The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  An important shift happened as the country’s republican institutions matured, particularly once the Federalist Party began its decline in 1801. Before then, Federalist conspiracy theorists generally complained about a Jeffersonian Enemy Below (in collaboration, perhaps, with an Enemy Outside based in France), while Jeffersonian conspiracy theorists generally complained about a Federalist Enemy Above (in collaboration, perhaps, with an Enemy Outside based in England). It was a natural sequel to the revolution-era battle between Enemy Above–fearing insurrectionists and Enemy Below–fearing loyalists. When there were exceptions to the pattern, they usually involved white revolutionaries casting a nervous eye at the people below them in the social hierarchy. (Along with its complaints of kingly oppression, the Declaration of Independence charged London with fomenting “domestic insurrections amongst us.” Pressure from above, pressure from below.)43

  But with Jefferson’s party in power, it was possible for Federalists to see their rivals as an Enemy Above as well. In 1804, a Federalist paper in Virginia, the Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger, complained that a “club in Richmond” intended to impose the “dominion of an unacknowledged aristocracy.”44 On a national scale, one Massachusetts Federalist protested, “Instead of free republicks united by solemn compact, under a federal government with limited powers, we have become a consolidated empire under the absolute controul of a few men.”45 Across the ocean, a revolutionary republic in France had decayed into the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte; now the Federalists believed they were watching a revolutionary republic in America decay into the dictatorship of Thomas Jefferson. The alleged entente between the Jeffersonians and the Paris-based Enemy Outside still played a prominent role in Federalist thinking; it’s just that the nature of their American and French foes evolved as each consolidated power. Even the Constitution, once the great Federalist hope, had “under the hands of its enemies, its present masters, been converted as if it were by magic into a formidable engine of tyranny, adapted to carry into effect the cruel system of the French ruler.”46

  That was a fantasy, but it was a fantasy provoked by real events. By buying the Louisiana territory from France, Jefferson had more than doubled the country’s size, leaving Federalists concerned that the nation had grown too large to govern itself; and by imposing an embargo on trade with the British, he had interfered with Americans’ economic freedom in a way that fell especially hard on New England cities, where the Federalists were concentrated. Jefferson was, in other words, working at least part of the time for the expansion of Power. It was natural for his critics to denounce him with the language of Liberty. And it was natural for some of those denunciations to take the form of conspiracy theories.

  “These purported conspiracies had no fixed origin and no single aim,” James Banner wrote in his history of the Massachusetts Federalists. “Plots were laid within the cabinet, in midnight caucuses of ‘Jacobin’ malcontents, in Napoleon’s carriage somewhere in Europe. There were conspiracies of ‘internal foes’ and of ‘external enemies.’ There were small conspiracies to seize elections and larger ‘secret and systemic’ foreign intrigues ‘by wicked and artful men, in foreign countries’ to ‘undermine the foundation of [Christian] Religion, and to overthrow its Altars.’ ”47 Outside and Within, Above and Below: Federalists found something to fear from every direction.

  Secret societies play a protean role in the paranoid imagination, their secrecy a mask that might conceal anything. In the Illuminati panic, Masonic orders were cast as an Enemy Outside. After Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800, on the other hand, Masons were linked to an Enemy Below: Slaves were said to have planned the insurrection under cover of organizing a Masonic lodge.48 In 1826, thanks to a high-profile crime in Canandaigua, New York, Masons became a symbol of the Enemy Above. The precipitating event was the apparent murder of William Morgan, an itinerant stonemason and former Freemason who had announced his plans to expose the order’s secrets. Morgan subsequently suffered several months of harassment, which culminated when he was abducted and never seen again.

  The uproar that followed Morgan’s disappearance included several high-profile trials and grand jury investigations, and the testimony aired in those forums convinced many onlookers that Masonic vigilantes had murdered Morgan, that many Masons had perjured themselves to protect the assassins, and that highly placed Masons had abused their power in an attempt to cover up the crime. In 1828, those onlookers formed an Anti-Masonic Party. When it competed in the presidential election four years later, the party garnered nearly 8 percent of the popular vote and carried the state of Vermont.49 Former president John Quincy Adams joined the movement, commenting privately in the early stages of the 1832 campaign that the “dissolution of the Masonic institution in the United States” was “really more important to us and our posterity than the question whether [Henry] Clay or [Andrew] Jackson shall be the president.”50 Anti-Masonic governors were elected in Vermont and Pennsylvania, and many Anti-Masonic activists would later become important figures in Whig and Republican politics, including future secretary of state William Seward, future senator Charles Sumner, future congressman Thaddeus Stevens, and future Whig party boss Thurlow Weed.

