The Great Pyramid of Grifters
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD A Pretentious Memorial As 19th Century Image Rehab. But Is Anyone Still Paying Attention?
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Note from Annette: Grifting(?) in Georgia
Fun story for you today! First, know that Hoosen and I are back at Non-Boring House after an intense week in Georgia! The Gnomes are delighted to see us, and I am delighted to see my personal library! Yes, it’s stories from books and documents and so on that will be my focus from now through the winter, as I bring you more Annette Tells Tales posts, rescuing jaw dropping stories told by academic historians and their raw materials, and reworking them into something a normal person like you might want to read.
Today, though, another Annette on the Road post, with a few more stories from our recent insane road trip across the West.
First, a bit of context. Nearly forty years ago, I sat in the outer office of a university public relations department, and eavesdropped. I was only about twenty, but training as a journalist, and so always had my ear to the ground.
Pretending to read, I was actually listening to a newly-appointed vice-president for public relations (not his title, but you get the idea) meeting with the university’s public relations guy.
The PR guy was a former news reporter who was very competent at the job he had been hired to do: Alerting journos to good stories on campus, and doing damage control when the news was bad. He didn’t seem to see a need to puff up this very ordinary state university into something it was not, and he certainly wasn’t about to participate in cover-ups: This was only a few years after Watergate, and look how well that turned out.
The VP was a slick corporate suit, while the PR guy was cheerfully politically incorrect. All I remember now is this exchange:
VP: “We need to draw attention to the excellence of our programs.”
PR Guy: “But they’re not excellent. They’re crap.”
Needless to say, PR Guy didn’t stay much longer. He saw the writing on the wall, quit, and went on to much better organizations. At that time, his department was only four, including him, the editor of the alumni magazine, the secretary, the part-time photographer, and the student assistant.
Today, that same department is made up of almost twenty PR professionals, a much higher rate of growth than the student body has experienced in the forty years since. In an entirely related development, the number of qualified and properly paid full-time faculty at the university has shriveled. Why try to improve academic quality when you can just have quality propaganda instead? Why be truthful when prospective students and their parents and alumni just want to be told comforting stories? Ooh, I don’t know . . . Ethics? Decency? But good luck with that when ethics and decency don’t pay a living wage, and integrity is the road to personal financial ruin.
We think of this PRopaganda explosion, made up of PR puff pieces, personal branding, advertising, media relations (aka corporate propaganda), and all the rest, as an invention of our lifetimes. Actually, what we’re seeing is the height of its achievement (so far… which worries me). We now live in a PR world of self-promotion, dishonesty, delusion, toxic positivity, and grifterism.
We are so accustomed to dishonesty and self-delusion on a massive scale, we take offense when someone is honest, even when all the evidence suggests they're right. I suppose we’re waiting on enough people coming to their senses. For the moment when the kid can announce “The emperor has no clothes!” without being dragged away to the dungeons. This may be a long wait: The world of delusion and dishonesty isn’t new. It’s just taken a huge leap forward in the past century.
Last week, as well as speaking to teachers at the Georgia Council for the Social Studies annual meeting about the need for all hands on deck to save history teaching, I also spoke (twice!) at churches in Savannah. My subject for the churches was pioneering 18th century evangelist George Whitefield. He pretty much invented TV evangelism long before TV was a thing: He adopted modern PR and marketing, which emerged in his youth, and he pioneered many techniques to sell his products, including his core message of born-again Christianity, but also literally products, like books and branded merch.
Yes, I gave this talk in churches! In Savannah, Georgia! I am delighted to announce that I was not burned at the stake at Asbury Memorial Church, so I was able to speak the following day at Wesley Oak Church, where they didn’t burn me at the stake, either. Nor, to my knowledge, is Pastor Rev. Billy Hester planning to announce my cancellation in his next sermon. Big huge thanks to these sister churches for hosting me, to Randy, Heidi, and all the volunteers, to SuperNonnie Gordon Baker for his very kind introduction, and especially to Nonnie Tom Lewis for making it all happen.
