The King of Confidence Quotes

“James J. Strang, innocent target of religious persecution—like all his personae, this one proved to be a mask. Yet it was exactly those masks—those endless layers of ambiguity—that gave the man his charisma,”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“In American Homicide, Roth attributes the sharp spike in murder rates during the late 1840s and 1850s to the fact that “Americans could no longer coalesce.…Disillusioned by the course the nation was taking, people felt increasingly alienated from both their government and their neighbors.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“In his book American Homicide, Roth notes that in the 1850s “aggression and vitriolic language invaded personal as well as political relationships and turned everyday encounters over debts or minor offenses like trespassing into deadly ones.” Fellow citizens, he writes, “killed each other over card games, races, dogfights, wrestling matches, and raffles.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“confidence artist to the very end.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Heath’s letter leaves the impression of someone with an apocalyptic worldview, someone who sees himself as part of a persecuted minority deserving justice and retribution, someone whose group identity is so strong he feels lost on his own, and someone with deep anxieties about his place within that group and a desperate need to prove his loyalty to its leader. It’s the mind-set of a fanatic, a man who harbors “such indignation against the enemy” that he can justify almost any crime as legitimate self-defense of his own people, who have been chosen by God for a sacred purpose. Not all Beaver Islanders held such beliefs, of course, but for an unknown number of hardened zealots, criminal activity had become a kind of sacrament.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Strang had already perfected his talent for telling other people just what they wanted to hear, so a dose of skepticism is in order for any belief he professed—a double dose for the ones he professed passionately.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Hollingsworth turns out to be a single-minded manipulator who plans to take over the colony for his own purposes. He is, in short, much like a number of real-life figures who succeeded in exploiting the utopian idealism of the era, “men of iron masquerading in Arcadian costume,” as one commentator has called them. Eventually the narrator comes to understand that such men “have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot.” In a time when, as Marx and Engels memorably put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” the Hollingsworths of the world—and the Strangs—offered firmness and strength; in a time when “all fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away,” they offered a sense of connection; and in a time of “everlasting uncertainty,” they offered absolute confidence.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“A “businessman,” meanwhile, was not just a craftsman who made goods or a merchant who traded them, but a more fluid kind of capitalist, constantly finding new ways to turn a profit.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Today we use the word cult to describe a small group of extremists cut off from contact with the outside world by an all-controlling leader. People in antebellum America, however, struggled to find language for the phenomenon, largely because they had never seen anything quite like it before. As recent scholars have attested, “The historical record indicates that utopian and apocalyptic cults and communes first appeared as a major form in the United States during this epoch.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch