A New York detective spent the 1920s exposing fake mediums for Houdini
the gist
In the 1920s Rose Mackenberg, a New York private detective, became one of Harry Houdini's undercover investigators, exposing fraudulent spirit mediums who exploited grieving people. Houdini, the famous escape artist, was campaigning against fake psychics. Mackenberg would pose as a bereaved sitter and watch for tricks such as hidden accomplices, rigged tables and cold reading. She gathered evidence, helped police arrests and carried on exposing mediums after Houdini's death in 1926. The work raised a question still debated: when is deception justified to expose deception?
so what
Spiritualism boomed after the First World War, with many bereaved families vulnerable to fraud. The case shows how skeptics used undercover investigation, a method that still features in consumer protection.
fun fact
Houdini and his wife Bess agreed on a secret code so that whoever died first could try to communicate from the afterlife; none was ever received.
Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0
Illustrative photo · Rose Mackenberg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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