American History Hit - Outlaws vs the FBI: J. Edgar Hoover's G-Men

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

What makes the ideal gangster hunter? In the 1930s, outlaws like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie & Clyde were the scourge on the justice system of the United States.To bring them in, the lawmakers needed to try something new. And that something new was the FBI.Don is joined by John Oller for this episode to find out how the FBI's powers were expanded over the years, the problems that they faced, and the influence of J. Edgar Hoover on the process.John is a journalist and author, his book on this subject is 'Gangster Hunters: How Hoover's G-Men Vanquished America's Deadliest Public Enemies'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Matthew Peaty. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. March 1934. The frames of a newsreel flickered a life in this dark theater. An FBI most wanted poster projects upon the screen, offering $5,000 for information leading to the arrest of the murderous bank robber John Dillinger. $10,000 if you bring him in yourself. The footage cuts to Dillinger standing with his captors at Crown Point Jail in Indiana, where he's supposed to be behind bars for the killing of a police officer named O'Malley.

Instead, he's chumming a cheeky smile, lowering his brow against the bright lights. The audience in the theater whoops and cheers. For them, this charismatic criminal has become an avenging hero, stealing from the fat cat banks that have taken so much money from Americans in these depression years. On screen, the law enforcement authorities who claim to be sending Dillinger to the electric chair, crowd in for a photo op with their favorite crook. Dillinger will once again escape his bonds and make a run for it, this time in the local sheriff's own car, crossing state lines.

But that puts him in the crosshairs of a more formidable foe. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover and his G-Men on the case, and hot on Dillinger's trail. Good day, glad, and grateful you're listening. I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. We have done a number of episodes on the series on various annual. angles of the FBI. See past episodes of our Outlaw Sub-Series covering the lives of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, among others, still on the horizon. We've also described in detail the

career of J. Edgar Hoover. But how the original Bureau of Investigation became the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a very specific tale, newly told in a book released last month entitled Gangster Hunters. How Hoover's G-Men vanquished America's deadliest public enemies. authored by our guest today, John Oller. Greetings, John. Nice to have you. Nice to be here. Your book starts with an author's note that explains the basic semantics. The FBI is established as the Bureau of Investigation, 1924.

1933, it becomes the Division of Investigation, DOI. A few years later, in 1935, the name officially becomes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI we know today. And in all three iterations, over a period of 48 years from the beginning to 1972, it's led by one man, J. Edgar Hoover. Let's go back to the beginning. When the Bureau of Investigation came into being 1924, what was its function and how did it differ from what it becomes? Well, early on, when Hoover first took over, it was kind of a sleepy federal agency. It didn't have much to do. It didn't have much jurisdiction. Mostly investigated things like bank fraud and antitrust violations

and corporate fraud and the like, kind of white collar crime, I would call it. And most of the young agents who entered the Bureau in those years were kind of looking for a desk job, you know, carry a briefcase and push papers. That's what they thought they were getting into. It was the depression in the early 30s, and they were looking for a decent job, decent pay. And most of them were law school graduates or accounting school graduates. And it was tough to get jobs in those fields. So they gravitated to the FBI and said, hey, this seems like a good gig. And then all a sudden the war on crime starts and somebody puts a Tommy gun in their hands and says, go out and find and capture or kill John Dillinger.

Many of these guys had never shot a weapon before. They didn't know how to handle a gun. In so many ways, the FBI, the development of the FBI mirrors or parallels the the federal government, the expansion of the federal government, but also the expansion of Jay Edgar Hoover in so many ways. Tell me about the notion of the G-man. I mean, the famous term, G-man, government man, would have been a new concept in 1920s. I mean, really, when the federal government was so much less a part of the average

American lifestyle. Yeah, G-Man started as a generic term for government man, all sorts of federal bureaucrats. But it became to be associated specifically with the FBI in the early 30s when they started going after these criminals. And there was a famous, maybe apocryphal story about how one of the outlaws named Machine Gun Kelly, not the rap artist, but a criminal back then was captured by the FBI and supposedly shouted out, don't shoot G-Men. Now, I don't think he actually said that, but that became the story. And the term G-man then became synonymous with FBI men. What was Hoover looking for in a G-man? What was his archetype? First of all, young, they had to be between 25 and 35. He wanted all-American boy types who had integrity and couldn't be bought.

