The "Sucker List" and the Evolution of American Business Fraud

in the early 1950S, mickey mantle burst onto the american sporting scene as a power-hitting outfielder for the New York Yankees. After a bumpy first year in the majors in 1951, this young man from rural Oklahoma soon became a star, attracting close attention from fans, the press, and promoters of all kinds. As a 1957 article in the Saturday Evening Post recounted, Mantle proved especially willing to listen to the pitchmen who promised to multiply his new sources of income. Within a mere week of arriving in New York City, he had signed a contract with a predatory agent who generously promised to secure all manner of endorsement and business deals, modestly reserving a full 50 percent of Mantle's earnings. Over the next few years, the Yankee phenom periodically took flyers on a series of ill-advised investments, including $3500 ($1000 paid in cash, the rest through a promissory note) for shares in a fake Oklahoma insurance company, hawked by a notorious sharper "who had served three prison terms and had an 'FBI file an inch thick.'" Mantle's remarkable lack of financial acumen meant that he "led the sucker list." And yet, the Saturday Evening Post profile also noted that Mantle learned from his mistakes rather quickly. By 1957, he had employed a reputable agent who identified excellent endorsement opportunities, which dramatically increased his income (Povich 1957, 19–20).

This vignette incorporates several key features of the broader history of deception and misrepresentation in American marketplaces. In the young Mantle, one can see several stock figures: the country bumpkin, the callow youth, and the credulous celebrity, but also the savvy pupil who became "more wise" through instruction in the school of wily charades. In the brief depiction of those who eagerly sized up Mantle and took advantage of him, one gets a sense of the omnipresent American snake-oil salesmen who have found fertile ground in a society that has often celebrated entrepreneurial innovation and aggressive marketing. That same discussion hints at the steady growth of antifraud institutions that took aim at duplicitous economic actors, shared intelligence about them across government agencies and jurisdictions, and at least sometimes curtailed their capacity to operate. Taken as a whole, the Saturday Evening Post article contributed to a longstanding public discourse about all the lies lurking throughout American commerce, a dialogue that sought to caution consumers and investors but simultaneously offered pointers to those who would deceive.

A SONG OF SAFETY

My morning mail is a penance to me. Long, fat envelopes meet my eyes, Filled with advice that is proffered free, Telling of many a wondrous prize. Old hooks baited with new disguise, Bundles of bunkum, a daily grist, New revamping of same old lies—PLEASE take my name off the Sucker List!

Hawkers from Maine to the western sea, Selling unsalable merchandise. Proffer me many a golden key—Me, who've been bitten in too many buys. Towers with no roof but the bright blue skies,

You and my earnings good-by I've kissed! I have sought plums in poor fruitless pies—Please take MY name off the Sucker List!

Booms in oil? (bring my snickersnee!) Rising industrials? Let 'em rise! All my visions of Araby Are gone where the last year's bird's nest lies.

I'm a year older—I hope more wise! Dreams of Golconda? I can resist. Buy for a fall? Then watch things rise! Please take my name OFF the sucker list!

ENVOI

Prints and pamphlets, circulars free, That paper the nation so lavishly.

Let me alone. You'll never be missed!

PLEASE TAKE MY NAME OFF THE SUCKER LIST!

—Anonymous, Logansport Pharos-Tribune, Jan. 13,1926

The Mantle profile also referenced, without comment, a specific tool of duplicitous marketing: the "sucker list." Rosters of easy marks, compiled by and circulated among the purveyors of consumer fraud and get-rich-quick schemes, have been around for at least a century and a half, and have become a mainstay of commercial duplicity in the United States. The emergence and evolution of...