America is built on cheating — and the fight against it DATE: 2024-05-23 13:43:47
It’s Cheat Week at Mashable. Join us as we take a look at how liars, scammers, grifters, and everyday people take advantage of life's little loopholes in order to get ahead.
Unpack one of America's seminal founding stories, and what you discover is a scam and a double-cross worthy of a heist movie.
Most of us think we know about Dutch traders paying Native Americans a pittance for Manhattan when they first arrived in 1626. The price was 60 guilders, or about $950 today. Not the glass beads and trinkets of legend -- and the locals understood property rights more than we tend to think -- but certainly not what the resource-filled peninsula was worth, then or now.
And yet historical analysis suggests the Dutch were in fact scammed themselves. Instead of making a deal with the Weckquaesgeek tribe that actually lived on Manhattan -- and would go to war with the Dutch over the territory years later -- the naive newcomers probably handed over their guilders to the Canarsee tribe, unaware they were based in what is now Brooklyn.
Which would make this the first case in history, but far from the last, of tourists coming to New York and getting ripped off.
An early illustration of the Dutch purchase of Manhattan. But who was cheating whom?Credit: Bettmann ArchiveEvery nation has its scammers and schemers, its cheats, criminal liars, and con artists. But nowhere are they more central to the historical narrative than America, even before one of them was elected president. What really distinguishes the United States, however, is that it has also long been ground zero for the fight againstcheating.
There's always a large, stubborn, noisy group using its First Amendment rights to spotlight flaws in the nation of laws. Nowhere do campaigners have a better track record of passing legislation and bending moral arcs towards justice.
Which is just as well, because this country's moral arc has been out of whack for centuries. First the U.S. celebrated cheating in the form of treaty-breaking, land-bilking pioneers (and Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump's presidential idol, was the biggest treaty-cheater of all). Then it began to romanticize the outlaws -- literally, people who cheat -- in a so-called "Wild West" that actually wasn't that violent (except when it came to violence against Native Americans). Then it elevated the "robber baron" (again, the clue is in the name) tycoons of the Gilded Age. We still memorialize the names of strong-arming, union-busting cheats -- names like Astor, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford.
Then came our 20th and 21st century fascination with organized crime and various kinds of mafia. As soon as Hollywood's talking picture industry arrived, it became obsessed with gangsters. Even now, in endlessly rewatching stories about Scarface and Tony Soprano, the culture is paying its respects to the Chicago OG, Al Capone, who was only caught because he cheated on his taxes.
America can't help itself; it loves an auspicious cheat. Not just big-time thugs like Capone or serial fraudsters like P. T. Barnum (whose story was whitewashed in the Hugh Jackman movie), or credit-stealing inventors like Thomas Edison, but the enterprising shyster in the street too.
Find an angle, meet a mark, make a fast buck by dubious but novel means, and you pass into legend. You've probably spoken the words "if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you." That phrase memorializes George Parker, the man who "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to gullible new arrivals -- not just once or twice, but as often as twice a week, for years. The ghosts of the Canarsee tribe must have looked on and smiled.
The more publicly the cheater sells their soul, the more we remember them. Take sports -- designed to be the opposite of cheating, a haven of fair play. Yet there hardly seems to be an American sport where the most widely-known names are not those of certifiable cheaters. Baseball has its steroid squad, led by A-Rod, plus enough famous cheaters for a top 50 list. Biking has Lance Armstrong, who also pressured teammates into cheating. The NFL has Bill "Spygate" Belichick and Tom "Deflategate" Brady. Think of figure skating and you think of Tonya Harding. (Her victim, Nancy Kerrigan, didn't get the movie named after her). The Boston Marathon has the late Rosie Ruiz. Even little league -- little league!-- had its nationally-known cheat, Danny Almonte, a 14-year-old who passed for 12.
A lot of American cheating goes unnoticed because it has simply been normalized. NBA and NCAA games, it has often been said, are long parades of ingrained micro-cheating. And speaking of college, the recent admissions scandal stood out as one of the more prominent examples of that American tradition of paying to play. The backlash managed to bypass the institutionalized cheating known as legacies -- a largely hidden leg-up on college entry based entirely on your family name. A third of 2019 Harvard freshmen are legacies.
