The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  Along with the other forces fueling the inquisition, from small-town gossip to an especially nasty war, the accused had an incentive to admit or invent spiritual crimes: It soon became clear that a purported witch who confessed would not be executed. There is even the possibility, suggested by the historian Chadwick Hansen, that some of the defendants really were witches—not that they actually wielded supernatural powers, of course, but that they attempted to do so.17

  There was also, as the sociologist Richard Weisman has pointed out, a change in the role of the government. The typical New England witchcraft accusation involved townspeople blaming their neighbors for various mundane misfortunes. If you look past the fact that the charges involved the use of magical powers, you’ll find that the conflicts weren’t so different from the disputes that modern people have over rat-attracting junk piles, dogs that dig up gardens, or tree branches that extend into an adjoining yard. Even by the legal standards of the time, the use of malevolent magic was difficult to prove, so the New England courts were ordinarily reluctant to take on such cases.

  But now the state was throwing itself into the conflict, creating a situation closer in spirit to Europe’s persecutions than to traditional tiffs between neighbors. An ordinary citizen of Salem might worry that the witches next door were poisoning his cow or making his children sick. The authorities had a grander fear: in Weisman’s words, that “an organized plot to subvert the Puritan mission had successfully infiltrated the core of the church.”18 Tales of vast conspiracies began to appear in the confessions. In August, when one William Barker confessed to witchcraft, he reported that “Satans design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next upon Salem and soe goe through the countrey.” In the new Satanic society, he continued, “all persones should be equall . . . there should be no day of resurection or judgement, and neither punishment nor shame for sin.”19

  The accusers eventually overreached, and the furor abated. By May 1693, when the final hearings were held, several witch finders were having second thoughts about the process, not least when they found themselves or their loved ones in the crosshairs. (Reverend John Hale lost his enthusiasm for the trials when his wife was accused.) In 1697, Massachusetts recognized a day of repentance for the prosecution of innocent people. One magistrate announced that he accepted “the blame and shame” for his role in the affair, and a dozen Salem jurors signed a formal declaration of regret.20

  The witch hunt encapsulated the most essential element of the Enemy Within: Anyone could conceivably be—or become—a part of the conspiracy. With the Enemy Outside, the conspirators are conspicuously alien. The Enemy Below and the Enemy Above have well-defined positions in the social hierarchy. But in Salem the alleged plot permeated ordinary society. As one minister summed up the situation, superficially Christian men and women who seemed to be “real members of [Christ’s] mystical body” could instead be “instruments” of Satan’s “malice against their friends and neighbors.”21 When the Enemy Within is at work, ordinary life is a masquerade.

  During the Salem witch hunt, the ranks of the conspirators were constantly expanding. If you believed the testimony of the afflicted, the specters would offer to end their torments if they would sign the Devil’s book; once they signed it, specters in the signers’ shape would torture another person and present that person with the same bargain. So the Enemy Within could be more than just a plot among your neighbors. It could be a plot to take your children and other loved ones away from you, to add them to the conspiracy’s growing circle.

  When the fear of the Enemy Within is at its strongest, even the physical world might feel inauthentic, like a fragile shell obscuring a hidden realm. In Salem, spectral evidence became admissible in court; the boundary between the waking world and the land of dreams broke down. That deep uncertainty is dramatized in “Young Goodman Brown” and is part of what makes it such a powerful incarnation of the Enemy Within story. The Black Mass that Brown attends might be a real meeting and thus a sign that the everyday world conceals terrible truths. It might itself be a false reality projected by the Devil. And it might merely be a dream.

  If the Enemy Within is the most dreamlike and fantastic of America’s primal conspiracy myths, it is also the most homely and prosaic. The suspicions that haunt our day-to-day lives usually feature our families, neighbors, and coworkers, even if we don’t believe they’re puppets of a Satanic cabal. Think back to New England’s earlier witchcraft cases, before the frenzy of 1692 broke out: petty feuds fueled by gossip and bad blood. A large-scale, Salem-style mania may seem bizarre to us, but the day-to-day misgivings that led Americans to cry witch shouldn’t seem so strange at all.

