The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  The historical Danites were a vigilante group created in 1838 to compel dissenting Mormons to exit the area and, subsequently, to protect Missouri Mormons from their neighbors’ attacks. It has never been proved that the organization lasted longer than a year, but it became a central part of anti-Mormon rhetoric for decades afterward, its reputation growing ever more fearsome with time. When Brigham Young set up a group of minutemen in Utah, saying that they were to battle rustlers and hostile Indians and the like, the group was quickly nicknamed the Destroying Angels, conflated with the old Danites, and feared as a secret squad of hit men. In 1859, the frontiersman John Young Nelson could casually (and inaccurately) assume, on meeting a Mormon painted like an Indian, that the latter was one of the church’s “fanatical renegade-destroying angels, whose mission was to kill every white man not belonging to the sect, and particularly those who were apostates.”41

  Those whose fears of the Danites were grounded in more than mere rumors could point to a memoir written by the outlaw William “Wild Bill” Hickman after he was arrested for murder in 1871. Hickman, who had been excommunicated from the Latter-day Saints a few years earlier, claimed to have carried out several murders on Young’s orders. There’s no consensus on how much of what he wrote was accurate and how much was blame shifting or braggadocio, but all of it was incorporated into the anti-Mormon lore.

  To see the hold that lore had on the American imagination, read Mark Twain’s 1872 account of an evening supposedly spent with a Mormon assassin, a tale calculated to puncture the minutemen’s image as a sinister elite. “ ‘Destroying Angels,’ as I understand it, are Latter-day Saints who are set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens,” Twain wrote in Roughing It. “I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one’s house I had my shudder all ready. But alas for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive old blackguard! He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders?”42

  The Mormons might not have maintained an order of covert killers, but they did build their own institutions: schools, temples, courts of arbitration, an elaborate private welfare system, a network of cooperatives. Those were the sorts of voluntary organizations that Americans often celebrate, but they appeared to be entwined with civil government in predominantly Mormon areas out west, with the same figures dominating both church and state. Sometimes they were more influential than the formal institutions of government.

  This stoked still more fears of subversion, and it led to some stunning restrictions on the Saints’ civil liberties. In 1884, the Idaho territory made it illegal for Latter-day Saints to vote, hold office, or serve on a jury. Legislators invoked the standard anti-Mormon conspiracy theories, but lurking behind those exotic charges were more ordinary resentments: opposition to plural marriage, jealousy of the Mormon co-ops’ economic clout,43 and, above all, Republicans’ eagerness to disenfranchise a group that in Idaho voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats.

  There were fears as well that Mormon practices—and Mormon weapons—were finding their way to the local Native Americans.44 Meanwhile, in the face of Gentile harassment, many Mormons started to identify with the Indians. But that had its limits, as one group of natives learned on September 11, 1857.

  It was the middle of the conflict called the Utah War. The federal government thought the Latter-day Saints were plotting a rebellion. The Mormons thought the feds, who had dispatched more than 2,500 troops to the region, were plotting to eliminate them. In that tense atmosphere of mutual distrust, a group of Mormons—it is not known whether they were following Brigham Young’s wishes or acting on their own—combined forces with a group of Paiute Indians (or, by some accounts, simply posed as Paiutes) and slaughtered around 120 unarmed emigrants passing through Mountain Meadows, Utah, including about 50 children. Afterward the Mormon hierarchy tried to scapegoat the natives, claiming that the assault had been committed by the Paiutes acting alone. Evidently, a church that identified with the persecuted red man wasn’t above appealing to anti-Indian prejudice.

  By that time Mormon conspiracies were a staple of popular culture. Dozens of lurid novels depicted Danite assassinations, church-sanctioned white slavery, and other alleged LDS crimes. On the other side of the Atlantic, the first Sherlock Holmes story, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), featured a Danite plot to force a woman into an unwanted marriage. The most famous American yarn about Mormon conspirators is probably Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), a book often credited with setting the mold of the formula western.