many local cops back then were on the take. So he wanted men first and foremost who would not be subject to bribery. They came from mostly middle class backgrounds, maybe slightly upper middle class, certainly not Ivy League types. He didn't like those types. They had to be slender or athletic, even though Hoover himself didn't fit that description. Most of them were law school graduates or accounting school, business school graduates. It wasn't an ironclad rule because he did end up taking some agents from sort of southwestern police departments and the like. By and large, they were younger, educated, morally upright, shined shoes, crisp white shirt, business suit, fedora hat, not much facial hair, maybe a mustache, but certainly no beards. I mean, in the midst of your answer,

you say the thing that really sticks out to me, which is this was an agency that needed to sort of fly above what was the understanding of state and local policing. And this was necessary at a time when the federal government is becoming more and more respected or at least larger and larger after World War I. It's a really interesting shift in America as reflected in its policing. Really, the expansion of the FBI was part of the New Deal expansion. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt, the president was very much in favor of, federalizing law enforcement to give the FBI jurisdiction that it had lacked previously over such things as killing a federal officer, which was not a federal crime as late as 1933. Taking stolen goods across state lines was not a federal crime at the time. Kidnapping was not a

federal crime. Murder was not a federal crime. And robbing a bank, even a federally chartered bank, was not a federal crime up through 1933. As part of the New Deal expansion, The FBI acquired all those jurisdictions beginning around 1934. But it was to match all that interstate crime that was going on as well, which is kind of a new phenomenon. It used to be you could commit a crime in a state, drive across the state line and be pretty good because the next state police isn't going to be after you. Right. That was kind of the movie cliche. The arrival of the FBI, the expansion of the FBI prevents that from being an escape for these guys.

Yes. Now, they didn't have the technology. The early FBI agents didn't have to have near. the resources and technology that you think of the FBI having today. You know, they didn't have SWAT team gear. They didn't have helicopters swarming overhead. They couldn't track cell phones. They couldn't track, you know, credit card purchases, things like that. A lot of it was gum shoe work. Now, they did have fingerprinting, but a lot of it was just legwork and by the field agents.

Right. And that's interesting because that was Hoover's original job, was this sort of detailed clerk work that he was doing in D.C. He brings that same sensibility to this new federal bureau, which can do a more forensic approach to investigations that perhaps state police aren't used to doing. Yeah, he developed this huge fingerprint division in Washington and, you know, build it up from a few thousand prints to, you know, over a million in just a few years. But it really is the war on crime, which is characterized by these bank robbers, the Bonnie

and Clydes, the John Dillinger's, that really really. really motivates the more aggressive FBI that begins to grow through the 20th century. How do they make that shift from being those clerical, forensic, shiny shoe guys to being a more well-equipped for this kind of era of crime? They first had to learn how to fire a gun, and then they had to acquire powerful weapons. The outlaws had much more powerful weapons than the FBI originally. The Tommy gun, which you see in all the 1930s, gang. They had the Browning Automatic Rifle or B.A.R. That was favored by Clyde Barrow. And these were very powerful weapons. They were legal at the time. They're no longer legal in the hands of citizens.

But the FBI, you know, and in local law enforcement, often were equipped only with pistols or six shooters and, you know, maybe a shotgun occasionally. But so Hoover started ordering Tommy guns and BARs and things like that for the FBI. cars were not as fast as the criminals early on. Dillinger drove these, you know, Essex Terraplane was his getaway vehicle and Bonnie and Clyde had a powerful Ford V8s. Law enforcement had these old Ford Model A's. So the FBI had to buy and attain faster cars. It was a gradual process. They were behind in the beginning. They made a lot of mistakes. They kind of stumbled and bumbled around at first. And then they had to adapt, and they did over the course of three or four years.

