by Jesse Walker
Such stories are missing from Hofstadter’s account, which drew almost all of its examples from movements opposed to the “right-thinking people” Cohen described. The result was a distorted picture in which the country’s outsiders are possessed by fear and its establishment usually is not. The essay had room, for example, for “Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers,”33 but it said nothing about the elites of the era who perceived Populism as the product of a conspiracy. Hofstadter did not mention the assistant secretary of agriculture, Charles W. Dabney, who denounced William Jennings Bryan’s Populist-endorsed presidential campaign of 1896 as a “cunningly devised and powerfully organized cabal.”34 Nor did he cite the respectable Republican paper that reacted to the rise of the Union Labor Party, a proto-Populist group, with a series of bizarre exposés claiming that an anarchist secret society controlled the party. “We have in our midst a secret band who are pledged on oath to ‘sacrifice their bodies to the just vengeance of their comrades’ should they fail to obey the commands or keep the secrets of the order,” warned one article in 1888.35 “How shall we maintain our honored form of government, or protect life and property from assassination at the hands of these conspirators, if their dark and damning deeds are allowed to continue and be perfected?” asked another.36 The paper kept up the drumbeat till election day.
Or consider this passage from Hofstadter:
This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. . . . Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various Christian anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.37
It is the most astute argument in the essay. But it never acknowledged that the same point applies to much of Hofstadter’s elite audience.
There is a reason, after all, that Hofstadter’s article begins with a reference to “the extreme right wing.” In the early 1960s, the United States experienced a wave of alarm about the radical Right. This dread had been building throughout the Kennedy years and exploded after the president’s assassination, which many people either blamed directly on the far Right or attributed to an atmosphere of fear and division fed by right-wing rhetoric. By the time Hofstadter’s essay appeared, the “projection of the self” that he described was in full effect. Just as anti-Communists had mimicked the Communists, anti-anti-Communists were emulating the Red-hunters.
In 1961, for example, Walter and Victor Reuther of the United Auto Workers wrote a twenty-four-page memo urging Attorney General Robert Kennedy to join “the struggle against the radical right.”38 The letter, coauthored by the liberal attorney Joseph Rauh, called for Kennedy to deploy the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Communications Commission against the enemy. By “the radical right,” the Reuthers and Rauh meant not just the Birchers and the fundamentalist Christian Crusade but Senator Barry Goldwater and the libertarian William Volker Fund. In Before the Storm, his study of Goldwater’s presidential campaign, the historian Rick Perlstein described Group Research Incorporated, an operation funded by the Reuthers’ union, as “the mirror image of the political intelligence businesses that monitored left-wingers in the 1950s, identifying fellow-traveling organizations by counting the number of members and officers shared with purported Communist Party fronts. Group Research did the same thing, substituting the John Birch Society for the reds.”39
Interestingly, the phrases that sounded so dangerous on the lips of the Right weren’t always so different from the rhetoric of the Cold War liberals. Robert DePugh—the founder of the Minutemen, a paramilitary anti-Communist group of the 1960s—claimed to have been inspired by JFK’s own words: “We need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life.” In Before the Storm, Perlstein noted that Kennedy “spoke often in these absolutist, apocalyptic terms.”40 When Hofstadter sketched out the paranoid style, he listed an “apocalyptic and absolutistic framework” as one of its characteristics. But he didn’t have the thirty-fifth president of the United States in mind.
When scholars and pundits aren’t claiming that paranoia is limited to the political extremes, they sometimes claim that it’s a product of particularly harsh times—that a conspiracy panic might leave the fringe and seize a large portion of the population, but only when the country is in turmoil. In 2009, the conservative writer David Frum offered that explanation for the popularity of Glenn Beck, a right-wing broadcaster with a fondness for conspiracy stories. “Conspiracy theories,” Frum wrote, “always flourish during economic downturns.”41
He’s right: They do flourish during economic downturns. But they also flourish during economic upturns. Frum was specifically attacking Beck for his interest in the idea that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was building secret concentration camps, so it’s worth noting that the very same fear was previously popular on the left during the booming eighties and on the right during the booming nineties. For the last few decades, elements of whatever party is out of power have worried that the party in power would turn fascist; the FEMA story was easily adapted to fit the new conditions. (Beck, I should note, wound up rejecting the FEMA theory.)