It did help, I think, that I had a positive conclusion to my talk, and not because I wanted to make nice, but because (ooh, what a novelty in this day and age!) it really is what I think. True, yes, OK, Rev. George Whitefield used the services of grifters, like pioneering Ponzi (pyramid) scheme publicist William Seward, the 18th century’s Bernie Madoff. He also worked with profiteering newspaper publishers like Ben Franklin, the 18th century’s Logan Roy (on TV drama Succession)
BUT.
Following Dr. Frank Lambert, the expert on Whitefield as marketer, I am convinced that Whitefield was not himself a grifter. He was sincere. He really did spend the money he raised for charity as promised. And he used modern marketing to spread a message he genuinely believed would save people from eternal damnation. We don’t have to agree with Whitefield’s beliefs to give him respect. I have to say, I feel a bit of kinship with His Reverence, as a missionary myself, one for history, who must shake the collection plate often, looking like a grifter, to continue the work at NBH. Speaking of which . . .
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And Now, Today's Feature:
The Great Pyramid of Grifters
”The Ames Monument”, Hoosen intoned from behind the steering wheel as we cruised on the freeway through rural Wyoming.
“Huh?” I was jotting down something on my phone.
“Ames Monument, coming up. Want me to get off?”
That’s weird, I thought vaguely to myself. We’re nowhere near Ames, Iowa.
I Googled, and the moment I saw it, I knew we had to go.
“YES! Get off!”
Fortunately, I was fast enough, and we avoided swerving. Almost immediately, a sign directed us onto a dirt road. I thought guiltily of my poor mother-in-law, who, days earlier, implored us to stop taking dirt roads in lonely places. She’s convinced we’re going to end up as corpses in the desert.
“So what is it?” Hoosen said.
“It’s a . . . . Oh, there it is!”
He saw it about the same instant I did. “Wow,” he said. “Yeah,” I said.
A pyramid in the middle of nowhere. Either space aliens had popped by Wyoming on the way between building in Ancient Egypt, and directing the Incas to draw the Nazca Lines* in Peru, or there was a more rational—but hopefully interesting— explanation.
Annette’s Aside: Chariots Full of Loot
Erich von Daniken, Swiss hotel manager and convicted fraudster, found great riches in writing books, starting with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968, at a time when Apollo and Star Trek were peaking interest in all things extraterrestrial. (UPDATE In the first version of this post, I called 1968 the year of the first Moon landing, when, in fact, that was 1969. Thanks to Nonnie Tim for pointing out this utter goof! )
Von Danikin told the public what it wanted to hear. And, what it wanted to hear was that much of human culture was invented by little green men from outer space, rather than being all our own very human doing, or fault.
People like sexy and simple explanations spiced up with spaceships. Consider, oh, I don’t know, the current willingness to hear a message of “Fear not about climate change, because we’re all going to Mars on billionaires’ rockets! Okay, maybe not all of us, but, of course we have a ticket for you, friend!”
Van Danikin got rich. The historians and scientists who will drone on with their rational explanations grounded in fact collectively said “What total BS”, and were rewarded with people thinking and saying they were wrong, because after dedicating their lives to scholarship, why would they know more than some random bloke with a sketchy past, who wrote books with flashy covers? Oh, and Von Daniken has sold 63 million books at least, been on the TV a lot. He's a rich celeb! He must be right! All the scientists and historians are just jealous!
Excuse me, I have to go get immediate medical attention, because I just rolled my eyes into the back of my head.
Then again, I would love to believe that the current news is all the imagining of space aliens, because it feels like it.
Follow the Road of Dirt
Hoosen and I bumped through the treeless landscape on a dirt road. It wasn’t a totally desolate scene: There were about four or five houses spotted on the way. But the strong wind added to the creepy factor. Shortly after we pulled up by the pyramid, the only other car in the parking lot took off. Maybe the people inside worried that Hoosen and I were the serial killers. I opened the door into a particularly strong gust of wind, and it almost slammed back on my leg, the one that had emerged badly battered from a battle with a bathroom floor in Hays, Kansas. Fortunately, my trusty walking stick saved the day.
I took a picture, and Hoosen took a picture of me taking the picture (above). This is a bit misleading, because, pleading my wound acquired in the line of duty, I now outsourced the photography to Hoosen. “And get a picture of the info panel!” I shouted after him as he fought the wind up the ramp to the pyramid. I hoped this wasn’t a Doctor Who episode, and that the pyramid wouldn’t suddenly lift off.