It must have been awkward to be, you know, suddenly this new agency on the landscape. How are they finding their targets and pursuing them through the channels? The way they ended up catching most of these criminals was through informants, often a female informant who had been associated with the criminal. I mean, it was a woman in red Anna Sage who turned Dillinger in. It was the father of the associate who was traveling with Bonnie and Clyde, who set them up. And baby Face Nelson was informed on by a woman. Basically, you had to find an informant who could tell you where the person was, and then they would close in on him and ambush him.

But did they flex muscle? I mean, did it automatically become that the feds are here and you have to give up your jurisdiction over this? Depending on the local officer, but often the local law enforcement, officer, the county sheriff or whatever, was very jealous of these tenderfoots coming in with federal badges and was often reluctant to share power with them. The other thing is sometimes the FBI's presence interfered with the locals' ability to remain on the take from the criminals, which many locals were. So it was an awkward relationship in the beginning.

It's funny, as we're talking, my mind is automatically going to these movie scenes. Like there have been those scenes in the movies where the state guys are like, get out of here. This is a, you know, and then there's the shiny shoe FBI, all these archetypal pictures of the FBI. Yeah. That's because this story has been sold so well through the media, so popularly. And Hoover had a lot to do with that, didn't you? Well, you know, you see it even in more recent times the fugitive where Tommy Lee Jones is with, I think, the U.S. marshals. And he comes in and takes over the investigation from the locals and they kind of resent it.

And he says, I don't care. I'm running things. The FBI didn't quite have that clout in early 30s. It took them some time to be accepted as the premier law enforcement agency in the country, which for all its critics, it still is. You know, it was really in the 30s that it gave birth to the modern FBI. An important chapter in the book involves the Lindbergh law and what happened with the Lindbergh kidnapping, which many Americans today of younger generations really don't know how big a deal that really was. was. We're talking about 1932, and the famous flyer, Charles Lindbergh's baby, has taken toddler in those days out of his own home. And this becomes a major international story. How does the FBI figure into this and how does it develop their role? Kidnapping was not a federal crime at the time the Lindberg baby was snatched. It was a huge cause celebrity. Charles Lindberg was maybe the most famous man in America outside of FDR. There was a manhunt for him. Now, the FBI did not have jurisdiction. in that case. Hoover wanted to get involved, but he was kind of sidelined. His people were kind of on the sidelines during that whole investigation. He supplied some technical help, fingerprinting and the like and some serial numbers on the ransom notes. But it was really the

state of New Jersey that largely controlled that investigation. Now, after the Lindberg baby turned up dead a few weeks later, Congress got busy and passed a federal kidnapping law, which made kidnapping a federal crime and gave the FBI jurisdiction to cross state lines and go after kidnappers. And some of the early episodes in this war on crime in the 30s were kidnappings of very wealthy businessmen, particularly a couple in Minneapolis, St. Paul, who were ransomed for, you know, huge sums, $100,000, $200,000, which would be well into the multimillions today. that's kind of where the FBI in part earned its stripes. In your writing of this book, I mean, whenever we've been talking about this growth of this agency,

it really mirrors to me the kind of growth of the United States and the world. You know, when you think about what the United States military has done about calming down the world policing-wise, the FBI is kind of the same thing domestically, isn't it? So much of the economy of this country relies on a feeling of something. safety and peace. The FBI gave that layer to America, didn't it? When Dillinger and Bonning Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd and those were running wild, there was a sense that things were out of control. Yes. And that the criminals had the upper hand and a lot of innocent people died in bank robberies. You know, they'd shoot to kill and they killed a lot of cops. They killed a lot of innocent bystanders.

And so there was this sense of chaos to some extent. Now, counterbalancing that, a lot of people sort of romanticized these outlaws. You know, they were robbing banks. Banks were not popular. They were the enemy. The banker was the guy in the suit who knocked on your door, you know, with the foreclosure papers to take over your farm or home because you hadn't paid the mortgage. At least initially, you know, newsreels were big back then in movie theaters, the preview. Dillinger would come on the screen and people would applaud, you know, and clap. And then some G-man would come on the screen. They would boo. Now that gets turned around a little bit over the next few years as the criminals became ever more ruthless and started killing more innocence. They sort of lost their romanticism.

