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.Chief Matt Leach, master of the press conference, gave the “facts”: the Dillinger gang had carried out eighteen robberies in sixty days (hisnumbers kept changing); they now had sixty-four connections withother gangs in the Midwest; they possessed eleven machine guns andeighteen bulletproof vests, plus shotguns and pistols.45It was no big leap from Leach’s “statistics” to imagining dozensof armed men, organized, invincible, and bloodthirsty.State and localofficials were forced to act, lest they appear to be losing control of the“The Farmer Turns Gangster” | 45situation.Federal agents were brought in to consult on October 24,and two days later Governor McNutt, the man who had signed JohnDillinger’s parole papers, called out the National Guard.More thanseventy officers and five hundred soldiers were deputized, armedwith machine guns, rifles, and shotguns, and deployed in small squadsat strategic points throughout the state.The American Legion onceagain offered the assistance of a vigilante “shotgun army,” and localofficials deputized countless men into posses manning improvisedroadblocks.46The ongoing economic depression was the backdrop for theseactions, and it made banditry especially frightening.Indiana courts, for example, were trying to deal with the problem of thousands of familiesunable to pay their mortgages and threatened with eviction from theirhomes.Hobo “jungles” at the edge of every town where the homelessgathered bore witness to the crisis; “Hoovervilles,” the unemployedcalled them, in honor of the former president.Just a year earlier fifty thousand citizens had gathered in Washington to demand early payment of the bonuses promised World War I veterans; so terrifyingwas the threat that the army forcibly dispersed them.The image ofarmed, desperate men grew doubly terrifying under the specter ofgenuine want abroad in the land and the government apparentlypowerless to do much about it.The Chicago Tribune spoke for many when it declared that civil authorities could no longer cope with thesituation, for the Dillinger gang was “as dangerous as the one headedby Jesse James many years ago.” The newspaper wrote approvinglyof new military measures being taken to “wipe out banditry” and to“halt the depredations.” 47Another note, equally discordant, occasionally sounded in this cho-rus.Some banks, it was rumored, welcomed the robberies.They wereso mismanaged or so overextended by the Depression—or, someargued, so baldly plundered by their owners—that a raid by the likesof Dillinger helped cover their misfeasance or malfeasance.Beforelong it was whispered that banks arranged robberies in order to collect insurance money and thereby bail themselves out of insolvency.48Nor was the public’s response to the “Terror Gang” entirely neg-ative.“I am for John Dillinger,” wrote one citizen to the “Voice ofthe Reader” column in the Indianapolis Star.The writer went on to explain that he was not excusing crime, though he questioned whetherDillinger was really guilty of all that the newspapers alleged.Why single46 | Dillinger’sWildRideout Dillinger, he asked, since “he wasn’t any worse than the bankersor politicians who took the poor people’s money.” Even more point-edly the writer declared, “Dillinger did not rob poor people.He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor.I am for Johnnie.” Anotherwriter likewise defended Dillinger, arguing that bandits gave bankersmore of a chance to protect themselves than bankers gave the commonpeople, whose life savings they stole or squandered.49With Indiana policed so heavily, the gang decided to move on, andthey disappeared from public view for the next few weeks
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