  Grey’s story is set in the devilish wilderness: the “wild country”45 of Utah in 1871, in a Mormon town afflicted by rustlers. The book is built around a captivity plot, with Mormons and outlaws in the captor role filled elsewhere by Indians and white-slavery rings. Indeed, the tale contains several captives. There is Milly Erne, an eastern woman abducted and forced to marry a Mormon elder; there is Fay, a little Gentile girl the Mormons kidnap near the end of the novel; there is Milly’s daughter, Bess, raised in captivity by the rustlers (who are secretly in cahoots with the church elders). But the book’s most important captivity involves no imprisonment at all. Jane Withersteen has been enmeshed in Mormon society since her birth. In theory, she occupies a high place in the community: Her father founded the settlement, and she is one of the town’s wealthiest citizens. But she refuses to marry an elder who wants her, and the consequences of that decision demonstrate just how little autonomy she has.

  Since a Mormon hierarchy controls every community institution, this may sound like an Enemy Above story. And indeed there are elements of that here. From Withersteen’s perspective, the conspiracy represents the eldritch forces of social control: “Above her hovered the shadow of grim, hidden, secret power.”46

  But the conspiracy doesn’t just lurk above her. Like Goodman Brown at the witches’ Sabbath, Withersteen soon finds traces of the secret power at every level of the social hierarchy; it isn’t an authority bearing down on her so much as an all-enveloping system that’s almost impossible to escape. Her friends and servants inform on her, and her ranch is haunted by spies and assassins. Everyone in her Mormon community is a potential betrayer. Lassiter—Milly Erne’s brother, who rode west seeking revenge on the cabal that captured his sister—tells Withersteen just how few people she can trust:

  “ . . . An’, Jane,” he went on, almost in a whisper, “I reckon it’d be a good idea for us to talk low. You’re spied on here by your women.”

  “Lassiter!” she whispered in turn. “That’s hard to believe. My women love me.”

  “What of that?” he asked. “Of course they love you. But they’re Mormon women.” . . .

  There came a time when no words passed between Jane and her women. Silently they went about their household duties, and secretly they went about the underhand work to which they had been bidden. . . . They spied and listened; they received and sent secret messengers; and they stole Jane’s books and records, and finally the papers that were deeds of her possessions. Through it all they were silent, rapt in a kind of trance. Then one by one, without leave or explanation or farewell, they left Withersteen House, and never returned.47

  Even apparently empty spaces are haunted. “There’s no single move of yours, except when you’re hid in your house, that ain’t seen by sharp eyes,” Lassiter tells Withersteen. “The cottonwood grove’s full of creepin’, crawlin’ men. Like Indians in the grass. When you rode, which wasn’t often lately, the sage was full of sneakin’ men. At night they crawl under your windows into the court, an’ I reckon into the house.”48

  Worse yet: Because Withersteen occupies such an important position in the community, she herself is implicated in its conspiracies. Milly Erne was forced to marry Jane’s father, and even after she grows f
ond of Lassiter she refuses to tell him the identity of the man he’s after. She may recognize some of the rot at the core of her world, but she also feels compelled to defend it. Indeed, though her affection for Lassiter is real—and eventually blossoms into a sincere romance—she also befriends and flirts with him for the express purpose of dissuading him from carrying out his revenge. Jane isn’t just confined by the cabal that rules the region; she’s a volunteer agent of the same conspiracy that harasses her.

  So Riders isn’t ultimately about Gentiles being seized and enslaved by Mormons. That happens in the story, but Withersteen, born Mormon, faces the same pressure—not to join the church but to submit to it sexually by becoming an elder’s wife. The woman-snatching conspiracy is willing to take Jane by force if it has to. “Your body’s to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into the world,” Lassiter tells her. “But your soul? . . . What do they care for your soul?”49

  Forty-four years after Grey’s book appeared, the question was easily answered: When the enemy takes our bodies, it will dispose of our souls altogether. Or at least that’s the premise in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a low-budget 1956 film that was released to little fanfare but would eventually establish itself as one of the most enduring artifacts of its era.

