In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  The Bogles are a carryover from this older America, when crime was largely a phenomenon of disadvantaged whites. By examining what happened in their family, how they passed a malignant heritage of criminality on to their children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, it might be possible to get around race when thinking about the causes of crime, to disentangle race and crime and overcome one of our most deep-seated stereotypes. This is not meant to downplay the terrible racial disparity that arose as the war on drugs and the accompanying movement to toughen our sentencing laws resulted in a quadrupling of the U.S. prison population from the 1970s until it declined modestly in the past few years. This experiment with mass incarceration has given the United States the terrible distinction of having the highest rate of imprisonment in the world along with a racially skewed prison population. In 2014, the Justice Department reported that 6 percent of all black men age thirty to thirty-nine were in prison; the rate for Hispanic men the same age was 2 percent, and it was 1 percent for white men in that age group. It is also important to note that even now, if property crimes are included with violent crimes, 69 percent of all crimes reported to the police are committed by whites, according to the Uniform Crime Report, published annually by the FBI.

  As I spent more time listening to the Bogles’ stories and learning how many of them ended up with criminal records, I realized the Bogles also offered a way to refocus on the family as a cause of crime. Oddly, many criminologists have neglected this aspect of criminality in recent years, looking instead at such well-known risk factors as poverty, bad neighborhoods, deviant peers at school, drugs and gangs. These are real issues. But chronologically, a child’s life and development begin at home with his or her family even before their neighborhood or friends or classmates can influence them. John Laub, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland and one of the leading American criminologists, has suggested that scholars have avoided focusing on the family because the very mention of family suggests a possible biological or genetic basis for crime that could lead to charges of racism.

  Tracey Bogle, though, had no such compunctions in trying to analyze his own descent into a criminal career. “Once you get in it, it is a really strong pull,” he told me in another prison interview. “Sometimes I think it was the power of imitation, copying the behavior of my father and older brothers and uncles.” Without realizing it, Tracey had stumbled into one of the main schools of criminology, known as “social learning theory,” which holds that young criminals develop by imitating behavior they see around them through the same psychological process as any other behavior is learned. Tracey had never graduated from high school, much less studied criminology, so it was sufficient for him to repeat his family’s view of how they became ensnared in criminal lives. “We just call it a curse, the Bogle curse,” Tracey said. Both Tracey and Bobby and their brothers and cousins had come to believe that crime starts at home. They learned everything they needed to learn in their father’s house. In other words, it takes a family to raise a criminal. And here lies the central thesis of this book: we talk about the importance of family values, and in doing so we tend to assume that these values are good, but family values can go off track and be bad, and the results, over generations, can be devastating.

  As the criminal paterfamilias, Rooster Bogle not only took his children out to commit crimes with him; he even happily prophesied where this would lead them. Some days he would take his boys to a lake southeast of Salem to go fishing, their route taking them past another sprawling prison, the Oregon State Correctional Institution, which was surrounded by mounds of shiny razor wire. Rooster would gaze at the facility with something akin to a perverse nostalgia, as if he were looking at a great castle. On these occasions he liked to tell his oldest son, Tony, “Look carefully, because when you grow up, you guys are going to end up there.” Tony took this not as a warning but as a challenge. Far from imposing and terrifying, the place looked downright inviting to Tony. He would look up at the guard towers and say to his father, “Let’s go there right now.” Later Tony made his father’s prognostication come true, albeit in a different state and a different prison. In 1991, at the age of twenty-nine, he murdered a man in Tucson, Arizona, and was sentenced to life in prison. He is still there.

  Bobby, Tracey and Tony had no idea about the total number of Bogles who have been sentenced to prison, or about when their family’s ruinous criminal history began. “The past was kept back from us,” Tracey said. “It was a secret.” As boys, the only thing they knew were the stories Rooster told them. He traced the family history to his mother, Elvie, who he said was a gypsy from Germany who migrated to Texas. Not just any gypsy, Rooster told them, but the queen of the gypsies who worked in a carnival, sold moonshine and befriended Bonnie and Clyde during the Depression. “My dad said gypsies lived by stealing, so we would steal,” Tracey recalled. Rooster personally gave each of his eight children what he said were gypsy tattoos, little blue dots under their left eyes.

  But even what little the brothers thought they knew about their family, the stories their father told them, often were not true, and none of their older relatives who knew more, their aunts and uncles, their grandfather and grandmother, corrected Rooster’s version. It was only years later, after the boys grew old enough to be sent to prison, that they learned the blue dots on their left cheeks were a mark convicts in state and federal prison in the 1950s and 1960s gave themselves so they could identify one another after they were released. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the two ex-convicts who murdered the Clutter family on their farm in Kansas, as recounted by Truman Capote in his best seller In Cold Blood, had the marks. It was another of Rooster’s ways of branding his children and leading them to a long criminal doom. Oddly, one thing that no one in the family seemed to know was the origin of their name, Bogle; it is a Scottish word, meaning a goblin that, on behalf of the victims, sometimes causes mischief to those who have committed crimes.

