The Confidence Man

in American Culture
Professor Mary Goodwin
National Taiwan Normal University
8 November 2022
 .

The ‘confidence man’ or ‘con artist’ is thus is a play on 1) the huckster’s

own confidence in his ability to dupe others for profit, and 2) the
confidence of the ‘mark’ in the con artist. Americans love confidence!
 “

“Fraud is a phenomenon that knows no borders, but

American exceptionalism … includes a special vulnerability
to fraudsters and con artists.
Americans’ admiration for ingenuity and gumption
leaves room for opportunists. “

“Why Americans Get Conned, Again and Again”

Brooke Harrington, Atlantic Monthly July 2017
Popular Expressions in America
• Fake it until you make it
• Just Do It
• Impossible is nothing
• Just believe
• “If you can dream it, you can do it.” ―Walt Disney.
• “Trust yourself that you can do it and get it.” ―Baz
Luhrmann
The Con Man as Covert Cultural Hero

• “The discrepancies between our ideals and our conduct”

• Reviewed Work: The Confidence Man in American Literature by Gary
Lindberg
• Review by: Sanford Pinsker, The Georgia Review, Vol
. 36, No. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 454-457 https
://www.jstor.org/stable/41399748
.
Two Models for the American Dream

PT Barnum
and
Horatio Alger
P T Barnum: The Greatest Showman
Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810 –
1891) was an American showman,
businessman, and politician,
remembered for promoting
celebrated hoaxes and for founding
the Barnum and Bailey Circus with
James Bailey. He was widely
admired for his showmanship – see
2017 film “The Greatest Showman”
for the legend, but his critics
decried him for doing anything for a
buck, even deceiving people with
scams and hoaxes. He is credited
with first saying, “There’s a sucker
born every minute.”
Horatio Alger and Ragged Dick
• Horatio Alger Jr. ( 1832 – 1899) wrote novels about
poor boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to
lives of success -- based on their virtuous behavior.
• It was this “rags to riches” social model that became
popular. His YA novels share essentially the same
theme: a teenage boy improves his circumstances by
virtuous behavior such as honesty and altruism. The
boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue
someone from an overturned carriage. This brings
the boy—and his plight—to the attention of a
wealthy individual. In one story, for example, a young
boy is almost run over by a streetcar and a homeless
orphan youth snatches him out of the way to safety.
The young boy's father turns out to be wealthy and
adopts the orphan rescuer.
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
• The great Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick,
wrote this 1857 satire about deception in America.
The book takes place on a Mississippi steamboat on
April Fool’s Day where a man sneaks on board and
tricks the different passengers while assuming a
variety of guises. The man seems less interested in
how to steal money than pleasure of trickery:
“Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and
hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How
much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?”
The Dark Side of the American Dream

• Melville’s The Confidence-Man taps into

themes of optimism, morality, and trust as a
commentary on the dark side of the
American Dream.
Huckleberry Finn: The Duke and Dauphin
• In Mark Twain’s great novel, the Duke
and Dauphin are two grifters. They
initially pretend not to know each other,
and portray themselves as down-and-
out European royals in an attempt to
inspire in Huck and Jim a combination of
pity and reverence. It doesn’t take long
before Huck figures out their ruse, but
he and Jim still get swept up in their
swindling ways, as they go from town to
town, giving mediocre performances and
scamming the locals out of their money,.
Finally they plot to sell Huck’s friend Jim.
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
“Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel is a first-rate
imposter. His real name is James Gatz, and he’s
from North Dakota. His family were peasant
farmers who migrated to the northern Midwest. At
the age of 17, James Gatz changes his name to Jay
Gatsby, and does everything he can to appear as if
he’s old-money. And because he really has no
money or connections, he’s forced to become a
bootlegger to accumulate his wealth, all the while
pretending his wealth comes from honest
transactions.” Jonathan Bastian, Aspen Daily News,
Oct 14, 2011
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
by L. Frank Baum

