The Pirate

by Harold Schechter

These were men who embodied the antithesis, the shadow side, of our national ideals: not independence but rootlessness; not a belief in the rewards of honest sweat but a willingness to do anything to make a fast buck; not self-sacrifice but rampant greediness; not a readiness to take up arms for the cause of justice but a reliance on ruthless violence to satisfy their basest desires. In that sense, Albert Hicks was—to co-opt a phrase from the poet William Carlos Williams—a “pure product of America.”