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Early Life
Born on October 24, 1903, Melvin Purvis, Jr. grew up in a tobacco town in South Carolina and several relatives had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, so he was immersed in Southern values. One of his favorite pastimes as a youth was riding and hunting, although he admitted that he was not a particularly good shot.
After graduating from law school, Purvis joined the only law firm near his family’s home and fell in love with the Rosanne Wilcox, the daughter of the firm’s founder. Although his family was better off than her family, he himself did not have a good enough salary to provide for a wife. While he found working in a law firm to be incredibly monotonous, the desire to improve his finances was undoubtedly a factor in his decision to pursue a career in Washington, D.C. Unwilling to wait, Rosanne married an executive with Standard Oil soon after he left.

After learning that the State Department, his first choice, had no openings, he followed the advice of his local congressman, and applied to enter the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, since as a relatively new and unknown agency, his chances were greater. Despite letters of recommendation from a congressman and a senator he was not immediately hired but an agent was sent to interview Purvis’s friends and colleagues. A favorable report was followed by an interview with a senior agent, who was sufficiently impressed to recommend him even though he was two years below the minimum age limit. This was largely due to good timing, since the Bureau of Investigation had a well-deserved reputation for corruption, and newly appointed director J. Edgar Hoover was cutting out the deadwood that he had inherited in order to build a more professional department made up of clean cut lawyers.

Since agents were never considered to be off-duty, they were expected to work incredibly long hours and be available at a moment’s notice to go to another city. Despite the lack of down time, Purvis embraced the lifestyle and soon earned the trust of his superiors. In fact, he had so much confidence that his first superior felt that it was his only weakness.

Deciding that he had leadership potential, Hoover transferred him to a series of field offices, where he continued to receive glowing personal evaluations. Three years after joining the Bureau, Purvis was appointed second-in-charge of the Cincinnati field office and he became the youngest Special Agent in charge of an office at age 27. The next two years were spent as special agent in charge of several field offices in order to gain further experience. Despite a deep and genuine loyalty to the Bureau, he had little patience for Hoover’s obsession with punctuality and strict attention to paperwork. However, this was not enough to prevent Hoover from giving Purvis the most challenging assignment in the Bureau, head of the office in Chicago, famous nationwide for its underworld and corruption.

Although Purvis was young, he had resisted Hoover’s pressure to fit a pre-existing mold, while his limitless energy and Southern charm made him stand out among the other agents. After Purvis was assigned to Chicago in 1932, he and Hoover cultivated a close friendship through a constant stream of letters and memos. Purvis had been groomed for a position of responsibility, but his experience was primarily with white collar crime, which did not prepare him for the challenge of dealing with career criminals. Realizing that he was unaware of the rampant corruption in city hall and the Chicago police force, Al Capone was able to use contacts in the prosecutor’s office to frame rival gangster Roger Touhy for the kidnappings of William Hamm and Jake Factor. Purvis had no idea that the chief investigator for the prosecutor was connected to Capone’s gang. Touhy and three friends were sent to prison on November 28, 1933 but later events showed that they were innocent of both crimes. Hamm had been kidnapped by the Karpis-Barker Gang and Factor had faked his own kidnapping.

Public Enemy Era
On June 17, 1933, an FBI agent and three law enforcement officers were killed in Kansas City during a bungled attempt to free captured bank robber Frank Nash. Angered by the death of one his agents, Hoover made solving the case the Bureau’s top priority. At the same time, the bank robbing sprees of Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were receiving national attention, while a series of celebrity kidnappings had led to calls for a federal police force. Nearly two weeks later, Attorney General Homer Cummings declared War on Crime in an effort to build support for the Justice Department. As part of the war, the previously unarmed agents were issued with sidearms, although the Bureau did not participate in the hunt for the bank robbers since robbing a bank was not a federal crime.

By late June, bank robber Verne Miller was the chief suspect in the Kansas City Massacre but his accomplices were unknown. Purvis became involved in the case when Miller’s girlfriend was found living in Chicago, and the apartment where she was staying was staked out in the hope that he would appear. Since the Bureau did not actually have a picture of Miller, a secretary and an agent who had met Miller before were assigned to the stakeout but had only seconds to signal the other agents when he did appear in late October. Poor coordination enabled him to escape in a hail of gunfire, while his girlfriend refused to cooperate. In addition, in the confusion of following up leads and supervising stakeouts, Purvis had failed to send agents to a known hangout of Machine Gun Kelly, wanted for the kidnapping of Oklahoma City oilman Charles Urschel, allowing him to slip away.

