The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  Of the people who did mistake the fictional news bulletins for real reports, a portion were under the impression that the invaders were not extraterrestrials but Germans, a less implausible scenario. Even the spikes in telephone calls didn’t necessarily represent public panic. The press critic W. Joseph Campbell has pointed out that the calls could be “an altogether rational response of people who neither panicked nor became hysterical, but sought confirmation or clarification from external sources generally known to be reliable.” Campbell added that the call volume must also have included “people who telephoned friends and relatives to talk about the unusual and clever program they had just heard.”52

  If Welles’s broadcast derived some of its impact from Americans’ anxieties about international tensions, the exaggerated reports about the response have persisted because they speak to another set of fears. After the play aired, the prominent political commentator Walter Lippmann took the opportunity to warn against “crowds that drift with all the winds that blow, and are caught up at last in the great hurricanes,” adding that those “masses without roots” and their “volcanic and hysterical energy” are “the chaos in which the new Caesars are born.”53 As Socolow put it, the legend of the Mars panic “cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists—or incendiary demagogues—could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation.”54

  To capture consciousness: what a chilling image. It’s an idea that appears when dissidents warn that our leaders are using the mass media to brainwash us. But you can also find the fear among those leaders themselves, who have a long history of fretting over the influence of any new medium of communication. If Orson Welles was cast as a wizard with the power to cloud men’s minds, his listeners were imagined as a mindless mob easily misled by a master manipulator. The social order is disrupted; riots are sparked from afar.

  The “War of the Worlds” story is usually told as a parable about popular hysteria—of a sudden spike in the sort of fear that Hofstadter’s essay decried. But at least as much, it is a parable about elite hysteria—of the antipopulist anxiety that Hofstadter’s essay exemplifies. No history of American paranoia can be complete unless it includes the latter.

  2

  THE DEVIL IN THE WILDERNESS

  Indians were the first people to stand in American history as emblems of disorder, civilized breakdown, and alien control. . . . The series of Red scares that have swept the country since the 1870s have roots in the original red scares.

  —Michael Paul Rogin1

  Here’s the story:

  Satan got here first. He knew he was losing ground to God as the Gospel spread through the Old World, so he “drew a Colony out of some of those barbarous Nations dwelling upon the Northern Ocean” and promised the pagans “a Countrey far better than their own.”2 Those disciples became the Indians, and with those savages as his servants Satan established an empire in the American wilderness. And there, “like a dragon,” the dark lord waited, “keeping a guard upon the spacious and mighty orchards of America.”3

  When Christian settlers eventually arrived, they found “a World in every Nook whereof, the devil is encamped,” his “Bands of Robbers” ready to menace the European arrivals. The American air was “fill’d with Fiery flying serpents,” and there were “incredible Droves of Devils in our way”;4 hostile Indian tribes were led by “ministers of Satan,” all “actuated by the Angel of the bottomless pit.”5 The Puritans established their colonies, and they did all they could to keep Satan beyond their walls. But the Devil’s Indians constantly conspired against them.

  Some Indians were more than the Devil’s pawns: They were devils in disguise. After one clash with the natives and their French Catholic allies, the influential minister Cotton Mather suggested that some of the shadowy figures firing on his countrymen were not men but “daemons in the shape of armed Indians and Frenchmen.”6 You thought you were watching a western, but that was just a mask: It was a horror movie all along.

  You’re never quite safe from the Enemy Outside, even when you’re at home. And when you leave your home, you take your life and soul into your hands. From 1682 onward, the American colonies saw a flood of captivity narratives, printed accounts by settlers who had been held prisoner by the natives. In the archetypal captivity story, as the literary historian Richard Slotkin described it,

  a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. . . . In the Indian’s devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian’s “cannibal” Eucharist. To partake of the Indian’s love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.7

  To be un-Englished: to be made alien. The Devil built his New World, Mather said, by “seducing the first inhabitants of America into it.”8 Given a chance, he would seduce the new Americans as well.

  The Puritans were aware of those dangers when John Sassamon arrived in the New England town of Marshfield one December day in 1674. Sassamon was no stranger to the colonists. He was a Christian convert from the Massachuset tribe, and he had served the English as an interpreter. He had even attended Harvard for a spell in the 1650s. But this wasn’t a social call. He had grave news for Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth Colony.

  Sassamon had just been to the camp of the Wampanoag leader known as Philip, he told the governor. He had heard something terrible: Philip was plotting to combine his forces with the other tribes in the area and to lead an assault on the English. The colonists were in danger, and so, Sassamon added, was he.

  It wasn’t the first time such a story had circulated about Philip. In 1667, some members of his tribe had informed the English that he was plotting an attack. He had defended himself by claiming that their story was itself an Indian conspiracy, aimed at undermining Philip’s power and manipulating the colonists. The Puritan authorities had accepted his explanation that time. They were less trusting in 1671, when they again heard that Philip was planning for war. That time, Philip was forced to surrender his weapons and pay a fine.

  But in 1675, Winslow dismissed Sassamon’s story. Increase Mather—Cotton’s father—would later offer an explanation for why the warning had been disregarded: It had come from an Indian, “and one can hardly believe them,” even “when they speak truth.”9 Sassamon was sent on his way.

