The Confidence Man

            Twain, Melville, Bret Harte, O. Henry and many other American writers celebrated the hero/villain of flush times in this country, the confidence man. Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) is the centerpiece of this literature, a book set on April Fool’s Day on a ship of fools, a Mississippi River boat. The confidence man who assumes various disguises is “a Mississippi Operator,” as one character styles him. Each of his various manifestations begins by urging his marks to trust in his or her fellows, to have confidence in the essential honesty of people. Pretty much anything can be supplied by Melville’s confidence man, from cough medicine and pain relievers to coal shares and even boys to help work a farm. The most effective separators of marks from their money are the share certificates of the Black Rapids Coal Company.

            At the beginning of the next century, O. Henry’s The Gentle Grafter (1908) recounts the exploits of several confidence men who have a conscience. In their world, the grafter is a gentler detacher of the sucker from his money than, say, the burglar. But even the burglar is not as bad as the Wall Street high flier. Two of Henry’s grafters accidentally get caught up in a scheme to sell stock certificates in the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company. When they discover these shares are being bought by factory girls, old veterans, widows, and even children, they give all the money back. “Making an honest livin’s better than Wall Street,” says one of the gentle grafters to another as they’re busy bottling up tap water colored with red dye to sell as either tonic to grow hair or a chill and fever cure. There would be testimonial certificates either way.

            Bernie Madoff was no culture hero. His con was a classic Ponzi scheme where he used money coming into his fund from new marks to pay the unrealistic “interest” or “dividend” he’d promised previous fund holders. There was no investment, and thus no real interest or dividends, and of course the con could only have a limited run before it collapsed. Such schemes prey on our desire to get rich quick, to get something for nothing. In the legal con game of the lottery, certificates that fuel this desire, millions of them, litter the floors of convenience stores and are swept up and thrown away on the days the winning numbers are drawn.

            Both Melville’s and O. Henry’s narratives make the same points about the confidence man, his mark, and trust. An honest man can be conned, because he is accustomed to trust his neighbors, most of whom deserve his trust. It is easier to con the man who has a streak of dishonesty and who wants to get something for nothing. And there is such a thing as a man who cannot be conned, but his imperviousness to being cheated is also a social barrier that cuts him off from normal intercourse with his fellows.