And the G-man became the guy to be admired. And there's no better illustration of that than Jimmy Cagney, who was usually played a gangster in the late 1920s. By 1935, he starred in a movie called G-Men, and he was an FBI agent. So that kind of marked the switchover from the criminals being the favorites to the G-Men. Again, mirroring the federal government, becoming a more prominent part of everyone's, you know, through the New Deal, as you say. And suddenly there's this federal presence in people's lives that's going to sort of settle everything down and take over. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like this to cover anything specifically, If you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at a H.H at

history hit.com. We'd love to hear from you. How does it intersect with all the fighting of the mafia? Is RICO come out of FBI work? Or who kind of thinks of that? Rico come in the statute, I think, was in the late 60s or 70s. Hoover's always been accused, I think somewhat misguidedly, of denying the existence of organized crime, denying existence of the mafia. I think at some point he did recognize them as a force. But in the period of time that I'm talking about the 30s,

the mafia and what I'll call mobsters, big city mobsters, they were involved in prostitution, gambling, alcohol, drugs, you know, big money stuff. The Dillinger's and Bonnie and Clydes of the world, they operated mostly in the countryside. They robbed banks in small towns. Maybe they hid out in the big city, but they were really kind of what I will call rural outlaws.

So there was a real demarcation between the mafia in the big cities and the rural outlaws in the countryside. And the reality is the FBI was a very small agency back then in 30s, 300 agents. Now there's, I don't know, 30,000 or something. But they were in no position to take on the mob and mafia in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, all these towns. I mean, they would not have even been able to put a dent in it.

And it wasn't for decades, really, until the 70s and 80s, 40, 50 years for law enforcement to really crack down on the mafia and break their back. In your research, were you able to sort of track Hoover's plan? He's there for so long, for almost 50 years. Is it traceable where he decides, oh, I need bigger budgets here? need this, I need that, or is it kind of an organic flow, organic growth? It kind of depended on what was going on in the country. So in the 30s, you had the public enemies. So he made it his mission to subdue them. Late 30s, early 40s, you had a lot of

Nazi saboteurs in the U.S. World War II coming. So the FBI went after the Nazi elements in the U.S. Post-war was the anti-communist era, and Hoover was a virulent anti-communist, so he really went after communists in the federal government in the 50s. 60s was the era of campus unrest and social protests, so he went after the campus protesters

and people like Martin Luther King and, you know, secretly taped them. So, you know, it's interesting to speculate as if Hoover were alive, today, who he would be, you know, training his sights on. I never really thought about that, but it's an interesting speculation. Well, you bring up an important point. I mean, the FBI has gone in and out of favor in the public view throughout its entire existence, especially in the 60s, as you say, even today. Some part of American society is very worried about FBI overstepping itself.

It becomes a sort of tip of the iceberg of that whole mentality. But be careful what you ask for when you start dismantling these things, something else crops up that's going to remind us why we have in FBI. Yeah, I think so. You know, it used to be that the FBI was hated by the liberals and loved by the conservatives, and it's sort of flipped around. Exactly. It does bring up an interesting question.

I mean, we talked this entire time about Jay Edgar Hoover. We never talk about any other agents, maybe Melvin Purvis. I can think of that only one name. It's a fascinating aspect of this agency that it's kind of. so anonymous, isn't it? Yeah, and that was by design, by Hoover's design. Hoover wanted to be the public face of the FBI and to be associated with it. He got his name on the building. It's still there. And he wanted his agents to be anonymous. Partly, he said that was for their own protection, because if their names became known, then they'd become targets for the criminals. I think it was

