Kogan
the project with a journalist’s passion and energy for research, the depth of which is on display in the book’s thick “Notes and Bibliography” section.
Strang was very much a man of his times and those times, the mid-1800s, were “feverish, filled with incredible enthusiasm, media revolution, economic upheaval, new technologies,” Harvey say.
He writes, “In the anxious climate of antebellum America, where a sense of powerlessness ran as rampant as typhoid fever, people were drawn to those who succeeded at writing their own rules, inventing their own truths.”
Strang was as master of selfinvention. His early years were spent in rural New York where, Harvey says, “he was a failure at everything. He was a newspaperman, a postmaster and an operator of various scams when he arrived in the Burlington in 1843.
“This was the frontier,” Harvey says, “a place where a person could run out and away from their history.”
Though nothing much to look at — “physically unimposing — a few inches over five feet, and bald, with an oddly bulging forehead” — Strang benefitted from the “carnivalesque atmosphere of antebellum America,” with “bigger-than-life figures that the era seemed to breed at will.”
Though an atheist, he converted to Mormonism, which was at the time, Harvey says, “a hip religious movement.”
He did more than convert. In the wake of the 1844 assassination of the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, Strang (as did others) attempted to take over, first with a very likely forged letter in which Smith named him his successor and then with a preposterous (if inventive) tale of his visit by an angel and his unearthing of brass plates naming him as Smith’s replacement, brass plates in a strange language only Strang could translate.
He pulled it off, sort of. “Strang may or may not have been a real prophet or an actual king or a sincere man of the people or an honest politician, but by 1853 he had become a bona fide celebrity.”
He did this with relative ease ” at a “time when Americans had ‘begun to see fame as being desirable in itself, elevating the wellknown and popular into position of power and authority,’ in the words of one scholar.”
Harvey introduces us to many of the hucksters, zealots and other characters of the time, most prominently the showman P.T. Barnum who, he writes, embodied this new era in which there was a “radical shift in public notions of celebrity — a word gaining widespread currency in the mid-nineteenth century, along with the theatrical term star.”
Strang was a star in part because he was “a master media manipulator,” able to have his activities cataloged in newspapers across the country. He eventually settled with hundreds of followers on Beaver Island in the upper reaches of Lake Michigan, caught by, Harvey writes, the “strange grip [islands] had on the human imagination, the dangerous allure that such isolated spots held for the dreamers and madmen who’d been aroused by the eternal lust to invent new worlds.”
It was there that he proclaimed himself “King,” practiced polygamy and set up all sorts of criminal enterprises including a gang of pirates, thieves and a series of hoaxes and scams.
His island world was one of “myriad entanglements, resentments, and annoyances,” but nevertheless had “an almost magical ability to impose on the world.”
But he also had a “tragic gift for making mortal enemies.”
Harvey visited the island during this research and found it a “beautiful place, very rustic.”
He is pleased with the book and you will find others are too if you visit milesharvey.com, where Dave Eggers calls it a “ludicrously enjoyable, unputdownable read”;
Jonathan Eig call is “that rarest of gems: gorgeously written, impeccably researched, and completely addictive.”
The title of the book derives from a phrase, so common now, that was born of this time. Harvey marks the “one day the perfect phrase bolted into being, as is waiting in the collective unconscious for just the right moment to form on people’s tongues,” to a July 8, 1849 headline in a New York newspaper.
Strang’s July 9, 1856 death made front page headlines such as “Death of King Strang” in New York and Harvey makes a good case that parts of Strang’s life inspired a book published later in that year, Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man: His Masquerade.”
And at the end of his riveting book Harvey writes, “But people like James Strang never really vanish. When the time is right, they reappear, wearing a new guise, exploiting new fears, offering new dreams of salvation. Americans are fixated on such figures especially in periods of profound social and economic upheaval. … So it is that the King of Confidence lives on.”