vvjl Luigi Mangione Isn’t the First Accused Killer America Has Loved. He Won’t Be the Last.

My father gave me the middle name James — not because it was his own middle name, but because of his affection for an outlaw who died roughly a century before I was born. Jesse Woodson James was a prolific bank and train robber who was shot to death by a fellow gang member in 1882. In the years that followed he would become a uniquely American sort of celebrity: an unrepentant serial killer and Confederate guerrilla whose exploits were nonetheless memorialized in a folk song that recast his crimes as acts of resistance. “Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor/He’d never see a man suffer pain,” ran one version. “And with his brother Frank, he robbed the Chicago bank/And stopped the Glendale train.”

That song, “The Ballad of Jesse James,” was not recorded until about 1919, nearly four decades after the death of the man it celebrated. But it existed well before that as the sort of tune people sang in billiard parlors — spreading, slowly, until it was so enmeshed in popular culture that no one person could claim to have written it. The mythology surrounding James himself likewise had many authors, all converging toward portraying him as a dashing foe of the bankers and railroad barons who had come to represent the inequities of America’s Gilded Age. Consider a passage from the 1939 Times review of the Hollywood film “Jesse James,” which credits an “ingenious” script with making the outlaw “romantically presentable” as “a handsome Quixote, hopelessly jousting with a public utility — a career with which any staunch American who has ever launched an individual campaign against the gas, telephone, or electric light companies, can sympathize.”

How many years had Jesse James been gone before anyone sang his praises in a saloon? I found myself wondering this last month, as a new outlaw myth took shape. Luigi Mangione — the man charged in the Dec. 4 shooting and killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare — was still a nameless, faceless gathering of pixels in grainy surveillance footage when a slice of the internet christened him a folk hero. Soon police released a photo of the suspect smiling at a hostel clerk, and people began to thirst over this modern equivalent of an Old West “Wanted” poster. By the day after the shooting, TikTok had supplied Thompson’s still-nameless killer with a folk song — though it was one unlikely to interest Bruce Springsteen or Van Morrison, two artists who have recorded their own renditions of “The Ballad of Jesse James.” (It’s hard not to cringe at lyrics like “Your claim to life was denied/Billionaires you cannot hide.”)

Among national universities,peso99 login Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

What made this instant folklore striking was not only its speed but also the order of operations: Instead of hagiography, which idealizes the subject, we saw an idealization that preceded the arrival of a subject. Mangione was cast as a hero, an imagined biography projected onto him, before anything at all was known about his life. His motives were yet unclear and his victim did not appear to have been a billionaire, but it all felt better, in some corners, if those things were true, and so that was good enough.

What followed was a bonanza of memes, especially in the days after Mangione’s arrest. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Some were made from mug shots and perp-walk photos that highlighted how young, handsome and sane Mangione appeared. Others used photos from his social media accounts, like the one that showed the suspect, shirtless and smiling, alongside a text warning: “Friendly reminder that Luigi Mangione promotes an unrealistic beauty standard that will harm the CEO hitman community for years to come.” A few portrayed him as a saintly figure — shirtless before Jesus, who is telling him “It’s OK, they called me guilty too,” or handcuffed and surrounded by police, positioned next to a similar tableaux in the late-16th-century painting “The Taking of Christ.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.vvjl