mostly, he was sort of a publicity hound, and he didn't want anyone upstaging him. And that was Melvin Purvis's misfortune is that Melvin Purvis, which you're right, he's probably the only FBI man other than Hoover whose name might be recalled today if you're into that genre of crime. He was credited, even though it's not true. He was credited with being the trigger man who shot Dillinger and who shot Pretty Boy Floyd. He didn't either. He was there. He was in charge of the operation, but he was not the actual trigger man. But anyway, he became celebrated in the press as the guy who got Dillinger, the guy who got Pretty Boy Floyd, he became very famous. Hoover became very jealous. Hoover had liked Melvin Purvis very much early on, groomed him to be a

top-level agent, made him the head of the Chicago field office, which was ground zero in the war on crime. But Purvis fell out of favor, and Hoover basically hounded him out of the FBI and conducted a vendetta against him for many decades afterwards. Yeah. It's really Dillinger that really sets the stage, isn't it? Yeah. The most important case in the birth of the FBI as we know it. I think so. And later in life, they would ask Jay Edgar Hoover, what was the highlight

of your career? He would always say the night we got Dillinger. Up until that time, Dillinger had escaped several times the FBI's clutches and had embarrassed the Bureau because he was surrounded, ambushed, and somehow he got away

and the public was saying if they don't catch Dillinger soon, Maybe we ought to return primary law enforcement to the local level. These feds don't seem to know what they're doing. But they eventually tracked Dillinger down to a theater in Chicago, got him outside the biograph theater, and that really catapulted Hoover and the FBI into the premier law enforcement agency in the country. It's a fascinating story.

I mean, I really love your book. It's an exhaust of history, but it's really entertainingly accessible. And that's what's so fascinating about the history of the FBI, that you can drop in anywhere, really, and find some sort of common ground with the story because it's so relevant to the development of modern America. Yes, yes, I agree. So, John, having written this book, what's its main takeaway for you? What did you draw from this story yourself? You know, I really wrote the book to give some recognition to these anonymous younger agents who worked under Hoover. and, you know, they didn't set out to be heroes.

They didn't know what they were getting into. As I said, they wanted to be deskmen, but they got this job, and it became a very dangerous job. And a lot of them, you know, you might have thought would say, hey, you know, I didn't sign up for this. I'm out of here. But they didn't. They stuck with it.

They pursued their men. They got their men in the end. And it's really a story of how fairly ordinary people thrust into a story. extraordinary circumstances can accomplish extraordinary things. And what they did was extraordinary. They brought down these criminals within two or three years and made the world, or at least the country, safer for democracy, etc. Are you thinking of one in particular when you reflect that way or not? As a group, I mean, there were several favorites. I had a guy named Tom McDade who got to know his son, who gave me a diary that McDade had written.

back then. It's the only diary of an FBI agent from the 30s of its type in existence. And it's very entertaining. He talks about trying to get dates with women and going to the movies and playing poker with the group. And then the next day, he's out being shot at by Babyface Nelson. So later in life, he becomes a crime writer and crime historian. It was maybe my favorite anonymous FBI agent. Tell me about another one. I'm curious. Jim Metcalf. wanted to be a priest initially. He went to Notre Dame. He was born in Germany, came over here when he was like a baby. Then he wanted to become a poet. Went to night law school, put himself through law school as selling insurance and the like, selling cars, even though he didn't know how to drive a car. He had to learn how to drive a car when he became an FBI agent. He was kind of a gentle soul, a poet, but he was right in the thick of many of the public enemies' chases. He ends up leaving the FBI and becoming a poet in late. life, writing a daily column of poetry for one of the Chicago newspapers. How fascinating.

I mean, there are just thousands of those kinds of stories of those men and women who are involved in this enormous effort, but they're all sort of lost by virtue of the fact that Hoover really wanted them to be anonymous, didn't he? Yes, yes. Extraordinary. John Oller has studied journalism at Ohio State and was a Wall Street lawyer before turning to writing. His previous books include The Swamp Fox about the Revolutionary War Flee.

Francis Marion and an all-American murder about the killing of Christy Lynn Mullins, which his book helps solve. This book, what we've been discussing for the last half hour, is called Gangster Hunters, How Hoover's G-Men Vanquished America's Deadliest Public Enemies. Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.

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