American Tricksters

Thoughts on the Shadow Side of a Culture's Psyche

William J. Jackson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625647900
  9781498222501
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877330
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Tricksters are known by their deeds. Obviously not all the examples in American Tricksters are full-blown mythological tricksters like Coyote, Raven, or the Two Brothers found in Native American stories, or superhuman figures like the larger-than-life Davy Crockett of nineteenth-century tales. Newer expressions of trickiness do share some qualities with the Trickster archetype seen in myths. Rock stars who break taboos and get away with it, heroes who overcome monstrous circumstances, crafty folk who find a way to survive and thrive when the odds are against them, men making spectacles of themselves by feeding their astounding appetites in public--all have some trickster qualities. Each person, every living creature who ever faced an obstacle and needed to get around it, has found the built-in trickster impulse. Impasses turn the trickster gene on, or stimulate the trick-performing imagination--that's life. To explore the ways and means of trickster maneuvers can alert us to pitfalls, help us appreciate tricks that are entertaining, and aid us in fending off ploys which drain our resources and ruin our lives. Knowing more about the Trickster archetype in our psyches helps us be more self-aware.

1

Yesterday

Tricksters in America’s Past

Preliminary Reflections: Visionary Nation and Land of Coyote

What constitutes the essence . . . the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. . . he was made to diddle. This is his aim—his object—his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s “done.”

—Edgar Allan Poe1

In childhood we learn of the heroism involved in America’s founding. We hear of the ideals of freedom and democracy from school teachers, political candidates, and dramatic presentations. We celebrate our nation’s greatness on July 4th, Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, and Thanksgiving. We teach our children noble sentiments like Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie.” The glories of America are there for all to see in museums and historical re-enactments, on sunny baseball fields, and in our heroic attempts to solve the world’s problems. But does America have a shadow? Could it be that the “land of the brave and the home of the free,” some of whose founders were wise visionaries, is also a land of wolves and thieves2—coyotes and tricksters?

If tricksters are known by their deeds, it is undeniable that in America the actions of tricksters can be seen in great variety. They appear in a profusion of stories old and new, and in many degrees, from mild to intense, in many lives today. I believe there is a pressing need today to explore this topic anew, to call to mind some examples of tricksters we may have come to take for granted. Otherwise the figure of the trickster, who is so talented at blending in, remains hidden in the background. The trick3 at hand is to tease this exploration of trickery into existence with examples and reflections that do not just entertain us, but reveal its significance with unflinching clarity. Otherwise trickery accompanies us like an unacknowledged shadow.

What does history tell us about how America might be different from other cultures? The poet Robert Bly once suggested in a talk about betrayal4 that American Indians put trickster power in the ground. This is a symbolic way of connecting a previous era of America with traits of America today, a way of saying the First Nations, already on this soil for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, left a legacy of wisdom and lore about the trickster, and more—a trickster vibe in the earth and very air of America. Besides the traditional trickster figure in old Indian myths, there is another famous form of the trickster—the American con man. Though we acknowledge there are tricksters all around the world, we nevertheless need to ask why America might be an especially fertile breeding ground for tricky con men.

We could begin with the very name of “America.” It derives from the tag-along traveler Amerigo Vespucci, a contemporary of the voyager Columbus. Vespucci claimed to be a seasoned navigator but the report, Mundus Novus, written before his first voyage and published under his name, was a forgery. Nevertheless, it led a German mapmaker to label a vast area of land “America” in his geographical representation of the New World. Vespucci seems to have been an opportunist, a dreamer and schemer who had a gift for moving on in life each time he tried something and fell on his face, boldly reinventing himself in different phases of his career—another American trait. So “America” was an appropriate name, even if it came to be used by happenstance.5

America and Land Fraud

One form of scheming and swindling that is especially associated with America concerns land fraud. Gary Lindberg, in his classic study The Confidence Man in American Literature, suggested that America has long been a Promised Land in people’s imagination, a place where the sky is the limit for fulfilling dreams. And because hopes were so high in the New World there were many homegrown land scams intended to bilk the plentiful naive dreamers. In the nineteenth century hundreds of “land-sharks” engaged in town-site frauds between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Dunleith, Illinois. Maps and brochures showed beautiful buildings in bogus towns like “Nininger” and “Rolling Stone.”6 Victims bought land, sight unseen, packed their belongings and traveled, only to arrive at a point characterized by confusion, or find themselves seeking non-existent locations, or arriving at a parcel of land legally belonging to Native Americans. Other states, such as Tennessee and Georgia, also had their share of land fraud.

