Part Two: The War On Vagrants

Margaret and Robert continue the tale of the default world's war on Malaga Island.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to the Dire Straits Cast, a podcast where
I know exactly one song by the band The dire
Straits money for Nothing, and Margaret, I understand you still
know two songs by the dire Straits.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
I do.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
Yeah, Sultan's is excellent.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
So this is a news and culture podcast about all
of the things going on in the Dire Straits world.
Any any updates that you're aware of, Margaret, Well, they
don't need to make the guitar cry or sing. Okay,
I've learned that, Mukay. How do we feel are they
allowed to use that slur sing no no, no no

(00:44):
in Money for Nothing?

Speaker 4 (00:48):
Oh? You know, there's no accountability that I could ask
from the Dire Straits.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
I don't think there ever was.

Speaker 4 (00:57):
I don't think it's what I would recommend they did.
That's That's where I'm going to go.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
My assumption is that everyone involved with that band died
in nineteen eighty nine, and yeah, they can't have lived
past that. They certainly can't have outlived in TV.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Why is this the thing you wanted to do? This
is this is.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
This is Margaret and I's most beloved bit. The Dire
Straits Podcast by two people who know very little about
the Dire Straits, Margaret, can you because I only know
one song and Margaret knows two.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
Yeah, well, we've done it before, so therefore it's our
most beloved I was.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
I was. I've been waiting for weeks to talk about
the Dire Straits again, because, you know, after we did
it the first time, I listened to Money for Nothing
again because I mostly had listened to a cover of
it done by a bluegrass band, and it wound up
you know that thing YouTube does where they like stick
it in your like recently listened to thing. And so
for the last like several months, every time I hop

(01:52):
on YouTube to put on music, there's like a fifty
percent chance I start playing that one song and then
it it quickly takes me away from that to other songs,
and then in thirty minutes, I'm singing Hotel California. But
you know, and it's four thirty in the morning. What else,
what are you gonna do? Anyway, this concludes the Dire
Straits cast. If they're not dead, don't tell us. You know,

(02:17):
we're We're both fine with that. I don't, I don't.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
Unless you are listening and you are in dire Strain,
in which case you have permissions.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Especially if you will record us a custom version of
either one of those two songs, but themed about I
don't know whatever we do here podcasting. I guess that
probably wouldn't be a very interesting song. Actually, you know what,
I'm certain there is a deeply, deeply frustrating version of
money for Nothing that's about like podcasters making money as

(02:46):
opposed to rock stars, and I don't want to hear it.
So no, no, thank you, yeap. That is the exception.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
Yeah, even if you're the Dire Straits people and you
wrote that song, you don't want it.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Would be very funny if the Dire Straits people were
just like the Monster mash Guy, where they just kept
making as anytime there was like a new group of
people who like got a bunch of money, they do
another version of that.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Why are you still talking about this?

Speaker 3 (03:12):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
I don't know, Sophie, because the rest of the story
we're talking about today, which is the history of vagrancy
and how it intertwines with the history of Benjamin Darling's
descendants and Malaga Island, the rest of that story is
very sad. So that's why we're talking about the Dire Straan.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Legally, we are only allowed to feel joy when we're
on cool people did cool stuff, bastards bad time.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
We did sign that contract. Well great, I don't know, Sophie,
See if we can get a deal with MTV and
do a real music podcast. Are they still around?

Speaker 3 (03:48):
I think so, But it's just like now they're m
pod for It.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Just seems to be like more like spinoff shows of
Jersey Shore.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
And over again.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, that's what a tragic state of affairs.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
That was a cultural moment.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, because honestly, like the Jersey Shore people probably committed
fewer sex crimes than the musicians that were previously the
draw to that channel. So I don't know, it seems
probably pretty equal. Well, now I've made our fun bit
about the Dire Straits, just.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
The regular shift, So yeah, let's continue on.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
So when we left our friends on Malaga Island, things
were still going pretty well there, but the twentieth century
was starting to turn and there were problems on the horizon. Right.
You know, this kind of anti vagrant hysteria had sort
of fed into you know, this kind of local culture

(04:55):
demonizing this this one. You know, dude, you know, squatting
alone on an island, and it was kind of like
a sign of things that are about to start becoming
a problem for more of the people who live on
these islands, because the kind of pleasant state of being
ignored that had benefited these people for so many generations

(05:15):
was going to come to an end because of the
development of Maine's first tourist industry. Suddenly Americans with disposable
income were flocking to the main coast every summer. These
isolated islands, you know, with the additional technology that existed,
were now less isolated. And you know, for a while,
about a century or so, affluent white maners had been

(05:37):
pretty happy to leave the people of the Casco Bay
Islands alone, especially since they were both an exit valve
for folks who didn't fit into like Portland society, and
they were a source of cheap labor. But now they
were starting to think, well, maybe there's more money if
we just kind of imminent domain those islands and put
up summer houses on them for you know, rich people,

(05:57):
and shit, yeah, what do we airbnb community? Yeah, yeah,
that's basically what's happening. So since there's money to be
made in the islands, now local businesses start leaning on
the local media to portray the Malagaites and their neighbors
as an iesore and a shame to the community. In
eighteen ninety nine, a columnist for the Bath Enterprise limited

(06:20):
that quote, few people of Pipsburg had faith that the
effort to get rid of Malaga with its burden of
poor people, would be successful. A flurry of local news articles,
like this one from the Casco Bay Breeze in nineteen
oh five described Malaga as the home of southern Negro
blood and an incongruent scene on a spot of natural beauty.

(06:41):
In nineteen oh eight, the Popular Liberals standby Harper's magazine
cent a correspondent, Home and Day and a photographer out
to Malaga and several neighboring islands to do an article
on the communities that had caused such a sudden panic
to their longtime neighbors. The piece, titled The Queer Folk
of the Main Coast, is a fascinating historical document, and

(07:03):
it uses the word queer more than any other document
not about like queer people that I've ever seen. It
is every third word in this.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
So well that just brings us back to money for nothing.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, exactly exactly. Does Holman Day get a pass?

Speaker 2 (07:18):
No?

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, I don't like this. I thought. I have such
a mixed feeling about this because Day comes across as
like a very like up his own ass like liberal
elite asshole, looking down on these people and kind of
like cheerfully condescending them. But also he is competent as
a reporter. He is going and talk and he's like

(07:40):
the only one who does and so a huge amount
of what we know about the culture of these islands
is just because he went and talked to people and
gave delivered their stories. So it is one of those
like kind of the way he does it is frustrating,
but he does provide us with an absolutely it's kind
of like you got that guy and like the White
House Press Corps, the one guy who can about aids

(08:01):
and like he's like dropping some you know, slurs and
laughing about it sometimes. But he also is pushing the
only guy pushing the Reagan administration about the fact that
people are dying and this is a serious problem. So
like you know, journalism, you get a lot of these
stories there where it's like this is fucked up, but

(08:21):
also this is the only reason we know about these people.
So I don't know, I don't know what to we're
morally to put that. It doesn't really matter. I guess
it happened.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Morally, it goes in the past. It's at a category
thing that happened.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
So holand Day's article opens promisingly enough with the lines
of old muskets drove the Abnakis off the coast of Maine.
Today money is driving away another race, which could be
like a good opening if you're trying to be like,
you know, the cruelty of settlers against the indigenous people
is being replicated by capitalists against these folks who have

(08:59):
found refuge here. That is a little bit of what
he means, but not not. I don't think he really
analyzes things in that context, you know, Okay. He continues
between Kittery Point and Quota Head. Resorters have acquired hundreds
of headlands and thousands of islands. A phalanx of cottages
fronts the sea. The queer squad are people who have

(09:20):
been dispossessed find little relish in being stared at as
human curiosities. So the queer folk live alone, and it
is said that isolation develops eccentricity. The ocean creeps to
the doors of their huts, and winter waves thunder in
their ears. And there are those who say that the
din of the sea boats beats curious ideas into their head.
So for one thing, this.

