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PREFACE
BY BRUNO RUHLAND
Is the stoutly anarchist AK Press really reprinting an autobiography by a guy who celebrates a long life of lying, cheating, and stealing? Well, yes, but a little context is in order here. Happily, the trillions of dollars the US government has given to the largest financial institutions of late provides a nicely clarifying display of the principle that Yellow Kid Weil based his life of swindling on: You simply cannot be cynical enough about how the capitalist system really works.
Yes, the financial world, the commanding heights of capitalism, now resembles nothing so much as a rigged game, a giant con. Which is actually not all that surprising. It is helpful to recall that capitalism, when we are done celebrating what a protean, dynamic, wealth-creating engine it is, has a squalid history. There were the horrors and poverty and appalling working conditions of the industrial revolution (or in China now, but let’s not think about it - we like cheap stuff). There have been the constant foul imperialist wars so we could and can cheaply extract the natural resources of less developed countries, all the death squads trained and the corrupt dictators and ruling elites propped up, all the alternatives to the capitalist way crushed, not to mention the repeated crises and crashes of the system itself.
Then there is the tirelessly suppressed fact that capitalism has always had swindling and rigging the system built right into it. While it promotes itself as a just and fair way to generate and distribute wealth, it’s really just the smoothest way for the few to divert the wealth of the many into their pockets. Swindling, irrationality, inefficiency, and exploitation are at least as essential to its nature as rationality or efficiency. All the fervent worship of the “Free Market” is strictly for the rubes, or the rationale that the owning classes use to feel good about how they acquired most of their ill-gotten booty. As time has gone on the capitalist system has generated so much and such concentrated wealth and power at the top that the swindling is now mostly done in a highly mediated and bureaucratic way through laws and governments. So, for example, America’s military industrial complex, which has to count as the greatest swindle of all time - literally trillions of dollars extracted over decades from American taxpayers, and still growing - is barely discussed. We have arrived at the time where the little issue of just how sensible and just how legitimate the capitalist system is has become the great naked elephant emperor in the room that dare not be spoken of.
What separates and elevates the Yellow Kid above the big boy swindlers that own and operate the system was that he chose to operate outside the law as an independent, who lived by his wits and imagination - not for him the insider corruptions of wealth and power where you get to make up the rules and laws to suit your needs. In talking to Saul Bellow years after he had retired, he had a couple of prophetic things to say about this. Of bankers he said: “They are almost always shady. Their activities are usually only just within the law.” And Bellow paraphrases the Kid as telling him “... your natural or talented confidence man is attracted to politics. Why be a criminal, a fugitive, when you can get society to give you the key to the vaults where the greatest boodle lies? The United States government, according to the Kid, runs the greatest give-away program in history.”
The Yellow Kid was a consummate outsider who made sport of the greed and self-interest that drove people that had a nice wad of cash - there was no point in preying on people who didn’t already have a goodly sum of money - but were hungry for more. He pretended to have a little illegit insider knowledge to stack the deck in the mark’s favor. He made a mockery of the craving for cash by any means. He often claimed he was actually offering a bracing and therapeutic experience to people who enthusiastically wanted to stoop to sleazy means to make a buck. It is hard not to agree.
In some ways the Kid fulfilled an American ideal of the restless, selfinvented guy who lived by being clever and adaptable. As he states plainly in this book, what drove him above all was the quest for excitement and adventure. Cooking up ever more wild and crazy cons and seeing just how far he could take them was his calling. A great con artist like the Yellow Kid really is an Artist. In fact in some ways the Yellow Kid harkens back to a more ancient tradition: that of the Trickster or the Shaman - the mischievous rogue who makes sport of all our worldly delusions and conventions. He was the guy whose actions made it clear that money can’t buy happiness and that the capitalist emperor has no clothes.
Which is not to say he was unaffected by the seductive power of money. He could not hang on to the stuff and so had to constantly cook up schemes to get more - which is what he really enjoyed anyway, but still there was something compulsive about it. The problem was the Kid also preyed upon the knowledge that people are actually fundamentally decent and honorable to each other. He won their trust and then combined it with the (hopelessly contradictory) fact that, in the pursuit of money any amount of lying and cheating is ok as long as you can get away with it. The Kid made sport and money of the contradictions but he was not immune to them.
Further Reading
It is no coincidence that Yellow Kid Weil flourished in Chicago. Chicago was the great American crossroads a century ago, full of all kinds of money - making and the corruption it is still renowned for, but also full of waves of immigrants and all kinds of political and cultural ferment. It was the hobo capital of the US and also the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World, the most glorious homegrown radical movement America has ever produced. A hugely under-appreciated hobohemia thrived for a while with places like Bughouse Square, The Hobo College, and the legendary Dil Pickle Club, where the Yellow Kid was an invited speaker. You can check out An Autobiographical Novel by Kenneth Rexroth or some of the books by Chicago publisher Charles H. Kerr, like Hobohemia by Frank Beck.
The best book about con artists by far remains The Big Con by David Maurer.
On the (surprisingly profound) significance of the Trickster/Shaman you should track down a copy of Clowns for Beginners by Joe Lee.
Bruno Ruhland
September 2010
FOREWORD
BY W. T. BRANNON
Long before I ever met the Yellow Kid, I had heard of him. His adventures fascinated me. I had a yen to know the inside story behind those fabulous tales I heard and read in the newspapers.
When I started to dig, I learned that the Kid had been a figure in criminal circles so long, that he had become a legend. Criminologists had devoted considerable space in their books to his exploits. But all this was third person stuff, based on a mixture of fact, rumor, and hearsay.
I determined to get acquainted with the Yellow Kid. But that was something of an undertaking. I trailed him all over Chicago before I finally found him. Not that he was trying to evade me. He’s just an elusive sort of fellow. I can imagine how the police of two continents must have pulled their hair when they were trying to nab him during his heyday.
Far from finding the Kid a man of superficialities, I discovered that he has many real accomplishments. One of these is his uncanny knowledge of human nature. In this respect, he may be far ahead of some of our more celebrated psychologists. He can size up a man and accurately forecast his reactions to almost any given set of circumstances.
Another trait of the Kid’s which rather surprised me was his knowledge of world affairs. Not only does he keep abreast of important happenings at home and abroad, he has very strong opinions about them. He is never indifferent about anything; he is either for it, or against it.
Some of his opinions have been