None of these scandals compare, of course, to the monstrous systemic cheats that were baked into America's own rules of play at the start. The odious cheat code in the Constitution that defined every African-American in chains as 3/5ths of a person, purely so that slaveholders could get more representation in the new republic. It helped ensure 10 of the first 12 presidents were slaveholders. The Electoral College was also instituted for the benefit of slave states; it has now cheated, in the eyes of many, five popular vote winners -- most more liberal than their opponents -- out of the presidency.
The cheating of democracy has lately taken two virulent forms: voter suppression and gerrymandering. The latter turns legislatures into funhouse mirrors of the people's will. In 2018, Democrats in the Wisconsin State Assembly got 53 percent of the votes but just 36 percent of the seats. Locked-in majorities like that can make the fight against cheating seem an impossible struggle.
But that doesn't mean Team Fairness ever stops fighting.
'America tries, man'
In the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings in early August, Trevor Noah did one of the unscripted Daily Showbits for which he is becoming justly famous. What began as a reasoned response to a poorly-timed Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweet turned into a passionate summary of Noah's adopted homeland's ethos -- one that has attracted immigrants like Noah (and me) for generations.
"That for me has always been what makes America -- America tries, man," Noah said. "It's not about being perfect, it's about tryingto be more perfect."
Indeed, the history of this more perfect union can be defined as the attempt to overcome one cheat or another. After a half-century of abolitionism and a bloody Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments tried to fix the flaws of America's original sin. Southern white elites regrouped and instituted Jim Crow laws, which cheated African-Americans out of their newfound freedoms. Another century of violence and struggle, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts took another two giant leaps towards fairness. Then the Supreme Court gutted Voting Rights in 2013, voter suppression rushed in, and round and round we go.
Round and round, but also onward and upwards. Every campaign for rights leaves its mark in the form of new laws, until America is planted thick with them -- and with the lawyers who give them teeth. Yeah, we deride lawyers as ambulance chasers and opportunists, but they also form a vast network that works, more often than not, to hold the big cheaters accountable. For every Ponzi schemer, there are a dozen faceless prosecutors staying up late at night to bring him down. Charles Ponzi himself got just 14 years in jail for his schemes; his spiritual heir, Bernie Madoff, is serving 150. That's progress.
Where the laws have led, the culture has followed. Americans are, on the whole, a surprisingly honest people. Around 83 percent of us pay the amount of taxes we're supposed to pay, voluntarily and on time, according to the IRS. While no European country has a tax compliance rate higher than 78 percent, the U.S. number has barely moved in decades -- even as the wealthy find ever more elaborate ways to avoid paying their fair share.
The ultimate cheat
Which brings us back to that ultimate example of a tax cheat, Donald Trump. A man who spent his life stiffing contractors, declaring corporate bankruptcy six times to evade debts, creating fraudulent organizations like the Trump Foundation and Trump University, stoking racist lies, cheating on his wives, and even cheating at golf, was presented in millions of American homes as a judicious businessman. (The selective editing of reality TV is another kind of cheating.)
He then eked out a tiny and still murky electoral college win, aided by voter suppression, and seemingly proceeded to obstruct an investigation into his election at least 10 times. In the absence of impeachment, Trump's tale would seem to be the ultimate refutation of the old proverb "cheaters never prosper."
But we're only partway through that story. The last time a president thought himself constitutionally incapable of cheating the law, the US passed a bunch of laws known collectively as the Watergate reforms, providing for more ethical and more transparent government. Did the post-Nixon reformers do everything they set out to do? They did not. But they tried. And we will try, after Trump, to close the loopholes in the system his dishonesty revealed.
Around 65 percent of Americans now consider Trump to be dishonest; 64 percent believe his cheating was criminal even before he became president. His approval rating is under water in states worth 419 out of 538 electoral votes. That will surely change after Democrats select a single opponent Trump can lie endlessly about.
But if the opposition can unite around that opponent, if campaigners do not become complacent, we could be on course for the most stinging rebuke to cheating in American history. We may even make it look easy.
And if you believe that, there's an island on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge I'd like to sell you.
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