6

Lying in State

If there’s one thing everybody knows about politicians, it’s that they lie. They lie about big things, and they lie about small things, and they lie about all the sizes of things in between. Surveys of the most and least trusted professions regularly put politicians right at the bottom, below real estate agents and even—God forbid—journalists. As the well-worn joke has it, you can tell when a politician is lying because their lips are moving.

Here’s the thing, though: most politicians actually don’t lie anywhere near as much as you think! I know this may sound somewhat implausible, especially given [waves vaguely at the world in general] recent events, but trust me—fact-checking what politicians say is very literally my job. Lies are actually a far, far smaller part of the day-to-day business of politics than the stereotype would have you believe.

This isn’t to say that politicians (and our leaders in general, and indeed the whole apparatus of the state) are universally noble, upstanding and entirely trustworthy individuals, selflessly committed to truth telling under all circumstances. That’s...well, it’s obviously absurd, although perhaps not much more misleading than the notion that politics is naught but a writhing snake pit of eternal deceit. But the point stands: if you think that politics is no more than the business of telling the most convincing lies, then you’ve got a skewed view of how we’re governed.

Our leaders do lie, of course. Just as with the human population at large, a small number of them lie habitually—they lie as a first recourse rather than as a final desperate fallback, and they often seem to actively enjoy lying. You can probably come up with more than a few examples of politicians in this category off the top of your head right now (which ones you choose will probably depend on your own political preferences).

But most of them lie only occasionally, if at all, and when they do it’s very often for the same sorts of dumb, basic reasons the rest of us lie: to get out of an awkward conversation, to disguise the fact that we are basically winging it in our job or to hide that we’re having sex with someone who—for whatever reason—we don’t want to publicly acknowledge we’re having sex with.

There’s a reason that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” is a cliché, which is that, quite a lot of the time, what brings politicians down are the lies they tell to stop people finding out about things that would be, at most, a bit embarrassing. (That said, the phrase is thought to have originated with the Watergate scandal—where, as we’ll discuss briefly in a bit, while there was certainly a cover-up, there was also a shitload of crimes.)

So why are lying and politics so inextricably linked in our minds? The problem is twofold. The first issue is that, if the business of politics doesn’t necessarily attract a higher proportion of compulsive liars than other careers (I am aware of no research on this—someone please do it), it certainly offers those who do have that tendency more than ample opportunity to practice their craft in an extremely public way. In a way that might not be the case if, say, they worked in a small agricultural transport firm in Iowa.

A politician is daily offered the opportunity to lie about six things before breakfast—and, more important, they’ll probably find both a willing platform and a receptive audience for those lies. There’s always someone out there who wants to hear comforting or infuriating deceit: that we’re entering a glorious new age, or that there’s someone else to blame for our problems, or that the world isn’t complicated and gray, but simple and monochrome. (And if you think that previous sentence was talking about those other people and not you, it was probably talking about you.)

And secondly, if you lie when you’re in charge of a country, it really fucking matters.

For starters, it means that, in those marginal decisions we all have to make between taking the honest path and the dishonest one, politicians often have a far greater disincentive to be honest. If you forgot to reply to an email in your job at Big Jim’s Pig Wranglers in Iowa, then some pigs might get stuck near Crawfordsville. That’s bad news for the pig farmer and might lose your firm a bit of business; you’ll almost certainly have to do some kind of “sorry I let the team down” all-staff email. But the incentives are still probably on the side of fessing up and taking the flak. By contrast, if you forgot to reply to an email in your job overseeing the TSA, then several million extremely angry voters might get stuck at airports shortly before Thanksgiving, cable news will be gearing up for a full-on rage-fest, and an email saying “Hey, to err is human; I hope we can move beyond this” probably isn’t quite going to cut it. We all say that we’d like politicians to be more honest, but generally we haven’t shown much indication that we’re prepared to repay them when that honesty involves saying, “Holy wow—yeah, I screwed the pooch on that one. I’ve learned a lot from this and I’ll do better next time.”

