiltrate the Angels:

“At the time ATF had some real interest in the Angels. … This kind of case is built around existing police reports, warrants, affidavits, arrests, convictions, financial document, and public records. Slats [one of the ATF agents] sought to prove that the Angels were a criminal organization, indictable under RICO …

“the Angels had been in Arizona for a little under five years… before them the state’s top One Percenters were the Dirty Dozen. The Dozen had been violent and well-established. …

“The Angels came onto their turf when Ralph “Sonny” Barger, the iconic godfather of the Hells Angels, “retired” his forty-year presidency in Oakland, California. He’d served a prison term in the Phoenix area and had fallen in love with the climate and the state. … The Dirty Dozen were in a hard spot… They were tough, but they lacked the resources… of the Hells Angels. The Dozen’s members were given a choice: Disappear or patch over to the Angels. Most enthusiastically chose the latter. …

“These facts were significant. For a club to go from nonexistent to the main show in town in under five years proved… that the Angels were wielding their influence ably and willfully. These are the types of bricks that RICO cases are built with.”

EvX: In other words, regardless of whatever else the Hells Angels were up to, if they used violence or the threat of violence to force the Dirty Dozen out of Arizona, then they could be indicted under RICO.

That “regardless,” though, haunted me throughout the book. What were the Hells Angels up to, besides controlling territory? Selling drugs? Buying guns? I have some answers, but we’ll get to them later.

A certain curious difficulty:

some biker investigators assimilate and sympathize with their adversaries. Some even form their own clubs. This has always been a mystery to me. Cops don’t mimic mafia dons or dress as Crips and Bloods and form up neighborhood sets, so why would some choose to create their own motorcycle clubs patterned after criminal syndicates? …

Instructions for riding with the Angels:

“We’ll be at the back, keeping up. We gotta keep up. They blow a light, we blow a light. They get traffic stopped, we get traffic stopped. Mesa rides like the Blue Angels on Memorial Day. Other charters hate riding with ’em ’cause they’re such fucking road Nazis. Stay eighteen inches off the wheel in front of you. And stay back. Never, ever cross the line of a full patch’s front wheel. You pass one of these guys and there will be hell to pay.”

Murder at the local Hells Angels clubhouse:

“There was a bar on one side with a small triangular stage wedged next to it. A twelve foot long Death Head painted on one wall, an adjacent wall covered with trophies and memorabilia. …

“At least on person had already been killed on the floor of the Mesa clubhouse. … On October 25, 2001, a forty-something woman named Cynthia Garcia was partying with the boys at Mesa. During the course of that night she had the drunken balls to insult the Angels on their home turf… she was beaten unconscious by patched members Mesa Mike and Keven Augustiniak and a prospect, Paul Eischeid…

“[They] hauled the body, which was still technically alive, into the carport and dumped it in the trunk of a car. They drove Garcia out to the desert. … They stabbed her repeatedly. They took turns trying to cut off her head, which they wanted to leave on a fencepost for the vultures. …

“Cynthia Garcia, a mother of two, had made a bad decision, and she was dead for it.”

EvX: one theme that comes up constantly in these books–here, in Donnie Brasco’s The Way of the Wiseguy, and eponymousy in Bourgeois’s In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is respect.

Some people say that North West Europe has a Guilt Culture, while many Asian countries have a Shame Culture. I’m not exactly sure what the difference is, but in a guilt culture, people are told that God is watching them even when they are otherwise alone and will know if they have sinned. God knows if you pick your nose. God knows if you don’t wash your hands after using the toilet. And God definitely knows if you kill someone, even if no one else finds out.

By contrast, high-crime groups (including groups that hail from NW Europe) seem to have what I’m going to call Respect Cultures. In Respect Cultures, one’s social standing is of paramount importance, and disrespect can be grounds for murder.

The danger here is three-fold:

1. People from Respect Cultures are often at the bottom of the American totem pole–cause and effect unclear, but this seems like a bad combination either way.
2. People in Respect Cultures believe in rigid hierarchies in which they do not treat social inferiors as equals.
3. People in Respect Cultures will not hesitate to use violence to secure or increase their position.

More hierarchical societies obviously lean toward Respect Cultures, while more egalitarian societies lean toward Guilt Cultures. In atomized, egalitarian cultures, individual behavior is kept in check via internalized norms that one should not violate the “social contract.” By contrast, in hierarchical societies, your behavior is dictated by your position within the social pecking order. You have certain obligations to the people above you (often monetary) and obligations to the people below you (such as organizing economic opportunities or providing for their safety.)

For criminals, respect is absolutely vital, because respect translates into other criminals staying out of your turf. You respect a criminal because he can kill you; you disrespect him if you think you can kill him.

