AP Success - AP English Language: Violence in American Ethos

On September 26, 1872, three mounted men rode up to the gate of the Kansas city

Fair, which was enjoying a huge crowd of perhaps 10,000 people. The bandits shot

at the ticket seller, hit a small girl in the leg, and made off for the woods with something

less than a thousand dollars. It was highhanded, and it endangered the lives of a whole host of

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holiday-minded people for comparatively little reward.

What makes the robbery and the violence notable is not the crime itself but the

way it was reported in the Kansas City Times by one John N. Edwards. In his front-page

story he branded the robbery "so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt

of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators."

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Two days later the outlaws were being compared by the Times with knights of

King Arthur's Round Table:

"It was as though three bandits had come to us from storied Odenwald, with the

halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments and shown us how the things were

done that poets sing of. Nowhere else in the United States or in the civilized world,

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probably, could this thing have been done."

Quite likely this deed was perpetrated by the James brothers: Jesse and Frank, and

a confederate. The details really do not matter. What pertains is the attitude of the

innocent toward the uncertainly identified guilty. The act had been perpetrated by

violent, lawless men. If the Times is any indication, a respectable section of people

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approved of their action. No one, of course, thought to ask the little girl with the

shattered leg how she felt about such courage. Nearly 17 months later, Edwards

was quoted in the St. Louis Dispatch as preferring the western highwayman to the

Eastern, for "he has more qualities that attract admiration and win respect . . . . This

comes from locality . . . which breeds strong, hardy men-men who risk much, who

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have friends in high places, and who go riding over the land, taking all chances that

come in the way." The purpose here is not to belabor one reasonably anonymous

newspaperman of nearly a century ago, but merely to point up a fact-and a problem-of

the American frontier.

The frontier placed a premium on independent action and individual reliance.

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The whole history of the American frontier is a narrative of taking what was there

to be taken. The timid never gathered riches, the polite nearly never. The men

who first carved the wilderness into land claims and town lots were the men who moved

in the face of dangers, gathering as they progressed. The emphasis naturally came to

be placed on gathering and not on procedures. Great tales of gigantic attainments

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abound in this frontier story; equally adventurous tales of creative plundering mark

the march from Jamestown to the Pacific. It was a period peopled by giants, towers

of audacity with insatiable appetites. The heroes are not the men of moderate

attitudes, not the town planners and commercial builders, not the farmers nor the

ministers nor the teachers. The heroes of the period, handed along to us with all the

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luster of a golden baton, are the mighty runners from Mt. Olympus who ran without

looking back, without concern about social values or anywhere they might be going

except onward.

We revere these heroes because they were men of vast imagination and daring.

We have also inherited their blindness and their excesses.