1930s gangsters rule Urschel’s ‘Year of Fear’
In an America where the exploits of legendary gangsters like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly have almost entirely faded from living memory, it’s the task of earnest historians to cut through the pulp fiction and tell it like it was. The brazen bootleggers and racketeers of the 1920s and ’30s were colorful enough, but they were mainly products of their time — nasty, brutish, short-lived avatars of Prohibition, the Depression and crude capitalism.
They also were the perfect bogeymen — and women — for an underripe federal lawman named J. Edgar Hoover to chase down in his quest for glory. He may have been a creepy obsessive, but Hoover had vision. He built a potent Federal Bureau of Investigation to transcend the loose, corrupt network of local and state police who often were in cahoots with the gangsters — especially when their marquee crime was providing illegal liquor to a population that craved it.
But once Prohibition ended, and as the Depression and the Dust Bowl were instead wringing America dry, the criminal element kicked up a reign of terror, robbing banks and kidnapping rich folk for ransom. And that’s where The Year of Fear, Joe Urschel’s entertaining new history of 1933, takes off, in a wheel-spinning flurry of detail that brings the era to life.
The book chronicles the kidnapping of a tough Oklahoma oil magnate, Charles Urschel (no relation to the author), and the manhunt that ensued — a Hoover-hounded circus that distracted the nation and generated feverish headlines for weeks until the Feds triumphed and the FBI had pretty much made its bones. They trapped the dapper kidnapper, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, his fashionable fortune hunter of a wife, Kathryn, and assorted ac- complices. A lively trial was the public payoff.
Joe Urschel, a former editor at USA TODAY, carefully cites the extensive source material that bolsters the fly-on-the-wall reportage of The Year of Fear.
It’s impressive to learn how the blindfolded oil baron, plucked at gunpoint from his home while playing bridge with his wife and another couple, made remarkable mental notes of every sensory detail of his captivity.
As for Machine Gun Kelly, author Urschel draws a humorous portrait of this fabled but doomed dude. Kelly wasn’t a poor boy gone bad so much as an educated, well-spoken, middleclass lout who preferred the easy money of rum running and bank robbing to an honest living.
Despite his prowess with an automatic weapon — a trademark that his canny wife promoted to the press — he was hardly a mad dog. In releasing an unnecessary hostage from his Cadillac, Kelly made a point of leaving the man with $10 to catch a cab home. Desperate times they were, but a certain civility still ruled, and Urschel draws a subtle bead on it.