Critical Mass

CRITICAL MASS: Our cheating hearts — From Peter Minuit to Jose Altuve

A sculpture at the base of the Netherlands Memorial Flagpole is a gift to New York from the Netherlands. The sculpture symbolizes the purchase of Manhattan from American Indians by Dutchman Peter Minuit and the creation of New Amsterdam. It is located across from the National Museum of the American Indian.
(AP)
A sculpture at the base of the Netherlands Memorial Flagpole is a gift to New York from the Netherlands. The sculpture symbolizes the purchase of Manhattan from American Indians by Dutchman Peter Minuit and the creation of New Amsterdam. It is located across from the National Museum of the American Indian. (AP)

The common story is the Dutch bought Manhattan from the American Indians for 60 guilders, which they say is the equivalent of $24.

Like most common stories, it's not entirely true.

Peter Minuit, in his capacity as director of the Dutch North American colony of New Netherlands, did negotiate a deal with Seyseys, chief of the Lenape (also known as the Canarsees), to buy the island. A letter written by a Dutch merchant to the directors of the Dutch East India Company in November 1626 stated that the purchase price was "60 guilders worth of trade" which would seem to indicate no hard currency actually changed hands. Maybe beads and trinkets were involved.

We say they paid $24 because, in 1846, historian and diplomat John Romeyn Brodhead figured 60 Dutch guilders in 1626 were roughly equal to $23 and change in his pocket. If we're talking today's dollars, that's about $800, according to online inflation calculators I consulted.

Elsewhere on the internet, you might read that the Dutch paid the equivalent of about $1,015 today. In 1959, Nathaniel Benchley, writing for American Heritage magazine, wrote that it was about $2,000 in 1959 dollars, which would make it about $17, 386. I don't know how anybody else arrived at their sums, but they could be right.

But still, you'd buy Manhattan for $800, right? Even $1,000? (I'd balk at $17,386; $15,000 is my final offer.) That's better than a deal, that's a swindle. So what better way to set up an essay about the culture of cheating in contemporary America than to point out that even before there was a United States our inchoate nation was being formed via shady dealing?

Because, you've probably wondered, what choice did the Lenape have in the matter? The Dutch had gunpowder and iron and who knows how many reinforcements waiting over the horizon. You could argue that they made the bargain under duress.

Also, you might wonder if they had the same understanding of property rights as the Dutch did. Some people will tell you that the idea of owning land was completely alien to the Lenape, that they would have had trouble wrapping their minds around the idea of selling Manhattan. (How can you sell the earth and sky?) Maybe, in their minds, selling Manhattan didn't mean anything more than allowing the Dutch to occupy a permanent trading post there.

There's a further twist. The Lenape, who mostly lived in what we call Brooklyn, didn't have much claim to Manhattan. They occupied only the southern tip of the island, what we know as the Battery. Maybe a few bark huts around what is now Wall Street.

Meanwhile, most of the island was controlled by a group called the Weckquaesgeek, who were headquartered in the northern part of the island, near the confluence of the Hudson and Saw Mill Rivers, around what we call Yonkers. Manhattan was like their backyard or a great game preserve. They hunted and fished there -- at that time the island was rife with deer, beaver, bear, wolves, moose, grouse, turkey, porcupine and otter. They got along peacefully with the Lenape, as there was plenty of food to go around.

Then the Lenape went and sold their land to the Dutch.

Let's take just a step back. The Dutch wanted to make their purchase of Manhattan seem as legal as possible because they understood that the British, who had established colonies at Plymouth north of Manhattan and Jamestown to the south, would likely object to the Dutch doing the same. And the Dutch did not want to fight the British. They figured that if they could produce a bill of sale from the Indians it would at least put them on the moral high ground.

So when Minuit arrived, he approached the first Indians he saw and asked if they wanted to sell their island. These Indians figured that was above their pay grade and went to fetch their chief Seyseys.

Maybe Seyseys understood what he was doing, and maybe he didn't, but the upshot is that he agreed to move his people off Manhattan and let the Dutch hunt, fish and "improve" the island to their heart's content. He felt no duty to disclose that the Weckquaesgeek existed, much less that they controlled about 75% of the island.

It took a while for the Weckquaesgeek to notice the Dutch.

But as more and more Dutch farmers began to arrive and put up fences to pen in their livestock (the Indians kept dogs, but otherwise the only animals they knew were wild), hunt game and eat the corn the Weckquaesgeek had planted, they eventually said, "Hey, dude, what the ...."

And the Dutch pulled out their bill of sale, showed it the Weckquaesgeek and told them it was too bad. That's what you get, Weckquaesgeek. Here're some trinkets for your trouble. Now, get off our property.

Which didn't sit well, but the Dutch still had the guns. And strict orders from the officers of the Dutch East India Company to be nice to the Indians. And, failing that, for heaven's sake, don't allow them to trade for guns and alcohol.

But the bosses were back in Europe. And the Weckquaesgeek wanted those guns; better tools would surely make them more efficient providers of fur. Who'd ever find out if they cheated a little?

Is Britney Spears a cheat because Auto-Tune is used on her recordings?
(AP)
Is Britney Spears a cheat because Auto-Tune is used on her recordings? (AP)

If you're scoring at home, the Dutch didn't really cheat the Lenape, though they certainly intended to pick up Manhattan on the cheap. Seyseys certainly cheated the Dutch by selling them a property he didn't own. But the worst used in the whole business were the Weckquaesgeek, who the Dutch called the Manhattans, which might seem to indicate that they knew more than they let on when Minuit signed the deal with Seyseys.

