Americans have always loved and fallen for hoaxes,
fakes, and frauds.
They are an enduring part of our culture
and folklore. It was all pretty harmless until one
ran for President and went off the rails. Take the inventions
of Parson Weems in his alleged biography of George Washington that gave us the cherry tree story, tossing the dollar
across the Potomac, and the vision at Valley Forge—all entirely fictitious but amazingly still taught in American elementary schools. There were literary hoaxes as crude as Davey Crocket’s
boasting or as bold as Edgar Allan
Poe’s Balloon Hoax about a supposed
air crossing of the Atlantic in
1844. There were hoaxes for profit involving phony Spanish Land Grants and salted gold mines; strategic hoaxes like George
Patton’s phantom army decoy in England
before D-Day; accidental hoaxes like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast; tabloid hoaxes like the alien
autopsy film and others too numerous to mention; and political hoaxes like Sarah
Palin—oops just informed that last one was not a hoax. Hard to believe.
Many
early hoaxes involved showman P.T.
Barnum, who makes an appearance in a supporting
role in our tale today about the most famous of all American
hoaxes—the Cardiff Giant.
On
October 16, 1869 workers hired to dig a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub”
Newell in Cardiff, New York hit what they first thought
was an enormous buried bolder. After
clearing away more dirt, one of the men, either Gideon Emmons or Henry
Nichols exclaimed, “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!”
It
was no Indian. It was something else
more strange and wonderful. Newell rushed to the scene and in short order
had a hoist erected over the excavation and hauled out the figure of
a stone man 10 foot 4.5 inches long. He even made sure that there was a photographer present to record the moment and the crowd of curious local on-lookers. Newell quickly proclaimed the discovery
was a petrified man, erected a tent over it and began charging the curious
the very tidy sum of
25 cents to get a gander at
it. Crowds were so big that in two days
he upped the ante to 50 cents, but the crowds kept coming from far and wide in
response to spectacular nationwide newspaper
coverage.
Not everyone was amused or taken in. Almost immediately scientists pooh-poohed the idea.
Geologists noted that there
was no good reason to dig a well where the giant had been found. Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh
proclaimed it “a most decided humbug.” If any had been able to obtain a sample of the stone they could have completely debunked the claims. But the press and
the public ignored the naysayers.
Members
of the Evangelical clergy were particularly voracious in defense of
the Giant’s authenticity because they found it proof of a passage
in Genesis 6:4 that “The Nephilim [giants]were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when
the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to
them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”
Those
preachers were just the ones that wealthy New York tobacconist and atheist
freethinker George Hull wanted
to make fools out of when he concocted his amazing, elaborate, and expensive
plot. Inspired by a hoax story that
had appeared in the newspaper Alta California about a miner who had had drunk a liquid that he found within a geode and became petrified, Hull commissioned a stone cutter in Fort Dodge,
Iowa to hew out a large block of gypsum, a soft sulfate stone. He told the men that it was destined for a monument to Abraham Lincoln and had it shipped
by rail to an address in Chicago.
There
he hired a German monument carver named
Edward Burghardt, paid him
handsomely, and swore him to secrecy. Hulls instructions were detailed—the figure
of a man had to be nude and apparently laying on his back, one arm behind him the other on his stomach. His face
should be rugged but
recognizable.
To age the carving various acids and other chemicals were
applied to the surface, the supposed petrified flesh was beaten with a board
through which steel knitting needles had
been hammered to create a pore-like
surface. Soil was rubbed onto the
carving.
Crated, it was shipped by rail to
Cardiff and transported the final distance by wagon to the farm of Hull’s cousin Newell in November of 1868. There they buried it in a pit behind the barn, covering the ground so that over the coming year vegetation
would cover the disturbed earth.
Then 11 months later Newell hired the unsuspecting well
diggers. It is a wonder that experienced
diggers did not notice that they were working in the loose soil and gravel used to refill the hole. Or if they did notice, they were paid well to
keep their traps shut about it.
To
this point Hull had spent over $2,600 of his own money—about $45,000 in today’s dollars and two years of
preparation on his hoax.
Even
with Newell as a partner, however, Hull made huge profits on his hoax. In addition to his take from the local
exhibition, which was considerable, Hull sold
his interest in the statue for $23,000, equivalent to $429,000
now. Newell made out almost as
well.
The new owners, a syndicate of five men
headed by David Hannum transported
the Giant to Syracuse, New York for exhibition. In the more
convenient location the Giant drew even bigger crowds—and fatter profits.
That
drew the attention of Barnum, who knew something about
exhibiting frauds—and there was no doubt that Barnum understood that the Giants was a phony. He offered the Hannum
group $50,000, but was turned down cold. Completely undiscouraged, Barnum arranged for
a wax cast to be secretly made of
the Giant from which a plaster of
Paris copy was molded. Within weeks he had his Giant on display in
New York City claiming that his was the original and the one in Syracuse a fraudulent copy. It was a
bold lie, but Barnum was confident that he could get away with it. For good reason.
The
press, naturally, ate up the controversy that Barnum had stirred
up. One reporter sought out
Hannum for a comment. The Upstate promoter seemed to shrug the
challenge off commenting, “There’s
a sucker born every minute.” Somehow
this quote entered American folklore
falsely attributed to Barnum.
But
Hannum unwisely did not let sleeping dogs lie even though both showmen
continued to rake in gate receipts. He sued Barnum for claiming he was
exhibiting a fake and sought an injunction
to make him stop. The judge, who may have been among those
who had read the scientific debunkers,
declined to issue an injunction unless Hannum could “get his giant
to swear on his own genuineness.”
Throwing
good money after bad, Hannum pressed the case.
While it was still pending on December 10, Hull gleefully confessed to the
press, satisfying his urge to catch the preachers with their metaphorical
pants down. Naturally this did not
enhance Hannum’s prospects in court. February
2, 1870 both Giants were declared fakes in court and a judge ruled that Barnum
could not be sued for “calling a fake a fake.”
Interestingly,
the well-publicized court case did not entirely damage the appeal of either of
the Giants. It turned out the public was
almost as eager to pay to see what all of the fuss was about—and to be able to boast they were never fooled at all—as they were when they thought they we were seeing a
genuine marvel.
Only
time and diminishing novelty eroded the exhibits popularity. Barnum got millage out of touring his Giant
with the side show attractions of
his famous circus. Hannum and his successors would trot out
the original for various exhibitions, most famously at the Pan American Exposition in San
Francisco in 1901. But compared to new
and more dazzling attractions at the fair, the Giant was not a success.
| The original Cardiff Giant has been at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York since 1947. |
Amazingly
both Giants remain on display today. An
Iowa publisher bought the original to
use in his basement rumpus room as a
coffee table and conversation piece. In 1947 he sold it
to the Farmers’ Museum
in Cooperstown, New York, where it is still on display to those who have time left over from the visit a visit
to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Perhaps
fittingly Barnum’s plaster copy resides in Marvin’s
Marvelous Mechanical Museum, a coin-operated game arcade and museum of
oddities in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
So,
suckers, you can pay your money and take your choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment