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Afterward, when the president disappeared back inside the Capitol, few in the crowd felt reassured. Mention of war left many frightened. There was talk of martial law, anarchy, dictatorship. Few understood what kind of war the president intended. Anything seemed possible.

What no one could know that morning was that one theater of the metaphoric war Roosevelt invoked would in fact involve guns and blood and death on American soil. It would be fought across a great swath of the country’s midsection, beginning at a railroad station in Kansas City before engulfing the streets of Chicago, pine-shrouded lodges in northern Wisconsin, dust-bowl farms in weary Oklahoma, and battle sites scattered from Atlantic City to Dallas, St. Paul to Florida. It would be fought not by soldiers but by another branch of the federal government, an obscure arm of the Justice Department, headed by an equally obscure bureaucrat named John Edgar Hoover, who in a span of twenty short months would rise from nowhere to hunt down a series of criminals whose exploits were to become a national soap opera, and then a legend.

When one looks back across a chasm of seventy years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric. To the generations of Americans raised since World War II, the identities of criminals such as Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, “Ma” Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time.

They were real. A wastrel Dallas thief turned multiple murderer, Clyde Barrow was born in 1909, the same year as Barry Goldwater and Ethel Merman. Had he lived, he would have been sixty-five years old when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, an aging coupon-clipper, maybe, spending evenings in a Barcalounger chuckling at Archie Bunker. Baby Face Nelson’s widow died only in 1987, after years of watching her grandchildren drum their fingers to MTV. After spending twenty-five years in prison, Machine Gun Kelly’s widow died in Tulsa in 1985. There remain people alive today who crouched behind teller cages as Dillinger robbed their neighborhood bank, who watched as Bonnie and Clyde shot innocent sheriffs, who tossed baseballs with Baby Face Nelson. Kelly and Floyd gave birth to children who still tell their parents’ stories.

They were the bogeymen for the children who have become known as The Greatest Generation. In the spring of 1933, when men like John Dillinger were ascending the national stage, a twenty-two-year-old named Ronald Reagan was broadcasting college baseball games on WHO radio in Des Moines, twenty-year-old Richard Nixon was acting in plays at Whittier College in Southern California, while a pair of third graders, James Earl Carter in Plains, Georgia, and George Herbert Walker Bush in Greenwich, Connecticut, were learning multiplication tables. At high school dances in Hoboken, New Jersey, girls were swooning to a seventeen-year-old crooner named Francis Sinatra. At a house on Judson Avenue in Evanston, Illinois, a hyperactive nine-year-old named Marlon Brando was learning to box.

Yet as these and other members of that generation pass from the scene, it is difficult to imagine a time when name-brand outlaws stalked twentieth-century America. In a world of pocket telephones, Internet shopping, and laser-guided bombs, the notion of marauding gangs of bank robbers wreaking havoc across the country is almost too outlandish to grasp, a story one might hear of the Wild West. But it wasn’t the Wild West. It was America in 1933, eight years before Pearl Harbor, twelve years before Hiroshima, twenty-three years before Elvis, thirty-six before Woodstock. For all the surface contrasts—there was no Internet,