Recent statement cropping up on a lot of social media about the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare Insurance over some other social media posts lionizing Luigi Mangione:
"A healthy society doesn't lionize vigilante killers.
But we don't live in a healthy society."
My response: Really? We don't lionize? Kyle Rittenhouse leaps to mind. I remember members of a certain party saying, "I want him to be my Senator", and urging him to run for office, even though he took a semiautomatic rifle (a Smith & Wesson M&P 15) out of state (from Illinois to Wisconsin) to a BLM riot. Seventeen year olds don't do that unless they're looking to shoot someone and he did. Daniel Penny, just acquitted for using excessive force in killing a homeless mentally ill man who was yelling at people on a subway, was taken to the Army & Navy game where he sat with President Elect Trump, VP Elect Vance, and Elon Musk. Seems a little like lionizing to me... Not to mention the long, tragic, on-going tradition of lynching.
Here in America, it's all about who gets vigilanteed. And it's assumed that some people are untouchable. And we all know that.
BUT – The simple truth is that there comes a point where the "common man" has had enough of being ripped off and used, and... crap happens. Let's use the Way-Back Machine and go to the Great Depression (1929-1939), when the most common folk heroes were bank robbers.
A little history first: The banks in the Roaring Twenties had invested a tremendous amount of money - too much money, most of their customers' money - in the roaring stock market. So when the stock market crashed, they closed, a polite term for went bust, collapsed, went bankrupt. And as those banks failed, people tried to withdraw all their money from both the collapsing and surviving banks, which only made things worse. Banks liquidated loans and other assets. 800 banks in 1930, 2100 in 1931, 9000 by 1933.
And there was no FDIC - which was created by FDR and which federally insures our deposits to this day - so if a bank failed, people who had any money in those banks lost it all, with no hope of getting it back.
MY NOTE: Certain people in the post-January 20, 2025 world want to abolish the FDIC because... reasons... No history, but "reasons"...
Meanwhile, there were a lot of small rural banks which were unregulated. (Again, times have changed.) They'd grown up after WW1, when the world needed a lot of corn and cotton. As farmers bought more land, real estate went up. As real estate went up, farmers took out more loans. As the economy tanked, these banks called in their loans, but farmers didn't have the money. And the Dust Bowl hit - the "Dirty Thirties", which was a severe drought (up to 8 years in some areas) exacerbated by "deep plowing" which led to soil erosion. Crops failed. No money. Result? Foreclosures, foreclosures, and more foreclosures. The banks took the farms, booted out the farmers, and then sold the land at a nice profit to someone else - anyone else.
The result was that about 3.5 million people left the Great Plains - 86,000 moved to California the first year - trying to find a place and a way to live. They weren't welcomed with open arms. They were called "Okies" and "Arkies" and treated as subhuman. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)
Anyway, all of these people - and more - blamed the banks for taking their land. They hated the banks. And so when various armed gangsters started robbing banks, they became folk heroes. It didn't matter that they often killed people during their robberies. Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd (who allegedly destroyed mortgage documents when he robbed a bank), and many more were heroes, because they were fighting back against the filthy banks that had taken everything the common people had. They even (sometimes) gave (some) money away, just often enough to make them Robin Hoods in the public eye.
And these modern day Robin Hoods / folk heroes showed up, in legends and ballads like Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, which included "Tom Joad", "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues".
They also showed up in the serious literature of the day: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (published in 1939) Ma Joad told her son Tom Joad about Pretty Boy Floyd:
"I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…He done a bad thing an' they hurt 'im, caught 'im an' hurt him so he was mad, an' the nex' bad thing he done was mad, an' they hurt 'im again. An' purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint an' he shot back, an' then they run him like a coyote, an' him a-snappin' an' a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An' he was mad. He wasn’t a boy or a man no more, he was just a walkin' chunk of mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn' hurt 'im. He wasn' mad at them. Finally then run him down and killed 'im. No matter what they say it in the paper how he was bad – that’s how it was."
When it came out, The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller that was banned and burned in many states, but also read voraciously. And it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Bonnie & Clyde, of course, got the full movie treatment, more than once - 1967's Bonnie & Clyde (directed by Sam Peckinpah) is the most famous. And there are a lot of songs written about them:
And here's one, in French, sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.
And you can read Bonnie Parker's own account of their career in "The Trail's End" Here.
Meanwhile, John Dillinger probably has the most movies made about him. Lot of people have sung about him, written about him (William Burroughs loved him and hoped he was still alive), and played him in the movies...
The only folk hero (so far) who beats him is Jesse James. I think Jesse James is proof that bank robbers have never been that unpopular among the "common man". When I was a little girl, my grandmother would sing "Jesse James" to me as a treat. I'll never forget her wavering voice singing the refrain, "The dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave." You could tell where her sympathies lay. Here it is, sung by Johnny Cash:
BTW, in case you're thinking that this is a grim message for the day after Christmas, you need to read more Dickens. First of all, Ebenezer Scrooge would be an obvious target for a folk hero's bullet - and was threatened with an ignominious death by the deceased Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Future. And then there's Dickens' The Chimes, so bleak it makes Cormac McCarthy look cheerful. Yes, Dickens does supply the mandatory happy ending, but until then... it's a treatise on the ultimate result of Victorian economic theory and practice (pay the poor the absolute minimum and step on any of them who objects), and a legal system designed to eliminate the poor the hard way (lock them up if they don't starve first). This fun read for the holidays is available for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/653/653-h/653-h.htm
Or you could just take a walk down some of the poorer streets of your city... Talk to some of the elderly who are working at hardscrabble jobs to make ends meet, because their Social Security isn't enough. To some of the working class parents, both of them working two jobs to pay for everything, and always falling behind. To that woman, living in her car because she lost her job, the bank foreclosed, and she still can't figure out how it all happened so fast. To the elderly man who divorced his wife, not because he doesn't love her, but because she's in a dementia ward, and the only way to keep her there is to let the nursing home take all the money, while he lives in a little apartment on his Social Security and works one of those hardscrabble jobs to keep himself alive. To the family of the teenager who got meningitis/encephalitis and was in the hospital for almost a year and got smacked with $1 million in debt... And that was AFTER a chunk of it was forgiven by the hospital...
The #1 reason for bankruptcy in this country (66.5%) is medical debt.