More on riding motorcycles:

“The Mesa boys rode like fearless banshees on crack. Jesus Christ himself could not have ridden a motorcycle better, faster, or tighter than Mesa… they kept no more than eighteen inches off the wheel in front of them–and they were often closer than that. By the time the lead riders had banked into a turn, the guy three bikes back had already leaned his shoulder into the thin air. They moved like a snake chasing a rabbit through its burrow. They blew lights and ignored traffic. The rabbits–everyone who wasn’t on a chromed-out Harley-Davidson, everyone who was ensconced in the “cage” of a car or truck, everyone unfortunate enough to be a pedestrian, everyone who was not a Hells Angel–ran scared. …

“Hells Angels live for their club and their brothers. One of there credos is “Step down or aside for no man, no law, no God.” They are free men unto themselves. At the root of this liberty is the experience of riding a bike. Their Harley Davidsons are the vehicles of their emancipation. Emancipation from society’s rule and expectations; from a life of work and obligations, from other men, wives, girlfriends, and family. … The things that the rest of us depend on for safety and consistency were never there for these men. They’re outcasts. The way they see it is, why should they return any favors?

“For these men it is the smallest of steps from outcast to outlaw.”

EvX: I wish the book had gone into more detail on what made these men “outcasts” in the first place.

“The irony is that while their appearance and lifestyle are clearly set up in opposition to those of us who live straight lives, they are hardly distinguishable from one another. Their individuality is confined by a rigid conformity. All wear the same kind of clothing, ride the same brand of bike, adhere to the same set of club rules. All must report once a week to “church” meetings, and all must pay monthly dues. The cuts [biker vests] forever remain the property of the club, as do the “skin patches,” the tattoos that each new member must receive. If for whatever reason a brother quits the club, then the Hells Angels are bound to go to his residence and remove every article of clothing, furniture, and memorabilia that contain ay reference to the Hells Angel–not merely to punish and divest him, but because the stuff simply is not his. … if he leaves on bad terms, then those tattoos are carved off–in some cases taken back with a cheese grater, or with a clothes iron on the linen setting. …

“the Hells Angels’ rules were legion and covered damn near everything … The Hells Angels have rules that govern their bikes, their appearance, their behavior, their old ladies, their engagement in criminal activity, their handling of rivals.”

So what’s the whole point?

“If you become a Hells Angel, everything else about you becomes moot. You’re no longer John J. Johnson–you’re a brother. A soldier. A unit of fear. … Drinks become free, and pussy is never more than a dick’s length away. … You’re suddenly capital-R Respected. If you’re done wrong by someone, the whole club is duty-bound to do wrong back to that person.”

EvX: This, right here, I think is it.

Throughout the book, I kept asking, “but what is the point?” The contrast with Brasco’s description of the Mafia is stark. The Mafia has a point: to make money. Drug lord Frank Lucas, in Original Gangster, had an obvious goal: to make money. But the Hells Angels are not obviously making much money. Perhaps they are, but are being very careful about not showing it off. Or perhaps some of them are, just not the ones Dobyns hung out with.

No, I don’t think money is the main point, though they probably make money when the opportunity presents itself. Rather, the Hells Angels and other groups like them are in it to control resources and territory. Drinks, women, bikes, and highways. That’s what they want, and by being the biggest bad-asses around (and pushing out any competing bad-asses, like the Dirty Dozen,) that’s what they get.

This is good place to wrap up for the week. See you next Friday.

A Digression about the Creek Freedmen

Note: We will be posting only on Mondays and Fridays for a bit. 

As we were reading on Friday in Dago’s Outlaws on Horseback:

It was commonly believed that a mixture of Creek and Negro blood was a dangerous cross, and that the offspring of such a union was sure to be ‘mean.’ It was true enough in the case of Lukey Davis, but there would seem to be little reason to accept it as generally so. For several hundred years there had been a strong infiltration of Negro blood into the Creek tribe, more so than with the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw. Few Creeks were a hundred per cent Indian. Undoubtedly intermarriage had some effect on Creek culture. That it worked any tribal character change or was responsible for the inflamed criminal instincts of some Creeks, such as those with whom Rufus Buck surrounded himself, must be dismissed as absurd.

Members of the Creek (Muscogee) Nation in OK around 1877. They included men of mixed Creek, European and African ancestry.

EvX: These are two interesting claims: first, that Creeks are heavily mixed, and second, that some people believe this an inauspicious mix. (Our author makes numerous statements throughout the book to the effect of not believing that criminality runs in families.)

This leads us to a modern-day controversy:

The Creek (aka the Muscogee,) were known as one of the “5 Civilized Tribes,” along with the Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw, for their high level of cultural sophistication and swift adoption of European technology. The five tribes are descended from the Mississippi Mound Builders Culture whose cities and towns once dotted the south east, before European diseases and Spanish-horse-mounted raiders from the Great Plains brought it down. And like their European neighbors in Georgia, they had slaves:

After the [Revolutionary] war ended in 1783, the Muscogee learned that Britain had ceded their lands to the now independent United States. … Alexander McGillivray led pan-Indian resistance to white encroachment, receiving arms from the Spanish in Florida to fight trespassers. The bilingual and bicultural McGillivray worked to create a sense of Muscogee nationalism and centralize political authority, struggling against village leaders who individually sold land to the United States. He also became a wealthy landowner and merchant, owning as many as sixty black slaves. …

In the summer of 1790, McGillivray and 29 other Muscogee chiefs signed the Treaty of New York, on behalf of the ‘Upper, Middle and Lower Creek and Seminole composing the Creek nation of Indians,’ ceding a large portion of their lands to the federal government and promising to return fugitive slaves, in return for federal recognition of Muscogee sovereignty and promises to evict white settlers. …

In 1805, the Lower Creeks ceded their lands east of the Ocmulgee to Georgia… A number of Muscogee chiefs acquired slaves and created cotton plantations, grist mills and businesses along the Federal Road.