Hoosen returned a few minutes later, looking windswept. “There’s no info panel,” he said. I repeated that back as a question, just to be sure. But no, he assured me. There was no sign anywhere from the State of Wyoming to tell passing visitors what this pyramid was about. Only the images on two sides of men, and a stone engraving making it clear that this pyramid honored the Messrs. Ames. It’s almost like we’re not supposed to know, beyond this tiny bit of info: This is the Ames Monument. It is dedicated to the Ames Bros, who obviously were more important and successful than you, member of the public! Look upon it in awe, bow down in amazement, and then get back in your car, and get on with your day, peasant.
Not bloody likely, I thought. Whoever decided not to keep info on site, or on the unforgivably lame Wyoming State Parks web site on the Ames Monument which says nothing of substance, hadn’t reckoned on a historian’s curiosity, or Wikipedia. And in the absence of an info panel, I had to see what I could glean from Wikipedia. If a professional historian or grad student in the field thinks I goofed in my story, I count on them to let me know.
At the time, I sat in the car, and started reading.
The Dodgy Brothers Ames
So here’s the quick version of the story. This pyramid is a memorial to brothers Oakes and Oliver Ames. They were born early in the 19th century, which turned out to be extremely good timing for anyone with family money, and the desire to use it to get even richer. They were the sons of a Massachusetts blacksmith who had become a self-made man, starting in 1774, by mass-producing and selling shovels, aka spades. Shovels aren’t a sexy product, but we need them, and that was the key to the elder Mr. Oakes’s success.
The brothers followed Dad into the family shovel business, and became known as the Kings of Shovels, or, better, the Kings of Spades. This was thanks to, among other things, the California and Australia Gold Rushes, and the rise of railroads, and the Civil War, all of which required lots of shoveling, The Ameses all made a fortune. Oakes also became a U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts.
As the Civil War ended, progress on a transcontinental railroad had stalled, and not just because of the war. Nobody wanted to invest, because investors saw that much of the Western part of the railroad would travel through desolate and unsettled lands, as they saw them, because for massive railroad profit purposes, American Indians didn’t count. It would be a Railroad to Nowhere.
So President Abraham Lincoln turned to his fellow Republican* Rep. Oakes Ames and urged him to make a transcontinental railroad happen. And Oakes Ames did! Along with his brother Oliver! The boys made it happen within four years! Ready to roll by 1869! The monument, like the railroad, is a memorial to Oakes and Oliver Ames, who brought us a railroad from sea to shining sea. Ames, Iowa, is also named after Oakes, in case you wondered.
*This is your quick reminder that the two parties changed a lot in later years. Best not to read too much into the label.
So far, that’s likely as much as the Ames Brothers would want you to know. A short, digestible and inspiring story. But things are never, ever that simple. So let me color it in a bit, as best as I can, just as I, in tourist mode, did on the day Hoosen and I took this unexpected detour to a pyramid in Wyoming.
By an amazing coincidence, the President and CEO of the Union Pacific Railroad, starting in 1866, the year after Lincoln greenlighted the project, was Shovel Bro Oliver Ames! So what, you say? Um, well, yes. At the same time, his brother, Other Shovel Bro and US Congressman Oakes Ames, was head of a construction company called Crédit Mobilier of America.
My US readers are perking up! They remember Crédit Mobilier from high school history, along with a whiff of scandal, but likely without remembering why! I’m no expert (I’m an early American historian, remember, and I was a tourist in a historic place without a book in sight). So I’ll keep this to the big outlines.
Union Pacific, the railroad company headed by Oliver Ames, hired a construction company to actually build the transcontinental railroad line. The name of that company? Crédit Mobilier of America, soon to be headed by his brother, who was already an executive in the company.
Crédit Mobilier of America! Sounds so French, so European, so sophisticated! Crédit Mobilier was indeed a major French bank involved in railroad financing. Only problem? Crédit Mobilier had nothing to do with Crédit Mobilier of America. Not connected at all. The name added a touch of respectability. And deception.
