Part One: The War On Vagrants

Robert sits down with Margaret Killjoy to talk about slavery and the origins of our present-day war on homelessness.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's not sending Sophie the script my Robert. This is
Behind the Bastards a podcast about anti authoritarianism, and as
an anti authoritarian, I reject the the hierarchy of Sophie
demanding my scripts before the end. Here's my question, hower
to the people, schools out for summer? Motherfuckers.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Okay, but here's my question. Here's my question. Would you
have survived the last five years without me?

Speaker 1 (00:32):
No, that's not what it's about. This is about principle, Sophie.
This is about you know, a higher ethics, Daniel, I
would appreciate it if you would put in a clip
from the song schools Out.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
No No, as the authority on this soe no, no,
what's summer? Okay, all right, we can have we can
have one SoundBite?

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Thank you, thank you, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Uh did you all listen to that song every summer?
Like on the bus home?

Speaker 1 (01:02):
I think I listened to it every year because there
was always like some sort of TV special or whatever
that was summer themed that always had it it important.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, back to back to Can I have the script? Please?

Speaker 1 (01:19):
No, Sophie, but yes, because I sent it? So Uh
Margaret kill Joy, how how how are we doing today. Good,
I'm doing great. How do you, uh, how do you
how do you feel about our nations escalating war on
the existence of people who don't have uh, you know,

(01:39):
the money to stay indoors?

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Uh, well, someone's got it. I think I'm going to
join that war.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
But on the other side, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's uh,
it's it's pretty like dark times right now in terms
of like right now we're kind of living through this
this intense scapegoating because the right has kind of gotten
there their ducks in a row and in terms of
how to like push insurgent camp like moral panic hatred campaigns,

(02:12):
and they've launched a few in a row, and one
of the ones that's really taken off in the last
really the last two years, has been this kind of
escalating war against the houseless. And kind of on one side,
you've got this huge right wing media ecosystem that like
anytime there's like a homeless person who's set up near

(02:34):
a fancy building somewhere in the West Coast, or anytime
like some right winger sees poop on the street, or
anytime there's there's like a broken window anywhere, you get
these like like this whole fucking ecosystem of shitty websites
and sites like The Post being kind of the bigger
ones putting up these articles about how San Francisco's in chaos,

(02:55):
or you know, Portland is in chaos, or New York
City's in chaos, and kind of as a result.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
And it's never because people have been kicked out of
their houses. It's always because there's people who haven't.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
It's not so like rent has doubled in like the
last three or four years or anything like that, or
that like a bunch of the companies that are responsible
for making our food have seen record profits because they
used stories about inflation as an excuse to jack up
the cost of basic food stuffs. That made it untenable
for a lot of people to like continue surviving in

(03:29):
the same way that they had. No, we don't blame
any of that. We blame you know, the folks who
need to live in a tent because that's the only
thing they can afford. And kind of a surge of
fun new laws has come down the pipeline in the
very recent past. This kind of like moral panic has
sort of metastasized this year into a sweeping wave of

(03:53):
new laws to criminalize houselessness. In Missouri, a state law
recently took effect January of this year that makes it
a crime for any person to sleep on state property.
This doesn't just mean like you can't crash on the
steps of the Capitol building or whatever. It means like
if you're sleeping in a public park or under a highway,
you can face up to seven hundred and fifty dollars

(04:14):
in fines and get up to fifteen days in prison.
The law went into effect right as Missouri cut funding
for homeless services, making incarceration the best funded option for
a lot of people living on the streets right now.
Last August, Los Angeles' city council banned homeless encampments within
five hundred feet of schools and daycares. This mirrored comments

(04:35):
made two days before we recorded this episode by San
Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, alongside a video that was just
like these dramatic shots of homeless camps and like parents
walking their kids to school and looking frightened. He made
this post quote, the encampments make it hard for kids
walking to school. They are forced into the street to
get around them. Plus they're seeing things kids should never

(04:57):
see now. Yeah, definitely, it's bad for kids to realize that,
like our addiction to capitalism has human consequences. We should
be we should be putting those people in fucking camps
where where children won't have to realize that perhaps there

(05:17):
are injustices in the system they live under.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
And none of those people in those camps are children,
so it's not a problem.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
It is. James actually, just before we started recording this,
sent me a link to an article by Or sent
me a link to a post from the from Alliance
San Diego, which is a community organization organized around kind
of building collective power in San Diego and is trying

(05:47):
to fight back against this criminalization of homelessness that the
mayor is pushing for. And they had an interview with
a woman named Zuleima who is homeless alongside her six
year old son, and she's like, this means that my
six year old son won't be able to, like, we
won't be able to sleep near the school that he
goes to. It's cool stuff, anyway, this is all very

(06:09):
anti human and fucked up, and there's a shipload of
bastardry in all of this.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
I mean Todd, Todd Gloria is a motherfucker.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
But there's Todd Gloria is a piece of ship.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
There's many Todd Gloria. Is that that Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Todd's Gloria.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
I think the yeah Todd Gloria.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
But yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Also there's that wonderful thing where the thirteenth Amendment that abolished.
Oh yeah, that says in case we're we're heading Margaret.
That's uh, what this episode is actually about. Because I'm
not just complaining, yeah, mostly be me fetching about these
modern laws. This is kind of explaining the surprisingly deep

(06:50):
and surprising origins of our of our war on on
what have been most commonly called vagrants, and we will
be using that term because that's the legal term that's
all used. I don't think being a vagrant is a
bad thing, very pro vagrant, but you know, it's it
is the legal term that for most of our nation's history,
and for most of like Western modern Western history, has

(07:12):
been used for people who like don't have a home
in the traditional sense of the word. I've been a
vagrant a little bit when I was younger, and then
my grandfather was a hobo in World War two or
not World War two, in the Great Depression, you know,
road freight trains around looking for work. Oh that's the
oid line of yeah, yeah, no, I mean I think
it's interesting when you kind of bring up the Great

(07:32):
Depression generation because like that that generation gets lionized so much,
particularly by conservatives, and like a most many, if not most,
of like those people.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
Had a hobo period. My grandpa when he was seventeen,
his dad was like, we can't feed you anymore, Garland,
and gave him like a pocket full of cornbread, and
he just like hiked two or three states down to Oklahoma,
where he found work. But like, how is that not
being a hobo? Like right, like he figured his shit
out and good for him, but like it's it's I

(08:06):
don't see a big difference between that and people who
are like, yeah, I couldn't make rent. You know, I
work a job. Most homeless people work a job. Like
this is just what's the open meaning? You know?

Speaker 3 (08:16):
My granddad was my granddad was like greatest generation. He
went from being a hobo to being a torpedo in
the South Pacific and fighting in the one war that
the US can say, well that was good that we
did that.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, And it's a it's this is because I didn't
include as much of the Australia context, but like Australia
has a long history of anti vagrancy laws, but also
like one of their proudest songs about like World War One,
Waltzing Matilda, is about a guy who was like, yeah,
I used to just kind of wander around without like
like you know, a backpack and a shit.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
Then I went and got my legs blown off by
the Turks at Gallipoli. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, uh, homelessness. The
this is this is a story kind of about our
Western civilizations war on people who, yeah, don't fall through
the cracks really, And it didn't start that way. This
episode started because there's a band that I listened to

(09:10):
a lot when I was younger called State Radio, and
they've got a song called The Story of Benjamin Darling
Part one, and it's based on the story of the
It's based on the largely apocryphal details about the life
of a very real guy. He's a was a freed
slave who established an island community for mixed race people

(09:30):
off the coast of Maine. And I wanted to tell
that story because there's a lot of bastardury and like
why the community stopped existing, And so I thought, just
kind of based on my surface level knowledge of the
story before I started digging in, I thought, Okay, this
is going to be like a story about like a
bunch of racists from cities and towns in Maine, you know,
just going after these these people who were kind of