  Bobby, Tracey and Tony have each been incarcerated most of their adult lives. They had no way to track down their lost family history, so they urged me to find out what I could. Perhaps by going back in time, back into the Bogle family’s memories, its myths, its brutalities, it might be possible to learn when all this began and how the criminal virus was transmitted. When we first discussed attempting this research, none of us knew that the Bogles could be traced to the hills of Tennessee during the Civil War or to a poor cotton sharecropper’s farm near Paris, Texas, in 1920. This is their family story.

  [ I ]

  ORIGINAL SIN

  I’m here to say one thing. Jesse James was a good man. I’d be thankful if you’d grow up to be as good a man as Jesse James.

  —WILLIAM A. OWENS, quoting his grandmother in his memoir of growing up near Paris, Texas, circa 1910, This Stubborn Soil: A Frontier Boyhood

  [ 1 ]

  Louis and Elvie

  The Carnival

  In June 1920, twenty-one-year-old Louis Bogle left his log-cabin home in the farming hamlet of Daylight, Tennessee, to seek his fortune in Texas. Daylight was near the small city of McMinnville on the edge of the high Cumberland Plateau, and there was a grist mill and a creek running down a hillside to power it, but not much else. Louis had merely a few years of education in the one-room schoolhouse that was open only during the winter when farming came to a halt. Louis, Rooster’s father, made the trip at the invitation of his uncle, Louis Harding. Harding himself had moved from Daylight to Texas only two years earlier to try his hand at selling Daylight’s specialty, nursery-tree stock—young apple, pear and peach trees—and had already made enough money to buy a fine house in the new city of Paris. More important to Louis, Harding had also purchased a Ford Model T, the symbol of the new age of the automobile.

  When Louis made his way to Texas, he was following a well-trod path. In every decade after the South’s ruinous defeat in the Civil War in 1865, peo
ple had been moving to Texas from the states of the old Confederacy in increasing numbers, seeking cheaper land and new beginnings. They left signs behind in their abandoned homes: “Gone to Texas.” It was a statement of fact, and a dream. Many of these Southerners headed for northeast Texas around Paris, where the long trail from South Carolina and Tennessee, from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, emptied into the flat prairies that marked the beginning of the West.

  This area, just west of the Arkansas border and just south of the Red River, which separated Texas from the new state of Oklahoma, was familiar-looking land to these displaced settlers. There were piney woods, stands of oak trees and creek bottoms for water, with the land planted ever more intensively with white blooming cotton as time passed, just like at home. These settlers, “pore whites,” in their own term, came at first by wagon or oxcart, on horseback or, as they said, “footback and walking.” Only later could they take a train, as Louis did, over a newly constructed rail network from Nashville to Memphis, then on to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Dallas. They shared a memory of defeat in the Civil War, lived on the edge of poverty and worshipped an Old Testament deity as Baptists or Methodists. By early in the twentieth century, perhaps three-quarters of the families in Texas were headed by people who traced their ancestry to the slave states. “So many Texans have come out of the South,” two scholars wrote in 1916, “that Texas is predominantly Southern in thought and feeling.” There were no cowboys around Paris; instead it was a center of the cotton business, one hundred miles northeast of Dallas.

  Louis Bogle was infatuated the moment he stepped off the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe train from Dallas. Although Paris had a population of only twelve thousand in 1920, it was the biggest and by far the most modern city he had seen. For the first time he saw paved roads, like smooth polished floors, and handsome white houses with shade trees lining the streets. There were more automobiles than he could count. On weekdays people walking on the sidewalks wore better clothes than most had for Sunday back home. A large cottonseed mill worked at night making golden-yellow meal to feed dairy cows. The plant left an aroma over the city in the morning like fresh-baked bread, only more delicious. Scattered around the city were factories making candy, furniture and boxes: the newest was a Campbell’s Soup factory, a sure sign that Paris had arrived. There was even a splendid new seven-story hotel, the Gibraltar, that dominated downtown. On the outskirts of town, behind a long fence, there were acres of green grass, and big shade trees and sprays of water turning slowly in the sun. Men were walking on it, but Louis could not tell what they were doing. It was the prettiest pasture he had ever seen. Later he learned it was called a golf course.

  The city fathers had changed the name of the town from Pin Hook to Paris to make it seem more grand and progressive, but it was still part of the Old South. A few days after Louis arrived, he was swept up in a crowd, later estimated at three thousand people, who were rushing to the city fairgrounds to seek revenge against two young black brothers, Ervin and Herman Arthur. They were cotton tenant sharecroppers who had been working for a white landlord outside the city when, as U.S. Army veterans of World War I, they had decided to move out when the landlord demanded an exorbitant share of their crop. They were in the midst of loading their meager possessions on a truck when the landlord and his grown son, armed with shotguns, tried to stop them. “When the white folks started shooting, Uncle Herman showed them what he had learned in the war,” a nephew of the Arthurs later recounted. The landlord and his son ended up dead. A sheriff had tracked the Arthurs down in Oklahoma and returned them to Paris, where on July 6, 1920, a mob used sledgehammers to break down the jail door and took the brothers to the fairgrounds. There they were chained to the flagpole, tortured, saturated with oil and set on fire. According to an account in the Chicago Defender, the black-owned newspaper, “Their charred, smoking bodies were then chained to an automobile and dragged for hours through the streets” of the black sections of Paris. Five men were indicted for murder, but the case was later dropped, and the records of the lynching destroyed in a courthouse fire. Louis would tell his family stories about that day for years, but his memories were more of the spectacle than any lessons learned.

