Is the confidence man a quintessential American type? The oleaginous smooth talker who comes to town peddling a treatment, a cure, a miracle, a faith. Miles Harvey tells the story of one man, James Strang, who was a schemer and, incidentally, an atheist who was acclaimed as a prophet in 1844. And he proclaimed himself to be the anointed heir to Joseph Smith's leadership at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Miles Harvey's book is "The King Of Confidence: A Tale Of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets And The Murder Of An American Monarch." Miles Harvey, author of the bestseller "The Island Of Lost Maps" and a professor at DePaul University, joins us from Chicago.
Thanks so much for being with us.
MILES HARVEY: My pleasure, Scott.
SIMON: I'm afraid the title of your book is so long, we've run out of time for the interview.
HARVEY: Well, thank you for having me on.
SIMON: (Laughter). Tell us about this man who had gifts but seemed to leave scandals and questions in his wake.
HARVEY: Yeah. He was a guy who was a, you know, an obscure farm boy from western New York who kind of failed at everything he did. He was a self-trained lawyer, a newspaperman, a postmaster general. And then he left New York in a scandal and moved out to what was then called the West, now the Midwest, and remade himself. And as you mentioned, he'd been an atheist, but he went down to Nauvoo, which was then the great Mormon capital on the shores of the Mississippi, and converted to Mormonism. And whether the conversion was real, I don't know.
But anyway, shortly thereafter, Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob. And this guy, James Jesse Strang, claimed that Smith had sent him a letter just before he died saying, you know, son, the church is yours. It would be like giving the U.S. military to, you know, a private in the army. But he managed to convince a lot of people that he was the rightful heir to the church.