  Some Anti-Masons were fairly levelheaded investigators. Others, particularly later on, were given to wild, over-the-top charges. Either way, they were not simply reacting to a probable murder and a suspicion that a larger criminal conspiracy was at work.51 They were channeling resentment of genuinely powerful institutions. In the upstate New York cradle of Anti-Masonry, the historian Kathleen Smith Kutolowski has noted, Masons held a “disproportionate share of influential public positions.” By Kutolowski’s estimate, Freemasons made up no more than 5 percent of the voting population in Genesee County. Yet

  half of the county’s pre-1822 office holders (including fourteen of seventeen assemblymen and senators) belonged to lodges. In the five years following enactment of the liberalized Constitution of 1821, fifty-five percent of all county political leaders—candidates and party committeemen alike—were Masons. A step below, at the town level, Masons dominated officeholding no less. Lodge brothers supplied three-fourths of Warsaw’s supervisors and justices and the town’s only postmaster, and over half of Le Roy’s supervisors, town clerks, and assessors. . . . From 1803 to 1827 two-thirds of the eighty-five known candidates for political office at the county level were Masons, including three-quarters of the Assembly candidates before 1822.52

  Men attending Masonic meetings were supposed to leave politics at the door, and it is certainly possible that they did. But it’s not hard to understand why the Anti-Masons were suspicious. And if those suspicions didn’t amount to much before 1826, the Morgan affair magnified them into a movement. (It helped that Andrew Jackson belonged to the secret society. As the movement grew, many critics of the Mason in the White House opportunistically attached themselves to a party opposed to Masonry in general.)

  The most obvious place to look for a “silent, powerful, and ever active conspiracy of those who govern” is, naturally, the government. But the fears that attached themselves to the Masons in the 1820s and ’30s—and to the Society of the Cincinnati in the 1780s—show that private organizations can fill the same shoes. The state may be the prize sought or tool used by the Enemy Above, but the conspirators themselves might prefer to prepare their plans elsewhere.53

  With the Bank War of the 1830s, a different sort of private organization was cast as the Enemy Above. President Jackson vetoed a bill to recharter the country’s central bank in 1831 and then withdrew the Treasury’s deposits from the institution in 1833, reducing the once-mighty Second Bank of the United States to an ordinary state bank, which finally closed its doors a few years later. Throughout the conflict, the president and his supporters denounced the bank as a monster, a dragon, a hydra, an octopus. That populist rhetoric sometimes took on a conspiratorial tone. Jackson described the bank as a shadow state: “a Government which has gradually increased in strength from the day of its e
stablishment.”54 The bank’s president, he later added, “rules the Senate, as a showman does his puppets.”55 Such language wasn’t so different from the anti-Power rhetoric we’ve seen before, but rather than being directed at a government or a secret society, it was pointed at a nominally private corporation.

  The Second Bank, to be sure, had been created by the U.S. government, and it was from the U.S. government that the bank derived its power. It was in no sense a break with the antistatist past to find an Enemy Above in an institution like this one, a fact the bank’s critics made very clear. “The aristocracy of our country . . . continually contrive to change their party name,” the Massachusetts Jacksonian Frederick Robinson explained in a Fourth of July address in 1834. “It was first Tory, then Federalist, then no party, then amalgamation, then National Republican, now Whig, and the next name they assume perhaps will be republican or democrat.” Those aristocrats, Robinson said, form “societies and incorporations for the enjoyment of exclusive privileges,” and the bank was the “most potent and deadly” of those privileged enterprises.56 To Robinson and those he spoke for, Washington’s battle against the British and Jackson’s battle against the bank were separate stages of the same long fight.

  Still, the Bank War was a step toward a world where puppeteers are perceived in the corporate sector as frequently as they’re found in the halls of state. It was also a step toward a world where a populist might turn to the executive branch, traditionally a habitat of the Enemy Above, to find a champion against the elite. That was true whether or not the populist in question was a conspiracy theorist. But as the chief targets of protest changed, so too did the suspicions of the protesters. The next step in that journey came in the wake of the Civil War, as national markets developed and the “octopus” label once attached to the central bank was now affixed to the railroads.

  The rail companies, like the Second Bank, were heavily subsidized by the government. Corporations such as Union Pacific would not have existed without government support—or, at least, would not have existed in the form that raised such ire. But though some of the industry’s opponents would have been happy merely to cut off its subsidies and legal privileges, a new generation of populists preferred the idea of using the state to take on the rails—and not the way that Jackson had taken on the bank, an approach that had aggrandized the executive’s authority but ultimately left the federal government smaller. They called for the government to regulate or even nationalize the railroads. A century earlier, someone who set out to fight the Enemy Above would have wanted to limit the state. Now he might instead intend to bend the state to his ends.

