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Dillinger’s legend was growing. By mid-May, though there had been no confirmed sighting of him since Little Bohemia three weeks before, most American newspapers were carrying daily stories of the manhunt, the Chicago papers three and four a day. Seemingly every Dillinger sighting, no matter how nonsensical, was grounds for a new article.

“Mr. Dillinger,” a Chicago Tribune columnist noted at the height of the hysteria, “was seen yesterday looking over the new spring gloves in a State Street store in Chicago; negotiating for a twelve-cylinder car in Springfield, Illinois; buying a half-dozen sassy cravats in Omaha, Nebraska; bargaining for a suburban bungalow at his home town of Mooresville, Indiana, and shaking hands with old friends; drinking a glass of soda water in a drugstore in Charleston, South Carolina; and strolling down Broadway swinging a Malacca cane in New York. He also bought a fishing rod in a sporting-goods store in Montreal and gave a dinner at a hotel in Yucatán, Mexico. But, anyhow, Mr. Dillinger seems to have kept very carefully out of London, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, and Vienna. Or at least if he did go to those places yesterday he was traveling [incognito].”17 Time magazine noted, “If John [Killer] Dillinger has really been at all the places he was reported to have been in the last month, he must leap along the central plains like a demented Indian’s ghost.”18

Much of the press treated the manhunt as a rollicking adventure story. In its May 7 issue, Time portrayed it as a board game set in a Midwestern “Dillinger Land”; GAME STARTS HERE, read the notation above Crown Point. The Time spread went out of its way to categorize Dillinger as an all-American anti-hero. “Great Desperadoes from little urchins grow,” it read. “When John Dillinger was 10 he, like Tom Sawyer, was a poor country boy. Sometimes he may have dreamed of being another Abe Lincoln or Jesse James . . . [but not] that he would achieve a great unwritten odyssey: Through the Midwest with a Machine Gun.”

The tone of this and other articles suggested that Dillinger was a harmless Roadrunner pursued by a hapless federal Wile E. Coyote. Not surprisingly, children ate it up. When a Boy Scout named Richard Neff visited the Indiana governor’s office, a reporter asked what he thought of Dillinger. “Personally,” the boy said, “I’m for him.” When he glimpsed the governor’s look of amazement, the boy stammered, “Err . . . I mean, I’m always for the underdog.”19

That underdog quality, underscored by the widely published photos and interviews at Crown Point, struck a chord in a country in which many felt slighted by the government. In Chicago and New York moviegoers applauded when Dillinger’s face appeared in newsreels. Detective magazine polled theater owners and found Dillinger was drawing more applause than Roosevelt or Charles Lindbergh. “In point of popularity,” its editor wrote, “they ranked in that order, Dillinger first, President Roosevelt second, and Colonel Lindbergh third, thereby actually making this notorious thief, thug, and cold-blooded murderer the outstanding national hero of the hour!”

As his fame grew, Dillinger’s name was inevitably drawn into political debate. He was already a favorite in the London tabloids, and in Germany a Nazi newspaper used him to argue in favor of sterilizing criminals everywhere. In Washington, Attorney General Homer Cummings employed Dillinger’s name to urge passage of a half-dozen anticrime measures, including one that made it a federal crime to kill a federal agent, a law Hoover had been seeking for years. The measures passed the House of Representatives on May 5 even as several Republican senators continued criticizing the FBI. The pressure on the Roosevelt administration was growing. “Looks like if the Democrats don’t get Dillinger [they] may lose this fall’s election,” Will Rogers wrote.

The President himself got involved. Without mentioning Dillinger by name, Roosevelt urged radio listeners to cooperate with the authorities