G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture by Richard Gid Powers (review)

Book Reviews265 RICHARD GID POWERS. G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 356 p. When the dustbowl farmers in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath lost their land to the banks, they joined other refugees from the Depression both on the road and in looking for someone to blame for their condition. The need of the dispossessed to find some person to hold responsible for their plight was voiced in their desperate question: "Who do we shoot?" Steinbeck's novel may or may not pose an answer to the question; however, the real-life answer, including the names of some of those who were shot, appears in G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture. The principal service of Richard Power's G-Men lies in its demonstration that the rise and perpetuation of the FBI issued from a deliberately conceived project in mass culture. Undertaken with cooperation of government agencies, the project aimed to provide a distressed citizenry with some symbol of their personal miseries; the symbol chosen was that of the "Public Enemy." Since a "crime wave" had already been created in the press by 1930, largely through the use of the career of Al Capone, the American public had begun to fear uncontrolled gangsterism, a sign of economic chaos. A solution to one problem might signify a solution to the other. Therefore, it was a short step to making film gangsters stand in for the real ones. In 1934 John Dillinger was gunned by G-Men near Chicago's Biograph Theater, and in 1935 Cesar Romero was "hit" by FBI agents in Show Them No Mercy; there was no longer much doubt about who should be shot. The nation's real problems had begun to be symbolized in the concept of the "Public Enemy" as found in movies as early as Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). It is significant to the reader of G-Men that when Powers begins to speak of the way Americans identified gangsters in movies with gangsters in real life by the early thirties, he refers to the American people as "audiences." Such a choice of words indicates that Powers believes that popular culture has turned Americans into spectators to life, as if life itself were a drama to which they had been invited. And the drama was only complete with the arrival of the Public Enemy's adversary. The Public Enemy was onstage only a short while before the Public Hero. At first there was no equal symbol in films or other forms of mass culture charismatic enough, as Powers puts it, "to counterbalance the anarchic power" which the criminal displayed in the role of Public Enemy. Enter, then, the new administration of Franklin Roosevelt with its emphasis on war against social evils. That struggle against the nation's problems created a combat-like environment in which all forms of mass media, including movies, magazines, radio, and comics, were gathered to wage war against the Depression and into both that war and that media stepped J. Edgar Hoover. Powers makes clear in his book that from the start the FBI was as much a media construction as an actual entity; its purpose was never to fight crime, but to do battle in the public arena with "celebrity criminals." Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, "Lepke" Buchalter of "Murder, Incorporated," spies, and communists: all had to be the stuff that popular myths were made of in order to attract The Bureau's attention. It was the apprehending of such "celebrities" that carried Hoover onto the columns of "celebrity columnists," wherein the public kept up with his latest appearances at the Stork Club. One 266Rocky Mountain Review only has to view the photographs of Hoover and the popular culture images of his agents in Powers' G-Men to understand the truth of the myth. LONNIE L. WILLIS Boise State University JEFFREY L. SAMMONS. Heinrich Heine. A Selected Critical Bibliography of Secondary Literature, 1956-1980. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982. 194 p. This volume represents a generous gift on the part of Jeffrey Sammons to students and scholars of Heinrich Heine. As the...