In the 1920s a con man named Oscar Hartzell worked the oldest swindle in the book: the lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake, and a substantial share of it for anyone who happened to be surnamed Drake.1
The mechanism is a mailing list and a surname. Thousands across the Midwest fell for it.
Then Hartzell did the thing that separates him from every other operator of the same scam:
Hartzell cleverly turned [it] into a crusade against the government and everyone else who was trying to keep the Drake fortune out of the rightful hands of its heirs. There developed a mystical union of the oppressed Drakes, with emotional rallies and meetings.1
He converted a mailing list into a movement.
An ordinary inheritance scam sells a payout. Its problem is that a payout has a date, and a date that keeps moving eventually exhausts the mark.
Hartzell's version solved that by supplying something with no delivery date at all: an explanation.
A Midwestern farmer in the 1920s who is not wealthy now has an account of why. Not bad luck, not bad harvests, not the structure of American agriculture — a fortune, rightfully his, being deliberately withheld.
That reframe does three things the payout alone cannot.
It converts an ordinary condition into an active wrong. Being unremarkable becomes being robbed. It supplies an antagonist — the government, and "everyone else." It makes waiting meaningful. A delay is no longer a broken promise; it is the enemy still winning.
The longer nothing arrived, the more the story was confirmed. That is a product with no maturity date, and it is why this one ran for years where a simple payout scam runs for months.
Greene files this under the third oppressive reality — society is fragmented and full of conflict, against the fantasy of mystical union — and the filing is exactly right.
Look at what the rallies actually delivered. People who had never met, connected by nothing but a surname, in a region and a decade of considerable rural isolation, gathering in rooms to be told they were a people with a shared history, a shared injury and a shared destiny.
They received that. It was real. The meetings happened, the fellowship was genuine, and it was delivered continuously while the money never arrived.
Which is the uncomfortable structure of this case: the fraudulent component had no delivery date and the genuine component was delivered weekly. A Drake who attended for three years got three years of belonging, and lost the subscription money.
That is not a defence of Hartzell. It is an account of why nobody left, and it is the same shape as Ninon's antechamber — see The Option of a Dream — except that here the antechamber was populated by other marks rather than by Molière.
🚩 This is the only case in the chapter Greene warns about, and the warning is one clause long:
Promise such a union and you can gain much power, but it is a dangerous power that can easily turn against you. This is a fantasy for demagogues to play on.1
A fantasy for demagogues to play on. He names the political application, in a chapter that is a list of opportunities, and then moves to the next pairing.
Two things about that sentence are worth separating.
The warning is self-interested. "Can easily turn against you" is a caution about the operator's safety, not about the harm done. The danger identified is to Hartzell, not to the Drakes.
And the naming is accurate. The structure — a dispersed population, a manufactured shared grievance, an external thief, emotional mass meetings, and an explanation that strengthens each time nothing is delivered — is the mechanism of demagoguery described correctly and in one paragraph.
Greene has identified the most consequential item in his own list and treats it as a footnote to a con. Recorded as document-don't-endorse: the finding is about the placement, not about the accuracy, which is not in doubt.
One structural detail is worth extracting because it is unusually clean.
Every mass movement needs a boundary — who is in, who is not. Building one normally costs something: an ideology to agree with, a rite to perform, a fee, a test.
Hartzell's boundary was already installed at birth and required nothing of anybody. You either are a Drake or you are not. No conversion, no commitment, no possibility of being wrong about your own eligibility.
That makes the recruiting cost approximately zero and the identity instantly stable — and it makes the grievance inherited, which is the strongest form. A person who was robbed feels wronged. A person whose ancestors were robbed feels wronged and also feels loyal, because acting on it becomes an obligation to the dead.
An arbitrary and costless membership criterion is not a weakness of the scheme. It is the reason it scaled, and it is a general property of movements built on ascriptive identity rather than on belief.
The honest use of this page is recognition, and the thing to recognise is not a con man.
You are in a group that has formed around a shared grievance, and the group is genuinely good — the people are warm, the meetings are the best part of your month, and the sense of being understood is real.
That part may be entirely legitimate. Most of what makes such groups valuable is not the grievance.
Run one test, and run it on the structure rather than on anyone's motives.
Does the absence of results strengthen or weaken the account? Ask what would happen if the thing you are collectively waiting for definitively did not arrive this year. If the answer is that proves how hard they're fighting us, you are inside an unfalsifiable structure — and unfalsifiable structures are not evidence of bad faith, but they are evidence that nothing can ever end this, including its own failure.
