Chapter 1: Dear Friend: Lurid Tales From Junk Mail America

Read Chapter 2: A Nation of Petty Gamblers

Read Chapter 3: Larceny in Laramie

As if he didn’t know it, J.M. Pattee learned again in June of 1873 just how hard it is to do good in the world.

The aging rogue had taken it upon himself to raise money for the Nebraska State Orphan Asylum. He started a lottery, his fourth in Omaha, and staged a gala prize drawing at Redick”s Opera House, with music by a German band.

Joined onstage by some of the city’s finest men as such things went in Omaha, Pattee exulted in the fact that he had pulled it off. “Notwithstanding the false stories that have been put forth, I have succeeded, and am able to go forward and fulfill my contract with every patron and purchaser of tickets,” he told the crowd.

But the ingrates who ran the town showed little appreciation. They issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of “obtaining money under false pretenses,” and Pattee was served with it the day he arrived in Leavenworth to start a similar lottery. Now he was back in Omaha, standing before the very man who had sworn in the officials at the drawing—Judge John R. Porter.

Pattee was a man of “common size and ordinary mould,” and his beard was frosted by 50 winters, as one biographer wrote. He looked scared as the judge examined the evidence: An affidavit stating that he had sold “duplicate and in some cases, even triplicate tickets,” signed by one of his clerks.

So what if justice in Omaha was usually open to bid? There was no telling what Porter would do. But there was no need for concern: Pattee was free on bond within minutes, and on his way to New York within hours. And not being a man of idle nature, as a reporter put it, he used the trip to revaluate his business plan.

For example, he asked himself: Why hold drawings in public? It would be safer to conduct them in a back room, or not at all. And why stick to lotteries when there were other things to offer people who wanted money without working for it? The same rubes would invest in nonexistent real estate and mines, and he knew who they were because he had their names on his mailing list.

Which led him to a related question: Why advertise in newspapers when there was a more hidden medium, one that would render him “hard to arrest for the deeds of the present, and harder to locate for the deeds of the past?”

That would be what is now called junk mail.

Pattee had already sent a great deal of it. He had that winter mailed thousands of one-sheet circulars for the “noble charity.”

This practice did not yet have a name. But it was the precursor of all forms of personal marketing, from telemarketing to spam.

It was crude by today’s standards—Pattee sent simple prize sheets. And there was no way to classify people by their characteristics. Still, early junk mailers had little trouble targeting their customers. They referred to them, simply, as “the fools.”

It was all they needed. For the real pioneers were grifters of whom little good can be said except that they were less likely than train robbers or other postal felons to be tattooed.

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