Americans want to believe in a Jeffersonian meritocracy of good individuals rising to leadership and receiving just rewards. Americans want to trust everyone, to believe in the democratic promise that all people are equally good and equally engaged in cooperative and progressive personal and communal development. And the problem of ascertaining identity-especially moral identity and intention-in a landscape without clear markers of class or lineage has become increasingly problematic. But since the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower (1620), Americans have recognized that the devil has been active in the New World.
Americans are trusting and like to be considered trustworthy.
Americans admire success, expertise, and imagination. For confidence men ambiguously represent shared national values. In many ways, Poe sums up the love-hate relationship that Americans have with confidence men. Poe exposes the characteristics of confidence men in his definition of diddling and reveals their alignment with antebellum cultural values: "Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin" (pp. To be a man is to lie, cheat, steal, and misrep-resent every man is essentially a diddling confidence man, seeking the confidence of others for his own profit and amusement. To Poe, diddling is a fundamental human behavior. And for this reason when a man's diddled we say he's ' done'" (p. In "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843), Edgar Allan Poe argues: "Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
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