The Tartan

There’s a story, preached to us by every aspect of this country. To most, it’s called “The American Dream,” a testament to the desire of the people who came to this country to turn what they had into something worthwhile. Yes, I’m handwaving. Yes, I’m oversimplifying. But America was sold to the world — sold to us — as a place where you could make something of yourself no matter what you had, whether it was a few crumpled bills or an assortment of rusted change. You — yes you, and anyone else, could take nothing, scraps, waste, refuse, name it whatever you want, and mold it into something great. It was a rejection of the ancient proverb: from nothing comes nothing, “ex nihilo nihil fit.” But it embraces the idea that nothing could bring about something. From nothing, one could somehow get everything. Ex nihilo, omnia.

It’s ingrained into the concept of America, it’s an immutable part of the psyche of this country, something people still debate and discuss. The American Dream is what so many of us want or have wanted. It’s the rags-to-riches story that has been popularized over and over again, regardless of place or time. People feel some sort of kinship to the underdog who somehow turns their lot in life into something so much greater, who makes a name for themself, by any means necessary, in this dog-eat-dog world. 

Well, by “any” means, as long as we can romanticize a little bit.

If you’ll let me, I want to tell you a story.

It’s 1921, and a young man slowly descends on the ladder from the boat he’s spent the last few weeks on. The trip had been cramped, uncomfortable, and sickening, and he’d spent half of it holding back nausea and the other half trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life when he finally made it off this sea-prison. His feet hit the ground, and for the first time in his life, he stands in the United States of America.

He’s part of a wave, nearly half a million strong, the last of the great waves to make it to Ellis Island before the U.S. decided to slow immigration down from fear of foreigners. He’s from Ireland, Italy, or Poland, or somewhere else in Europe, looking, praying, hoping, for a new life.

A young man steps into the arms of the immigration officers at Ellis Island; he’s stripped of his humanity; he’s classified and categorized, his flaws recorded carefully, his entire worth being weighed to decide if he can become an American. His name is butchered by some Iowa-raised officer, who somehow made it this far out east with just a few bills in his pocket. He may have to change it. He shudders at the thought.

It’s 1926, and the young man is not so young anymore. He’s spent his life shuffling between odd jobs, an immigrant stuck in a hostile world that still doesn’t consider him fully human. He curses his name, unchanged after all these years, his face, his demeanor. But he curses his fellow Americans — are they really his peers? Do they consider him one of them? This was a land of opportunity, and he saw none of it. 

It’s 1929. The young man stands outside the bank, waiting for whatever’s left after the rushes end. He has watched his entire life turn to ash in the fires of the New York Stock Exchange, as the United States teeters on the brink of disaster. He watches as people run to get their money and leave empty handed. There used to be hope in those eyes, life in those eyes. He reminisces of his home country in the throes of its own chaos, with its own problems, and wonders if he really hated those problems that much. That grass had never been greener.

It’s 1931. The man has aged a decade in two years, barely able to keep his house and home. His family works odd-jobs as he moves from career to career trying to keep food on the table. He’s kept himself out of a Hooverville, rotting among those who couldn’t find a new job, steady pay, or who couldn’t make a payment. There are ads for a movie — “The Public Enemy.” It looks interesting, but he doesn’t have time for movies. And besides, he can’t go with his family, this one doesn’t look like it’d be good for the young ones.

He goes anyway, one weekend, slightly drunk with the last of his paycheck. He’s looking for an escape.

And he finds it, on the silver screen. 

“The Public Enemy” is a movie from which a genre was born. It was such a simple idea — the story of the villains, the mobsters, the gangs that were running in the undercurrent of America. It’s the story of young friends scurrying outside of the law and making it big. Making it so big, even, that they can’t hide from their enemies anymore.

It’s the story of a man being rejected by his family. It’s the story of a pair of friends flying so high with friends in such low places, that it eventually ends in their deaths; gunned down, one by one; killed for their mistakes, for their belief they could make something of themselves. The movie’s last scene is haunting — the brutalized body of Tom Powers, our principal hero, tied up and propped on the door to his family’s house. He’s been killed by his rivals and they’ve left him, unceremoniously, as a reminder. The movie fades out and tells the audience that there’s nothing good about Tom Powers. It’s there, white font on a black background, an ending card telling you what you really ought to think. That Tom Powers? He’s a problem, a sin, a side effect of a society struck by the deep rooted problems that have been gnawing away at America.

I don’t think a single person who watched the ending of “The Public Enemy” cared about that ending card. I don’t think a single one sat down and thought about how Tom Powers died. They were too busy thinking about how Tom Powers lived.

Because he did. He lived life to its fullest. He lost his family, sure, but he made amends. He made a life for himself. He got his revenge. He died, sure, but we’re all going to die — he died for something that made a damn difference. 

It’s not hard to see why “The Public Enemy” was so important to people like that young man from somewhere in Europe, and for the millions of immigrants and children of immigrants that now filled the U.S. They were seeing the American Dream play out on the screen in front of them, even if that dream had a little more crime than the stories of Ben Franklin did in their previous iteration. But the gangster flick was a representation of staking your own claim, making a name for yourself, fighting against what you were told to do and told to think about. It was a rejection of norms and rules. 

It resonated with America. The gangster flick was an ode to our hearts, an ode to the people unheard, an ode to making something great in the rubble. 

It was interesting how the genre paralleled the plots. It was in the opening acts of the 1930s, the dog days of Prohibition, that the gangster flick became one of the most popular genres in the U.S., rising to its peak from nothing. Everyone knew who the gangster was, and briefly, momentarily, they respected them and loved them. We saw ourselves among the gangsters — we saw them as people to look up to, if you put their moral failures aside. They were iconic. They were what we wished we could be, if only we could cast off the shackles of morality and legality that bound us to our normal lives.

What was interesting, and what “The Public Enemy” did that was important, was letting Tom die at the hands of a rival gang, not at the hands of the police, or troops, or the government. In fact, the government couldn’t touch him — which played so well to the sentimentalities of an American public watching the Hoover administration fail in the face of the Great Depression over and over again. 

This ode to the great American dream, this ode to breaking out of society and making a name for yourself, ran afoul of the Production Code, the self-imposed content restrictions followed by major film studios. The violence was gratuitous, the sex excessive, and the stories scandalous. But “Anything Goes”, shouted Cole Porter, shouted the Studios almighty, shouted America.

Unfortunately, the gangster films, much like their protagonists, burned too hot and shone too bright. Soon, there were eyes on them; eyes they’d rather not have. There were eyes they could handle — religious groups who had just now discovered that they put violence on screens had always been up in arms about it all. But sooner or later, there was a certain governmental flavor to the watchful eyes on cinema. There was a study: violent criminals were raised on the gangster film. There was a reaction: groups from Roman Catholic bishops to the Association of Chiefs of Police were outraged. There was a scramble. In that scramble, the gangster in its purest form was killed. It was shot down, and in the flurry to save their hides, the gangster was martyred.

The parallels to the plots are, I promise, only a little forced, but the tragedy is not. Killing the gangster was a call that came in from Hollywood to save themselves from censors. They enforced the Production Code because Hollywood had no intent of being actually, genuinely censored. So they were a little censored. Just enough.

In its place stepped the cop flick — a genre which was the gangster inverted. Now, we were the cops, breaking out of the system, trying to put together the clues, working on the edge, constantly, to solve a case. We were watching the Feds make their raids, the bank-robbers and moon-shiners and mobsters of yesteryear shot down against the slow march of justice. It coincided with the New Deal coming into play, an injection of wealth and hope and optimism in a country that had lost almost all of it. It was the resounding return of Law and Order, of Justice and Morality, of Good in the face of Evil, in the face of the mob, of organized crime, of the parts of your cities you didn’t visit or the shops you tried not to frequent.

The Fed Movie existed in the face of Tom Powers, and the American Dream. Not the American Dream that glittered and sparkled in the light, the diamond we sold to the rest of the world, but the one that had grown in the underbelly of the New American City. 

But it worked. At least, until it didn’t. Until the British, in their own moral panic, told us that the cops hunting the criminals were just as violent as the criminals themselves. Well, pack it up. The gangster may be dead, and we’re burying the cop flick in the same grave.

It was approximately here when I took a step back, decided to start editing, and decided, briefly, to take a word count. That was among my first mistakes. 

Hoo boy. I have a lot left to write about. Hi Editors 🙂 How’s it going?

Now, to prevent my kind editors from contacting the mob and putting out a hit on me because of my proclivity to write too much, I’m going to stop myself. I’m already testing the limits on how many words I can fit onto a single page, and at this point I’d rather avoid waking up with a horse’s head in my bed, which means, like every badly franchised flick out there, I’ll save the rest for a part two.