(09:51):
like living off grid, doing their own thing. But the
more I dug into the story, the more I found
out that the evil in the story of like what
Happened to Benjamin Darling's Descendants is a story about vagrancy
and a story about the way our culture prosecutes these people.
So let's get into it, because I think this is
going to go some places you may not anticipate. The

(10:13):
concept of vagrancy was established in the West in the
early modern period, kind of the end of the medieval
early modern period. During most of the medieval era, most
poor people in kind of Western European countries were some
kind of like peasant or surf and in England, like
surfdom is kind of more of an Eastern thing, but

(10:34):
in England and a lot of Western Europe there was
this status called villainage. And it's not villains spelled the
way we spell it, it's v I L L E
I N. I don't know, maybe there's I should have
checked to see if that was the root of our
term villain. But I'm a hack and a fraud. But
a villain, like in the medieval context, was a kind

(10:56):
of surf. Basically, they're a person who's bound to a
parcel of life and got to occupy it and farm
it in return for laboring for his liege lord, usually
working in the lord's fields, although I'm sure there were
other options and thus in the countryside. For most of
kind of this medieval period, anything approaching homelessness on a
large scale was usually uncommon. You would have some people

(11:18):
who were, you know, kind of roving between. Some of
them would be like entertainers, some of them would be
you know, you know, merchants, some of them would be
kind of folks in a more desperate state. But there
usually weren't like huge numbers of folks like that because
it was kind of part of the system. Was like
people generally had like a place they were supposed to be,

(11:38):
and yeah, it was kind of when you sort of
got large numbers of people who were, you know, didn't
have a set place to occupy to live. It was
generally because like a war or something had swept through
their land, right and you'd have had like a bunch
of villages burnt down and people uprooted. But the growth
of cities kind of as the medieval period sort of

(12:00):
leads to early modernity, the sort of growth of cities
leads to larger and larger numbers of people who have
no real means of support. A lot of this was
the result of the increase increasing enclosure of common lands,
which forced people out of their rural lifestyles. That's where
there used to just kind of be land that was everyone,
so you could graze your sheep on it, you could
grow stuff on it, you know. And over time, like

(12:23):
that started becoming the property of like generally members of
the nobility, and so it was fenced off and separated
from the people who had been using it, which made
them unable to live the way that they had lived
and force them generally into cities. Cities are rancid pits
of disease in this period, So a lot of times
people would die and they'd leave their kids orphaned, or

(12:45):
like you know, a woman who'd had like you know,
a husband who was supporting her would suddenly have no
method of support, and this led to a growing vagrant class,
and a lot of vagrants, by the way, were former soldiers, right,
because in this period, you go to war for the king,
your duke or whatever, and you lose an arm, good
luck to you. You're not getting like you're not getting

(13:07):
like a fucking disability payment, right, Like, there's not a
va Yeah, you know, there are some things that kind
of fill that gap, but not well, yeah, generally. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
I looked up the etymology of a villain and village
and they are the same, excellent hot and it comes
from and villain basically came from like a rustic.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Oh okay, cool satcha yeah, yeah, because that's that's kind
of the way people lived out, you know, in the countryside.
So there was always kind of a degree of sympathy
and acceptance of the need for sort of charity for like,
you know, some guy who's lost his arms, or some
woman who's got like a family but no one to
help raise them because you know, the husband died or whatever.
There was some degree of sympathy for that, but there

(13:50):
was a great deal and it kind of becomes this
growing moral panic, particularly in England, and like the sixteen
late fifteen hundreds early sixteen hundreds, about people who were
in physically good shape but didn't have any means of support,
and the term that started being used for them was
sturdy beggars. This is a kind of slur, sturdy beggar.

(14:11):
It's meant to imply both that a person is like
healthy and can work and chooses not to. And the
common idea was that, like, these people are con men.
Right if like you're able to work and you don't
have some sort of job, you're a con man. In
townshend cities started keeping lists of sturdy beggars and their
supposed crimes. And if you are looking to make some
D and D characters this weekend, are these are pretty

(14:34):
good places. So I'm just gonna read one from the
sixteen hundreds. But the guy the guys like crime was
pretending to be insane and like following people until they
gave him money to go away. And his nickname, his
nickname was tom O Bedlam, which is fucking hell. I

(14:55):
do love tom O Bedlam. Fucking cool name, guys. So
in fifteen forty seven, furious British elites pushed through the
First Vagrancy Act, which declared that any able bodied person
who lacked employment should be branded with a V, so
should be like branded with a V and sold into

(15:17):
slavery for two years. It's pretty pretty bad. There were
no sort of like there was no like separation between
like if this happens like a dude in his thirties
or like a six year old, and in fact, child
vagabonds were regularly forced into labor. It was thought to
be good for them. Laws agin teach them some life

(15:38):
skill exactly. And these kind of these laws spread from
the UK to other parts of Western year or to
parts of Western Europe. Some of the laws are not
it's not always like you get branded and sold into slavery.
Laws in other places would demand that vagrants be whipped
and then returned to their birthplaces. The idea was like, well,
their people will like make them work, right, you know.

(16:01):
Throughout the sixteen hundreds, while kind of this this sort
of war on vagrancy, that's when it really starts. Kind
of the late fifteen hundreds you get these very first laws,
and then the sixteen hundreds it kind of it becomes
the norm that it will be criminalized to be out
and about in cities and towns without a visible means
of support. Right now, while this is going on throughout

(16:23):
the early sixteen hundreds, a couple of other big things
are happening. One of those big things is the Atlantic
slave trade, right, that's really starting to cook in the
sixteen hundreds. And another thing that's really starting to cook
in the sixteen hundreds is the British colonies in the
New World, right in the northeast coast of North America.

(16:43):
And kind of while both of these things are happening,
everyone has one of those like Reese's Pieces Peanut butter
Cup moments where they're like, well, if we mix slavery
and qualities to get a govna and you know, that's
a you know that story, right, Like everybody's aware of
kind of where that goes.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
It didn't go well, I mean no, it does not
go well. Morally, No, morally, it did not go well. Yeah,
morally it's a fucking nightmare. But yeah, to the economic
power of empire, it did good.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah. For the Yeah, they make a lot of money
off of it. So this that starts cooking, and you know,
fast forward like one hundred and sixty hundred and seventy
years something like that, and you know, you start to
get I mean, I'm flattening out a lot of things.
But it takes, you know, one hundred and sixty hundred
seventy years before kind of the crusade for abolition which

(17:36):
had always existed from as soon as like people were
doing the African slave trade, people were like, that's bad.
But it really abolitionism starts to really pick up legal
momentum kind of one hundred and sixty hundred and seventy
years later, in the late seventeen hundreds. Popular summaries of
the battle to abolish slavery tend to focus on the

(17:57):
first electoral successes of state abolitionist movements, which started when
slavery was made illegal by Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three.
By the early eighteen hundreds, the legal Atlantic slave trade
had been ended, although that did not mean that people
stopped doing that sort of shit. It just meant that,
like they could get in trouble for it. And yeah,

(18:21):
it's interesting to me that like kind of when we
talk about, at least when I think about my education
on sort of the history of slavery and abolitionism, it's
sort of portrayed fairly quickly in this period sweeping over
the North. And so there's this very quickly we have
our good guys and our bad guys. Right, you've got
the free States and the slave States, and that all
builds up to the Civil War. That cuts out the

(18:43):
fairly long period in which slavery was real popular in
New England. And yeah, I think that's probably a mistake.
And since our story involved slavery in New England today,
I want to talk a little bit about that. So
here's a quote from an article on slavery in Maine
in the Portland Press Herald. Quote, slavery in New England

(19:04):
look much different than those large southern plantations. In New England,
enslaved men, women and children were owned by prominent and
wealthy merchants, but also by families of less prominence who
used slaves to do the manual labor they had once
done themselves. Northern slave owners were more likely to own
one or two slaves than hundreds. The enslaved people became
the foundation that moves those early household economies to a

(19:25):
market economy because of the labor that the slave owner
was previously was responsible for. Once he has the enslaved person,
it frees him up to begin to build his own
economic base, said author Patricia Wall, who researches and writes
about slavery and Maine. Well, there weren't hundreds and thousands
the way there were in the South. You can see
that the enslaved people were at the base of the
economy and these small communities in Maine and throughout New England.

