SOURCE: “Indian-Hater, Wild Man: Melville's Confidence-Man,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 21-35.

[In the following essay, Matterson discusses Melville's use of the Indian Hater character, claiming that Melville considered him a central figure in American attitudes toward Native Americans and implicated the government, the judicial system, and organized religion as participants in these attitudes.]

The last novel Herman Melville published in his lifetime has been considered his most problematic. The Confidence-Man (1857) is especially difficult because four chapters, 25-28, are concerned with Indian-hating, and offer a profile of the legendary (and possibly fictional) “diluted” Indian-hater Colonel John Moredock of Illinois. These chapters have generated a substantial body of criticism, and almost everyone who has written on The Confidence-Man has addressed them. One assumption made about the chapters is that they provide a center to an otherwise fragmented novel, a work which one of the standard reference works for American literature persists in calling “unfinished” (Hart 158) and which F. O. Matthiessen called “a distended fragment” (412).

The chapters have also attracted attention because, like his use of Henry Trumbull's Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter for his own Israel Potter (1855), they exemplify Melville's reworking of an identified source. Melville took the description of Moredock from chapter six of the second volume of James Hall's 1835 Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West, though he considerably alters his short source, as he had altered the source in the making of Israel Potter.¹ In The Confidence-Man Melville emphasizes that the story is someone else's and obliquely acknowledges his debt to Hall by impersonating him in the character of Charlie Noble, the teller of Moredock's story.

One striking feature of much of the criticism devoted to the Indian-hating chapters is a kind of collusion with Melville's own supposed aestheticization of Indian-hating. Included in the title of chapter twenty-six is the phrase “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating,” and the philosophical term has provided a handy means of both dehistoricizing Melville and ignoring or minimizing the political dimensions of the novel. During the 1950s, and for some time after, Melville scholars who addressed the book seldom questioned their assumption that the author complied with a conventional allegory in which the American Indian is a devil. In fact, this supposed use of allegory formed the basis for other arguments about the chapters and their place in the novel. In the first critical edition of The Confidence-Man, published in 1954, Elizabeth S. Foster paid special attention to the Indian-hating chapters, asserting that “in the large framework of the novel, the tale of the Indian-hater stands as the rooftree” (xci).

Foster's scholarship on the history of the Indian-hater is exemplary and still provides a starting point for anyone interested in the issue (see 333-41). She also recognized that Melville's treatment of Indians outside of the novel was complex. But even though she had at her disposal a wealth of information, she too accepted Melville's use of the Indian as a symbol of evil: “something not so much sub-human as extra-human” (lxvii). Her own argument that the Indian-hating chapters posit a world totally without charity depends upon this association; in effect, she colludes with what she recognized as Melville's use of the American Indian as a symbol of evil. This led her to conclude with what seemed a reasonable explanation of how the chapters fitted into a novel seemingly preoccupied with metaphysical concerns such as the presence of evil and the possibilities of charity and salvation. Similarly, one of the most important and influential of all Melville critics and scholars, Hershel Parker, took for granted the supposed allegorical nature of the chapters when he wrote that they were “obviously, a satiric allegory in which the Indians are Devils and the Indian-haters are dedicated Christians” (166).

It is important, however, to explore how far Melville is very self-consciously utilizing an established set of conventions regarding the Indian-hater, and what effects he achieves through this and through his related use of the myth of the Wild Man. In short, we are faced with the obligation and the opportunity to avoid collusion by seeing the relation between the metaphysics and the politics of Indian-hating.

I. INDIAN-HATER

The chapters on Indian-hating have a direct source in James Hall's Sketches. Hall was a widely read “Western” author. In addition to the profile of Moredock in Sketches, Hall published several sketches of Indian-haters, including one entitled “The Pioneer,” which has striking similarities to the sketch of Moredock, and a short story simply called “The Indian Hater,” whose eponymous character is Samuel Monson.² What is especially interesting about the Indian-hater as archetype is precisely that he is an archetype, with a carefully delineated set of characteristics. Hall himself works to establish these, both in his sketch of Moredock and in his short story, but they are closely followed by other depictions of the Indian-hater. There are Indian-haters in works by James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Robert Montgomery Bird, among others. Cooper's most fully figured Indian-hater is Michael O'Hearn in Wyandotté (1843). In Bird's Jibbenainosay, or Nick of the Woods (1837), the Indian-hater is variously called Bloody Nathan, Nathan Slaughter, Jibbenainosay, the devil (Nick) of the woods, a former Quaker who masquerades as a Friend to the ridicule of his neighbors. There were many more Indian-haters in American popular literature, and Roy Harvey Pearce provides an important survey of them in The Savages of America (196-236). The Indian-hater is a recurring figure never very far from American popular culture, a figure always open to reinvention or rediscovery. A century after Melville wrote The Confidence-Man John Ford directed John Wayne in the role of the Indian-hater Ethan Edwards in his film The Searchers (1956).

Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of the Indian-hater as archetype is his essentially solitary, therefore celibate, lifestyle. Indian-hating is almost a priestly vocation; indeed, celibacy itself was a feature of the calling in its purest state, what Melville calls the “Indian-hater par excellence” (182).³ The Indian-hater has an unsettled life and has renounced the connections between himself and community and family, even though some of the Indian-haters retain respect from the community. Usually, the Indian-hater has a revenge motive, tied to the loss of family. In Moredock's case, his mother, brothers, and sisters were slaughtered by a band of outlaw American Indians from various tribes. In the case of Bloody Nathan it is, again, the loss of family—his wife and children murdered by Shawnees—that provides the revenge motive. Hall's Indian-hater, Samuel Monson, from the 1846 story, lost his wife, mother, and children when Indians set fire to his home. In Cooper's Wyandotté, Michael O'Hearn's case is slightly different, since he is a man without family. His vengeful lust for scalps begins after the murder of his surrogate family, the paternalistic Captain Willoughby and his wife and daughter.

One aspect of the Indian-hater's solitude is his ambiguous relation to the community, where he is respected in spite of his aberration. However, his status as Indian-hater is never forgotten, and it creates a distance between himself and others. This can be best seen in Hall's story, where one neighbor says of the Indian-hater:

Monson is an honest fellow, works hard, pays his debts, and is always willing to do a good turn, and it would seem hard to break neighborhood with him for the matter of a few Indians.

(“Indian Hater” 142)

In Sketches, Hall makes the same point about Colonel Moredock:

At home he was like other men, conducting a large farm with industry and success, and gaining the good will of all his neighbors by his popular manners and benevolent deportment.

(2:82)

The situation in Nick of the Woods is slightly more complex, since the Indian-hater is in disguise, and Bloody Nathan has an ambiguous status in the community. In effect, the Indian-hater in Bird's novel is covertly in and of the community. Generally, the Indian-hater is not quite disowned by the community and often is a complex figure because of his ambiguity. Michael O'Hearn, for instance, is described as “all contradiction, both in theory and in practice” (86). As Melville is going to emphasize, the Indian-hater is an essential if not readily acknowledged accessory to the community, a kind of extreme version of the Backwoodsman. Part of Melville's elaboration of Hall's Sketches involves introducing the Indian-hater with a sketch of the Backwoodsman, thereby intensifying the bond between them. Melville specifically refers to Fenimore Cooper: the Backwoodsman is a “Pathfinder”; the Indian-hater “a Leather-stocking Nemesis” (180).

The distance between the community and the Indian-hater is reflected in the fractured language of the Indian-hater. He speaks broken English, and his idiosyncratic language reflects his withdrawal from the community, his failure to belong fully to it. Indeed, the Indian-hater par excellence would have no use for language at all. Moredock, though a diluted hater, has no language. Even in Hall's sketches, the Judge provides voice for him. Michael O'Hearn, an illiterate, speaks a kind of stage Irish. As a Quaker, Bloody Nathan's speech is also different from that of the community: he uses the archaic “Thee” and “Thou,” which become part of his own version of the Indian-hater's broken standard English. The Indian-hater is also unorthodox in religion, or, at least, not straightforwardly Protestant. Bloody Nathan (the “Bloody” a sarcasm invented by his townsfolk) has been a Quaker, and Michael O'Hearn is an Irish Catholic. Nevertheless, the vocation of Indian-hating demands a renunciation of religion. Cooper makes this particularly clear in Wyandotté. In becoming an Indian-hater O'Hearn trades his Roman Catholicism for a new religion:

Many thanks for this bag of gold, which will sarve to buy scalps wid', for devil bur-r-n me, if I do n't carry on that trade, for some time to come … and, if there was such a thing, as a bit of a church, in this counthry, would n't I use this gould for masses—dat I would, and let the scalps go to the divil!”

(365)

Another recurring characteristic of the Indian-hater is that he practices some particular mutilation of his victims which functions as an identifying mark. Samuel Monson has a special rifle with an individual bore. Bloody Nathan cuts a cross in the victim's body. Such mutilation intensifies the association of killing with sexual gratification. Libidinous pleasure achieved through wounding may be linked in the case of the Indian-hater to the demands of the celibacy that is part of his vocation.

These are standard features of the Indian-hater. Not only is Melville obedient to them all in The Confidence-Man, he exaggerates them. For instance, he develops the idea of Indian-hating as a vocation, a kind of priesthood, much further than any other writer on the Indian-hater:

… he makes a vow, the hate of which is a vortex from whose suction scarce the remotest chip of the guilty race may reasonably feel secure. Next, he declares himself and settles his temporal affairs. With the solemnity of a Spaniard turned monk, he takes leave of his kin. … Last, he commits himself to the forest primeval; there, so long as life shall be his, to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lone-some vengeance.

(180)

Hall makes no mention of Indian-hating as a form of religion, but the language he uses has religious connotations:

… there have been many instances of individuals who, in consequence of some personal wrong, have vowed eternal hatred to the whole Indian race, and have devoted nearly all of their lives to the fulfillment of a vast scheme of vengeance.

(Sketches 2:78)

Melville develops these connotations in his invention of an Indian-hating priesthood:

… to be a consistent Indian-hater involves the renunciation of ambition, with its objects—the pomps and glories of the world; and since religion, pronouncing such things vanities, accounts it merit to renounce them, therefore, so far as this goes, Indian-hating, whatever may be thought of it in other respects, may be regarded as not wholly without the efficacy of a devout sentiment.

(186)

II. WILD MAN

In his delineation of the Indian-hater par excellence Melville develops a series of associations between the Indian-hater and the Wild Man. Melville was very interested in this European-based archetype, and in The Confidence-Man there are references to famous wild men such as Hairy Orson, Peter the Wild Boy, and Casper Hauser. At its base the myth of the Wild Man reflects anxiety about civilization, and by his very existence the Wild Man challenges the institutions of family, state, and church. As Stephen Greenblatt has recently reminded us, the Europeans entering America projected their anxieties onto the American Indian (16-39). The American Indian, like the Wild Man, occupied a position on the other side of a strictly maintained boundary between civilized and savage. The Wild Man's archetypal characteristics served as the defining features of the savage: lack of language, or “linguistic confusion,” lack of control over sexual urges, lack of religion (White 16). The Wild Man and the American Indian were defined by what they lacked, and the concept of their wildness belonged, as Hayden White has put it, to “a set of culturally self-authenticating devices” (16).⁴ Wildness is lack and the Wild Man's lack of language, religion, and family threatened those institutions, the self-authenticating definitions of the civilized. By the same token, the very definition of “civilized” depended on an idea of the other, of what “civilized” was not. The archetypal Wild Man, it should be pointed out, is not a savage, as there is contact between him and the civilized, settled community.

Melville exaggerates the archetype of the Indian-hater and makes a powerful connection between him and the Wild Man. Like the Wild Man, the Indian-hater is without something, a settled life, a self-defining civilized identity, which the community maintains in its self-definition as civilized. For the Indian-hater this lack is loss of family, and the resultant voluntary renunciation of a full connection to the community. The Indian-hater, as representations of him frequently emphasize, is defined by what he has lost. He has lost family, and has also lost the sense of restraint supposedly marking the division between the civilized and the savage. As White points out, “The Wild Man always represents the image of the man released from social control, the man in whom the libidinal impulses have gained full ascendancy” (21). In the Indian-hater this is evident in the libidinous wounding of the victim's body.

Part of Bird's intention in Nick of the Woods is to reinforce the constructed boundary between civilized and savage, and to name the American Indian as someone who cannot be civilized. But as Bird delineates this boundary, it becomes clear that his Indian-hater is likewise outside of civilization:

Individual virtues may be, and indeed frequently are, found among men in a natural state; but honor, justice, and generosity, as characteristics of the mass, are refinements belonging only to an advanced stage of civilization.