Speaker 4 (09:40):
Rules they're just cool as they are so cool. Even
though this guy sounds like love he does.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
That's what he's about to say, is he sounds like
like the madness is creeping in from the ocean waves,
battering their their simple brains. It is interesting that he
like he starts with almost almost like actual class analysis here,
talking about like a real like the kind of like
longitudinal problems between the genocide of the native peoples of

(10:08):
this isle and kind of the relentless hunger that that,
you know, the quest for profit brings and how it
just inherently dispossesses and forces people out of their homes.
But he immediately moves to like, and these folks believe
weird shit, like that's the focus of the article, espe
silly they are. So he acknowledges that problem and then
drops it right away, like a paragraph into this fucking

(10:31):
article that said, Homan Day is a pretty textbook earnest
white liberal intellectual. That's at least the picture one gets it.
I haven't read his entire ouvra. That's the picture that
you get of this guy. In this article. He paints
a pretty desperate picture of the educational standards in general culture, which,
as we've already said, is not accurate. These people seem

(10:53):
to have been and this is something that like modern
day archaeologist will note, seem to have been pretty like
reasonably well educated by the standards of the day and
the area. Day uses a lot of noble savage imagery
here too, in lines like this quote. They are not envious,
they do not want to beg Where penury and pride
meet in the city, there are heart burnings. But the

(11:15):
man tossing in the battered dory in the swash of
a millionaire's yacht neither size nor glares, provided he be
one of the queer folk. For the queer folk are
queer in one respective. Especially, they dwell content in their
own world, which is often a world of illusion. For
solitariness and the sea breeds strange thoughts. Kids, keeps going back.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
To that, Uh, this guy is just as it is.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
He's like this reporters living some dog shit life back
in the city, watching all of his friends get collar
every season, and like, what do I have on these people? Well,
some of them believe silly stuff. Holman really wanted to
make sure people got the picture that these people were
sweet but deranged and thus not capable of taking care
of themselves and the ways that we modern Americans expect now.

(12:04):
To his credit, Holman travels pretty widely around the islands,
and he comes across people with legitimately fascinating stories that
I wish desperately had been investigated by a proper anthropologist,
although those didn't really exist back then. But yeah, it's
enticing the bits that he gives us. One of the
stories he tells us is about a guy named Ossian Dustin.

(12:26):
Ossian lives on an island called Newcastle, not far away
from Malaga, and when Holman meets him, Ossian Dustin is
eighty years old. He survives mostly off of just kind
of like pulling what he can out of the ocean.
He makes about fifty dollars a year doing odd jobs
for people back on shore, mostly firewood sawing, and this
pittance is enough for him to remain alone and independent

(12:47):
on the island, engaging in his life's goal hunting for
Captain Kid's treasure. That is his entire This man has
spent hell y rad Dude, he spent his whole life
living alone on this eye and hunting for Captain Kid's
treasure quote the buried existence of which he implicitly believes. Now,
what this guy represents in actuality is a dude who

(13:10):
was born in around the early eighteen twenties and seems
to have decided, like, taken a look at American society
in the eighteen twenties and been like, nah, fuck that shit.
And he has this kind of comfortable fantasy about Captain
hood Kid's treasure that gives him like purpose and a
sense of meaning and seems to make him pretty happy.

(13:32):
As far as we can gather from Holman's reporting, he
came to believe that Kid's treasure was hidden in the
area due to a local legend he encountered as a
young man, and he just decided to spend his entire
life trying to find it. Holman describes this as quote
the type of content that relieves these hidden human tragedies
of some of that pitifulness. Right, Well, this guy's so
happy it makes it less sad that he lives this

(13:53):
depressing life. He is like, the life's only depressing to you, Holman.
Like this guy's doing fine. He is hunting for buried treasure.
He is probably friends with seagulls. Like his life is great.
He is eighty years old. Nobody lives that long. Like
whatever he's doing is working well for him. Yeah, here's
Holman again. He has toiled nights for the most part,

(14:14):
believing that in the night a treasure seeker can best
circumvent the enchantments laid on buried pirate spoils. He searches
with the treasure rod made by his own hands. He
has the tip of a cow's horn, plugged with wood
and containing various metals. In the wooden plug are stuck
parallel strips of whalebone, and he clutches these strips, one
in each hand and walks along, balancing the tip of
the horn. When he passes over the famous iron pot,

(14:37):
the tip, thus is his belief, will turn down and
point at the buried treasure. He says his spade has
struck the iron pot several times, but that enchantment has
whisked away the treasure. He expects that eventually his own
charms will prevail over the power of evil. That's a
cool That's a fine life. I'm sorry, Like, that's a
perfectly fine existence.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
He gets his steps in every day.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Like what has built a whole, like almost religious mythology
around this treasure that allows him to always be searching
for it but never quite finding it, while still getting
little victories along the way. What's wrong with this life?
In the grand scheme of things? How can you have
a problem with this? I bring this guy up both
because this is an amazing story and it made me

(15:23):
so happy to read, and also because as evidence of
what these islands were, they were a refuge, not just
for people like the Darlings and their descendants whose very
relationships are criminal, but for folks. I think it's fair
to say, whatever is going on with Ossian Dustin, He's
not what you'd call neurotypical, right. He is someone who
has built this kind of religious cosmology around the search

(15:43):
for this treasure. He has visions that he talks about
regularly of a figure in shining gold guiding him along,
and in most of the rest of the country, a
man who said these things and did these things would
have been forced into a sanitarium where he would have
fucking died of cholera. Right, that's this guy's story. Ninety
nine percent of the US is he is imprisoned and

(16:05):
left to die of disease, but instead he's eighty years old,
you know. And Holman is absolute like repeatedly mentions he's
the happiest, one of the happiest men that he's ever met. Right, Like,
this guy has has built a life for himself, which
is a pretty awesome achievement. And Holman is human enough
to recognize that he's witnessing something remarkable. Well at the

(16:27):
same time rejecting this man's beliefs as worth any thought. Quote,
it can scarcely be said that Uncle Ossian's unfailing cheerfulness
springs from any philosophy of life that he has evolved.
But after our talk, I came out of his dingy
hut with the feeling that probably some of the proud
folk in the cottages down the bay needed pity more
than he. So he's like, Wow, this guy seems deeply

(16:48):
happy and has lived in an advanced age, but there's
probably nothing worth studying. And like his approach to life,
I don't know if he's not Ray, he's not in
them money. I don't know, man. Maybe he figured something
out that most of us never do. Yeah, he seems firal.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Maybe he found a goal the year after him.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Maybe he did.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
Maybe he did.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
So again. Holman here is kind of on the edge
of a revelation that his journey through these islands makes
crystal clear, which is that civilization is not an unalloyed good,
and many marginalized people have always been able to take
care of themselves better by dropping out of it. That
has been a fact of history for as long as
people have been like building cities and making rules. Is

(17:31):
that some people, particularly those persecuted society, are better off
without them. Next, Holman visits Spruce Island, inhabited solely by
three elderly men, the Shanks brothers, William, Daniel, and Nehemiah.
They had lived all their lives and what he describes
as a tumble down shelter. William and Daniel never married,

(17:51):
but Neamiyah had what our writer Buddy patronizingly calls a
poor little romance that broke his heart. Basically, Neamia and
their dad used to go to Portland to sell their
fish catch, and at one point this lady married him
as a con to take his money family savings away,
which is sad their father forgave Neemiyah by tasking him

(18:13):
to watch over his brothers for the rest of their lives.
It kind of seems again like his brothers at least
are it sounds like a myth that you're telling. Well,
I mean this is amazing. He meant these people basically
what you know? Yeah, no, no, no, no, I believe it.
It's just I think that it's like his actual life
has elements that are mythic storytelling. Yeah, like, ah, you

