by Amy Reading
Norfleet excelled at selling himself, and in this quality he was the quintessential American. In the span of Norfleet’s lifetime—indeed, within his own life story—a gigantic transformation had occurred in the American cultural imagination. In the antebellum era, the confidence man was the manifestation of the very devil himself. As one writer warned in 1850, just one year after the appearance of the watch swindler Samuel Williams-Thomas-Thompson, the confidence man may be “gifted in intellect, eloquent in speech, beautiful in person, commanding in attainments, captivating and shining in all that he does,” but in truth his talents were like “the beautiful hues on the back of the serpent, the more hideous in proportion to their power to charm the victim.” Those venturing into the city were never to forget, as another advice writer cautioned, that the confidence man “had a pleasant address, was mild and courteous in his manner,—but within him was the spirit of a fiend.”
Yet by the second decade of the twentieth century, what had been the confidence man’s most odious quality, his chameleonlike ability to change himself to meet the moment, was becoming the modern era’s hallmark. The sociological trends that gave rise to the big con—such as the growth of the cities, the distension of local networks of trust, the creation of the professional-managerial class that relied on expertise and confidence for its authority, and explosive middle-class participation in the consumer marketplace and the financial markets—also rendered the swindling arts a necessary part of success in the business world. To succeed in this exuberantly redrawn landscape, the ambitious American needed, above all else, to compel others to like him.
Self-help writers, like the wildly popular Orison Swett Marden, exhorted traveling salesmen, store clerks, insurance agents, stockbrokers, and the ambitious new cohort of advertising men to develop “impelling personalities,” yet to be “all things to all men,” turning the kaleidoscope of their being in accordance with their audiences’ needs. Marden asked the readers of his 1921 book, Masterful Personality, “Did you ever feel yourself reinforced, your ability doubled, your power to do things increased tremendously in the presence of some powerful personality whom you admired?” In books like How to Get What You Want, Selling Things, and Making Yourself, Marden offered ways to magnetize your customers or audience and align them so that your interests would come to seem their interests, and you could move them in any direction.
By the 1920s, the same middle-class monthly magazines that serialized Norfleet’s story and published articles exposing the tricks of the swindlers also ran essays that frankly acknowledged that confidence artists had perfected what the rest of the middle class must now hurry to emulate: salesmanship as a science, with codified principles and measurably successful techniques. As a 1925 Collier’s article, “Take a Tip from the Con Man,” explained, swindlers had been successful “for nearly two centuries” because “they have what is virtually a standardized presentation of each confidence game,” handed down from generation to generation. It further explained that “their proficiency is due to the fact that they adopt a definite method of procedure and painstakingly perfect themselves in the details of its practice. Nothing is overlooked.” The modern businessman, it seemed, should make himself over into a phonograph of dynamism and charisma. He should work on his self-presentation as arduously as an actor in a play or a swindler in a con, yet with a vast enough repertoire to turn any situation to his advantage.
This rehabilitation of the confidence man’s social status, from a villain to a near-Napoleonic hero, signaled a larger revolution in American values that began around the time of Norfleet’s birth and was nearly complete by the era of his swindling. The nineteenth century valued above all else the notion of character. An individual with character was someone who integrated moral law deep into his or her being, yet also interlocked with the larger societal prerogatives of hard work and self-control. In a survey of over two hundred nineteenth-century works of literature and popular culture, the words that repeatedly accompanied the idea of character were “citizenship, duty, democracy, work, building, golden deeds, outdoor life, conquest, honor, reputation, morals, manners, integrity, and above all, manhood.”
The industrial age invented a host of metrics by which to weigh the American individual’s character, and soon, quite noticeably, the thing being measured itself began to change. Life insurance agencies, with their accounting methods and actuary tables, expressed in dollar signs a man’s productive capacity. Credit-rating bureaus, with their spies in every city and their ledgers tallying each man’s reputation, calculated just how risky it was to invest confidence and money in each new endeavor. Contract theory—which expresses the doctrine of possessive individualism, in which the individual is the proprietor of his or her own capacities and the law exists to preserve his freedom to exchange them—became solidified in the American legal system in the 1850s under the direction of the Massachusetts chief justice, Lemuel Shaw, Herman Melville’s father-in-law. In the age of Samuel Williams and Melville’s Confidence-Man, the law enshrined the individual as an entrepreneur of himself, personhood as something fungible, the self as capital. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, the American man’s highest calling was “to invent something, to be somebody,—i.e., to invent and get a patent for himself,—so that all may see his originality.”
The self-made mythology, which in the nineteenth century was expressed in highly loaded terms like “the go-ahead spirit” and “the wide awake man,” began to take root at such an intimate level of the American psyche that identity itself became precisely commensurate with financial circumstance. The word “failure” initially meant “breaking in business” or going broke, and it described a singular, fairly rare event in an adult’s life. The expansion of the word to describe an individual himself, his substance and core, marked the breach in the stone wall that had fortified the idea of character: the penetration of the marketplace into the heart of American identity. Norfleet, who used to define himself by the firm grip his cowboy boots had on the prairie of the Texas Panhandle, came dangerously close to such failure. His subsequent actions, the manhunt, all those trial testimonies, and the autobiographical story told and retold, speak to the American response in the face of any failure of selfhood: reinvention.