  There were whispers that Ann Lee was a witch too, but she had the good fortune to live in New York at the end of the eighteenth century rather than New England at the end of the seventeenth. So there never was a risk that she’d be hanged. Not for witchcraft, anyway.

  Lee was born in England in 1736, the daughter of a Manchester blacksmith. At age twenty-two she fell in with the Shakers, a sect that had been born about a decade before. The Shakers believed that the end of the world was close. They also believed, more unusually for the time, that women could be leaders in the church, and Lee quickly rose in the ranks, eventually becoming the head of the organization. Along the way she started proclaiming her own revelations from God, and with time her followers began to describe her as the second coming of the Christ spirit. Lee put her personal stamp on the group’s beliefs, not least when her revulsion toward sex became a full-fledged doctrine of Shaker celibacy.

  In 1774, Lee came to America with a handful of followers. As pacifists, the Shakers refused to fight in the revolution, and that led to rumors of subversion; Lee was jailed for a spell as a suspected British spy. The first wave of American anti-Shaker literature appeared in this period, and it often took the form of a jeremiad against the Enemy Outside. One pamphlet described the religion as “a body of more than two thousand people, having no will of their own, but governed by a few Europeans.”22 If you think that sounds like the charges Protestants liked to levy against Catholics, you’re right. Indeed, apostate Shakers were known to claim that the young faith’s doctrines “exactly agree with the doctrines of the church of Rome.”23 There were rumors that the movement was a front for the pope.

  Such sentiments died down somewhat as the revolution receded into the past. When anti-Shaker fears flared up again a decade or so into the nineteenth century, the group’s foreign origins were no longer a concern. The Shakers had become an Enemy Within.

  A religious revival swept the United States in the early nineteenth century, a spiritually rambunctious period now known as the Second Great Awakening. On the outskirts of the excitement, unusual sects were finding new followers: not just Shakers but Adventists, Mormons, Oneidans. With the new wave of worship came a new wave of paranoia. The idea of a Catholic conspiracy, a fear that had been relatively quiet in the wake of the revolution, came roaring back to life. And just as the Salem inquisitors slid easily from a fear of Indian conspiracies to a fear of homegrown witches, nineteenth-century Americans surrounded by fears of that other traditional Enemy Outside, the Vatican, adapted those anti-Catholic myths into tales of domestic conspiracies.

  You can see that process at work in Protestant Jesuitism, a remarkable volume published a year after “Young Goodman Brown.” Written by Reverend Calvin Colton, a Presbyterian, the book began in a familiar anti-Catholic manner. Colton condemned the Jesuits, informing us that the order “controlled the power of princes; absorbed the chief sources and principal ramifications of social and political influence; and while professing obedience to Rome, like the janizaries of the Sublime Porte, it held the staff in its own hand, and thus had nearly brought the world in subjection to its sway, and threatened to bind it in perpetual chains.”24 But Colton endorsed immigration from Catholic countries, arguing that the Europeans’ arrival would make it easier to convert Catholics to
“pure Christianity.”25 And he denounced nativist fantasies such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, calling them a “false alarm.”26 Colton’s target didn’t dwell in the Vatican. The “Jesuitism of Popery,” he told us, had been joined by a domestic force operating “under the Protestant name.”27

  The force in question consisted of groups that had appeared during the Second Great Awakening, voluntary associations devoted to moral reform and missionary work. A handful of people “who stand at the head of moral and religious organizations” aimed to impose “a new structure” on “the whole frame of society,” Colton warned, putting “the great mass in subjection to the will and control of select, and often self-elected, individuals.”28 No one “can openly oppose them without the risk of being crushed by their influence,” he added.29 “Their agents swarm over the land in clouds, like the locusts of Egypt.”30