Makes sense so far. Perhaps a whiff of corruption. But here comes the really good stuff. Crédit Mobilier of America was not a company that Union Pacific hired to build the railroad. Crédit Mobilier was Union Pacific. It was a fake company created by Union Pacific executives to cover up the fact that Union Pacific itself was building the railroad tracks at jacked-up rates for enormous profit.
You read that right. Union Pacific suits started Crédit Mobilier of America as a deliberate fraud. It was what today we might call a shell corporation, invented to disguise the true ownership of a company for unethical and often illegal reasons (unethical isn’t always illegal, no matter how harmful to Americans. It depends on who makes the laws.) I wonder if Crédit Mobilier of America was the very first shell corporation?
Union Pacific wasn’t supposed to be in the railroad construction business. It was supposed to make its profit by running the railroad, not by building it. But Union Pacific execs didn’t think there would be profit in running a railroad across most of the West. The profit wouldn’t be in running the railroad, but in building it, using taxpayers’ money. How could they get in on building it, and maximize their profits in building it, while appearing to act above board and in the public interest? Crédit Mobilier of America.
So Union Pacific suits, according to their invoices to the government, patriotically took only very small sums from the building of the transcontinental railroad, to cover expenses. However, the Crédit Mobilier invoices that Union Pacific processed and paid, and billed to the taxpayer, included massive profits for Crédit Mobilier—which was, to remind you, Union Pacific, only with its suits wearing berets and puffing on Gauloises and speaking in outrageously fake French accents. Okay, I made that last bit up, except for Crédit Mobilier being a fake company used to cover up the profiteering of Union Pacific suits. Which it was.
In sum: Union Pacific, pretending to be “Crédit Mobilier of America”, completed the transcontinental railroad at grossly inflated prices (funded by US taxpayers), and covered up the fraud with dodgy billing, while making truckloads, um, trainloads of cash.
The transcontinental railroad actually cost $50 million to build. “Crédit Mobilier” charged Union Pacific $94 million. Union Pacific sent the bills to the US government, for the taxpayers to pay, without mentioning, of course, that Union Pacific executives were also Crédit Mobilier executives. And while the profit “Crédit Mobilier” reported was $23,366,319.81, the actual profit, disguised by dodgy invoices, was almost twice that. And we’re talking 1860s dollars here. Whether you have a problem with that may depend on your politics, and on whether you’re vastly rich—or hope to be.
Oliver Ames was head of Union Pacific. And by the time the railroad track was built, US Congressman Oakes Ames was head of Crédit Mobilier, still a fake company. The Oakes Brothers were, then, joint heads of Union Pacific railroad, and they were cleaning up.
Where did the money go? Half of it went to the Ames brothers and other Union Pacific/Crédit Mobilier executives for the usual toys: Fancy carriages, big houses, a life of incredible luxury and inflated bank accounts, all at the expense of the patsies who did work, taxpayers and poorly-paid railroad workers.
But how would Union Pacific execs make more profit, once the railroad was built? Oakes Ames used the rest of the profits, plus discounted stock in Union Pacific, to bribe make friends among his fellow politicians in Congress. so they would pass laws that would help Union Pacific’s business interests from now on, regardless of the public interest. And some politicians didn’t have to be pressed too hard: They saw how well Crédit Mobilier stocks were doing, and they wanted a piece of the action.
The Government awarded Union Pacific a lot of the land along the route (which properly belonged to American Indian peoples, but, as usual, they were not a consideration). The company eventually sold most of that land to farmers, who would ship their produce to the coasts at high costs charged by the railroad companies. Union Pacific was among them, but it was less a railroad company, and more a land speculation/”whatever pays the most” business.
And, to repeat, by the time the railroad was built, Oakes Ames was president of Crédit Mobilier of America, while his brother, Oliver Ames, was head of Union Pacific during the building.
It looked like the grifting Ames brothers would get away with it, except for those meddling kids (journalists) who blew the story wide open in 1872: That was the year President Ulysses S. Grant was running for re-election, and he, too, was implicated in the scandal. But then again, so were many politicians who had not accepted bribes, because the journalists for the NY Sun were partisans, out to get Grant, and they didn’t do the most professional job. One outraged wrongly-accused congressmen led the investigation into the scandal.
