As scholar Richard Gid Powers notes, "a formula adapts the universal myth to the national experience so that national history might be understood as an instance of the eternal struggle between good and evil." The FBI and its agents became potent forces in this eternal struggle as it played out in American popular culture.
The FBI gained power and popular notoriety during the gangster era of the 1920s and 1930s. This era was characterized by a general sense of lawlessness accompanying the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting the use of alcohol as well as the despair and fear brought about by the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. Organized crime became increasingly visible because of its involvement in the production and distribution of illegal alcohol. Americans felt that they were witnessing illegal activity with increasing frequency and that criminals were lurking on every corner. The famous kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant son and the crimes of the legendary gangster Al Capone captured Americans' imaginations and they demanded revenge. Powers explained that the American public feared that this seeming crime explosion was undermining the country's moral base.
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