The Seminole tribe fused about this time in Florida from a combination of Creeks, various other local tribes, and runaway slaves:

Led by Chief Secoffee (Cowkeeper), they became the center of a new tribal confederacy, the Seminole, which grew to include earlier refugees from the Yamasee War, remnants of the ‘mission Indians,’ and escaped African slaves.^[20]…

Many Muscogee refused to surrender and escaped to Florida. They allied with other remnant tribes, becoming the Seminole. Muscogee were later involved on both sides of the Seminole Wars in Florida. …

The Red Stick refugees who arrived in Florida after the Creek War tripled the Seminole population, and strengthened the tribe’s Muscogee characteristics.^{[34] …}

The Seminole continued to welcome fugitive black slaves and raid American settlers, leading the U.S. to declare war in 1817. … In 1823, a delegation of Seminole chiefs met with the new U.S. governor of Florida, expressing their opposition to proposals that would reunite them with the Upper and Lower Creek, partly because the latter tribes intended to enslave the Black Seminole. Instead, the Seminole agreed to move onto a reservation in inland central Florida.

But enough about the Seminoles; let’s get back to the Creek who are called Creek:

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, [Creek Chief] Opothleyahola refused to form an alliance with the Confederacy, unlike many other tribes, including many of the Lower Creeks. Runaway slaves, free blacks, Chickasaw and Seminole Indians began gathering at Opothleyahola’s plantation …

Because many Muscogee Creek people did support the Confederacy during the Civil War, the US government required a new treaty with the nation in 1866 to define peace after the war. It required the Creek to emancipate their slaves and to admit them as full members and citizens of the Creek Nation, equal to the Creek in receiving annuities and land benefits. They were then known as Creek Freedmen. The US government required setting aside part of the Creek reservation land to be assigned to the freedmen. Many of the tribe resisted these changes. The loss of lands contributed to problems for the nation in the late 19th century.

So in 2001, the Creek tribal government changed the rules:

Creek Freedmen is a term for emancipated African Americans who were slaves of Muscogee Creek tribal members before 1866. … Freedmen who wished to stay in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory, with whom they often had blood relatives, were to be granted full citizenship in the Creek Nation. …

The term also includes their modern descendants in the United States. At the time of the war and since, many Creek Freedmen were of partial Creek descent by blood.^[1] Registration of tribal members under the Dawes Commission often failed to record such ancestry. In 2001, the Creek Nation changed its membership rules, requiring all members to prove descent to persons listed as “Indian by Blood” on the Dawes Rolls. The Creek Freedmen have sued against this decision. …

Most of the Freedmen were former slaves of tribal members who had lived in both upper and lower Creek territories in the Southeast. In some villages, Creek citizens married enslaved men or women, and had mixed-race children with them. Interracial marriages were common during this time, and many Creek Freedmen were partly of Creek Indian ancestry. …

Beginning in 1898, the US officials created the Dawes Rolls to document the tribal members for [land] allotments; registrars quickly classified persons as “Indians by Blood”, “Freedmen,” or “Intermarried Whites.”…

The peace treaty of 1866 granted the Freedmen full citizenship and rights as Creek regardless of proportion of Creek or Indian ancestry. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation in 1979 reorganized the government and constitution based on the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936. It changed its membership rules, requiring that members be descendants of persons listed as ‘Indians by Blood’ on the Dawes Rolls. They expelled Creek Freedmen descendants who could not prove descent from such persons, despite the 1866 treaty, asserting their sovereign right to determine citizenship.^[3] Since the Creek changed their membership rules in 2001, they have excluded persons who cannot prove descent from persons listed on the Dawes Rolls as Indians by Blood.

An illustration of the Cahokia Mounds Site in Illinois, part of the Mound Builder Culture

Who belongs? For that matter, who has the authority to determine who belongs? Are you a real goth, or just a poser? A real American? A real Creek? It’s rather silly signalling when we’re talking about teenagers at the mall; it’s a significant question when “belonging” to a group entitles a person to significant benefits. Americans enjoy the benefits of protection by the American Armed Forces, welfare if we need it, and a free trade/free movement zone within the 50 states, for example. Creeks enjoy the benefits of scholarships, housing assistance, health care assistance, and of course culture and community.The Creek likely don’t regard treaties with the conquering US government as actually determining who is a “real” Creek–and money can be a strong incentive for tightening the membership rules.

Here’s an interesting article about the functioning of the Creek Government and its budget:

Today, the Muscogee Nation operates a more than $106 million budget and has more than 2,400 employees. It has tribal facilities and programs across eight districts of the Muscogee Nation and serves more than 60,000 enrolled tribal members.