More importantly, it left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Relations between the Dutch and the Weckquaesgeek were strained, and there were massacres perpetrated by both sides. (Arguably the worst atrocity occurred when a group of Weckquaesgeek asked the Dutch for protection from the Mohawk, who had invaded them from the North. The Dutch took them in and slaughtered them and tried to make it look like the Mohawk were responsible.)

By 1664, when the British finally swooped into New Amsterdam and took it from the Dutch, the Weckquaesgeek had been decimated by diseases and years of fighting a three-front war with the Dutch, the Mohawk and the Lenape. According to amateur historian Doris Darlington Cohen (a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's), writing in the Village of Ardsley (New York) Historical Society's newsletter in the 1950s, some Weckquaesgeek fought on the side of the colonies during the Revolutionary War, "but no provision was made for them in the Treaty of Paris." By the turn of the 19th century, the Weckquaesgeek were virtually extinct.

That's what you get, Weckquaesgeek. Suckers are not supposed to get an even break.

CHEATERS PROSPER

If you take even a medium-long view of American history, it's obvious that cheaters prosper. The U.S. government broke almost every treaty it ever signed with indigenous people (although Andrew Jackson would tell you that they were children in need of guidance and had no business signing legal documents anyway). Great fortunes (and generational wealth) often proceed from great crimes. We lionize outlaws and robber barons.

We cheat because winning is more important than how you play the game. We cheat because we can.

Some studies show that 75% of college students have cheated on tests. Even happily married people sometimes cheat on their partners. We share our Netflix passwords. A Harvard psychologist who once wrote a paper called "Costs of Deception: Cheaters Are Punished ..." was fired after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity determined he "fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways." Because he cheated.

I found that last fact in an article published in Scientific American Mind in 2013. But when I went to the magazine's website, I found I couldn't read the entire article because I wasn't a subscriber. I could have paid $7.95 to download a PDF of the story, but I pulled out a quote from the teaser copy, Googled it and found a copy of the article someone else had scanned and posted online. So, I read it for free.

I cheated.

I can justify my cheating -- the only thing I used from the SAM article was that one factoid, and it was included in the few paragraphs I could read for free. Or I could have walked to the library and obtained a copy of the article and read it. I am fairly sure that if I'd bothered to call or email one of the editors at SAM they would have emailed a copy of the story as a courtesy.

On the other hand, I could have paid the $7.95. I could have been a sucker.

I didn't do that, and the only reason is that this is an essay about how easy and ingrained cheating is in our culture. I probably cheat in this fashion a dozen times a week. If it's even cheating.

IS PITCH CORRECTION SOFTWARE CHEATING?

Some people get really upset when they find out singers often use vocal processing tools such as Auto-Tune or Melodyne to correct the pitch of their vocals on recordings and in live performances. These programs function as aural Photoshop in that they can alter the pitch and timbre of a voice. They can, more or less transparently, make a vocalist sound better.

Whether they can make a bad singer passable is another question since there are limits to how far a voice can be stretched or compacted before it falls into this sort of sonic uncanny valley. While there are likely very few recordings produced today that don't employ at least some sort of subtle vocal processing, there's no program that can make a horrible singer sound like a good singer without introducing stilted and robotic effects.

This dynamic is further complicated by the fact that some artists and producers purposefully employ stilted and robotic effects for artistic reasons.

So is the use of pitch correction software like Auto-Tune or Melodyne cheating?

A lot of people think so, even though it's likely that their favorite artists use it. It's a great tool that allows producers to tweak tracks they might otherwise have to re-record. This saves them time and money. And when used skillfully -- it takes skill to use these tools -- these effects are nearly impossible to detect.

But, probably since the birth of the recording industry, pop music has been at least as much about the marketing of image and personality as it has been about music. Pretty people sell, and if someone has all the other qualities necessary to be a pop star, then technology can make a weak singer stronger and bolster the confidence of an adequate singer. Does that mean some like Britney Spears (to cite but one example of someone who has been alleged to be a beneficiary of Auto-Tune) is cheating?

Were The Byrds cheating when the Los Angeles session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew played on their records? Were The Monkees? (No and no is the correct answer.) Recording is, like filmmaking, often a collaborative process where disparate talents alchemize marks on paper (or ideas in someone's head) into a moment that's both transient and reproducible. Some of the best moments in rock 'n' roll (and film) are happy accidents achieved by enthusiastic amateurs.

How you get there isn't important. You get the moment by any means necessary.

Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros scored a game-winning run during the ninth inning of Game 2 of the American League Championship Series on Oct. 14, 2017. The Astros beat the New York Yankees, 2-1.
(AP)
Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros scored a game-winning run during the ninth inning of Game 2 of the American League Championship Series on Oct. 14, 2017. The Astros beat the New York Yankees, 2-1. (AP)

All this might seem a long way around to the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox and the cheating they have alleged to have indulged in over the past few Major League Baseball seasons. Sports is like business in that while there are rules, it's expected that these rules will be pushed. No one wants to be a sucker -- or be perceived as a sucker.

So you read the fine print and erase the back line of the batter's box with your spikes. You use the gunk that somehow smeared on the back of your knee to unbalance the baseball slightly, just to see how it makes it react. Everyone cheats a little; the conventions of the game allow for phantom tags and brinkmanship. No umpire calls the strike zone the way it's set down in the rule book.

We have always stolen signals. It's not even cheating.

But now teams are using technology in ways that seem to undermine the game's integrity. Put a camera in center field and a wire running up a player's undershirt that tingles when the off-speed pitch is coming, and in the 2017 post-season, and the little second baseman, Jose Altuve, the league's Most Valuable Player, hits .472 at home, as opposed to .143 away.

It feels important in the way the steroids scandal never did.

And it also feels like business as usual.

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Style on 01/26/2020

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