Also, when our leaders lie, sometimes really, really, really large numbers of people die. There can be wars and stuff. And, yeah, that sort of thing does tend to stick in the mind a little.

Political lying has been with us for as long as, well, politics (exactly when we invented politics is unclear, but it’s safe to say it was quite a long time ago). To take just one example, one of history’s most notable liars was a chap named Titus Oates, who, in 1678, managed to send England and Scotland into a state of wild anti-Catholic hysteria for three years on the basis of some extremely transparent lies.

Now, it’s important to not overstate how unusual that was. For much of our history, getting the British to indulge in anti-Catholic hysteria has been roughly as difficult as getting a dog to freak out about its own tail. But, still, it’s notable that, for several years, the country’s most influential people were in thrall to a man who’d got himself ordained as a vicar by falsely claiming to have a Cambridge degree and then had spent most of the next decade fleeing various charges of perjury and buggery.

Once described as “the most illiterate dunce, incapable of improvement,”137 Oates was a dull, unhappy child, living in the shadow of a violent father, and was once expelled from school for fudging his tuition fees. He tried to study at two different Cambridge colleges, but never graduated—although, while at Cambridge, he did gain, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “a further reputation for stupidity, homosexuality, and a ‘Canting Fanatical way.’”138 (I mean, not that any of those things are particularly unprecedented at Cambridge.)

In 1677, after a brief stint as a Royal Navy chaplain that ended rapidly when he was accused of doing gay stuff, and at least two escapes from prison over a perjury charge, Oates decided that this would be a good time to convert to Catholicism. Helpfully, at the same time, he also fell in with a quite probably insane anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist named Israel Tonge. That, er, unusual combination of influences would set Oates up perfectly for his most infamous contribution to history: the spurious allegation that there was a Popish Plot to assassinate King Charles II.

Titus Oates: incapable of improvement.

This involved writing a dense, sixty-eight-page pamphlet filled with wild allegations of plots and the names of over a hundred conspirators, which Oates and Tonge planted in the house of Sir Richard Baker—a fellow anti-Catholic zealot—where Tonge promptly and fortuitously “discovered” it the next day. No, it doesn’t make sense. Why would it be there? Why would the Catholics write their plot down and then accidentally leave it in the house of someone who hated them? Look, conspiracy theories have never had to be logically consistent, right?

Tonge then had a friend approach the king to warn him of the plot. It’s worth noting that Charles II was absolutely having none of it; he thought it was all nonsense. But the same can’t be said of Charles’s ministers, or Parliament in general, who absolutely ate it up. Oates was called to testify before the Privy Council, where—despite Charles II himself cross-examining him skeptically—the politicos decided he was telling the truth. Whenever Oates hit a snag in his narrative, his solution was simply to invent whole new plots and accuse more people; he told the assembled dignitaries exactly what they wanted to hear, and the fact that his claims weren’t even internally consistent didn’t seem to matter much. At one point, the king caught him in a particularly brazen lie and had him arrested; Parliament overruled this decision and not only released Oates but gave him a house and a salary. Among the people that Oates would end up accusing of plotting to murder the king were the queen (a Portuguese Catholic, who wasn’t exactly popular in England), the diarist Samuel Pepys and the schoolmaster who had expelled him years earlier.

The result was complete hysteria. Scores of prominent Catholics were arrested and put on trial—twenty-two were executed. Catholics were expelled from London. The media and the public stoked the fears and contributed their own inventions, with panics about Catholic plots and suspicious figures spreading like wildfire. It was several years before the hysteria would die down and Oates would come to be viewed with skepticism, eventually being asked to move out of his government-provided house, as everybody got a bit embarrassed by the whole thing.