As for the second claim, that Creek-African mixes were likely to be unpleasant people, if there is any truth to it at all, it was most likely due to which Africans ended up in the Creek Nation and which particular Creeks they married. Many of the whites who crossed into Indian Territory and married into the various tribes seem to have been “difficult” people (often criminals) escaping the US legal system. The same may have been true for blacks who chose to move to Indian Territory, or were sold to the Creeks by white plantation owners. Overall, though, Creeks aren’t genetically that different from related tribes like the Cherokee, so there’s nothing exceptional about a black/Creek mix besides the individuals involved.

Anthropology Friday: Outlaws on Horseback: Henry Starr, Gentleman Bandit

Welcome back to Anthropology Friday. Today we’re finishing up Harry Dago’s Outlaws on Horseback: The Organized Bands of Bank and Train Robbers Who Terrorized the Prairie Towns of Missouri, Kansas, Indian Territory, and Oklahoma for Half a Century.

I don’t normally read (or watch) Westerns, but I thought this was a great book. If the excerpts I’ve highlighted here pique your interest, I recommend you pick it up.

Since this is our last day, I have a series of short but interesting vignettes, ending with the story of Henry Starr, gentleman outlaw. As usual, quotes will be in “” instead of blocks for readability.

Ned Christie:

“Proof of the esteem in which Ned Christie was held in the community is found in the fact that when he was still in his early thirties he was elected to the Cherokee Tribal Council.”

EvX: I’m going to skip most of Christie’s story, though it’s interesting. He became an outlaw, was hunted by the marshals, and eventually he and his gang built a fort for themselves out in Indian Territory. The marshals tracked him down and began a dramatic battle involving dynamite and a cannon they had hauled through the wilderness.

“…the fort was demolished and only a twisted mass of logs remained. In the smoke and confusion, one of the Indians escaped. The other one was killed. Out of the ruins stepped Ned Christie, snapping his empty rifle. The marshals opened fire on him, and he toppled over and lay still. …

“The marshals had rid themselves of Ned Christie, but with little honor. If it had taken them so long to catch up with him, it was undoubtedly because there was something of robin Hood about Ned Christie. Most of his crimes were against white men. When he plundered an Indian it was usually a matter of robbing the rich to reward the poor.”

EvX: Local support for bandits/criminals/outlaws/pirates is a common theme running through these books–drug lord Pablo Escobar was popular among poor Colombians, pirate Jean Lafitte was popular among Louisianans, 450 men followed the outlaw Quantrill into Kansas, and even folks like Jesse James appear to have had some locals willing to protect and look out for them.

These are all cases where the bandits provided some services to the locals (such as smuggled goods) or at least weren’t targeting the locals. The next story is notably not one of these cases:

“There was nothing of Robin Hood in Rufus Buck, the young Yuchi (non-Muskhogean Creek) fullblood who, in his small way, was as vicious as Cherokee Bill and coupled with it a depravity rare even among Indian outlaws. He was born and raised near Okmulgee, in the Creek Nation. It was in that country that he committed his first robbery, minor crimes but so successfully carried out that three young Creeks… were attracted to him. A fourth man, Lukey Davis, by name, a Creek Negro mixblood, accepted his leadership.

“It was commonly believed that a mixture of Creek and Negro blood was a dangerous cross, and that the offspring of such a union was sure to be ‘mean.’ It was true enough in the case of Lukey Davis, but there would seem to be little reason to accept it as generally so. For several hundred years there had been a strong infiltration of Negro blood into the Creek tribe, more so than with the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw. Few Creeks were a hundred per cent Indian. Undoubtedly intermarriage had some effect on Creek culture. That it worked any tribal character change or was responsible for the inflamed criminal instincts of some Creeks, such as those with whom Rufus Buck surrounded himself, must be dismissed as absurd.”

Members of the Creek (Muscogee) Nation in OK around 1877. They included men of mixed Creek, European and African ancestry.

EvX: These are two interesting claims: first, that Creeks are heavily mixed, and second, that some people believe this an inauspicious mix. (Our author makes numerous statements throughout the book to the effect of not believing that criminality runs in families.) This leads us down a long tangent that I’m going to save for Monday.

Back to Dago:

“U.S. marshal S. Morton Rutherford came out from Fort Smith with a brigade of deputies… It took them weeks to track down the gang. The outlaws were camped in a motte of live oaks, three miles south of Muskogee, when Rutherford and his deputies surprised them. A furious battle, in which several hundred shots were fired, began at once. There was a hill behind the camp. Rufus Buck and his companions retreated to its highest point and held off the attackers for hours. When their ammunition was exhausted, they had no choice but to surrender.

