This All-but-Forgotten Con Man Sold America on ‘Fake It Till You Make It’
Glenn W. Turner is now all but forgotten. But this salesman extraordinaire in flashy suits was once all but omnipresent in American life. Turner, the son of a sharecropper, told people they could all be rich and successful like him — if, that is, they made an investment in his multi-level marketing company. They would peddle “mink oil” makeup and his “Dare to Be Great” motivational tapes, and collect more money by recruiting others and taking a percentage on their sales.
When newly minted salespeople found it impossible to make a go of it, they were told to “fake it until you make it,” by wearing expensive clothes and waving around $100 bills to lure in others, a disillusioned Oregon recruit testified in court in 1972. A few months later, another seller would tell a Florida courtroom that he, too, had been instructed to “fake it till you make it.” When the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Turner’s company, a judge cited the phrase as evidence of malfeasance.
As far as I’ve been able to discover, these are among the first times that this now commonplace phrase received prominent mention in the media. Today, “fake it till you make it” has come to represent the scrappy, optimistic mind-set of American hustle culture. But as Turner’s saga shows, there’s a dark side baked into the “fake it” mentality: the fakers who attempt to win success through fraud, then never make good on their promises.
“It’s inherently manipulative, deceptive, fraudulent, inauthentic,” says Robert L. FitzPatrick, co-author of “False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes.” Yet, he adds, “it’s just entered the culture, and it’s completely normalized.”
As Elizabeth Holmes gives way to Sam Bankman-Fried, who gives way to George Santos, it’s worth pondering why our society has embraced an ethos popularized by a huckster such as Turner. What does it mean for a nation to valorize faking it as a means to an end — and is there any way for Americans to turn back?
Click on the link to see how this huckster opened the door to the mainstreaming of Ayn Rand’s selfishness.