How did Oates, a person with a terrible reputation and an incoherent story, acting alongside a probable lunatic, come to control the political narrative of an entire country for several years—when even the person who was supposedly the target of the assassination plot didn’t believe him? Like many modern conspiracy theories, it played to an agenda that lots of people already had: they wanted to believe, and that meant its contradictions and inconsistencies didn’t hurt it. But there was also Oates himself, an unattractive and uncouth man, who nonetheless seemed to have a magnetic sway over his listeners. To put it simply, he was a deeply talented bullshitter, who, even when he wasn’t plausible, was at least entertaining. As the writer Sir John Pollock put it, “His gross personality had in it a comic strain. He could not only invent but, when unexpected events occurred, adapt them on the instant to his own end. His coarse tongue was not without a kind of wit. Whenever he appears on the scene...we may be sure of good sport.”139

You can’t talk about political lying without mentioning Watergate, but I kind of feel that, with multiple Hollywood movies on the subject, this has been covered enough. I’m guessing you roughly know the story? I mean, if you don’t, look it up—it’s a doozy. But, still, there are a couple of aspects that are worth revisiting. Probably the second most interesting thing about Watergate is how very, very close they all came to getting away with it. The Washington Post articles that played the major role in uncovering it all were a slow drip-drip of mostly non-earthshaking stories, and it could very easily have gone the other way—where people just took the previous revelations for granted, adjusted their internal how-much-dishonesty-is-too-much-dishonesty bar, and so the story never quite swelled into the world-shaking scandal it became.

The most interesting thing is how astonishingly bad they all were at lying.

I mean, really awful—just gobsmackingly incompetent. For starters, you have the basic, famous fact that Nixon recorded all of the conversations in the Oval Office, where they talked about the bad things they were doing. Nixon wasn’t the first president to bug his own conversations—that was FDR—but he was the first to do it as a matter of routine, which is weird when you consider that he was probably discussing way worse stuff than most other occupants of that office. (I mean...maybe he wasn’t. How would we know?) The fact that the most plausible explanation offered for this behavior to date comes from Doctor Who—namely, that he was doing it to combat the effects of memory-erasing aliens—maybe gives a sense of how supremely dumb and inexplicable this was.

But the really good stuff is about the eighteen and a half minutes of tape that we don’t have. That’s the total amount of time that was “accidentally” erased from the tapes covering the morning of June 20, 1972—during a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, three days after the bungled Watergate office break-in. Given that the tapes that weren’t erased were still enough to condemn Nixon, one can only assume that the erased portions must have contained something approximating the following exchange:

NIXON: So, can you update me on the crimes we are doing?

HALDEMAN: Yes, uh... Yes, the crimes.

NIXON: The crimes—how are they? The crimes I ordered you to do. Tell me about the crimes.

HALDEMAN: The crimes, uh [inaudible], crimes have happened. We did the crimes, as you very specifically demanded.

NIXON: Okay, good. I am glad about the crimes—the crimes I explicitly told you to do and that you then agreed to do. It is good that the crimes have happened. [inaudible] Hot diggity, I love those crimes.

HALDEMAN: Yes, but the crimes went wrong. They found out about the crimes. This is bad.

NIXON: Oh, no. Now we must do more crimes to stop people finding out about the previous crimes.

HALDEMAN: Yes, okay... Okay, yes, more crimes. Understood. Together, let’s do crimes immediately.

NIXON: Okay, yes, good. Thank you for the crimes—the crimes we share. [inaudible] I hate communists. Hoo, boy, do I crave alcohol.

The best bit of the failed Watergate cover-up comes from the wonderfully bad attempts to explain why the tapes had been wiped. Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, publicly took the blame for “accidentally” wiping the tape. She had been transcribing the tape, she said, when she was interrupted by a phone call. Reaching over to answer the phone, she accidentally pressed Record on the tape machine and kept her foot on the pedal that made the tape go forward, all the way through the five-minute call. Ignore for a moment the fact that this doesn’t explain the other missing thirteen minutes, that the wiped portions weren’t in a single block, but four or five different sections, and that the model of tape machine in question didn’t work like that.140 Focus instead on the fact that someone decided it would be a good idea to get Ms. Woods to demonstrate for press photographers exactly how she had come to accidentally erase the tapes, to illustrate just how credible and plausible her story was.

Behold, Rose Mary Woods’s extremely normal phone-answering-while-keeping-foot-on-pedal-for-five-minutes pose:

Rose Mary Woods, reaching.

