Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan. His book Painter in a Savage Land was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Booklist Editors’ Choice. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.
Harvey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, and reported the following:
The King of Confidence tells the stranger-than-fiction story of James J. Strang, a self-declared prophet who convinced hundreds of mid-19th-century Americans to move with him to a remote island in northernmost Lake Michigan, where he declared himself King of Earth and Heaven. Page 99 describes an anguishing moment in the troubled existence of his wife, Mary Perce Strang.Visit Miles Harvey's website.
In the fall of 1849, the prophet dropped off Mary and the couple’s three young children at his parents’ farm in Western New York. He then proceeded to go on a months-long recruiting and fundraising tour of the East Coast, accompanied by someone named Charles J. Douglass, whom Strang introduced to anyone he came in contact with as his 16-year-old nephew and private secretary. But in fact, Charley wasn’t a man at all. His real name was Elvira Field, and she was Strang’s 19-year-old second wife in men’s clothing—a secret the prophet hoped to keep from Mary, who did not yet know that her husband had become a polygamist. By the time of his murder by disaffected followers in 1856, Strang would have a total of five wives.
Page 99 describes the miserable conditions most married women faced in the antebellum era, that tumultuous period of American history leading up to the Civil War. The page starts with a frustrated Mary writing her husband, who had largely ignored her earlier letters. “If I had money,” she angrily declared, “I would take the children and go home” to Wisconsin, where the family was then living. The text on page 99 then continues: “But Mary Strang couldn’t go home. Like most women of her generation, she had almost no real power in her marriage, much less anything resembling autonomy. Although a few states such as New York had passed laws that granted limited economic rights to married women, most jurisdictions still held that a husband owned his wife’s body, her property, her earnings, and her offspring. ... If Strang’s intention had been to cut her off from the outside world, he could hardly have devised a better prison than his parents’ house, where Mary could neither get news of his travels nor be exposed to gossip.”
It’s hard to say that this passage gets a perfect score on The Page 99 Test, since readers don’t get a direct glimpse of Strang. But even though the prophet is absent from this particular page, readers get a very clear sense of one of his defining character traits: duplicity. The term “confidence man” came into the American lexicon that very same year of 1849, and Strang certainly fit the bill. Readers also get a feel for the upheavals of the mid-19th century, a time that gave rise to many feverish religious enthusiasms and powerful political movements. The final paragraph of page 99, for instance, explores the strikingly prescient ideas of the noted antebellum essayist and journalist Margaret Fuller, whose 1845 book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century was described by one later historian as “the boldest and, in a real sense, the first statement of American feminism.” Fuller argued that the place women of the era occupied was “so narrow” that any attempt to break out would cause them to “become outlaws.” Men, too, were stunted by the rigid gender divisions of the antebellum period, which, in Fuller’s view, imprisoned members of both sexes and suppressed their true selves from soaring free. She looked forward to a time when false borders between the two genders faded away. “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism,” she wrote. “But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”
The surprisingly complex gender politics of the antebellum era—and of Strang’s utopian colony, where women were wearing pantaloons almost a year before women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer famously adopted the fashion—were among the most fascinating aspects of researching and writing The King of Confidence.
--Marshal Zeringue
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