Pretty Boy Floyd: The Bank Robber Oklahoma Mourned as a Hero

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In 1934 an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people crowded into Sallisaw, Oklahoma, for the largest funeral in the state's history. The man in the casket was a bank robber. Charles Arthur Floyd, better known as Pretty Boy Floyd, began at 18 by stealing $3.50 from a post office and ended as Public Enemy Number One, shot dead in an Ohio cornfield with a pocket watch bearing ten notches. This episode peels the folklore away from the record to ask how a violent outlaw became a working class hero of the Great Depression.

Prison was his education. After a 1925 payroll heist in St. Louis he served about three and a half years in the Missouri State Penitentiary, then joined the Kansas City underworld. Rumor held that he burned mortgage papers during robberies to free poor farmers from debt, a claim with no confirmed evidence, yet locals sheltered him even as lawmen died. Then J. Edgar Hoover tied him to the Kansas City massacre of June 1933, and the full weight of the federal government came down on him.

• Floyd hated his nickname, which came either from the white dress shirts he wore in the oil fields or from a robbery victim's description of his apple cheeks.
• A 2002 ballistics analysis suggests some lawmen killed at Union Station may have been hit by friendly fire, and Floyd denied involvement in a postcard to police.
• His final run began when his car slid off a foggy road and hit a telephone pole, and a passing motorist reported two men in fine suits hiding nearby.
• The FBI said Floyd fell in a clean shootout, but in 1979 retired police captain Chester Smith claimed Melvin Purvis ordered the wounded man shot.
• Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him in 1939, the same year John Steinbeck had Ma Joad defend him in The Grapes of Wrath.