(19:47):
So a lot of what becomes kind of the upper
class in these in these colonies, particularly these more rural areas,
are families who start out with a couple of slaves
to help them with, like you know, they're cooking food,
they're cleaning, doing the laundry and stuff, and that frees
up the free people to like make money which generate
you know, in a lot of cases, when you're looking

(20:08):
at a place like mad and the people who have
like nice houses and money now two hundred years later,
it's because you know, their ancestors enslaved somebody and it
let him get a leg up.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
No, and that's so important for people to realize. I
hadn't known as much about New England slavery, but that
makes so much sense that basically, like all of the
aristocracy of the United States comes from this.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, it's cool to look into the people who are
doing stuff like funding the Daily Wire now and see
where they're their ancestors, what they were getting up to. Ah, Margaret,
this is an awkward thing we recorded later for me
to throw to ads because I forgot to do it
when I was supposed to.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yay.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
I love being good at my job.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
If only somebody was messaging you to do them.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
I never read messages, Sophie, I just just vibes. We're back.
So yeah, since Maine had no giant plantations, most enslaved
people are used as personal servants or laborers, and industries
often like shipbuilding and fishing. So the state you know

(21:19):
this because Maine is part of the Massachusetts colony, right,
So in Massachusetts, the new state makes slavery illegal in
seventeen eighty three or whatever like that applies to Maine
as well. You're not supposed to be, you know, buying
those slaves or bringing them in and stuff. But that
does not mean that, like after that point, Maine stops

(21:40):
playing a role in the spread of slavery. For one thing,
Maine has the second highest percentage of registered seamen in
the United States and is a shipbuilding hub. And there's
a lot of stories in this period of like seamen
from Maine taking slaves and like selling them in places
like the Caribbean, and like illegally doing like slave runs
and stuff. I'm proud of me for not laughing when

(22:02):
I said seaman twice. You know, I feel like we
should have known I laughed.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Yeah, I'm sorry, I know, I'm not sorry, deeply disrespectful, Robert.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
All of this brings us to the life of a single.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
See people is the current.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Yeah, that's real new one.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
But it's funny when Magni says it. It's not funny
when you make that.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
It's all about delivery. It's all about delivery. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
All of this brings us to the life of a
single enslaved black American in Maine in the late seventeen hundreds.
His name was Benjamin Darling, and we have no idea
where or when he was born. He was probably somewhere

(22:47):
in like his twenties, maybe thirties by the start of
the seventeen nineties, but he might have been older. It
is unlikely that he himself knew precisely when he was born.
There's a good chance he was born somewhere and after
Africa and was taken over to North America kind of
during the latter stages of the Atlantic slave trade. He
may have been born here and then separated from his

(23:08):
family when he was sold as an adult, or as
at least like a teenager. We simply don't know. But
while we lack details about his life, we do have
archives of history of slavery in Massachusetts in Maine which
are filled with letters from slave traders that provide some
grim context as to the kind of experience he might
have had, especially if he was brought over from Africa.

(23:30):
And I'm going to quote from one of these letters now, Sir,
I received yours by Captain Morris with bills of lading
for five negroes and one hogshead of rum. One negro
woman marked why on the left breast, died in about
three weeks after her arrival, in spite of medical aid
which I procured. All the rest died at sea. I
am sorry for your loss. It may have resulted in

(23:52):
deficient clothing so early in the spring. Benjamin Bullard to
Sir William Pepperrell, June twenty fifth, seventeen nineteen. She is
maybe a deck or two before this guy was born. Yeah,
I hope they died pooping themselves to death pretty badly.
But you see, like it's like it was pretty there's
a decent chance, like almost to guarantee one where the other.

(24:12):
This guy's got some pretty intense trauma in his childhood
or early life. Now, there's two kind of broad versions
of the story of Benjamin Darling. One was that his
mother smuggled him out of slavery and into freedom and
he just kind of entered life in Maine as a freeman.

(24:32):
That is not the most common version of the story.
The most you know, there are a couple little like
he escaped on his own too, you get that. But
the most widely told and enduring myth of Benjamin Darling,
who was a real dude, is the one I'm going
to relate to you right now. So whatever went on
with this guy when he's you know, a kid and
a young man. By the start of the seventeen nineties,

(24:53):
he had been purchased by the captain of a small
merchant vessel that ran the coast of New England up
at least as far as Port and probably hauling Timber.
The exact story of what happened is apocryphal, but the
most common version of it is that one day, you know,
this captain basically is this kind of he's a small
business owner. He's somebody who has like a boat, probably

(25:13):
not a huge one, doesn't really have the money for
a large crew, and in order to kind of like
make his business more efficient, and as we've talked about,
build his economic base up, this guy buys Benjamin, right,
and you know, they're they're running the coast of New
England together, doing kind of like cargo loads. And one day,
you know, they judge things wrong. A storm comes in

(25:34):
stronger and bigger than kind of they had anticipated, and
they're they're kind of caught with their pants down. This
fierce gale overtakes the small ship. Buffeted by winds and waves,
the boat crashes into a brace of jagged rocks off
the North Main coast, and the captain has flung into
the frigid, churning waters. Now ben in this situation is

(25:55):
a dude who has been like probably ripped away from
his family one way or the other to work for
this guy. Ye like incredibly difficult backbreaking labor by on
the sea. No reasonable person could have judged him for
leaving that man to drown, especially given the fact that, like,
I don't know, most people don't know how to swim,
even if you're on a boat in this period, like

(26:16):
it's not common to be good at swim, and even
if you are, like fuck, it doesn't matter how good
you are at swimming. Diving in to try to save
someone who's drowning is a terribly dangerous thing for the
best swimmers in the world. Like, it's incredibly anyway, So
for a lot of reasons, no one could have blamed
ben for just kind of like trying to get his
own ass out of here. But he dives into the

(26:36):
water after this man who like bought and like uses
him as chattel, pulls him out of the water and
to Shuore saves his life. The captain, so the legend goes,
was basically just overcome with shame. Once she regained consciousness
realizes like, oh my god, I was like treating this

(26:57):
person as like a fucking can opener, and they just
saved my life like for no reason other than the
goodness in their heart. So he immediately frees Benjamin and
making Benjamin a freedman and disappears hereafter from the pages
of history. Benjamin Darling does not disappear. He takes a

(27:18):
job at a salt mill near Phippsburg, which is a
ridiculously named town in Maine. I do not like it
Phipps b U r G. I want to say Phillipsburg.
Every time I look at it. I'm livid. Fuck you people,
Fuck Phipsburg. Anyway, Benjamin lives in Phipsburg, and he takes

(27:38):
a job at a salt mill, and he develops a
reputation very quickly as a reliable worker and a good citizen.
And this may seem hard to believe, given where the
story goes, but from what I've read, it seems fair
to say, actually that like a free black man in
rural Maine in this period was one of the better
situations you could be as like a free black guy.

