He Was a Great Humanitarian

    Jesse James was a great humanitarian.  So concludes Gus W. Dyer, professor of economics and sociology at Vanderbilt university.

    Prof. Dyer has spoken in Joplin and will be remembered by many local citizens.  He has a nation-wide reputation.

    Originally, declares Prof. Dyer, a "humanitarian" was a lover of mankind, a philanthropist, who gave of his time and substance to help people.  The idea of penalizing one class in the interest of another was fundamentally antogonistic to the conception of humanitarianism.

    But today a great humanitarian is one who uses his power to take property from one class by legal compulsion and distribute it to millions as gifts.

    A great humanitarian now is one who gives away other people's money on a large scale.  He assumes the role of re-distributing the wealth of others.

    Because of this new conception of humanitarianism, it is impossible to deny that Jesse James was one, concludes Prof. Dyer.

    It is true that Jesse ignored the injunctions of the Ten Commandments and the constitution of the United States against the invasion of the sanctity of property rights.  But this only demonstrated the fact that he was not bound by superficial restrictions, and believed that human rights should come before property rights.

    In his efforts to bring about a better distribution of wealth, Jesse raided only the "big boys," the economic royalists.  He specialized on banks and transportation companies.  He was dominated by the conviction that these great organizations had more than their share of the country's wealth.

    Moreover, points out Prof. Dyer, Jesse James did not hoard the money he took from the "big boys."  He used his "increased buying power" to bring prosperity to the communities that he and his associates would visit from time to time.  The hardware business, the munitions business, the grocery stores, the saloons, etc., were all helped by his increased buying power.

    "To the credit of Jesse James," concludes Prof. Dyer, "he helped the poor without any expectation of a political or any kind of reward."