(18:34):
have done You've failed in this way by being tricked.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Now you have a new task. Yeah, and it does.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
It does. That is kind of what's cool happening because
like William and Daniel, it seems like are again what
you would say, not neurotypical, right they are. They are
not people who can live. Neamiah probably could have, these
are not people who can exist in the regular society
of the time. Their dad realizes that and he's like, look,
you've got to take care of them because this is

(19:00):
the only place that they're ever going to have. And
so that's what Neami. These guys are all like, I
think in their sixties seventies when Holman meets them, and
it's an int remarkable stories you've noted, and it gets
kind of more fascinating to me. There's a paragraph in
here about William in particular that I have not been

(19:22):
able to get out of my head since I read
it for more than twenty years. William has never come
out of the hut into the sunshine. He told me
that he feared the sun might heat his brains and
interfere with his life work, which is the composition of poetry.
There is a brain blanket slung across one end of
the hut. William sits behind his blank this blanket and
fixes his eyes on the sunlight that enters through Anthole

(19:43):
and composes. He states that he is now the author
of a thousand pieces, none of which he ever writes down.
He just his entire life is sitting in that chair,
filling his brain with his own poetry that no one
else will ever hear.

Speaker 4 (20:02):
That's yeah, that's cool, Yeah, that's like. Yeah, it's like
the anchor writes. The people who would like to go
and like wall themselves.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Up, Yeah, like yeah, And I honestly, you know, if
Holman was a better journalist. The thing to do would
be like, would you read me some poems, like so
I can write them down. I want to know what
this is like.

Speaker 4 (20:22):
Yeah, of course, yeah, he's either like he's probably the
best or worst poets, never absolute trash verse.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah either way, that's there's like a deep kind of
harrowing beauty and that that simple statement about this guy's life. Anyway,
when I started researching this, my thinking was again that
I would start with the tale of Benjamin Darling and
then Malaga and how it became a haven for these
kind of like these people who had who couldn't live

(20:52):
in regular society or chose not to and built this
resilient culture of their own, and how that culture was
destroyed in the name of progress. But for all my
issues with homans smugness and dismissal of the depth of
inner life lived by his subjects, I must admit that
the substantial footwork he did is what keyed me into
the deeper story here, because the people he's describing, a
lot of these folks. You lead a guy like Ossian, right,

(21:14):
you look at people like these brothers. These are folks
who today would probably be living on the street, right,
you know, if they don't have family support, if they
don't have like some access to funding, a lot like
these are people who cannot fit in with capitalism, right.
You know. They can do like some odd jobs and
stuff here, but they're never going to like buy a
house in a city. They're never going to like own
anything that they have a deed for. That's like not

(21:36):
for most of these people, not the kind of people
that they are. And while there was this place where
they could go and be outside of the law and free,
a lot of them lived okay lives based on the
standards of the time, you know, verging on a lot
better lives than many of the people back on land
would have lived. Not that they were easy lives, but

(21:58):
they were lives. And that's not an option for people
like this anymore.

Speaker 4 (22:04):
There's just there's no outside anymore. It's like one of
the things that you.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
Know, there's no it's not like any you know, the
quote unquote places that aren't owned, you know, by somebody
who can lock you out, are owned by the city,
who can make a law saying it's illegal DeCamp there
or whatever. Yeah, So this is a story about how
that happened and about how these anti vagrancy laws that
primarily got instituted in order to police the behavior of

(22:30):
newly free black Americans kind of coincided with the disgust
of moneyed people in cities against the folks who had
managed to build a life outside of them. That's that's
what we're talking about. But you know what we're talking about, first, Margaret,
what's that ads for products?

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Wait? Why are there there's advertisers on this?

Speaker 1 (22:55):
There sure are, there's sure are all of whom I
don't I don't know. I don't know. I'm kind of
kind of bumming out right now. So we're just we're
just gonna throw to ads. I don't have a joke.
Here you go. Ah, we're back. You know, good, good stuff.

(23:20):
We're we're feeling happy. Everybody's having a good time and
on a solid emotional level.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
So yay.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Anyway, I'm having a good time. Yeah, uh yeah, it's
it's cool. And obviously, like you know, the fact that
these islands were available for this descendants of the Darlings
and all these other people is partly a result of
the ongoing genocide against the indigenous peoples who had inhabited
them before. But you know, Benjamin Darling didn't have a
choice about being here, right, Like, I don't, I don't,

(23:50):
I can't. I don't put that on them that like, well, shit,
there's nobody here, and like the folks in those cities
suck ass. Let's get the fuck out of here, you know,
like what else are they going to do?

Speaker 4 (24:00):
Right?

Speaker 1 (24:01):
So, as I write this, in Portland, Oregon, the mayor
Ted Wheeler is working to has Actually when I wrote this,
he was still building support for it. But the vote
just passed to ban camping, as he calls it, during
daylight hours on city property. This includes the parks in
green spaces that tend to be preferred by the kind
of folks who find themselves living in encampments. And of

(24:22):
course these laws are not meant to criminalize the kind
of camping that like affluent white people do where they
like go out to camp to feel connected to nature.
What they're trying to criminalize is the existence of people
who cannot afford rent or a house, who they don't
really care where these people end up. A camp, like
a concentration camp is kind of the thing that Ted

(24:43):
Wheeler is floating is like actively trying to build support
for is like enforced camps where people are checked when
they enter and leave and have like their hours restricted
and are searched when they come in, Like that is
the goal. I think the real goal would be just
to like force them to move somewhere else. People used
to bust their homeless folks to California. Yeah, but yeah,

(25:05):
it's it's it is kind of One of the things
that I'm frustrated by is sort of the patronizing mockery
of describing these people as as like camping, you know,
like these are their homes. This is the lives that
they've built for themselves. It's kind of like describing the
people of Malaga or whatever is like hermits living in caves,
where it's like, no, I mean they have they have
structures that they built, they have houses, like they're just

(25:27):
they're they're living the life that they are able to live.
Like you don't have to be a dick about it.
You couldn't you couldn't hack it out there. So from
time to time folks put out in this way attempt
to construct more elaborate structures for themselves in order to survive.
A lot of this makes me think about the kind
of communities that build up on these islands in Malaga,

(25:50):
and they make me think. When I was reading about
and looking at some of the photos of the houses there,
I was brought back to a story of a guy
outside of Portland named Mikey, who in November of twenty
twenty built a two story wooden home for himself off
Airport Way. This immediately became like a huge There was
a bunch of different like conservative news stories and stuff

(26:10):
that like fucking covered this kind of a representative example
is on a Babylon b affiliated website written by an
author who gives his name as the Ghost of Reagan,
titled this Portland homeless Man's house is fancier than your home.
It's interesting, Like when he was interviewed by local media,
he was like, I needed somewhere to live and I

(26:32):
hate tents, so I like built myself a house. And
of course the city finds out. Yeah, like pisses off
all these right wingers. Mikey gets forced out of his home,
which is demolished. You know, I love that that they're
going to present this man as lazy.

Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah, you know this this on industrious man who has
built a two stories where's.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
The third story? There's not even a basement. Yeah, and
it is like, you know, when you're talking about sort
of some of the problems of encamp ments and stuff.
You know, I live near several of them. You and
I just went and put out a fire at one
the other day. Now, in that case, I think it
was a fire started by there's some local kids who
like to attack homeless people. I believe it was them

(27:13):
lighting some of their shit on fire, because it seems
to be random, you know that said stuff like that.
I talk to people who live there. Sometimes it's like
one group has beef with another and like their shit
gets lit on fire. There's also like fires happen in
these encampments because of improperly you know, handled like propane
stoves and stuff. There are problems that need to be

(27:35):
dealt with, and in some cases even it, like especially
during fire season, you may have to say like, hey, guys,
we can't have a bunch of fucking propane burners out here.
It's going to cause like a serious problem for a
lot of people. I'm not saying like there shouldn't be
any kind of like attention paid to what people do
if they decide to set up homes for themselves. On
like you know, city property or whatever. I just don't

(27:57):
think the default should be destroying everything they have and
putting them in jail, like you know, there's all this,
it's also this like yeah.