Although he had racked up other successes, a carefully planned trap to capture notorious bank robber John Dillinger only netted Billie Frechette, his girlfriend, on April 9, 1934, which damaged his image with Hoover. When the frightened owner of the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin contacted the Bureau to say that Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and the rest of their gang were staying at his lodge, Purvis took charge of the operation on April 22. Although he managed the difficult task of assembling agents in a remote location, the knowledge that the gangsters planned to leave that evening meant there was only time for a hastily prepared plan. In the end, the inexperienced agents fired on the wrong car, killing an innocent man and warning the outlaws, who escaped from the rear of the lodge in the darkness, leaving two girlfriends and a wife behind. The agents spent the night shivering and waiting for dawn’s light to storm the lodge. The gangsters made their way through the roadblocks set up by the local police but an agent was killed by Nelson.

The humiliating failure of the raid on the lodge at Little Bohemia led to calls for Purvis to quit. In fact, he did offer to resign but Hoover refused to accept the resignation since it would have been an admission of fault in giving him the position in the first place. Furthermore, none of the men who participated in the raid ever publicly criticized Purvis. A lack of manpower made it impossible to maintain round the clock surveillance of the three women captured at Little Bohemia, so the Bureau’s last lead disappeared when they vanished on May 31.

Additional setbacks and leaks to newspapers did not give Hoover the impression that Purvis was on top of matters. Veteran agent Sam Cowley was sent to Chicago to inspect the situation and when his report reached Hoover, Cowley was assigned to replace Purvis, although the agents still remained loyal to Purvis, who was technically still in charge. While the manner in which authority was taken away from Purvis was neither respectful nor efficient, he had been groomed for a leadership position because he had always radiated confidence that he could handle any problem, therefore it should not be surprising that Hoover expected him to live up to his image.

Following a tip from Anna Sage, a former madam faced with deportation, Dillinger was finally tracked down and killed when leaving the Biograph Theater. When Purvis admitted that he was nervous when waiting for Dillinger outside the Biograph because he was worried about disappointing Hoover and that innocent bystanders would be killed in a shootout, the press nicknamed him “Nervous Purvis.” However, the assistant attorney general arranged for Attorney General Homer Cummings to hold a press conference in Chicago where he publicly congratulated Purvis for the success. Despite the national attention given to the hunt for Dillinger, no one expected the massive fixation with his death or that Purvis would become a celebrity. Given the bleak lives led by most people during the Depression it should not have come as a surprise that people needed some form of good news to give them hope and there were very few positive stories. While it is unclear who really was in charge, Cowley or Purvis, the dapper, stylish Purvis was undoubtedly a better choice for the press, especially since he was still nominally in charge of the Chicago office. Purvis was blamed for the situation because Hoover wanted the Bureau as a whole to receive the credit but the media needed a face and he fit the mold.

Whether Hoover was simply jealous of Purvis’ easy charm or irritated that he was hogging the glory is unknown, but it soon became clear that he was not happy. Moreover, Hoover continued to believe that the Bureau’s scientific methods were the key to success and public acknowledgement of the use of informants like Sage would have contradicted that image. Hoover tried to replace Purvis with Cowley as the public face of the bureau in Chicago but Cowley lacked Purvis’ skill at dealing with reporters. However, Hoover kept Cowley in charge of Chicago’s major cases without officially demoting or replacing Purvis. Basically, Cowley was supposed to represent Hoover without playing a role in the actual chain of command. This treatment was undoubtedly petty and harsh but it was not uncommon. Every Bureau employee, even Associate Director Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s special friend, routinely had to put up with unwarranted criticism from Hoover.

