Published: 29 December, 2011
by DAN CARRIER

His gun-toting trademark was an athletic leap over the top of a cashier’s desk while his gang of armed hoodlums kept security staff and customers cowed. He would then calmly empty the bank before making a clean getaway.

John Dillinger’s year-long spree made him an unlikely folk hero. Helped partly by his daring, Wild West-style escapades – while being held in prison as America’s “Public Enemy Number One”, he managed to lock the entire police staff in a cell, threatening them with a wooden gun he’d carved himself during his confinement – but also because his crimes took place against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

The bank robber blazed a trail across America in 1934, leading a gang of desperado outlaws who committed murder in their quest for riches. And they captured the public’s imagination: they kept a step ahead of the police as they swooped on small-town banks and emptied their safes.

In an age when  the radio, newsreels and mass-circulation dailies were looking for racy copy, his exploits were celebrated.

He was feted as a little guy getting one back for the masses over the greedy capitalists who had led the nation into bankruptcy.

Now a new biography by social historian Professor Elliot J Gorn tells the story of Dillinger, the outlaw whose wild spree lasted for 12 months until Federal agents finally caught up with him as he left a Chicago cinema and gunned him down in a busy street.

Professor Gorn tells Dillinger’s story – but also considers why Dillinger’s life has resonance today, as the world tries to weather another Depression.

He argues that Dillinger represented a frontiersman myth of primitive freedom against social conventions.

He says the setting is the key: Dillinger was painted in newspapers and newsreels as winning big money, planning daring jail breaks, surrounding himself with fast women and fast cars as he zig-zagged through the wide open spaces of the southern states, always a step ahead of the forces of law and order.

It was pure escapism. His actions went on against a backdrop of starving Okies and Dust Bowl landscapes, and a US where 10,000 banks had closed and taken their customers’ savings with them, a quarter of the population was unemployed, and the New Deal had yet to kick in.

It meant Dillinger was a hero. As one writer stated in the Indianapolis Star newspaper: “He wasn’t any worse than the bankers or politicians who took the poor people’s money. Dillinger did not rob poor people. He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor. I am for Johnnie.”

This strikes a chord with the author. “Our current banking meltdown deepens the emotional resonance of Dillinger’s story,” says the professor.

“When I think back on those 1934 letters from Americans to their leaders expressing sympathy for Dillinger as he robbed banks; on those citizens criticised by newspapers and politicians for openly saying they admired the man; on the people who asked why, during the Depression, a few profited handsomely while others suffered, I understand them all a little better.

“As our own day’s story of stupid policies and lax regulations, of greedy money men, free market hucksters, white-collar thieves, and self-serving politicians unfolds, and as banks foreclose in millions of families homes, workers lose their jobs and life savings disappear, it becomes clear why Dillinger’s wild ride so fascinated America during the 1930s.”

He wasn’t the first bank robber to be lauded – three days before he was released from his first spell behind bars, newspapers ran the story of the 51-year-old Kansas farmer, Russ Mundell.

After watching his farm lose all its value and his neighbours’ homes confiscated by banks, he walked up to his local branch, pulled a gun and stole $2,000.

He told the cashier: “I’m sorry but I am desperate. I’ll pay this back when times get good.” His fate was reported sympathetically.

Dillinger seemed to be the real-life embodiment of the gangsters that were stars of the silver screen – though instead of being a street tough who spoke out of the corner of his mouth, he was portrayed as a gentleman, his father an honest, archetypal hard-working American.

Dillinger’s gang followed others who had filled the newspapers with exaggerated and excited copy, all blessed with nicknames to set the readers’ hearts astir: Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd... this was Hollywood-style hold-ups.

The book reveals Dillinger was the son of a respectable small-town grocer, a bright child with a wild streak.

He did his first stretch for being an accomplice in a botched attempt to rob a store – he got a nine-year sentence that he felt was grossly unfair as he had simply been an on-looker.

His spell in prison hardened him: he was a rebel, constantly committing minor infringements while inside that stopped him getting parole.

He also met a host of other small-time crooks who had big ideas: his prison friends were to become his partners in crime.

Dillinger was no Robin Hood – he didn’t give to the poor, though he had a reputation for tipping well at gas stations, perhaps to discourage attendants from pointing officers in his direction as they hunted him down.

But he was loved. “He was not admired because he aided the poor but because he attacked the rich, symbolically, anyway,” says Professor Gorn.

“His victims were banks, the capitalist bastions that were deeply unpopular. He assaulted his targets frontally, brazenly, in acts that at once appalled and thrilled his countrymen. To read about his gangs exploited in the papers or see his image in news­reels was to feel both the fear and excitement of men taking matters into their own hands. There was also and edgy, working-class bohem­ianism to gang life.”

He adds that Dillinger’s constant movement also appealed: his violent spree was linked to an American myth – love of the road. “His life since his parole was one continuous road trip, an outlaw version of America’s romance with the automobile,” writes Professor Gorn.

The idea of travelling across the nation was a powerful and potent image, born by the pioneers and continued with the Okies’ westward migration.

To have a gang on the roads zipping about laden with riches stolen from bankers instead of families laden down with their worldly goods in clapped-out Model Ts was an attractive idea to  America of 1934 – and one, Professor Gorn argues, that carries an attraction today.

• Dillinger’s Wild Ride. By Elliot J Gorn. Oxford University Press, £15