George Santos' elaborate lies have seen the congressman compared to a 19th-century huckster. History bears that out.

• "George Santos is essentially a 19th-century character," one tweet said.
• That's not entirely off-base. Santos' behavior is well in line with 19th-century fakes. 
• Lots of scammers faked a résumé, dressed nice to deflect inspection, claimed great feats.

If you haven't been keeping track of George Santos' lies lately, I don't blame you. It's hard to stay up to date with the reveals!

But my fascination isn't really about the specific lies — that he was a star player on Baruch College's volleyball team or that he founded an animal charity that saved thousands of pets. Instead it's the vibe of the lies, and the depth of them, the way once you start looking deeper they expand endlessly in a fractal of fraud. The lies, taken together, form an aesthetic of pure shamelessness that holds an eternal appeal.

My obsession is summed up pretty well by a tweet from @blagojevism: "George Santos is essentially a 19th-century character. He should be traveling about the countryside in a mule drawn wagon, with a trunk full of patent medicines and the deeds to various fictional gold mines."

The traveling-conman archetype the tweet references is part of a constellation of tropes that also includes the quack doctor, the Barnum-esque showman, and the fake psychic. Media depicting these characters found inspiration from real life: In a time before digital records and facial recognition, opportunity was everywhere. You could reinvent yourself from town to town as you moved across the expanding frontier; or you could settle in a big city and take advantage of a steady flow of brand-new suckers.

Santos' brand of full-throated scammery is particularly American, something that belongs to this country as much as Abraham Lincoln and apple pie. It's inspiring to believe that you can live the American dream, using solely your knowledge of human nature and your sweet, trusting face to get handed wads of cash and ascend the social hierarchy.

Let's examine some remarkable and iconic historical American impostors and fraudsters, and assess Santos' place in this country's wide and admirable spectrum of swindlers.

The Man Who Sold The Brooklyn Bridge

George C. Parker, born in 1860, was one of the most successful American scammers of the 19th century. The phrase "and if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you" comes from his legendary real-life method.

Parker would identify a mark—usually a tourist or a recently arrived immigrant at Ellis Island—and convince them, with the help of official-looking forged papers, that he was offering them a fantastic deal to make money off the foot and road traffic across the bridge. The marks, eager to become true American capitalists, would part with their cash; Parker would scram; and later the poor suckers, believing themselves to be in possession of the bridge, would have to be stopped by policemen from erecting toll booths in the middle of the bridge in order to earn their rightful commission.

The idea of "selling" a landmark to a dupe wasn't new, but Parker's innovation came in the breadth and depth of his attempts, as well as the impressive rate of success he had. His audacity was certainly as impressive as Santos': one time he escaped jail by snatching up the overcoat and hat of a sheriff who'd just arrived, putting them on, and walking out the door right past the guards.

Described by newspapers as an "amazing rascal" who had "a lot of imagination, but very poor judgment," Parker was finally sentenced to life imprisonment at Sing Sing at the age of 58. A highly profitable few decades of fake real estate sales ended when a check for $150 bounced and earned him a fourth convicted felony.

But his pioneering scam lived on: until the 1920s, when people started to finally catch on (helped out by cards given out at Ellis Island that informed people that they could not buy public landmarks), the Brooklyn Bridge was sold over and over again — as was the Statue of Liberty, Madison Square Garden, and Central Park.

The Man Who Owned Arizona

James Reavis earned his fraudster stripes forging the signature of his commanding offer on passes in order to get leave from the Confederate army and go visit his mother. This power went to his head, and after the war he went into the real estate business, making up fake 18th-century documents to clinch land deals, taking advantage of the federal agreement with Mexico that Spanish land grants had to be honored.

Like Santos, Reavis earned the initial support of politicians and government officials for his campaign, including the prominent New York lawyers James Broadhead (the first president of the American Bar Association) and senator Roscoe Conkling. Various philanthropists and industrialists were so impressed by Reavis' extensive documentation that they agreed to support him in court, presumably thinking they'd benefit from his favor when the case cleared.

When his business partner, who had been in possession of a deed to some 2,000 square miles of land in Arizona, was mysteriously found dead in 1874, Reavis went on a spree. He traveled to Guadalajara and Mexico City to insert forged documents into the archives to show that the land (now apparently covering 18,000 square miles, including Phoenix and Tempe) known as the Peralta Grant, had been passed down from a made-up 18th-century Spanish baron to his business partner and then to him.

This worked well for a while, with railroads and mines in the area paying him for the privilege to use "his" land. But then some residents he'd threatened with expulsion took him to court, and he had to find another scheme. He met an impoverished servant girl in California who looked suitably noble, married her, and declared that she was the last living descendent of Baron Peralta. Sweeping off to Spain with her to mingle with high society, he snuck into the archives of Madrid to insert yet more forged documents backing up his land claim. The documents told a long, complex, and realistic story of the Peralta family's association with the land of the Baronia de Arizonaca,a fictitious saga worthy of Borges.

But the scheme couldn't last forever, especially not when Reavis's forgeries were pretty easy to see through: done with modern pens instead of quills, on modern paper, and relying heavily on highly obvious cut-and-paste. In the end, he was charged with fraud and sentenced to federal prison. Upon release, his wife divorced him, and the once-wealthy Baron ended his days as a pauper.

The Scheming Count

Nobody knows what his real name was or where he was actually from, but he really wanted everyone to believe he was Count August Schaefeslysky de Mukkadel de Castellane Seymour, a French (or was it Danish?) nobleman who was a direct descendent of Baron Munchausen, served in the French Army, was once a dentist to the Bey of Tunis and his harem.

