In life you have to rely on the past, 
and that’s called history.
-Donald J. Trump

THE CARDIFF GIANT

In Cardiff, New York, in 1869, two men digging a well on a local farm uncovered a ten foot tall man, either petrified or carved from stone, depending on one's interpretation of its origins at the time. It became known as the Cardiff Giant, and over the course of the next few years, tens of thousands of paying customers would make pilgrimage to view it and to conjure up in their own minds some miraculous, or not so miraculous reason for it to be. Additionally, hundreds of thousands across the country would read about the find in the newspapers and magazines of the day. Only a spare minority of those in the know, however, would come to believe the Cardiff Giant to be a hoax. And yet, hoax the creature was, perpetrated by a local swindler named George Hull, intent on securing his place in history and on amassing a personal fortune to boot. 

Two years earlier, he had engaged a Chicago stonemason to carve the statue according to his specifications, after which he had transported it to Cardiff and discretely buried on the property of a relative, left there to weather in the soil.

Following its “discovery”, Hull would sell the giant for $30,000 to a consortium of businessmen in Syracuse, New York, they having been persuaded that it really was a petrified man from biblical times. 

By the following year, P.T. Barnum, knowing a good thing when he saw it, had replicated the statue in plaster and was displaying it in New York City, claiming his version of the artifact to be the original and declaring the Cardiff Giant, on exhibit in Syracuse, to be a counterfeit. 

The Syracuse business consortium, who had purchased the original from George Hull, then filed a lawsuit claiming Barnum was defaming both their integrity and the authenticity of the likeness in their possession. Testimony in court, however, would reveal both versions of the Cardiff Giant to be fabrications, compelling the presiding judge to throw out the defamation claim filed against Barnum, ruling that legal proceedings couldn’t be brought against someone for making a fake of a fake, or for calling a fake a fake.

For several years thereafter, both versions of the giant continued to be displayed to enormous crowds, all refusing to accept any evidence that substantiated the statues’ fraudulent origins. These folks, for whatever reasons, chose to embrace the incredible, but more compelling, biblical narratives instead, conflating them with a better and more prosperous mythical time, when men had been men and giants had roamed the earth, choosing to place more faith in the figments of their imaginations than in the crudely carved truths of the matter, fashioned out of profit, plaster, and stone, laid bare right in front of them for one and all to see.