The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  Alert Americans found the conspirators’ fingerprints everywhere. In 1762, when Anglican missionaries created a Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge Among the Indians of North America, the colonists understood that the evangelists’ real target wasn’t the natives; it was the rival faiths that had taken root in the colonies. The secret plan, John Adams explained, was to “establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches.”5 When the Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a tax on printed paper, Joseph Warren of Massachusetts announced that the law had been “designed . . . to force the colonies into a rebellion, and from thence to take occasion to treat them with severity, and, by military power, to reduce them to servitude.”6 The Boston Massacre of 1770, the Tea Act of 1773, the Intolerable Acts of 1774: All were evidence of the dark design. One isolated act of oppression “may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day,” Thomas Jefferson acknowledged, but America was undergoing “a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers.” And that meant it faced “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”7

  If you were to poll the founding fathers, you would hear slightly different accounts of who was a part of this conspiracy and what exactly the conspirators were up to. But when it came to where the enemy was taking them, they agreed with Jefferson. George Washington wrote that “a regular Systematick Plan” threatened to reduce the colonists to “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”8 Alexander Hamilton concurred: A “system of slavery,” he said, was being “fabricated against America.”9 When the revolutionaries formed a Continental Congress, the body denounced the “ministerial plan for enslaving us” and issued a warning to the people of Great Britain: “May not a ministry, with the same armies, enslave you?”10

  When the colonies declared independence, the plot against America was detailed in the new country’s founding document. The Declaration of Independence did not merely describe “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” It argued that those abuses added up to “a design” to bring the colonists “under absolute Despotism.”11

  After the Americans defeated the puppet masters in London, they had to contend with like-minded marionetteers at home. A cabal of nationalists were dissatisfied with the young country’s constitution, called the Articles of Confederation, with its limits on the central government’s powers; they wanted to bring the country under more centralized control, replicating the old order in the now independent United States. They saw an opportunity in 1783, when Congress was unwilling to impose an import duty to fund a standing army. With one hand the cabal encouraged officers to plot a military coup; with the other they counseled the country’s leaders “to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation” by adopting Alexander Hamilton’s economic agenda.12

  The plot, known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, fell apart after George Washington intervened to stop it, but the nationalists merely moved on to new schemes. The soldiers among them created the Society of the Cincinnati, an aristocratic military order that hoped to establish itself as a parallel government in each state, eventually superseding the elected legislatures. The society had “a fiery, hot ambition and thirst for power,” one patriot warned, and America’s government “will be in a few years as fierce and oppressive an aristocracy as that of Poland or Venice, if the Order of Cincinnati be suffered to take root and spread.”13

  When the conspirators finally struck, though, the blow came from a different direction. In 1787, they persuaded twelve of the thirteen states to hold a constitutional convention. In theory the conclave was merely going to propose some revisions to the Articles, fixing some widely acknowledged defects in the document. Instead, the nationalists “turned a Convention into a Conspiracy.”14 Behind closed doors, the delegates ignored their assignment and instead set to work replacing the Articles with an entirely new constitution, one that would concentrate far more power in the national government. Of the fifty-five people participating in the meeting, twenty-one belonged to the Society of the Cincinnati.

  The extent of the new design did not become clear until a dissenting delegate, Luther Martin of Maryland, broke the convention’s code of silence and revealed the coming new order in a long address to his state’s House of Delegates. The nationalists, he warned, were “covertly endeavouring to carry into effect what they well knew openly and avowedly could not be accomplished”: a plan “to abolish and annihilate all State governments, and to bring forward one general government, over this extensive continent, of a monarchical nature.” Allying themselves with figures from the larger states, who didn’t share the conspirators’ grand design but did share their interest in reducing the smaller states’ power, the delegates had dreamed up a document that would enact the oppressions the colonists had fought a revolution to prevent: the power to impose direct taxes, the power to raise a standing army, and, in general, “the most complete, most abject system of slavery that the wit of man ever devised, under the pretence of forming a government for free States.”15

  Other Anti-Federalists, as the foes of the new Constitution were called, praised the speech. A Pennsylvania writer exulted that Martin had braved “the rage of the conspirators” and “laid open the conclave, exposed the dark scene within, developed the mystery of the proceedings, and illustrated the machinations of ambition.”16 But the exposé wasn’t enough: Running roughshod over normal legal procedures, the conspirators rammed through the Constitution in what amounted to an illegal coup d’état. Revising the Articles was supposed to require the thirteen states’ unanimous consent, but the nationalists invented a rule allowing the document to be replaced entirely with the backing of only nine states. Even so, the Constitution still had to attract public support, so the nationalists appeased the Anti-Federalists by adding a Bill of Rights to the document.

