The New York Times - USA - Book Review (2020-07-26)

8 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020

WILL THE AMERICAN THIRSTfor snake oil

ever be quenched? Probably not, at least

judging by “The King of Confidence,” Miles

Harvey’s jaunty, far-ranging history of the

19th-century con man and prophet James

Jesse Strang. Despite the frontier setting,

there is something eerily contemporary

about Harvey’s portrait of a real estate

huckster with monarchic ambitions, a cre-

ative relationship to debt and a

genius for mass media. Until

his assassination in 1856,

Strang ruled over a breakaway

Mormon colony on Lake Michi-

gan’s Beaver Island, where he

was crowned “King of Earth

and Heaven.” King Strang, as

the press delighted in calling

him, tried his hand at various

roguish trades — lawyer, news-

paperman, prophet, pirate,

state legislator — but his true

gift was for the pure flimflam of

American celebrity.

In 1843, Strang, a young man

from the Burned-Over District

of New York, went west to duck

a warrant. In the Mormon capi-

tal of Nauvoo, Ill., the avowed

“unbeliever” was baptized by

Joseph Smith himself. After

Smith’s murder, Strang re-

ceived a letter, allegedly writ-

ten by the slain prophet before

his death, appointing Strang

leader of the 25,000 Latter-day

Saints. While Brigham Young

consolidated power and began

organizing the Mormon exodus

to the high desert of Utah,

Strang gathered his own modest flock in

Wisconsin. Late in the summer of 1845, he

led a troop of men to the base of a tree by

the White River, a spot revealed to him in a

vision. There, the men exhumed three

brass plates engraved with a mysterious

script, supposedly written by one “Rajah

Manchou of Vorito,” the leader of a long-

vanquished civilization. Using a pair of

“seer stones” on loan from an angel, Strang

translated the Rajah’s prophecy: “The

forerunner men shall kill” — Smith — “but

a mighty prophet there shall dwell”:

Strang. Like The Book of Mormon,

Strang’s plates tied a makeshift American

sect to the ancient world. Unlike Smith,

Strang produced a genuine relic for his fol-

lowers to see with their own eyes.

Following another revelation, Strang re-

located his colony to Beaver Island, where

he intended to establish his own New Jeru-

salem, an independent kingdom within the

borders of the United States. At his 1850

coronation on the island, he wore the robes

of “ancient Jewish high priests” and a

crown made of paper and tinsel.

Confidence, Harvey writes, functions as

a “de facto national currency.” Strang had

plenty of it. In the contest to succeed

Smith, he staked out the anti-polygamy po-

sition, contrasting himself with Brigham

Young on the church’s most divisive issue.

That did not stop him from secretly marry-

ing four “spiritual” wives, in addition to his

long-suffering legal wife, Mary. Strang’s

first “celestial marriage” was to an intelli-

gent young woman named Elvira Field.

Field cut her hair short, dressed in men’s

clothes and accompanied Strang on his

evangelical tours, staying with him in his

rooms and introducing herself as Charles

J. Douglass, nephew of and personal secre-

tary to the prophet.

Having claimed a divine right to the

lightly populated Beaver Island, Strang’s

subjects began counterfeiting money and

practicing a form of religious piracy, “con-

secrating” gentile property to themselves

with guns, swords and a fast schooner.

President Millard Fillmore, who had been

denounced in the press for going soft on

Brigham Young and the Utah

Mormons, dispatched an iron-

hulled Navy steamer to raid the

island, arrest Strang and sub-

due his marauding followers.

The factoid doesn’t get much

respect as a source of genuine

historical insight, but Harvey

deploys small scraps of knowl-

edge to great effect. His account

of Strang’s rise and fall is lit-

tered with thumbnail histories

of 19th-century cross-dressing,

John Brown, John Deere, the

Brontës, bloomers, the Under-

ground Railroad, mesmerism,

newspaper exchanges, the Illu-

minati and much else. This ap-

proach amounts to a sort of his-

torical pointillism, bringing the

manic, skittering mood of the

era into focus. It is a style of his-

tory well suited to the antebel-

lum decades, when American

culture was most unabashedly

itself — uprooted, credulous

and bold with scattershot plans

for civic and moral perfection.

Horace Greeley, who embodied

that time almost as well as King

Strang, wrote of living in “this

stammering century.”

Harvey’s wonderfully digres-

sive narrative is interspersed

with news clippings, playbills,

land surveys and daguerreo-

types, as if to periodically cer-

tify that all of this madness is re-

ally true. Strang himself, how-

ever, remains a cipher. Where

did the calculation end and the

delusion begin? Did he himself

ever convert to his own gospel?

In any case, the inner life of a

prophet is less interesting than his or her

effect on the world. Tinhorn revelators are

seldom in short supply. Few of them secure

private theocracies.

Rather than a probing biography of a

single man, Harvey offers a vivid portrait

of the time and place in which a character

like Strang could thrive, an era when “re-

ality was porous” and an anxious popula-

tion cast about for something exciting to

believe in and someone confident to follow.

Once it is written, the history of our current

moment won’t be the story of any particu-

lar scoundrel. Confidence men are always

among us. It takes extraordinary circum-

stances for one to become king. 0

American Grifter

The story of a 19th-century con man who scammed his way to the top of a religious sect.

By CHRIS JENNINGS

THE KING OF CONFIDENCE

A Tale of Utopian Dreamers,

Frontier Schemers, True

Believers, False Prophets,

and the Murder of an

American Monarch

By Miles Harvey

Illustrated. 401 pp.

Little, Brown & Company. $29.

James Jesse Strang

PHOTOGRAPH VIA THE CHURCH HISTORY LIBRARY OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

CHRIS JENNINGSis the author of “Paradise

Now: The Story of American Utopianism.”

SIMEON W. JOHNSON

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