By the time Norfleet encountered Joseph Furey and Lou Blonger, “character” had begun to give way to the entirely different idea of “personality.” Sincerity was replaced with appearance, morality with efficacy. The vocabulary of personality included words like “fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful.” Gone was the notion that tending to one’s own moral core with industry and sobriety would be enough to earn God’s favor and a steady income. Now the material rewards of the Roaring Twenties economy went to the one who aggressively pursued the main chance and who mastered the dual art of managing his own impression and managing others so that they contributed to his own destiny.
And with the advent of the mass market, the entrepreneurial self had a wealth of media outlets in which to grow his capital, as Norfleet so restlessly demonstrated. This archetype was necessarily a speculator, living in the moment to come, anticipating future gains, ever confident that continuous risk would bring an expanded asset base. Capitalism had shaped the American soul in its own image, from P. T. Barnum, who taught people how to enjoy being duped, to J. Frank Norfleet, who learned how to enjoy being inauthentic, a self-invented imposture of himself, forever spieling his tale of deception reversed.
Norfleet’s life is the story of triumphing over his susceptibility by embracing it. Perhaps one of the reasons why he captivated so many listeners and readers with his tale is that he gave expression to an aspect of his identity that few would otherwise be able to admit they shared. Norfleet never possessed that hard carapace of skepticism that the experts of his day tried to instill in the American populace. Instead, he let out his inner mark, that fragile bubble of hope and optimism. It’s what led him into Furey’s trap, but it’s also what led
him to believe he had a chance at succeeding on his quixotic quest—two stories that would never have happened without a large measure of gullibility. Certainly this credulity is as essential to American mythology as the self-made man, but Norfleet’s adventures go further to suggest that the mark inside is the first requirement for narrative itself. What he did was cultivate this characteristic until it became knowing, self-aware, perennially game for a kind of wide-awake deception. Norfleet came to represent the personality type that best fits American modernity: the sophisticated sucker.
Norfleet and Van Cise kept in touch all their long lives. In his early nineties, Norfleet sent Van Cise a postcard to ask him for the address of Len Reamey, and Van Cise supplied it to him. After turning state’s evidence, Reamey had reverted to a life of honest enterprise; he and Van Cise exchanged Christmas cards each year. When he was ninety-five, Norfleet wrote to Van Cise again, this time to complain about his treatment in the hands of Argosy magazine, which also portrayed him as an alcoholic gentleman rancher. Norfleet wondered if he shouldn’t write the editor and “ask The writer of the Story if he dont think he Should Give me a Quart of Old Scotch. So I can taste it. I Never Have.” Norfleet’s letters to Van Cise are touching in their garrulous sameness. In one, he wrote, “I am not too Frisky. I have been Shot Down 6 times Stabbed Down Twice. Been in 4 accidents When I was the only Survivor in Each Accident. The Last one June 20th 54 I got my Left Hip and Knee Badly Crushed. Have been in Doctor Shops nearly ever since can walk some by using 2 canes but cannot Dance a Step. But wife says I still make a Full Hand at the Dining Table only.” Three years later, he wrote, “I am still here and My Wife Says I Still Make a Full hand At the Dining Table Only. We both have Good Health. Our Wheat Looks Fine Prospects Looks good for a Bumper Fruit Crop. Cattle and Race Horses Fat. I hope to see you in Denver this Fall At the Fair.”
All too soon afterward, Norfleet’s good health deteriorated. He began to lose his hearing and his patience. In 1960, when someone asked him if he had hated Joseph Furey, those many years ago, Norfleet shouted, “I had to do it, don’t you understand? Why I had to do it man.” He was turning ninety-five that year, and his family threw him a big party at his home with hundreds of guests from the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico, but Norfleet was certain about one thing. “I’m 100 years of age, never mind what the papers say,” he bellowed. “You’re 95,” his wife shouted back at him, then, turning to the assembled guests, she explained in a softer voice, “He’s always wanted to live to be 100, so he says he’s 100. He’s 95. I’m 89.” But Norfleet heard her. “I’m 10 years older than you by three days,” he hollered. In other respects, though, Norfleet didn’t want to admit that he was getting older. His grandniece, Sandi Clark, remembers that when the family was gathered together for Easter the year that Norfleet was ninety-eight, someone dared him to do a headstand on the front lawn. He stood up from his chair, grabbed his cane, and started out toward the center of the lawn. Sandi’s mother ran into the house, calling for her father and uncles to come save Uncle Frank from a broken hip. Sandi’s father came running out, but he was holding a camera, and he took pictures as Norfleet did his headstand. He always did love an audience.
