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"Perspective from Waiting for Superman",,"When I was in high school, there was an incredible amount of buzz around a new documentary, Waiting for Superman. The documentary focused on the struggle some students faced to get a quality education in major U.S. cities, like Washington, D.C. For many the film was enlightening, but for some the idea of ""lottery schools"" were controversial.
My teacher encouraged our entire AP English class to watch this documentary, as we were all attending a nationally ranked ""lottery school"" just a few miles outside of Washington, D.C in Arlington, Virginia. She encouraged us to look for the similarities and differences in the two education systems that were separated by only a few miles. To set the stage, I lived in Arlington with my family, and our home was situated 3.5 miles from the Washington Monument. My neighborhood school was a nationally ranked Top 10 High School as calculated by the U.S. News and World Report, while the lottery school I was attending was a nationally ranked Top 3 High School as determined by the U.S. News and World Report. No matter which school I went to, I would have had a great education by any standard.
Before watching this film, I had never thought of the privilege that my zip code brought me. I never knew how vastly different the education system was 10 minutes from my home. It had never occurred to me that some students worry about whether their school is able to provide what they need to have the life they want for themselves. This film showed me that the education system was not ""fair"", nor equal. I didn't ""earn"" my zip code, I was simply born into it. Thus, I didn't ""earn"" my education; I didn't do anything special to obtain my education.
Every student is entitled to a quality education, no matter their zip code. After seeing this film, I was convinced that something needed to be changed in our education system. Every student deserves to have access to the same education that I was able to experience. It is a basic right for students to be safe, supported, and challenged to their greatest ability in school. All children should have access to a top tier educational experience. No child should have to worry about having access to a quality education. The lasting impact this film had on me, ultimately led me to choose a career in education as a teacher.","Davis Guggenheim","Waiting for Superman",,2010,"Samantha, 27, Teacher",,,,,,perspective-waiting-superman,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Craig Perrier","Access,Documentary Films,Education,Equality,Guggenheim, Davis,Learning",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/519/bus-2690793_640.jpg,Text,Educators,1,0
"“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory",,"“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
","Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais","Night and Fog (1955)",,"Spring 2021","Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University",,,,,,il-faut-le-savoir,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"From one of my graduate students at Penn State (Morgane Haesen, whose ""Moment"" you published)","Documentary Films,Emotional Experience,Film and Movies,Historical Memory,History,History Education,Holocaust,Memorials,Memory,Teachers & Teaching,War",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/433/syn-ecc_NotreDame1-296x300.png,Text,,1,0
"Three Identical Strangers - not really...",,"I had heard about this documentary, Three Identical Strangers, from a co-worker - she said I absolutely had to see it! I am fascinated by the nature vs. nurture discussion and I could not wait to see how this was represented in the film. At the beginning of the story, I was 100% on board the ""nature"" wagon. Genetics had to be the reason we are who we are. The documentary played right into that thinking, citing the similarity of the likes, preferences, physical gestures, etc. of the triplets. But as the movie went much deeper into their lives, all of the superficial ""sameness"" lost its value, and the ""nurture"" argument began to gain strength.
This movie flipped my thinking completely, proving how much impact one's environment has on one's mentality. These were no longer identical strangers, but rather three very different people, clearly molded and influenced by their loved ones and surroundings in their formative years. I shocked myself with my change of mindset and began to think more critically about how our own ""hard-wit\ring"" could be undone - to either our success or our detriment.",,"a documentary",,"July 2018","Connie, age 54, sales analyst",,,,,,three-identical-strangers-not-really,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"from my brother","Documentary Films,Genetics,Science & the Humanities,Three Identical Strangers,Wardle, Tim",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/331/ousa-chea-gKUC4TMhOiY-unsplash.jpg,Text,,1,0
"The Ho Chi Minh and Marcus Garvey Connection ",,"This seminar has been an amazing experience for me. I have always admired Ho Chi Minh. His commitment to the people of Vietnam and his efforts to free his land from colonialism is such an inspirational story. I must admit that I had never heard of the term Contested Territory before I came to this NEH two-week seminar. After much study over these two weeks, I can see how contested territory fits this topic. Each time the Vietnamese people attempted to rise and reclaim their territory, they were met with resistance from colonizers who had a vested interest in preserving their presence in the country for in my opinion, political and economic reasons.