Beginning in the 1830s “Claims Clubs” were established—settlers’ associations formed mostly west of the Mississippi. Ostensibly they were designed to make farmland available to settlers in need of land. Some of these were squatters’ clubs, good old boy associations formed for mutual benefit implementing coercive and deceitful methods to accomplish their goals. During this time when Jefferson’s land grant program offered acreage for establishing new homesteads, some families would squat on land that they had not legally purchased. Then, when the rightful new owner with a legitimate title arrived, the members of the Claims Clubs would vouch for the previous tenant as a longtime resident and rightful owner. Sometimes the Claims Club even had a portable dwelling, a sort of cabin on wheels, which could be moved around from lot to lot and set up temporarily, providing “hard evidence” that the “tenant” (who was actually a claim jumper) being vouched for had invested his time and efforts and had “improved the land.”7

The Omaha Club, founded in 1854, was known for imposing violent frontier justice on those who could not be persuaded by words, enforcing their opinions on ownership by force, including dunking those with claims to land but not belonging to the club in the Missouri River while it was frozen. Another Nebraska club was known for beating claim jumpers and attempting to tar and feather squatters.8

Land sellers in the western plains used clever phrases like “Rain follows the plow” (meaning: if you plow dry land, rain will fall), promising a bright future in Oklahoma and other nearby states that received too little rainfall per year to support successful farming. Using such ploys, they tricked buyers into acquiring land that in time would turn to dust. In the early twentieth century, developers sold 3,000 lots in Boise City, Oklahoma. Boise City was at the center of the ecologically devastated “Dust Bowl” area with few attractive features. The developers claimed Boise was a bustling city replete with conveniences, services, streets, buildings, businesses, and a railroad station. Authorities eventually took the developers to court and jailed them for their fraudulent claims.9

Later, salesmen devised real estate pitches involving Florida swamp lands, using alluring images to misrepresent the properties as being full of rich soil, never in need of fertilizer, with great possibilities for development. Thus they presented the land as prime real estate opportunities for rewarding investments. They described tropical paradise land needing only wonderful homes to be built in order to become perfect settings for a happy life. These scams, which fooled many gullible buyers, became so famous that phrases like “I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you” became part of American slang. In the 1960s another wave of con artists exploited nationwide advertising media to attract investors in Florida land. Midwesterners excited about an exotic region of America would invest their savings and find their land was a soggy swamp.10 Some states, as a result, legislated laws against false advertising. With such an abundance of land and so many newcomers desirous of a plot, America has been especially prone to land fraud.

Americans’ Soft Spot for Charming Con Artists

All along, there have been shrewd schemers in the American saga—some died as paupers, some amassed great wealth. The frontier, which moved westward during the formative period in American history, was often a lawless territory, with fewer authority figures, and many rootless mobile people. Lindberg observed that all the moving around Americans have done tended to make them “restless, unstable, thirsty for novelty.”11 One consequence of mobility may be an uncertainty that the unscrupulous can victimize. When change is constant and identity is up for grabs, a shifty con man can more readily exploit vulnerable people’s hopes and needs. On the westward-moving frontier, where new settlements were being established and new social identities were being formed, there were necessarily many leaps of faith required, and wishful embraces of hopeful promise.

The first generations of Puritans had hoped that the New World would be a kind of Promised Land, a divine city on a hill, and the era of land speculation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America still carried with it a mood of optimistic belief. The New World was a land of promise, and a fertile ground as well for the “land sharks” who would prey on idealistic hope, exploiting settlers’ dreams of betterment and temptations of greed. Rolling Stone City, for example, was a fictitious picturesque territory said to be ideally located on the Mississippi River. It existed only on paper, in glorious descriptions written by real estate swindlers who invented the place out of fantasies to entice gullible buyers. America in those formative times presented a novel situation. When identity is based on beliefs and hopes (rather than on an established ethnic community, or on class, as was the case in a feudal system) there is a larger scope for the unsuspecting person to be duped. Individuality means each person is on his own, independently exercising options. The confidence man gains people’s trust by talking them into believing in him and in the future he portrays, in a variety of ways.12 Lindberg noted two styles of American confidence men that overlap and bolster each other. One is the “gamesman-shapeshifter,” which fuses with the “booster idealist.” Summing up his characterization of America as a land embodying a tradition that is paradoxical, one producing inventors, and dreamers and schemers, such as “Franklin and Emerson, Jefferson and Augie March, Whitman and Gatsby and Huck Finn,” he sees it as “the tradition of confidence men busily renewing the New World.”13