  The story begins with Dr. Miles Bennell returning home from a conference to Santa Mira, California. Almost immediately, he encounters two people convinced that close relatives—an uncle, a mother—are imposters. Bennell’s secretary tells him that his office has been crowded with people desperate to see him, but when he arrives at work the patients have canceled their appointments. Miles and his girlfriend, Becky, run into Danny Kauffman, the local psychiatrist. He tells them that a mass hysteria has hit the town: A dozen people have told him the same story about imposters. It’s “a strange neurosis, evidently contagious,” he says.

  A shadow does seem to have fallen over Santa Mira. Family members don’t trust one another. Formerly convivial public places have been deserted. A restaurant has had to lay off its house band and replace it with an emotionless invader: a jukebox. Eventually we learn that those patients weren’t neurotic at all: Extraterrestrial seeds have fallen to Earth, where they are growing into enormous pods with the power to adopt the form and engorge the minds of the creatures near them—including, as it happens, Danny Kauffman. “There’s no pain,” the doctor tells Miles after his alien identity is revealed. “Suddenly, while you’re asleep, they’ll absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.” Your replacement may have your memories, but its personality will be only a facsimile: Under the skin, everyone will be identical.

  As Miles and Becky watch in horror, the invaders gather in the center of town and plot to bring more pods to more cities. After Becky falls asleep and is replaced by a pod person, the distressed Miles runs out onto the highway and tries to warn the drivers about the invasion. They whiz past, doing their best to ignore him. Miles climbs onto the back of a truck and realizes with horror that it’s full of pods. Turning to the camera, he shouts a final warning to the audience: “You’re next!”

  The studio deemed that ending too frightening, and it insisted that director Don Siegel add a prologue and epilogue implying that the invasion would be defeated. Siegel reluctantly agreed, grumbling that pod people had taken over the film industry. The change blunts the picture’s paranoid vision: Though the director’s cut shows us a world where the agents of psychiatry and law enforcement are completely malevolent and untrustworthy, the studio version ends with Miles breathing a sigh of relief as a psychiatrist alerts the FBI to the invasion. But in either incarnation, it is a harrowing and disturbing film. The story may be science fiction, but it’s rooted in a familiar experience. “I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away,” Miles mulls to Becky in one scene. “Only it happens slowly instead of all at once.” The film’s star, Kevin McCarthy, proposed an alternative title for the film, which Siegel liked but the studio rejected: Sleep No More.50

  So while middlebrow America was taking in tales such as Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, a heavy-handed allegory in which the Salem trials stand in for McCarthyism, you could find much more potent visions of the Enemy Within in disreputable genre fare. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the most memorable example, but it was hardly the only movie engaging those anxieties. It wasn’t even the only movie about extraterrestrials disguised as human beings.

  It Came from Outer Space, for example, subverts the formula by making the aliens benign: They don’t intend to invade Earth; they crashed here by accident, and they plan to leave as soon as they’ve repaired their spacecraft. They have adopted the forms of the people they’ve encountered not because they planned to replace them but because they didn’t want to alarm anyone by appearing inhuman. “We cannot, we would not, take your souls or minds or bodies,” one of the intruders informs us. “Don’t be afraid.”51

  In this film, fear itself is the Enemy Within, possessing people and leading them to do destructive things. “How do we know they’re not taking over?” a paranoid sheriff exclaims. “They could be all around us and I wouldn’t know it!” Moments later, he’s raising a posse and chasing the alien into the Arizona desert. (You thought you were watching a science fiction flick, but that was just a mask: It was a western all along.)