Speaker 4 (28:07):
I just I can't quite wrap my head around the
kind of person who thinks that criminalizing homelessness is a
good idea, because part of it is like, well, but
that could just be yeah, right, like that could just
like the crime is that they had a series of
bad events and you just assume that your life will
never include bad events, Like what life have you led

(28:31):
where you don't have bad events? Like yeah, I don't know,
I don't know how to even phrase it. It just
makes no sense to me.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
And there's and there's like a lot of options that
are not like obviously there's a lot of safety reasons
why yeah, maybe we can't just have people setting up
wherever they want to, like for example, like in the
West during fire season, that presents a danger. I spent
a decent amount of time back in twenty fifteen in
a place called Nicholsville, which is one of a couple
of Nicholsville's that have existed in Seattle, which was like

(28:58):
empty land that local homeless people started building tiny homes
in fairly well constructed safe they were able to get
like trash pickup and stuff, and as a result, it
was like a decent safe play. I mean, eventually they
got forced out. It's happened a couple of times. But
you know, one of the things that's kind of neat

(29:19):
is that there have also been like kind of the
attention that this got helped build support in Seattle for
local and governments to embrace some ideas that kind of
offer more dignity on autonomy to houseless regiments like Nicholsville,
and so there have been we've seen the creation of
more kind of like tiny home villages made for recycled
materials and stuff, where people kind of have more autonomy

(29:40):
and are involved in the project of like helping to
craft their own living spaces. These are not perfect. These
projects are generally, when they're legal, are conducted under the
strict eye of the city. This sometimes means that some
of them have like mandatory searches for drugs or strict
limits on what pets are available. But you know, it's better,
you know, certainly than a lot of options that exist.

(30:03):
I do find it frustrating that when homeless people build
their own communities on undeveloped land, rather than being given
access to services that might allow them to do this
safely and hygenically, they're more often forced violently out of
their homes at greater expense than it would be to
provide them with services, because it's not cheap to actually
do all this. When cities do give these people the

(30:24):
opportunity to exist in a place where they could build
some sort of comfort for themselves, the reactions from neighbors
are often vicious, and I want to quote from a
twenty seventeen article in Crosscut about a Seattle community called
Nicholsville in Ballard. This is a couple of years after.
I think it's from a different location from the one
I went to quote. The plan to build one of
the camps near residences and in the middle of businesses

(30:46):
on the west end of Ballard's Market Street drew frustration
and angry objections, including from the Ballard Chamber of Commerce.
When the news report was reported on My Ballard, it
garnered nearly one hundred comments. Reasonable voices were drowned out
by the aggressive rhetoric of some commenters. The real brilliance
put them between a liquor store and a bar. Brilliant
thinking better Yet, let's put them right at the gateway

(31:08):
of a historic treasure, like the Locks, one of our
most visited sites, wrote one commenter on my ballard. Another
compared the encampment to an episode of The Walking Dead,
claiming the area would no doubt go to total shit fuck.

Speaker 4 (31:20):
Yeah, that means that person's thinking about machine gun in there.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, I mean, of course. Yeah. And it's like, there's
this outrage people have, not just when homeless people build
something for theirselves, but when they do it in a
place where like they have a nice view. There was
an article that went viral in Portland in April, and
I'm going to quote from the Fox coverage of this.
Residents living near Portland's Willamette River have witnessed a series

(31:45):
of homeless cabins and structures being built on prime river
real estate with million dollar city views, but have so
far been unable to get anyone to do anything about it.
Pretty Much everyone comes back and says they don't have
jurisdiction because it's Union Pacific rail Road. Rick Scaramella, who
owns a condominium on the other side of the Willamette
River told KOI n on a report. In a report

(32:07):
Thursday this Voice, I hate it too. Scaramella told the
outlet that people from across the river. Across the river
from his home have been building makeshift cabins complete with doors, windows,
and sometimes even solar panels, on the banks of the
river that feature views of downtown Portland. Rick, fuck you.
I hope you step on a nail and get tetanus.

(32:29):
That costs you your leg. That's what I hope for you, Rick, Scaramella.
You fucking condo owning piece of shit, like they've got
a nice view and they didn't pay what I paid
for it.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Suck my dick, Rick, go fuck yourself.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
I lived.

Speaker 4 (32:46):
I've been a squad in a lot of different cities
at various points, and I remember and one I think
that the way the Netherlands used to handle it until
they changed the laws is brilliant, which is a lot
of people were suddenly houseless in the late eighties. I'm
gonna have the timeline of this a little bit wrong. Yeah,
the ladies and so eventually everyone just started squatting all

(33:07):
of these buildings and it became this massive thing, and
eventually they got the law changed where if a building
was left vacant for a year with no clear plan
of what was going to happen to it, it was
legal for people to squat it. And so you don't
have real estate prospectors holding properties empty while people need houses,
because if you leave it empty, someone's gonna move in

(33:28):
and then you're fucked as the landowner or whatever. And
so it got people to lower rents, it got people
to sell properties to families, and it provided squatters places
to live. And I remember I at this moment, I
was playing accordion on the street with one of my
squatterfront's next to me, and this person comes up and
asks my friend, why does that accordion player play such

(33:52):
sad music? And the actual answer is that I'm a
goth and I like sad music. But the answer that
my squatter friend had was like, oh, it's because we're squatters.
We spend all of our time building things and then
they come and they take them away, And I just
I think about that where it's like there's this version
of the squatter where they like they shit everywhere and

(34:13):
they live in absolute hord everything. But then when people
are like, okay, I'm going to build a cabin. I'm
going to put solar panels on it. I'm going to
like get the trash taken out. I'm going to like
try and do this right. Yeah, people get even angrier
because they want people living in squalor, because they want
people to suffer, because they're bad people.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Yeah, it's the like you know again, I spend a
lot of time in and around encampments. I'm like friendly
with One of the reasons why I'm friendly with folks
is that, like a year or so ago, a woman
I lived with, who has had an infant child at
the time, was like going along this area and got
shot at by kids on very nice new motorbikes with
BB guns, and like some of the local homeless folks

(34:54):
like rallied to her defense. And we're like, yeah, they
come and like shoot at us all the time. It's
just like a thing shitty kids do. And you know,
I've gotten to know folks and stuff, and it's you see, like, yeah,
I don't like that there's trash out there. I don't
like that there's piles of trash in a nice natural area.
That's not nice, you know, where there would be big
piles of trash if I is my house, if I

(35:16):
didn't have access to like city trash pickup. You know,
like this is an optional and it's cheaper than letting
it all build up and then hiring professionals to come
and deal with it, like they don't want to live
in trail Like anyway, there's solutions to this that aren't
sending the fucking cops and the fucking biohazard drugs every
like two or three times a year to fuck with

(35:37):
people's stuff. You know, I find the discourse around this
all very frustrating, which is why this episode got written.
So yeah, let's go back to Mlaga Island. So in
nineteen oh eight, you know, The Walking Dead was still
a couple of years away from being on television. But
Holman Day's description of the community isn't much more interests

(36:00):
than that fear mongering bullshit We hurt a little earlier.
As a no man's land, Malaga has more striking peculiarities
than any other island alongshore. There are about fifty persons
on it oft, all of grades of Negro blood, and
most of them descendants of a runaway slave who came
and hid here more years ago than any man about
their remembers. That's Benjamin Darling. He's talking about These people

(36:23):
form a strange clan. They have married and intermarried until
the trespass on consanguinity has until the trespass on consanguinality
has produced its usual lamentable effects. They are as near
to being children of nature as it is possible for
people to be who are only as stones to away
from the mainland and civilization. They lack entirely the spirit
of thrift and of providing for future emergencies. Winter after winter,