The Rufus Buck Gang, 1895

“Hands manacled and in leg irons, the prisoners were put in a wagon and taken to Muskogee. … news of the capture of the Buck Gang preceded their arrival in town, and when the wagon bearing them turned up North Third Street, an angry mob of several hundred armed men made a rush for it and tried to drag the cowering wretches away from the officers and string them up at once. It was a Creek mob, ninety-five percent or so. As it surged about them, held off only by the pistols of Rutherford and his deputies, Rufus Buck, Lukey Davis and the others knew only too well that their crimes had outraged their own people and that they could expect less mercy from them than from white men.”

EvX: This is quite something! Even mafia bosses and drug lords have little to fear from spontaneous violent lynch mobs. But the Buck Gang had gone beyond mere robbery, murdering innocent people just because they felt like it. At least two women died from their injuries after being raped by the gang. Quieting the mob took a speech from the Creek chief himself and Rutherford threatening to shoot them if they rushed the jail.

The gang went before Judge Parker, the “hanging” judge who’d vowed to clean up Indian Territory, and were sentenced to death. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, failed, and they were finally hanged on July 1st, 1896.

An interesting story about Bill Dalton of the Dalton Gang:

“Bill Dalton… left Kansas to seek his fortune in the gold fields of Montana, possibly as early as 1885… he went on to California and established himself on a small ranch near the town of Livingston, in Merced County… and became active in “politics”–which meant throwing himself into the fight the ranchers of the San Joaquin Valley were waging against “The Octopus,” the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation, and its avowed policy of creating and maintaining a monopoly of transportation in California, and of exacting “from that monopoly the utmost possible profit.”

“Footnote: This was the struggle that was to last for a decade and a half, snuff out the lives of a score of men, cover the Southern Pacific with such obloquy that the passing years have never completely erased it, and make the names of John Sontag and Chris Evans household words in California to this day.”

EvX: I have never heard of “The Octopus” but then, I don’t live in California. Can any of my California readers confirm if this is still a household story?

If you want the story of the Southern Pacific, Wikipedia has a page full of interesting information, including a great illustration of the “Octopus.” Leland Stanford–yes, the Stanford who founded Stanford University–was president of the Southern Pacific in 1885. (Leland Stanford also drove the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad and is the bearded fellow shaking hands on the left in this photo of the celebration.)

Worth in the Future:

In the Condon Bank the robbery was not proceeding as planned. There was $18,000 in the safe, but cashier Ball informed Grat and his companions that the time lock on it was set for 9:45 and that it could not be opened before then. It meant waiting three minutes. That could not have seemed like much of await to Grat. But those lost three minutes sealed the fate of the Dalton Gang. Had Grat known it, the safe had been open since eight o’clock. If he had given the steel door a tug, it would have swung free in his hand. …

EvX: In one of his papers Leeson argues that promising delivery of the goods in the future (“Yes, Mister Pirate, we can get those sheep for you down from the mountain next week,”) lets an otherwise helpless group switch mobile bandits to traders. This is a very short version of this strategy.

On the Town of Ingalls:

“I have before me a plan of Ingalls as it was on September 1, 1893, the day of the fight. it was on a surveyed townsite, with a population of about one hundred and fifty men, women and children, and among its places of business, in addition to the saloons, were Bradley’s general store, Perry’s grocery, Nix’s restaurant, two blacksmith shops, two livery barns, a shoe shop, a drug store, a third grocery, Mary Pierce’s hotel and around the corner on Second Street, George Ransom’s O.K. hotel, where, according to Dr. Pickering’s diary, the bandits “boarded” when they were in town. …

“It is also worthy of note that Ingalls had a new schoolhouse, costing twelve hundred dollars–no trifling sum for so small a community in those days. On the same street with the schoolhouse was the Methodist Episcopal Church, North. … And there was the post office–the first post office established in Oklahoma Territory.

“Three doctors cared for the health of the town; Dr. J. H. Pickering, Dr. Selph and Dr. Call, the latter the stepfather of Rose Dunn, the fifteen-year-old girl who became the mythical “Cimarron Rose.”

EvX: A town of 150 people is about the same size as my immediate suburban neighborhood, though we are surrounded, on all sides, by more neighborhoods… And how many of us own a business at all? In Ingalls, most men likely worked for themselves; here most of us work for large corporations.

The Oklahoma Land Run:

“…in the spring of 1896, as has been stated, Perry was the rawest, toughest town of any size in the Territory, born on the first day of the great “run.” On the townsite, where there had been nothing at dawn, eight thousand frenzied men and women were crowded together by nightfall. A mile away to the north at Wharton station, where the Dalton Gang had staged their first holdup, the late trains were disgorging additional thousands. To establish some semblance of law and order in that seething madhouse where food and water were not procurable and fifty tent saloons were doing a roaring business, Marshals Tilghman, Thomas and Madsen were rushed up from Guthrie.”

