Besides chronicling one of the most ingenious hoaxes ever perpetrated (and one of the only known examples of a con game being used for good instead of ill), The Confidence Men explores the strategy that underpins all confidence schemes: the subtle process of mind control called coercive persuasion, colloquially known as brainwashing. The answers to this book’s central questions — How does a master manipulator create and sustain faith? Why do his converts persist in believing things that are patently false? — also illuminate the behavior of present-day figures such as advertisers, cult leaders, and political demagogues. Above all, The Confidence Men is the story of the profound friendship of two men who almost certainly would not have met otherwise: Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep station. Vowing to see the scheme through if it cost them their lives, each was sustained throughout its myriad hardships by the steadfastness of the other.
In the introduction to The Confidence Men, author Margalit Fox explains that even years after having read Elias Henry “Bones” Jones’ 1919 memoir, The Road to En-dor (in which Jones details his incredible escape from a Turkish POW camp during WWI with co-conspirator Cedric Waters Hill, whose own memoir The Spook and the Commandant was published shortly after his death in 1975), she was transfixed by the “how” of the pair’s escape, but couldn’t understand the “why”: just why did their captors fall for a long con that involved malevolent spirits, buried treasure, and faked insanity? By quoting Jones and Hill’s own accounts at length, backing up their assertions with quotes from other memoirs and historical reports, and layering on research from incredibly diverse fields, Fox tells a riveting fact-is-stranger-than-fiction tale that gets to the heart of her “why”. This is a fascinating, thorough, and accessible read about war, cunning, and friendship; it contains lessons that are relevant to our modern world and would make a compelling movie. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
This is the true story of the most singular prison break ever recorded — a clandestine wartime operation that involved no tunneling, no weapons, and no violence of any kind. Conceived during World War I, it relied on a scheme so outrageous it should never have worked: Two British officers escaped from an isolated Turkish prison camp by means of a Ouija board.
Turkey’s Yozgad prison camp in the Anatolian mountains was considered escape-proof: not only was its location remote, forbidding, and surrounded by marauding brigands, but it was well known within the camp that any attempt to escape would bring swift and severe punishment down on those left behind. Two of the prison’s inmates — the aristocratic E. H. Jones (a British officer who surrendered to the Turks after the siege of Kut) and C. W. Hill (a downed Australian airman who flew for the RAF) — were so focussed on escape that they conceived of a plan that would not only see them making their way to freedom, but would actually improve conditions for the men who remained at Yozgad. Hill had spent years honing the skills of magic and mentalism, and as a lawyer, “Jones had been schooled in the verbal seduction that is the con man’s foremost asset”, and between the two of them and a homemade spirit board, they had all the tools they needed to persuade their captors to set them free. (The plan would also include starving themselves, a nearly successful “attempt” at a double suicide, and a six month stay in an insane asylum; but they did get out of Yozgad just as planned.) And again, as fascinating as the “how” was, Fox elevates what is essentially an adventure tale with her multidisciplinary research into “why” it worked:
In the end, what aided the mediums most of all were the times, for it was only in that liminal era, poised at the nexus of the scientific and the spiritual, that this particular con could have stood a chance. The period saw the resurgence of the Victorian ardor for spiritualism, a movement, itself founded in fakery, that has been called “conjuring in disguise.” It was a time when cutting-edge technologies such as the phonograph, radio, and telephone were making disembodied voices audible to an enchanted but largely uncomprehending public, rendering the idea of discourse with the dead an authentic empirical question. It was an age, suspended between alienism and Freudianism, when the observed symptoms of mental disorders had been neatly codified and could thus be well emulated. It was a time when orthodox psychiatry endorsed the belief that mediumship could result in madness. And it was a time of sustained, widespread social upheaval, when many stood ready to grasp at whatever straw might offer succor.
Perhaps this particular con would no longer work, but while times change, people don’t; we’re all capable of being conned and gaslit, attracted to cults and strongmen, and it’s always worthwhile to read a cautionary tale about such “coercive persuasion”. I enjoyed everything about The Confidence Men and the only thing lacking would have been a deeper dive into who Jones and Hill were as people; Fox shares plenty of their biographical details, but I’m left not really knowing them or understanding their desperate drive to escape (and especially after they had used their con to vastly improve conditions in the prison camp.) Still a solid read, rounding up to four stars.
