Con Men, Hustlers, And Swindlers, The Heart And Soul Of America - Without Them Life Would Be A Thudding Bore

America has had its share of con men, tricksters, hustlers, and swindlers.  Back in the day snake oil salesmen were a feature of every rural town, itinerant frauds making a buck off the land.  They were most often found around revival tents, for there, the locus of the biggest con of them all, the atmosphere all about miraculous cures, salvation, and redemption from a life of misery. 

Hiram T. Beckham was well known in Missouri, for he had turned his small apothecary business - eye of newt, salamander, and desert horned lizard - into a statewide business, recognized by the governor and the legislators of the Show Me state, and a plaque honoring him and his contributions to the great land of theirs was affixed to the courthouse of Ames County, his ancestral home. 

He and the Reverend Poole Harding, the most famous evangelist West of the Mississippi, a barnstorming man of God who had converted thousands and shown heavenly light to hundreds more, were a team, a marketing duo that anticipated advertising tie-ins and buy-ins by a hundred years.  One promised spiritual salvation and the other physical restoration, and together they made a fortune.  

'Jesus loves you', said Pastor Harding, to circus tent full of sorry souls, 'and salvation is just around the corner.  All you have to do is to take Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and the miracle of redemption and heavenly ascension will be yours'. 

 

And on the way out, he added, be sure to visit Dr. Hiram T. Beckham, 'a healer of the body just as the Lord Jesus is a healer of the soul'; and in return Beckham in each and every one of his whistle stops through the state talked of the miraculous power of invocation of Reverend Harding. 

The two men had a good laugh over beers in a saloon across the river in Illinois, and treated everyone especially the whores like they were royalty.  After all, what was money if not to be spent, and the fine liquor and beautiful women of Cairo were more than worthy of their attention. 

The Baker Saloon was their office where they planned their joint ventures.  Both enterprises were prospering beyond their wildest dreams, thousands knew their names, and the money kept pouring in.  It seemed as if the good people of Missouri were a miserable lot, and it was the good fortune of Beckham & Harding to be the purveyors of spiritual and physical remedies. 

This is all by way of saying that con men are as much a part of America as apple pie.  There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of both swindlers and their gullible, credulous victims in every generation, and good enterprising men of ambition and canniness have made millions since the beginning of the Republic.  

America began as a nation of true believers, European refugees who in the minds of the temperate burghers of the majority were just spiritual mountebanks, hustlers who preached the most cockamamie interpretations of the Holy Book that anyone could imagine. 

So, it was no surprise that these improbable notions took hold in the New World, already a totem-filled, primitive place of sacrifice, animism, and tribal savagery.  A kindly, compassionate, moderate Christianity was a non-starter in such a land.  

Their forbears, the Spanish legions who colonized much of the Americas with a savage bloodiness of their own had set the table.  No, only a harsh, uncompromising Protestantism would do.  Salem was their Jerusalem. 

Both fundamentalism and credulousness was the ethos of the new nation, fertile ground for missionaries and swindlers.  Despite the hopefulness of the Founding Fathers for a kind, compassionate, community-minded land in which individual enterprise would be rewarded only if it was expressed with due consideration of the many, wagonloads of hustlers, con men, and tricksters plied their wares along with coopers, carpenters, and yeomen. 

Bobby Evans was the epitome of this very American spirit.  Not only was he able to wheedle millions out of unsuspecting investors, he was able to seduce young women and matrons at will.  He had been born with a silver tongue a quick wit, and a canny understanding of human nature.  He was living proof of P.T. Barnum's famous adage, 'There's a sucker born every minute' or even more appropriately, 'You can fool most of the people most of the time'. 

'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?', Evans was fond of saying when insiders suspected his shenanigans.  'It takes two to tango'.  That profitable complicity of the gullible and the savvy was what America was all about. 'Or supply and demand'. 

He had not one iota of guilt or shame in what he did, just the opposite.  He was as proud of his gains as could be and felt that he spiced up the life of those living lives of quiet desperation.  The look on those young women he courted was worth millions - a look of pure delight and joy.  This handsome, wealthy, alluring man was interested in me?

And the knowing nods of the gentlemen who believed in his financial wizardry, able to turn dross into gold, were just as satisfying. 

The Devil in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that without him life would be a thudding bore, three hundred and sixty five days of church, goodness, kindness, and sedate weariness.  I am a vaudevillian, says the Devil, here on earth to cause trouble, to stir things up, and to let people know that there is more to life than propriety and good faith. 

 

Evans was so savvy a con man that he often let his marks win - a show of serious investment insight - and often took losses himself; and with such evasive chicanery he kept the gullible coming and federal investigators in their barracks.  

As far as women were concerned, he treated them well and let them down easily.  The end of the affair was always a matter of unfortunate circumstance, intervening variables, never them; and so it was that his lovers went quietly, happy for the chance to be loved by him if only temporarily, and proud to show off their former relationship with him. 

Bobby Evans was a genius, a real American, an icon, a tribute to the best of America's entrepreneurial spirit.  A Nietzschean Superman beyond good an evil?  He shook his head. He was no such thing, no amoral beast riding astride the herd.  He was just a simple man who knew how to dance with willing partners who loved the attention. He prospered because Americans are born to prosper. Some do it on paths of propriety and good faith, and others around tricky bends and curves; but both are Americans to the core.