GULLING THE PUBLIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 39, 15 February 1941, Page 19

GULLING THE PUBLIC

SOME FAMOUS HOAXES

A Professor MacDougall must have had 1& lot of fun gathering material for I his "Hoaxes," remarks a reviewer in I the '.'New York Times." He •,,. has searched the files for curiosa and has found more than enough to make the point that, for gullibility, the genus homo sapiens leads all the rest. We accept and believe all manner of things, and for many reasons. The principal fact, however, is that we do believe.

Take, for example, the prize of the MacDougall collection: In 1917, H. L. Mencken wrote a story about the first American bathtub, which was installed, he recalled, in a Cincinnati household in 1842. It was of mahogany, lined with sheet lead. A stag party celebrated its installation, the guests learning of the marvel by personal experience. Physicians, hearing of what had happened, denounced the tub as a menace to health. Cities adopted ordinances against the use of tubs; taxes were levied upori ■ them. Yet, despite wide opposition, people insisted on taking their baths in tubs, and finally President Fillmore defied the,, critics by placing one of the controversial objects in the White House,

It was a swell story—the "New York Evening Mail" printed it—but it was Mencken, not history. What had been written as a joke that all would recognise became a chapter in American manners—as well as American gullibility. Doctors discussed the bathtub's history in sober fashion, basing their research on Mencken's hoax. Reference works accepted the 7 account. The author denied all, confessed all, but what he had started he proved powerless to halt. In books and magazines ' and newspapers, in public speeches, and radio broadcasts the "facts" about the early American bathtubs .reappeared and were retold. The hoax had made history.

INVENTING AN AUTHOR. An-equally successful hoax, though one that was detected more quickly and had less general circulation, related to the "father of Russian literature," Feodor Vladimir Larrovitch. He was created at the Authors Club of New York in a moment of fun at the expense" of a member whose knowledge was supposed, to, be encyclopaedic. A dinner to honour the imaginary Larrovitch was arranged. Selections from his p"oems were read to the guests and mementos of his life were .displayed. Members of the club were initiated into the secret, and after a time a book appeared that contained appreciative essays ; on. Larrovitch, selections from his works, and reminiscences.

Sbme; revie^yefs took the book seriously. Many were hesitant, for as one of the perpetrators said: "The Authors Club" is an-organisation of tremendous age and dignity, . . . Consequently, when this, society put out the Larrovitch book no one in literary circles dared question its sincerity and truth at the first glance. It was too much like imagining your great-grandmother getting drunk."

These items are but two of scores that Professor MacDougall has brought together—the, collection at times TDecomes almost a catalogue or an undigested card-index file—under the general head of "hoaxes." Some of the others are less literary and more famous. The case of the celebrated Cardiff Giant is a- case iri: point.

PETRIFIED GIANT.

The giant, found at Cardiff, New York, appeared to be a petrified human figure. It measured. 12ft long, 4ft wide, 22in thick, and its 'discovery on October 16, 1869, caused a sensation. Serious scholars pronounced the giant genuine, though there were doubters who ultimately proved that their scepticism had been justified. Human hands" ha&: carved the giant from a block of gypsum and planted the figure. But the doubters did not kill the Cardiff Giant. P. T. Barnum had a;replica made and started the. petri-fied-gentleman on tour.

HOAX OR SWINDLE?

The bathtub story, the Larrovitch business, and the Cardiff Giant are obvious hoaxes. They fit the Webster definition of "hoax" as "a deception for mockery or mischief; a deceptive trick or story; a practical joke." But the MacDougall definition is much broader. Included are incidents and circumstances that under almost any classification would be called "fake," "fraud," or "forgery."' The fun seeps away. Tragedy enters:

Certainly there was no hoax in the ordinary sense of Bismarck's famous alteration of the Ems dispatch that proved.the spark to set off the explosion of the Franco-Prussian War. Nor was there any hoax in the letter which implicated Alfred Dreyfus in , the treason charges that sent him to Devil's Island and brought France close to civil war. Both instances were forgeries, pure and simple. The Musica episode in the history of McKesson and Robbins was no hoax. Nor were the complicated transactions of Ivar Kreuger, of Alexandre Stavisky, and of many other get-rich-quick gentry in our own time. Swindle is the usual word.

Was Parson Weems perpetrating a hoax when he told of George Washington's youthful exploits with a hatchet? Was there any hoax to Samuel Hopkins Adams's novel of the Harding years, "Revelry"? Was Gordon's eighteenth-century history of the American Revolution a hoax just because the author plagiarised the "Anriual Register"?

.These exceptions have point, even though they may not upset the MacDougall thesis that in humans the greatest will appears to be the will to believe. Barnum had words for it. And, finally, is Professor MacDougall trying to "hoax" us when he tells that Jefferson in 1830 issued a denial that the Mecklenburg Declaration, North Carolina's declaration of independence, was authentic? Jefferson died on July 4, 1826.