  And then those rights fell under attack as the same gang of nationalists, now headquartered in the Federalist Party, took power. Patriotic printers warned the public: A “detestable and nefarious conspiracy” in the government aimed to undo the revolution and make the president a king.17 The Federalist president began to surround himself with pomp and ceremony, as though the office were more royalist than republican—an insidious scheme “to familiarise us with the forms of monarchy.”18 Congress began to impose internal taxes, and when frontiersmen protested a particularly onerous whiskey levee, the government smashed their rebellion. John Adams’s administration pushed through the speech-squelching Sedition Act, and under the new law’s powers it rounded up some of the government’s most vocal opponents. Then the original English monster reentered the picture as word spread that Adams planned to “unite his family with the Royal House of Great Britain, the bridegroom to be King of America.”19

  Or that’s the story, anyway.

  If you take words such as design and plan and plot as metaphors, a great deal of that story is accurate. As Bernard Bailyn pointed out in a widely cited 1967 study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the revolutionary generation tended to see the world as an ongoing conflict between Liberty and Power. “ ‘Power,’ ” he wrote, “to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion.”20 When revolutionary pamphleteers discussed Power, they liked to personify it: It would creep and encroach, grasp like a hand, and consume like a cancer. That is a literary device, and there is nothing innately conspiracist about it.

  But design and plan and plot were not metaphors. They were concrete charges against the colonists’ foes in the ministry, in Parliament, and eventually on the throne. Such charges, the intellectual historian George H. Smith has explained, played “a key part of the Whig theory of revolution: Before revolution can be justified, it must be shown that the injustices of a government are not merely isolated and unrelated events but are part of an overall plan to establish despotism.”
21 Combine encroaching Power with a plan, and you get the fourth of our archetypes, the manipulative and privileged Enemy Above: to borrow a phrase from the founders’ day, “the silent, powerful, and ever active conspiracy of those who govern.”22

  The revolutionaries believed that when power is unchecked, the powerful will conspire to expand their wealth and influence. As political philosophy, this is a perfectly defensible position: If power can corrupt, it isn’t unreasonable to expect corruption from powerful people. The theories go wrong only when the accusations leap beyond the evidence—a leap that, alas, was a little too easy to make. At the time it was widely believed, as the historian Gordon Wood has summarized it, that since “no one could ever actually penetrate into the inner hearts of men, true motives had to be discovered indirectly, had to be deduced from actions. That is, the causes had to be inferred from the effects.”23 Since the effect of British policy was to reduce the colonies’ liberty and self-government, the cause was presumed to be a plot to reduce the colonies’ liberty and self-government. Under modern standards of evidence, that isn’t enough.

  But if the story at the beginning of this chapter isn’t always an accurate account of what America was undergoing, it’s a good guide to how a lot of Americans felt. England really was extending its power over the colonies in ways that interfered with the colonists’ autonomy. The Constitution really did concentrate more power in the central government. The Federalists really did have authoritarian inclinations. There is truth in those stories, even when they’re false.

  It is undeniable, for example, that some American Anglicans wanted their faith to be the officially established religion. Some of them dreamed of more than that: At one point the president of King’s College, Cambridge, complained to the archbishop of Canterbury that Americans “are nearly rampant in their high notions of liberty,” suggesting that if the colonies’ “charters were demolished and they could be reduced under the management of a wise and good governor and council appointed by the King, I believe they would in a little time grow a good sort of people.”24 But such skylarking hardly proves that the king’s ministry and the Anglican ministry were in cahoots, and there are good reasons to believe that the state’s attempts to extend its power over the colonies and the church’s attempts to extend its reach among the colonists were pursued independently.25

  Similarly, it’s easy to see why men who had just fought a revolution would be alarmed by the Society of the Cincinnati, with its aristocratic trappings and its tendency to support nationalist policies. Jefferson himself distrusted the order and urged General Washington to “stand on ground separated from it.”26 But even if the society had, as the Boston Gazette put it, “all the formal parade and arrangement of a separate government,”27 it never did act as a shadow government; it was a gathering spot and pressure group for the young country’s nationalists, but it was not an instrument through which they governed. It even included a few figures who wound up rejecting the Federalists and joining the party of Jefferson.28

  On the other hand, the Newburgh Conspiracy really happened, though historians don’t agree about the extent to which the soldiers were manipulated by the nationalists. And the part of our opening narrative that is most likely to strike modern ears as odd—the conspiratorial account of the Constitution—is actually the most defensible segment of the tale. It is undeniably true that the Constitutional Convention met in secret, refusing even to publicize the minutes of its debates; that it exceeded its original mission, which was merely to reform the Articles; that some of the delegates intended from the beginning to overshoot those instructions; and that there was no legal basis for allowing the Constitution to take effect with only nine states ratifying it.29 If the ratification of the Constitution is not usually described in conspiratorial terms today, it isn’t because there is any serious dispute over those facts. It’s because most people are glad the Constitution became law and thus are less likely to dwell on any irregularities in its birth.30

