On May 23, 6:34 am, "steve" steve.com> wrote:

I agree with your original meaning and of course by that definition,
volunteerism would necessarily not include coercion, by contradiction.
But my question is about the consequences of volunteerism, can it
result in coercion of those who volunteer and others?

I see your point, but can you think of a borderline case where it is
hard to distinguish between dishonesty and normal free enterprise
conformity with the law?

I wonder what you would think of P.T. Barnum's approach, which is the
original model of most entertainment forums in America.

...Probably no individual in the antebellum era took advantage of the
appeal of the penny press as effectively as did the incomparable P. T.
Barnum, a brilliant promoter of himself and his exhibits. ...In 1835,
two years after Barnum returned to Manhattan, he took a bold step,
quitting his job, borrowing money, and joining the itinerant "hawkers
and walkers" who trudged the countryside with acts and exhibits
ranging from animals to peep shows and freaks. Barnum, however, had a
particularly audacious exhibit: Joice Heth, whom he touted as "The
Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World"-natural because
of her alleged age of 161 years and national because of her ability to
tap patriotic emotions...

...Barnum, displaying an absolute genius for marketing, devised
several strategies to publicize the Heth exhibit and fend off critics.
Working with Levi Lyman, whom he hired as an advance man, he scheduled
special opportunities for ministers to meet Heth, showing them
baptismal documents that he and Lyman had forged. In order to reassure
abolitionists, he planted a newspaper story that the exhibit was
actually an antislavery benefit. He published a short biography, "The
Life of Joice Heth, the Nurse of George Washington," further
heightening the tensions over her identity...

...Barnum cleverly seized on charges that Heth was, in fact, a fraud.
He planted newspaper stories and staged incidents suggesting that she
was actually made of whalebone and India rubber (itself one of the
era's wonders) and that the contraption's voice came from a
ventriloquist. As Barnum snickered: "Many who had seen her were
equally desirous of a second look, in order to determine whether or
not they had been deceived." Whether they paid once or twice, Barnum
reaped the dividends...

...For several decades, the once-proud museum business had been
descending rapidly toward the disreputable. ...Barnum hoped to
capitalize even more on the appeal of the excessive and the bizarre...

...The museum in downtown Manhattan that Barnum purchased in 1841
became, under his inventive leadership, nationally known and, for a
while, New York City's most popular attraction. The five-story
building had formerly been John Scudder's American Museum but had
fallen on hard times...

...With formidable show business savvy, Barnum skillfully implemented
vigorous advertising, stunning decorations, and, of course,
controversy to publicize a breathtaking range of exhibits and
experiences. He later delighted in relating how, in 1842, he had
manipulated the city's Independence Day celebration to his advantage.
One of his plans was "to run out a string of American flags across the
street on that day, for I knew there would be thousands of people
passing the Museum with leisure and pocket money"; the flags "would
arrest their patriotic attention, and bring many of them within my
walls." Vestrymen from St. Paul's Church threatened to scuttle his
plan, however, when they objected to his attaching any rope to their
churchyard tree. Early on July 4, Barnum defied them, hanging flags
from a rope with one end tied to that very tree. By 9:30 a.m., when
the vestrymen discovered what he had done, festive crowds were already
thronging the street between the church and the museum. Barnum seemed
accommodating enough when the vestrymen came to his office in angry
protest. But, after persuading them to join him outside, he said
loudly: "Really, gentlemen, these flags look very beautiful; they do
not injure your tree." Rolling up his sleeves, he then dared the
vestrymen to take down the flags and threatened to "show you a
thousand pairs of Yankee hands in two minutes" if they tried "to take
down the stars and stripes on this great birthday of American
freedom!" By now, Barnum had successfully captured the attention of
the crowd, including some loud patriots who were determined to protect
the flags at all costs. The vestrymen quickly relented. Barnum's
gambit had worked so well that by 1 p.m.his museum was so crowded that
additional customers could not get in. To avoid repeating that
situation, Barnum devised a gimmick for future use. Several months
later, when the museum was again full, he fooled some of the customers
into leaving prematurely by hanging up a sign that said "To the
Egress." Curious spectators, anxious to see whatever this egress was,
found themselves exiting into the back alley, thereby allowing Barnum
to sell more tickets up front...

...Barnum ...toyed with issues of sexuality when he exhibited
Josephine Clofullia, his Swiss bearded lady. Ever mindful of the
benefits of controversy, he encouraged rumors that she was, in fact, a
man. After paying a customer to accuse her of being a fraud, Barnum
brought the phony case to court, where doctors, as well as Clofullia's
husband, testified that she was truly a female. The big winner, of
course, was Barnum, who used the case's notoriety to boost his museum.
Similarly, he profited from public speculation over the sex lives of
Chang and Eng, the famed Siamese twins who performed all kinds of
astonishing physical feats before enthusiastic audiences...