Dubbed by the press “the Rose Mary Stretch,” there’s a plausible case to be made that—for all the heroic investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein—it was the Twister-like image of a middle-aged woman extending herself as far as she could to try to reach the phone and the pedal at the same time that really made the American public think, “Hmm, something’s not right, here.”

If there’s a time when the dishonesty of our leaders truly comes into its own, it’s when somebody wants to go to war. A really large number of wars were sparked by inciting incidents that, in retrospect, turned out to have been less than accurately reported. There’s the second Gulf of Tonkin incident that provided the justification for the Vietnam War, which subsequently turned out to have involved a completely fictitious attack on a US boat. The Spanish-American War of 1898 had a major catalyst in the sinking of USS Maine in Havana, which a rabid American press blamed on the Spanish—even though it was initially believed to be an accident, and subsequent investigations mostly agree that the likely cause was a spontaneous fire in a coal bunker. And, of course, there’s that thing about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in forty-five minutes.

At the top of the roll of dishonor that is bullshit reasons for trying to start a war, though, must come the Suez Crisis. At the time of writing, in the UK, Suez is having something of a rhetorical renaissance, thanks to its frequent deployment in phrases such as “This is the worst crisis since Suez.” The current state of British politics doesn’t actually bear any real resemblance to Suez (I mean, for one thing, it involved cooperating with the French), but it’s still worth revisiting briefly, if only to note how the crisis played out: a nation was left humiliated, and a prime minister ended up resigning without people even knowing quite how much bullshit had been involved.

In short: it was 1956, the Age of Empire was ending and Britain was not coping well with the breakup. Rather than taking the time-honored post-dumping approach of sitting under a blanket, binge eating and listening to Alanis Morissette, the UK decided to do a war instead. Having belatedly withdrawn from Egypt, the Brits were rather miffed when Colonel Nasser seized power in a coup and promptly nationalized the Suez Canal—the vital trade route between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean that, until the nationalization, had been jointly owned by the UK and France.

The question was what to do about it. In Britain, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was being urged to take a hard line, especially by some in the press—The Times, in particular, possibly remembering its ill-fated support for appeasement prior to the Second World War, urged Eden to get tough. A similar story was playing out in France. But it wasn’t clear that military action would (a) work, or (b) be terribly popular with any other countries. Nasser’s actions might have been annoying, but it wasn’t clear they were illegal: the shareholders of the canal company had been paid at market rates. So, for several months, the situation remained in a tense, nervous limbo.

This all changed at the end of October, when Israeli forces invaded Egypt. This obviously raised the possibility of a huge and bloody war that could envelop the whole Middle East; quickly, British and French troops moved to intervene as peacekeepers and separate the Israeli and Egyptian forces. Which, entirely coincidentally, meant that they would also have control of the canal.

Some people couldn’t help but find all this a little bit...convenient.

In Britain, the mood began to shift. While the war still had support, the tough stance that previously had overwhelming approval from across the political spectrum began to attract more and more criticism. The mood of the press changed; The Times started to urge caution, while the Manchester Guardian came right out and suggested there was something dodgy going on. The international response was worse: condemnation from around the globe and, in a profound blow to Eden’s plans, a blunt refusal from the USA to support the venture, and the threat of oil sanctions if they carried on. Yes, America opposing a war in the Middle East. It was a different time.

The result of this wild miscalculation about Britain’s post-imperial ability to impose its will on the world was a humiliating withdrawal some weeks later. Eden insisted to Parliament that the UK had had no foreknowledge of Israel’s invasion, but his authority was gone and his health was failing. He resigned in January 1957.

The thing is, all of this happened without people knowing the full story, despite the widespread suspicions. That wouldn’t come out for several decades, when it was finally revealed that Britain hadn’t just had foreknowledge of the invasion—they’d planned it. Eden’s denials had been complete horseshit. In fact, Britain, France and Israel had secretly plotted every stage of the war in advance—Israel’s invasion, and the “peacekeeping” response. This was all decided a week before, at a covert meeting in France, where the three parties had drawn up a document outlining exactly what role each of them would play in this geopolitical pantomime. Britain destroyed their copy of the document. Unfortunately for Eden’s historical reputation, Israel kept hold of theirs, quite reasonably not trusting the two European countries to keep up their side of the bargain.

