Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One

I like to think of myself as a more than a casual John Dillinger buff. I've been riveted by the Indiana badman since my teens and later, as a sometime newspaper writer, I traveled throughout Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin visiting sites that were famous simply because Johnnie had been there...if only for a little while. While researching a three-page travel article covering those sites (published in the Chicago Tribune in 1994) I became acquainted with Ursula Patzke, a hostage in a particularly livley bank robbery in Racine, Wisconsin, Emil Wanatka, Jr. and Audrey Voss, who were present at the Little Bohemia fiasco and Delbert Hobson, of Mooresville, Indiana, boyhood pal and neighbor of the teenaged Dillinger. To a person, they admired him. Hobson called him generous, Wanatka remembered him as warm and friendly and Patzke described him as a perfect gentleman. Despite the rants of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, John Dillinger was an incredibly popular character who resonated with a mostly law-abiding public. As author and historian Joe Pinkston (Dillinger: A short and Violent Life) noted, "Everyone who knew him liked him." There are plenty of excellent books recounting the life and times of the celebrated folk hero with more who,what, wheres and whens to fill a library. But for fuller understanding of the bandit himself, his personality, and his times--the whys--the most enjoyable is Elliott J. Gorn's "Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One." Professor Gorn, while covering all the essentials, does not attempt to overwhelm the reader with his encyclopedic knowledge of Dillinger and his era (that's found in his footnotes and in other authors' books.) Instead, his conversational narrative allows us to experience Dillinger and his unbelieveably fast-paced life on the run as did, depending on the readers' age, our grandparents who remembered the era firsthand. Moralizing here is beside the point. Dillinger was a thief and, though never tried or convicted, probably killed an East Chicago, Indiana policeman in a hearted gun battle during a robbery. The banks he looted at the height of the Depression were seen as robbers themselves and his persuers gunned down citizens--and Dillinger himself--with a ruthlessness the outlaw himself would have abhorred. And therein lies his appeal; his courage was unquestioned, he was free with his money, was courtly, was loyal to his friends and loved his family deeply. What's not to like? One can wonder if Dillinger's legend would have endured had he survived the ambush at Chicago's Biograph Theater and died in prison or forgotten in some halfway house afterwards. None of his biographers,including Gorn, have spent many words on that question probably because it doesn't matter. Dillinger sailed through his one wild year like a comet and probably never gave the subject a thought. Gorn has written the book I wish I could written myself. Only time will determine what mo

We hate dishonesty, and we hate it when dishonest people succeed. And yet we are fascinated by crime and criminals. The guy who gets away with crime repeatedly and eludes pursuit - that's someone for whom we have dislike, but also we have an inherent interest, and maybe even an admiration. No criminal has received more sentiment both ways than John Dillinger. During newsreels at the movies in 1934, audiences would cheer when Dillinger's picture came on screen, resulting in letters between the Justice Department and the newsreel company. That's one of the many anecdotes in _Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One_ (Oxford University Press) by Elliott J. Gorn. There are plenty of fans of Dillinger still, and plenty of biographies, and Gorn goes over Dillinger's life briskly, with concentration on the activities of his last year and the efforts of local and federal enforcers to stop him. "More than that, however," Gorn says in his preface, "I seek to explain how the Dillinger story was created, interpreted, and reworked, how Americans felt about his exploits, and how we have come to remember him." This requires going back to original sources (Gorn's book is well referenced) and in not only debunking some of the myths but explaining how the myths got made and how they filled a societal need. One of the most interesting of the myths was that Dillinger was a country boy gone wrong when he came to the big city. No; he didn't move to the country with his family until he was almost seventeen. Another was that he was a good boy until he was railroaded into prison. He did come clean about that first offense, beating and robbing an elderly grocery clerk, and he didn't get the light sentence he expected from confessing, but Dillinger had already been AWOL from the Navy, and had a spotty job record. Prison did give him contacts and enthusiasm for a life of crime, however, and between his release in May 1933 and his death fourteen months later, he made a name for himself holding up banks with his gang. It was an astonishingly successful run while it lasted. Dillinger and his gang were seen all over the place, even in places they could not have been. Part of the appeal of Dillinger's escapades was that he was a little guy after what were seen as the big crooks. Dillinger didn't pursue the second half of Robin Hood's portfolio of giving to the poor, but the public knew he was taking from the rich they distrusted. There were even persistent stories that the banks welcomed or arranged the robberies to cover up the mismanagement and malfeasance of the bank owners. J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly looks bad in this saga, unjustifiably hogging credit for his agency, and trying to claim that modern scientific police work eventually brought Dillinger down when it was old-fashioned, perfidious payoffs to informers that had done so. Gorn is especially good at recounting the postmortem legends that have swirled around Dil

Elliott Gorn has masterfully retold the history of one of the most intriguing characters in 1930`s America: John Dillinger. In Dillinger's Wild Ride, Gorn provides compelling and new evidence about his subject, as he skillfully places Dillinger within the broader history of the popular sentiment in the United States during the Great Depression. Readers will find Gorn's biography of John Dillinger to be comprehensive, lively, and the best-written book on Dillinger to date. Gorn is particularly attentive to Dillinger's exploits as they relate to the public frustration during the Great Depression, and the book brings new insights and incisive interpretations to this much-studied subject. As the characters move from state to state, hideout to hideout, and robbery to robbery, the reader gets a sense of the intrigue, fear, and hope that Dillinger inspired in a downtrodden America. The bungling federal agents are thwarted time and again as Dillinger hides "in plain sight", and the public's fascination grows as the gang's exploits become more and more surreal. A great read!