(212)

The Indian-hater, like the Wild Man, may fulfill the need and enact the secret desires of the community. Nevertheless he must be disowned, seen as other, because he has crossed the boundary between civilized and savage, losing what Bird terms the characteristics of “an advanced stage of civilization.”⁵

Although a distinction is made between the Indian-hater and the renegade (Nick of the Woods includes a renegade named Abel Doe), the Indian-hater himself turns into the American Indian, or at least into the stereotype of the brutal, vengeful American Indian. This is especially true of Michael O'Hearn in Wyandotté. Like Wyandotté himself, and with whom he is paired in the text, O'Hearn becomes the avenging figure who cannot forget an injury. Both Bloody Nathan and Samuel Monson turn into what they seek to destroy. Melville completely departs from Hall's Sketches to exaggerate this closeness between the Indian-hater and the object of his hatred. Melville has the judge tell us that there are:

… instances where, after some months' lonely scoutings, the Indian-hater is suddenly seized with a sort of calenture; hurries openly towards the first smoke, though he knows it is an Indian's, announces himself as a lost hunter, gives the savage his rifle, throws himself upon his charity, embraces him with much affection, imploring the privilege of living a while in his sweet companionship.

(181)⁶

Because he is embruted, the Indian-hater must be disowned—he is what we are not. But at the same time, it is more or less tacitly acknowledged that the Indian-hater performs a useful service for the community which must disown him. It is the extremity of the Indian-hater's vengefulness which marginalizes him; killing American Indians is not in itself considered wrong by the community. In Nick of the Woods Bird has one of his main, normative characters, the pioneer Roland Forrester, say:

I come to Kentucky … like other emigrants … to fell trees, raise corn, shoot bisons and Indians, and, in general, do anything else that can be required of a good Virginian or good Kentuckian.

(35)

The European archetype of the Wild Man ostensibly threatened the community but actually existed to validate its foundations. The Indian-hater also serves the community, in that his activities more or less directly assist it. Furthermore, while he senses that he is himself lost to civilization, more than anyone else the Indian-hater defends the idea of an absolute boundary between the savage and the civilized, and between Christian and heathen: “I never harmed a Christian man, to my knowledge” says Hall's Samuel Monson (“Indian Hater” 149). Even though he has lost or renounced the constructed self-authenticating marks of civilization—family, community, settlement, and Christian church—he paradoxically defends them. He is the guard of the border which he has crossed.

III. INDIAN-HATER AND CONFIDENCE MAN

In The Confidence-Man Melville disallows the strategy of distancing the Indian-hater from the community, and effectively erases the supposed boundary between the savage and the civilized. While other writers disown the Indian-hater, Melville accords him a central place in American society. He does this in various ways: by his narrative technique, by exaggerations or departures from his source, by a series of references to the political and judicial treatment of the Indian, and by relocating hatred as an element of the civilized rather than of the savage.

The narrative technique of The Confidence-Man is unusual for Melville. Up to the time of Pierre (1852), Melville's usual practice was to use a named (or nicknamed) narrator who is involved in the action. However, in Pierre and in Israel Potter, the two novels immediately preceding The Confidence-Man, Melville moved much closer than before to the convention of the omniscient narrator whose identity is unspecified. However, while The Confidence-Man has an apparently omniscient narrator, the narrative has odd gaps and omissions. For instance, the narrator disclaims knowledge of how much money passes from Mr. Roberts to the man with the weed (30), and gives us a seemingly full but actually empty description of Charlie Noble, who is to narrate the story of Moredock (168-69). Moreover, the novel contains many stories told by separate narrators and includes three chapters concerned with the nature of fiction. One effect of these narrative devices is to draw the reader's attention to the artifice of the narrative.⁷The Confidence-Man is proleptically Brechtian as Melville reminds us that fictions are made. What Brecht called “the alienation necessary to all understanding” (71) is partly the effect of this novel—and may help to account for some of the bewilderment of its 1857 reviewers. Through his own masquerade Melville calls attention to myths and fictions which masquerade as truth, or which are constructed but which are accepted as natural. The association of the American Indian with the devil is one of those constructs, as is the supposedly natural boundary between civilized and savage.

