Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [126]
These and other frauds presupposed a mobile society. Investment frauds, of course, assumed a population of gulls with extra money and dreams of wealth. A mobile society is one in which people have such dreams. Mobility also means, above all, the ripping up of roots, the destruction of fixed, settled ways. This can happen literally when a person leaves his home, his place of birth, and moves to greener pastures. But, as we have pointed out, those who stayed put also experienced mobility in a psychological sense—their consciousness was changed under the influence of messages from the wider world, messages in the newspapers, books, and magazines they read, or brought by the U.S. Mail.
Many swindlers, to be sure, plied their trade in person. They were adept at face-to-face schemes. But these schemes often presupposed the anonymities of a mobile society. Con men slipped from place to place, geographically speaking; they also milked the fact of social ambiguity.
It was an age in which boundaries between classes (of every sort) were more porous than before. It was possible to pass oneself off as a lord, a professor, or a rich investor, which simply could not have been done in a tight, controlled, barnacled society where the markers of class are more obvious, if not indelible. Victorian society was a society of emulation. The respectable wealthy set the tone; and the middle classes and the respectable poor followed as best they could. Technology permitted the more obvious forms of emulation: cheap copies of hats or dresses; mass-produced artifacts and furniture. This made it possible for your humble parlor to resemble the parlor of your betters. But the drive to imitate was social and cultural; technology helped but did not create this drive.
The United States was, of course, a much more egalitarian society than England; but it was far from classless, and there were certainly rich, and very rich; and poor, and very poor. It was also easier here to imitate one’s betters than in England—in voice, dress, and manner. This opened up rich opportunities for fleecing the gullible. Newspapers and crime literature are full of imposters, fake doctors, brokers, tycoons, foreign potentates, English lords, a Russian Count, and the like8—even imitation priests and nuns, men like James Crawford who, in 1902, dressed as a priest, went from house to house asking for money; or Mrs. Emma Meyer, whose disguise was the “garb of the Little Sisters of the Poor.”9 Charity collectors were frequently swindlers, and at the very bottom of the scale there were the “one-armed, or one-legged beggars, whose missing member, sound as your own, is strapped to their bodies . . . out of sight, [or] women wishing to bury their husbands or children, women with hired babies, and sundry other objects calculated to excite your pity.”10
Many prominent swindlers aimed much, much higher in their impostures. A certain “Norman La Grange, Lieutenant Colonel of the Queen’s Guards,” swaggered about the Waldorf Hotel, in New York in 1894. This gentleman, who, of course, never paid his bill, was a confidence man who sometimes passed himself off as “Lord Ashburton.”11 George Walling, former police chief of New York, described Dr. Gabor Nephegyi, a great swindler, as someone who “lived gorgeously.... He was unmistakably a man of taste, education and refinement,” with “extraordinary” powers of conversation.12 Just as fleas and ticks tend to stick to a single species of animal, some con men preyed exclusively on one species of victim: hotel operators, or undertakers, or lawyers.al
Some swindlers came from good backgrounds; for these people, swindling was, perhaps, a form of downward mobility. Many other small or large-scale deceivers were simply cheating and pretending their way up the ladder. A fascinating