I learned so much about the battle of Dien Bien Phu, The Ho Chi Minh Trail, Contested Territories, GIS Mapping, and some of the comrades who assistant in the movement to liberate Vietnam. However, my greatest moments were the GIS mapping assignment we received in the first week. Our team decided to create a GIS map that centered around Ho Chi Minh travels. I was stunned by how many places and people this person encountered. In my opinion, it is his travels that shaped his outlook and set the mental framework for him to be able to return to Vietnam with a strong ideology of independence, Nationalism, and Communism.
After our presentation, I decided to do more research in this area and discovered a film by Floyd Webb entitled Ho Chi Minh in Harlem: Nguyen Ai Quoc, Marcus Garvey and the American Empire. I was beyond excited to see the connection between Marcus Garvey and Ho Chi Minh as I see the Black Struggle in the United States similar to the Vietnam struggle in that both races were in a constant battle for liberation and freedom and contesting territory or carving out a space on the earth where people could express their own ideologies and live their own way of life. Marcus Garvey was a huge proponent of Black people in America carving out territories within the United States and creating their own government structures, military, political systems, etc. To know that Ho Chi Minh attended Marcus Garvey lectures and meetings was rewarding in that it shows that Ho Chi Minh met with all races in his quests to build a bridge and shape his identity which moved him closer to contesting territory and win the ultimate battle for Vietnam; Independence.",,"Ho Chi Minh in Harlem: Nguyen Ai Quoc, Marcus Garvey and the American Empire by Floyd Webb",,"July 2018 (during the Contested Territory Seminar)","Solomon C. Williams, 38 years old, teacher of high school American Government and Economics ",,,,,,ho-chi-minh-marcus-garvey,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,http://filmfablab.de/wordpress/2016/05/15/ho-chi-minh-in-harlem/,"Colonialism,Documentary Films,Garvey, Marcus,Geopolitics,Hồ Chí Minh,Ho Chi Minh in Harlem: Nguyen Ai Quoc, Marcus Garvey and the American Empire,Intersectionality,Liberation,Vietnam,Webb, Floyd",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/207/ho-chi-minh-2026935_1280.png,Text,"Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0
"Chronicling a Summer in Cinéma Vérité",,"For Peter Galison, an influential moment was seeing a film made in 1961 by an anthropologist and a sociologist, featuring a series of estival interviews with people on the sidewalks of France. With its innovations in sound technology, Chronicle of a Summer opened Galison’s eyes to the possibilities of documentary film. The film illuminated the interplay between image and text, revealing how the humanities can “open up a world.”",,"Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été)",,,"Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University",,,,,,peter-galison-chronicling-a-summer-in-cinema-verite,,,,,,"Hi, I’m Peter Galison, I’m a professor at Harvard University and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center this semester. I’m interested in a combination—odd as it sounds—of filmmaking, physics, and the history of science.
A moment that really was hugely affecting for me in the humanities was seeing an old film, that was filmed in the summer of 1960, called Chronicle of a Summer. It was a French film made by a collaboration between a sociologist/philosopher, Edgar Morin, and a great filmmaker, might be called an anthropological filmmaker, Jean Rouch.
They combined to make this film in a moment just when it was possible to have portable sound-taking. They went onto the street and they asked people everything from, “Are you happy?” or “What are you doing?” In the course of what people say, you see a France that goes back even before the war, of horse-drawn carriages, but also cars. You meet a woman who had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, lost her father there, and was now trying to navigate this post-war world. But 1960 is also the cusp of this opening up to another world of France. In a sense you see the beginnings of the unrest, the uneasiness with the received order of things, that culminates in May ’68 and the explosion of the student and worker revolt of that period.
