As American as Mock Apple Pie

For several years I have half-heartedly questioned whether fraud is a quintessentially American preoccupation, or a universal and eternal activity somehow ingrained in human nature. I have so far made few conclusions, but have found much evidence in literature and news headlines to suggest that, at very least, I am not the only person who suspects that (since its foundation, anyway) the United States has always contained fraud's richest soil.

H.G. Wells's Tono-Bungay is a wholly English story which somehow manages to be American in all of the places forgery, quackery, and money are involved. Edward Ponderevo, king of quacks, follows American models in all of his dealings, rising to financial prominence through (false?) advertising, dubious acquisitions, and shady stock exchange transactions which seem very much at odds with his nephew's understanding of England and its people. A new way of doing business is simultaneously an American and an illicit way throughout the novel, and George never quite comprehends it. Uncle Ponderevo wishes he'd "been born American--where things hum," and is continually trying to convince his nephew that the current times are best suited for advertising and show and selling things not for what they're worth, but for what you can get for them.

I thought I might get some insights into the relationship between Tono-Bungay and America from Theodore Dreiser's introduction of it in the edition I got from the library; I could find many parallels between Dreiser's Financier and Uncle Ponderevo, though financial speculation is a serious business in Dreiser, while in Wells it's mostly absurd. Dreiser's introduction just told me to read the novel, and made no mention of America or quackery or anything financial, so I am left to make my own conclusions. Wells writes about the state of England in 1908, but I think he's wary of America's increasing influence in it as much as he is of the country's natural decay. The narrator does not see buncum and shady dealings as innate to England, and it seems to me that America and fraud could be nearly synonymous in the novel. Whether or not this is/was a commonly held view of America, I am still attempting to discover.