Purvis was in Cincinnati investigating a kidnapping when he received word that Adam Richetti, Pretty Boy Floyd’s partner, had been captured by Sheriff John Fultz in Wellsville, Ohio on October 20. The Bureau had been hunting Floyd since the Kansas City Massacre, so this was momentous news. He called in FBI agents from several different offices and tried to take charge of the investigation, but Sheriff Fultz had little interest in cooperating with the Bureau. He even refused to hand over Richetti since he had fired at the sheriff, so he would be prosecuted locally. Purvis was furious but had no jurisdiction. The situation was not helped by Sheriff Fultz’s desire for media attention and unwillingness to let agents conduct a proper interrogation of Richetti. Hoover had put Purvis in charge of the operation, so when Cowley arrived a day later, Purvis decided to let him deal with the sheriff while he continued to hunt Floyd.

After a great deal of searching, agents found witnesses who had seen Floyd at nearby East Liverpool in the past few hours. Purvis collected several agents and called Chief H. J. McDermott, the police chief of the area, who brought several officers. They finally found Floyd as he was just about to get a lift from a farmer, and when he tried to escape by running across a field, he did not even fire his weapon, even though it would have brought him more time. Three of the roughly hundred bullets fired by the eight men found their target. Badly wounded, Floyd was unable to prevent the officers from taking his guns away. Although willing to admit his identity, attempts to press Floyd about the Kansas City Massacre produced the response “Fuck you. I’m through. You have got me twice.” Floyd died before an ambulance could arrive.

While people were lining up to see Floyd’s body in the coroner’s office, Hoover was trying to ensure that only the Bureau got credit. The press immediately decided that Purvis had killed Floyd, although Purvis dutifully gave credit to the Bureau and Hoover. In fact, Purvis refused to allow the bullets from Floyd’s body to be matched against the agents’ guns in order to ensure that no one got credit. Even so, Hoover forced him to take a week off, to keep him away from the press. However, when the press learned of Purvis’ involvement in the killing he was made the hero. His repeated assurances that he had no interest in fame did not reassure Hoover, whose friendly attitude towards Purvis cooled rapidly. In fact, he refused to cooperate with requests from the press for more information about Purvis, even though this weakened the FBI’s campaign to improve its public image. Hoover claimed that shining a spotlight on one agent would feed jealousy but the only agent on record criticizing Purvis was Hoover. Seeking an excuse to sideline him, Hoover ordered a standard inspection of the Chicago office, and since Purvis was the first to admit that he was not the most efficient administrator, the numerous violations of Hoover’s admittedly anal regulations gave him what he needed. Given Purvis’ track record and the fact that he had been out of the office hunting Floyd and then on leave, he should have only received a warning.

When agents sighted Baby Face Nelson near Chicago on November 27, Cowley mobilized every agent in the area but chose to leave Purvis behind in the office, even though he had been on numerous stakeouts and chases, while Cowley had spent his career behind a desk. It is unknown whether Hoover had ordered him directly to not involve Purvis in any more high profile cases. When Cowley was fatally wounded in a shootout with Nelson, Hoover instructed Purvis to manage the chase for Nelson and give no interviews to the press. He also arranged for Earl Connelly, the head of the Cincinnati office, to take over at Chicago. The sight of Cowley’s wife crying at her husband’s bedside drove Hoover’s instructions from his mind and Purvis told a nearby reporter “If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get Baby Face Nelson-dead or alive.” Hoover was furious when he learned of Purvis’ statement and ordered him to stay at home despite the plea of Inspector Hugh Clegg that Purvis was too experienced to be left out of the chase. Connelly was given authority over the main cases but there was no public mention of Purvis’ demotion. By that time, he was one of the most popular men in the country, eclipsing Hoover.

Once the Chicago office had been given to Connelly, Purvis was assigned low level administrative and personnel tasks. Even so, he led the group that caught Volney Davis, a member of the Karpis-Barker gang, on June 1, 1935.

In April 1935, Hoover organized a shake-up of the FBI where fifteen agents-in-charge were transferred to other offices. Purvis was the only one who was transferred to a smaller office, Charlotte, North Carolina. By this time, even Purvis could read the writing on the wall and he resigned on July 10, although he refused to confirm reporters’ suggestions that his resignation was due to Hoover’s pressure. Still, the resignation made national headlines despite Hoover’s efforts to downplay the issue. People naturally wondered why an agent at the height of his career and fame would suddenly resign without reason. However, Hoover made use of friendly reporters, such as Walter Winchell, to present the resignation as an amicable separation, successfully portraying the move as being motivated by the desire for a higher salary. At the same time, agents were instructed to keep tabs on Purvis to ensure that he did not attack the Bureau or Hoover now that he was outside the organization.