  Louis’s uncle and his son, Charlie Harding, who was Louis’s cousin and best friend, welcomed their newly arrived relative into the house they had purchased in Paris. His uncle said Louis could live with them, and they treated him to several sets of new city clothes, including a brown suit and a white dress shirt with a high, narrow, pointed collar topped with a stickpin for his tie. They also taught Louis to drive their new Model T around the city’s streets. It was a thing as rare to Louis as a chariot of the gods dropped from the sky. To him all this was a miracle. For the first time in his life he felt like a success; in his mind he had money, a house, a car and, most definitely, a future.

  Louis’s favorite place in Paris was the S. H. Kress and Company five and dime store on Lamar Avenue. The curved-glass display windows and heavy bronze doors led into a long room of shiny glass-and-wood counters under bright hanging lamps. The counters were filled with buttons, men’s hose, glassware and hardware. The air smelled of new, mercerized cotton cloth, candy in big glass bins and sweet, flowery perfume, unfamiliar yet delightful scents to Louis. Best of all were the salesgirls behind the counters. They were friendly with Louis, who was tall and slender, with brown hair and eyes and large protruding ears. Most of the girls were, like him, from poor farms in the countryside. Their families had moved to Paris so the girls could work at a place like the dime store—for seven dollars a week, far more than they could hope to make from farming. Most important, working at the Kress store gave them a better chance to find a husband. It was the best pickup spot in the city. If a girl did get married, though, she had to leave. Samuel H. Kress, who owned the company, did not employ married girls. He thought it was bad for business, according to the principles of modern scientific management that he practiced. So a girl had to be careful in her choice; there were no second chances.

  Louis was particularly taken with a short girl who wore her dark hair in marcelled waves, in the flapper fashion that had suddenly come into vogue. Her name was Elvie Morris, he learned, and she too was a country girl, born and raised on a cotton sharecropping farm in the crossroads village of Sherry, twenty-five miles east of Paris. Elvie, born in 1902, was three years younger than Louis. Her father had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, with no land or house to his name, but her mother, Florence, making use of a small life insurance policy, had bought the two women new clothes and a modest house near Paris so Elvie could get a job at the Kress store. Florence and Elvie’s self-improvement plan was to find a man with means to enable them to escape their life of poverty. Elvie had a clutch of new short flapper dresses and cloche hats, with their tight-fitting, bell-shaped tops decorated with large bows and ribbons. Elvie also wore bright lipstick, still frowned on in places like Paris, where the Baptist and Methodist churches had a strong influence. Louis was naturally quiet and reserved, but to his relief he discovered that striking up a conversation with Elvie was easy. She was open and direct and told Louis just what she thought. They were soon going out for Coca-Colas and then for rides in what he passed off as his car, his uncle’s Model T. And when they visited his uncle’s house, Louis did not hesitate to suggest he was part owner.

  This embellishing was something that Louis had learned as a child in Tennessee from his mother, Mattie, from his grandmother Narcissa, and indirectly from his grandfather Carpenter. In 1866, when Narcissa was eighteen, she met Carpenter Harding, who claimed to be a doctor and a former Union Army cavalry officer. In fact, he was neither. But his stories made him appear to be an attractive match even though he was fifty-two. Carpenter and Narcissa soon married. After the wedding, Narcissa discovered her new husband was a bigamist, with six children and a legal wife back in Indiana, something Carpenter had neglected to tell Narcissa. She also belatedly learned he had not serv
ed in the cavalry but was a private in the Thirteenth Indiana Light Artillery Regiment. As Louis himself heard years later from family stories, Carpenter was a confidence man, in the language of the time, or a con man in modern terms, the first of a series in the family. Despite these deceptions, Carpenter and Narcissa quickly had four children of their own, starting with Mattie, Louis’s mother, and lived off their small farm. But Carpenter was old and suffered from dysentery he had contracted during his four years in the Army during the war, and he died of the disease in 1884.

  For Narcissa, and eventually for Mattie, the most important thing after Carpenter’s death was getting his Union Army pension, and Narcissa first applied for it to the War Department in Washington in 1887. Alone, with four young children, life would be hard without it. Carpenter’s pension would have paid her $8 a month, plus $2 a month for each of her four children, a total of $16 a month, or $192 a year.

  Union Army pensions were like a golden ticket, the first large-scale, nationally funded welfare system in American history. Between 1880 and 1910, Union Army pensions were the largest item in the federal budget, except for payments on the national debt. More than half a million men above age sixty-five and more than three hundred thousand widows and orphans were receiving payments from the federal treasury that averaged $189 annually.