This also explained the somewhat unexpected shift of mood in the pages of The Times: their senior editors had been briefed by the government on the plans for the war before it all happened.141 Realizing that this was a terrible idea, they quickly shifted their line. Of course, they didn’t actually think of reporting the fact that they knew the war was based on a lie.

It’s not just in the beginnings of war that the falsehoods of statecraft flourish. Rather notoriously, wars are not great for producing reliable information: the fog of war means that many of the details coming from the battlefield are unreliable at best. But, more than that, war provides a tinderbox for the blend of rumor, myth and propaganda that fuels wild and uncontrollable falsehoods.

You can see this in all those reports from the field during the First World War that so annoyed H. L. Mencken a few chapters ago. While his estimate that 99 percent of all war reporting at that time was bullshit is probably a tad overstated, that unprecedented conflict gave rise to a legion of completely untrue stories.

There was the widespread story of the Canadian officer who had been bloodily crucified by German troops near Ypres, pinned by bayonets through his arms and legs. The details varied: when it was reported in The Times, he had been pinned to a wall; in the Toronto Star, he was tied to a tree; the Morning Post said he had been stuck to a door. As the rumor spread, it morphed from one crucifixion to two, then multiple incidents. The rumors prompted unrest on the streets of London and questions in the House of Commons, including one which added even more baroque details to the crime, alleging that “the Germans had removed the figure of Christ from the large village crucifix and fastened the sergeant while alive on the cross.”142

Did the crucified Canadian ever exist? There were certainly no substantiated reports at the time, although that didn’t stop the allies turning it into fertile propaganda. Subsequent investigations have turned up possible candidates for who the soldier might have been, but none has ever been verified.

But that grim story was nothing compared to “the master hoax” of the First World War: that of the German “corpse factories.” Exactly where it began is unclear (it’s often claimed to be the work of British intelligence, which it probably was, although that could be a myth in itself), and the details changed regularly. The basic story was always the same: the Germans would transport their dead back from the front lines in corpse bundles, to a factory where their bodies would be processed and boiled down to produce all manner of products—soap, explosives, fertilizer. The factory even had a name: “the great Corpse Exploitation Establishment (Kadaververwertungsanstalt),” as an article in The Times had it.143

The most plausible source for the story is the British intelligence chief, Brigadier General John Charteris, who, it was reported, had boasted about inventing the tale, at a dinner in New York, in 1925—but he furiously denied the report when he got back to Britain, which could have been because he got told off for running his mouth, or could have been because the report itself was hooey.

The grim tales of the First World War weren’t the first atrocity tales to emerge from the fields of war, though—they have a much longer history than that. In April 1782, around the end of the American Revolutionary War, a shocking story appeared in a supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle. It related a horrifying discovery made by one Captain Samuel Gerrish of the New England militia. Eight large packages were seized in transit to the governor of Canada. Upon examination, it was found that the packages contained the most grisly cargo imaginable: a total of almost a thousand human scalps.

Captain Gerrish related how the scalps had been taken, over the course of three years, from their unfortunate American victims by a group of Seneca people, on the orders of the British government. The packages were intended to be sent onward from Canada to no less a person than King George himself, as a gift to lift his spirits.

The newspaper broke down the source of the scalps in grim and unsparing detail. Three hundred and fifty-nine were the scalps of farmers, murdered in their fields or in their houses, eighteen of them specially marked to show they had been burned alive. Forty-three were the scalps of American soldiers, shot dead in skirmishes. Eighty-eight came from women. The article dutifully recorded that a very large number of the scalps had been taken from children: 193 from young boys, 211 from young girls, and, perhaps worst of all, 29 from babies that “were ript out of their Mothers’ Bellies.”144

The story was stunning and scandalous, and other newspapers in cities from London to New York and Philadelphia followed suit in printing their own versions of it over the following months. It caused consternation in Britain, while, in America, passions rose against the British for ordering these awful crimes.

