A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  Having seduced readers thus far, the paper revealed the most sensational discovery of all: the moon was inhabited by several species of humanlike creatures with wings—batmen of sorts. Their wings were semitransparent and extended from their shoulders to their legs. Some, observed bathing in a lake, spread their wings out and “waved them as ducks do theirs to shake off the water.” Others politely shared fruit, passing the choicest pieces to their friends. The bat people apparently enjoyed vigorous sex lives, although the Sun only implied this by noting that Dr. Grant had requested certain portions of his report be censored for the sake of decency. The society of these startling creatures seemed remarkably peaceful and idyllic. “As far as we could judge,” the Sun “quoted” Grant, “they spend their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about.” This in addition to the “improper behavior” the paper said “would ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.”

  The Sun’s moon hoax was a smash. New Yorkers devoured the story, snatching up installments as fast as they were printed. The presses were run at full capacity for ten hours a day and still the demand could not be satisfied. Some of New York’s more respectable papers picked up the story. The New York Times called the revelations “probable and plausible.” Genuine belief in Herschel’s moon discoveries was widespread, even in academic circles. “Yale College was alive with staunch supporters,” a reporter wrote years later. “The literati—students and professors, doctors in divinity and law—and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel’s wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard the news of the man in the Moon? These were the questions that met you everywhere. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story.”

  Edgar Allan Poe was understandably steamed over the success of the moon hoax that had eclipsed his own. He did his best to discredit the Sun’s story, but to no avail. People were determined to be deceived, he concluded in a huff. Almost ten years later, however, Poe had his own hoax published in the Sun. He reported that a balloon had been successfully piloted across the Atlantic Ocean for the very first time. Though no trip to the moon, it was a most successful ruse that delighted the normally dejected and morose writer. Poe noted happily that he “never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a paper.” People had finally swallowed one of his stories.

  5

  The Hoax That Roared

  Rivaling the success of the Sun’s moon sham was a New York Herald fable with a more local angle. The city was swarming with hordes of vicious, snarling beasts, the headlines screamed—escaped animals from the Central Park Zoo. Scores of people had already been trampled, clawed, and bitten to death, according to the Herald’s dramatic account that filled the entire front page on November 9, 1874, and a number of dangerous animals were still on the loose.

  An unidentified Herald reporter claimed to have been at the scene when the chaos erupted. A zookeeper had been tormenting a caged rhinoceros named Pete, the story went, poking him with a stick until the frustrated animal finally exploded. In a rage, Pete smashed apart his cage, charged the keeper, and stomped him into pulp before finishing him off with his horn. The rhino, his anger unsated, then began smashing open the cages of the other animals housed with him. Another zookeeper fired a bullet at the crazed beast, but it practically bounced off Pete’s tough hide. With a snort, the rhino turned on the shooter. “The horrid horn impaled him against a corner cage and killed him instantly,” the Herald breathlessly reported, “tearing the cage to pieces and releasing the panther.” The big cat immediately started to make a meal out of the impaled zookeeper.

  One by one the cages of other dangerous creatures were torn open, including that of Lincoln the lion. As horrified spectators looked on, Lincoln crashed through a window and escaped outside. The king of the beasts, paw planted on the corpse of an onlooker crushed under his weight, then let out a mighty roar. A bullet fired by a zookeeper missed the lion, which then leapt into the middle of a gathered throng. Women fainted and children screamed as Lincoln pounced on one man and tore him to pieces. Meanwhile, Pete the rhino continued to smash open cages and release even more creatures. As he emerged from the animal house, a small army of policemen and armed civilians that had rushed to the scene started shooting at him. The rhino, unscathed by the volley of bullets, turned and headed back inside. But, the Herald noted, it was almost as if Pete was deliberately setting up an ambush rather than retreating, for as the men followed him inside, a puma sprang up and attacked. “Almost on the heels of the puma came the black and spotted leopard, followed by the jaguar, the African lioness, and tiger.”

  Already the Herald story was stretching the limits of credibility, but it was merely a preview of more scenes of terror. Dangerous animals bolted from Central Park, including Pete, who attacked a party of young girls and killed one of them before moving on to destroy a shanty in which a family was having supper. All escaped, the paper reported, “except a child in the cradle, which was burned to a crisp.” The animals attacked not only New Yorkers, but one another as well. In one instance, a tiger “buried his teeth in the lion’s neck until the King of the Beasts howled with the keenest anguish. . . . Blood covered the avenue and, in the distance, awestruck spectators looked on in breathless fear.”

  Horrific events were reported throughout the city, with screaming citizens running for their lives as wild creatures chased after them. One “witness” told of a tiger entering the Church of St. Thomas: “Men and women rushed in all directions away from the beast, who sprang upon the shoulders of an aged lady, burying his fangs in her neck, and carrying her to the ground.” At the 23rd Street ferry, one unidentified animal bounded onto the vessel. Terrified horses hitched to wagons plunged into the river, taking with them the wagons and all their occupants.

