The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books $26.00)
It’s tempting to think that people of the 21st century are too worldly to be taken in by the sort of hoaxes that were perpetrated 100 or 200 years ago. But then you hear about people who are convinced that the Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t really walk on Earth’s moon, but simply kicked up dust on a Hollywood stage set. And suddenly the capacity for men and women to be buffaloed doesn’t look so related to an earlier day. Still, the rich deception pulled off by editor Richard Adams Locke and his New York Sun “penny paper” in 1835 depended on their era’s inhabitants being less knowledgeable about science and more easily wowed by pseudo-scientific discoveries. To drum up attention, the Sun published a series of articles supposedly proving the existence of life on the moon. And not just any life, but such exotica as walking beavers, unicorns, peculiar bearlike creatures, and 4-foot-tall “man-bats.” For several weeks, the “Great Moon Hoax” captured international attention and brought acclaim (and income) to the young, struggling Sun. Renowned showman P.T. Barnum later claimed that the paper peddled $25,000 worth of moon-hoax paraphernalia to gullible readers. Marshaling ample (and then some) trivia and stories related to this fraud, New York in the 1830s, and people who were affected in some way by Locke’s bunkum (including Edgar Allan Poe, who claimed that the Sun had plagiarized his fiction), author Goodman delivers a remarkable story of a more innocent America and the sort of journalism that turned its residents into newspaper followers. – Jeff Pierce