There is something intoxicating to Americans about outlaws. I used to think it stemmed from the twenty-five-year period of the 19th Century we now call The Wild West, where such lawless renegades were as prominent as mosquitoes in a bayou, but access to the Internet and many books on the era suggests that this may have begun during the Revolutionary War when men stood against the Mad Hanoverian king. These original outlaws—Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Hamilton, etc.—would have been hanged for treason had their desperate Enlightenment ideals and guerrilla tactics failed to liberate 13 English colonies from tyranny. Their lawlessness, which we call patriotism, delivered to us our independence, and yet, from a different perspective, they were effectively violent criminals, even terrorists.
There is something romantic about this disregard for the law that benefits those in need. When the law is seen as corrupt or those who enforce it cannot be trusted, anyone who moves against the established power seems to be a hero. They may even rise to legendary status in the public eye. However, what happens when those outlaws are truly dangerous people, killing recklessly, with no real motivation except a penchant for violence or greed, reaping no real punishment for their crimes, but continuing to derive great social adoration? How do we reconcile our love of freedom and liberty and rugged sense of individualism with the fact that many of the people we have idolized over the decades and centuries have been reprehensible and despicably violent criminals?
Enter Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow; the figureheads of a notoriously violent gang of thieves and murderers who racked up between them a heart-stopping 13 murders, nine of whom were police officers. Despite their violent behavior, they were so beloved by the people of America that their hair and clothing styles were copied and grew into fads. People heard the news reports and still rooted for them. The entire country was captivated by them, although they were violent killers.
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It was a time of brutal poverty in America. The wake of the financial crash and the heart of the Great Depression lowered over the nation like an iron-black storm. Shanty towns (called Hoovervilles in a scathing rebuke of President Herbert Hoover's disastrous economic policies) lay spread around small towns and cities. The flat, dusty Texas landscape was no exception to this exhausting national nightmare.
It was around this time that Bonnie and Clyde had, over about 21 months, robbed many small businesses in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Missouri and Arkansas. Their rampage created a media sensation, as each time they hit a business or killed, the news broadcasts sensationalized the two as anti-hero, modern-day Robin Hoods.
To law enforcement and beleaguered state government officials, though, the problem of the Barrow Gang was a very violent and deadly situation. Families of their victims sought redress for their loss. Local police worried that they might become victims of the gang’s murderous attacks. J. Edgar Hoover’s federal agents got involved in a flailing campaign to catch the outlaws in a dragnet, to no avail. Public opinion was such that attempts to capture and arrest Bonnie and Clyde were hugely unpopular and the gang had networks of support helping them behind the scenes in many of the places they frequented. As each week passed, the death toll ticked up. Something had to be done to stop Bonnie and Clyde.
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Clyde Barrow was from a poor family that migrated from the rural emptiness surrounding Dallas to the urban slums of the city when he was quite young. Legend has it that Barrow stole a chicken as a child and never got free of police persecution. His actual story is much more violent.
By all accounts, he was a troubled youth with a penchant for safe-cracking and theft, but it was his time in prison that made him into a hardened criminal. While he was incarcerated, Clyde learned to kill and that was probably where he learned to hate law enforcement officials.
Once his sentence was up, Barrow went right back to committing minor crimes, but friends who knew him as a youth related that the young hoodlum had come out of stir no longer the fun-loving, mischievous boy he had been. He was now a cold-blooded criminal with the dead eyes of a killer.
In 1930, Barrow met Bonnie Parker, a petite teenager from Dallas, when Barrow attempted to steal her mother’s car. Their love was instantaneous. Parker lived with her mother and waited tables and had already been married at age 16, but found in Clyde Barrow her soul mate. Over the next few months, Bonnie, aged 19, was corrupted by his darkness and learned to love killing. Over the course of their crime spree, the two were inseparable and, according to the poems that Parker wrote and entries in her diary, she knew and believed that their misadventure would eventually end in a fiery death for both of them. In the meantime, they became heroes to the American people.
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For years after they were killed, Bonnie and Clyde continued to generate an incredible amount of public fascination. Their period of murder and robbery filled America with a deep sense of rural lawlessness, infused with the same cultural fascination that made Frank and Jesse James and Billy the Kid icons. Even when historians and biographers began the long and arduous process of unraveling the lives and family history of Bonnie and Clyde, the hero worship didn't end. Their names became synonymous with an aura of fame that overshadowed and eventually outlived the memory of the brutality of their crimes and murders.
Troubling as this is, of course, it is nothing new. Americans love their criminals and the media has always added a dash of romanticism to “the bad guys”. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone all had a considerable influence on the American mindset around the same time as The Barrow Gang was ruling the country roads of the southern midwest. The adoration of criminals likely arose from the sour distaste for the establishment that had so blatantly failed people's needs over the years.
Most Americans in the early 1930s mistrusted banks and the government, of which police were seen as aiding. But there was also the sense that Bonnie and Clyde was a tragic love story, like Romeo and Juliet, doomed and yet fighting back against the dominant social limits of the day. Behind it all was the gruesome shadow of American violence.
Thirty or so years later, Bonnie and Clyde's fame had begun to fade in light of events with more gravity, when a nostalgic and well-received movie, released in 1967, reawakened their popularity for a new generation. Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunnaway as the infamous duo, the film recreated a far more romantic version of events. The film, directed by Arthur Penn, but produced by Beatty, made Bonnie and Clyde seem like slightly bumbling, stupid hicks, affable and engaging, but not the brutal killers they were. There was nothing of the hardened “rattlesnake” in Beaty's performance, nor the cold-blooded murderer in Ms. Dunnaway's role. By their inevitable and well-publicized end, Parker and Barrow have the sympathy of the audience, who have been fooled into thinking that their heroes deserve to live and ride off into the sunset. The film also drew criticism for making American cinema even more violent and gory than it had been to that point.