For me, this film had a huge effect because it seemed to me to capture, in a moment in specificity, some really deep understanding of this transition point between the old order and the new order. It showed me that film could do something, a documentary film of a certain type—a certain exploratory, innovative type—could push beyond what text alone could do. I think, for me, the idea which I keep trying to figure out, is how do visual sources—especially the filmmaking that I’m doing and writing—combine to produce something whole that each part can’t quite do on its own.
With each bit of understanding, as people push what can be done with text, or text plus still images, or with film in innovative ways, I find it enriching and exciting and it opens up new possibilities for how I think about the kinds of problems that I want to work on. For me, the humanities at its best can do that, can take something specific and open up a world from it.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Anthropology,Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été),Cinema Vérité,Cultural History,Documentary Films,Film,History,Morin, Edgar,Professors,Rouch, Jean,Sociology",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/182/paris-2971589_340.jpg,Sound,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Top Secret Rosies","As a high school math teacher herself, this contributor understands the impact she can have on the life of her students, leading her to reflect on her own teaching: “Am I doing everything in my power to engage and energize my students so that they are open to their own potential and any opportunities that may come their way?”","A high school math teacher discusses the documentary Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII. Beyond the awe for these women who took part in American military operations as human computers during World War II, this contributor is inspired by a statement made by one of the women in the movie, crediting her high school math teacher for her interest and advanced skills in mathematics.
",,"The documentary film Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII",,,Anonymous,,,,,,top-secret-rosies,,,,,,"In 1942, soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a secret military program was launched to recruit female mathematicians to be human computers. These women were pulled from high schools and universities, and their work computing the trajectories of U.S. ballistics was critical to the success of our military operations.
A handful of these women are interviewed in the documentary Top Secret Rosies and I was drawn in when one of the Rosies said that she credits her high school math teacher, Miss Clark, for her interest in advanced skills in mathematics.
As a lateral-entry high school math teacher, who’s been in the classroom only two years, I’ve thought a lot about Miss Clark. I wonder who I would have been in 1942, and would I have had the strength and confidence to be one of these young women? Would I have had the spirit to encourage young women to accept these jobs if I had been their math teacher? My mind then brings me to today. Am I doing everything in my power to engage and energize my students, so that they are open to their own potential and any opportunities that may come their way?
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Attack on Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), 1941,Documentary Films,Inspiration,Mathematics,Rosie the Riveter,Teachers & Teaching,Top Secret Rosies: The Female ""Computers"" of WWII,Women's History,World War II (1939-1945)",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/6/164/top-secret-rosies-900x562.jpg,Sound,"Weaver Academy",1,0 "Story-Making and the Fault Lines of American Capitalism","This documentary film prompted historian Edward Balleisen to reflect on the powerful and protean role of storytelling in the American imagination, specifically in the realm of modern capitalism. An appreciation of the humanities may provide us with a deeper understanding of the shape-shifting role that stories play in the economic realm. This understanding, in turn, may serve as a compass as we, in Balleisen’s words, “navigate” the world around us.","Several weeks ago I had occasion to watch the new documentary, Betting on Zero. This fascinating film presents several interlinked stories, all related to the founding and growth of Herbalife, a multi-level-marketing company that sells nutritional supplements, weight loss concoctions, and the “business opportunity” to distribute these products. Among the narrative threads:
At issue in Betting on Zero is the primary question of which story about Herbalife would stick, whether with its sales agents, throughout the communities in which it operated, within the financial markets, or in courtrooms and regulatory agencies. What would become the prevalent, even official story about Herbalife’s purposes, practices, and impacts? Was the firm a vehicle for social and economic uplift, a mechanism for individuals with minimal education and social capital to build a proprietary business that would deliver the American dream, even make them wealthy? Or was it an especially cruel confidence game that separated the vast majority of its sellers from initial capital investments, and, even worse, turned them into recruiters who ensnared fellow community members in a losing proposition? This debate has been and remains a hotly contested one.
