by Jesse Walker
Lutheran parochial schools, with their overwhelmingly German-American student bodies, were rumored to be hotbeds of subversion. Several states banned the schools from using the German language, and many states and cities ordered their public schools to stop teaching German too. (If you were eager to stop espionage, you’d think you’d want more Americans to understand the spies’ language. Evidently not.) Three states established committees to probe for German propaganda in textbooks. When a flu pandemic swept the country, killing approximately 675,000 Americans, a story spread that the outbreak had been caused by Bayer—a German company—contaminating its aspirin.
The fountainhead of paranoid literature was the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda agency created by President Woodrow Wilson. Along with traditional agitprop painting the German soldier as a savage—“the Hun”—who committed terrible atrocities abroad, the committee brought the war home with literature that reimagined ordinary American environments as a domestic battleground haunted by the enemy. “German agents are everywhere, eager to gather scraps of news about our men, our ships, our munitions,” warned one advertisement. “It is still possible to get such information through to Germany, where thousands of these fragments—often individually harmless—are patiently pieced together into a whole which spells death to American soldiers and danger to American homes.”
Vigilance, the ad continued, didn’t merely mean maintaining discretion:
[D]o not wait until you catch someone putting a bomb under a factory. Report the man who spreads pessimistic stories, divulges—or seeks—confidential military information, cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.
Send the names of such persons, even if they are in uniform, to the Department of Justice, Washington. Give all the details you can, with names of witnesses if possible—show the Hun that we can beat him at his own game of collecting scattered information and putting it to work. The fact that you made the report will not become public.
You are in contact with the enemy today, just as truly as if you faced him across No Man’s Land.51
Committee on Public Information, National Archives
At this point you might be thinking of Hofstadter’s remarks about the paranoiac’s “projection of the self” and “imitation of the enemy.” You should also note that, contra Hofstadter, the Committee on Public Information was anything but a “minority movement.” Not only was it run by the federal government, but it helped inspire a host of public and private vigilance efforts on the local level. And those, in turn, had the blessing of the country’s establishment. The Washington Post spoke for much of the American elite when it editorialized, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”52
The committee’s efforts didn’t net many actual spies. But the authorities did do a capable job of rounding up people who cried for peace, for an end to conscription, or for anything else that might be construed as undermining the war effort. (A German-American filmmaker, Robert Goldstein, was imprisoned under the Espionage Act because he included scenes of English atrocities in a picture about the American Revolution. The government argued that the movie might undercut audiences’ support for Great Britain, our wartime ally.) In Words That Won the War, a sympathetic account of the committee’s work, James R. Mock and Cedric Larson acknowledged that the spy hunt could get out of hand. “Captain Henry T. Hunt, head of the Military Intelligence counterespionage section during the war, has told the authors that in addition to unfounded spy stories innocently launched there were many started with the apparent object of removing or inconveniencing political, business, or social rivals,” they reported. At one point “two of his own men were taken into custody by the Department of Justice, while seeking to determine the loyalty of the headwaiter in a Washington hotel.”53
Here the search for diabolical immigrants and other clearly foreign figures—for enemies easily identified as aliens—shifts into something else: a search for enemies who, on the surface at least, can’t be distinguished from “normal” Americans. In other words, the story of the Enemy Outside yields to the story of the Enemy Within. We’ll take a closer look at that second archetypal foe in the next chapter. But before we get there, let’s allow the tale of the Enemy Outside to reverberate one more time.
May 2, 2011. Navy SEALs storm a mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The compound is the home of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist at the top of the terror network known as Al Qaeda.
In the popular imagination, Al Qaeda is a tightly disciplined, globe-spanning hierarchy, with bin Laden serving, as The Washington Post put it, as a “terrorist CEO in an isolated compound.”54 In practice, the group has never managed to be both large and centralized at the same time. In the decade before the Abbottabad attack, it became an increasingly loose network, an organization with “no single center of gravity, but multiple ones,” according to George Michael, a professor at the Air War College. Al Qaeda cells, Michael has explained, “can act on their own initiative when the opportunity presents itself”; they don’t depend on a central authority for direction. Since 2002, nearly every Islamist terror attack around the world has been conducted either by one of those peripheral franchises or by a group whose only link to bin Laden is ideological.55 By the time the raid was planned, Al Qaeda was urging independent “lone wolf” terrorists to carry out attacks on their own.