  The Second Great Awakening was well under way when Hawthorne composed “Young Goodman Brown,” and it is entirely possible that as he wrote it he was thinking about the America he lived in as well as the America of the past. The Satanic night meeting in the story does resemble the big camp meetings of the revival circuit. As the literary scholar Robert S. Levine has pointed out, Hawthorne’s

  frenzied meeting is presided over by “some grave divine of the New-England churches” in search of new enthusiasts. “Bring forth the converts!” the minister thunders; and Brown responds to the summons by emerging from the shadows and approaching “the proselytes, beneath the canopy of fire.”31

  Traditional religious leaders often denounced revival preachers as puppet masters engaged in a sort of mass hypnosis. The same year that Colton published Protestant Jesuitism, he attacked the revivals as events at which minds were “compelled, in a moment of the greatest possible excitement, to yield themselves entirely—their intellect, their reason, their imagination, their belief, their feelings, their passions, their whole souls—to a single and new position, that is prescribed to them. . . . The mind, reduced to such a bondage, can never afterward be free.”32

  Other critics compared the revival style to mesmerism. A former revivalist, La Roy Sunderland, gave up preaching and devoted his career to investigating and demonstrating hypnosis (or “Pathetism,” as he called his philosophy), arguing that the techniques with which he put people into trances were essentially the same methods he had used in his ministry days. (Sunderland also thought that his theory would “explain all the mysteries of witchcraft.”)33

  The camp meetings and moral reform groups were mainstream movements. If they could inspire such reactions, imagine the horrified responses the more unusual offshoots of the Awakening inspired. The Shakers, who by now had set up several enclaves where they could live according to their principles, rejected both the familiar family structure and the sexual intercourse that makes a family possible. Their prophet was a woman, and they frequently put other women into leadership roles. To a certain mind-set, the sect was a standing threat to the traditional household: a domestic menace in more ways than one.

  The biggest difference between the witch fear and the Shaker fear was that you knew whether someone was a Shaker. Shakers didn’t live normal lives by day and meet in secret spectral sessions at night. They lived in communes, refused to have sex, and engaged in ecstatic trance dancing, by some accounts in the nude. They stood out precisely because they were different. That’s one reason it was so easy to transform tales of alien Catholic conspiracies into stories about domestic “cult” conspiracies: The new religious movements made themselves alien.

  What made them an Enemy Within was that they threatened to make ordinary white Protestants into aliens too. The captivity narrative was frightening enough when the captors were imagined as Indians. The fear took on a new dimension when the enemy looked and sounded like your neighbors and kids. Outsiders accused the Shakers of drawing in new recruits with mesmerism and keeping them in line with intense physical violence. When one parent left the Shakers and the other stayed put, the sect sometimes found itself charged with keeping the children prisoner.

  Some Shaker children really did want to leave the colonies, just as boys and girls raised in traditional families sometimes want to run away from home. At other times there were episodes such as the “rescue” of Ithamar Johnson from a colony in Ohio: The rescuers held the teenager overnight, and on his release the next morning he promptly returned to the Shakers. In 1825, a boy ran away from a Shaker settlement in Kentucky, then helped raise an armed posse to free his sister. They took the girl, but unlike her brother she didn’t want to go; a year later, her relatives were still attempting “to re-create her mind” along the lines they preferred.34 (Who exactly are the body snatchers here?) Other mobs broke into Shaker buildings, burned Shaker churches, and assaulted the Shakers themselves, all in the name of what were basically custody disputes.

  But for all the vitriol and paranoia among the Shakers’ critics, there was at least one rising religious movement that attracted even more opposition. It was born in upstate New York in 1830, and it is still with us today. It calls itself the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and its members are better known as Mormons.

