The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), an enormously influential movie set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, exalts the Klan and denounces northern carpetbaggers. It climaxes with a mob of former slaves attacking whites who have holed up in a cabin. If you’ve seen Romero’s zombie movies, you’ve seen an afterimage of the cabin scene: In Griffith’s eyes, the black figures outside that little house are the Living Dead, their monstrous arms reaching through the doors and windows while our heroes try desperately to fend them off. (In Night of the Living Dead, Romero subverts that subtext: His hero is black; his zombies are white.)

  As wild as these stories could get, there were two kernels of truth to them. Angry African Americans did resist white supremacy, and they did have Caucasian allies in the North, both in the battle against slavery and in the battle against segregation. The myth of the Enemy Below distorted their dissent into something feral and demonic, and the myth of the Enemy Outside gave whites credit for a movement launched and led by blacks. But the threat to the racial power structure was real, even if the tales told about the threat were drenched in fantasy.

  You didn’t have to be black to be cast as the Enemy Below. In the 1870s, while a six-year depression ravaged the country, a Tramp Scare swept the press, as papers filled their columns with accounts of crimes by unemployed wanderers. Some of the stories strained the reader’s credulity, and even the plausible ones were often soaked in fearmongering rhetoric. A typical report, published in the New York World, listed a series of unconnected “outrages by tramps”—a burglary in one town, a stickup in another—culminating with the comment that a “number of fires have occurred within the past two weeks, presumably set by tramps.”38 (Presumably!) Later that month, after some hoboes were shot while resisting arrest, the same paper called the killings a “partial solution of the tramp question”; “some more shooting,” it suggested, “might be wholesome for the community.”39 In the academic world, Yale Law School dean Francis Wayland wrote a paper describing the tramp as “a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.”40 Several states passed antitramp statutes, which allowed the authorities to arrest and imprison vagabonds essentially at will.

  As is often the case with moral panics, conspiracy theories followed. In 1878 Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York and former Democratic presidential nominee, argued in Harper’s that vagabonds were “rapidly gaining a kind of organization” that was “growing into a system of brigandage” with “systems of communication and intercourse, which are made more perfect each year.”41 A Texas paper informed its readers that undercover Massachusetts detectives had discovered a “perfectly organized brotherhood” in which “each tramp has a special duty assigned to him. Some of them beg and some of them steal, and they are even instructed what to steal and whom to steal it from.”42

  While the army of tramps crisscrossed the country, a more settled Enemy Below was haunting the Pennsylvania coal country. When mine owners, foremen, and superintendents started turning up dead in the 1860s and ’70s, word spread that they’d been killed by a secret society of Irish-American workers called the Molly Maguires. Back in Ireland, the story went, the Molly men would dress as women, blacken their faces, and assassinate the landlords’ agents and other enemies. In the United States the Irish continued to conspire against the social order, applying blackface and murdering men in the night. There were thousands of Molly terrorists, with lodges that held their conclaves in Irish saloons. Or so said the local authorities, who convicted twenty miners of murder after James McParlan of the Pinkerton Detective Agency testified that he had infiltrated the Mollies and learned their secrets.

  No one doubts that the area’s Irish laborers sometimes beat and even killed people perceived as enemies of their communities. There is considerable doubt, on the other hand, about the tale of a far-reaching Molly conspiracy, a story that relies heavily on the word of a detective who was never a neutral party. There has also been a reaction against any history of the coal industry that stresses workers’ violence while playing down the considerable violence brought down on the miners, including vigilante killings of suspected Molly Maguires.

  The war between the Mollies and the Pinkertons is usually framed as a battle between workers and employers: The Pinkertons were brought in by the president of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company, and one of the crackdown’s goals was to prevent any sort of labor organizing, not just the kind that ended with a foreman dead.43 But the tale of Molly terrorism reflected ethnic enmity as well as class conflict. As early as the 1850s, the historian Kevin Kenny noted, “the term Molly Maguires was being used in the anthracite region as a synonym for Irish social depravity.”44 The authorities attempted to link the Mollies not just to the budding union movement but to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish fraternal association that McParlan believed was a Molly front.

  That didn’t make the Mollies an Enemy Outside. Just as slave conspiracies were not believed to be based in Africa, the Mollies were not, by and large, accused of being manipulated from abroad. While other Irish immigrants were denounced as pawns of the pope, prosecutor Franklin B. Gowen, an Irish Protestant, struck a different note during the Molly trial, pointing out that the Vatican had condemned the Maguires and calling on his ethnic brethren to reject the Maguires as “not true Irishmen.”45 Think of it as the paranoid underside of assimilation: As the Irish became American, alleged Irish conspiracies evolved from a foreign to a domestic threat, from an Enemy Outside to an Enemy Below.