Post FBI Career
Hoover’s fears proved unfounded but Purvis did embrace his fame. He wrote a series of articles about his time with the Bureau for Redbook magazine, which were quickly expanded into the book American Agent. However, he became increasingly reluctant to discuss his experiences with the Bureau in public. This reluctance did not prevent him from endorsing products such as Gillette razors and Post Toasties Cereal, which formed the Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man Club. The club strengthened the popularity of both Purvis and the FBI but Hoover did not express any gratitude. Offers from Hollywood poured in, he moved in the same social circles as movie stars, and he even became engaged to Janice Jarrett, a famous advertising model best known as the Lucky Strike Girl. Around the same time, he decided to return to his original career and opened a law practice in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Hoover had agreed to let NBC produce a series of radio shows about the Bureau’s hunt for the Public Enemies on the condition that a writer who understood Hoover’s viewpoint would produce the show’s scripts. The first episode focused on John Dillinger and erased Anna Sage’s involvement, while Purvis was replaced by Cowley, since his death in the line of fire meant that he could not contradict Hoover. The approach proved effective and all FBI approved material in the future would completely ignore Purvis’ role. Furthermore, FBI records show that Purvis was kept under surveillance until his death and agents soon learned that providing Hoover with negative information about Purvis was an excellent way to win his approval. Hoover also discouraged studios from hiring Purvis as a technical advisor and persuaded them to accept a current agent instead, using the promise of his personal cooperation as an added incentive. He also offered his agents to speak for free at lectures where the organizers were considering Purvis.

Purvis and Jarrett were planning to marry in April 1937 but he called it off a couple of days before the wedding. The next January, he ran into his old flame Rosanne and they married a month after she divorced her husband. The newlyweds returned to the town where they had grown up and built a mansion. He had hoped to become head of a new state police force but the local sheriffs felt that his fame would make it difficult to deal with him. Frustrated, Purvis opened a small newspaper but he lacked the financial resources to make the paper a viable entity, especially since the market was not large enough for two papers. An attempt to win an appointment as a judge was blocked by Hoover. Although he had no concrete evidence at the time, Purvis tried repeatedly to talk with Hoover to determine if his suspicions were correct but Hoover refused to meet him. He finally invested in a radio station and gave himself an impressive office, where he would entertain celebrity struck visitors.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Purvis enlisted even though he was married with a young son. Although Hoover did not block the commission, his refusal to recommend Purvis ensured that he was unable to enter military intelligence as planned. Instead, he had to settle for the rank of major in the Provost Marshal’s Office, where he directed officer training until he finally wrangled a transfer to the army in North Africa, becoming a lieutenant colonel and deputy provost marshal general of the European Theater by early 1944. Although Purvis was honorably discharged as a colonel and his service was commended by the Judge Advocate General, Hoover remained fixed in his view that Purvis was a threat to the FBI. While his wartime records disappeared in a fire, it is known that Purvis had assisted with the establishment of the protocols for the Nuremberg trials.

Purvis’ second son was born while he was in North Africa and his first son grew up a little wild without his guidance. Purvis returned home to a house filled with servants, many of whom were descendents of slaves that had belonged to either his family or his wife’s family and had chosen to remain after being granted freedom. However, he refused to allow his servants to be treated as second class citizens despite segregation. The huge mansion enabled Purvis to indulge his passion for horses and collecting guns, so much of his free time was spent riding, hunting or cleaning guns.

Although he told his children stories of his exploits during the Public Enemy Era, he only revealed snippets and highlights, as if the experience was a bitter memory. Certainly, his life turned darker as he got older. Both he and his wife drank heavily during the 1950s and Purvis suffered from chronic depression to such a degree that he even accepted shock therapy, while his relationship with his teenage sons worsened steadily. Meanwhile, Hoover’s hatred for Purvis was as strong as ever, and Purvis knew that Hoover was using the FBI to sabotage every job opportunity. At the same time, severe back pain forced him to take morphine and he suffered from a sleeping disorder. Late in 1959, news that a close friend who had also experienced relentless surveillance and harassment from Hoover had committed suicide was a harsh blow.

