by Amy Reading
When the Herald announced that P. T. Barnum had paid $1,000 for the right to exhibit the Fejee Mermaid in his American Museum on lower Broadway, you might decide it was worth the twenty-five-cent admission to see the creature for yourself. You would have headed down Broadway toward the Drummond light slowly revolving on a spear atop a five-story building. In a time of gaslight and tallow, this limelight was itself a wonder, a free attraction anticipating the treasures within. You would have waited in line and then wended your way through the exhibition halls packed and layered so tightly with wonders that you wouldn’t have been able to take them all in: wax figures of European royalty, skeletons, taxidermied animals, live animals, dioramas, oil portraits, minerals, gems, optical instruments—and hundreds and hundreds of curiosities, from the miniature to the monstrous, from a straw taken from the mattress upon which Czar Nicholas slept when he visited Buckingham Palace, to a gigantic hair ball taken from the belly of a sow.
Perhaps, like Herman Melville, you would have simply relished the museum’s “lean men, fat women, dwarfs, two-headed cows, amphibious sea-maidens, large-eyed owls, small-eyed mice, rabbit-eating anacondas, bugs, monkies and mummies.” Melville was a great admirer of Barnum, and it appeared to him that the organization of the universe had bent itself to accommodate the American Museum. “If the whole world of animated nature—human or brute—at any time produces a monstrosity or a wonder, she has but one object in view—to benefit Barnum.” Perhaps, like Henry James, you would have loved the American Museum’s “spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal” with a “passionate adverse loyalty.” James remembered that when he was a boy, he and his family “attended this spectacle just in order not to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught.”
One of the images P. T. Barnum used to advertise the Fejee Mermaid at the American Museum in 1842 (photo credit 1.3)
You would have ascended the staircase to the Second Saloon, past the dioramas and war relics and daguerreotypes. And then at last you would have come to a tall glass bell sitting on a table and, underneath it, the Fejee Mermaid. The object at the heart of all those words was, in Barnum’s own later confession, “an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen, about three feet long. Its mouth was open, its tail turned over, and its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.” The mermaid was unquestionably humbug, the head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish.
Almost certainly, had you been in that stifling and crowded museum in 1842, you would have done what thousands of visitors did. You would have peered as closely as the bell jar allowed to see if you could spot the seams joining the monkey to the fish. That bend of the waist, that squint of the eyes—that was the foundation of Barnum’s genius and his fortune. He realized that the mermaid’s exposé was a single and relatively insignificant moment in an otherwise lengthy production. The exhibits were not simply static objects in glass vitrines; they were occasions for dramas that swayed thrillingly between suspicion and credulity. Nineteenth-century visitors seemed always to be game for the intellectual challenge and never to resent the way Barnum played with their perceptions. As Lawrence Weschler observes in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, the spectator “continually finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the marvels of nature) and wondering if (any of this could possibly be true). And it’s that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion … that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human.” So that’s why so few visitors complained about the deceptions. Neil Harris, one of Barnum’s biographers, believes the showman was distinguished by “a peculiar and masterly way of manipulating other people and somehow making them feel grateful for being the subjects of his manipulation.” Barnum brought out something livelier and more interesting in his visitors than simple umbrage.
Barnum’s Fejee Mermaid as it exists today in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The museum lists the materials of construction as fur, ceramic, fish skin, tooth, animal claw, wood, papier-mâche, and wool. (photo credit 1.4)
In his 1855 autobiography, Barnum confessed that he had rented “her fish-ship” from his colleague Moses Kimball and that it was probably crafted in Japan, the birthplace of unicorns, phoenixes, triple-headed snakes, and other fabulous creatures residing in curio cabinets around the world. Barnum further revealed that Dr. Griffin was, in reality, a confederate named Levi Lyman. “Dr. Griffin” never set foot outside of New York. All those dispatches from the South were written by Barnum himself, then sent to friends in southern cities and mailed north with the requisite postmark. The woodcuts, the pamphlets, the transparency outside of Concert Hall had all been commissioned by Barnum. Every notice in the Herald—except the two-line declaration of humbug—was an unsigned, paid advertisement written by Barnum. In the first four weeks that the mermaid was on view at the American Museum, attendance almost tripled, and Barnum made more than $30,000 that year.
Yet Barnum’s customers were not dim-witted, inexperienced, or overly susceptible. His attractions called forth not their naïveté but their rational skepticism, not their blind faith but their empiricism—just like a swindler. Barnum’s critics found his deceptions too uncomfortably similar to those of Samuel Williams, the Confidence Man. Melville, for his part, made sure his readers understood the connection by describing his protagonist in The Confidence-Man as an “original character,” who is “like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all around it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it.” But Barnum strenuously—if disingenuously—denied the similarity. In 1865, he published a book titled The Humbugs of the World in which he defined humbug as “putting on glittering appearances—outside show—novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” Humbug is merely publicity, not deception. “An honest man who thus arrests public attention will be called a ‘humbug,’ but he is not a swindler or an impostor,” insisted Barnum, as long as he gives them “a full equivalent for their money.”
