Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [125]
In this process, which took perhaps a century to complete, the tight, face-to-face, vertical relations of authority, in small communities, weakened greatly; the horizontal authority of peer groups and the big world of the cities got stronger. The family, the village, the local church, no longer had the young in their exclusive grip. The media and mobility broke the monopoly on formative messages. The soul was now exposed, almost from birth, to the whole bursting, blooming, noisy world.
Mobility, real or imagined, had all sorts of effects on crime and punishment in the nineteenth century. A mobile society was just the right setting for certain crimes, which found their niche in this time and place. Big spaces, and the looseness of society, made it easy for a wanted criminal to get away. At the beginning of the century, there were still some crimes that were literally crimes of mobility, that is, crimes committed in the very act of physically moving on: slaves and indentured servants who ran away.3 The savage labor laws of the South late in the century were laws designed to keep black workers in place. For the rest, mobility was not against the law; it was, in fact, the American dream.
Swindlers
American mobility created rich opportunities for crimes against trust. Swindlers, fakers, imposters, and con men swarmed about in the middle and late nineteenth century looking for (and finding) prey. Facts and figures are, of course, hard to come by; but there can be little doubt that swindling increased in the nineteenth century. Certainly, there was more talk about the various swindles and con games. Popular and semi-popular literature were full of accounts of swindlers and swindling. Swindling and fraud were very much crimes of mobility; these crimes depended on anonymity, ambiguity of identity, and the fluidity of lines that separated strata and classes in the population.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the expression confidence man to 1849; it is American in origin. Herman Melville published a novel by that name in 1857. To be sure, trickery is as old as the human race; and state laws had long since criminalized fraud and related acts, including “obtaining money by false pretences.”4 But confidence rackets positively blossomed in the nineteenth century. To a degree, the statute law reflected this rich pattern of growth by constantly defining new forms of cheating, imposture, and fraud. Thus South Dakota, to take one minor example, made it a crime to wear “the badge of the grand army of the republic,” if you were “not entitled to the same.”5
The point is not that a plague of special villainy infested the nineteenth century; rather, the conditions of American law and American society made types of swindling possible that had been difficult or impossible before. To begin with, there were new and efficient ways to find good victims to fleece. Mass media, a mass reading public, and the national postal system all helped in the search for suckers. As Anthony Comstock put it in 1880, swindling depended “upon two mighty agencies of our present civilization, the Newspaper and the United States Mail. By means of these two instruments for good or evil, it is possible to reach every household in the land.”6 There were, in fact, countless schemes of postal fraud. Other frauds made good use of the popular press. Newspapers were not, to say the least, fastidious about the advertisements they carried, just as they were not too finicky about making up or embroidering “news.” Country newspapers, for example, were happy