Thought at first, not a blockbuster, the film continued to engage audiences and once again, the implacable love for Bonnie and Clyde woke up in the American psyche, now even more augmented by media sentimentalism and the strange worship of violence, all caught permanently in the blinding quadrilateral of light on the silver screen.
Bleached of its folkloric mythology and the public’s love for violence and fame, the tale of Bonnie and Clyde is a uniquely American horror story. For just shy of two years, the southern midwest was terrorized by a gang that saw no value in human life and would stop at nothing to escape capture. Motivated in part by the media's shameless pandering and blinded by their fame, a young man and woman and a rotating cast of side characters raced across the dust-bowl states carrying heavy machine guns and stealing and killing recklessly. They consistently avoided Hoover's FBI agents, who were the only law enforcement able to, like Barrow and Parker, cross state lines freely.
Desperate to capture and stop the deadly killing, Texas Governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson temporarily reactivated the defunct Texas Rangers, charging Frank Hamer and Maney Gault to do what no other law enforcement agency had been able to do: stop Bonnie and Clyde. In 2019, the movie, The Highwaymen, released on Netflix, dealt with the manhunt that the Rangers conducted that eventually led to the end of the crime spree.
The film captures just how popular Bonnie and Clyde were, but stops short of giving the pair their faces, upending the mistake that the 1967 eponymous film so blatantly and flippantly made.. Rather than romance, the film focuses on the efforts to capture them and scours the tale of its hero-worshipping mythos while also being shocked and critical about the level of fame Bonnie and Clyde had attained in their short-lived criminal careers.
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Evidence collected by Hamer and Gault eventually led the pair to Louisiana, where one of the accomplices of Bonnie and Clyde had family. The rangers set up an ambush, just outside of Bienville Parish. They convinced the father of the accomplice to set his truck out on a back lane in order to lure Clyde to help.
The trap worked. As Clyde pulled his car up to help, law enforcement, led by Hamer and Gault, shouted for the duo to put their hands up. Bonnie and Clyde reached for their weapons and the rangers opened fire.
The infamous occupants of the car were machine-gunned to death. In less than 20 seconds, one-hundred and fifty bullets riddled their vehicle. Though their almost two-year run of violence, murder and havoc was at an end, their deaths merely cemented them in the public consciousness and created a kind of secular martyrdom, wherein their legends could grow unhindered by fact or the violent reality of their lives.
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Today, America's fascination with outlaws is no less potent though it has been compounded with a more broad and terrifying disinterest with facts or reality. When Bonnie and Clyde were riding the highways, guns blazing, news organizations sensationalized the duo, but still reported the facts, such as they were, as the situation unfolded. In the modern era, social media, news silos (where people can get information that claims to be news but that confirms or solidifies their inherent biases) can create a reality where the worst possible people are taken by some portion of the nation to be good guys and beyond reproach. All criticism of these people is, to their supporters and fans, created to bring them down. If the Barrow Gang had decided to rev up the dust of west Texas in 2024, one-half of the nation would be for them and the other half against them, but the people who supported and aided them would be lining up to help until the Barrow Gang was a million strong.
Preachers and priests would share their support in foam-flecked sermons that the criminals were the hands of God, bringing about His Will. Politicians would say disparaging things about them in public, but in private, they would tank legislation that aided the police in their attempt to capture them. The men who eventually trapped and killed Bonnie and Clyde would be, in the modern polarized mind of America, the real bad guys.
This is not just speculation. In the past several years, the court of public opinion is on full display in our nation and there is an undeniable adoration of the worst possible mammals as they are voted into the top levels of power.
Though access to information has increased in the intervening 90 years, people’s opinions are no less easily manipulated. 20,000 people lined up to see Bonnie Parker’s body at her funeral. Only slightly fewer did so for Clyde Barrow. In the wake of their horrible deeds, the nation has long struggled with whether to call them folk heroes—modern-day Robin Hoods-or scourges and a symptom of a national addiction to violence and outlawry that has at its foundation the brutal frontier Calvinism and prudish repression that led to the westward expansion. This mindset is very much alive today and has continued to embrace a deep and poisonous loathing of authority and the rule of law. America today is a country that still struggles with this disparity: it is the etching on the soul of the nation of our greatest moral failing.
Today, Bonnie and Clyde retain a toehold in the cultural memory. Few would know the names of Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, the Texas Rangers who brought the terrible duo down without the provocation to look them up after watching the movie. We might blanche at the brutality of how they were taken down, but we might see, as the rangers likely did, that the only way to stop Bonnie and Clyde was to rise to their level of violence. The story seems to be that, when the violent have control, only violence can strip their power. This is the biggest and most dangerous lie at the heart of this topic.
The enduring fascination with figures like Bonnie and Clyde reveals a deeply troubling aspect of American culture: a romanticization of violence and a dangerous disregard for the consequences of lawlessness, particularly when fueled by social and economic anxieties. Here we are again. In this modern moment, the disparity between the classes is evident. Distrust with the government and with law enforcement is a backstop of many of our societal issues.
Criminality is now a problem of relativism; certain groups decide what a crime is without due regard for what the law says. People with wealth get off “scott-free” even when their crimes are egregious and deadly, while regular people have no recourse if they become victims of crime. This topsy-turvy dystopia mirrors the Texas roads of 1935. Whether we can survive this moment, may be a discussion for another day, but the question at the bottom of it all is whether America can face its deep affection for violence and if it can, once and for all, decide to repent from its love of the outlaw.