(27:59):
For one thing, fear and hatred of Indigenous Americans by
white settlers was much more like the thing that white
people were flipped out about in Maine in this period.
So like a free black dude was seen as like, well,
if he's like one of us, then it's it's us
against these these dangerous you know natives, Right, yeah, there
was there was. This is like the historians ever would

(28:20):
be like he might have faced kind of less discrimination
in this particular period in main than you might expect. Yeah,
and what we have, the actual like official documents from
like that that kind of got recorded in the local
government about Ben are all really positive. He's described as
a sturdy and industrious individual. He marries a white woman

(28:43):
named Sarah Proverbs, and one of the very few details
we get about his life after this point is that
he is mauled by a bear defending his neighbor's corn patch,
which probably yeah, yeah, which probably describes why local records
call him a man with many staunch friends, right, Like
he's he's like, he's like a solid just saves people.

(29:05):
You can rely on Ben, He's got your back. Yeah.
So you know he lives up to his last name. Yeah, yeah,
he's a darling. And so he marries Sarah Proverbs, giving
her a much better last name. Like I cannot overstate
what a glow up darling is over Proverbs.

Speaker 3 (29:23):
I feel you, but Proverbs is weird. It is weird
in a nice way. I mean that anyone listening to
this his last name is Proverbs. Congratulations, you seem like
you are a character who exists to make everything more interesting.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
If I if I get a time machine, Margaret, I'm
going back to these people and I'm gonna explain to
them our modern concept of hyphenating names, because Darling Proverbs
would be a pretty cool last name, right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
So he's a he's he develops a lot of respect
in his local community. He seems to be like having
a pretty good life. He gets married, he has kids.
You know, this is at the time a crime called missagenation.
But also he's kind of in rural Maine, so it
may just have been a thing where like people aren't
really like flipping out about it right now so much,

(30:17):
although they could have, and they were in most of
the United States. That said, that may have been something
that did cause him problems because in about seventeen ninety four,
when he and Sarah have two sons, he buys an
island off the coast of Maine. So he's like, now,
islands aren't that expensive back then, right, Like, now having

(30:37):
an island means like island of money. Yeah, it's a
big thing. Back then, it's like, oh, you want like
a rock to die on. Like yeah, it's like, do
you have any idea how are these islands are to
live on? But you know, that does probably also insinuate
that he was pretty thrifty and resourceful. I'm gonna guess
it wasn't like nothing. But anyway, he buys this island,

(30:58):
Horse Island, probably saved the life of the person who
is selling. Just keeps saving people, getting till he's given
an island. So he gets this.

Speaker 3 (31:06):
Mountain lion just jumps out of nowhere, fucking cold cox it.
Here's the deed to my lion or island. I don't
know why I said lion. Oh you said mountain lion. Anyway, whatever,
So he and Sarah and their sons moved to this island,
Horse Island, and kind of, you know, they have some
more kids, their kids get married to other people, and

(31:27):
they this community starts to build on Horse Island, mostly
of mixed race people, right, And it's it's kind of
like you do kind of get the feeling that like, well,
maybe once they started to have kids, the white people
in Pitpsburg and stuff were a little bit less welcoming
of Benjamin. Either that or he was just smart enough
to be like, you know, it's probably not going to
be safe forever to hang out around all of these

(31:49):
like white people who are not going to treat my kids. Well,
we should just kind of do our own thing out
in the sticks.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
You know.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Either way, he kind of establishes this. You might call
it like a mixed race commune kind of. You know,
I don't think there's like a like a lot of
you know, it's not like a political thing, but it's
like that's the way it works, right, Like, when you've
got people living off grid in a place like these
islands off the main coast, which are desperately hard places
to survive. We are not talking fertile soil. We are

(32:17):
not talking a shitload of stuff that you can like
you know, pick out of the ground or whatever to
live off of. You're you're pulling stuff out of the sea,
and you're you are you are working your ass off
to like make that place habitable. That said, you know,
when he moves to Horse Island, part of what drew
him there may have been the fact that he had,
you know, lived in the area for a while, and

(32:38):
he had heard plenty of stories about the folks who
lived out in those islands off the off the coast
of Maine, and kind of in this period of time,
these islands, because there's there's hundreds of them, had come
to be inhabited by this kind of growing population of
people who were considered who were either considered undesirable by
mainstream society back on land, or who themselves considered settled

(33:01):
society back on land undesirable. A good number of them
were what you'd call were what was called maroons, and
these were formerly enslaved Africans who had freed themselves, right,
who had gotten away. But like that's not a safe
legal position to be in. And they figure, if I'm
hanging out in this fucking island off the coast of Maine,
people will anyone trying to come and get me is

(33:22):
probably got to die finding me, right, Like it's sorry
out here. Yeah. One source I found on the matter
notes quote, these early settlers maintain their ancestral languages and
lived in caves to avoid detection, which is pretty dope,
cool story. Yeah, it is unlikely. Well it's possible that
Been and his family kind of lived this way, but

(33:44):
you know, they had been pretty integrated to some extent
into kind of like mainstream American society for a while.
Kind of however, life, whatever life was like on Horse
Island for this community. They established the relationship that he
has with his wife, and the existence of their kids
is illegal in the state of Maine, as are the

(34:04):
marriages that all of their kids are going to have
later on, because they're all mixed race. Heedless of this, though,
the Darlings spread and multiply and start to kind of
like seed into little communities all throughout these islands through
the early to mid eighteen hundreds, from Horse Island and
some of the areas and the mainland around Pitpsburg down
to Portland and his descendants, it seems like are as,

(34:25):
you know, thrifty and successful as their patter familias, and
right as the Civil War starts to or sorry not
right as the Civil War comes to an end, and
kind of like the period where shit's starting to build
in the US towards that I think it's eighteen forty seven,
two of Darling's granddaughters sell the family interest in Horse
Island and use it to buy all forty one acres

(34:47):
of a nearby island, which they start calling Malaga for
reasons that aren't really known. We don't really know why
they called it that, but they start calling it Malaga Island.

Speaker 3 (34:57):
I wonder if those are like one of the other
languages that people were speaking around there, you know, I
don't know, because you're saying that people were like speaking
African languages there.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yeah, but Malaga is also a place in Spain, so interesting.
I kind of wonder if it's maybe like some you know,
some kids there, you know, as their kids. He's got
bought them some books or something, and they're like reading
about other parts of the world, and they just like
when they buy this island. I've heard about this place
called Malaga. That's a pretty name. Let's call it that. Yeah,
I don't really know, no one does it is It

(35:26):
is a mystery. Today. Malaga Island, population zero, lies just
a short span of water away from the Krabby Lobster
Shack on the mainland and directly across from the Kennebec Kennel.
But back in the late so it's like today, if
you look at it, it's not that far from stuff.
Like you know, you can kind of like take a
boat across in a few minutes and then you're back

(35:48):
on the mainland where there's like city or towns and stuff.
But back in the late eighteen hundreds, antiques stores I've
been to, I've been to the coast of Maine. It's
antique stores. It's nothing but antique stores back then. It
is I cannot exaggerate. This is like maybe the most
isolated place in the United States, or these islands off
the coast of Maine. Like you are out off the

(36:10):
fucking grid, right, I mean there's not a grid, nobody
has power, but like everyone's off grid, I guess. But
these guys are off off grid, right, like you are
really kind of out out in the wilds. And as
a result, the people who live in these islands are
able to kind of develop communities separate from mainland culture
and the rest of the world in a way that

(36:31):
does not exist anymore. These little islands around Maine central
coast then are kind of settled over the late eighteen hundreds,
you know that started out as a lot of these
maroon communities and people like Darling. They get added to
by these sort of ragged bands of loaners, madmen, and
people whose existence had been criminalized by the state. Darling's granddaughters,

(36:53):
and this sounds like a rule it does, it's you're
not going to stop thinking that it sounds pretty fucking cool.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
So Darling's granddaughters and their families establish an isolated free
community on Malaga Island, and over time they're joined by
a couple of dozen other refugees from mainstream You get
You get what I did there?