After watching this cinematic engagement with a contentious recent episode in the annals of American consumer capitalism, I found myself coming back again and again to a single scene. A few years into the battle waged by Bill Ackman, the camera zooms in on Herbalife CEO Mark Johnson as he addresses a sports stadium filled with Herbalife acolytes. Portraying the company as inevitably beset by establishment naysayers out to destroy Herbalife and the avenues of opportunity that it provided, Johnson proclaimed that he and the Herbalife family would fend off its enemies. The multi-level marketing firm, Johnson explained, would always “seize the narrative.” That might mean shining the public spotlight on hardworking, charismatic Herbalifers who had recruited so many other sales agents that they had ascended into the company’s Millionaire Team. Or proclaiming that in the household where Johnson was raised, the abiding parental message stressed the importance of “integrity” to sustain “trust.” Or reframing the motives of a financial operator like Ackman, implying that his short position undercut any arguments or analysis that he might put forward about the company’s mode of operations. Johnson offered a brash forecast of narrative dominance—that Herbalife would identify the narrative high ground, occupy it, and hold it against all comers.
This declaration struck me so forcibly in part because one rarely sees such candor about the role of stories and story-telling in the hurly burly world of American capitalism. Surrounded by insiders, Johnson was willing to pull back the curtain on how corporations approach public relations in the broadest sense—not just through the messages of advertisements and endorsements, but through the wider management of reputation and popular belief.
The comment from Johnson also resonated for me because it encapsulates so much of my own work as a historian of American law, policy, and business culture. For a quarter-century, I’ve been writing about fault-lines in American capitalism, the zones of instability created by an economic system depending on widespread trust in economic counterparties. For much of the 1990s, I focused on the legal, social, economic, and cultural problems posed by business failure in the nineteenth-century—those dislocating moments when the era’s firms could not pay their debts. Since then, I have been wrestling with the American flim-flam man (and woman), chasing after alleged and actual business frauds from the early nineteenth-century to the present, as well as investigating the shifting institutional responses to the problem of marketplace deceptions.
Stories, of course, help to grease the wheels of modern capitalism. Would be entrepreneurs construct them as they seek to persuade friends and relatives, banks, or venture capital firms to supply them with the funds they need to launch businesses. Advertisers dream up fantasies to convince consumers that some good or service truly offers a crucial need or fulfills some deeply felt want. Even without the prompting of some crisis or scandal, corporate public relations departments construct tales about corporate origins and the essential elements of a firm’s business culture, all to foster employees’ identification with their employer and customers’ identification with the firm’s products or services. In recent decades, business executives have spun yarns about their heroic contributions to financial results to justify gargantuan pay packages. For more than a century now, societies have also confronted a host of meta-stories about the workings of capitalism, such as descriptions (or forecasts) of the business cycle’s predictable arc, moving from growth to boom to bust and recession.
Hardly any of this story-making and telling goes uncontested. Savvy investors and lenders do not uncritically embrace the projections of those who seek after capital and credit. In competitive markets, firms challenge each other’s marketing narratives, as do consumer watchdogs and the business press. Labor unions usually offer a very different take on a company’s history and practices from that laid out by management. The same surely goes for social activists and journalistic muckrakers who seek to expose the negative consequences of corporate activity, whether for workers, consumers, or the environment. At least occasionally, stockholders express qualms about the munificence of executive compensation. And even if there is broad consensus about how to describe the business cycle, politicians and pundits hardly have achieved consensus about how much government can or should seek to moderate its swings. These opposing groups usually tell very different stories about the impacts of counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policy.