Rose Dunn and Outlaw Women:

“Who was it that testified against Rose Dunn? They have never been identified. … And what was it they could have said against her? It must have been very damaging to have drawn from Judge Bierer that same sentence he had previously handed out to those two little she-wildcats, Cattle Annie (Annie McDougall) and Little Breeches (Jennie Metcalf) who were guilty of selling whisky to the Osages, stealing cattle and unmistakably acting as spies and lookouts for the Doolin Gang. They were no older than Rose, but the were range waifs, hard, vicious, ignorant, and always went armed with rifle and six-gun. When marshals Tilghman and Steve Burke finally cornered them at a ranch near Pawnee, they did their best to kill the two men. Even after they were disarmed, they fought with tooth and nail until they were subdued. Rose Dunn was none of those things. The worst that can be said against her is that she was the sister of Dal, George, and Bee Dunn, and the cousin of Will Dunn–all hard cases and suspected horse thieves.”

The Jennings Gang:

“Instead of returning to their old haunts, the [Jennings] gang headed south. Far down in the Chickasaw Nation, at a place named Berwyn, ten miles north of Ardmore, they had a try at another Santa Fe Train… Jennings always claimed that they got $35,000. Discounting his usual propensity for exagertion, one may estimate that it likely amounted to no more than $20,000. But it was a stake. They cut up the loot and scattered for a few months. Al [Jennings] and his brother Frank got passage on a tramp steamer at Galveston and landed in Honduras, from which there was no extradition.

“In the cantinas of Puerto Barrios they fell in with a shabby, overweight and congenial refugee from Texas who had fled his native country to escape an indictment for embezzling funds from an Austin bank. With pseudo-histrionic dignity, he informed them that he was William Sydney Porter. … The three of them embarked on a drunken carouse, lasting for weeks, and ending only when they ran out of funds.

“Penniless when they sobered up, Al says he suggested robbing the Puerto Barrios bank. Porter refused to have a hand in it. He was going back to Texas, he said, and face the embezzlement charge that he claimed had been brought against him to cover the speculations of the bank’ officers…. He was found guilty, however, and sentenced to five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary, where, under the pen name of O. Henry he began writing the short stories that were to make him world-famous.

[Eventually the Jennings Gang was arrested]

“All four served five-year sentences at Columbus, Ohio. Al had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but he came out with the others, freed on a presidential pardon. At Columbus, he was assigned to the dispensary, and there he met his friend from Honduras, William Sydney Porter …

“Whatever else he was, [Al] was an excellent storyteller, and his tales were seldom about himself. It has been said that O. Henry got some of his short stories from him. I know that I did–many of them. …

“Al was in his middle fifties when I became acquainted with him–a lean, wiry little man, with twinkling blue eyes in a grizzled face, and dyed red hair. He passed away in 1962, aged ninety-eight by his reckoning, projecting to the end the illusory image of himself that he had used for half a century and more to cancel out his frustrations.”

EvX: 1962! (Wikipedia claims 1961.) It is amazing to think of all the decades a man’s life might encompass–a man born during the civil war, a train robber and bandit, who witnessed the rise of cars, highways, and airplanes, World Wars I and II, industrialization, electricity, television, and the first man in space.

Henry Starr, Gentleman Outlaw:

Henry Starr

“Though perhaps not justified, I have always entertained a sentimental regard for Henry Starr. To me, he is the classic example of the man lost to outlawry who should have been saved for something better. He had the intelligence and personal charm to have taken him a long way. …

“He was born at Fort Gibson on December 2, 1873, and attended the Indian school at Tahlequah. He was remarkably abstemious, never using liquor, tobacco, tea or coffee. He made friends easily, many of whom remained loyal to him after he was steeped in banditry. Everybody seems to have liked handsome, soft-spoken Henry Starr. The U.S. marshals, whose business it was to run him down, respected him, even befriended him at times. They knew he was “absolutely without fear, that he would fight like a wildcat if cornered.” …

“Though Henry Starr robbed a score of banks and faced the gunfire of marshals and irate citizens many times, it is a tribute to his coolness when the chips were down that only one killing appears on his record.”

EvX: Like many outlaws and criminals, Henry Starr was married, to a girl named Mary Jones, a mixed-race Cherokee.

But Starr was caught:

“Henry Starr faced a number of indictments, one of them for the slaying of Deputy Marshal Floyd Wilson. It was on the murder charge that prosecutor Clayton brought him to trial.

“It was the only time he faced the famous Hanging Judge. He was convicted and sentenced to die on the gallows. …

“The date set for Starr’s execution was February 20, 1895. He was still very much alive when the day passed. His lawyer had appealed to the Supreme Court, which then was possible, to set aside the verdict. … In the meantime, Henry Starr remained caged in the overcrowded, vermin-infested hell-hole that was the Fort Smith court’s prison. He was still there on the evening of July 26, when Cherokee Bill killed Turnkey Eoff and set off the riot. For his bravery in going into Cherokee Bill’s cell and disarming him, the charge against him was reduced to manslaughter, and he was sentenced to fifteen years in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

“At Columbus, with fifteen years of confinement ahead of him, he began the self-education that he was to pursue for the est of his life. In his thirst of learning, his reading took him into widely unrelated fields–political science, ancient history, criminology and the science of firearms, phases of the last, such as the velocity of discharged missiles, windage and trajectory, requiring some knowledge of mathematics to be understandable. …

“When he had served five years, the warden was convinced that Starr could safely be returnee to society. He instituted proceedings for his pardon. President Theodore Roosevelt Granted it.