(36:47):
through all the years they have shivered and starved, but
never does November find a woodpile on Malaga, nor a
weak supply of food in reserve. To counsel on economy
and to preachment on thrift. They are as inattentive as
little children would be. A coast missionary took in hand
one especially improvident family of six father, mother and four
children well grown. Spurred by him, they fished doug clams,

(37:08):
sold bait to trawlers, and at the end of the
summer had saved about seventy dollars among them. Then the
missionary went away, confident that at least one Malaga family
would reach march Hill in comparative comfort. When his back
was turned, they used for kindlings the shingles that he
had given them for the repair of their miserable Hut
bought six dogs in order to each member of the
family could have his own pet, and spent the rest

(37:28):
of the money for sweets, pickles, jellies, and fancy groceries.
He's literally be like these poor people are buying nice food,
they have pets. I also love like he is full
of shit here, like everything he says about them, like
not being able to store food, they don't know how
to survive the winter. They don't like you know, like yeah,

(37:48):
I mean among other things, like he's like their children
are well grown and healthy where It's like, how did
they get that way home? Man? It just happened by
accident before this minister showed up. Or were they actually
capable of taking care of themselves. We know again from
recent archaeology that local children were reasonably well educated by
the standards of the time, and the fact that this
community survived more than half a century and more like

(38:10):
about a century doesn't really suggest people who were incapable
of planning for the future or storing food. Archivist Kate McBryan,
who curated an exhibition about Malaga for the Maine State Museum,
notes the documentary and archaeological evidence refutes all of these myths.
The people of Malaga Island lived just like their neighbors
on the mainland. Again, we have evidence of how these

(38:32):
people lived and it was not in like shocking desperation,
and Holman's article includes photographs that don't agree with the
statements in his article. The only extant visual evidence of
Malaga in these days shows well dressed women in what
appear to be competently constructed homes like here's and you
know this is like there are some mission there's like
a missionary family on the island who seemed like they

(38:54):
were pretty chill, but like these homes are older than
them showing up like Sophie, if you'll show Margaret the picture,
like these are these are not like tumble down shacks
like these are well, seem to be pretty well constructed
homes with like shingles and shit, like you can see
them like in the article where you're talking about like
these are competently built homes.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
I don't know what is fucking talking.

Speaker 4 (39:15):
They burned all the shingles except for the ones that
are on all the shingles you can see and the siding.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yeah, there's a lot of big use of shingles.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (39:25):
And then the house in the background is even more
like that. It's nice, Yes, it's fine. Yeah. They we're
doing plenty of windows, a lot of yeah, and windows
is like when you're building a house on the chips.
Windows is like the crazy expensive part, you know. Yeah, yeah,
they got fucking glass and stuff.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
You know. They're clearly like again, interfacing with mainstream society
to some extent to get stuff that they can't. You
can't make your You're not going to have like build
a glacier in some island off the coast of Maine,
so they get what they need.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
There's multiple uh, multiple gables.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Enough house in the back right, Like that's not even
just like like that is fancier than if I went
out and built a house I would build.

Speaker 3 (40:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Yeah, they're like, you know, it's fine. I find this
all particularly fascinating in light of how differently Holman describes
another one of these communities, Loud's Island. Now, we don't
have information on what the specific racial makeup makeup of
Loud's island was. But my assumption is that they were
mostly white, and my assumption that there is that they

(40:27):
were mostly white, because Holman does not describe them as
blacker mixed race, and he does that every single time
he writes about Malaga. So again, these are two islands
like a mile from each other something like that. Here's
how he describes Loud's Island, and I'm gonna say you
can pick up on the slant in his coverage at all.
It has a considerable population of thrifty fishermen and farmers.

(40:48):
They live in good houses and are intelligent. They and
their ancestors have dwelt here for more than one hundred
and fifty years. But the men of the island have
never voted in any election towns or state or national.
They have never paid any state in our county taxes.
They resisted the draft at the time of the Civil
War and drove the officers off the island with clubs
and rocks. They say they do not need the protecting
arm of state or national government. They raise money for

(41:11):
schools and roads, elect municipal officers to administer affairs, and
seem to get along very comfortably. The Malaga is doing
this it's the same thing. They've got their own little
thing going on, and they don't trust the government, like
just like these other people. But one of them get
described as like thrifty pioneers and the other like dangerous,

(41:32):
savage or not dangerous. He doesn't describe the miss dangerous.
Give him that they live close to nature, animals exactly. Yeah,
so Holman paints a picture of the Malagaites is all
but incapable of work because of their childlike nature. The
fact that he describes them as harmless does not make
this less toxic. And we know that his assessment was
again inaccurate. By the early nineteen hundreds, many Malagaites worked

(41:55):
ashore at resorts like the New Meadows. In from a
nineteen eighty article in Downey Magazine, quote their ragtag Island neighbors,
some white, some black, many of mixed blood living in
make dew dwellings became an embarrassing eye sore to both
local and summer and year round residents. There was a belief, too,
made popular by several widely read even sensational sociology studies

(42:17):
of the time, that poverty, crime, and mental retardation stemmed
directly from retrograde families, and that removing such decaying stock
would improve the moral fiber of society. Oh god, in
nineteen oh half step from here to Nazis. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
we are right on the road. This is right when
eugenics is starting up. Like it all is cooking together, right,

(42:39):
this is all you're putting, putting more stuff in the pot, right,
you know. Now you've got a stew going, right now,
you got a real racism stew agoing. So in nineteen
oh eight, the same year as holman Days, Harper's article,
main established a school for the feeble minded, later renamed
the Pineland Center. This was a prison where poor unfortunates

(42:59):
would be removed from public site, basically right. This happened
as the media campaign against the Islanders reached a fever pitch,
and the people who lived on the mainland grew horrified
that the bad press about these Islanders might rub off
on them and damage their reputations to like folks in
New York, they might think everyone in Maine was like
a savage, right, Like, that's a big part of why

(43:19):
they take action.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Now.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
By the standards of a lot of these articles, I
will say Holman's Peace positively shines. And to provide an
example of that, I'm going to read a quote from
an article in the Casco Bay Breeze from nineteen oh five.
This is them talking about the Malagaites. They drank tea
spelled with a capital if you please, for if reports
be true, its strength would sink a ship tobacco as

(43:41):
their ambrosia. And it said they would almost sell their
souls for a cut. A superstitious race, are they on Malaga?
Even the screeching of an owl is an ominous sign
for them? And then the author goes on to suggest
that these people should be removed from their home so
that summer houses can be built upon the island. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(44:02):
I hope that guy died badly. From nineteen ten on,
the state began pumping more and more resources into Malaga
in the form of aid. And again, this is one
of the justifications is they're like, look at all this share,
look at all the public aid money they're taking, all
of like the welfare money that they're taking, which like
they'd basically gotten none up until the early nineteen hundreds

(44:22):
when suddenly it starts being pushed into the island by
the state government. And then they're like, well, now that
you're receiving aid, we have to go police things to
make sure that you're not doing things improperly, which leads
immediately to them taking children away from their families because
the living standards aren't high enough, and these children are
taken and immediately interned in the School for the Feeble Minded,
because obviously these kids can't learn, like they wouldn't live

(44:45):
out here if they were capable of learning things, So
let's take them from their loving families and put them
in a prison home. The purpose of all this was
laid out quite clearly in a nineteen sixty eight article
of The Pineland Observer. Looking back on this moment, Maine
was reputedly a wasteland with popular pockets of social indigence
of low intelligence. It was considered advisable for the good

(45:07):
of society that these little settlements be broken up and
persons incapable of working moved to a home for them.
In nineteen eleven, I don't like it. No, it's not good.
It's bad, Margaret, It's real bad. In nineteen eleven, a
whole family was forced out of their home on Malaga
for the very first time. The justification was that the