  Alleged leftist conspiracies evolved in the other direction. America’s first Red Scare began with the brief reign of the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871. It gradually grew as the depression set off labor unrest at home, including much of the activity attributed to the Mollies, and it peaked with the railroad strike that swept several states in 1877.46 The strikers were imagined as a classic Enemy Below, but they were frequently tied to an Enemy Outside as well. After the Tompkins Square Riot of 1874, in which New York police beat thousands of demonstrators who had gathered without a permit, the New York Herald did not merely blame the rally on “dangerous conspirators against society.” The paper suggested that the protesters had received “the material aid to carry on these nefarious projects” from “the booty of the plundered churches of Paris,” the Commune’s tendrils apparently extending into the United States three years after the French revolutionaries had been defeated.47 After the Russian Revolution, the focus shifted further. The popular image of the domestic Communist enemy looked less like a union organizer and more like a spy, and the spy in turn was less likely to be imagined as an immigrant. The Red foe was now conceived as an imperial Enemy Outside allied with a subversive Enemy Within.

  But the older narrative wasn’t forgotten. As in the antebellum days, the black underclass could be cast as the beast below. Sometimes its supposed plots were small-scale affairs. During World War II, black “Bump Clubs” were rumored to be organizing covert carnivals of aggression, specially designated days on which black women would deliberately bump into white women who were shopping. “Because of the tensions of the war,” one study of racial rumors later reported, “both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police departments felt it necessary to investigate these white beliefs.” Not surprisingly, they didn’t find any evidence that the tales were true.48

  Other black threats that haunted the white imagination were much larger. And in the absence of John Murrell and John Brown, new outside agitators were tapped to fill their shoes.

  In 1919, The New York Times blamed race riots in Chicago and Washington on an organized campaign of “Bolshevist agitation . . . among the negroes,” even though the violence in both cities had been launched by whites against blacks, not the other way around.49 In 1943, Texas Congressman Martin Dies reacted to a race riot in Detroit by suggesting that Japanese Americans released from internment camps had made their way to Michigan and f
omented the disorder. Meanwhile, across the South, blacks were rumored to be covertly aligned with the Japanese, perhaps via a secret organization called the Black Dragon Society, or with the Germans, perhaps via a secret organization called the Swastika Club. “Hitler has told the Negroes he will give them the South for their help,” one informant told the sociologist Howard Odum, who collected rumors in the southern states during World War II. “Hitler will make the white people slaves and the Negroes the leaders,” declared another. One person claimed that black churches were “receiving Nazi propaganda. They can arise and attack the whites whenever they want.”50

  By the 1960s, the Axis powers were no longer in a position to be charged with kindling racial violence. But the Communists were still available.

  On August 11, 1965, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, the California Highway Patrol pulled over a young black man named Marquette Frye on suspicion of drunk driving. A brawl broke out between the cops and some of the locals, and the fighting grew worse when a rumor radiated through the crowd that the police had beaten a pregnant woman. Soon Watts was engulfed in a full-scale, five-day riot. Residents burned entire blocks, fired guns, hurled bricks, looted stores. It was the first of many riots that would shake America’s cities in the sixties.

  While Watts burned, rumors circulated that the violence had been planned by street gangs, Communists, the Nation of Islam, or some other ghetto menace. In 1965, unlike in 1741, some people in positions of authority tried to tamp down the fears: In December the governor’s commission on the riot rejected the idea that there had been “outside leadership or pre-established plans for the rioting.”51 Two years later, nonetheless, a widely distributed tract described Watts as a subversive “Plan to Burn Los Angeles.”

  The pamphlet, which had originally appeared as an article in the John Birch Society journal American Opinion, claimed that the riot had been “a rehearsal for a nationwide revolution.”52 According to the author, Gary Allen, the

  board of revolutionary strategy which planned, engineered, and instigated the Watts Rebellion was composed of some forty to fifty Negroes sent by the Communists in the Los Angeles area from all over the United States. Included in the group were Black Muslims, Black Nationalists, representatives from the paramilitary Deacons of Defense, the Communist Revolutionary Action Movement (R.A.M.), and professionals from other such militant and Marxist groups. These men are not hoodlums or criminals in the ordinary sense, but are drawn from among an intellectual elite of the Negro community. . . . This small revolutionary group, which is referred to in Watts and by the Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department simply as “The Organization,” has three common denominators among its members: high intelligence, hatred of “The Man” (Caucasians), and a disciplined commitment to the interests of the International Communist Conspiracy.

  This curious coalition of Muslims and Marxists had picked Watts, Allen wrote, because blacks were actually rather well off there: “[I]f Watts could be exploded they could do it anywhere else in America.” So they had flooded the area with propaganda, most notably a “publicity campaign rivaling the Advertising Council’s promotion of Smokey the Bear” aimed at “the construction of the myth of police brutality.” With that meme installed, the conspiracy’s agents had been able to spread the rumors that had set off the riot, which the mesmerized locals embraced uncritically: “The denizens of the area had been conditioned by the years of prior propaganda to accept such fairy tales without question.”

  The Organization had incited teenagers to throw bottles and burn cars, Allen continued, and over the next few days had been seen “directing the chaos [while] wearing red armbands and using electric megaphones.” They had made a special effort to loot and burn liquor stores (“keeping the mob intoxicated so it could be more easily led”), supermarkets (so residents would “suffer a lack of food” and blame the authorities), pawnshops (“to acquire large supplies of firearms”), and department stores (so the Organization could get more “guns, ammunition, merchandise, and money”). Gullible outsiders might have assumed the looting was unorganized, but Allen assured us that “as much as 90 percent” of the stolen guns and money found its way to the Organization, with Organization snipers covering Organization looters as they stole the goods, which they would use “NEXT TIME.”