Readers familiar with Elliott Gorn's previous books (The Manly Art, A Brief History of American Sports, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America) know the author of Dillinger's Wild Ride as a master historian and storyteller. Gorn, Professor of American Civilization and History at Brown University, tells us in his slyly self-effacing "Acknowledgments" that he has spent his career "working history's city desk," "writing about the likes of boxers and brawlers, labor organizers, and bank robbers." His unique mode of "history from below" has consistently deepened and complicated our understanding of the American past and American culture, and this is especially true of Dillinger's Wild Ride. The ostensible focus of the book is the period from 1933 to 1934, when Dillinger and his shifting band of fellow outlaws darted from state to state robbing banks, breaking out of prisons, embarrassing police and FBI agents, eluding capture, and capturing America's attention. But in Gorn's rich re-telling Dillinger's life story reveals the ways in which American icons shape and are shaped by the cultural moment. Gorn is particularly attuned to the ways in which Dillinger's increasingly audacious assaults on banks both fueled and expressed public frustration during the Great Depression, and he draws without dwelling on provocative parallels between that economic crisis and our own (Americans in the 30's got Dillinger; we get Bernie Madoff; go figure). Among its many virtues, Dillinger's Wild Ride offers an extended rumination on the ways history is rewritten (often in the making) to serve specific cultural needs. The book is framed by telling instances of this impulse. Chapter 1 reveals that even the famously fact-checking New Yorker rewrote Dillinger's life story while he was still alive. James Finan's 1934 essay for the magazine, published two months before Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago (betrayed by a woman in orange, not the woman in red of popular imagination) presents Dillinger as a product of small-town middle America, when in fact he spent most of his youth in the midsize metropolis of Indianapolis. But Gorn points out that Mooresville, Indiana, where Dillinger was born, "was not just a place, it was a metaphor by which Americans understood Dillinger's saga. Dillinger's Hoosier boyhood, followed by his descent in to crime, was an age-old American story: rural virtue and small-town honesty succumbing to urban vice." False though this trope was, it did not stop newspapers and magazines from glossing Dillinger's story "as a parable of America's declension from country virtues to city vices." While Gorn repeatedly subjects reductive representations of Dillinger to the refiner's fire of historical scrutiny, his book also shows us how and why American icons like Dillinger periodically return to haunt the popular imagination. The book's final chapter, "Dilinger's Ghost," presents Dillinger as a kind o

Elliott J. Gorn has written a well-researched, eloquent and fluid account of the notorious Jack Rabbit who is better known as John Dillinger. The book moves at a fast clip and is never dull: but then again how could any book ever be dull about so fascinating a character? It is hard to believe that his story is real, that such a man could ever have existed. Dillinger is impossible in today's technological society with its surveillance cameras and cell phone bings and helicopter pursuits of crime cars that make the TV news as they happen. And that is part of his undying fascination. While he is implausible in today's society, today's economically recessional society is not so far different from the breeding grounds of Dillinger's Depression youth. The book is flawed, however. It would be nice to learn the fates of some key players in Johnnie's life: Melvis Purvis for one (the G-Man most often credited with bagging the bandit, soon to be played by Batman himself...Christian Bale opposite Johnny Depp's Dillinger). Purvis shot himself, by-the-way, but you won't learn of his fate herein - nor that of Dillinger's dear old dad or best gal out of several, Billie Frechette. The photo section also excludes some important personages and it would have been nice to see them included. The book's subtitle is actually not even needed and reads rather clumsily: "The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One." While the book examines the times as relates to Dillinger's doings, one does not get a larger sense of the year(s) (1933-34) as pertains to the entire country and the rest of the world. I mean, 1933 saw the ascension of the biggest criminal in the history of the world - Hitler - so for a larger historical context mention of these momentous happenings would have justified the subtitle. But such is not the case. Plus, it is actually two years that makeup the Dillinger days. The best biography of Dillinger is still Dary Matera's book of a few years ago - and this author as much says so. So - why was this book written? Because of the upcoming 75th anniversary of of the bank robber's death and because a new Dillinger movie will hit the summer screens and anything about Johnnie D. sells? Perhaps. Whatever the motive, the results are nonetheless a stimulating read, a page-turner, a head-shaker of a book. It is a wild read of a very wild ride.