(45:29):
father and one of his sons were both terminally ill,
so they and all of their younger siblings were forced
into a sanitarium at the stroke of a doctor's pen.
That year, Mulaga was declared by the state government to
be part of Phitpsburg. They also decided that a wealthy
family from that town actually owned the island. Now, this
family had never bought Mulaga Island. They were the family

(45:52):
who had bought Horse Island from the Darlings in eighteen
forty seven, before the Darlings bought Malaga Island, and so
basically they are like, well, if they bought Horse Island,
they must also own the island. That the black people
they that sold the island to them like bought right,
it must be their property too. So this family become
the owners of Malaga Island, which becomes an excuse for

(46:16):
the local government to send the sheriff in with an
order for everyone to vacate. Modern sources agree that this
was all extremely illegal, But the Malagites are going to
be evicted without resistance. They're given tiny pittances for their
homes and forced onto the mainland. We have but a
few precious direct writings from residents at this time. One

(46:36):
is from a letter by an islander named Nelson Layton McKinney.
And here's what he says about the process of eviction.
And this is after he and his family have been
forced out. The others of us are having hard times
to find homes anywhere on all an account of folks
saying we've got the cramp catch in our fingers and
take too many things that are lying around loose. But

(46:56):
it's all a lie. We don't steal if we are poor.
If you know any place where I can crawl in
with my wife and five kids and my old peg leg,
please let me know, right because of like all of
the rumors about how these people are like dangerous tramps
who will steal it. And he's not layed, laid down
once the state kicks them out of their home, like
they can't find any place to settle, you know, no

(47:16):
one will rent to them, no one will like let them,
you know, live anywhere, because they're dangerous. In nineteen twelve,
the last forty five holdouts on Malaga are evicted by
Governor Plaistead, who made a big showy visit to the
island with media in tow before finishing the eviction, he
had himself photographed setting foot on the island like a
conquering hero. He and his executive council ordered the eviction

(47:39):
of the community after taking eight residents into custody and
forcibly institutionalizing them, putting them in a mental institution.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
The justification in most of these cases, for like, why
these people had to be put in an insane asylum
was that when questioned, they didn't recognize a phone. Now
this is nineteen twelve.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
None of these people were born in a world with phones,
and there are no phones on the island in which
they live. But they don't know a phone. Put them,
Lock them up forever in an insane asylum death camp,
you know.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
Yeah, which is funny because you could show the same
phone to someone born fifteen years ago and they might
not recognize it either.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
Things change, Yeah, Like, and.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
It's one of those like I don't know, you know what,
maybe they don't recognize a phone. What I would like
to see, governor place dead. Can you last an entire
winter alone on fucking Malaga Islands?

Speaker 2 (48:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (48:32):
Oh no, you're dead, ah, cause you're not competent to
manage your affairs anyway. Yeah, you know who's competent to
manage all of our affairs, Margaret, Ooh, is it stuff?
It is the products and services that support this podcast
are the only people who should be allowed to vote.
I think we can all agree on that absolutely, and

(49:00):
we're back living in a product ocracy. So Governor Playstead
evicts the last people on Malaga Island in nineteen twelve.
The island is almost immediately sold to a friend and
a business partner of the governor's, a guy named doctor
Gustavus Kilgore, who had signed the commitment levers letters to

(49:22):
the institution of all of the evicts. That's cool. Fuck,
not crooked at all. They're not at all crooked. No,
it's fine, it's fine. It's fine.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
This isn't a.

Speaker 1 (49:32):
Problem that could have all been solved with one well
placed pipe bomb. So good stuff, good stuff. Other photos
from the island before its clearing became popular tourist chachkes.
One infamous set is called The Deuce of Spades and
the Tray of Spades, and it shows a black woman
sitting inside of a corral holding a small child. The

(49:53):
other postcard shows the same woman with two children looking
through a fence line. The implication was that the malaga
Ites kept their children lif animals in a pin, when
it was really like a photo of a family who
kept animals properly on their land that they lived on.
But like, look they're animals, their kids are in a pin.
It's it's very frustrating. Once the state forced everyone off

(50:17):
of Mlaga Island, they exhumed the local cemetery and put
them in prison. No, no, they rebury them on the mainland.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
Which what they do they do put them in prison
because they just saying, but the kids, they're like, these
people keep kids in pens.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
That's fucked up. We better put those kids in a
prison and.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
A crazy people jail, which they do anyway, I'm sorry.
Then they dig up all of their dead relatives and
bury them the institution, like they literally imprison the corpses.
Like it is like, I don't know, maybe there's a
degree of like the fear level, the fear that like
these rich and powerful people always have about folks who

(51:00):
don't need them, or the society that they've thrived in,
about folks who like literally like enthusiastically reject the society
in which these people are successful and manage to make
a life for themselves is the most frightening thing of
all of them anyway. Cool stuff. A January nineteen thirteen
news article celebrated cleaning up Malaga Island no longer a

(51:22):
reproach to the good name of the state. It celebrated
that these dispossessed people had been raised to a standard
of living they'd probably never dreamed of before. Look, they
never dreamed of prisons. Yeah, before this, none of them
had died of cholera in a dank cell.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
Progress. They can use a phone once a week.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Yeah, they can see the phone. They're not allowed to
use it now when they know as a phone number.
That article in Down East magazine, The Shameful Story of
Malaga from nineteen eighty goes further about kind of what
happens to these folks after eviction. Except for those sent

(52:05):
to the main school for the feeble minded, no provision
had been made for the other islanders, and, as the
press soon discovered, not only was it costly to support
people at the state home, but surrounding towns and refusing
popper status to the displaced Islanders denied their right to
belong to any community. King McKinney and Jerry Murphy were lucky.
They rafted their houses to lots on the mainland at

(52:26):
Pipsburg and Meadowbrook. Not so fortunate was Robert Tripp's family, who,
having rafted their house up on a whole, sailed up
the new ret Meadows River in search of a lot,
but were prevented from landing by prosperous Christian people and
town authorities. Caught literally between the well known rock and
a hard place, the family hawsered up some trees on
the tiny bush island. They were barely able to eke

(52:48):
out an existence and often bordered on starvation. This was
acknowledged in a newspaper story of December nineteen fourteen, the
first year of World War One, with a headline reading
Maine misery as dark as Belgium's. When Laura Tripp, formerly
strong and healthy, soon became desperately ill, her husband rode
three miles for help through the worst gale that has
swept the coast in years, but by the time he

(53:10):
returned with a doctor, his wife had died. She was
later buried in Potter's Field. And probably it is the
place to point out that, like you know, being evicted
increases mortality by an enormous amount, Like having all of
your stuff trashed, having like whatever structures you've built trashed
increases the risk of mortality. You know, this war on

(53:31):
the homelessness in San Diego has been met with a
lot of deaths of houseless people. This is what happens
anywhere this kind of shit goes on, and it was
happening back then too. The war on vagrancy continued even
though I should know. Sorry, Malaga Island remains uninhabited to
this day. There are if you find some modern stories

(53:53):
about descendants of the Darlings, there's people with last named
Darling who like found within the Latin most within the
last like ten years, the story of their family and
like where they like what had happened. There have been
some attempts, like there's been like official apologies from local
governments in Maine. There have been like some trips that
some of these descendants have gotten to take to Malaga Island.

(54:14):
There's like been This is part of why there's we
know what we do now, Like archaeology has been done.
People have been studying this. But there are one of
the stories I read it was it was with some
you know, this young woman who was like, I never
had heard about any of this, and when I brought
it up, her dad was like, don't fucking look into this,
like because there was still this fear of like this
is dangerous, Like don't go dig in this shit up,

(54:37):
Like do you know what happened to my grandpa?