  The movie sounds like a response to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it came out in 1953, three years before Body Snatchers was released. Let me repeat that: Three years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared in theaters, stories about aliens possessing or impersonating Earth people were familiar enough that a movie could play with viewers’ expectations by presenting extraterrestrial imposters who turn out not to be invaders at all. Invasion may be the best of the body-snatching stories, but it wasn’t the first.

  Tales about possession and imposture have been around for centuries, of course. In a science fiction context, the trail goes at least as far back as Harl Vincent’s “Parasite,” published in 1935, in which invaders from a doomed world transform themselves into “microscopic energy charges” that can reproduce their minds in the bodies of their human victims.52 Weird Tales published H. P. Lovecraft’s novella The Shadow Out of Time a year later, though it was written before Vincent’s story appeared; it too dealt with inhuman beings possessing human bodies. In England, H. G. Wells’s 1937 novel Star Begotten toyed with the idea that extraterrestrials are manipulating us via cosmic rays, so that new babies who appear to be Terran would actually have Martian minds. Back in the United States, John W. Campbell, Jr.’s, influential 1938 novella Who Goes There? featured an alien with the ability to adopt the appearance of the people it consumes.53 A variation of the idea even appeared in the ongoing series of sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which continued to be produced by other hands after L. Frank Baum died. In The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946), written by Weird Tales veteran Jack Snow, supernatural creatures capture Dorothy and the Wizard, adopt their physical forms, and take the opportunity to engage in espionage within the Emerald City, searching for the spell that will allow their race of monsters to invade Oz and subject the rest of its people to the same fate.

  Some of those stories are close to the Body Snatchers model. Others are more distant. Lovecraft’s intruders are more interested in exploration than invasion. The tone of the Wells book is more ironic than paranoid, with a narrator who’s clearly dubious about the alien force that the characters think they perceive. (Nor do all of those characters imagine the incursion as a body-snatchers scenario. Some see something closer to those Coming Race stories where we’ve got to make way for the Homo superior.) But all those tales established a set of plot devices that invaded Hollywood in the middle of the twentieth century. Besides Body Snatchers and It Came from Outer Space, fifties films that feature aliens impersonating or controlling human beings include Invaders from Mars (1953), Killers from Space (1954), It Conquered the World (1956), I Married a Monster from Ou
ter Space (1958), and The Brain Eaters (1958). Body snatchers continued to appear on the printed page as well, the most notable examples being Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951) and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1954). Finney’s novel was the direct inspiration for Siegel’s film.

  Since these stories involve extraterrestrial invaders, they may sound more like tales of the Enemy Outside than the Enemy Within. But although that’s arguably true of a few of them—The Puppet Masters, for example, is obviously an allegory for the Cold War—most of them locate their horror not in the skies but in the suspicion that anyone you encounter, even your own spouse or parent or child, might secretly be something else, and in the possibility that you too might be made alien. In The Brain Eaters, outer space is a red herring: The invader turns out to come from the interior of the earth. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the invading seeds may have drifted to our planet from space, but they took root and grew on Earth’s own soil. In several other films, the aliens set up their base in a cave or under the earth’s surface. The most famous British version of the story, the 1955 TV serial Quatermass II, ends with the hero defeating the enemy by riding a rocket to an asteroid. But in Hollywood, meeting the monster behind the invasion is more likely to require a trip underground. To encounter this enemy, you don’t aim for the stars; you descend into Hell.54

  It is often said that Invasion of the Body Snatchers can be read as a critique of either communism or McCarthyism. The flip side is that the opposition to both communism and McCarthyism fed on the same dread that animated the movie, a horror at the thought of being swallowed by the conformist collective. That was one of the core fears of the 1950s. It surfaced in the work of writers as diverse as William Burroughs, Ayn Rand, and Jean-Paul Sartre; it appeared in intellectual critiques of “mass man,” in uneasiness about subliminal advertising, in worries that suburbia would become a ticky-tacky nightmare.