  Armed New Yorkers, including Governor John A. Dix, tried to subdue the rampaging beasts in their midst. They fired wildly in all directions, including out of tenement windows. “There is no instance reported of any animals being hit,” the Herald noted, “while it is believed many citizens were struck by the missiles. One policeman, Officer Lannigan of the Seventh Precinct, was wounded in the foot near Grand Street by a shot from a window during a chase after the striped hyena, which was mistaken by the crowd for a panther. This cowardly brute was finally killed by a bartender armed with a club.”

  The litany of horrors continued. The Herald actually printed a list of many of the supposed dead and wounded, and announced that some of the escaped animals were still at large. “There is a sharp lookout for the black wolf,” the paper warned. “He has escaped into the city but looks so much like a Dutchman’s dog he may evade detection until he has committed some lamentable tragedy.” The mayor had issued a proclamation, the report continued, enjoining all citizens, except for the National Guard, to stay inside until all the escaped beasts were killed or captured.

  The story then concluded with a paragraph headlined THE MORAL OF THE WHOLE. It was a frank admission that the entire report had been fabricated. “Not one word of it is true. Not a single act or incident described has taken place. It is a huge hoax, a wild romance, or whatever epithet of utter untrustworthiness our readers may choose to apply to it. It is simply a fancy picture which crowded upon the mind of the writer a few days ago while he was gazing through the iron bars of the cages of the wild animals in the menagerie at Central Park.”

  What the Herald’s editors failed to foresee, however, was that many panicked readers of the popular newspaper would never get to the last paragraph. People all over the city were utterly fooled, terrified by the menace supposedly lurking among them. “There was a public school in our street,” the writer of the hoax, I.C. Clarke, later recalled, “and one after another I saw mothers come round the corner, make a dash for the school, and
presently come forth with one or more children and dash homeward, dragging little ones after them. By George! It scared me. I went some half mile up to my mother’s home through almost empty streets. I found the family around the lunch table in consternation. My cousin, Jennie, was reading my story in a broken voice, and my mother and sister were in tears. They rose as I came in, ‘Thank God you are safe.’ ”

  Some of those drawn in by the hoax were not amused. The New York Times was one of several newspapers that condemned it, publishing a number of letters from indignant readers. “My children had started for school about 10 minutes before we saw this monstrous joke,” one irate father wrote. “A carriage was sent for at once to go after them, my wife trembling lest they should be already killed. I had read aloud part of this long rigmarole when glancing at the last paragraph, I saw the explanation. My wife said she will not have such a paper in the house again, and has ordered it stopped.”

  Despite the tempest it caused, the Herald, like the Sun, actually benefited from the fraud. Managing editor Thomas B. Connery, who had conceived the hoax and defended it as an entertaining way to alert readers to the careless way he had observed animals being handled at the zoo, claimed the paper’s circulation “did not drop by so much as one subscriber.” Instead, sales actually increased. Besides, Connery speculated, the reason The New York Times had been so critical of the story was because its editor had fallen for it, leaving his home “with a brace of pistols, prepared to shoot the first animals that would cross his path.”

  6

  Extra! Greed All About It!

  Abraham Lincoln was not a man given to fits of rage or rash decisions, but one day in May 1864 the normally placid president blew his stovepipe top. Two newspapers, the New York World and the Journal of Commerce, printed a proclamation, said to be from Lincoln, that detailed recent Union setbacks in the Civil War and announced the draft of an additional four hundred thousand men. The president was furious when he heard of the bogus announcement. He ordered the two newspapers shuttered and a number of their editors and reporters arrested.

  It was soon discovered, however, that the World and the Journal had been duped into printing the false proclamation by a wily news-paperman named Joseph Howard, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. Described in one account as “dashing and somewhat reckless in his way, ready to supply on short notice any sort of sensation that might be desired,” Howard came up with a plan to profit from the Civil War. As a seasoned editor, he knew bad news about the war tended to drive up the price of gold, a stable commodity in uncertain times. Accordingly, he set out to create some bad news and buy up some gold. He enlisted the help of one of his reporters at the Eagle, Francis A. Mallison, and together they forged copies of an Associated Press dispatch with the dire proclamation supposedly issued by the president. Then they had it sent to a number of newspapers. The World and the Journal were the only two that ran the announcement, but it was enough. The price of gold rose, and Howard pocketed a tidy profit.

  But suspicions rose just as quickly as the price of gold. People wondered why only two papers had printed the proclamation, and crowds gathered at the World and the Journal to try to find out what was happening. Major General John A. Dix, commander of the Department of the East, telegraphed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as soon as he saw the papers to verify the proclamation. Stanton wired back, “this paper is an absolute forgery,” and went to the White House to confer with Lincoln.