The business narratives prompted by moments of failure or alleged deception tend to have an especially great urgency about them. For the proprietors, managers, and operators caught in the eye of a given storm, they involve questions of social standing, legitimacy, legal liability, economic future, even personal honor. They turn on interpretations of personal motivation, as well as understandings of the social norms, cultural values, and legal standards that structure economic exchange. And they have a collective dimension. As individual stories of bankruptcy and fraud multiply in a given era, they draw on prevailing macro-stories with familiar plotlines. As those macro-stories evolve in new circumstances, they can also help to establish reform agendas that seek to reconfigure social norms, cultural values, and legal standards.
To make these rather abstract points more concrete, consider the following primary sources, each involving a determined effort to “seize the narrative” about a specific enterprise facing existential threats.
The first source comes from a New York City bankruptcy case under the 1841 National Bankruptcy Act, the subject of my first book, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (2001). This short-lived legislation (Congress repealed it in 1843, just thirteen months after it went into operation) gave individuals the chance to petition for a discharge from their debts. Doing so required that petitioners offer a comprehensive list of their assets (most of which they would have to surrender to the federal court where they applied for relief) and their debts (which, if they successfully navigated the legal proceedings, they would no longer have to pay). One can infer a story of failure from this snapshot of property holdings and financial obligations, but such fragmentary evidence poses lots of interpretive challenges. One can of course dig for other relevant evidence about specific paths to insolvency. Occasionally, moreover, petitioners voluntarily offered a fuller account of their troubles as part of their bankruptcy filings. Such moves represented, at least in part, attempts to take out insurance against any counter-stories from creditors, who possessed the right to lodge formal objections to the granting of a bankruptcy discharge, or against eventual misconceptions by lawyers and the judiciary.
The document in question comes from the voluntary bankruptcy petition of Granville Sharpe Pattison, a New York City physician who found himself ensnared in complex and allegedly fraudulent land deals during the “mania” of the mid-1830s. Not content to offer up just a list of assets and debts, Pattison offered a detailed story that placed his insolvency in the context of the general asset craze that took hold in the run-up to the Panic of 1837. Describing himself as “excited by the spirit of speculation,” the doctor recounted his eager purchases of Illinois town lots and stock in a copper mining company on the basis of false claims about their value. Sometimes he paid by liquidating other assets. More frequently, amid the heady atmosphere of boom times, the transactions rested on his mere promises to pay in the future.
Pattison further explained that he could not raise challenge the legality of his debts in court, because the sellers had immediately transferred his obligations to “innocent third parties.” He also assured the court that he had never indulged in any “extravagance, having always lived within his income.”
Most importantly, Pattison insisted that he might have avoided insolvency had he been willing to look out only for himself, since he subsequently sold most of the property “to English capitalists at immense advances.” But once he discovered that the sales rested on outright misrepresentations, he claimed that “he spontaneously cancelled all the contracts of sale ... without having been asked to do so,” despite the fact that doing so left him unable to make good on his own debts. As Pattison described his thinking, he would rather “be a Bankrupt in fortune” than allow “the shadow of a suspicion ... [to] rest on the uprightness and rectitude of his character.” Even the handwriting that produced this self-exoneration told a story of sorts, conveying a firm, clear penmanship that invited trust from readers.
The next two sources come from twentieth-century entrepreneurs who confronted highly publicized allegations of business fraud, each of whom received some attention in my most recent book, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Edward Lewis, a key figure in Chapter Six of Fraud, developed a cluster of businesses from his early twentieth-century base outside Saint Louis, including a subscription magazine that targeted rural women, a mail order bank, and a correspondence university. His legal troubles began with administrative fraud orders that damaged his core businesses and eventually led to criminal mail fraud proceedings. Glenn W. Turner, who makes a cameo appearance in Chapter Ten of Fraud, ran multi-level marketing schemes in the early 1970s that offered self-help literature/records and cosmetics, as well as opportunities to make income through recruitment of sales agents. His businesses attracted civil actions by a slew of state Attorneys General, as well as the Federal Trade Commission.