Even if you set aside purely partisan fears, the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and allegedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, the United States is riven by conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that “it’s the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war.”42 The Piaroa Indians of Venezuela, he wrote, “are famous for their peaceableness,” but “they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities.”43 Many middle-class bloggers leading comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean universe.
This is a book about America’s demons. Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself.
Just as an animist treats natural forces as conscious spirits, many conspiracists treat social forces as conscious cabals. Real restraints on national sovereignty become a pending UN occupation. Lousy conditions in the ghetto become a genocidal plot against blacks. An ongoing increase in executive power becomes an imminent dictatorial coup. Even a less elaborate theory can play this allegorical role. Take the idea that the football star O. J. Simpson was framed for the murder of his wife. Simpson was probably guilty, but sometimes the police do frame suspects, and few would claim that innocent black men never run into trouble with racist cops. For many African Americans, the Simpson case became more than one man’s encounter with the law. As the jo
urnalist Sam Smith wrote during the trial, Simpson’s defense served “as the mythic translation of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should have been on CNN but weren’t. Everything is true except the names, times and places.”44
In the next few chapters I will lay out five primal myths that underlie America’s conspiracy folklore. By using the word myths, I don’t mean to suggest that these stories are never true. I mean that they’re culturally resonant ideas that appear again and again when Americans communicate with one another: archetypes that can absorb all kinds of allegations, true or not, and arrange them into a familiar form. One is the Enemy Outside, who plots outside the community’s gates, and one is the Enemy Within, comprising villainous neighbors who can’t easily be distinguished from friends. There is the Enemy Above, hiding at the top of the social pyramid, and there is the Enemy Below, lurking at the bottom. And then there is the Benevolent Conspiracy, which isn’t an enemy at all: a secret force working behind the scenes to improve people’s lives.45
Because these are tales of masks and puppeteers and events that are not what they initially seem, the cabals can shift their shapes over time. Plotters at the bottom of the social hierarchy are suddenly discovered to be manipulated by plotters at the top; or the plotters at the top turn out to be agents of a foreign conspiracy; or, conversely, it’s the foreign conspirators who are controlled by plotters at home. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society, which had attracted notoriety by accusing eminent Americans of being agents of international communism, changed course and started arguing that international communism was controlled by powerful U.S. capitalists. The society also suggested that black and student protesters in the United Sates were pawns of the same cabal, a setup the Birchers described as “pressure from above and pressure from below.”46 And those shifts took place within the worldview of a single organization. Conspiracy tales can change even more dramatically when a story leaks from one social group to another. Different people adopt and adapt these myths for their own needs, keeping the scaffolding of a story line in place while changing the content.47
There are few pure examples of those five core myths. But there are prototypical tales that tell us a lot about how each category functions. In the first half of the book, we will watch those stories take hold in early American history, and we will see some of the ways they have echoed through the centuries that followed. In the second half, we’ll move from the deep end of history into the more recent past, watching those primal tales in action as Americans react to events from Watergate to Waco to today. Throughout the book, we will also see the myths manifest themselves in stories that do not pretend to be true—in fiction, film, television, songs, comics, games—and watch as those overtly imaginary tales influence accounts that are supposed to be accurate. We will also observe the rise of an ironic style of American paranoia, a mind-set that is less interested in believing conspiracy theories than in playing with them.
But before we do any of that, I should make three things clear, both to prevent misunderstandings and to distinguish my project from some of the other conspiracy books that are out there.
First: I’m not out to espouse or debunk any particular conspiracy theories. It would be absurd to deny that conspiracies can be real. Spies, terrorists, and mafias all exist. Alger Hiss really did engage in espionage for the Soviet Union. The Central Intelligence Agency really did plan a series of coups and assassinations. At the very moment that you’re reading this, someone somewhere is probably trying to bribe a politician. The world is filled with plots both petty and grand, though never as enormous as the ancient cabals described in the most baroque conspiracy literature.
It will sometimes be obvious, as with John Smith Dye’s yarn about the plan to poison James Buchanan, that I think a conspiracy story is untrue. There will also be times, particularly in chapter 7, when I discuss conspiracy stories that clearly were true. Often a theory will have elements of truth and elements that are more fanciful. But this is ultimately a history of the things people believe, not an assessment of whether those beliefs are accurate. This book has nothing to say about who killed the Kennedys or what UFOs might be. It has plenty to say about the stories we tell about assassins and aliens.