Just as reporters breathlessly cover Santos' every move today, serving up his latest hijinks (such as losing track of his pet flea) as pure entertainment fodder, the newspapers were chock-full of Count Seymour. For a period of about two years, his travels across the country and the outrageous statements were covered extensively and syndicated in papers from coast to coast.

First, he appeared out of nowhere in Washington in 1912, exclaiming in an exaggerated French accent how outraged he was at the poor table manners of Americans, who dared to comb their hair and use toothpicks at the dinner table! Then, still in Washington, he proclaimed that he was seeking an American wife in order to gain access to a $150,000 inheritance promised to him by an aunt. In case he could not find one, he said he planned to open up a profitable suicide hotel, equipped with a gas room, a chloroform room, and a pistol room.

He next appeared in Pittsburgh, standing in a shop window for an hour at a time every day in order to advertise the use of corsets to give men's chests a better shape: a plea he would repeat in Chicago a year later, claiming that while the "raw material of them is abundant," the policemen of the city would "present a better front" if they wore his corsets.

By 1913, he was claiming to be the reincarnation of one of Nero's scribes, as well as promoting a wild combination scheme of treasure-hunting and corpse reanimation. His proposed expedition would sail to Africa to dive for the treasure in a shipwreck called Dorothea, the proceeds of which would in turn go to equipping a journey to the Antarctic. Once on the ice, the Count and his team would dig up the bodies of Captain Scott and his two companions — who had only died a year previously — and bring them back to life using a respirator and a special secret reanimating fluid. This plan obviously went nowhere, and by 1914 he was in Nashville, telling stories to the citizens about catching giant fish in Miami.

By Occam's razor, we can probably safely assume he was actually born in America, probably to either American or immigrant parents, with a very boring name and a boring life, and decided to spice things up by traveling the country as a foreigner and saying bizarre stuff to any reporters who would listen. In a time before Twitter, who can blame him?

The Dueling Pole-Seekers

In 1909, two rival explorers staked their claims to having been first to the geographical North Pole. The destination was one that had been sought after for centuries: the theoretical "Big Nail," whose eventual "discoverer" would gain fame and fortune forever.

Dr. Frederick Cook, a charming Brooklyn boy, was up against his erstwhile mentor, the stiff and uncompromising naval officer Robert Peary.

Cook claimed to have gotten to the pole with two Greenlandic Inuit companions, Etukishuk and Awehlah, in 1908 and it took him a year to get back to civilization after that. Shortly after he showed up in Copenhagen with news of his triumph, Peary also appeared on the scene to claim that he and Matthew Henson, his African-American assistant, were the first to reach the Pole in 1909 and that Cook was a liar.

This devolved into a very public cat fight. Peary warned the public that Cook had "handed them a gold brick;" a famous quote from an anonymous lady circulated throughout the newspapers, stating that "Cook is a liar and a gentleman, and Peary is neither." Eventually Peary stooped so low as to bribe some of Cook's associates to sign affidavits stating he had not performed his earlier claimed feat of climbing Mount McKinley (now known as Denali), which discredited him in the eyes of the nation and ensured that Peary was recognized officially for his Pole feat instead of Cook.

The punchline? It's quite possible that neither of them reached the pole. The debate rages to this day. Cook may have gotten a little closer, but his "aw-shucks" charm couldn't stand a chance against Peary's armament of governmental and institutional support. By all accounts, Peary wasn't a very nice guy,but he was a powerful one. He was buddies with the head of the National Geographic Society and the prominent banker and philanthropist Morris K. Jesup, among others. This influence helped Peary become a feted Admiral. A humiliated Cook, meanwhile, ended up in Texas selling shares in various failing oil companies that he and his business partners had acquired for cheap.

Eventually, he was convicted of mail fraud, and the judge, a family friend of Peary's, gave him a surprisingly heavy sentence — some said, in order to make an example out of him. Which side of this drama will Santos end up on? Only time will tell.

King of the Con Men

The Yellow Kid, aka Joseph Weil, was a Chicagoland legend. His scams were legion: from selling cure-all elixirs made of rainwater to taking half a million from Andrew Mellon's brother, he did and saw it all. One (likely apocryphal) story has it that he sold a man a chicken in exchange for a nugget of gold, and that's where the term "chicken nugget" comes from.

Much like Rep. Santos, he knew the value of being a snappy dresser. He had an expert knowledge of human psychology, relying on the foibles of mark after mark to get them to part with their money. While he claimed that he only ever cheated people who deserved it, that was probably another one of his scams. For every banker he conned out of thousands, there was a rural farming family he talked out their whole savings. According to his obituary, he was so magnificently talented that while literally imprisoned for fraud he managed to convince a visiting detective to buy $30,000 of nonexistent stock off of him.

Weil's flamboyance and shamelessness made him a figure of great fascination in the city: Just like Santos, he was nothing if not a total character. He had a similar love of attention, going so far as to team up with journalist W.T. Brannon to publish a sensationalized autobiography, which was a bestseller in 1943. In the book, Weil claimed that each of his victims had "larceny in his heart" and bemoaned the downfall of the swindling profession. By the time he died in a nursing home in Chicago, he was 100 years old and a celebrated cult figure. Shortly after Weil's death, Brannon sued the makers of the hit movie The Sting for adapting parts of the book without permission.

Despite a lifetime of scamming, the Yellow Kid only spent about a cumulative six years in prison— some at Leavenworth at the same time as Frederick Cook! But Santos, so far, has avoided jail time, giving him at least one leg up over the Yellow Kid.

Allegra Rosenberg is a writer and researcher in Brooklyn, NY. She covers fandom, pop culture, tech, history, and the environment.