Cheaters Always Win: The Story of America

by J. M. Fenster

Overview

A social history of cheating and how American history — through real estate, sports, finance, academics, and of course politics — has had its unfair share of rigged results and widened the margins on its gray areas.


Drawing from the intriguing (and sometimes unbelievable) true stories of the lives of everyday Americans, historian Julie M. Fenster traces the history of the weakening of our national ethics through the practice of cheating. From marital infidelity to financial fraud; rigged sports competitions to corruption in politics and the American education system; nuclear weaponry to beauty pageants; hospitals, TV gameshows, and charities; nothing and no one is exempt.


And far from being ostracized, cheaters in every sphere continue to survive and even thrive, casting their influence over the rest of our society. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent tectonic shift in politics, where a revolution in our collective attitude toward fraudsters has ushered in a new kind of leadership.


Part history of an all-American tradition, part dissection of an ongoing national crisis, Cheaters Always Win is irresistible reading — a smart, sardonic, and scintillating look into the practice that made America what it is today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538728703
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	12/03/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

J.M. Fenster is the award-winning author of many works of American history and commentary, including Packard: The Pride, which won several national awards; Ether Day, which won the Anesthesia Foundation prize; the New York Times bestseller Parish Priest with Doug Brinkley; the PBS documentary First Freedom; and the book Mavericks, Miracles and Medicine, which was also a documentary on A&E. After writing The Spirit of Invention at the invitation of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center, she published two works of presidential biography: The Case of Abraham Lincoln and FDR's Shadow. Fenster has been called "witty" by The New York Times and compared to Mark Twain by The Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book was Jefferson's America. A graduate of Colgate University, she lives in upstate New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction. What Is Cheating? xi

Section 1 You Who are Cheated 1

Chapter 1 Your Own Kind Why cheating is so hard to confront 3

Chapter 2 To Be or Not to Cheat People who never cheat 17

Chapter 3 Power Play Cheating as punishment or symbol of superiority 33

Chapter 4 Rooked but Good The proper way to respond to getting cheated 49

Chapter 5 Game Change The accommodation of the cheater 67

Chapter 6 Section One Conclusion You. The Cheated 85

Section 2 You who Cheat 89

Chapter 7 Your Own Kind Cheating those with whom cheater has bonded 91

Chapter 8 To Cheat or Not to Be Who cheats? 109

Chapter 9 Power Play When cheaters prosper 127

Chapter 10 Rooked but Good Cheating against cheaters 145

Chapter 11 Game Change Will a cheater ever stop cheating? 157

Chapter 12 Section Two Conclusion You. Who Cheat 179

Section 3 Cheating and a Society that Likes it 185

Chapter 13 Your America Today Cheaters Always Win 187

Afterword 217

Acknowledgments 219

Notes 223

Index 238

About the Author 254

Editorial Reviews

11/11/2019

In this acerbic survey of American culture, historian Fenster (Jefferson’s America) examines how and why people cheat, and whether or not cheating is part of the national character. Fenster relates stories of fraud, deception, and rule breaking in sports (caddies in 1920s Chicago who demanded payment in order to keep golfers’ true scores secret), entertainment (the quiz show scandals of the 1950s), and law (a New Jersey man who went to the district attorney when the fake law license he bought for $1,000 never showed up). She investigates whether or not it’s true that everybody cheats (it’s not); examines various responses to being cheated, including seeking revenge and staying silent (“all are apt to fail”); and provides a quiz to determine the likelihood that a partner who’s had an affair will do so again. According to Fenster, American society has stopped believing that “nothing is more important than integrity”; as a result, she writes, “never has cheating been so blithely accepted by the non-cheater and never has it been granted as a privilege of leadership, as it is today.” Fenster’s sarcasm gives the book a somewhat peevish tone, but her moral outrage is genuine. Readers who’ve noticed a downward trend in American virtue since the 1960s will relate. Agent: Julia Lord, Julia Lord Literary Management (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"With her trademark panache and wit on fine display, J.M. Fenster brilliantly unmasks the epidemic of casual dishonesty that is corroding our democratic culture and civic life. Cheaters Always Win sparkles with historical vignettes, sardonic humor, and homespun pluck. An elegant page-turner for the ages!"—Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of Moonshot and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc

"Reading Cheaters Always Win is like listening to a really smart and witty friend tell you things you never knew about a subject you never properly thought through. Educational and fun."—John Strausbaugh, award-winning author of City of Sedition and Victory City

"J. M. Fenster's new book is every bit as entertaining as it is important, for she tells a dazzling variety of often hilarious stories while brilliantly illuminating an increasingly crucial — like it or not — aspect of the character of almost all of us."—Frederick E. Allen, former managing editor, American Heritage

"If one of your occasional crank rages is that yesterday's round of golf, your job, that car deal, your marriage, that new reality show, some presidential election...is just way off because someone is cheating, then Fenster has written a book packed with unexpected, hilarious, and sardonic proof that you're not paranoid at all."—Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs: Inside America's Hidden World of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Job Creators

"Timely...A lighthearted romp through several centuries of cheating at popular American pursuits."—Kirkus

"Thoroughly entertaining...From the banal marital affair to cutthroat political backbiting, Cheaters Always Win spotlights America's can't-quit-you-baby relationship with deception. Wickedly fascinating."—Daily Beast

From the Publisher

2019-09-29
A lighthearted romp through several centuries of cheating at popular American pursuits.

Cheating isn't what it used to be, argues historian Fenster (Jefferson's America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation, 2016 etc.) in this quirky dishonor roll of cheaters from the Colonial era to the present. Americans blithely tolerate lapses their forebears might have condemned. "The abandonment of the stigma against cheaters is a trend in our times across every pursuit," writes the author. With a wit that ranges from deadpan to sardonic, Fenster shows how "cheating has found a comfortable place" in fields that include politics, business, higher education, bridge tournaments, and NASCAR races. Consider the Kansas biology teacher who, after discovering in 2001 that 28 of her students had plagiarized work for a project, gave them all zeroes, which effectively left them failing the course; the principal supported her, but parents protested, and the school board ordered her to pass all but one of the cheaters. Compare the young plagiarists' get-out-of-jail-free card with punishments faced by cheaters of yesteryear: the producers of the rigged 1950s game show The $64,000 Question, investigated by the government, or runner Rosie Ruiz, stripped of her title after faking a victory in the women's division 1980 Boston Marathon. Fenster ascribes the destigmatizing of cheating in part to the waning moral influence of elders like grandparents—"America should have thought of that when it traded in ancestor worship for descendant worship"—and tarts up the history with devices like a twee self-interview and a California marriage counselor's "Test to Identify Chronic Cheaters and Whether a Spouse Who Has Strayed Will Do So Again." There are also digressions into topics such as the author's golf game (at times "I shoot a neat 67—per hole"). The flippant tone of much of this book—entertaining as it can be—is often at odds with its serious and well-taken points about the normalization of cheating in America.

A timely subject gets a treatment at times too clever for its own good.

Kirkus Reviews