  By the time you get to the corporate combinations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the octopus metaphor was ubiquitous enough to be spoofed in one of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy novels for children. In The Sea Fairies (1911), a little girl traveling through an underwater world has to explain to a sea creature why she assumed he was a villain:

  “Why, ev’rybody knows that octopuses are jus’ wicked an’ deceitful,” she said. “Up on the earth, where I live, we call the Stannerd Oil Company an octopus, an’ the Coal Trust an octopus, an’—”

  “Stop, stop!” cried the monster in a pleading voice. “Do you mean to tell me that the earth people whom I have always respected compare me to the Stannerd Oil Company? . . . Just because we have several long arms and take whatever we can reach, they accuse us of being like— like— oh, I cannot say it! It is too shameful, too humiliating.”57

  There never was a complete split between the anticorporate and antistatist strains of the antioctopus tradition. It was still possible to argue, as many do on the libertarian Right and the antiauthoritarian Left, that big business derives its power from big government and that opposing one therefore entails opposing the other as well. Even those who prefer to focus on either Wall Street or Washington usually find it impossible to entirely ignore the other. Neither the Yippies nor the Birchers trusted the CIA, and neither was fond of the big banks either.

  And both antistatist and anticorporate crusaders love the image of the octopus. He does make an excellent puppeteer: He can manipulate eight arms at once.58

  “A Horrible Monster,” July 19, 1880, The Daily Graphic

  So the Enemy Above conspires to take people’s liberties, reducing them to slaves. But what if you already are a slave? There’s another tradition of Enemy Above stories in the United States, one that dates back to the days when blacks were held in bondage. Those tales have often involved threats to precariously won freedoms, but they were also present when there weren’t any liberties left to steal. In those cases, the conspiracies coveted their victims’ bodies.

  The fear appeared when Africans first encountered the European slave trade, as captured blacks worried that the Caucasian invaders intended to eat them. As with many conspiracy theories, the captives came to that conclusion through a combination of empirical observation and frightened guesswork. One prisoner remembered seeing “parts of a hog hanging, the skin of which was white—a thing which we never saw before; for a hog was always roasting on a fire, to clear it of the hair, in my country; and a number of cannonshots were arranged on the deck. The former we supposed to be flesh, and the latter the heads of the individuals who had been killed for meat.”59 (You thought you were reading Roots, but that was just a mask: It was The Silence of the Lambs all along.) Another slave recalled his fellow captives jumping overboard “for fear that they were being fattened to be eaten.”60 Africans arriving in Louisiana and Haiti reportedly mistook their masters’ red wine for blood.

  As it turned out, the slavers really were conspiring against their prisoners; it was just the nature of the conspiracy that was misunderstood. The captives were to be consumed by the white economy, not by white mouths. If American slave owners had reasons to be afraid of their slaves, the slaves in turn had many more reasons to be afraid of their owners. Some whites resented that dread. Others figured that stoking those fears might help keep the laborers in line.61 That deliberate fearmongering continued after emancipation, as whites spread scary stories about the perils of urban life to discourage black workers from venturing north.

  That might be the origin of one conspiracy story that circulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rumor in which “night doctors” allegedly captured blacks, killed them, and dissected their corpses. “There was a scarcity of black bodies,” one African-American informant recalled to the folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry, and “in order to get one for dissection [the night doctors] would sometimes kidnap people.”62 The earliest versions of the idea date back to slave times, when southern whites tried to discourage blacks from going out after dark by donning Klanlike night doctor disguises. After the Civil War, by some accounts, whites spread word that night doctors awaited any free blacks foolish enough to settle in the cities.

  When former slaves moved to the city anyway, they carried those stories with them. “Have you ever heard talk of the old Naval Hospital on E Street?” a black woman from Washington, D.C., told Fry in 1964. “Well, the doctors, the student doctors used to go there, you know, and most of these people were so scared, scared to go out at night. Afraid the doctors might catch them.”63 Some rumors had it that the kidnappers were after any black body, while others asserted that the doctors were interested only in people who were unusual or deformed. (“That’s the reason I stayed off from New York so long,” another woman told Fry. “I weighed 200 pounds.”)64 Just as black middlemen were complicit in the African slave trade, there were tales of black body snatchers who worked for the whites.

  Sometimes the scientists were said to use the bodies’ blood to make medicine, a sort of institutionalized cannibalism. A gruesome version of that tale reappeared in Atlanta during the child murders of 1979 to 1981, when at least twenty-one black children and teenagers (and a handful of young adults) were kidnapped and killed. According to one rumor, the government was harvesting the kids’ genitals to make aphrodisiacs.
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  There was more at work here than an old planter disinformation campaign that refused to die. Black people had good reasons to fear white institutions, even those, such as hospitals, that theoretically were devoted to helping people. In the antebellum South, the medical historian Todd Savitt has reported, scientists “took advantage of the slaves’ helplessness to utilize them in demonstrations, autopsies, dissections, and experiments.”65 The abolition of slavery did not end the abuses. In the Tuskegee experiment of 1932 to 1972, for example, the federal Public Health Service offered free medical care to several hundred black sharecroppers. It didn’t tell the patients that they had syphilis, which the doctors deliberately left untreated in order to study whether the disease affects blacks and whites in different ways.

  Beyond that, on a simple day-to-day, nonconspiratorial level, blacks had plenty of firsthand familiarity with high-handed mistreatment at the hands of white doctors. In that context, it shouldn’t be surprising that the tale of the night doctors could take hold, or that later generations would find it easy to believe rumors that doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS.