Part Two: The War On Vagrants

it in your like recently listened to thing. And so for the last like several months, every time I hop 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,

we're We're both fine with that. I don't, I don't.

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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.

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 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, 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, 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.

a problem with this? I bring this guy up both because this is an amazing story and it made me 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

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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 have done You've failed in this way by being tricked.

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 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 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.

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,

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 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 they were lives. And that's not an option for people like this anymore.

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?

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?

of folks who find themselves living in encampments. And of 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 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, 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 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,

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 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

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

Residents living near Portland's Willamette River have witnessed a series 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

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. 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.

gonna have the timeline of this a little bit wrong. Yeah, the ladies and so eventually everyone just started squatting all 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 they take action.

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

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 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.

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

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 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 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.

happens to these folks after eviction. Except for those sent 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

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

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 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 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 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. 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, Like do you know what happened to my grandpa?

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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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.

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, 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.

angry now, Margaret. I don't know what to do. I'm gonna go or something.

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 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 named Benjamin Darling who rocked.

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 against the left and against anti colonial movements.

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 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 value of radical compassion.

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.