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Yeah, No, I was trying to make this pun earlier,
but I didn't have a good space.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
I wrote it into the script, Margaret, and I capitalized
them so people would know it wasn't just a misspelling.
If anyone caught a glimpse of my script, proud of me.
So the people who kind of join with the Darlings
descendants on this island are a mix of there's some
white folks in there, there's some a number obviously of

(37:37):
like free black people. There's Native Americans, and there's mixed
race residents and these kind of These folks all come
from very different backgrounds, but they're united primarily in their
desire to get away from the rest of the country
and raise their children in peace. This is not an
easy life, as this rite up from Soulofamerica dot com
makes clear, Malaga Island was typical of many island communities

(37:59):
of the eastern Castbay, which were seldom occupied by legal owners.
Fishermen would store their gear in crudely constructed sheds or
shacks and often remain on the islands as unchallenged squatters
for generations. Having little contact with the mainland. These individuals,
who are not counted in the census, seldom paid taxes
and rarely voted. Illness and even death were taken care
of at home, as was education. Most of the inhabitants

(38:21):
of Malaga Island were direct descendants of Darling, including his
sons Isaac and Benjamin, both of whom married women of
the island and raised a total of fourteen children over time.
Other groups also inhabited the island, including Irish, Scottish and Portuguese.
And again this is a tough place. The soil shit,
so you're not going to grow a lot of food.

(38:41):
You can raise some livestock, but they've got to be
like goats and shit, really like hardy animals, and most
of what they live on period is going to be
taken from the sea. This includes huge quantities of like shellfish,
which is part of why we know what we do
about them, because when they would shell you know, the
stuff they were eating would toss the shells and these
large middens in the community, and they would toss other

(39:04):
stuff there. And that's a really good way to preserve
certain things. So actually, like a surprising amount gets preserved
because of the nature of their diet. One of the
things that's preserved this way are ledgers and papers from
a school that was established on the island. Linda Wyman
of the Pitpsburg Historical Society notes, the papers written by

(39:24):
the students show their penmanship was perfect and their spelling
was better than mine. It absolutely shows that kids were educated,
not illiterate or so called feeble minded or any of
those things. They're going to be accused of being that
quite later. But from everything we know, not only did
these people survive in this difficult place, but they put
a premium on making sure their kids were educated, which

(39:47):
is pretty fucking dope, I think. So something like fifty
people live on Malaga at its height. Again, forty one
acres is not big, especially considering not all of the
land is the land that you could put a house on.
They survived in a mix of Some people would build
these small houses. A lot of folks are basically like
taking boats and shoving them up on land and then
converting the boats into houses. Some of the houses like

(40:10):
float and they can float them to other islands if
they like decide to move, which is pretty It's kind
of it's kind of dope. It's kind of cool.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah, Like band's gonna be on goat back. I'm just
gonna get like six goats and a hell yeah house.
Yeah yeah on the goats have a palanquin of goats. Absolutely. Yeah,
it's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Like if you're thinking about life in the eighteen fifties
eighteen sixties rough for everybody, compared to modern standards, this
seems like, yeah, one of the better places to live.
That's that's where That's kind of how I'm thinking about
it right now. The Portland Press Herald notes, quote Malaga's
people lived like so many others, eking out an existence,

(40:50):
trapping lobsters, hooking cod, digging clams, or laboring at boarding
houses and farms on the mainland. And so yeah, that's
also an important point is these people are not totally isolated.
A lot of them make money, at least a side income,
sometimes seasonal, working for folks on the mainland. One woman
on the island. We know, was a laundress for a
bunch of boarding houses in Pitpsburg. So she would take

(41:10):
their water, their laundry handle, you know, a large volume
of washing, and then return it once it was dried.
So for on the main land, Yeah, on the main
very nice, very nice, getting away with a lot of that. Well,
you know who else likes ads, Sophie, You the listeners.

(41:32):
I was going to say, the same people who were
largely responsible for the worst parts of this story. Anyway,
here's ads. So yeah, you know, for a time, life

(41:55):
seems to have been is about as good for the
denizens of Mlaga as it could be, particular for people
who weren't white as hell in the United States. In
this period of time, they were isolated and in very
poor obviously, but they were pretty much completely free, right
in a way that very few people in all of
history have ever been. Yeah. Yeah, So back on the mainland.

(42:19):
Slavery reaches its peak in the United States and shortly
thereafter its calamitous end. Freedom comes to black men and
women in the United States, but it was not freedom
as the Malagites knew it. In the occupied South, white
men started even before the end of the war, scheming
for a way to maintain what they saw as the
natural order. In eighteen sixty two, Union troops took the

(42:42):
city of Memphis. Quite understandably, freed black people started fleeing
there right There was a lot of areas where they
had been kept in bondage near Memphis. If you could
kind of escape and get through the Confederate lines, then
you get to be a free person in Memphis, which
sounds a lot better than not being a free person.
So it kind of was for a while. Memphis is

(43:02):
sort of this like Southern Canada almost. You might see
it that way, where it's like, if we can get
to fucking Memphis, then we're, you know, we're free. By
the wars end, the city's black population had gone from
three thousand to twenty thousand, So this is a pretty
dramatic change. But while that's great, you know who's not
going to be happy about a demographic change like that.

(43:25):
This isn't an advertiser based pro shop. Yeah, yeah, the
Beast pro shop pyramid owners, who I am blaming for
all of what we're about to talk to. So I'm
going to quote next from an article and a website
called Zocallo by Christopher Hager quote. The growth of Memphis
free black population meant that West Tennessee plantations were proportionally emptied.

(43:45):
To the dismay of cotton planters who needed laborers in
their fields, vagrancy laws provided a convenient solution to the
labor shortage. Memphis blacks who could not prove gainful employment
in the city were presumed guilty of vagrancy and subject
to arrest impressment into the agricultural labor force. They were
brought back onto the plantations and forced to sign labor contracts. Yeah,

(44:07):
it's pretty pretty fucked up and terrible. So vagrancy laws
had come to the United States from like our whole
legal system, right, We get it from England, you know,
for obvious reasons. And so during the colonial days, the
British had kindly given us their anti vagrancy laws. Now
these had for the most part, these were not commonly

(44:29):
enforced in most parts of the United States prior to
the late eighteen hundreds, and when they were, it was
mostly in the South against freed black people who had
the bad luck to exist in slave states. These laws
were also enforced on the border between free and slave
states and places like Pennsylvania, where such laws were used
to maintain a form of racial hierarchy, even in an

(44:50):
area in which black people were supposed to not be
subject to slavery. But as the Civil War came to
an end, white people across the political spectrum were faced
with a tear rible specter large numbers of black people with,
as they saw it, nothing to do, and so the
enforcement of vagrancy laws against black Americans became one of
the first political issues to unite Northern abolitionists and Southern

(45:14):
plantation owners. Because when these laws are instituted and executed
in the North, it's going to be abolitionists who pushed
them right, and the South it's former Confederates who want
to get black people back on the plantation. In the
North it's abolitionists. They are a huge part of this.
And it's it's interesting they want people to work because

(45:34):
they want people to work, right. That's that's the short
end of the story. So in the South, the use
of law enforcement to cement racial violence should not surprise anybody,
But the North was host to a dedicated population of
what were called charity reformers, and most of them, including
most of the kind of driving figures behind this movement
were people who had been dedicated radical abolitionists prior to