Most of the congressmen involved were quietly let off, but Oakes Ames was the sacrifice, and he was censured in Congress. He was nicknamed “Hoax Ames”. Once known as the “Kings of Spades”, the Ames brothers were now called the “Kings of Frauds”. Oakes died from a stroke soon afterwards.
These days, the Ames family would hire an image consultant to rehab their reputation. But the 19th century was a different time. Or was it?
The Pyramid of Rehab
My account of the Crédit Mobilier scandal, pieced together as it is, isn’t detailed, because I didn’t want to get out of my depth. NBH at times is like teaching a college history survey: You cover far more ground than you can be expected to be expert in. You do your best in good faith. But no question, Crédit Mobilier was a scam, and the Ames brothers were up to their eyeballs in scandal.
Here’s where I feel on more certain ground: The Ames family hired a famous architect, H. H. Richardson, to restore the family name by building grand worthy buildings, and slapping the Ames name on them. One of these structures was the pyramid, the Ames Monument. Richardson designed the pyramid, hiring noted sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create two nine-feet high portraits of Oakes and Oliver to be embedded in the top, along with the words In Memory of Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames in letters one foot high.
And the Pyramid was not in the middle of nowhere, because what would be the point of that? It was built next to the transcontinental railroad line, at its highest point, where trains stopped to change engines. When they did, passengers got out and paid homage to the Ames brothers, which they would want to do, because, blimey, look, a pyramid! Oh, and the 1882 dedication was attended by no less a person than Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, plus the brothers had already been “exonerated” by Congress, sure, right, uh huh. Funny how that happens.
Three years later, a local man realized the plot on which the pyramid stood was not on Union Pacific property, but on land available for purchase from the US government. So he bought it, pyramid and all, and announced plans to cover the pyramid in ads, making it the best billboard ever. This wannabe grifter’s lawyer was quickly squashed in court by Union Pacific’s better-paid lawyers.
A town sprung up next to the railroad yard and the pyramid, so more people came to see and know the Ames Monument in the next few decades.
And then it all ended, in 1918. That’s when Union Pacific moved the tracks three miles south. The town died. Only the pyramid remained. And by then, nobody cared.
The pyramid is a national monument today, and a state historic site of Wyoming, but mostly because of the fame of Richardson and Saint-Gaudens, who designed it. Not shockingly, in such a lonely spot, it’s not much visited. And there’s nothing on site to tell visitors the distasteful story of the brothers who cheated their nation. It’s not that the site has been abandoned: After years of vandalism, the state of Wyoming restored it in 2010. It just hasn’t rushed to shed light on who the Ames brothers were. If I’m being unfair, Wyoming Parks, do let me know. I don’t like being wrong, but I’m always delighted to fix it if I am.
Hoosen observed that there was no memorial to the thousands who actually built the transcontinental railroad, many of whom lost their lives, among them Irish and Chinese immigrants, and Utah Mormons.
Because who would want to remember that sad story? Or the story of grifters? Not when there’s a pyramid at which to worship. So much easier, and so much more pleasant.
When Hoosen and I drove away, two more people stopped by the pyramid, in a truck. I looked anxiously to see if they seemed like serial killers. Probably not. But I doubted they would leave the Ames Monument any more informed than when they arrived. Why does the state of Wyoming not talk about the Ames Brothers?
When you think about it, grifting relies on us forgetting past grifting. Funny that. And historians are all about trying to recover what has been forgotten.
I regret not being able to make it to Savannah for the talks on Whitfield, who I’ve been interested in since I came across mention of him at the Decatur Public Library when my daughter was taking Georgia History in the 8th grade. And now you mention the Ames! I’d read about them in relation to the Harvard botanist who searched out varieties of orchids was a descendants and learned that George Ames Plimpton was another. Who knows if I can find that book with its suitably green dust jacket in the bookshelves upstairs. But Google tossed up this obituary along the way, while I saw headlines about the Ames family being great that I skipped. Here is the obituary for George’s mother Pauline: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/17/obituaries/pauline-a-plimpton-93-author-of-works-on-famed-relatives.html
The Apollo moon landing was 1969, not '68.