In O’Henry’s humorous short story “The Chair of Philanthromathematics,” the narrator, who among other things was a wildcat prospector out West, says, “When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get scared and wants to return part of it. And if you watch close and notice the way his charity runs you’ll see that he tries to restore it to the same people he got it from.” He further observes that the owning of a large amount of money causes the condition of “Philanthropitis”—one symptom of which is feeling an urge to do something for humanity, instead of just to humanity. Having gouged the public with petty schemes, he and his friend want to turn an empty building into an educational institution. They do, but it soon runs low on money. “Philanthropy, when run on a good business basis, is one of the best grafts going,” the narrator observes. He concludes that to work efficiently the school needs a chair of mathematics. So the founders hire a mathematician who can work wonders as a Faro dealer, fleecing the rich young students to make the school flourish financially. Perhaps the moral is this: it takes a trickster with skill and savvy to make a go of things and turn them around—a kind of Prometheus figure.14

Ideas about trickster con men are prominent in the seminal nineteenth-century novel The Confidence-Man, where, employing multiple scenarios, Herman Melville explores topics of trust and tricks from shifting perspectives. The story is set on a steamer ironically named the Fidele, and all the action occurs on an April 1st—April Fool’s Day. Melville gamely keeps shifting the deck, showing how the various passengers have their different cons and issues with trust. Multifariously, the trickster impulse does a brisk trade in the currency of confidence; as long as the con artist can draw upon the “trust fund” of the gullible sucker—the reservoir of confidence in human nature—he can tap those assets to his cynical heart’s satisfaction. Reading The Confidence-Man scenarios about trust sensitizes the reader to develop sensible questions about even sincere people’s appeals.15 There is much evidence in newspapers, literature and the lives of heroes that Americans do love their straightshooters, but also have a soft spot for chameleon charlatans and sweet-talking Robin Hoods. Americans admire inventors who out-trick nature, and honor and sometimes even idolize self-made tycoons, smooth operators, and celebrities who are self-improvisers getting away with endless underhanded antics to further their own prospects in the seemingly boundless horizons of the New World.16

Why do people admire and enjoy con artists, and applaud successful cons? Is it because industrious and plodding drones show less gumption and imagination, less performers’ verve, and therefore people naturally delight in skillful displays of those who put on an act and get away with it? The trickster con man pulls off a funny drama, bluffing and fluffing, fudging and faking. There’s a colorful pop of cleverness in the performance, but then in the results of the trickery, people can get hurt, wrecked, and ruined. But before that happens, there is glamor and fun. Fascination with bravado and celebrity and notoriety may have to do with attraction to charisma. Women send convicted murderers coy and passionate letters, and even marry them, for the same reason—excitement spices up a life of boring routines lacking imagination. The epic tricks of Nuckie, an illicit liquor kingpin in the TV series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), for example, show a survivor’s skills and attract a wide audience.

Americans often seem to look up to the skillful players of improvised self-invention and confidence games, despite the sleaziness of their actual crimes and their punishments. Americans unconsciously often seem to honor tricksters, applauding skillful tricks such as those portrayed in films like Ocean’s Eleven (1960 and 2001) and Ocean’s Twelve (2004),17 the TV series Leverage (2008–2012), and the film The Thomas Crowne Affair (1968 and 1999). The two TV series House and The Mentalist both feature brilliant detective work by figures who are rogues, eccentrics who think outside the box. Dr. House is a genius at diagnosing rare diseases, and Mr. Jane is an intuitive super-sleuth finding clues to solve crimes. The Mentalist character played by Simon Baker is a daring trickster figure for whom boundaries are seldom taken seriously. His freedom, fearlessness, acuity, and playfulness allow him to find deeply hidden solutions to baffling mysteries. House, despite dysfunctional faults and antisocial eccentricities, uncannily knows or discovers facts to successfully diagnose confusing illnesses. Both are also unpredictable tricksters with a devil-may-care attitude, full of surprises and fascinating insights, always fun to observe in action. The 2014 FX television series Fargo is a dark comedy featuring a mysterious hit man, Lorne Malvo, played by Billy Bob Thornton. In the storyline, Malvo takes a hapless apprentice under his wing, the incompetent trickster Lester Nygaard, played by Martin Freeman. The bumbling Lester makes a perfect foil for the cool, slick, and...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Yesterday
• Chapter 2: Today
• Chapter 3: Tomorrow
• Notes
• Appendix 1: On Archetypes
• Appendix 2: Some American Stories about Con Men
• Appendix 3: On Masks and Head Coverings
• Appendix 4: On the Clown in America
• Appendix 5: On Mortgage Fraud and other Cons
• Appendix 6: George W. Bush as Painter
• Appendix 7: On Torture
• Select Bibliography