“Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34”, by Bryan Burrough

 

624 pages, Penguin, ISBN-13: 978-0143115861

I saw the movie “Public Enemies” in the theater back in 2009 when it first came out and was thoroughly entertained by it, although even at the time I had to wonder to myself just how accurate it was – so when I found the book the movie was based on, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough, you just know I had to have it. But the cost of reading and owning this book meant that I had to give the movie up, because I found that there were just too many liberties taken with the historic truth for me to enjoy that movie ever again – pity, too, ‘cause it was a damn good movie.

The theme of the book is simple: the Feds, faced with an unprecedented national crime wave, had to create an enforcement organization on the fly capable of tracking fugitives across state lines and, in some cases, internationally. This task ultimately fell to a (‘til then) nameless, faceless bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover (I still have yet to read a satisfactory history as just how Hoover landed this job that so many better, more senior officials could have handled). While Public Enemies is the story of the founding of the FBI, it is the criminals and their actions that are the ultimate stars, the driving force, of the book. Typical.

What set the criminals of ’33-’34 apart from all of the scum that preceded them was the seemingly romantic glamour of a lost cause; once the overwhelming might of the Federal Government was brought to bear against them, there was no way in which they could win. Besides that, the Great Depression made Robin Hoodesque heroes out of these aimless losers. With millions of Americans unmoored by the Depression and adrift on America’s highways and byways – whole families sleeping in their cars, living in what were known, in a grimly chipper euphemism, as “tourist camps”, essentially middle-class shantytowns on wheels – these new criminals could be seen as striking back against The System, when all they were really doing was wandering aimlessly from place to place without a plan and without a future, robbing banks to feed their wanderlust and fuel their inability to do anything productive.

But for all that, they are with us still. Alvin Karpis, the shrewdest of all the bank robbers, took time out from his interstate flight to cruise the streets of Hollywood with his girlfriend, hoping to see an actual movie star, only to ultimately be arrested by none other than Hoover himself. He was one of the most notorious prisoners in the then-new federal penitentiary of Alcatraz, alongside Machine Gun Kelly who, it turns out, was a pussy-whipped whimp enthralled by his wife. Baby Face Nelson was gunned down trying to escape the Feds, but not before killing three of them first. The Barker Gang was broken up and “Ma” Barker, the supposed mastermind of her brood’s antics, was killed alongside her son, Fred (actually, Kate Barker was nothing more than an ill-tempered hillbilly who wanted nothing more than to play with her jigsaw puzzles; the myth of the motherly mastermind was invented by Hoover to justify her wrongful killing).

And there’s more, still. While Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd was the nation’s most wanted fugitive, his wife, Ruby, consorted with radio preachers, made a short film on a Christian theme and toured with the film and a vaudeville show called “Crime Doesn't Pay”, all while being bugged and tailed by a team of federal agents, though he was eventually gunned him down by officers of the East Liverpool (Ohio) Police Department. When Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow set off from Dallas on their muddled multistate murder spree, they took a famous set of photographs – Bonnie with a gun, Clyde and Bonnie with cigars – and the photos, widely published together with Bonnie’s eerie girlish poetry, became the very stuff of the magazines Bonnie herself had once read; their strange journey ended in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. And of course John Dillinger, likewise obsessed with movies, was shot by agents after seeing “Manhattan Melodrama” which featured Clark Gable playing a character not unlike John Dillinger. These outlaws loved the publicity and the public loved them back.

Strangely, the Oklahoma bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd would become a true folk hero of the plains, the subject of a classic Woody Guthrie song of protest against capitalism and the supposed evils attached to it:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen

Criminals as heroes. It’s an old, old theme, brought forth especially when times are tough and the future is murky, at best. I wonder: if our own times were more settled than they are, would Black Lives Matter and Antifa be enjoying their apparent popularity?