Sure enough, Norfleet lived to be 100, and a reception was held at the Hale Center City Hall for the “living legend of the old West.” On his 102nd birthday, President Lyndon Johnson sent his personal congratulations to him, a man who’d been born at the end of the Civil War. Eight months later, on October 15, 1967, Norfleet died peacefully in bed. Even The Washington Post carried the news. Norfleet’s account at the great brokerage of American culture had been closed out, his speculation in the field of deception and con artistry finally brought to a halt for lack of funds, but it had been a grand run.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to my husband, Jay Farmer, who had unwavering confidence in this speculative enterprise. I cannot put a value on the easy grace with which he supported me, his unconditional endorsement of my uncertain career after those financially unproductive graduate student years. Every writer should have such a backstop.
Thank you to my daughter, Lucy, for writing circles around me and humbling me with her artistic freedom. One day when she was three, I told her part of Norfleet’s story, and then she asked me to transcribe her book. It went like this: “Chapter 1. Norfleet. He used to put saddles on horses so the horses could be ridden at races. Then when they were tired he would take the saddle blankets off and he would untie the gwumph and that is because he wasn’t a helper on a farm. He was the owner of the farm so he could decide what to do on the farm.” She petered out after that first chapter, but I think it’s pretty clear that a writing career is hers if she wants it.
My son, Jasper, deserves credit for being present at the creation. I worked on the proposal the whole time he grew in my belly. Then he was born, and I worked on the proposal some more while he napped in a sling on my belly. He was in the background trying to get my attention during every phone call with agents and editors. And for the next few years, he perfected his uncanny skill at slapping my keyboard and causing my screen to do alarming things.
I cannot thank my writing group enough for treating me as if I was a writer and thus making me believe it. I am especially indebted to Aaron Sachs, my first reader, whose fingerprints are all over this book. I am so grateful to have had the wit and wisdom of Andrea K. Summers, Lizabeth Cain, Michael Sharp, Geno Tournour, Jennifer Wilder, and Rachel Dickinson, not to mention the spouses who peered over their shoulders, including Christine Evans, Alison Shonkwiler, Eric Geissinger, and Erik Hoover.
Erik Hoover deserves a special mention for countless research leads, and for the title. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Name That Book contest.
This project was incubated in the American studies program at Yale University, where I had the honor to work with Jean-Christophe Agnew, Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Hungerford, and Lara Cohen. When it came time to turn an academic idea into a trade book, Nancy Bereano and Joan Jacobs Brumberg saw the possibilities and helped me get started.
Along the way, I had many readers, commiserators, and cheerleaders, including Rebecca Peabody; Angela Macey-Cushman; Lucia Silva; Sandy Zipp; Karen, Ann, and Bob Shepherd; and Anisa, Linda, and Bob Mendizabal. I appreciated the coffeeshop companionship of Robert Danberg, Roger Kimmel Smith, and Melanie Bush. A special thanks to Davina Morgan-Witts for feeding the flame with books.
The Historians Are Writers graduate student group at Cornell University is also a world-class group of readers, and their comments helped catapult the manuscript from a draft to a book: Sarah Ensor, Heather Furnas, Melissa Gniadek, Amy Kohout, Rebecca Macmillan, Laura Martin, Daegan Miller, Katie Proctor, and Josi Ward.
For help procuring primary source materials from all over the country, I am indebted to a whole host of research librarians and archivists, including June Gilligan at the Finger Lakes Library System; Nancy Stoehr at the Tompkins County Public Library; Bruce Hanson and the staff of the Western History and Genealogy Department at the Denver Public Library; John Sigwald at the Unger Memorial Library in Plainview, Texas; Patricia Clark at the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas; Elva Hipolito at the Llano Estacado Museum at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas; Thomas A. Wilder, the Tarrant County District Clerk in Fort Worth, Texas; Deborah Bales at Brown, Dean, Wiseman, Proctor, Hart & Howell, LLP, in Fort Worth, Texas; Ellen Belcher at the Lloyd George Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York; Sylvia Rowan at the San Francisco Public Library; Ryan Roenfeld, president of the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for sharing his research on Ben Marks; Barry Cohen of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, for sharing his research on credit reporting agencies; and Khanh Hoang at the Archives and Regional History Collections at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
I benefited from the research assistance of Noah Wheeler in New Haven, Connecticut; Lou-Jean Holland
Rehn in Denver, Colorado, and Curtis Peoples in Lubbock, Texas.
Phil Goodstein, the people’s historian of Denver, happened to sit down next to me while I was reading one of his books at the Denver Public Library and was gracious when I accosted him and beyond generous with information and research leads.
A heartfelt thank-you to Jen, Chris, Roan, and Conall O’Brien for their hospitality and good humor on my research trips to Colorado, and to Fred and Sally Lippert for providing such a gorgeous place to write a few pages.