Introduction: Cons And Scams In American Culture

this issue's contributions by geoffrey o'brien, who discusses a classic 1940 study of the methods and attitudes of confidence men, and by Edward Balleisen, who focuses on the concept of the "sucker list" in American media and business life, both identify the 1930s as the end of wild personal fraud in the nation's history. As Balleisen writes here, the institutional temper of the New Deal and the overwhelming systemic failure of the stock market crash in 1929 consolidated a new common wisdom in the subsequent decade: that "pretty much everyone … was vulnerable to duplicitous salesmanship" (713) and "the government had an obligation to protect them and work to limit the socioeconomic damage" (714).

These two graceful and edifying historical articles sustain a certain piquancy in the midst of our current surprising swerve of history, in which the United States elected a con man to the presidency. It had seemed to many commentators as if Donald J. Trump represented the recollection and revival of a bygone America. This was said by commentators both hostile and sympathetic to be central to his political appeal. But it was not often enough said, and perhaps not yet possible to see, how that lost American figure was not just P. T. Barnum or Harold Hill (from The Music Man), but likely one of those shadowy criminals gathering in the portrait quoted by O'Brien: "Slobbering Bob, Fifth Avenue Fred, The Indiana Wonder, Cold-deck Charley … [m]any of them made up like millionaires" (732) to con one another, too, with "the threat of violence … never really far away," as O'Brien cannily judges the historical reality in another context, and "not a trace of merriment" among the "cold-eyed swindlers" (736).

When read together, the papers converge on at least two issues of grave relevance to the present moment. One is the pleasure, or gratification, that law-abiding people seem to feel in witnessing the spectacle of their peers, neighbors, or countrymen fooled and fleeced by a con artist, especially if the con seems artful, complex, or grandiose, and even when these innocent onlookers may be victimized by it, too (either subsequently or previously). Why love the con man when one hates the thug? The other relevant issue is the odd phenomenon of reflection, and duplication, once one enters the world of con and anti-con. It as is if, once one allows the collection of names of likely dupes, or makes caveat emptor your law, or accepts the seduction of another, one is likely to be seduced and fooled in turn.

Balleisen's historical tracing of "fraud v. anti-fraud" goes some distance to explain why it became possible for a neo-con man to ascend to high political office only now. The collapse of the New Deal and Great Society consensus—and the decline of regulations that favor citizens and consumers, in order to unleash business innovation—managed to bring with it a "resurgence of business fraud" at the highest echelons since the 1970s. Balleisen mentions, among the most recent miscreants, that holdover from the Wild West, Wells Fargo (719). But the Republican Party's embrace of the "big lie" in economics since the time of Reagan, promising that upward redistribution to the richest citizens would be the most effective means of getting money to the working and middle classes, now seems to have initiated a cancer of normlessness and the war of all against all. The notion that all is fair in love and war may have long ago expanded to also include business, with the right to grab as much from one's "counterparties" as they'll let you take. Only in recent decades has it also become an openly avowed principle of US party politics, at least for the Republican Party.

If the enigma has been why at least half the electorate determines that an increasingly criminal-seeming party is still the best vehicle for its hopes and sympathies, the psychology of pleasure-in-another's-deception may be relevant here too. Perhaps there's a bit of a clue to...