Some Americans lauded the 30-year-old bank robber as a Robin Hood-esque folk hero. Others castigated him as a violent criminal whose misdeeds were emblematic of the troubled era

October 22, 2026 7:45 a.m.

Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd was a Depression-era outlaw who earned the title of the nation's "public enemy No. 1." Illustration by Meilan Solly / Images via Bettmann / Getty Images and Newspapers.com

It was October 22, 1934. The late afternoon sun baked the Ohio cornfield in a wash of orange and red—an earthly premonition of the bloodshed soon to come. A volley of gunshots cut through the usual autumn quiet as a man in a mud-stained blue suit dashed through the tree line, a group of officers on his tail. Suddenly, he fell.

As the officers approached the man, he looked up at them in shock.

“I’m done for,” he said . “You’ve hit me twice.”

And then—silence. Thirty-year-old Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd , America’s public enemy No.…