  The president had a particular loathing for those who sought to profit from the war. “I wish every one of them had his devilish head shot off!” he fumed. In a rage he issued the order that the offending newspapers be closed, a controversial act that marred his reputation. Given the constitutional implications, and the fact that he believed the newspapers had been tricked, Dix was reluctant to carry out Lincoln’s order. He advised Stanton that he would start an investigation, which displeased the secretary tremendously. “A great national crime has been committed by the publication,” Stanton replied to Dix. “The editors, proprietors, and publishers, responsible and irresponsible, are in law guilty of that crime. You were not directed to make an investigation but to execute the President’s orders. . . . How you can excuse or justify delay in executing the President’s order until you make an investigation is not for me to determine!”

  Dix had no choice but to do as the president demanded. The doors of the two newspapers were padlocked and members of their staffs arrested. Even the office of the Independent Telegraph Line was seized for allegedly sending the false dispatch. It “was hasty, rash, inconsiderate, and wrong and cannot be defended,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote in his diary. Such acts, he concluded, “weaken the Administration and strengthen its enemies.” And with the 1864 elections looming, Lincoln’s decision gave his political opponents ample fodder. “Will the people see the danger of entrusting power again to a man who dares use it in the wanton invasions of private rights?” editorialized the New York Herald.

  The fact that the culprit was apprehended just days after the newspapers were forced to close only made the administration appear all the more reactionary. Howard was incarcerated in the New York military prison Fort Lafayette, where he served less than three months. Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned abolitionist preacher (and brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe), interceded with Lincoln on Howard’s behalf, and the president, apparently back to his more sanguine self, showed mercy.

  7

  False Alarm

  Freedom of speech precludes yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but what about a newspaper that reports a devastating theater fire that never happened? That’s just what the Chicago Times did on February 13, 1875. BURNED ALIVE, screamed the top headline, followed by a number of smaller headlines outlining the calamity: “The Angel of Death Brings Terrible Mourning to Chicago,” “Burning of a Theater Last Night—Hundreds Perish in the Flames.” The eleventh headline above the story should have given it away: “Description of a Supposititious Holocaust Likely to Occur Any Night.” But for people anxious to read exactly what had happened, the point of this subtle revelation was lost.

  The story that followed had enough horrific detail to make it seem all too real. The fire started on the stage of an unnamed theater, the Times reported, and became a “roaring, seething, curling mass of flame, which lit up the interior of the theater with an awful glare and blistered and burned the unfortunate people who stood nearest to it.” As the flames spread, so did the panic. “Timid females raised their hands to heaven, shrieked wild, despairing cries, and fell trampled into eternity by the heavy heels of the maddened, rushing throng. Mothers pleaded piteously, in the turmoil and the roar, that their darling little daughters might be spared.” But, according to the Times, few were. When at last firemen were able to douse the flames and enter the ruined building, a gruesome scene conceived by an imaginative writer awaited them: “There were blackened corpses covered with the grime of the conflagration; and bloody corpses trampled to death and mutilated. There were corpses crisp and hideous, and hair burned off, the white teeth grinning, the hands fleshless. There were others that sat in their seats, who had evidently been seized with a fright and rendered incapable of moving.” To make the story all the more realistic, a list of some of the dead and injured was published. Initials and common names were used, which made thousands believe that their loved ones had been among the many lost souls.

  Finally, after delivering more gory details and castigating the theater owners for their negligence, the Times admitted the story was entirely fictitious. It was not a prank, but a public service designed to warn readers of the extremely dangerous conditions that actually existed in most Chicago theaters. Yet despite the paper’s pretensions of civic mindedness, the false report was widely condemned. The rival Chicago Tribune published its own bit of fiction, reporting that a woman had been driven insane by the belief that her husband had perished in the flames, and that the woman’s mother collapsed and died after readin
g the account in the Times. “She was as really murdered as though the assassin had sent a bullet through her heart,” the Tribune opined in its own fake story, which concluded: “Whether anything of the kind has resulted from the publication of the hoax, we do not know. If there has not, no thanks are due to the editor of the Times, for it was calculated to accomplish just such calamities as we have imagined, and no amount of subterfuge or specious argument can justify such violations of journalistic decency.”

  8

  Mencken Up History

  There was nothing at all remarkable about what famed journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in his New York Evening Mail column on December 28, 1917—no tales of life on the moon or wild beasts roaming New York—just a restrained, somewhat whimsical tribute to the bathtub. Perhaps that’s why it became one of the most enduring of all media hoaxes, a perpetual source of misinformation that has fooled journalists, historians, and even the president of the United States. The simple, nonsensational quality of the story made it utterly believable. Who would ever suspect that something as benign as the bathtub might be the subject of a hoax?

  The column, titled “A Neglected Anniversary,” began: “On December 20, there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history—to wit: the 75th anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into these states. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.”