The characters of the novel go on a

grand adventure to get the help of the
great and powerful wizard, who
appears to Dorothy as a gigantic head.
Later they find out that he isn’t a wizard
at all. He’s just an old man whose hot
air balloon crashed into the magical
kingdom.
Con Artists in Films
• The Sting (1973)
• Inception (2010)
• The Grifters (1990)
• Ocean's Eleven (2001)
• Paper Moon (1973)
• Catch Me If You Can
(2002)
• The Usual Suspects (1995)
Con Games In Business
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in
a Silicon Valley Startup
• The Wizard of Lies: Bernie
Madoff (this Ponzi scheme was the
largest known financial scam in
history)
• Billion Dollar Whale
• The Smartest Guys in the Room
“The next big thing”
“Misrepresentations are usually made possible by two factors: their
complexity and their proponents’ social craftiness. Madoff and Holmes
used both of these to their advantage. When it comes to complexity,
the basic principle is that the less people understand of an underlying
business proposition, the more vulnerable they are to being taken in by
pretenders. Schemes involving science or math have been particularly
successful because the knowledge needed to evaluate such proposals
critically is not widely distributed in the population. This makes it easy
to pass off nonsense as the next big thing. “
-- Harrington, Atlantic Monthly
The Notorious Ponzi Scheme
“In the 1920s, Charles Ponzi, newly arrived from Italy, preyed on other
immigrants through his eponymous pyramid scheme—a pattern
repeated with other immigrant groups, including those from India,
Eastern Europe, and Latin America, in the ensuing century. Immigrants,
along with people from rural areas, have long been favored targets of
fraud; as Balleisen writes, “demographic groups likely to suffer from
informational gaps” are shut out, whether willfully or accidentally, from
crucial knowledge about the world.” == Harrington, Atlantic Monthly
.
In Religion, Elmer Gantry
• Elmer Gantry is a 1960 American film
about a confidence man and a female
preacher selling religion to small-
town America. Directed by Richard
Brooks, the film is adapted from a
novel by Sinclair Lewis and stars Burt
Lancaster and Jean Simmons.
Social Scams
• My Friend Anna: The
True Story of a Fake
Heiress by Rachel
Williams, the story of a
female con artist in New
York who convinced a
lot of people that she
was a wealthy heiress.
Finally she was
sentenced to jail and
then deportation.
The “confidence” in the “confidence
game”
• The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova
taps into the psychology behind scammers
and why they succeed, revealing the
common thread amongst everyone from
Bernie Madoff to Lance Armstrong --
confidence.
• “I've seen this in play more times than I
can count in the courtroom when I was a
lawyer, completely baffled that intelligent
judges were "buying" something I knew to
be untrue all based on the confidence of
the attorney presenting the argument. “
Admiration of the Con Artist
“Analysis of con artists in American history leads
readers to a rather bleak conclusion: Americans don’t
really want cheaters and con artists punished, or driven
out of national institutions. On the contrary, the
historical record suggests that many Americans actually
admire con artists and seek to emulate them.”
-- Harrington, Atlantic Monthly
Confidence Man:
The Making
of Donald Trump
and the Breaking of
America
New analysis by New York Times
reporter Maggie Haberman,
published in 2022
The Chinese Tycoon in New York
• How a Tycoon Linked to Chinese Intelligence
Became a Darling of Trump Republicans
• Guo Wengui has been trailed by scandals
involving corruption and espionage. What is he
really after?
• The New Yorker, October 2022
• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/
2022/10/24/how-a-tycoon-linked-to-chinese-
intelligence-became-a-darling-of-trump-
republicans
The Power to Change the World
“The belief dear to so many Americans in the power of
individuals to invent something world-changing makes
room for innovators both earnest and deceitful. In
other words, in order for a Steve Jobs to find colossal
success, there must be enough credulity baked into the
culture to make room for a Bernie Madoff.”
• ==Harrington, Atlantic
Monthly
Sources and Resources
• https://www.julesbuono.com/books-about-con-artists/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/americans-c
on-fraud-balleisen/535281
/
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63125238
• https://www.looper.com/984328/the-best-con-artist-movies-ranked/
• https://crimereads.com/literatures-great-con-artists/
• https://magazine.krieger.jhu.edu/2012/11/con-men-characters-of-am
erican-literature/
• https://crimereads.com/seven-fictional-con-artists-and-the-communi
ties-they-swindled/
The Explosion of Con Artist Media
• https://time.com/6160306/con-artist-books/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/theater/tammy-faye-almeida.
html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Theat
er
• https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/03/18/first-came-the-sc
ams-then-came-the-films-and-shows-about-the-scams