  Mormonism began after Joseph Smith, a failed farmer and part-time treasure hunter, claimed to have found a holy book engraved on golden plates. The plates contained a host of revelations, he reported, including the old idea that the Indians were descended from Israelites and the new idea that Christ had visited their ancient American civilization. On a more paranoid note, Smith’s Book of Mormon, allegedly transcribed from the plates, describes a criminal “secret society of Gadianton” that was based in the wilderness and whose leader had sworn “secret oaths and covenants” to the Devil.35 (In Mormon folklore the Gadianton robbers still haunt the American West.)36

  “Mormonism in Utah—The Cave of Despair,” February 4, 1882, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

  As Smith attracted followers, he moved his church’s base to Ohio and then to the Missouri frontier, where its adherents faced heavy harassment from their non-Mormon neighbors. (Gentiles, the Mormons called them.) The church tried to establish a town of its own in Illinois, and it was in that state that an angry mob killed Smith while he was confined to a jail. Control of the movement shifted to a Vermont-born tradesman named Brigham Young, who led the Mormons west to establish a kingdom in the desert.

  Smith’s religion was a product of the Second Great Awakening yet stood apart from it, a faith capable of alarming both the old Protestants and the new. Almost from the beginning, there were rumors of Mormon conspiracies.

  Some of those tales featured the sorts of suspicions that had befallen the broader religious resurgence. Critics of Mormonism, like critics of Shakerism, took old anti-Catholic themes and retrofitted them for a younger faith: Smith and then Young were imagined as the all-powerful popes of a cult, their followers as docile sheep. There was the predictable suggestion that their allegiance was achieved through a sort of mind control, and Mormonism was mistaken for mesmerism.

  A rich example appears in the best-selling Female Life Among the Mormons (1855), which presented itself as the memoir of a woman hypnotized into marrying a Mormon elder. (A more accurate description was offered by the historian David Brion Davis, who called the book a “ridiculous fantasy.”)37 At one point in the narrative the author asks another ex-Mormon how Joseph Smith had managed to master Franz Mesmer’s mind-control method before “its general circulation throughout the country.” Her informant, Anna Bradish, replies that “Smith obtained his information, and learned all the strokes, and passes, and manipulations, from a German peddler, who, notwithstanding his reduced circumstances, was a man of distinguished intellect and extensive erudition. Smith paid him handsomely, and the German promised to keep the secret.” What’s more, “You, madam, were subjected to its influence. So have ten thousand others been, who never dreamed of it. Those most expert in it, are generally sent out to preach among unbelievers.”38

  The church star
ted promoting polygamy privately in 1843, and it acknowledged the practice to the outside world in 1852. That heightened the sexual dimension of Female Life Among the Mormons and stories like it. In the popular imagination, Mormon men were out to add Gentile women to their harems, by hypnotic seduction if possible and by force if necessary. Like Shaker celibacy, plural marriage was perceived as a threat to the traditional family, and the anxieties it inspired unleashed a flood of fantasies about the other sorts of sexual nonconformity that the Latter-day Saints might be up to. The excommunicated Mormon John C. Bennett spread stories of a “secret lodge of women” who serviced church officials, going into great detail about the orders within the lodge and the duties and depravations identified with each. The Consecrates of the Cloister, for example, was an order “composed of females, whether married or unmarried, who, by an express grant and gift of God, through his Prophet the Holy Joe, are set apart and consecrated to the use and benefit of particular individuals, as secret, spiritual wives. They are the Saints of the Black Veil, and are accounted the special favorites of Heaven.”39

  As with the anti-Catholic tracts, there’s a lot of projection involved here. In Davis’s words, readers “took pleasure in imagining the variety of sexual experiences supposedly available to their enemies. By picturing themselves exposed to similar temptations, they assumed they could know how priests and Mormons actually sinned.” Bennett, he added, had been “expelled from the Church as a result of his flagrant sexual immorality.”40

  When Mormons clustered in a single location, the fear that they might steal Christian bodies and souls through kidnapping and conversion was joined by another anxiety: the fear that Mormons would steal American institutions by voting en masse, installing a government that would replace the republic with a theocracy. And since you couldn’t expect such a subversive menace to limit its efforts to the ballot box, another story began to take hold: that the church commanded an army of assassins, dubbed the Danites, to inflict its will by force.