In fact, as Barnum knew full well, it was precisely because his exhibits veered so close to con artistry that audiences found them so exhilarating. Visiting the American Museum was not all that different from running into a well-dressed stranger who asked you for your watch. Barnum’s exhibits invited spectators to think like speculators. When they opened the morning newspaper to an advertisement for a mermaid, the issues that confronted them were fundamentally market based. As the historian James W. Cook argues, nineteenth-century urbanites continually needed to pose and answer questions such as “Is this advertised commodity genuine? How much should I pay to find out? Are the remarkable claims in the papers to be trusted? or is this merely another overrated fraud in a vast sea of dubious commodities?” Humbug is the characteristic stance of American capitalism, what Jackson Lears calls “vernacular philosophy for a society on the make.” It is a game with its own self-referential rules that begins the instant the viewer recognizes that a deception is being practiced upon him or her. The value that structures this game is not truth or beauty but irony: the invisible, unbridgeable, yet palpable difference between what is indicated and what is meant. There is no attempt to conceal the fact that the showman controls the game, but the spectator is invited to join as an intellectual equal who fully consents to the rules. And it is flattering to be welcomed into a deception as a knowing participant of guile and cunning.
P. T. Barnum was not, strictly speaking, a con man, but perhaps he softened the moral hardness toward deception and made the swindlers’ jobs a little easier. Certainly as the popularity and geographical reach of humbug escaped the city, swindlers found they didn’t need to wait until potential marks disembarked at the train station before hooking them and taking off the touch. Beginning in the 1870s, swindl
ers began to use the mails to draw their victims to the city with circulars offering them “green goods.” They’d comb lists of reputable businessmen as compiled by credit-reporting agencies like R. G. Dun or the Bradstreet Company, and they’d send out letters by the tens of thousands to cities around the nation. “Dear Sir,” read one such letter. “Your name was sent to me by a reliable person in your town. He said he knew you to be a man who was not adverse to making money in any way, manner, or form, and that he knew you were up to snuff.” The letter writer would then wink and nod, saying something like “I am dealing in articles, paper goods—ones, twos, fives, tens and twenties—(do you understand?).” Some circulars would be even more explicit, offering to sell the recipient “the best and safest counterfeit money ever put on the market.” The recipient could buy the money for a fraction of its face value: $1,500 for $75; $4,500 for $125; $6,000 for $180; $10,000 for $220; and, for the truly go-ahead man, $30,000 for a mere $400.
The circular would direct the mark to a hotel in New York, where he would be met by a steerer who would swear him to confidentiality and then bring him to a secret office. A distinguished gentleman would show him a sheaf of bills, genuine bills masquerading as counterfeit, and the mark would be so astounded by their verisimilitude he would eagerly part with his own savings, only to discover that the satchel he received in exchange was stuffed with green-colored paper. One steerer, who worked for a green-goods kingpin named Eddie Parmeley, estimated that Parmeley would take the touch off at least fifteen and as many as thirty marks a day in amounts ranging from $300 to $1,000 apiece. For those who could not make it to the city in person, the letter would offer $1,000 in counterfeit for a deposit of $20, saying, “I will trust you for the balance until we meet face to face to show you I have the best of confidence in you.” The green-goods men garnered a fortune in $20 bills from the hinterlands.
Another version was the “gold brick” swindle, where a respectable businessman would desperately need to sell a block of the precious metal on behalf of a friend, who had come into possession of the gold during a mining dispute. The mark would be shown a heavily gilded lead block with a slug of real gold in the center, to ensure that a sample taken from it would test as authentic. This was a trap only the wealthier marks could afford, for a $9,000 brick would sell for the still significant price of $7,500.
With a swindle for every income bracket and the means to reach marks in their hometowns, no one need be left out of the busy urban market in fraud. The culture of the city streets—its ethics, its assumptions and conventions, its language—had overrun the urban grid and now extended deep into the nation. Green-goods circulars appealed not only to the mark’s greed but also to his unwillingness to be left behind in the sprint into the future. Green goods grew out of humbug, but its structure prefigured the big con, and many of its elements—the steerers, the green-colored boodle, the bribes to policemen and detectives—would soon be imported wholesale into the phony stockbrokerages and betting parlors.
No matter where one lived, by the end of the century it was impossible to be innocent of humbug. Barnum had injected a new stance into American popular culture; winking had become a recognizable cultural code. His success with the Fejee Mermaid proved eminently repeatable, and he went on to present a wild buffalo hunt in Hoboken, a maneless horse covered in woolly fur supposedly captured in California, the wooden leg that Santa Anna had lost on a Mexican battlefield. As this list suggests, Barnum found inspiration for many of his hoaxes in the folklore and mythology of the American West, importing into the urban centers of the Northeast the untamed energy of the frontier. If, in the 1880s, deceptions as serious as cheating at poker on the Texas plains were still punishable by hanging or burying, nonetheless a new and separate exemption had been carved out for deceptive entertainments. Norfleet would have been equally capable of killing a crook and chortling at a Barnum exhibit. Humbugging and running a blazer were two points on a long continuum, with confidence artistry somewhere in between.
