Jesse James is America’s own Robin Hood, an outlaw hailed in novels, film, and music for standing against the great forces of industrial capitalism, the railroads, and the robber barons of the North. Art hides the truth of Jesse James—that he was the scion of a slaveholding family, that he fought on the side of slavery and then against Reconstruction, and that in his first train robbery he wore a Ku Klux Klan mask. In time, even that symbol of terrorism would itself be redeemed.