The Indian-hating chapters are a particular example of this strategy of alienation: they are narrated by a professional Westerner, but one who has to tell the story of Moredock by assuming the voice and the mannerisms of Judge Hall. However, a further dimension to this ventriloquism narrows the distance between the Indian-hater and others, particularly Hall. Although the Indian-hater par excellence has no language, there are many others who can claim to speak competently for him; “the judge found him expression for his meaning” as Melville puts it (179). The Indian-hater is not entirely “other” and we know him well enough to give him language; that is the point of the narrative device.

Melville also emphasizes how the Indian-hater embodies the community's secret desires:

Indian-hating was no monopoly of Colonel Moredock's; but a passion … largely shared among the class to which he belonged. And Indian-hating still exists; and, no doubt, will continue to exist, so long as Indians do.

(172)

This observation is an addition to the source, as is Melville's extended use of the backwoodsman to introduce the Indian-hater.⁸ The backwoodsman is presented not as someone marginal to society and civilization, but as someone essential to it: “captain in the vanguard of conquering civilization” (174). The military metaphor emphasizes the connection to the Indian-hater and his contribution to a war between civility and wildness.

Melville emphasizes the centrality of the Indian-hater to American society. He is not a marginal figure who can be disowned; he is the defining center of American attitudes toward the native. In particular, Melville alludes to the presence of Indian-hating in the judiciary, in government, and in religion. In the title to Chapter 27 Melville refers to Dr. Johnson, member of the literary establishment par excellence, and “eminent English moralist” who, having said that he “liked a good hater,” would have esteemed Moredock (182). Melville's citation of Johnson, and his characterization as a “good Christian” (188) brings to the fore the role of self-righteousness in promoting hatred. The use of Judge Hall as narrator in these chapters, and the continual emphasis on his identity as judge, bring to the forefront the involvement of the judiciary in Indian-hating. Hating cannot be disowned as a savage or unchristian activity, since it occupies a central position in civilized society. Melville makes a particular reference to the Supreme Court:

Whether the Indians should be permitted to testify for themselves … is a question that may be left to the Supreme Court.

(176)

This is of course a supreme irony. During the removals the Cherokees had twice appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On the first occasion the Supreme Court in 1831 ruled their appeal invalid, determining that since the Cherokees were neither U.S. citizens nor a foreign power the Court could not consider their case against Georgia; they could not “testify for themselves.” The following year their case was heard and their appeal upheld, but the ruling was ignored by President Jackson who allowed the removals to proceed anyway. Things, Melville saw, could either be “left to the Supreme Court” or the Court itself could be ignored.

A further embellishment of Hall's sketch allows Melville to emphasize the connection between Indian-hating and the legislature. Hall provides no reason for Moredock's refusal to be a gubernatorial candidate, flatly stating that:

Colonel Moredock was a member of the legislative council of the territory of Illinois, and at the formation of the state government, was spoken of as a candidate for the office of governor, but refused to permit his name to be used.

(Sketches 2:82)

Melville expands this brief detail into a telling series of connections:

At one time the colonel was a member of the territorial council of Illinois, and at the formation of the state government, was pressed to become candidate for governor, but begged to be excused. And, though he declined to give his reasons for declining, yet by those who best knew him the cause was not wholly unsurmised. In his official capacity he might be called upon to enter into friendly treaties with Indian tribes, a thing not to be thought of. And even did no such contingency arise, yet he felt there would be an impropriety in the Governor of Illinois stealing out now and then, during a recess of the legislative bodies, for a few days' shooting at human beings, within the limits of his paternal chief-magistracy.

(186)

It is significant that Melville here reminds us that the Indians are human beings, thereby disturbing what critics have taken to be their unequivocally allegorical nature in his text. Moredock refuses the office of governor not on moral grounds, that it is incompatible with his calling as Indian-hater, but on the grounds of propriety. Indian-hating is not in itself incompatible with serving in federal, state, and territorial government, but it would be improper to make overt the congruity between them. To do so would mean exposing as fiction the carefully maintained barrier between the Indian-hater and the settlers.

