Dillinger's Wild Ride -- Elliott J. Gorn: A Book Review

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

Elliott J. Gorn

Oxford University Press, 2009

Dillinger's Wild Ride is a book of legend mixed with fact. It is the story of a real man. It is the story of real events. Dillinger's Wild Ride is also the story of how that real man and those real events became rewoven in a tapestry of newsprint that would elevate a bank robber named John Dillinger to America's Public Enemy Number One.

The story of John Dillinger is mythic. In fact, most of what people believe they know about the famous outlaw is not true. Some of it is. Some of it isn't. And some of the legend is based in reality. Dillinger's Wild Ride is an attempt by Elliott J. Gorn to ascertain just where the true John Dillinger ends and where the legend begins.

Elliott J. Gorn, a professor at Brown University, lets the reader know from the outset that his book, Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One, was not written to add luster to the fame of John Dillinger, nor was it penned to add ignominy to the bank robber's reputation. Gorn simply wanted to show how a farm boy from Indiana who led a gang that robbed banks, shot policemen, and outwitted federal agents could have built himself into an admired and somewhat respected fellow.

Part of the appeal of John Dillinger was his ability to seem unruffled and his casual, good-natured manner. Whenever he was around a camera or newsmen, he always had an easygoing smile to share. He was a regular guy, just like everybody else, a victim of the system and the Great Depression.

Who just so happened to rob banks and get chased by the cops.

Elliott J. Gorn begins the Dillinger's Wild Ride explaining that part of John Dillinger's appeal was always the country-boy-ruined-by-the-big-city mythos that was built around him, a semi-Robin Hood that at least stole from the rich, even if he didn't distribute his take with the poor. But John Dillinger wasn't a country boy. He was born and reared the first 17 years of his life in Indianapolis. Hardly a rural setting, even at the turn of the 20th century.And it is important to note that during the time of Dillinger's Wild Ride, the public sentiment was directed against banks, so someone stealing from those that were perceived to have taken a man's life savings, foreclosed on his house, or wouldn't extend a loan to someone in need was somewhat of a hero. Sure, many reasoned, he was breaking the law, but the banks had swindled millions from hard-working people and the bankers that ran them never saw a day in jail.

As John Dillinger robbed more and more banks, his reputation grew as a fair man, an intelligent man, and a man created by the harsh prison system and the Great Depression environment. Much of that side of John Dillinger's reputation was due to his father, a god-fearing store-owner-turned-farmer who insisted that Johnny would not have been robbing banks if he had gotten a "fair shake" by a judge that sentenced him for assault. Dillinger, who gave himself up to authorities at the insistence of his father, was sentenced ten-to-twenty years and served nearly nine.

John Dillinger was paroled in May 1933. Using contacts he'd made while in prison, Dillinger soon began robbing banks. The Division of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, would be called in when Dillinger seemingly kept eluding local law enforcement. But then he kept eluding the federal authorities as well, making a laughingstock out of most law enforcement agencies he came near.

Captured in Tucson, Arizona, John Dillinger was sent back East to stand trial for the murder of a policeman. While in jail, he carved a wooden gun and proceeded to escape. He would again begin robbing banks but by Summer's end, he would be dead.

In the meantime, his legend grew, and therein lies the thread of Elliott J. Gorn's narrative. The building of the legend of John Dillinger, from "Dillinger, the Country Boy Killer" (Chicago Daily News headline) to being described as "crafty as a fox and ruthless as a wolf" by the Associated Press. "The notorious gang leader," as the Newark (Ohio) Advocate would refer to him, was J. Edgar Hoover's "Public Enemy Number One," a distinction he would carry until his death outside the Biograph Theatre in July 1934. In a little over a year's time, John Dillinger would become a popular folk hero born from the sensationalized accounts of newspaper articles that exaggerated everything he did, from the number of bank robberies to the things that he supposedly said. Dillinger was helped along the way by law enforcement officers attempting to make him look worse by adding to his statistics, inept local and federal authorities who kept letting him slip by them (or escape from places he should not have escaped from, such as jail), and a feeling among the general populace that bankers -- and those who were protecting the bankers (police and federal agents) -- were getting what they most assuredly deserved.

Dillinger's Wild Ride is a book about a land disenchanted, about a people pushed to the breaking point by the Great Depression, and a common man anti-hero that may have been seen as morally wrong in his endeavors but understandable in what he did. And it did not hurt his reputation that he was likeable. Far from it. And it may have been that nonconforming likeableness that made the man such a threat to an emerging national police force, J. Edgar Hoover's Division of Investigation (soon to be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation).

Questions still remain unanswered as to why so many men were used in the killing of one man and why he wasn't simply captured when the federal agents knew all the details of his evening at the Biograph Theatre. Of course, those questions just add to the legend.

But Dillinger's Wild Ride is about something elusive as well. It is about the loss of the American Dream, that abstract ideal of America at its best, cheapened, sullied, and foreclosed upon by people in positions of power that the average person did not know and did not care to know. It is a book about the loss of the limitlessness that had always been part of America's grandeur. It is about an American boy that could have become anything, but was beaten down by a ruthless system that denied him fairness and justice. It is about a man rising as a symbol of the downtrodden striking back the only way that he could and finding freedom in robbing banks and hitting the open road.

Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One is a book about a man who may have been part of what they said he was and part of what they did not say he was, but he was all outlaw, bigger than life, and mostly a creation of the press. His good side, his bad side, his real side, his fictitious side all became part of the John Dillinger legend. And regardless of whether he was driven to crime because of an overbearing penal system or because he was biologically engineered to perform antisocial acts, before it was all over, Elliott J. Gorn let's the reader know that John Dillinger enjoyed his year-long wild ride.

******

In the last paragraph of the book, the author mentions the blockbuster motion picture slated for release in the summer of 2009, a movie with A-list actors that would no doubt add to the legend of John Dillinger. "Public Enemies," starring Johnny Depp and John Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, was released on July 1 and is no doubt a wild ride of a movie as well, given the directorial style of Michael Mann, giving credence to Gorn's main thesis.

Some legends aren't meant to die...