Though separated by more than six decades and pursuing different businesses, the two businessmen adopted similar strategies in the effort to shape public perceptions and deflect allegations off fraudulent behavior. Lewis vigorously defended himself through his magazine, political and journalistic allies, and an eventual book, published in 1911, Order Number Ten: Being Cursory Comments on Some of the Effects of the Great American Fraud Order, which collected a series of editorials from Lewis’s Woman’s Magazine. I include here the text of the fraud order against Lewis that he placed at the beginning of the volume, the publisher’s preface, Lewis’s “Introductory,” one illustration conveying popular skepticism toward new ideas, his “Afterthoughts,” and a hard-sell recruiting plea at the back of the volume for book agents to market a related volume. These excerpts hit many recurring themes in the narratives offered up by alleged fraudsters: the difficulty of distinguishing economic deception from enthusiastic promotion at the forefront of innovation; the tendency of powerful, entrenched interests—in this case, the Post Office—to discredit competitors that threatened their position; and declarations of deep affection for those investors and customers who stood by him despite unjust persecution.
Glenn W. Turner similarly expended considerable effort to convince the public that he, in the words of his authorized biographer, was a “saint” rather than a “con man.” I offer here the text from the back cover of Turner’s 1975 promotional album, “Glenn W. Turner SPEAKS OUT: ‘You Can Better Your Best.’” In this concise marketing pitch, Turner put forward a common rendering from American entrepreneurs of all stripes—the remarkable rise from difficult circumstances—as well as the persistent theme of uplift through a mutualistic sharing of opportunity to others who lack advantages.
The authors of these such stories themselves depended deeply on humanistic modes of thought and action. They put forward arguments, evoked sentiments, and sought to influence public opinion and/or official decision-making through personal accounts that drew on widely shared metaphors, tropes, and narrative arcs. For Granville Sharpe Pattison, the voluntary narrative of honorable failure may not have been necessary, since no creditors appeared to challenge his version of events. For both Edward Lewis and Glenn Tucker, tales of innovative striving helped their inveterate investors and customers keep the faith, but lacked punch with officialdom. Each had business empires upended as a result of legal actions; each ended up doing stints in jail as a result of criminal fraud convictions.
We are storytellers and consumers of stories, all of us, and not just in the realm of culture or family or other social relations or politics, but also in our economic and legal lives. The sharpest conflicts within modern capitalism turn in large measure on contending efforts to seize the narrative. Granville Sharpe Pattison, Edward Lewis, Glenn Turner, Michael Johnson, Julie Contreras, Bill Ackman and countless others have crafted stories in order to shape agendas, define the realm of the possible, assign blame or credit, justify or undermine, move themselves and others to action. These endeavors may not accord with all or even most of the relevant facts. They do not always manage to attain the highest narrative ground, nor hold it against all the counter-stories pressing up the slopes of our collective culture. But they reflect our essential nature as story-making, story-telling, and story-craving beings, who inevitably construct narratives to render our world intelligible.
This basic humanistic insight is crucial for clear-eyed understandings of how modern societies have handled thorny problems such as bankruptcy or business fraud. Indeed, this insight is crucial for making sense of wider questions about how modern capitalism works, who enjoys the fruits of its bounty, who has to bear its risks and costs, and how its mechanics and outcomes accord with our sense of justice.
Recognition of this essential perspective also can make us savvier consumers and investors, more thoughtful workers, professionals, managers, owners, and retirees, and more deliberative citizens. If we understand the ubiquity and power of stories in the economic realm, we will be better armed to identify them, to evaluate their basis in fact, and to appreciate their emotional pull. And that level of understanding can only help us as we navigate the complexities of a capitalist society.
For those interested in additional reading about story-making and its impact on how we make sense of the history of economic life (and the past, present, and future more generally), see: