Bonnie and Clyde: Depression-Era Crime as Economic Revolt

Introduction: The Legend and Its Roots

What accounts for the persistence of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde? For two not particularly distinguished criminals from a bygone era in American history, the staying power of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in the collective consciousness is nothing short of remarkable. In part, the media has played a substantial role: the epochal 1967 Arthur Penn film was succeeded in 2013 by a television miniseries about the duo and their gang. Yet an examination of the historical source material suggests that the reason for Bonnie and Clyde's persistence can be explained in one single word: economics.

What Bonnie and Clyde signify for later generations of interested readers is a response — however criminal — on the part of ordinary people to the Great Depression that defined America during the presidency of Herbert Hoover. Although certain other aspects of their short career — particularly their reliance on automobiles to commit their crimes, in a decade when the automobile was a more or less new national phenomenon — may play a role in maintaining their fame long after their deaths, it is as a symbol of economic revolt that their story finds its ultimate resonance. In an era when the overall economy must have seemed perpetrated by criminals operating on a far grander scale than these Texas youths, their narrative carries a power that transcends mere notoriety.

Economic Backgrounds of Bonnie and Clyde

It is worth noting that the economic circumstances of both Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were not extraordinarily deprived. They both came from what would best be understood as lower-middle-class backgrounds. Although America was widely understood to have experienced an economic boom in the immediate aftermath of World War One, that prosperity would prove short-lived. One aspect of the brief boom — the sudden ubiquity of the automobile — was responsible for what little financial footing the Barrow family was able to maintain. As Phillip Steele writes in his biographical study of the Barrow family, written in consultation with Clyde Barrow's youngest sister:

"Henry Barrow, with financial help from his daughter Nell, managed to acquire a small frame home for his family near the campground. Soon afterward, Clyde helped his father convert the front part of the home into a gas station and garage, while they kept the back apartment for their living area. Recognizing Clyde's natural ability for repairing and servicing automobiles, Henry encouraged his son to help him develop a successful business. This offered Clyde his first opportunity to 'own' his own business, and at the same time help his parents, brothers, and sisters establish roots and better survive the seemingly endless depression." (Steele 33–34)

The fact that automobiles would become crucial to the methodology of Clyde Barrow's criminal activity is therefore not accidental: he was essentially part of the founding generation of American car mechanics. The difficulty was that he was repairing and servicing vehicles in Texas, a state that would be particularly devastated by the economic crisis of the 1930s for a variety of compounding reasons.

The Great Depression and the Collapse of Rural Economies

By the time Bonnie Parker first met Clyde Barrow in early 1930, both had been badly affected by the Great Depression. Schneider notes that, although Bonnie Parker had previously found work as a waitress, by the time she met Barrow — at the age of nineteen — she was once again unemployed: "'[Bonnie Parker] lost her job, and she came to my beauty shop looking for work,' says Artie, who unfortunately has no work to offer her little brother's girlfriend. 'She was just another of those Depression kids like Clyde.' Bonnie is between jobs in an economy with unemployment at 20% and heading up." (Schneider 119)

Barrow's circumstances were similarly a reflection of the overall economic climate — and in particular the devastation that swept Texas and the surrounding regions as the Great Depression combined with the Dust Bowl to essentially collapse local economies. As Jeff Guinn writes in his study of the pair, after Barrow had lost his work at the family service station:

"[Barrow] began job hunting at a time when the state and local economies were at their lowest point yet. Particularly in the South and Southwest, 1931 had been financially devastating. Cotton prices dropped to four cents a pound. The year's wheat crop set a record of 250 million bushels, but the twenty-five-cent sales price of each bushel was half of what it cost the farmer to grow it. Banks had no choice but to foreclose on farms, and then the government began its own stream of farm foreclosures for failure to pay taxes. An average of twenty thousand farms across America failed each month. Destitute families abandoned the country for cities that had no jobs or shelter to offer them. Like every major city in the region, Dallas was inundated with new desperate residents." (Guinn 83)

This is crucial to understand within the context of American history, because the agrarian lifestyle — with its modest profits but proud self-sufficiency — had always been held up as something of an American ideal. The economic panics and setbacks of the late nineteenth century had previously dealt a sharp blow to America's more rural states, but in those decades there had been an organized political response in the form of Populism. A political response seemed almost beside the point amid the desperation of the Great Depression. In this climate, banks must have seemed like the real enemy of the people. The fact that Bonnie and Clyde turned to robbery might therefore be seen as a small-scale expression of revolt — a kind of desperate nihilism on the part of a generation that would never see sunnier economic prospects.

Works Cited

Barrow, Blanche Caldwell. My Life with Bonnie and Clyde. Ed. John Neal Phillips. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Print.

Guinn, Jeff. Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. Print.

Phillips, John Neal. Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Print.

Schneider, Paul. Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. Print.

Steele, Phillip. The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Pelican Publishing, 2000. Print.