Are good and bad people “made” by their environments or are they born that way? Ask anyone from a psychologist to Lady Gaga, and you’ll get a wide swath of opinions. Maybe the film character said it best, that perhaps it’s a little bit of both at the same time. At any rate, Kate was born Arizona Donnie Clark in Missouri in 1873 to what we would refer to as a normal family. Her parents and friends called her Arrie after her given first name, but she later said she never liked that moniker. So, she preferred to go by Kate.
At the age of 21, she married a man named George, and the couple moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. To say that the newlyweds fought would be an understatement according to their neighbors. Now, growing up in Alabama like I did, we’d’ve referred to somebody like George as no-account. A later report described him as shiftless. Same difference. George drifted from one low-paying job to the next, never seeming able to hold on to a job for too long before getting fired for doing something dumb or showing up to work intoxicated or interminably late.
One thing the couple did well was have sons. Four of them, in fact, over the course of seven years. And, with each birth, the family grew more and more impoverished. If the family was know for anything in the local community, it was that those boys were wilder than a bunch of feral cats, making even their daddy seem respectable by comparison. Herman, the oldest, got arrested at age 13 for running over a local child with a vehicle he’d “borrowed.” All four of the lads were illiterate; the parents had no interest in sending the boys to school because they couldn’t see the sense of learning anything. Hell, what little learning their parents had didn’t help Kate or George at all, it seems.
The boys’ crimes increased in severity with their ages. By the time Fred, the youngest, was 17, the boys had committed armed robbery and had been accused of killing a police officer. Herman died at age 33 after a gun battle with police. Eventually, Lloyd, Arthur, and even young Fred all found permanent lodging in various state penitentiaries across the middle west. By 1928, father George was done; his sons’ escapades were too much even for him. He left Kate, some said, because she didn’t care what her boys were doing. Besides, George had heard the rumors around town that Kate would have men over to the house when he wasn’t there. George blamed his now-estranged wife for the plight of his sons, saying that she never taught them any discipline at all.
For her part, Kate didn’t care what George did. After her living three boys were put in prison and George left, Kate took up with an unemployed man in Tulsa. Then, Arthur and Fred were released. They didn’t need much persuasion to convince Kate and her new beau to join them in a move to St. Paul, Minnesota. It was there that the group, joining forces with other known criminals, became a true menace to society. By 1933, they had so much power in the Twin Cities that they even had bought off the chief of police there. They expanded their reach even more by branching out into the lucrative kidnapping business. Kate was the key in this new enterprise; she was the one who would launder the money to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to anyone associated with their new criminal capers. If anyone said that crime didn’t pay, they never spoke to Kate. She was thrilled in a way only a mother can be by how much money her sons brought in through their illegal activities.
Finally, in 1935, the Federal Bureau of Investigation got a tip that Kate and the boys were hiding out in Florida in a rented house. The FBI raided the house, and, in the ensuing gun battle, Kate and Fred, her favorite, were killed side by side. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Kate “the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal mastermind of the past decade.” That’s saying a lot considering that she was a contemporary of Al Capone and other Chicago mafia types. Some today argue that Kate never really partook in the robberies and the murders and the other illegal activities, that she was a willing stooge in the organization at best. But many hold to the theory of Hoover and others in law enforcement that she was the brains behind it. After all, her boys were simply too dumb to do it all themselves. Isn’t it a good mother who encourages and helps her boys as they try to achieve their goals?
Either way, Kate “Ma” Barker won’t win any Mother of the Year awards.
The Rest of the Story 