Speaker 3 (54:39):
Like it's fucked up.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
It's fucked I mean it's good that like this has
turned a corner and people are talking about this. I
don't know, I feel like we should give those people
that island. Maybe I don't know what to do. It's probably, yeah,
I mean hard to live on. But it was always
legally theirs.

Speaker 4 (54:55):
Yeah, like that's the even the like like I don't
have a ton of repet for.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
The concept of.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
I'm not a property rights yeah uh yeah, but they
it was literally theirs.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
They literally bought.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
It, like they purchased it with money with your currency
and owned it. And then you were like, now we'll
give it to this these guys. So this doctor who
locks people up can buy it because he's friends with
our fucking dog shit ass governor. Anyway, cool stuff. Uh yeah,
So that is the story of Malaga Island. It's you know,

(55:33):
tail ends for a while, but the war on vagrancy continues.
The laws pioneered in Tennessee and Massachusetts spread over the land,
and soon enough places like California and Florida had their
own vagrancy laws. In California, the state declared everyone from
wanderers and willfully unemployed people to prostitutes and the lewde

(55:55):
guilty of vagrancy. The way the laws were written gave
police total power todaye who actually fit the definition of vagrant,
and whether or not to take them into custody. This
power was used primarily on non white people, but it
was also used on other folks who were disliked by
the state, including communists. For example, in nineteen forty nine
in Los Angeles, Isidore Edelman, a Russian born communist soapbox speaker,

(56:20):
was arrested by the LAPD as he spoke in Pershing
Square Time magazine Rights. It was Edelman's strident and offensive
speeches that caught the attention of the police. His politics
were just too inflammatory for the early Cold War. Twenty
years later, in Jacksonville, Florida, Margaret Lorraine Papa Cristo was
arrested while out with her friend, another young blonde woman

(56:40):
and their dates to black men. Papa Cristo was arrested
under a Jacksonville law that made twenty kinds of vagrancy illegal.
Time notes that this included rogues and vagabonds or dissolute
persons who go about begging, Persons who used juggling or
unlawful games or plays, common drunkards, common railers and brawlers.
Persons wandering are strolling about from place to place without

(57:02):
any lawful purpose or object, habitual loafers, disorderly persons. How
often juggling is in these especially since Yeah, one of
my favorite movies is fucking Hot Fuzz, which is about
a town whose hatred of I think it starts with
like Roma traveling through town, but of like homeless people
of like you know, folks like travelers kind of going

(57:23):
through and setting up camps and stuff. Briefly leads them
to like mass murder, like I build a fascist death
state where they kill anyone who doesn't abide by the
local laws. It's a pretty based movie, but like the
old people in it who are like creating this death
state are like one of the things they complain about
is the jugglers, right, like, who all get murdered by

(57:44):
their their junta. Pretty cool stuff. Good movie. Watch Hot Fuzz.
It's about all this actually in a lot of ways.
So yeah, Papa Christo. One of the things I found
interesting was that she and her friends were found guilty
of vagrancy for these acific modern crime of what was
called prowling by auto, which is I think just like

(58:05):
hell yeah. Basically the crime was like she and her
friend were white and they were dating black eyes and
they were driving around like so that we got a
crackdown on that.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Yeah, that's not gonna fly.

Speaker 4 (58:17):
The kinds of laws that make me angriest are laws
that are well racist laws are the mostest, the most angry.
But laws that are just like literally victimless crimes. There
are laws that like might possibly lead to situations where
other crimes might be more likely or whatever, like yeah,
like no cruisy, like you can't just drive around or whatever.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
This is not you know, the cruising law, the anti
vagrant law. When you kind of look at the civil
rights movement about like the end of like Jim Crow,
and shit, these are not examples of Jim Crow, right,
This anti vagrancy law is not a Jim Crow law.
Doesn't specify any race, but it gives the police to
do whatever they want with someone they think is a vagrant.
And the cops happen to feel that anytime they see

(59:01):
a black person right likes. That's how it works. You know,
these are racial laws. They're just a little stealthier than
you know. Jim Crow, James Crow, as his friends know him,
who are bad people? I don't know. I don't know
why what I was going whatever, anyway, let's continue. So
I'm going to continue with a quote from that Time

(59:22):
magazine article talking about vagrancy laws. Between Aedelman's arrest and
Papa Cristo's twenty years later, literally millions of people shared
their vagrancy fates. Some of those arrested comported with the
usual image of the vagrant. Sam Thompson, for example, was
an underemployed handyman and alcoholic arrested some fifty five times

(59:42):
in Louisville, Kentucky in the nineteen fifties, but many, like
Adelman and Papa Cristo, are more surprising. The police arrested
for loitering the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, co founder with Martin
Luther King, junior of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when
he spoke briefly with colleagues and a Birmingham Street corner
during a nineteen sixty two department store boycott. It was
vagrancy the police used when they could not get to

(01:00:04):
Lane law students Stephen Wainwright to cooperate with a murder
investigation in New Orleans' French Quarter in nineteen sixty four.
It was vagrancy as well, that justified the nineteen sixty
six arrest of Marsha of Martin Hichhorn, a young cross
dressing hairstylist, arrested in his hotel room in Manhattan wearing
only a half slip in Brazier. Police turned to vagrancy
in nineteen sixty seven when they arrested Joy Kelly in

(01:00:26):
the crash pad she had rented for herself and her
Hippi friends in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they used it
again when they mistook Dorothy Anne Kirkwood for a prostitute
when she was on her way to meet her boyfriend
on Memphis famous Beale Street in nineteen sixty eight. These
and other vagrancy suspects were white and black, male and female,
straight and gay, urban and rural, southern, northern, Western, and Midwestern.

(01:00:47):
They had money or needed it to fight authority or
tried to comply with it. They were arrested on public
streets and in their own homes as locals or strangers
for political protests or seeming like a murderer for their race,
their sexuality, their poverty, or their lifestyle.

Speaker 4 (01:01:05):
Yeah, yep, fucked up. The state doesn't like. Yeah, yep,
the state doesn't like when people live outside. It's logic
it does not. And cops, you know, are when you
just kind of give them the power to do what
they want against the people who they think are doing wrong,

(01:01:26):
they will wind up, you know, enforcing the kind of
laws that the governor of Maine, you know, would have
thought were good. You know, you don't have to like
write out who they should do violence to, who they
should stomp out. You know, they'll get to it on
their own. And you know, it was one of those
things because of how all pervasive these vagrancy laws were.

(01:01:49):
And one of the things that paragraph I read makes
me think about is there's a song I quite like,
back back from the era before country music was taken
over by boot liquors by Chris Christofferson called the law
is for protection of the people. And it starts with
Billy Barton, a drunk guy, you know, stumbling around the sidewalk,
and the bunch of police cars come screaming to the

(01:02:10):
rescue and haul old Billy Barton off to jail. And
then there's a hippie dude walking through town and the
cops pull him over and like beat him up and
shave his hair, and you know, like this goes on.
Like the refrain is because the law is for protection
of the people, rules or rules, and anyone can see,
you know, we don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton

(01:02:30):
scaring decent folks like you and me. And the song
kind of builds to you know, these lines here, So
thank your lucky stars, you've got protection. Walk the lion
and never mind the cost, and don't wonder who them
lawmen was protecting when they nailed the Savior to the cross.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
Because the laws for protection of the people, rules are rules,
and any fool can see we don't need no riddle
speaking prophets scaring decent folk like you and me. Chris Kristofferson,
pretty based guy. Oh yeah yeah, because of sort of
how universal these laws were and how universally they were

(01:03:08):
applied to people on the margins. It became, you know,
wrote for folks who lived you know, in the margins
of you know, kind of white society to warn their
children about these laws. Working class immigrant families would tell
their kids like, do not leave home without You have
to have money on you at all times. You can't
spend it, like you have to have money because if
the police full you over, you have to be able

(01:03:29):
to prove that you have money. You know that, otherwise
you can't exist in public. Right. There were early home
what were called homo file organizations, which are like the
first pro gay organizations, right, that would educate you know,
their members who were young, gay, lesbian, trans people about
lewd vagrancy arrests and that the way to avoid them

(01:03:50):
was quote where at least three items of clothing of
your own sex, otherwise like you would get in trouble.
Black newspapers would tell you know, people that like, yeah,
you like vagrancy arrests, Like here's how to avoid doing them,
because like if you if you piss off the cops
or just exist in a way that pisses off the cops,
Like this is what's going to happen to you. Civil

(01:04:12):
rights organizations would publish like vagrancy forms that you could
get like filled out, that would basically be a thing
you carry it around that looked official, that would say
you were a respected member of the community. And this
kind of persisted until, Yeah, the night, you know, nineteen
forty nine is when this guy Aedelman is arrested and
he he sues and stuff, and he doesn't win his case.

