Public Viewing of John Dillinger's Body

Photograph

By: Anonymous

Date: ca. 1934

Source: "Public Viewing of John Dillinger's Body." Corbis, ca. 1934.

About the Photographer: This photograph is part of the stock collection at Corbis photo agency, headquartered in Seattle and provider of images for magazine, films, television, and advertisements. The photographer is not known.

INTRODUCTION

John Dillinger was a depression-era bank robber who instigated a crime wave in 1933–34 of daring and brutality. Lasting just months, a succession of bank robberies led by Dillinger made him the FBI's Public Enemy Number One and a figure who was both feared by his victims and idealized and admired by the downtrodden of depression-hit America. His death after a shootout with police outside a Chicago cinema in July 1934 gave way to a score of myths and legends.

Born John Herbert Dillinger to a middle-class Indianapolis family in June 1903, on leaving school the young Dillinger struggled to settle into working life. He could not hold down a regular job and later deserted from the U.S. Navy, from which he was eventually dishonorably discharged. His marriage to a local girl, Beryl Hovious, lasted just several months over 1923–24 as Dillinger increasingly retreated to the speakeasies and dives of Indianapolis.

After a drinking binge in 1924, Dillinger assaulted and robbed a local drugstore owner. He was caught and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Serving time in Indiana's prisons changed the petty lawbreaker and drifter into a hardened criminal. Dillinger fell in with a gang of seasoned bank robbers who planned a massive crime spree upon their eventual release.

Dillinger served nine years of his sentence before being released on parole in May 1933, following the intercession of his father and the judge who had sentenced him. Almost immediately he resumed his criminal career with a series of petty robberies in Indianapolis. This earned him enough cash to buy a fast car and guns, enabling him to turn to the more lucrative pursuit of bank robberies. Within three months of his release from prison, three bank raids had yielded him more than $40,000.

Using this new wealth, Dillinger plotted the release of his jailbird friends. He smuggled arms into the jail where he had spent so much of his life, and using those weapons ten men escaped from Indiana State Prison on September 22, 1933. Four days before that breakout, Dillinger had himself been picked up by police in Indianapolis and sent to Lima, Ohio to face trial on bank robbery charges. One of his freed friends first acts was to reciprocate the favor and raid Lima Jail, killing a sheriff and freeing Dillinger.

The daring and brutality with which these jailbreaks were executed brought Dillinger additional fame and notoriety. He had become the criminal that no upholder of the law could touch, a famed desperado who used his renown to justify his crime spree in Robin-hood-like terms to newspapermen who caught up with him and who he actively courted. He was, he explained, only stealing wealth from bankers who had themselves stolen from the good people of America. In a depression-hit country, where incomes had halved in just a few years, his anti-establishment rhetoric struck many a chord, although there is little—except vague anecdotal evidence—that suggests he ever shared any of his newfound wealth.

Throughout the remainder of 1933, the bank robberies continued across the Midwest, although the Dillinger gang were also often blamed for crimes they had not committed. His reputation widened as tales of his daring and near misses from police assumed mythical proportions. On one occasion, police caught him coming out of a Chicago doctor's surgery, but he drove away through a hail of bullets. Yet when police did finally catch up with him, vacationing in Tucson, Arizona in January 1934, his arrest passed quietly.

This was not the end of Dillinger's story. On March 3, 1934, Dillinger bluffed his way out of Indiana's Crown Point jail brandishing a wooden gun and escaping in a sheriff's car (evidence has since shown that it is likely that Dillinger bribed his captors and used the wooden gun as cover for his methods).

Now with the title of the FBI's Public Enemy Number One, Dillinger reunited with his gang, who waged a desperate path across the Midwest, trying to avoid detection, but also funding their exploits with further robberies. More close encounters with the law added to the fugitive's reputation. At one point he was cornered in a St. Paul apartment, but equipped with a machine gun, sprayed his way to freedom. At a Wisconsin roadhouse, FBI agents killed one of his gang members and wounded another two, but not Dillinger.

Finally, on July 22, 1934, Dillinger met his end. Attending the film Manhattan Melodrama at a Chicago cinema with his girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, and a brothel owner, Mrs. Anna Sage (also known as Ana Cumpanas), he was betrayed to police by Sage, who was seeking to avoid deportation to her native Romania by striking a deal. On leaving the cinema, Sage tipped off agents who opened fire into Dillinger's back, killing him instantly.

PRIMARY SOURCE

PUBLIC VIEWING OF JOHN DILLINGER'S BODY

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

When the FBI released Dillinger's body a week later, a hearse rode his body to the home of his sister outside Indianapolis. There, 2,500 mourners filed past the dead criminal before he was buried a few days later before an attendance of family members, pressmen, and sympathetic members of the public. This show of sympathy was instructive of how Dillinger had captured the public's imagination, despite being a reckless and violent criminal.

But why was John Dillinger revered by so many people? He certainly wasn't the first career criminal to divide American opinion. Only a few years earlier, Al Capone, a Chicago bootlegger and smuggler, had become one of the most famous men in the world for, as he liked to put it, giving "the people what they want"—namely booze during the prohibition era. In a sense, Dillinger did just that: in a country transfixed by the poverty depression had brought, Dillinger's claim that he was a modern-day Jesse James and recovering from bankers what they had "stolen" from the people carried huge resonance. It was a myth that Dillinger was the Midwest's answer to Robin Hood, but so inculcated by poverty were most people that they believed him to be a kind of savior, a decent man battling against the same authorities that could not alleviate their plight.

By degrees, crime had been "normalized" during America's prohibition era, as the country's drinkers engaged in the largest binge of civil disobedience in history in the nation's speakeasies and blind tigers. It was also a time when gangsters were making an imprint on popular culture. In comic books and particularly movies, such as The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932), the glamorization of crime meant real-life crooks were becoming anti-heroes. Dillinger, who modeled himself on Douglas Fairbanks (the star of Robin Hood), seemed a real-life incarnation of one of these silver-screen stars. He would even add a few film-star flourishes to his bank raids, such as vaulting over counters and treating female bank employees courteously while robbing them. Of course, all this added to his allure.

The final layer of mystique came after Dillinger's death, when rumors and myths about his prowess perpetuated. Most notable amongst these was that he had actually escaped and a different body had been buried—this despite the very public display of his corpse.

Dillinger's fame and infamy has continued partly because of such myths, but also because he has been immortalized on film so often. Starting with the FBI's propagandist newsreel John Dillinger: Public Enemy Number One (1934), a number of movies and TV series have been made about him. These include: Dillinger (1945), Appointment with Destiny (1971), Dillinger (1972), The Lady in Red (1979), and John Dillinger (2005). Such interest has been added to with numerous books published about his brief life.