The church is also involved in Melville's metaphysics of Indian-hating, again as part of a notable departure from his source in Hall. Although Indian-hating is a vocation requiring the renunciation of religious belief, Melville explores how theology is implicated in the transmission of Indian-hating: “In one breath [the child] learns that a brother is to be loved, an Indian to be hated” (175). Furthermore, Melville is in one sense actually identifying a metaphysics of Indian-hating by reminding the reader of Puritan typologies of the Indian as devil. While this metaphysics serves as a basis for Indian-hating in a materialistic, actual sense, Melville is, of course, refusing to collude with it.

Melville's presentation of the Indian-hater, his exaggeration of the archetypal characteristics evident in Hall, Bird, and Cooper, effectively makes the Indian-hater into the confidence man. Both rely upon, without exposing, the self-image of the community. The confidence man functions because he can both exploit and bolster the self-image of his victims. He reflects back to his victims the image of themselves which they most want to maintain, reinforcing their will to see themselves as disinterested or charitable, even as he offers them covert opportunity for (usually material) advantage.⁹ The Indian-hater, too, validates the white community's self-image of civilized Christianity, because he permits the community overtly to disown his actions (as unchristian, uncivilized), even as he serves its material and political interests. In this reinforcement of the community's self-image, he functions both as confidence man and as Wild Man.

Toni Morrison has recently proposed that “the metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy definitive places in American literature” (63). More than any of his contemporaries, Melville saw that the supposed boundary between the civilized and savage was a metaphorical and metaphysical fiction, constructed and not natural. If that boundary had in fact existed, Melville himself would have crossed it during his South Sea travels, and he repeatedly shows how this construction demeans the savage and makes possible the phenomenon of Indian-hating. Because he can see that the concept of this boundary is a metaphysical one, maintained as much by those who believe in the noble savage as much as by those who degrade the Indian, Melville discloses how a metaphysical boundary facilitates the actuality and the politics of Indian-hating.

Notes

1. The chapter from Hall's Sketches most relevant to The Confidence-Man had been published separately in 1833 as “Indian-Hating.” One of Hall's biographers has argued that Melville used this version as his source, rather than the later reprint (Randall 218-20, 310, 341). The relevant chapter from the Sketches is reprinted in some editions of The Confidence-Man (Hayford et al.; Matterson). Foster provides an abridged version in her edition. The question of whether or not John Moredock actually existed has been a matter of some uncertainty, but Foster provides references to a Moredock or “Mordock” (333), and Randall (310) cites an obituary sketch of Moredock written by Hall and published in the Illinois Intelligencer, November 7, 1829.

2. An indispensable bibliography of Hall's writings is provided by Randall, 323-47.

3. I have referred throughout to the Penguin edition of The Confidence-Man, ed. Matterson.

4. “The notion of ‘wildness’ … belongs to a set of culturally self-authenticating devices which includes, among many others, the ideas of ‘madness’ and ‘heresy’ as well. These terms are used not merely to designate a specific condition or state of being but also to confirm the value of their dialectical antitheses: ‘civilization,’ ‘sanity,’ and ‘orthodoxy’ respectively” (White 16).

5. Similarly, by his technique in the opening and closing scenes of The Searchers John Ford makes it clear that Ethan Edwards must be rejected by the family and the home.

6. While this is not an aspect of Hall's depiction of Moredock in the Sketches, the theme of a shared identity between the Indian-hater and his victim was later explored by Hall in “The Pioneer.” There, the Indian-hater refrains from slaughtering an Indian family when he recognizes that the supposed Indian woman is his own sister, abducted in childhood during an Indian attack. The hater is initially repulsed by his sister's renegade behavior and her refusal to return to the white community, but later he is forced to recognize that his murderous activity has gradually made him identical to the slaughtering Indian he has reviled. This reflection leads to an acknowledgment of his guilt and to his attempted atonement as a Methodist minister.

7. These metafictional dimensions to the novel have been frequently noted, and much recent criticism pays special attention to chapters 14, 33, and 44.

8. In 1832 (rpt. 1853) Hall had published a study of the backwoodsman and this may have served Melville as source for this section of The Confidence-Man.

9. In his screenplay for the film House of Games (1987) David Mamet expresses this idea with admirable and characteristic terseness. Mike, one of the confidence men, asks Margaret Ford why she thinks the confidence trick is so called. He continues, “Because you give me your confidence? No, because I give you mine.”

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