  One sign that the English, and later the Federalists, did not perceive themselves as plotters is the ease with which they persuaded themselves that they were the victims of conspiracies, falling frequently into Enemy Below and Enemy Outside theories about their foes. Some Englishmen argued that the Revolution was all a French scheme, with Paris employing “secret emissaries” to spread “dissatisfaction among the British colonists.”31 Even without dragging France into it, Tories such as Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson believed, in Bailyn’s words, that “the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority.”32

  Similarly, the Federalists were filled with fears of revolutionary conspiracies. They looked at Jeffersonian political clubs and saw Jacobins plotting an insurrection, probably under the direction of French foreign agents. The Whiskey Rebellion was taken to be their handiwork, and more revolts were presumed to be on their way. In the last year of the Washington administration, future president John Quincy Adams fretted to his father that the French and their domestic allies were planning the “removal of the President,” which would “be followed by a plan for introducing into the American Constitution a Directory instead of a President, and for taking from the supreme Executive the command of the armed forces.”33 (The Directory was the name of France’s ruling committee.) With the XYZ Affair of 1798, in which French diplomats demanded a bribe from their American counterparts, and the Quasi-War of 1798 to 1800, in which French and American ships skirmished at sea, the fear of foreign subversion reached new heights. In that soil there sprouted the most infamous of the Federalist conspiracy theories, in which the country was allegedly threatened by a secret society called the Bavarian Illuminati.

  The actual Illuminati had been founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria; he was motivated mostly by a desire to undermine the influence of the Jesuits. His followers weren’t the first people to call themselves Illuminati: The Spanish Alumbrados, French Illuminés, and Afghan Roshaniyya of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had used the label for their religious movements, as had some eighteenth-century French followers of the Swedish spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg. (Naturally, conspiracy theorists have attempted to link those older sects to the Bavarian order.) Weishaupt’s Illuminati were antiauthoritarian in theory and elaborately hierarchical in practice, with a baroque series of degrees and a careful system of secrecy. Recall Richard Hofstadter’s remark that the John Birch Society adopted a structure similar to the one it imputed to the Communist enemy. Weishaupt did the same thing, establishing a chain of command that outdid the most intricate image of the Jesuits’ secret machinations.

  Weishaupt’s group took hold within Freemasonry—a secret society inside a secret society—attracting at least two thousand members before the Bavarian authorities started cracking down. The biggest blow came in 1786, when the police raided the home of Francis Xaver von Zwack, an Illuminatus who had recently held a post in the government. The search turned up a large cache of the order’s papers, including not just its secret symbols and a partial membership roster but a letter in which Weishaupt wrote that he had impregnated his sister-in-law and then procured an abortion. The papers were published, and the group fell into disgrace. Soon Bavaria’s duke declared that anyone caught recruiting new members into the order would be put to death.

  That seemed to be the end of it. But rumors continued to circulate that the higher ranks of the Illuminati were still active, and a former member of the organization made a well-publicized though ill-fated effort to launch a similar group under a new name.34 Continental conservatives whispered that the illuminated underground had infiltrated French Freemasonry and sparked the French revolution of 1789.35 This idea reached the English-speaking world when the Edinburgh physicist John Robison promoted it in his 1797 book Proofs of a Conspiracy. According to Robison, the bloodshed in France was only the
beginning: “AN ASSOCIATION HAS BEEN FORMED for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE.”36 At about the same time Augustin Barruel, a French Jesuit exiled to England, offered a more elaborate version of the story in his four-volume Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. And from Robison and Barruel the theory filtered to the United States, where Federalists afraid of Jacobin subversion found a new basis for their fears.

  One of the first to spread the word was the New England geographer and minister Jedidiah Morse, who proclaimed from the pulpit that a global conspiracy was trying to “subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government.”37 Morse’s sermons laid out the enemy’s plans, including a scheme “to invade the southern states from [Haiti] with an army of blacks . . . to excite an insurrection among the negroes.”38 But Morse was ready to expose the conspirators before they could destroy the social order: “I have, my brethren, an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, &c. of the officers and members of a Society of Illuminati . . . consisting of one hundred members.”39 Prominent figures joined the warnings, notably Yale president Timothy Dwight, who denounced the Illuminati as a threat to chastity, faith, and the family. Eventually, predictably, the scare seeped into partisan politics, as when a Connecticut Federalist attacked Thomas Jefferson as “the very child of modern illumination.”40

  The order began to appear in popular culture, too. In 1800, the Maine writer Sally Wood published Julia and the Illuminated Baron, a Gothic melodrama set in prerevolutionary France, featuring an Illuminatus who holds a young woman captive and plots against her virtue. Combining anxieties, the book’s villain is both an aristocrat and a Jacobin: “He hated royalty, yet was sometimes so vain as to aspire at the possession of a scepter. He laughed at religion, and he trembled at its power and wished to present it.”41 Wood’s Illuminati are a depraved band of nature worshippers, seizing pleasures for themselves as they prepare for the coming uprising. At one point in the tale a woman describes their initiation ceremony: “[D]isrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered.” She adds, “This sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins.”42