Karen Halttunen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870.
Introduction | Overview | Social Conditions | Reactions | Outcomes | Commentary
Social Conditions
Halttunen begins laying the context for her argument by describing the confidence man and painted women that figure in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography; the confidence man was not a new figure that appeared in nineteenth century culture. However, social reaction to the confidence man in the nineteenth century was marked by an anxiety about the potential threat he posed to members of society.
A number of individuals wrote advice manuals, intended primarily for the young men who left the small towns in which they grew up to go to the big city. These advice manuals provide an insight into the identity crisis in America as society was in the process of transforming from a rural society with a relatively fixed social structure to an urban society with a fluid, liminal quality. The national identity and the individual identity were both in question. Those advice writers who felt that there had been a golden era in social relations from which society had declined, warned of the threat of such a decline to the American republican experiment.
As a mechanism for protection from confidence men—those who pretended to be what they were not in an effort to advance themselves at the expense of others—middle-class society felt a need to create means of distinguishing confidence men from the rest of society.
In an interesting contradiction, while they were busy defending themselves from the deceptions perpetrated by confidence men, many of these middle-class Americans were immersed in their own deceptions, geared toward their advancement in society.