Cardiff Man

There is a wonderful story about America in a book called "Finding Oz" by Evan Schwartz. In October of 1869, in Cardiff, New York, a small town outside of Syracuse, a farmer named William Newell discovered a twelve foot "petrified giant " while digging a well. He soon placed a tent around it and charged admission. He eventually sold it to a local businessman for 37,000 dollars, a huge amount at the time.

Meanwhile archeologists examined the giant and declared it a recently created fake. Then a factory owner named George Hull admitted that he had commissioned its creation out of gypsum-just to prove how easy it was to fool Americans--and gave it to his cousin Newell to be "accidentally discovered". This apparently grew out of an argument he had with a local fundamentalist who believed that, according to Genesis, giants once roamed the earth.

Case closed, right? No. People kept coming. People kept paying to see it. P.T. Barnum offered an unbelievable 60,000 dollars for it and, when rebuffed, had his own replica built and advertised it as the real fake. ("There is a sucker born every minute" was apparently coined by the owner of the "original fake.") But Barnum's observation was more profound: "The American people love to be humbugged," he observed.

There was a local man, L. Frank Baum, a Syracuse castorine-oil merchant, who watched this evolve and took it to heart. When he wrote "Wizard of Oz" and the wizard is finally revealed as a fraud, he says, "it was the only thing I could do." The people of Oz were eager to be deluded and were willing "to do anything I wished them to."

Other generalization are yours to make.