Second: This book isn’t exhaustive. Every significant event in U.S. history has inspired at least one conspiracy theory, and plenty of insignificant events have done the same. I will describe a lot of them, but it would be impossible to cover them all. Still, if I’ve done my job, you will not simply come away from this book having learned about the stories I’ve told. You’ll come away with a tool kit that will help you make sense of the stories I didn’t tell, including the yarns that have yet to emerge.
Similarly, I will generally ignore the political paranoia found in the rest of the world, though I will occasionally cover a foreign story if it has had an influence on these shores. I do not believe that the United States is unusually paranoid in comparison with other countries, and I’m sure a fine book could be written comparing and contrasting the conspiracy theories that flourish in America with the tales told elsewhere. But this is not that book.
Finally: When I say paranoia, I’m not making a psychiatric diagnosis. I hope it’s obvious that I’m using the word paranoia colloquially, not clinically. But it’s worth stressing the point, because there’s a long history of people using psychiatric terms to stigmatize political positions they oppose. I wish a better word than paranoia were available, but I don’t think such a term exists. (Conspiracism comes close, but it doesn’t quite cut it, since political paranoia can take the form of a dread that is broader than the fear of a cabal.)
To his credit, Hofstadter insisted that he had “neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics,” adding that “the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”48 But you still can come away from his article with the sense that large swaths of the American past have just been put on the psychoanalyst’s couch. And not every writer in his tradition has been as careful with his caveats as Hofstadter was. The same fall that Harper’s published “The Paranoid Style,” with its opening declaration that “the Goldwater movement” showed “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority,” Fact magazine announced that “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!”49 Naturally, those irresponsible diagnoses from afar included the claim that the candidate had “a paranoid personality.”
Like Hofstadter, I’m not limiting my scope to certifiable lunatics. Unlike Hofstadter, I’m not limiting my scope to minority movements either. By the time this book is over, I should hope it will be clear that when I say virtually everyone is capable of paranoid thinking, I really do mean virtually everyone, including you, me, and the founding fathers. As the sixties scare about the radical Right demonstrates, it is even possible to be paranoid about paranoids.
And to illustrate that last possibility, I’ll tell one more story before we plunge into those primal myths.
On October 30, 1938, at 8 P.M., the CBS radio network transmitted “The War of the Worlds,” a special Halloween edition of The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The broadcast, directed and narrated by Orson Welles, was based on H. G. Wells’s famous novel about a Martian invasion of Earth, but the action was moved from Victorian England to contemporary New Jersey. The first half of the story jettisoned the usual format of a radio play and adopted a more adventurous form: a live concert interrupted by ever more frightening bulletins. It was and is a brilliant and effective drama, but the broadcast is famous today for reasons that go well beyond its artistic quality.
You might think you know this story. In popular memory, hordes of listeners mistook a science fiction play for an actual alien invasion,
setting off a mass panic. That’s the tale told in one of the most frequently cited accounts of the evening, a 1940 study by the social psychologist Hadley Cantril. “For a few horrible hours,” Cantril wrote, “people from Maine to California thought that hideous monsters armed with death rays were destroying all armed resistance sent against them; that there was simply no escape from danger; that the end of the world was near. . . . Long before the broadcast had ended, people all over the United States were praying, crying, fleeing frantically to escape death from the Martians. Some ran to rescue loved ones. Others telephoned farewells or warnings, hurried to inform neighbors, sought information from newspapers or radio stations, summoned ambulances and police cars.” At least six million people heard the broadcast, Cantril claimed, and “at least a million of them were frightened or disturbed.”50
The truth was more mundane but also more interesting. There were indeed listeners who, apparently missing the initial announcement that the story was fiction, took the show at face value and believed a real invasion was under way. It is not clear, though, that they were any more common than the people today who mistake satires in The Onion for real newspaper reports. Cantril’s numbers are dubious, and the people interviewed in his book were not a representative sample of the population. “Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the broadcast,” the media scholar Michael Socolow noted. “Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry. . . . Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn’t handle the load, but it appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for Life magazine.”51