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The Cardiff Giant: A Cautionary Tale in the Perils of Belief  

saturn1019 63M
8 posts
8/15/2019 4:16 pm
The Cardiff Giant: A Cautionary Tale in the Perils of Belief


Among the many gems of wisdom left to us by the late Dr. Carl Sagan, was the quip, "I have no interest in believing. I want to know." That is a pretty sound piece of wisdom we would all do well to follow more often, but it is not exactly a new problem in the realms of human experience. To relate our cautionary tale de jour, we set the Way Back Machine (some of you will get that one) to the year 1868, where we have an appointment to meet one George Hall.



By profession, Hall was a tobacconist, by belief an atheist: That was rather uncommon in the U.S. four years after the conclusion of the Civil War and not a whole lot more common 0 years later. We still have a lot of growing up to do as a species, and a nation. However, the genesis of our story begins with a Biblical argument Hall was having with a fundamentalist Methodist minister.



Hall took the position that while the Bible did contain some valuable moral lessons, the could not be taken literally. Like many who have actually taken time to read the Bible, he was unimpressed with its long list of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, preposterous stories and often ambigious moral teachings. The Reverend he was arguing with took the extreme opposite position, arguing that everything in the Bible had to be taken literally. As Hall pondered this conversation later, a little lightbulb must have appeared above his head. Or not, since they hadn't been invented just yet. That might have been another good story. Instead, one particular Biblical passage led Hall to author perhaps the most famous hoax of the 19th century, if not all time.



Genesis 6:4 reads, "There were giants in the Earth in those days" and Hall began to wonder if folks with beliefs similar to the good Reverend could be convinced that a large, stone statue that was excavated from the ground could be a real, petrified giant, as described early in the Old Testament. So he enlisted the aid of a few stone cutters and a farmer friend, Stub Newell of Cardiff, New York to put the question to the test. Using himself as a model, the stone cutters fashioned a foot stone "giant." The creation was then buried on Newell's farm, where it was later dug up by workers Newell hired to dig a new well on October , 1869 about a year after it was originally buried on the site.



The find became an immediate national sensation, and Hall ultimately profited wildly. People began streaming to Newell's farm to examine the wonder. Soon, Hall and Newell began charging visitors the rather excessive sum of 50 cents a piece to see it, yielding them a handsome return on Hall's original $2,600 investment to create the giant. Buoyed by proclamations of the authenticity of the giant by local religious leaders, its fame continued to spread like wildfire.



Soon Hall and Newell began taking the giant on tour and as Hall expected, it was proclaimed genuine in every city they visited. About the only note of dissent came from Dr. John F. Boynton, who suggested that it was carved by Jesuit missionaries in the th century to impress local natives. But most fervently believed it was an authentic, petrified giant, as described in the Bible.



Hall netted around $30,000 from touring the giant, then cashed in to the tune of $37,500 when it was purchased by a of businessmen in Syracuse who proposed to offer it a more permanent and prominent home for display. Hall was obviously laughing all the way to the bank as he accepted the offer and turned the giant over the the Syracuse . Soon after, the weight of scientific expertise came crashing down upon the Cardiff Giant.



The giant's arrival in Syracuse was followed quickly by Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh of Bone Wars fame. Marsh quickly declared the giant to be not only a fake, but a rather obvious one. He noted the still visible chisel marks, indicating that the giant was definitely not a petrified creature, and the marks would have quickly worn away if the giant had been in the ground any length of time. It was clearly a fake.



Hall, who had already cashed in handsomely on his scheme saw no point in continuing the charade and came clean. By this point he was probably more than a little proud of having duped religious leaders all over the eastern United states with a clumsy hoax. One would have thought the matter would have quietly ended there, but the public didn't seem to care all that much that the giant was fake. They kept handing over their cash to come see it, many affectionately calling it Old Hoaxey.



Matters got even more of hand when the great showman of the era, Phineaus T. Barnum entered the picture. Never one to fail to see the opportunity to turn a profit, Barnum offered the Syracuse the astonishing sum of $60,000 for a 3 month lease of the giant. They should have accepted it and run. Instead, rather mysteriously, they declined Barnum's offer. Undeterred, Barnum hired an artist to create an exact plaster replica of the giant and displayed it in his museum in New York City. Barnum's fake of the fake brought in more than the original.



The Syracuse , probably kicking themselves in the rear end daily for having declined Barnum's original offer, decided to pursue the matter in a very typical American fashion: They launched a lawsuit against Barnum. But the judge assigned to the case was evidently weary of the foolishness the giant had unleased. He refused to hear the case unless the Syracuse could establish the authenticity of the original. They rather quickly dropped the lawsuit and the Cardiff Giant mania that had swept the nation finally quieted down.



Well, somewhat anyway. What is believed to be Barnum's fake continues to draw large crowds of curious visitors at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum near Detroit. The original spent a of years in a private home in Des Moines, Iowa, until the New York Historical Association managed to convince its owners to part with it for the sum of $30,000. It was placed on permanent display in the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York. It is rather clearly the town's second most popular tourist attraction, behind the Baseball Hall of Fame.



The moral of the story here should be clear: Not only is belief not enough, it can be downright dangerous. The desire to confirm a particular world view can easily be manipulated at the of truth and seperation of from its owners. It is easy enough to revile Hall and Newell for profiting handsomely for such a crude hoax. Yet I am able to enlist little sympathy for the masses who eagerly fell for it. Hall made precious little effort to make his hoax convincing. Quite the contrary, he did everything but chisel "This is a fake" into its chest. The more powerfully we want to believe in anything, the more fervently we have to question apparently supporting evidence, particularly when that evidence is highly questionable.

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