In other words, when the Post uses phrases such as “terrorist CEO,” it falls into the same sort of conspiracy thinking that attributed dispersed Indian raids to a single superchief. And the Post’s words weren’t an isolated lapse. Even when Osama’s group was more centralized, it was often conflated with the larger Islamist movement of which Al Qaeda was merely the most notorious part.56
All the same, bin Laden and his lieutenants have plenty of blood on their hands. They have been responsible for several lethal operations, most infamously the assaults on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that killed nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001. Because of those massacres, armed Americans have arrived in Abbottabad.
There is a firefight at the compound. Bin Laden is killed. The SEALs relay the news to Washington with a code word: Geronimo.
3
THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR
They’re here already! You’re next!
—Invasion of the Body Snatchers1
Here’s the story:
Night falls in Salem Village. Leaving his wife at home, a Puritan called Goodman Brown walks into the wilderness, fretting that devilish Indians might be lurking behind the trees. Instead he encounters the actual Devil, a worldly, well-dressed man who bears a distinct resemblance to Brown himself.
As the two walk together, Brown suggests nervously that he should return home. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him,” he protests. “We have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs.”
Don’t worry, says Satan:
I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. . . .
I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too— But these are state secrets.2
The pair encounter one of Salem’s respectable citizens, the woman who taught Brown his catechism; she reveals that she is a witch and that she is heading to a mysterious meeting. The deacon and the minister pass by, riding to the same night gathering. Then Brown thinks he hears his wife in the woods, and when he calls out her name her voice replies with
a scream.
In a space in the forest, Brown finds a Black Mass in progress. Virtually all of Salem is present:
Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft.3
Brown learns that he and his wife are to be initiated at the witches’ Sabbath that night. As the man and his bride stand before an altar, the Devil outlines his creed: “Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”4
At the last moment, Brown calls out to his wife to look upward to heaven and resist the Devil. Suddenly everyone vanishes, and Brown is alone in the woods; he does not know whether his wife succumbed, or even whether he witnessed a ritual or merely dreamed it.
Either way, he is scarred for life. From that night till his death, he is a gloomy, distrustful man who sees wickedness in everyone around him.
Or that’s the story, anyway.
I’ve just laid out the bare bones of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” an enigmatic short story published in 1835. It imagines a conspiracy in colonial Massachusetts, but this is not the kind of cabal we encountered the last time we discussed the Puritans. The Indians have been reduced to a cameo role. The chief conspirators don’t live outside the village gates anymore, and they aren’t easily identified as aliens. Anyone might be a part of the plot. Even the investigator who discovers the secret circle is in danger of being absorbed by it. Goodman Brown has met the Enemy Within.
The story’s obvious inspiration is the witch fever of 1692 and 1693, in which a wave of witchcraft accusations swept through Salem and the surrounding area. One of the judges in those trials was Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather John Hathorne. Judge Hathorne’s father, William Hathorne, was responsible for an act attributed to Goodman Brown’s ancestor: He ordered a Quaker woman whipped through the streets of town. Hawthorne felt considerable guilt for this family history, and it’s easy to read his story as a critique of a society that set out to destroy monsters but ended up becoming monstrous itself. Acts done in the name of fighting the Devil, from persecuting Quakers to slaughtering Indians, appear in the text as crimes committed with Satan’s blessing.
The critique applies not just to the woman-whipping, village-burning citizens of Salem but to Goodman Brown himself. Though he intended to resist the Devil, he ended up living his life as though he accepted the doctrine the Devil preached: “Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.” And it is Brown who adopts the mind-set of a witch finder, always suspecting that Satanists are everywhere. Indeed, one reading of the story suggests that Brown’s vision in the forest was itself the Devil’s work and that by accepting it as valid Brown fell into the Devil’s trap.5
The trials that inspired Hawthorne’s story weren’t the first witch-finding expedition in New England, but they were both larger and more lethal than the others. If you set aside the Salem saga, ninety-three accusations of witchcraft are known to have hit the colonies’ courts in the whole seventeenth century, of which sixteen led to executions.6 In the Salem episode, by contrast, at least 144 people went on trial in a little more than a year, and many others were accused without landing in court. Fourteen women and six men were executed, mostly by hanging; even a couple of dogs were sent to the gallows. Another man and three women died in jail, as did several babies.7 The defendants came from a much wider spectrum of ages, occupations, and social ranks than the typical docket of witches. The trials cast an unusually wide geographic net, too: The accused hailed from more than twenty locations, not just Salem Village and the adjoining Salem Town.8
By European standards, on the other hand, the trials were small potatoes. English America was less witch-obsessed than England, and England in turn was less witch-obsessed than Scotland or the Continent. From 1623 to 1631, the German bishopric of Würzburg burned an estimated nine hundred people for their ostensible dealings with demons. If that body count is accurate, one tiny principality killed more supposed Satanists in an eight-year period than were executed in all of New England in the entire seventeenth century.9 That didn’t satisfy the authorities’ appetite for blood: European witch hunts continued to erupt for decades after the Würzburg carnage. The trials of 1692, by contrast, disgusted so many people that they effectively ended witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts.
The Salem saga began two and a half years into King William’s War, a bloody conflict that pitted the English colonies against the French and their Wabanaki Indian allies. In January 1692, a pastor’s daughter, age nine, and her cousin, age eleven or twelve, suddenly began to suffer wild and inexplicable fits. They “were bitten and pinched by invisible agents,” wrote Reverend John Hale, who witnessed the girls’ spasms; “their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented.”10 As weeks went by and the children’s condition grew worse, the local experts suspected witchcraft.
Following a traditional (and rather witchy) ritual to discern the source of the sorcery, the girls accused Tituba, an Indian slave in their household, of being their tormenter.11 Tituba denied the accusation. Then some older neighbors declared that they too had suffered fits and that Tituba and two other women were responsible. At that point Tituba confessed. She would later report that her confession had been extracted only after her owner had beaten her.
“Young Goodman Brown” begins with an excursion into the external wilderness, where there “may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,”12 and then unexpectedly turns inward, imagining a plot at the heart of Salem society. The real-life Salem story followed the same pattern. When the witch hunt began, the first accusation was directed against an Indian woman, and the Indians never disappeared entirely as the episode unfolded. The purported witnesses to witchcraft frequently described Satan or his emissary as “a black man,” which in the local context was more likely to suggest an Indian than an African. One alleged witch, Reverend George Burroughs, was accused of “bewitch[ing] a great many soldiers to death” in the Indian wars.13 Cotton Mather even suggested that the attacks “by the spirits of the invisible world” originated “among the Indians, whose chief sagamores are well known unto some of our captives to have been horrid sorcerers, and hellish conjurers, and such as conversed with dæmons.”14 In one essay he announced that “at their Cheef Witch-meetings, there has been present some French canadians, and some Indian Sagamores, to concert the methods of ruining New England.”15
But the movement that began with an accusation against an Indian quickly expanded to include the white tow
nspeople, and when that happened a different set of fears and feuds came to the fore. In their 1974 book Salem Possessed, the social historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum made a strong case that the initial wave of accusations was closely correlated with long-standing local disputes over land, church politics, and the tensions between the agrarian Salem Village and the more mercantile Salem Town. Meanwhile, many accusations came wrapped in a long history of gossip, as old chatter about who might be a sorceress, a wife beater, or a whore made it easier for certain citizens to fall under suspicion.
From there the circle widened. More purported witches were accused, and many of them confessed, sparking still more accusations. The recriminations extended into areas far removed from the local dynamics discussed by Boyer and Nissenbaum, and the ranks of the purported Devil worshippers increasingly included people who defied the standard profile of a witch: ministers, wealthy merchants, the governor’s wife. When Hawthorne wrote that “the lady of the governor” had been at the Black Sabbath—or at least that “some affirm” that she had been there—he was reciting the historical record. “The afflicted,” one prosecutor wrote, “spare no person of what quality so ever.”16