...Race as a subject was never more evident than in Barnum's "What Is
It?" exhibit. In this instance, Barnum pressed beyond some of the
racial issues that had surrounded his Joice Heth tour. In 1860, he
undoubtedly took advantage of intensified public speculation,
following the recent publication (in 1859) of Charles Darwin's On the
Origin of Species,about connections between humans and monkeys. Barnum
had devised earlier exhibits to suggest such connections, but never
before had he used a black man as, according to advertisements, the
"connecting link between man and monkey." The man was William Henry
Johnson, under five feet tall, with a small, pointed head, a large
nose that seemed to start at the hairline, and diminished intellectual
capacity. "Zip" was his stage name, perhaps echoing that of the "Zip
Coon" minstrel character. Although Johnson was more than likely born
in New Jersey, Barnum claimed that a group of explorers in Africa,
looking for gorillas, had found him and an entire race just like him,
living nude in the trees. Johnson had supposedly been the only
survivor among the several of his species whom the explorers brought
to the United States. He reportedly walked initially on all fours and
ate raw meat as well as fruit and nuts. One of Barnum's advertisements
claimed that Johnson "has been examined by some of the most scientific
men we have, and pronounced by them to be a connecting link between
the wild african and brute creation." Other museum ads suggested that
"it seems to be a sort of cross between an ape species and a Negro" or
"between the wild native african and the orang outang." As white
museum customers watched Johnson, they could wrestle with questions of
race, secure at least in the knowledge that the "missing link" was
apparently black.

At least one skeptical reporter suspected that the act was fraudulent.
He observed that, when the keeper was delivering his "What Is It?"
lecture to the audience, the "It" made "many sly manoeuvers that lets
in the light on the humbug terribly."...

...Barnum's clever gambits fit superbly in the antebellum era, when
American culture, as one historian has described it, "was a jamboree
of exaggeration, chicanery, flimflam, and bunkum." Against a backdrop
of wrenching change, citizens understandably worried about making
sense of what was happening all around them...

...difficult because of the expanding numbers of people who engaged in
trickery, wearing disguises to fool innocent citizens and mastering
the art of the swindle. A fast-talking New Yorker named William
Thompson inspired the label confidence manby convincing strangers to
loan him their watches, which he promptly stole. In 1857, with
Thompson in mind, Herman Melville published his novel The Confidence
Man.The penny press reported regularly about con artists and "painted
ladies" who adopted poses in order to fleece unsuspecting
individuals....

...Within this "burgeoning marketplace of playful frauds," Barnum
competed for customers. Indeed, the era's fascination with human
oddities was so large that some individuals-"Horatio Algers of the
underworld who cannily faked their uncanniness," as one historian has
characterized them-tried to cash in on the phenomenon by posing as
freaks...

...Overall, Barnum more than held his own when it came to inventive
deceptions, some of which he termed his "side shows." He once
advertised for free viewing of a wild buffalo hunt. Fifteen of the
animals, which he had purchased for $700 from the Western frontier,
were on a farm in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from
Manhattan. On one day, twenty-four thousand passengers jammed on
ferryboats to see these fearsome animals. To their chagrin, they
discovered not magnificent beasts but ones that were mangy, emaciated,
"so weak and tame that it was doubtful whether they would run at all,"
as Barnum later admitted, and so terrified that they fled into a
nearby swamp. Still, because, except for the cost of transportation,
the buffalo exhibit was free, viewers masked their disappointment with
humor. When one of them on a departing boat shouted to passengers who
were just arriving at the New Jersey wharf that the exhibit "was the
biggest humbug you ever heard of!" the incoming audience cheered.
Barnum, meanwhile, happily pocketed his share of the transportation
fees, courtesy of a deal he had struck with the ferryboat owners, and
made a profit of $3,500.

Intuitively, Barnum seemed to recognize that the phenomenon of
"diddling" not only stirred public anxieties but was also a rich
source of entertainment. While the confidence man loomed as a
frightening specter of social disorder, he could just as easily be a
beloved rogue, a trickster in the mold of a Davy Crockett or a Yankee
peddler, like the fictional character Simon Suggs, who joked, "it is
good to be shifty in a new country." Deception perhaps played an
important role in many of the new amusements because it continually
tested the viewers' abilities to distinguish fact from fiction, the
authentic from the artificial, and what was legitimate from what was
pretense.

