Native Grain

THE DILLINGER DAYS (371 pp.)--John Toland--Random House ($5.95).

About a year after John Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents outside a Chicago theater in 1934, Actor Humphrey Bogart scored his first Broadway success as the gunman in Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest. Dillinger and Bogart looked remarkably alike: both were small and wiry, both had a kind of insolent, scarred good looks, each cultivated a distinctive trademark--Bogart a toothy wince and Dillinger a sarcastic, lopsided smile. Coming to public attention when they did, both became national idols.

In this lively account of Dillinger and the other gangs that roistered through the Midwest during those Depression years, John Toland records not only what kind of men made the gangs but what kind of climate made the men. When Dillinger (he pronounced it with a hard g) formed his first gang in 1933, the national income had dropped to half of what it was in 1929. Dillinger thought of himself as a modern Jesse James, and he never tired of saying that he merely recovered from the bankers what they had stolen from the people--an assertion that a surprising number of the people believed. The members of Dillinger's and other Midwestern gangs were almost entirely native-born Americans, some of them descendants of Ozarks outlaws like the James brothers. They scorned the Jewish and Italian gangs of New York and Chicago, run by cold-eyed executives like Dutch Schultz and Al Capone, who preferred not to shoot anyone themselves.

The Women. The Midwesterners were romantics. More often than not, they did their gunning while their women urged them on. There was, for instance, Ma Barker, who moved to St. Paul with two of her four sons in 1933 to set up the most successful kidnaping gang in the Midwest. Ma took the boys to church every Sunday. Tiny, cigar-smoking Bonnie Parker ran away from her husband with Texas Gunman Clyde Barrow and celebrated by writing adolescently boastful verses to the newspapers:

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang.

I'm sure you all have read

How they rob and steal,

And how those who squeal

Are usually found dying or dead.

Dillinger himself was a longtime admirer of Douglas Fairbanks. When robbing banks, he vaulted over the partition to the cashier's cage rather than force his way through the door. He loved the gallant gesture: when he ordered a bank clerk to lie flat during one of his holdups, he insisted on spreading a teller's smock for her on the floor.

Jealous Title. Son of a moderately well-to-do Indianapolis grocer, Dillinger lost his mother when he was three, was brought up by his father (who disciplined him by chaining him to a delivery cart) and by a stepmother he detested. At 21 he was convicted of his first attempt at armed robbery and sent off to serve his only long stretch in prison--nine years in various Indiana prisons. Then he was paroled. In the next 13 months, he built the legend that still clings to his name.

In those months, Dillinger robbed at least twelve banks in six states. Twice he was arrested and twice he escaped. After the first escape he was a celebrity, and by the time of the second arrest he was Public Enemy No. 1, a title that he was jealously proud of. Holding court for reporters, he acknowledged good-naturedly that he was "just a born criminal." Even with a $10,000 reward on his head, he could not resist tempting fate. Once he walked into a newspaper office and asked for the files on himself. Another time he entered a Chicago police station and asked the desk sergeant if he could see a nonexistent prisoner. He wrote long, folksy letters home: "Say, how is that redheaded Sis of mine? I haven't heard from her in ages and I'm beginning to think I'm an orphan."

Dillinger was finally betrayed in Chicago by a woman acquaintance. A line a quarter of a mile long, mostly made up of women, formed outside the morgue. ("I wouldn't have wanted to see him," said one woman to a reporter, "except that I think it's a moral lesson.") In the circus that followed, Dillinger's brain, which had been removed for analysis, was temporarily "mislaid" by the city of Chicago. The body was shipped back to the family farm at Mooresville, Ind., and placed on display again, giving certain townspeople a chance to launch a myth by claiming the man in the coffin was not Dillinger. Finally the gangster was buried in Crown Point Cemetery, along with President Benjamin Harrison, three Vice Presidents, two Governors and James Whitcomb Riley.

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