(45:58):
the Civil War and kind of the become charity reformers afterwards.
Part of why is that the eighteen seventies, right after
the Civil War, the US has its first really great depression,
right like the I think eighteen seventy five is when
it kind of hits its death. But this is like
a calamitous economic collapse, and it's a partial consequence. One
of the things that contributes to this is that, like

(46:19):
you've got all these soldiers who had been paid by
the government and now suddenly they're all demobilized, and that
causes some problems. So one of the things that happens
is there's a huge increase in starving people begging for money,
and this really pisses off a large number of kind
of like upper class liberals who had been who were
staunch abolitionists, and many abolitionists. One of the reasons why

(46:42):
this is the case is that a significant chunk of
the abolitionist movement hated slavery, not because they weren't racist,
although they were generally less racist than you know, the
plantation owners, but because they saw slavery as violating the
sacred contract between labor and its employer. Right. That was
like a big part of their issue with it is

(47:03):
that they believed that workers had a sacred right to
choose where they were going to labor, but they didn't
have a right to not choose to labor.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
That's a big part of this to them. And I'm
going to quote from a paper in the Journal of
American History by ad Stanley. In the eyes of charity reformers,
there was a clearly etched line of distinction between laboring
for wages and begging. The wage laborer was an independent person,
self supporting, one who participated in the vast social exchange
of the marketplace and obeyed its rules. The polar opposite

(47:35):
of the slave, the beggar, was a dependent person who
neither bought nor sold, but prayed on others. The wage
journer abided by the obligations of contract, the beggar eluded them.
Charity reformers derived their view of beggary from the best
thought of the day, the teachings of classical economists and
other liberal and scientific thinkers. Composing a constituency of state

(47:55):
and city officials prominent industrialists and businessmen, intellectuals and moral ways,
most of whom had been abolitionists. They were air to
an intellectual tradition that dissociated relations of personal dependency from
transactions based on voluntary contract. That indeed had been the
ideological lesson of the Civil War and emancipation the basis

(48:15):
for vindicating the free wage system. Now, I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
I hate it.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
I didn't know that at all. Yeah, and it's interesting.
Stanley points out that like two wage laborers, who none
of these wealthy liberals are talking to ever in their
entire lives. To wage laborers, this does not make sense
because wage laborers know that like, yeah, man, sometimes there's
no work right, Sometimes the you know, the factories closed.
Sometimes you can't make money, and you like have to
beg or your family's going to starve. That's like begging.

(48:43):
Wage laborers don't see begging as separate from like them.
They be like, yeah, sometimes you wind up like yeah,
meeting charity because like shit's fucked, it's it's tough out there. Yeah,
but these liberals.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
Have all the part communities take care of each other.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah, Yeah, that is not how these wealthy liberals think
these kind of intellectual leaders because they've been building in
their head this kind of uh at, this kind of
like belief system that is kind of going to become
what we you know, a lot of it's going to
become like kind of the traditions of modern capitalism. But
they're sort of building this belief system based on how

(49:20):
they think the social order works between wage journers and
you know, the poor and the rich and all this stuff.
Like they've they've set up this kind of view of
the world that they've made without talking to any of
the people who like exist in the in the situations
that they're trying to define. And it is one of
the things that it has kind of like laid out

(49:42):
in this belief system, which is also going to play
a lot into the eugenics beliefs that are just around
the corner, is that like beggars are fundamentally immoral, right,
it is it is an act of social evil to
not have a means of visible support.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
We get the like we talked about a little bit
of the medieval stuff, you know, like the deserving poor concept. Yes,
and so there's this like very Protestant idea of like
the deserving poor should get something, but most people are
not deserving poor.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Yeah, and that's when this is starting to really get
cooked up, and there's this idea, Like the kind of
conclusion these people come to is that like giving money
to beggars or is going to disincline people to work.
So when you have deserving poor, the social aid they
receive needs to be so painful to receive that no
one but the deserving poor will seek it out right, totally.

(50:35):
One of the things I find interesting is that in
this period, when you've got these people talking about the
dangers of like charity or of social aid for folks
that like don't have work, you have kind of two
different boogeymen they cite. One is socialism, right, which makes sense,
you know that they're that they're they're citing that. The
other is monarchism, right, because a lot of Americans in

(50:56):
this period believe that monarchies inherently create this like huge
class of dependent people who were utterly dependent on the state,
and that's seen as anti American. So it's both monarchism
and socialism usually by like slightly different chunks of this
movement that you see cited as like the nightmare scenario, right, Yeah,

(51:17):
interesting to me. I didn't know that idea.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
One of the things that really it just really quickly
the one of the things that really Like, I read
this book called Russia through a shot Glass about a
hobo in Soviet Russia, right, and I didn't know about
poverty in Soviet Russia. Right in USSR And there's this
conversation with a beggar who's like, oh, I do this.
I don't actually need to go beg. I mean he

(51:42):
kind of needs to rate doesn't have a job, but
he's like, I go out and beg every day because
I'm doing a social good because when people give me
twenty bucks or whatever, they feel better, like I am
good for people. And I've thought about that ever since,
like ever since now that I'm employed, when I give
money to directly to people who were asking for money,

(52:02):
it's like I feel good about myself. They are doing
a social good by like helping people feel good about themselves.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
Anyway, it's I think that there's a the like panhandling
is a complicated historical topic. I do think there's a
degree to which it's it's one of our one of
our like dying communal art forms. But yeah, it's it's interesting.
I think a lot about the way homelessness works in

(52:34):
the United States and how how not inevitable it is
that that be the way society like treats this sort
of thing. Like just one of the kind of memorable
conversations I had, you know, when I was in Mosul,
I was kind of bunking up with this civil defense unit,
which is like they're guys who pull people out of
like the wreckage of air strikes and shit. Like their

(52:54):
job every day was to like go and help people
who had been injured in the bombings and fight and
stuff from the previous day. And we're kind of like
just chatting about life. I was living in Los Angeles,
you know at the time, and like they're asking me
about LA because you know, everybody knows about Hollywood, even
if they don't know much about the city, and I'm
talking about like, you know, the good things and about

(53:16):
the problems, and I'm like, you know, there's a lot
of like homelessness, and they like kept questioning me about that,
and they were so upset with the idea of like
people living on the street where they were like what
about like their families, Like was it like doesn't anyone
take them in? Don't they have Like there was this
like this is kind of like because Iraq's got plenty

(53:36):
of problems, but like the the idea that like there
would be large numbers of people just kind of completely
abandoned by their families and community was like so alien
to these guys who were like dealing with some really
nasty aspects of their own country, you know, on a
daily basis. But like, yeah, that was it was really
just like the kind of disbelief they had that like

(53:59):
this could have, that could happen on any kind of
large scale, that people would just like let it occur
was so interesting to me. Yeah, anyway, So we had
talked about a little earlier that in the late or
in the seventeen eighties. Massachusetts is the first US state
to ban slavery, right, That's something Massachusetts can take great

(54:19):
pride in. Massachusetts is also the first Northern state to
criminalize begging. In eighteen sixty six, the Republican Legislature of
Massachusetts passes the Act Concerning Vagrants and Vagabonds. Ad Stanley
Wright's Massachusetts was the first of the Northern states to
enact new rules against beggars. In eighteen sixty six, the
Republican dominated legislature passed an Act concerning vagrants and bat vagabonds.