Then the second question, which is the useful one: is anyone collecting money? A grievance-based union with no revenue is a community, and it may be a good one. A grievance-based union with a subscription and a promised payout has an operator, and the operator's incentive is precisely for the payout never to arrive.
And if you are building something: note that inherited eligibility recruits itself. If your movement's boundary is something people were born into rather than something they chose, you will grow fast and you will not be able to steer it, which is the "can easily turn against you" Greene is talking about.
Strongest evidence. A named operator, a named decade, a named region, a specified mechanism, and an explicit statement of the political application. The Drake swindle is genuinely one of the longest-running frauds in American history.
Tension — the only flagged case is flagged for the operator's safety. Documented above.
Tension — the genuine component was delivered and the fraudulent one was not. The rallies happened; the money did not. That is why it held, and Greene's account treats the union as a technique rather than as a thing people received.
🚩 [POPULAR SOURCE] · 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — no dates within the decade, no sums, no source, and no ending. Hartzell was eventually prosecuted and imprisoned — [SPECULATIVE], supplied from outside the source and flagged as such — and Greene stops before that, as he does with Stavisky at Law 31. Twice in two laws the chapter cuts a con's story at the point where it still looks like it worked.
Open questions. What did the Drakes do after? A movement built on inherited identity does not disperse cleanly when its premise collapses, and the chapter has no interest in the aftermath. And: how much of the money came from subscriptions versus one-off payments — the answer determines whether this was a fraud with a community attached or a community with a fraud attached.
Within Law 32, this is the case that most clearly exceeds its chapter.
The other three fantasies are retail — a senate, a court, a collector, a dinner party. Hartzell's is mass, and mass fantasy has properties the chapter never addresses: it self-recruits, it develops internal enforcement, and it outlives the operator. Greene's single clause about demagogues is an acknowledgement that his framework has run out.
Against Law 27 — the cultlike following — the overlap is close enough to be a filing question. That law's five-step apparatus (vague promises, spectacle over words, the trappings of religion, revenue structure, keeping followers from each other) describes Hartzell almost exactly. The difference is that Law 27 has a mechanism and Law 32 has a market analysis, and the same operation sits under both.
And against Salvation Must Come From Outside, Hartzell is the purest instance in the build: he did not merely find an external attribution, he manufactured one and gave it a name. The government withheld your fortune. That is the missing noun supplied, which is also what Find a Goliath sells at Law 28 — three laws apart, the same product.
Psychology of crowds — the grievance that recruits and enforces. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion describes belief propagating through a population by each holder's conviction serving as evidence for the next, with the aggregate estimate detaching from any external source.
The Drake rallies are that mechanism given a room and a schedule.
The insight neither produces alone: contagion accounts usually describe belief spreading despite the absence of evidence. Here the absence is converted into evidence — nothing arriving proves the enemy is still winning — which means the structure does not merely survive disconfirmation, it feeds on it. That is a specific and identifiable architecture: a claim whose predicted observable is indistinguishable from its own failure. And it gives the defensive question a precise form that works from inside a group, where questions about motive never do: what would we expect to see if this were false, and does it differ from what we see now?
Business — the subscription whose product is the waiting. The Prepayment Step-Down Sequence analyses revenue structures where the customer pays ahead against future delivery, and how the terms shape both parties' incentives across the interval.
Hartzell's operation is that with the delivery removed and the interval extended indefinitely, and the comparison isolates what makes it fraud rather than merely a long contract.
What the pairing produces: in a legitimate prepayment structure the operator's incentive runs toward delivery — they are paid and then owe. In Hartzell's the incentive runs the other way, because delivery would end the revenue and disconfirm the story simultaneously. The diagnostic is therefore not about honesty but about incentive direction: does this person get richer if the thing arrives, or if it does not? That question is answerable from outside anyone's head, it does not require assessing character, and it separates a slow legitimate venture from a Drake union without needing to know a single thing about Oscar Hartzell.
Sharpest implication. The fortune was the bait and the thief was the product — what thousands of people actually bought was an explanation for their ordinary circumstances that was not about them. That is why it outran every other version of the same scam: a payout has a date and an explanation does not, and the longer nothing arrived, the more the story was confirmed. The structural tell is a claim whose predicted observable is indistinguishable from its own failure.
Generative questions.