“On his return to the Territory, Starr found his wife and embarked in the real estate and insurance business… His son was born, and he named him Roosevelt for the man who had pardoned him. …

[Some technical stuff happens and he gets pulled up on an old robbery charge, so he decides to flee to California]

“On the way, he passed through the little town of Amity, Colorado… Its one bank, patronized almost exclusively by farmers, looked so easy to rob that, in his words, it seemed a shame to pass it up.

“He collected several thousand dollars and continued on his way, but was captured by a sheriff’ posse east of Lamar and sent to the Canon City penitentiary for twenty-five years. …

“At Canon City, Henry Star was once more an exemplar prisoner. He was made a trusty and put in charge of a road gang of a hundred convicts. At the end of the prescribed five years, the warden signed his application for parole. It was granted, with the provision that he was to report to the parole board once a month and was not to leave the state of Colorado He was no sooner at liberty than he hurried back to Tulsa to find his wife. [She had meanwhile divorced him.]

“It was at this time that a wealthy stockman, who still had faith in him and believed he could get straightened out if he got away from his Oklahoma environment, took him up to St. Louis, bought him expensive raiment and got him a job. All went well for a time, until Starr was invited to a party in Webster Groves, a suburb. By chance, he got off the trolley car in front of the bank. Once again it was a case of a bank looking easy to rob. A week or so later it was held up by a lone bandit in typical border fashion. Starr disappeared from St. Louis.”

EvX: Some men “fall off the wagon” into alcohol. Starr fell off the wagon into bank robbery.

“In the course of the two years that followed, a score of small banks were robbed, all daylight jobs, and always by a lone bandit. The cry went up that Henry Starr was responsible. At Stroud, Oklahoma… on March 27, 1915, its two banks were robbed in spectacular fashion, the twin robberies being accomplished in less than a quarter of an hour. …

“Henry Starr jogged into Stroud with five armed companions whom he had recruited in the Verdigris Valley and the Osage Hills, the breeding ground of outlaw and horse thieves for half a century. They were “unknowns” in the world of banditry at the time: Lewis Estes, Bud Maxfield, Claude Sawyer and Al Spencer, an undersized young punk who survived to become one of the F.B.I.’s mot wanted Public Enemies in the era of “automobiles and automatics” that was soon to follow. Very likely the fifth man who rode into Stroud that day was Spencer’s borther-in-law, Grover Durrell, a future Spencer mobster. …

[Everyone gets away except for Starr, who has been shot. He is captured and Marshal Tilghman arrives:]

“‘Henry, I’m becoming convinced that you are going to live and die a criminal,’ Tilghman recalled having told him. ‘You’ve broken every promise you ever made me. You told me you were through robbing banks, and here I find you pulling a double-header.’

“‘Mr. Tilghman'” he said, ‘when I came to Stroud to look thing over, I saw it was just as easy to rob two banks as one, so I decided to kill two bird with one stone.” …

“When Starr was able to stand trial, he was found guilty and was sentenced to twenty-five years at McAlester. …

“McAlester was reputed to be a tough prison, but Starr had no trouble there. He behaved himself and soon was given many privileges. Friends on the outside worked for his release. He appeared to be Contrite. He was forty-seven, his health broken. in December 1920, he was released on parole, having served only five years and six months.

“In all, he had been sentenced to sixty-five years in prison, but he served only slightly more than fifteen.

“He returned to Tulsa but had no luck finding a job. … Oklahoma was booming, and he was a relic of the past who had outlived his time. Automobiles were everywhere, and hard-surfaced roads were shooting out across the prairies in every direction. Oil was making millionaires of dirt farmers almost overnight. ….

“And then on February 18, 1921, he was back in the headlines. Accompanied by two armed men, he walked into the bank at Harrison, Arkansas, a hundred mile east of Bentonville, where he had cracked his first bank, and informed William J. Myers, the cashier, and a bookkeeper that it was holdup.

“Myers was prepared for just an emergency. When Star ordered him and his bookkeeper to back into the vault, he consented readily enough, for just inside the vault door was a double-barreled shotgun… as he followed Myer into the vault, the shotgun roared and Starr crumpled to the floor. …

“Henry Star, who had been among the first, and certainly was the last, of the noted horseback outlaws was dead. Waiting in the wings, ready to take over, was a new crop of bandits of a deadlier breed, mad dogs who killed without compunction. Armed with automatics, submachine guns and bombs, using speeding automobiles to make their getaways, they were to terrorize the country as the James-Youngrs, the Daltons, the Doolins and the Henry Starrs never had. …

“Starr’s body was brought to Tulsa and given a Christian funeral and burial.

“It was the end of the era of the outlaw on horseback.”

EvX: I find this transition, both from horseback outlaws to car-driving mobsters and from basically pre-industrial to industrial society, absolutely fascinating. What was it like for the people who lived through it?

We won’t be reading about Prohibition Era mobsters, interesting though they are, though we will be reading about outlaw bikers (who feel more like the spiritual heirs of the horseback outlaws) next and Donnie Brasco’s The Way of the Wiseguy about the Mafia after that.

