uals with counterfeiting talent.
Individuals with counterfeiting talent: call it whatever - "Rugged individualism," "entrepreneurship," "the spirit of rebellion" - Americans have indulged in counterfeiting, or indulged the perpetrators, to a degree that surprises observers both in this country and abroad. The idea of a lone artisan recreating intricate currency designs strikes the American fancy as, somehow, deserving of his ill-gotten gains. Even the counterfeiter's opponents wax romantic about his persona, as witness this passage from Allan Pinkerton (of the "Pinkerton Detectives" fame) in Thirty Years A Detective, bewailing the death of counterfeiting "auteur" Pete McCartney in 1890:
He was not an ordinary man, and when he disappeared suddenly, it was as if some great wreck had gone down at sea.
Be that as it may, the actual process of counterfeiting revolves around something far less attractive: fraud. The basis of the counterfeit item is that something of little value is presented as something it is not - something of greater value. It is not a matter of sales hyperbole or a con artist's playing upon the mark's own greed. A counterfeit Van Gogh painting, sold as the genuine article, is an easy illustration to understand: the value in the original is not just in the final presentation, but in the uniqueness and creativity of vision that made the work of art. The wampum counterfeits of the early colonial era are more difficult to comprehend - until one understands the context in which wampum came to be considered valuable. Native Americans of the New England region valued wampum because of the time and labor it took to find and string together the particular black and white shell beads that comprised a string of wampum. For a colonist to substitute cheap glass beads on the wampum string undercut the intrinsic value of the time and labor that made wampum valuable as currency of exchange.
So, too, with c...