In that regard, one of the era's most popular exhibits-and one from
which Barnum drew much inspiration-was a mechanized chess player.
Viewers could wonder whether it was truly a thinking machine or a
glorious hoax...

...A human hid behind false panels inside the cabinet, shifting from
one side to the other as the owner opened each door for examination.
When the chess game started, the concealed person was able to
manipulate the automaton's arm and fingers in response to the moves
that the owner described. Barnum was particularly impressed with how
Maelzel, following exposure of the ruse, in effect reinvented himself
as a creator of elaborate hoaxes rather than thinking machines.
Deception, even once the secret was out, could still be a source of
profit. Controversy and doubt-not conclusive demonstrations of truth-
were magnets for audiences.

With that lesson in mind, Barnum cultivated his growing reputation as
the "prince of humbug," a term that he proudly applied to himself.
"Now and then," he recalled, "some one would cry out 'humbug' and
'charlatan,' but so much the better for me. It helped to advertise
me." Humbugging was, from his view, different from swindling or even
lying. It depended on the participation of the "victim"; typically,
the object of the deception enjoyed the ruse or was at least so
gullible that others could laugh. "When people expect to get
'something for nothing' they are sure to be cheated, and generally
deserve to be," Barnum wrote. Humbug was like an inside joke, and it
was an expected part of merchandising. Barnum recalled that, when he
was clerking in general stores as a youngster, "the customers cheated
us in their fabrics: we cheated the customers with our goods. Each
party expected to be cheated. . . ." Barnum implicitly nudged viewers
in the rib and gave a wink; participants agreed to join the game, just
as they had done when they were purchasing goods from the general
stores at which he had worked: "Our cottons were sold for wool, our
wool and cotton for silk and linen; in fact nearly everything was
different from what it was represented." Thus, later in his museum,
the ballyhooed "Man-Eating Chicken" turned out to be a "man eating
chicken," and "the great model of niagara falls,with real water!" (an
exhibit that city officials initially feared would demand a huge
amount of water) was, in fact, only eighteen inches high and used a
barrel of water per month.

Such artful deception meshed well with the antebellum era's
celebration of democracy-evident, for instance, in the leveling
rhetoric of President Andrew Jackson, whom Barnum warmly endorsed.
John Quincy Adams could write, but Jackson could fight, as one poet
observed in 1828. Similarly, the art of deception was open to common
scrutiny, regardless of wealth, privilege, or education. Any
individual could try to figure out the puzzle, solve the mystery,
discover the hoax. In that spirit, at a time when science and
technology were opening vast areas for inquiry, Barnum was urging rank-
and-file citizens to join the debate. A prime example was his infamous
"Feejee Mermaid," a manufactured curiosity with a monkey's head
attached to a fish's body whose exhibition virtually tripled the muse-
um's receipts in just four weeks. Barnum publicized it as the
discovery of London's Dr. J. Griffin (actually Levi Lyman, Barnum's
advance man during the Heth exhibit). Spectators could reach their own
conclusions about the mermaid's authenticity. The opinions of common
citizens in effect counted as heavily as did those of famous
scientists, who, according to Barnum, were themselves deeply divided
over whether the exhibit was a fake. To entice people to view his
"critter," he contemplated an advertisement that asked: "Who is to
decide when the doctors disagree?" Barnum's museum thus encouraged a
kind of cultural democracy; truth rested with the majority.

Even low-life Bowery residents were welcome at the museum and could
join the debates over whether exhibits were phony or genuine. Upper-
class patrons could take offense, "but I worked for the million,"
wrote Barnum, which was also "the only way to make a million." He
admittedly greeted Bowery types in part because he recognized that
their dimes and quarters matched in value those of everyone else.
Moreover, he liked to tweak the respectable folks who sneered at him
and his amusements, complaining, as one did, about "crowds rushing,
ready to break their necks, to witness a vile imposter, a gross
humbug" who exhibited "stunted children, pasteboard mermaids, wooly
horses, and other 'wonderful inventions.'"...

...Although Barnum liked to say that he would "rather be kicked than
not noticed at all," he privately regretted that he had "(foolishly)
stuck my worst side outside." As he tried to bridge the expanding
cultural gap between the Bowery and Broadway, he leaned increasingly
toward the prosperous and the respectable. And, in that regard, he
mirrored trends in other amusements, including the minstrel shows and
the press...

With Amusement for All -
A History of American Popular Culture since 1830
LeRoy Ashby
http://www.amazon.com/Amusement-All-History-American-Popular/dp/0813123976