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Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934. By David E. Ruth. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. x, 190 pp. Cloth, $42.50, ISBN 0-22673217-7. Paper, S15.95, ISBN 0-226-73218-5.)
"How Al Capone Would Run This Country" was a perfectly serious article that Liberty magazine published in 1931, an interview with the Chicago mob boss on the nation's economic and cultural crises. The crime czar was also a personality worth citing in Dale Carnegie's poppsychological best seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). These items from the mass-mediated discourse on gangsters in American culture from World War I to the New Deal are among the choicest evidence bolstering David E. Ruth's contention that the gangster was constructed-"invented" is his word-not as an outsider or a deviant, but as...