So is Norfleet humbugging us with his story of the mark turned ace detective, and if he is, are we entertained or aggravated? How much of our pleasure in Norfleet’s adventures is dependent on their truth? It turns out that if we decide to pull a Norfleet on Norfleet—to chase after the man and attempt to pierce through the scrim of the deception—what we find is a kind of reversed Fejee Mermaid.
The unadorned facts of Norfleet’s account of hunting down E. J. Ward and Charles Gerber check out. Norfleet did indeed put two notches in his belt almost immediately upon starting his vigilante sleuthing, and independent sources like newspapers and court documents make it possible to fill in dates and details for his adventure tale. There are only a few disquieting inconsistencies.
On December 21 or 22, S. N. Cathey did indeed stop at the Sunset Hotel in San Bernardino. He fell into conversation with Charles Gerber, who invited him for a walk down the street. As they sat down on a park bench, Cathey discovered a lost pocketbook. Inside were the exact same documents that Norfleet had examined in the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas: a code cipher, a letter warning against undue publicity, a membership card, a bond, and a receipt. Gerber suggested they return the wallet to its owner, a man named E. J. Ward, but Cathey balked and the play floundered.
Sheriff Walter Shay did indeed spot Ward and Gerber at the Pacific Electric Depot in San Bernardino just before Christmas, and he did indeed arrest them as they attempted to board an eastbound train. He confiscated their baggage and examined it when he returned to his office, finding the same pocketbook with its now-familiar five slips of paper. Shay, however, claimed that this arrest happened on December 16, five or six days before Cathey’s arrival in the city. Certainly it happened before December 23, because by then the governor of Texas had issued extradition papers for Ward and Gerber; therefore, Norfleet couldn’t have arrived at the San Bernardino jail on Christmas morning, as he’d so dramatically portrayed.
It is true, though, that Ward and Gerber must have been terrified at the testimony that Norfleet would be able to give against them. They spent over $10,000 and hired two of the best criminal attorneys in the State of California to fight their extradition. It was rumored that at their final hearing in district court, they were going to stage a fake fight and then slip away in the company of their colleagues planted in the audience, but the courtroom was heavily guarded. The proceedings were routine. Their writ was dismissed, and within half an hour they were on the Sunshine Special, headed for Fort Worth. They arrived handcuffed to each other, but otherwise looking the very picture of respectable businessmen. Norfleet was standing on the steps to the jail. As Ward and Gerber passed by him, none of them said a word.
Jesse M. Brown, the district attorney for Fort Worth, wrote in his own autobiography, “Some of the facts recited in [Norfleet’s] book are exaggerated.” But it is true that in May 1920, District Attorney Brown did indeed prosecute Ward and Gerber separately in two jury trials. Norfleet testified in both trials—wearing, according to the International News Service, “a sombrero and a corduroy suit out of the plains”—and in what remains of the court transcripts, we can see that his testimony tallies perfectly with his later autobiography, sometimes nearly word for word. This is either reassuring or deeply suspicious. On the stand he recalled Furey’s words upon sending Spencer out to the Fort Worth exchange for one last gamble: “Today will be the last day that we will be on the anxious seat.” He recalled Spencer’s fearful cries when he pulled a gun on them in the Westbrook Hotel: “Before my Angel Mother in Heaven, with the Bible lifted up to Heaven, before my Angel Mother, I swear to you that I never did prove false and never will prove false to you.” Under oath, he told the jury that Furey quelled his fiery temper by giving him a Master Mason’s sign—which, you’ll remember, was the second of two versions of how the altercation was smoothed over. Norfleet’s wife and son also testified, giving their version of Spencer’s visit to the ranch as a representative of the Green Immigration Land Company. Mr. Cathey and Sheriff S
hay testified to the San Bernardino chain of events. And the real secretaries of the cotton exchanges in Dallas and Fort Worth testified to never having transacted business with Ward and Gerber.
Neither defendant brought a single witness to the stand but instead attempted to stall and obfuscate by filing a small forest’s worth of legal motions. Their lawyers bickered with each other about who should be tried first. Gerber even attempted to invalidate his trial by giving up Reno Hamlin. He filed a bill of exception pointing out that Hamlin was also indicted by the same grand jury and arguing that Hamlin should be tried first and, in the event of his acquittal, Hamlin’s testimony be used to acquit Gerber. Gerber alleged that “the said Reno Hamlin, alias R Miller, now is and is residing in the town of Cleburne in Johnson County, Texas, about thirty-five miles distance from Fort Worth, Texas, where this court is in session, and that he is living there openly and notoriously, and without any effort on his part to secrete himself from the process of this court, and that he can be arrested upon said charges at any time under the orders of this court.” Gerber’s attempt to turn in Hamlin instead caused the judge to dismiss the case against Hamlin. Gerber must have howled in outrage. And yet, just a few days later, Reno Hamlin found himself unceremoniously dumped in the county jail. The court’s dismissal of Hamlin’s indictment was apparently a ruse to draw him out into public life, and it worked exactly as planned.