(54:43):
The eighteen sixty Criminal Code had punished beggars along with
a motley band of jugglers, tricksters, common pipers and fiddlers, pilferers, brawlers,
and lude persons. Sounds like literally my friend the best people. Yeah,
everyone I hang out with on a daily basis. Yeah, tricksters,
comic drivers, lewd persons, yeah, for sure. But the new

(55:06):
law dealt more specifically on the crime of begging. It
was promoted by the Board of State Charities, which explicitly
called for additional legislation sentencing sturdy beggars to enforced labor
directed against idle persons without visible means of support. The
Act punished at forced labor for not longer than six
months in a house of correction or workhouse. Quote, all

(55:28):
persons wandering abroad and begging, or who go out from
door to door or place themselves in the streets, highways
or passages well from other public places to beg or
receive alms. One month before the new law took effect,
Congress enacted a civil rights The Civil Rights Act which
ended the Black Codes in the South. These had been
the legal basis for a lot of the vagrancy arrests

(55:50):
of freed black people. So Republicans both spent the post
war years cutting down the legal apparatus for one means
of suppression and forced labor, and voting in a new
one based around anti vagrancy laws. Because these spread rapidly
towards the Northern States, towards the Northern States, kind of
outside of Massachusetts, over the next twenty years, many states

(56:11):
followed mass The Tramp Acts, as they were often called,
were passed in Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy one, in Illinois
in eighteen seventy four, and in New York in eighteen
eighty and eighteen eighty five. Massachusetts also regularly added new
laws to their vagrancy laws. Every time the economy takes
a dip, they'll make more laws to criminalize and force

(56:33):
people who are like ruined by economic collapse into the
forced labor system. Right, this is like a regular thing
where they're constantly like as the economy keeps going up
and down, they're constantly like making new laws to put
people in workhouses. You know, when they fall through the cracks.
Under the Illinois Vagabond Law, begging was punishable with six

(56:53):
months in the workhouse. In New York, beggars were given
hard labor in prisons. States soon began extending the time
of sin from generally like six months or so at
the start to as long as two years. And again.
The organizing impulse behind all of these laws is the
work of charity reformers eighty Stanley Wrights. Many of the
statutes were the direct accomplishment of charity reformers. Among the

(57:15):
central tasks the Conference of Charities assigned itself was showing
how legislation ought to travel. As one member declared, suppression
of vagrancy in street begging was probably the most important
work of charity reform. Even before the Conference of Charities
organized the effort, both public and private philanthropic agencies vigorously
promoted laws against begging, all of which entailed forced labour.

(57:37):
By eighteen sixty six, New York City charity officials had
concluded that the only way to prevent sloth was compulsory labor.
A few years later, a commissioner of the New York
State Board of Charities recommended that the laws must be
more stringent regarding vagabonds and professional beggars. In Illinois, charity,
police and prison officials all pressed in the mid eighteen

(57:58):
seventies for what one police chief cond a good vagrant law,
and both the Industrial Aid Society in Boston and the
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor in New
York City, agencies with close ties to the Republican Party
promoted penal laws and involuntary labor as a cure for begging.
And again, folks, I know, you know, we all hit

(58:19):
Republicans around here. When we're talking about Republicans this period,
we're talking about liberals. That's who is is Democrats, right,
Like that's like, let's be fair here. We are talking
about like liberal intellectual and social elites who are pushing
these laws alongside the police who are always super supportive
of criminalizing homelessness. Because these vagrant laws. Here's a fun thing.

(58:41):
We'll talk about this more at the end. The way
they're written means that cops can just decide someone's vagrant
and then they get to do anything they want to them.
That's cool, yay, great, hey, great so much. Yeah, it's
deeply infuriating. Margaret informersly states a good deal of the

(59:01):
you get.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Some Oh, I was just thinking about how okay, So,
like in my current life, I don't get harassed by
police very much. But when I lived out of a
backpack in hitchhiking, and to be clear, I chose that
because of the way that I was choosing to do activism,
I chose that riding freight trains in hitchhiking was a
good way to do activism right, just to be clear
about that. But I interacted with police so so much

(59:25):
that like, roughly daily I would have my ID run.
I never understood how people did crime. Like when I
meet people who just sort of do drugs or like
have drugs or move drugs around, I'm like, I don't understand.
You get searched every day, and it's because of this
vagrancy shit. It's because of this. Like everyone, if you

(59:49):
have a backpack, you are the enemy of the police,
like and just you will be constantly harassed. And I
don't think you will quite understand the degree to which
that harassment is just ever present even when you're not
And it annoys the shit out of me because you
have this like ostensible freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
But you don't.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
And then also capitalism presents itself as the system that
you're like, well, if you don't like it, just don't
do it. Right, Capitalism is all about choice and the
freedom of the individual. It is not like if you
don't work, if you choose not to work, if you
ask other people for money or just choose to just
eat trash instead of asking people for money, you are
breaking the law. I hate this stuff so much.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
And it's no, it's like, yeah, I you know, I
lived out of a car again by choice with two
other people, you know, and it was kind of like
an adventure. We were going up and down all throughout
the US and Canada. I had like three notable interactions

(01:00:56):
with police and all of them were really negative and
took like an hour or two to get through. They've
tried to bring out dogs and shit, but that was all.
It wasn't like a daily thing. It was because like
we were in a car, right, and like, while if
they see that you're sleeping in a car, you get
shipped from the cops. If cops just see people in
a car, they think like that is that is the
world happening? Is it's supposed to happen a person in

(01:01:17):
a backpack is not supposed to exist outside of a
car or a school campus, you know, like it's it
is interesting the way that that works, because we were
like just as vagrant a city, but like we were
ye letting out of the back of a Toyota Prius.
But you know, if you don't look like they expect
you know, then you're you're generally okay, yep, cool stuff.

(01:01:43):
So in former slave states, a great deal of the
actual punishment work of the vagrant law system was done
by employees of the Freedman's Bureau, which had been created
in March eighteen sixty five with the stated goal of
helping freedmen adapt to their newfound liberty. The first superintendent
of the Bureau, though, made it clear that his organization

(01:02:03):
was about control as much as support. He stated his
determination that quote freed people shall not become a worthless,
lazy set of vagrants living in vice and idleness. His
successor added that Memphis had six thousand black people who
were lazy, worthless vagrants, and so in Memphis, the Freedman's
Bureau started organizing patrols to arrest black people at random

(01:02:27):
and send them to work for white employers, often the
same plantations that had owned them or their relatives. Patrolmen
were given bounties of one to five dollars per head, right,
and then just told like, get us people. You know,
they recreate slave patrols. They but the freedman's bureaus running them,
and they're doing it to provide cheap labor for you know, plantations,
and shit, oh god, h this piss is off a

(01:02:51):
lot of freed people. You know, they don't take this
lying down. And those who could, for one thing, wrote
letters to the Bureau commissioner. Obvious in this period, literacy
is not super widespread among the community of freed people,
yet for very obvious reasons, it had been illegal for
them to learn to read and write in most of
the places they came from. But there were always people

(01:03:12):
in the community who had either who had taught themselves
to read, who had benefited from some sort of education,
And so they would organize in groups where like everyone
would come and bring their complaints, and like the people
who could write would would write letters for everybody and
then send them in right in order to kind of
do like they were organizing, you know, like in order
to like exert a kind of political power, right, the

(01:03:33):
way that people do so for whatever reason, And I
guess it does make sense. Most often, like the most
common job for the people who would be like the
letter writers in their community were barbers, right, this was
a lot of the people doing this are barbers. And
one of these barbers is a guy named Warner Madison
who had taught himself to read. Now his pros is,

(01:03:55):
obviously it's not like as polished as the writing, and
say the government notices organizing vagrant patrols. But he got
his point across. And even with this kind of distance,
you can you can feel the rage that radiates off
of his words, burning like a fucking cinder. And I'm
going to quote again from that article in Zocalo. In

(01:04:15):
a letter to Friedman's Bureau Commissioner Fisk, he began by
describing what was going on. They go around and arrest
all they can find, regardless of whether they are employed
or not. Just ask if you don't want to go
with mister whoever. It may be that they don't find
out whether you want to go or not at all,
They make out the agreement to sell you for the
price that the man gives them. Then Madison narrated in
an instance of a young African American man being taken

(01:04:37):
away by the point of the bayonet at the direction
of a Friedman's Bureau agent. As his letter rose to
a pitched fury, Madison began to punctuate almost every word
as if stabbing at the paper with his pen. I
think it is one of the most obnoxious and foul
and mean things that exists on any part of this bureau.