  It was the last time any Englishman would see him alive. Sassamon disappeared that day, setting off for the village of Namasket but never arriving. On January 29, 1675, his body was found under the ice of Assawompset Pond. The colonists concluded that he had been murdered, noting that his neck had been broken in a way that suggested someone had deliberately twisted it. An Indian witness came forward to swear that he had seen three Wampanoag assassins killing the informer and concealing his body under the ice.

  Or that’s the story, anyway.

  The allegations in that tale operate on two different scales. At one end you have the mysterious death of John Sassamon, which may well have been a genuine murder committed by a genuine conspiracy. At the other end there is the legend of Satan and the Indians, a story that is larger, more mythic, and to modern eyes offensive and absurd.

  This distinction will become familiar as we move through American history. There are conspiracy theories about particular crimes, many of which are plausible and some of which are true, and there are grander visions of long cosmic struggles, which might resonate on a metaphoric level but do not have much empirical grounding. It will always be possible to accept one of the smaller theories while rejecting a larger theory associated with it, and it will usually be possible to do the reverse. Believing that Philip was behind the death of John Sassamon did not require you to believe that Satan was behind the activities of Philip, and believing that Satan was directing Indian conspiracies did not require you to believe in any particular plot by the Indians.

  Let’s start with the smaller allegations. In this case,
that means starting with uncertainty. To this day, it is unclear whether Sassamon’s death was an accident or an assassination. If it was an assassination, it is unclear whether the three Indians accused of the crime were guilty. If they were guilty, it is unclear whether Philip, who denied all involvement, was a party to the crime. “After years of Philip’s appearing relatively ineffectual in controlling the English,” the historian James David Drake pointed out, “some Wampanoags, especially male youths, undoubtedly would have been tempted to take matters into their own hands.”10

  Today a Kennedy assassination theorist can spend a lifetime poring over autopsy photos of the president’s head wounds. In 1675, Sassamon did not receive an autopsy at all, and no official record of the inquest into his death was made; if you have questions about, say, the condition of his broken neck, you’re out of luck.11 Meanwhile, the prosecution’s star witness, a Christian Indian, owed money to the three men he fingered as the culprits—a fact leading some historians, though hardly all, to doubt his testimony.

  Nor is it clear what to make of the plot that Sassamon allegedly uncovered at Philip’s camp. Was he telling the truth about what he had heard, or was he spreading false reports for his own reasons? Sassamon was a former aide to Philip who had established a power base of his own, and even before his mission to Marshfield some of the Wampanoag considered him disloyal and deceitful. And it was not unprecedented for an Indian to extract assistance from the English by dishonestly accusing other natives of plots against the colonists.12

  A reasonable person can read the surviving evidence and conclude that John Sassamon was probably the victim of a conspiracy. Another reasonable person can read the same evidence and conclude that he probably wasn’t. In 1675, a New England jury concluded that he was. The alleged assassins were executed. Within three days there were rumors of Philip’s men taking up arms, and within three weeks the Wampanoag were battling settlers in the town of Swansea. It was the beginning of King Philip’s War, one of the bloodiest chapters in American history—a war more lethal, in proportion to population, than any other conflict involving either the English colonies or the independent United States.

  In wartime, the fear of conspiracy grew still stronger. On September 11, a Rhode Island settler relayed a rumor that “all the Indians were in combination and confederacie to exterpate and root out the English.”13 This was surely untrue, given that many tribes, having their own differences with the Wampanoag, took the colonists’ side in the war. But with such suspicions we have started our transit out of the territory of ordinary empirical claims and into the realm of cultural myth, where the competing interests of real-world Indians are obscured by the image of “all the Indians.”

  It’s just a short jump from there to that larger scale of cosmic conflict. At one point in the war, one New England writer claimed that the Indian enemy, by “worshipping the Devil,” had been able to conjure “a most violent Storm of Wind and Rain, the like was never known before.”14 The vestiges of such folk beliefs persisted for longer than you might expect. Nearly a century later, the Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles—a cofounder of Brown University and later the president of Yale—casually included this detail in a description of Philip’s attack on the town of Bridgewater: “[T]he Devil appeared in the Shape of a Bear walking on his 2 hind feet; the Indians all followed him & drew off. The Indians said if the Appearance had been a Deer they would have destroyed the whole Town & all the English.”15

  The idea that Indians were Devil worshippers was common among the settlers, and not just in the English colonies. In sixteenth-century Chiapas, ruled by Spain, when the local bishop learned that some of the area’s Indians had maintained elements of their old religion, he construed the worshippers as a clandestine coven of witches, writing that they were “giving cult to the Devil and plotting against our Christian religion.”16 (The secret sect’s beliefs, he added, resembled those of the Spanish heretics known as the Alumbrados, or Illuminati.) The notion that Satan had brought the Indians to America was advanced by the English theologian Joseph Mede, and in New England it was repeated by two of the most important figures in Puritan politics: William Hubbard, who found “the greatest probability of truth”17 in Mede’s account; and Cotton Mather, whose history of New England included his own version of the story.