There was just one thing about all this, which you will have guessed already: it wasn’t true. None of it. There was no Captain Gerrish, and there certainly weren’t any gruesome packages of human scalps winging their way to a bloodthirsty King George.

But not only was the story a fake—so was the entire newspaper. Or, rather, this edition of it was. To be sure, the Boston Independent Chronicle was a real publication. To give it its full title, it was the Boston Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, because eighteenth-century newspapers were really not big on snappy branding. But the so-called “supplement” was a fabrication from start to finish. The story about the scalps on page 1 was a fiction, as was the letter from the war hero John Paul Jones that followed it, and so, too, were the classified ads for a “large tract of land” and “a convenient tan-yard” that filled out the space at the bottom of page 2.

The whole thing was an extremely convincing forgery, a work of genuine craft and care, and possibly even love. Its deceptive origins would only have been apparent to you if you’d been looking incredibly closely, and also if you were an eighteenth-century typography nerd. If you were an eighteenth-century typography nerd, then—in addition to giving thanks that you’d been born two centuries before the invention of Comic Sans—it’s possible that you might have noticed the metal type used to print the newspaper wasn’t American or English in its style. It was actually French.

That’s because the newspaper had been printed, not in Boston, but in Passy, at the time an idyllic, upmarket commune with a rather nice spa, on the outskirts of Paris. Its author had nothing to do with the real Independent Chronicle, and he hadn’t even lived in America for several years. The person who created the fake paper was none other than the United States’ ambassador to France—the Founding Father, polymath, future mesmerism debunker and eighteenth-century typography nerd Benjamin Franklin.

Yeah, him again.

What could have driven Franklin, this man of science and of letters, one of the most revered figures of his age, to come up with such an outrageous deceit? The practical answer is quite simple: it was an act of propaganda against the British. At the time Franklin distributed his Independent Chronicle hoax, the Revolutionary War was all but over; the decisive French-American victory at the Battle of Yorktown was six months past and the Paris peace talks were just starting. Franklin’s hoax wasn’t actually distributed in America; instead, he sent it to allies in Britain, Spain and the Netherlands. His goal—in which he succeeded—was to seed the tale in the British press, in the hope that it would sway public opinion toward the payment of reparations to America for the cruelties the British had inflicted.

But, while that’s the immediate, pragmatic reason, there’s also a deeper—and, I think, much more satisfying—answer to why he pulled this con, which is this: Benjamin Franklin really loved lying. Absolutely couldn’t get enough of it. From his teenage years until just days before his death at the age of eighty-four, Franklin was the consistent, gleeful perpetrator of wild and extravagant hoaxes, both great and small. Sometimes they were for political purposes, sometimes for financial gain, sometimes for personal pettiness, and often just for the sheer unalloyed joy of making shit up. Others may have misled with greater consequences, but, by any standards, Ben Franklin has to go down as one of the most prolific, skillful and innovative bullshitters in history.

Exactly how seriously Franklin expected people to take most of his hoaxes is...unclear. After all, he was hardly the only person publishing things under fictitious pseudonyms at the time. The rise of the printing press had led to an explosion of what we might call “content,” and people were still getting their heads around the fact that some printed things could be true, while others could be made up. Just a few years before Franklin created Silence Dogood in 1722 (for more on this, see chapter 2: Old Fake News), Daniel Defoe had published Robinson Crusoe—a strong candidate for the first ever English novel, and one that was written in the style of, and was widely believed to be, a factual autobiography. At around the same time, Jonathan Swift was busy inventing modern satire. Was Franklin’s intention to actually deceive, or was he simply experimenting with new literary forms whose ethical boundaries were still a little fuzzy?

The line between “hoax” and “spoof” is a blurry one, even now, and almost all of Franklin’s fabrications were united in being outlets for his puckish, satirical and extremely overactive sense of humor. Simply put, Franklin was a leg-puller extraordinaire. According to one possibly apocryphal tale, Thomas Jefferson is said to have explained to people that the reason Franklin wasn’t asked to write the Declaration of Independence was “because he could not have refrained from putting a joke into it.” I feel I speak for many people when I say that it is a profound shame that history was denied Benjamin Franklin’s alternative, funnier Declaration of Independence.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Declaration as it stands is a solid piece of work, but it’s not exactly noted for its banter. It couldn’t have hurt to chuck a couple of gags in there to lighten the mood.

But, while many of Franklin’s hoaxes were undeniably intended to amuse (himself, at least, and possibly others), that can’t really be said of the scalping story. Whatever satirical intent there may be in his writing is far outweighed by anger. And by this point in his career, he was perfectly aware of how widely his tale would be believed, and he knew exactly how to plant a false story in one country’s press in such a way that it would spread internationally, copied from paper to paper and passed from country to country. This was a deliberate deceit for devious diplomatic ends. It was done with care: the issue number on the paper was that of the issue published only a month before, it included the name of the paper’s real editor and its appearance was a very close replica of the look and style of the real Independent Chronicle (although, like many forgers throughout history, Franklin couldn’t resist the opportunity to slightly improve on the thing he was supposed to be copying, using an elegant but telltale italic typeface that he’d had custom-made for his own Passy Press).145 And, when he mailed the paper to John Adams, he even pulled the old trick of pretending to be skeptical about the fake that he himself had created mere hours before.146

Though the target of Franklin’s disinformation was the British, the story he told ended up wounding an entirely different set of victims: the Native Americans, about whom he’d constructed what can only be described as a massive racist lie. In his hunt for gory details to give his story a bit of attention-grabbing sensationalism, Franklin repeated, amplified and embellished a falsehood about the indigenous nations that would color perceptions of them for a very long time to come.

To be clear, scalping as an act of war undeniably took place in America, and had almost certainly been practiced by the indigenous people long before the arrival of European colonists. But, from the very beginning of the Revolutionary War, the potent combination of fear, rumor and propaganda blew it up into an ever-present threat, far out of proportion to its actual occurrence. It became a folktale—a universal, constantly lurking boogeyman. Hearsay and whispers meant that false tales of massacres and mass scalpings by Native Americans, supposedly urged on by the British placing bounties on white American scalps, were commonplace—one such hoax even made it into the Declaration of Independence.147 (It would definitely have been better with jokes instead.) In reality, scalping was by no means the sole preserve of the Native Americans. It was actually practiced by every side during the war, with the revolutionary forces frequently offering large bounties for Native American scalps. Indeed, just a few weeks before Franklin composed his fake newspaper, probably the single worst atrocity of the war had taken place at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, when a white revolutionary militia herded more than ninety unarmed prisoners—Native American men, women and children—into barns, before beating them to death with mallets and then scalping them.

Maybe if Franklin’s ploy had stayed where it was intended—in the London press of spring 1782—it would only be a footnote to history today. But, instead, it had an afterlife that extended far beyond the eventual signing of a peace treaty in 1783. Because that’s the trouble with really compelling lies: once you put false information out into the world, it doesn’t just quietly go away after it’s done the job you wanted. Lies are like zombies—they refuse to die, and they’re coming for your brains.

That’s what happened with Franklin’s hoax, which roared back to life with a vengeance more than two decades after his death. In the lead-up to the USA once more fighting the British, in the War of 1812—with some native tribes again siding with Britain—the tale was somehow unexpectedly resurrected. And, this time, its impact was far larger.

When Franklin had first spread his story, eight American newspapers picked it up. On its second go-round, between 1806 and 1814, no fewer than twenty-seven different newspapers published versions of it, twelve of them—ranging from South Carolina to Vermont—in the space of just seven months in 1813. The myth seeped into American public consciousness, adding to the perception of the Native Americans as merciless savages. Despite it eventually becoming public knowledge that Franklin had admitted to the hoax in his letters, the claim still occasionally gets repeated as truth, even in the modern day. We can never know quite how much that outrageous, memorable falsehood contributed to the callous treatment the Native American nations received over the following centuries, but it surely wasn’t nothing.