(01:04:35):
But over the next twenty or so years until the
early nineteen seventies, reformers and activists repeatedly kind of bring
cases against these vagrancy laws. And in the early nineteen seventies,
seventy one and seventy two, there are three cases, including
Papa Cristo's, that eventually make their way to the Supreme Court,

(01:04:55):
who announces that vagrancy, loitering and suspicious persons person's laws unconstitutional.
So that's kind of where we've been living since nineteen
seventy two. Is this world where these laws that were
used to give the police kind of ultimate power to
do violence against anyone that didn't fit in, you know,

(01:05:16):
we're not constitutional. And now we are seeing them start
to return the authoritarians of our day, who are liberal
as often as they are conservative, are poking at the edges,
seeing what they can get away from, seeing what they
can reinstitute, because, as we all know, Margaret, the law
is for protection of the people.

Speaker 4 (01:05:35):
This is the quote that I come back to you
all the time as an anatole friends, quote, the law
and its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to
sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to
steal their bread. Yep, you know, it's just like, oh, well,
no one's allowed to be homeless, rich people in poor people.

Speaker 3 (01:05:54):
Yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
It's cool. It's the same, It's I mean, it's it's different,
but it's a similar logic. We've got this law that
the liberals are trying to pass in Portland to criminalize
what they call like domestic terrorist organizing, which is so
ill defined that basically, if like anyone ever arms themselves
or acts in self defense as part of a protest,

(01:06:17):
that can be seen as like a terrorist paramilitary organization.
And they're like, well, this is because of all the
right wing terrorism that we have a huge problem with
in Oregon. And it's like, yeah, but you're just handing
the cops a thing they can use against anyone they
don't like, and who don't the cops like. Anyone who
supports that law is an idiot, and if your legislator does,
you should throw raw eggs at them, is my opinion,

(01:06:38):
my legal opinion on the First Amendment, raw eggs. I
don't like these people. I don't like any of this.
I'm angry. Fuck fucket.

Speaker 3 (01:06:54):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
You know what's cool is that it turns out the
head of intelligence for the Capitol Police was feeding information
to the Proud Boys before January sixth. It's good that
the cops could be trusted. I love our men in
law enforcement supporting the vagrancy laws that were used to
institute a police state only for certain people for most

(01:07:19):
of the time that my parents were alive or are
a love have been alive, whatever, my grandparents whole lives,
all sorts of cool shit. I don't know. I'm very
angry now, Margaret. I don't know what to do. I'm
gonna go or something.

Speaker 4 (01:07:36):
Yeah. No, it's just bad. And it still happens in
a lot of different ways, you know, like and obviously
it's getting worse again. I don't know. And none of
it makes sense. I mean, it only makes sense within
a certain logic, but it doesn't make any sense on
like a moral level or anything like that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
Yeah, throwing eggs at state legislators make sense to me.
You know, providing aid and sucker to people who are
living you know, outside of you know what, Yeah, assholes
are comfortable with makes sense to me. Yeah, listening to
Chris Christofferson makes sense to me. Also, check out that

(01:08:16):
that State radio song about Benjamin Darling. You know, that's
a that's a good one, and that's I also think,
like when we think about what the antidote to this
stuff is, it is the kind of radical compassion that
Darling exemplified when he chose to save a person just
because they were a person, regardless of the wrong that

(01:08:36):
had been done to him. Which is probably why I
shouldn't talk so much about throwing eggs at people who
annoy me, because Benjamin Darling wouldn't do that. But you
know whatever, I mean, he than me. Maybe he wouldn't.
Maybe he would have done that. I shouldn't talk about
the other things that I talk about sometimes when I
get because Benjamin Darling wouldn't have done that, Benjamin Darling.
Let's let's all remember that there was a cool dude

(01:08:58):
named Benjamin Darling who rocked.

Speaker 3 (01:09:01):
Yeah, hell yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
Yeah, Margaret, you got anything to plug?

Speaker 4 (01:09:05):
Well, if you like cool people who rocked, let me
tell you about cool people, the cool stuff where we
cover things about like cool people who threw rocks at fascists. Yeah,
like a recent episode, I've literally no idea when this
comes out. A recent episode about the Cable story. Next
week the Battle for Cable Street great in it might

(01:09:27):
be the same week. Who knows that. You can listen
to my podcast talking about it, and it actually gets
into a bunch of this really similar stuff about how
after the Fascist Party was defeated in by working class
people fighting them, the state passed a law saying, Okay,
no one's allowed to march in uniform anymore. And it
was directed against the fascists, and it was used primarily

(01:09:49):
against the left and against anti colonial movements.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
You know, there's another thing, ever, changes There's another thought
I have based on something you told me about that story,
which was that when the fascists came to Cable Street
to attack the Jews. One of the reasons why the
anti fascist one is because all of the Irish showed up,
and the Irish showed up because when they had been
having a strike earlier and been cracked down on by

(01:10:14):
the state, the Jewish community took their children into their
houses to take care of them during the strike, like
twenty years earlier. And so when the Irish heard that
there were fascists coming around to threaten the folks who
had helped raise them, they were like, well, let's go
fuck some shit up and maybe, you know, it's a
lesson again, back to Benjamin Darling of the sometimes unpredictable

(01:10:36):
value of radical compassion.

Speaker 4 (01:10:39):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, So that's my main plug. Cool people,
the cool stuff every Monday and Wednesday, and cool Zone
Media and also I Kickstarting or have finished Kickstarting or
whatever tabletop role playing game called panumber City that gets
into if you want to play this kind of thing,
this life, this living outside the system, et cetera, is

(01:11:01):
a really good game for you.

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):
And that's what I got.

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
Yeah, well, let's uh, let's all check out that spend
some time in Panumbra City before it is it is
attacked by whatever that governor's name of Maine, you know,
or maybe make him your bad guy if you want
to run a campaign governor placed it. You know there's
a there's a fucking monster name for you right there.

Speaker 3 (01:11:26):
Yeah, I might do that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):
Yeah, let's burn him in effigy in our role playing games. Well,
you can listen to this podcast and Margaret's podcast, and
a variety of other excellent podcasts like Hood Politics by
our friend prop for without ads. If you pay a
small amount of money by getting on Apple and signing

(01:11:50):
up for cooler Zone Media, where you'll get all of
our stuff ad free cooler Zone Media on Apple. There
will be an Android version soon. We are working on it.
Sophie's working on it. I'm doing nothing at all. I
don't care about it. You Android users. I'm an Android user,
but I don't care about you. Sophie does, and she
is taking care of it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
Mm hmmmm.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):
Also I didn't care about the Apple people. Sophie did
all the work on that too, So thank you, thank
you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
And our friend, our friend Jack and Ran is a
new show on cool Zone Media.

Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
What's it called?

Speaker 3 (01:12:23):
He does?

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
He does? It's called sad Oligarch, and it's about all
those Russian oligarchs who strangely died the exact same way
by falling out of windows at high heights. Anyway, check
all that out. Cooler Zone Media, Apple Whatever, Bye.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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