  Not everyone agreed. Some settlers even thought that the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel, giving them godly rather than demonic origins. But that relatively benign theory still made the mistake of looking to the legends of the Old World to explain the people of the New. Europeans, having landed on strange shores, viewed what they found through the lenses of the worldviews they imported, and that sometimes led to deep misunderstandings of the cultures they encountered. The New England Indians’ tales of a Creator were often seen, the anthropologist William Simmons wrote, “as mistaken, confused, and desiccated vestiges of the Christian God.” Other spirits were believed to be the Devil, and powwows were perceived as Satanic ceremonies.18 Some colonists managed to mistake puberty rites for ritual child sacrifice.19

  Such cultural projection wasn’t limited to the religious realm. The settlers tended to imagine their own social structures among the natives, mistaking decentralized networks for centralized states, loose alliances for empires, an influential Indian for a grand conspirator. The fighting that broke out in 1675 is called “King Philip’s War,” but Philip was actually a sachem, not a king; the Europeans had no exact counterpart of that position, and they didn’t always understand that the person who held it did not have anything akin to absolute authority in his own village, let alone outside it. Because colonists “feared organized Indian conspiracies,” Drake argued, they “probably attributed greater unity to the Wampanoags than the circumstances warranted. The label ‘King Philip’s War’ suggests an organization and structure for the conflict that is unsupported by evidence.” Philip the purported puppeteer “had quite possibly lost control by 1675,” Drake added. And even if he really was behind Sassamon’s death, “much of what ensued over the next fourteen months was out of his control.”20 The war itself dragged on in some places for a year after Philip died.

  When the English exaggerated Philip’s power, they were enacting another familiar pattern, one that the historian Jeffrey Pasley has called “the myth of the superchief.” From the first English colony at Roanoke to the closing of the frontier, Pasley wrote, “serious or widespread Indian resistance was usually attributed by Europeans and later chroniclers to the machinations of some preternaturally brilliant, all-powerful” leader. Often, “a widespread conflict was blamed on someone who was really only a major figure in some critical early encounter, or promoted himself as the primary conspirator in a later treaty with the white authorities.”21

  But even imaginary cabals can have real effects. In the early 1640s, in the wake of the Pequot War, dubious rumors of Indian plots helped inspire the creation of the New England Confederation, the first union of English colonies in the New World. The resulting regime remained in place for four decades.22 And while King Philip’s War raged, the fear of a vast Indian conspiracy—in one colonist’s words, a “universall Combination of the Indians”23—had dreadful consequences for those natives who thought they had joined the colonists’ community. In August 1675, the Massachusetts Council confined all Christian natives to “praying towns,” fourteen villages of Indian converts that had been set up over the previous two and a half decades. In October, the government rounded up at least five hundred Christian Indians and interned them on Deer Island in Boston Harbor.

  More than half of the Deer Island prisoners died that winter. Several of the remainder were enslaved. And still that wasn’t enough for certain settlers, so convinced were they that all the Indians were in league with one another. After some Nipmuc warriors burned the town of Medfield, the magistrate Daniel Gookin reported sadly, it “gave opportunity to the vulgar to cry out, ‘Oh, come, let us go down to Deer Island, and kill all the praying Indians.’ They could
not come at the enemy Indians, for they were too crafty and subtle for the English; therefore they would have wreaked their rage upon the poor unarmed Indians our friends.”24

  The fact that whole towns could be filled with native converts to Christianity cuts against the idea that the Indians and the English lived in diametrically opposed worlds. So does the fact that several unconverted tribes took the colonists’ side in the war. So does the fact that Harvard allowed John Sassamon to study there, and that Harvard’s 1650 charter described it as a place for “the education of English and Indian youth.”25 So does the fact that an Indian known to his people as Wassausmon would answer to the name “John Sassamon” in the first place; and, for that matter, that a sachem called Metacom would adopt the name “Philip.” Behind those black-and-white tales of the Enemy Outside lay a much messier reality, one where English and Indian worlds overlapped, settlers and natives found common ground, and there was an ongoing process of assimilation and exchange.

  When I use the word assimilation, I don’t simply mean that Indians adopted European ways. The colonists absorbed a lot from the Indians too. When the men who built the colonies feared the frontier, they were afraid of more than just Indian attacks. They knew that frontier life lured people away from the discipline of life in a Puritan town, and they were concerned that men and women of European descent might feel the pull of the Indian’s ways, which they associated with sexual license and spiritual degeneration.

  Thanks to the land available in the wilderness, Increase Mather complained, people “that profess themselves Christians have forsaken Churches, and Ordinances.” Away from strong social controls, frontiersmen put worldly self-interest above their devotion to God, trading arms with the Indians without any thought for the greater good. “[W]ould ever men have sold Guns, and Powder, and Shot, to such faithless and bloody creatures, if a lust of Covetousness had not too far prevailed with them?” Mather asked.26 “How many that although they are Christians in name, are no better then Heathens in heart, and in Conversation? How many Families that live like profane Indians without any Family prayer?” Whole towns, he declared, “have lived from year to year, without any publick Invocation of the Name of God, and without his Word.”27