I hope you have enjoyed this series. I sure have.

Cultural Marxists are the Real Capitalists: A Critical Critique of Critical Criminology

Critical Criminology claims that:

1. The legal system was created by and for the ruling class (cishetero white males) in order to keep the rich rich and the poor and oppressed poor and oppressed.
2. To this end, crimes the poor commit (such as burglary) are heavily penalized, while crimes the rich commit (such as racism or insider trading) are not.
3. Many of the “crimes” of the oppressed (like rape, assault, mugging, and mass rioting) shouldn’t be considered crimes at all, but are just desperate attempts at survival
4. The “real crimes” are things like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., which create the oppressive capitalist society that creates common street crime
5. When racism sexism, homophobia, etc. are outlawed, then we can create the perfect socialist state which will have no crime.

Creationism is more factually solid than Critical Criminology, but Critical Criminology is taught in real universities alongside real theories about how the world works.

But let’s step back a moment. #1 is at least partially true–the rich do have a disproportionate influence on the legal system and the poor are often at its mercy. Corporations and wealthy individuals do use their money and influence to get legislation written and enforced in ways that benefit themselves.

But which crimes, exactly, are the rich interested in prosecuting? Do they care if a drug addict steals wallets down in the ghetto? They don’t live in the ghetto. They use their money to insulate themselves from violent crime by buying houses in nice, gated neighborhoods with private security forces.

It’s the poor who are the primary victims of crime, and it’s the poor who’d like murderers to be arrested. Only someone who is rich enough not to live with the threat of violent crime could possibly say something as stupendously idiotic and  insensitive as “rape and assault aren’t real crimes.”

If critical criminologists are the wealthy, then wouldn’t they, logically, be trying to reshape the legal system to benefit themselves?

Meanwhile, they accuse the wealthy of  racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., but these attitudes are actually associated with the poor. Rich whites absolutely pride themselves on being open-minded, tolerant, anti-racist, feminist, etc, and are horrified at all of the racist, sexist, Islamophobic bigotry embodied in low-class Trump voters.

So the crimes these wealthy critical theorists are trying to get outlawed are not things that the rich are doing, but things the rich want the poor to stop doing.

Here I could cite a dozen examples, from Hate Speech laws in Britain being more strongly enforced than rape laws to Hillary Clinton’s “Would bringing down the banks end racism?” speech to Piers Morgan complaining about Islamophobia.

Why are the capitalists so intent on smashing bigotry in all its forms?

Simple: Capitalism wants to make money. Capitalism doesn’t care about oppressing brown people, or women, or gays, or Muslims, or foreigners, or anyone. Capitalism just wants the best possible ratio of worker quality : worker cost. If Mexicans can do the same job as Americans for half the cost, then capitalists want to hire Mexicans and they want Americans to stop trying to pass laws limiting the number of Mexican immigrants who can come work for the capitalists. If Europe is facing a labor crisis because Europeans haven’t made enough new workers to fill the factories and finance the welfare state, then European capitalists must import new workers and they want European workers to stop complaining about the terrorist attacks. Capitalism just wants to hire “the best person for the job” or at least the cheapest person who’ll do an adequate job.

The only odd part is that capitalists are wrapping themselves in the Communist flag while imprisoning people for objecting to the importation of cheap, union-breaking labor. We could accuse them of lying–or gaslighting–except many of them seem to really believe it. Perhaps socialism provides the necessary tool for lying to themselves. “Oh, I am not actually screwing over the poor by advocating on behalf of my own profits.” Most people don’t like to think of themselves as nasty, evil, and self-serving, but they will often project those qualities onto others. (“I’m a nice person, it’s everyone else who’s backstabbing cheaters!”) By casting their enemies (middle and working class white males who don’t want to lose economic security)’s concerns onto the cartoonish figure of the evil capitalist, they simultaneously dismiss those concerns and recast themselves as heroic defenders of the “oppressed.”

Wikipedia has an interesting theory on self-deception:

Some evolutionary biologists, such as Robert Trivers, have suggested^{[6][page needed]} that deception plays a significant part in human behavior, and in animal behavior, more generally speaking. One deceives oneself to trust something that is not true as to better convince others of that truth. When a person convinces himself of this untrue thing, they better mask the signs of deception.^[7]

This notion is based on the following logic: deception is a fundamental aspect of communication in nature, both between and within species. It has evolved so that one can have an advantage over another. From alarm calls to mimicry, animals use deception to further their survival. Those who are better able to perceive deception are more likely to survive. As a result, self-deception evolved to better mask deception from those who perceive it well, as Trivers puts it: “Hiding the truth from yourself to hide it more deeply from others.” In humans, awareness of the fact that one is acting deceptively often leads to tell-tale signs of deception, such as nostrils flaring, clammy skin, quality and tone of voice, eye movement, or excessive blinking. Therefore, if self-deception enables someone to believe her or his own distortions, they will not present such signs of deception and will therefore appear to be telling the truth.