  When NEXT TIME comes, Allen warned, the Organization will begin with a mass assassination of police officers. Then it’ll launch the campaign it calls “Burn Los Angeles, Burn.” It’ll start fires in the oil fields near the harbor and the foothills that surround the city; then it’ll set the Civic Center ablaze and put a torch to the Wilshire neighborhood. After that, “ ‘The Organization’ hopes to herd its ‘ghetto’ mobs into Beverly Hills.” As simultaneous riots break out in San Diego, Long Beach, Compton, Pasadena, Bakersfield, Fresno, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and Sacramento, the National Guard will be unable to contain all the revolts at once. The plotters hope that whites will be roused to “invade Negro neighborhoods in retaliation,” thus forcing “the ninety percent of the Negroes who want no part of the revolution” to join the fighting in self-defense.53

  The John Birch Society’s account, unlike the rumors that had seized Manhattan in 1741, came from a group outside the political mainstream. But the mode of thinking that Allen’s article represented wasn’t confined to the outer circles of politics. In 1966, it was possible for an Iowa congressman to go to a Farm Bureau meeting expecting queries about agriculture policy and instead be grilled about the waves of black Chicago rioters that his constituents were convinced were planning to invade the state “on motorcycles.”54 A year later, when the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence surveyed seven northern cities, 77 percent of the whites interviewed believed that outside agitators were at least partly responsible for the riots.55

  Some officials believed the same thing. LAPD Chief William Parker spouted some of the same theories as Gary Allen (attributing them, as Allen did, to the force’s Red squad). The mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty—a man with more direct authority over Watts than anyone involved with the governor’s commission on the riots—shared Parker’s take on the era’s urban violence. Testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on November 28, 1967, Yorty warned that “subversive elements” liked to “plan incidents that they would hope would spark a riot.” Even when a disturbance was apparently unplanned, he added, the radicals’ “broad propaganda campaign” had created “an atmosphere where a riot may break out spontaneously, in appearance, but actually where there has been a great groundwork laid for it.”56 For Yorty, as for Allen, the chief aim of the propaganda was to spread the idea of police brutality, a social problem that by Yorty’s account barely existed at all.

  Yorty and Parker were not the only influential figures who saw a hidden hand behind the riots of the 1960s. The Peace Officers Research Association of California, one of the country’s biggest law enforcement lobbies, released a film denouncing a pair of black politicians as “the two leading Communists in the state and the instigators of the Watts riot.”57 The popular evangelist Billy Graham declared that “a small hard core of leftists” were using the fires as “a dress rehearsal for a revolution.”58 When riots hit San Francisco in 1966, Mayor John Shelley told the press that he suspected “outside agitators” might have been responsible.59 (According to one of Shelley’s aides, the agitators were rumored to have come from—where else?—Watts.)

  And in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson asked his cabinet if the Communists were behind the country’s riots. Attorney General Ramsey Clark replied that there wasn’t any evidence of that, but Johnson wasn’t convinced. “I have a very deep feeling that there is more to that than we see at the moment,” the president commented. He pushed the FBI for evidence that the Reds were behind the turbulence, and when the Bureau came up empty-handed, he just pushed harder.60

  Allen’s article did include one note that was missing from the more mainstream accounts of a riot conspiracy, an esp
ecially incendiary echo of the antebellum insurrection scares. When NEXT TIME rolls around, he told us, the conspiracy plans “the shooting on sight of all white men and children.” But not the women. “The women,” Allen explained, “are to be utilized as a reward for the insurrectionists.”

  5

  PUPPETEERS

  . . . a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.

  —Boston Town Meeting, 17701

  Here’s the story:

  The conspiracy against America began as a conspiracy against England. A faction had formed in the back rooms of the British government, a “junto of courtiers and state-jobbers” who would “sculk behind the king’s authority,”2 amplifying their influence by bribing legislators and spreading self-serving lies. They aimed not just to enrich themselves but to destroy the freedoms won in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. To that end, this “set of intriguing men,” as the polemicist and philosopher Edmund Burke called them, decided to create a secret government. Now “two systems of administration were to be formed,” Burke wrote: “one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible.”3 The power of the state would be extended over the country, and the power of the puppet masters would be extended over the state.

  They were wildly successful. By the 1760s, the cabal controlled Parliament, and the king was either their ally or their dupe. But the Western Hemisphere was a threat to the would-be tyrants’ schemes: Their subjects could always flee across the Atlantic, leaving the rulers with no one to obey their commands. If the colonies could be subdued, one pamphleteer warned, the plotters “might open their batteries with safety against British Liberty; and Britons be made to feel the same oppressive hand of despotic Power.” The alarm was sounded: “a PLAN has been systematically laid, and persued by the British ministry . . . for enslaving America; as the STIRRUP by which they design to mount the RED HORSE of TYRANNY and DESPOTISM at home.”4