The Other Time Anger at the Elites Drove Americans a Little Crazy
Nearly 100 years after the pernicious scam, there’s a moral in Drake’s Fortune
Nearly 100 years after the pernicious scam, there’s a moral in Drake’s Fortune
Drake’s Fortune: The Fabulous True Story of the World’s Greatest Confidence Artist, by Richard Rayner, was so much more depressing than I thought it would be. While the book is certainly worth the read (especially if you don’t mind being outraged 100 years too late), the story is disheartening in its relevance.
On its face, it’s the biography of Oscar Hartzell, a conman who “persuaded tens of thousands of Midwesterners to part with millions of dollars to start a legal fund that would see the mythical fortune of Sir Francis Drake restored to its rightful heir.”
As we watch the war of opposing opinions about reality play out, the book also is a reminder that we may be doomed to be governed by cowards and ruled by idiots. There is no other way to put it.
A loser knows his own
Hartzell was a failed businessman who made and lost his own fortunes as well as fortunes he borrowed before turning full-time con artist. He burned through wives/lovers and friends pretty easily and worked his way into a partnership in the Drake scam. Before too long he betrayed his partners and took the scam over.
This is all routine stuff.
It must be said that nothing in Hartzell’s Drake pitch passed the smell test. You see, he didn’t just tell his suckers that there was a chance at getting at the Drake estate. He told them that in the process of claiming the estate much of England’s wealth would be forfeit.
Year after year he explained that he was working with the Crown as they rummaged through their accounts to settle up with the heir. He did this for more than a decade claiming time and again that the resolution was 90 days away.
Americans Have Always Treasured Their Right to Be Conned
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When the Depression hit, he said that it was because word got out that he was liquidating England, but it wasn’t his audacity or his marks’ credulity that got me down. I’ve spoken with lots of people who still are in thrall to long-debunked nonsense like NESARA. What depressed me was the story of Ed Smith, Iowa’s secretary of state at the time.
Iowans were sending Hartzell thousands of Depression-era dollars per week and, as a public servant, Smith tried to stop it. Since the con man was living in England and not breaking any English laws, he was untouchable.
Smith ran warnings in the papers providing evidence that the Drake Fortune was an outright scam, that there was no such thing as a “Drake Estate,” and that England would not be relinquishing most of its wealth to the Iowans who were making donations to Hartzell.
A failure of leadership
It didn’t work. Hartzell wrote his own responses, which the papers happily printed, telling his followers that the government was lying, the papers were lying (except when they printed his letters), and that the billions were forthcoming. His backers began planning to buy four Midwestern states turn into their own private club. This is absolutely true.
Undaunted, Smith drew up legislation making it illegal to send donations to, or accept them for, a fraudulent cause. As the bill came up for consideration, Hartzell ordered his faithful to write letters to their legislators and get them to block the bill.
This worked.
Even though they knew Hartzell was draining millions of working-class dollars out of Iowa, the non-working class legislators decided to let him keep doing it rather than risk getting thrown out of office and having to get day jobs.
Daunted, Smith left public service.
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Our religious myths will define us whether we like it or notmedium.com
Hertzell also set his mongrels on the USPS when it tried to intervene. There was a lot of handwringing at the time about how easy it was to subvert the mails for criminal gain, but no action to prevent it.
Post Office agents were the ones who got him in the end, but Hartzell had been bilking the public for nearly 15 years by the time they did. The details of Hartzell’s capture and trial are astounding, and I assure you I haven’t ruined the book.
I only wanted to tell you this part of the story because it reinforces the idea that, these people are right in their own twisted way.
The fix in
They had a sense, even as today’s QAnon devotees have, that the East Coast banks and the Washington elites didn’t share their interests, and actually often work at cross-purposes to them. This is a fact, possibly the only fact upon which conspiracy theory junkies and reasonable people agree. What they struggle with is the why of it all.
We have this sense in America that we should be made to do nothing and convinced to do everything. I think we so often see laws as an impingement of our freedom because we have a sense that they aren’t really for our own personal good. As we see every day, the collective good is a matter of opinion.
We want the freedom to do what we want to do.
We want to be free of responsibility for any ill our actions cause.
The fact that these are incompatible desires just breaks some people during times of crisis. In the run-up to the Great Depression, when Hartzell was active, it was the mad accumulation of wealth and land that had people spooked.
Folks in the Midwest saw an uncomfortable number of East Coast speculators getting into farming (well, sharecropping really) as they bought up land to have others work.
No one likes to think of themselves or their community as a resource to be mined for wealth. It surely made the unlanded in the region feel powerless, especially given that they agreed that it was the god-given right of East Coast speculators to buy up all the land they could get mortgages on.
As much as we try and bury our animal attributes, I feel like we have a primal sense of resource scarcity. People who fall into conspiracy thinking understand that they need a shortcut to the top before things get too bad. As things get worse, they’ll believe anything that promises the shortcut because they can’t imagine a political solution that benefits them.
It Is So Hard to Empathize With Conspiracy Theory Enthusiasts
It is also absolutely critical to diminishing their influencebytonyrusso.medium.com
They have observed (ostensibly along with the rest of us) that the “Powers that Be” have zero interest in becoming the “Powers that Were” and will use any and every means to prevent that from happening.
While those of us who chug along under the impression that politics is a method for living together with less discomfort, we’re opposed by those who believe politics is the mechanism for making people do what you want.
What I saw in the Hartzell story (as well as in my own and in the news pretty much every day) is that there are often way more people who think politics is a stick with which to beat the facts of the matter into submission than we reasonably might have guessed.
What I also saw was that then, just as now, it was a symptom of an unsustainable culture. A close read of the 1930s reveals that it was a miracle the U.S. didn’t descend into utter chaos and violence.
I hope to Christ it’s what a close read of the current decade reveals in the future, but should we have to rely on luck? Are we all so tied to being absolutely right about everything all the time that the notion of compromise is ghastly?
That’s kind of what it looks like from here. Moral certainty has taken hold across the political spectrum and, failing our ability to return to a politics of living together rather than one of attrition, let’s hope it all shakes out for the best some other way. Hopefully not involving a world war.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.