(01:04:58):
Why do my children have to get passes now to
go to school? Nathan Dudley of the Freedman's Bureau was
sent to investigate these claims. He looks into whether or
not children are getting like arrested for vagrancy while they're
heading to school, and here's here's what he writes. I
can find no evidence whatever that school children with books

(01:05:19):
in their hands have been arrested except in two or
three cases. First off, I can't find evidence that they
got arrested if they had books. And second, I can't
find any evidence except for this evidence other than these people,
these kids who got arrested, I can't find any evidence
of this is happening. Very funny, not funny, infuriating, but

(01:05:39):
you know it happened. So, yeah, that's frustrating, you know, yeah,
fair to say irritating Malaga. We're thinking back to our
friends on Malaga living free of all of this bullshit
because they're very isolated, have a lot of protection from

(01:06:01):
this wave of vagrancy laws sweeping the country. So, you know,
the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, the stuff, they were not
really dealing with consequences of this because of how far
off the grid they are. But by the start of
the nineteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, the
unique communities that had formed both on Malaga and these
surrounding islands were starting to gain the attention of mainland culture,

(01:06:24):
in a mainland culture that had been influenced by this
anti vagrant hysteria. We can illustrate this well with the
story of John Darling, a third generation descendant of our
buddy Benjamin. He was born in eighteen fifty to Isaac
and Rebecca Wallace Darling in Phippsburg. His brother remained in
the area, marrying and having children. At twenty one, John

(01:06:44):
got married to his first cousin, Aurelia Darling, and she
gave birth first to a set of stillborn twins and
then a son, dying soon after. At twenty nine, John
married again to a woman named Albertina Gilliam from Orr's Island,
and the family moved to Or's Island to live with
her parents. This was a good life for some years,
but then in eighteen ninety seven, the land that his

(01:07:04):
wife's family lived on was sold to a syndicate of
Philadelphia businessmen who sold the land off for summer cottages.
The Darlings were evicted, so they fled to Pond Island,
a half miles to the south and squatted on it,
building a two room house that John Darling insulated with
newspaper rags and dirt, which is just kind of like
what you did at the time, right You can't just
pop down to the home depot. His wife eventually took

(01:07:27):
sick and had to return to the mainland for treatment,
while John passed into local legend, living alone as the
Hermit of Pond Island. From a write up by the
Harpswell Historical Society, the hermit was featured on postcards and
histories and as an example of what might happen to
a child if they didn't work hard and learn those
ABC's The story of finding John frozen solid in his

(01:07:47):
bed of rags and eaten by everything from rats to
seagulls has been told around media campfire, So he becomes
kind of this like people will like glimpse him or
sail by to look at him, and he's like this
kind of figure of low like mockery, right, because he's
he's living alone out there now. Despite kind of this
public image of him, johnis by all accounts a resourceful

(01:08:09):
and tough man who like lived alone in the most
like and and made a life for himself, built a
fucking house out there and survived to an advance. Doesn't
sound lazy, no, he's he sounds like today, a man
with the kind of skills that he have would go
on one of those game shows like Alone where you
have to like live alone in the middle of nowhere

(01:08:29):
with like a knife and win. He would like win
every time. Like no, no modern man could compete with
John Darling on one of those shows like yeah, oh
I gotta be I gotta not talk to anyone for
one hundred and twenty five I do that without trying,
like fuck it. Yeah, So again, he's by all accounts

(01:08:50):
a pretty resourceful guy. And he minds his own fucking business.
But as the nineteen hundreds were alife, he represented to
people on Maine, in places like Pipsburg and Portland, a
provention backwards past that they wanted to jettison because it
made them feel embarrassed about themselves. Photos were taken of
John and published in breathless news and magazine articles to
crying his primitive state and the fact that he was

(01:09:12):
a squatterner. John's physicality was particularly well suited to this
sort of thing. He was over six feet tall and
at least two hundred and fifty pounds, which again suggests
he's pretty good at surviving out there if he's that big.
But they're like, look's they basically treat him like an ogre, right,
like he's this, like this, like dangerous, like almost inhuman

(01:09:36):
hobo living you know, alone on this island. There were
rumors in local reporting that he was illiterate and uncultured,
although there's no actual evidence of this. The Harpswell Historical
Society notes his signature has not been found on any
town records or petitions, and it is quite likely that
he did not read or write, but it may also
be that he was just not a very sociable person

(01:09:57):
and did not concern himself with the affairs of others
or the town, preferring to keep to himself, and therefore
did not sign or make his mark on the public record.
The treatment of John Darling would be mirrored with greatly
enhanced brutality against other descendants of Benjamin Darling on their
kin and their kin on Malaga Island. And that is

(01:10:17):
the story we are going to talk about when we
come back in part two. But Margaret, you know what
time it is right now?

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
No more, ads, I don't know. It's time to advertise myself.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
Yeah, it's time to plug plug plug plug your bluggables.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
Well, if you like the opposite of this show, where
we talk about people who fought these things, you might
like my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Available
wherever podcasts are found, specifically from cools on Media, also excellent.

Speaker 1 (01:10:54):
I am I don't know whether on comes out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:57):
I'm either kickstarting or have kick started a tabletop role
playing game called p Number City that I'm making with
a bunch of people have been working on for a
very long time. The kickstarter is doing amazingly. We're at
like three hundred percent or something of our goal, and
so you should check out p Number City and or
Cool People Did Cool Stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
Excellent, and you can check out me anyway. You can
also get this podcast and you know, presumably other podcasts,
but I hate all other podcasts except for the one
that we're recording right now and the other ones that
we've recorded. If you go to Apple and Sophie, how

(01:11:38):
do we what am I supposed to? How do I
say this? How do we do this? Go to Apple
and buy Cooler Zone Media, give them money, and then
you won't have ads on any of our shows, including
Margaret's show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, including Hood
Politics with our good friend prop including It Could Happen Here,
the daily news show that is slowly destroying all of

(01:12:00):
our sanities. You know you can, you can. You can
get no more ads, not a single ad, motherfuckers. And hey,
here's what makes it better. If you go on and
get an account with Cooler Zone Media right now and
get that fucking give us, give us, you know, sign
up for that, then we'll go up the charts and
we can. We are we are right underneath Radio Lab

(01:12:21):
and most subscribers on Apple and I have hated the
Radio Lab people for years now, no real.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Reason that seems logical to me.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
You have to pick an enemy and then destroy them
with with almost unthinkable violence. And that's that's what I
want to do to those Radio Lab motherfuckers.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
You know what else people can listen to now, and
they could listen to them the AD free or the
free version with ads.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
No, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
Our dear friend Jake Hanrahan's newest podcast that is part
of cool Media.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
Jake Canrahan or Jan Rahan as he has never been
called by anyone. Don't call him that and we'll make
him angry.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
But you should. You should check out his new show.
It's called Sad Oligarch. It's a modern truth, cold style
investigative series that looks into why these Russian oligarchs keep
just dying.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
These Russian oligarchs keep like falling out of windows and
hotels surprisingly just downstairs. Clumsy yeah, clumsy ola Arks the classic.
So check that out, you know, and you know, check
it out AD free and help us destroy Radio Lab, you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
Know, please, and we'll be back for two.

Speaker 1 (01:13:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:41):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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