Death
On February 29, 1960 Purvis died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. When the news reached Hoover, he had the Bureau release a statement that Purvis had committed suicide, even though the autopsy and coroner’s report had not been completed. Understandably, Purvis’ death shattered his family. Hoover refused to send an official delegation to the funeral but a number of agents, both active and retired, attended the funeral. Rosanne sent Hoover a telegram thanking him for ignoring Purvis’ death and stating that her husband had still loved Hoover until he died.

Debate over cause of death
The jurors at the coroner’s inquest were unable to conclude whether or not Purvis had deliberately shot himself, only that the wound was self-inflicted. The argument that it was an accident is supported by the fact that an experienced shooter would have put the gun next to his temple or in his mouth, not under the jaw as Purvis had. In addition, the gun in his hand was to be lent to a friend to be displayed at a gun show and he was going to clean it first. His son has admitted that he and a friend had used the gun a week before and had not cleaned it, so there could have been a bullet left inside. Weakened by a bad case of Asian flu and limping because a horse had stepped on his foot the previous day, he might have stumbled and shot himself. However, suicide can not be ruled out because the family physician admitted that Purvis had been extremely depressed for weeks because of back pain and insomnia.

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Related Movies:

Dillinger (1945)
Directed by Max Nosseck, starring Lawrence Tierney and Anne Jeffreys
It shows the rise of John Dillinger from petty criminal to bank robber and finally Public Enemy Number One. (please click here to read the review)
Dillinger (1973)
Directed by John Milius, starring Warren Oates and Ben Johnson
Following the death of several FBI agents during the Kansas City Massacre, FBI agent Melvin Purvis vows to capture or kill a number of famous outlaws including Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger. (please click here to read the review)
The Lady in Red (1979)
Directed by Lewis Teague, starring Robert Conrad and Pamela Sue Martin
While hiding in Chicago, Dillinger starts a relationship with Polly Hamilton, a sometime prostitute looking for a better life.
Public Enemies (2009)
Directed by Michael Mann, starring Johhny Depp and Christian Bale
Led by Melvin Purvis, the FBI pursues notorious outlaw John Dillinger during the Public Enemy Era. (please click here to read the review)

Further Reading:

The Vendetta: FBI Hero Melvin Purvis’s War Against Crime, and J. Edgar Hoover’s War Against Him-Alston Purvis and Alex Tresniowski, New York: Public Affairs, 2005.

The son of Melvin Purvis, Alston Purvis has produced a good examination of his father's life, although its value is limited by the fact that it is very clearly a son’s book about his father, rather than an attempt to present an impartial examination of Melvin Purvis. Furthermore, it depends far too much on Doris Rogers’ memories of the situation. While she was Purvis’ secretary, a hundred people worked in the Chicago office, so relying so heavily on a single source is inefficient. While the book provides an in-depth viewpoint of Purvis and it explores Hoover’s vendetta in greater detail than other books, the main source for the Public Enemy Era remains Public Enemies.

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Bryan Burrough, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

The author grew up listening to stories about Bonnie and Clyde, and decided to write the book because there was no single history of that period, partially because the FBI files had only been released in the late 1980s. His access to previously sealed FBI files means that the story is as much about the evolution of the FBI as it is about the gangsters themselves. It is a superb, one-stop look at that brief period where outlaws seemed to roam free. Ignoring the easy approach of dividing the book into several sections that focus on individual gangs, the story is told in chronological order, which might appear confusing to some readers but serves to show how interrelated the events were. Most of the gangs knew each other and their paths crossed more frequently than I would have thought, which may help to explain why the FBI was so confused in the beginning. Burrough’s attention to detail is impressive, he shows what happened to the main FBI agents, the surviving outlaws who ended up in prison, and their various girlfriends and accomplices. What is odd is that once the War on Crime was over, no one really talked about it. The agents rarely told their families, while the families of the outlaws often preferred to move forward and leave their tainted past behind them.

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