The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  41. Harrington O’Reilly [and John Young Nelson], Fifty Years on the Trail: A True Story of Western Life (Chatto & Windus, 1889), 180.

  42. Mark Twain, Roughing It (American Publishing Company, 1873), 106.

  43. The most telling attack on the Mormons’ economic enterprises came from New England, not Idaho. Writing in the 1880s, Samuel Porter Putnam complained that the “Mormons are money-getters, like the Jews.” Quoted in Dyer D. Lum, “Mormon Co-Operation,” Liberty, July 3, 1886.

  44. Recall that Wovoka studied both the Mormons and the Shakers before he revived the Ghost Dance. Outsiders observed the two sects’ influence on him, and conspiratorial speculation predictably followed. Catherine Weldon, an Indian rights advocate who didn’t approve of the Ghost Dance, claimed that “the Mormons are at the bottom of it all & misuse the credulity of the Indians for their own purposes.” Quoted in Rex Alan Smith, Moon at Popping Trees (University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 110.

  45. Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (Grosset & Dunlap, 1912), 310.

  46. Ibid., 26.

  47. Ibid., 160–62.

  48. Ibid., 172.

  49. Ibid., 174.

  50. Don Siegel, A Siegel Film: An Autobiography (Faber and Faber, 1993), 178.

  51. It Came from Outer Space, directed by Jack Arnold, screenplay by Harry Essex, from a story by Ray Bradbury, Universal Studios, 1953. Sources differ as to how much of a role Ray Bradbury played in writing the movie. The film was produced by William Alland, who earlier had acted in Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds.”

  52. Harl Vincent, “Parasite,” Amazing Stories, July 1935.

  53. Campbell’s novella was the basis of Howard Hawks’s 1951 film The Thing from Another World, which removed the body-snatching element of the plot but maintained the atmosphere of paranoia. The theme of imposture was restored in the second movie to be based on the story, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). For a clever reimagining of the scenario from the alien’s point of view, see Peter Watts, “The Things,” January 2010, clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10.

  54. The Puppet Masters, in keeping with its Enemy Outside leanings, does end with the hero preparing to battle the invaders at their home base on Titan. In Britain, meanwhile, the sequel to Quatermass II—the six-part serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59)—features a mind-controlling Satanic alien that has been lying dormant beneath the earth.

  55. Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Third Congress, Second Session, Pursuant to S. 190 (United States Government Printing Office, 1954), 93.

  56. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Ig Publishing, 2007 [1957]), 32. Packard was a former staffer at Collier’s, the same magazine that serialized Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers.

  57. Ibid., 33.

  58. Ibid., 219–20.

  59. That worldview was widespread not just among the critics of advertising but also among the admen themselves, many of whom “contemplated the rise of the modern mass man with fear and contempt,” according to the historian Roland Marchand. Advertisers were aware that this fear and this contempt were also becoming prevalent in the larger society, and they found ways to exploit both. As early as the 1930s, as pitchmen recognized “a rising public fear of submergence in mass conformity,” ads “frequently appealed to this concern by advertising products on the strength of their capacity to lift the individual out of the crowd.” Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (University of California Press, 1985), 268–69.

  60. The Whip Hand, directed by William Cameron Menzies, screenplay by George Bricker and Frank L. Moss, from a story by Roy Hamilton, RKO, 1951. Menzies’s next credit would be the aforementioned Invaders from Mars.

  61. Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2003), 146–47. Philbrick was played by Richard Carlson, who was also the lead in It Came from Outer Space.

  62. Ibid., 146.

  63. On the 1950s fear of brainwashing and its influence on Condon’s book, see Louis Menand, “Brainwashed,” The New Yorker, September 15, 2003. As Menand pointed out, American observers exaggerated the brainwashers’ power: “the former prisoners who had come home praising the good life to be had in North Korea soon reverted to American views.”

  64. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004 [1959]), 32. This edition of Condon’s book reprints Menand’s essay as an introduction.

  65. Ibid., 41.

  66. Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (University of California Press, 1996 [1959]), 51.

  67. Kerouac’s views on McCarthy are discussed, with different degrees of sympathy, in Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America (Da Capo Press, 2003 [1979]), 185–86; Bill Kauffman, America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics (Prometheus Books, 1995), 172; and Barry Miles, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (Virgin Books, 2010 [1998]), 239. To see Burroughs praising Pegler, read William S. Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg, December 24, 1949, in The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, ed. Oliver Harris (Penguin Books, 1993), 57.

  68. See Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Temple University Press, 1983). The term Brown Scare is also sometimes used to describe fears of Mexican subversion. The historian Ricardo Romo attached the phrase to an anti-Chicano crusade of the 1910s that “developed peculiar dimensions on the West Coast,” including fear of “a revolution which would claim the entire American Southwest for Mexico.” Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (University of Texas Press, 1983), 90.

  69. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Avon Books, 1969 [1941]), 266–67.

  70. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” The Twilight Zone, CBS, March 4, 1960.

  71. Even as the fear of the herd mind was riding high in the 1950s and early ’60s, social scientists were doing research that undercut the idea that mass panic was a common response to disaster. Much of their work was funded by the Pentagon, which was worried about how the public would act in a nuclear war and was surprised by the conclusions that E. L. Quarantelli, Charles Fritz, and other sociologists reached.

  72. Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Eugene Rolfe (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 52. (First published in German in 1949.)

  73. Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar, 2nd ed. (New American Library, 1965), 158. Vidal was not the first writer to compare homosexuality to freemasonry: Richard Burton and Marcel Proust, among others, had used the same metaphor.

  74. R. G. Waldeck, “Homosexual International,” Human Events, April 16, 1952.

  75. Congressional Record, May 1, 1952.

  76. Quoted in David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 112.

  77. Ibid., 76. The Lavender Scare rebounded on some of the McCarthyists as well, eventually grazing against Joseph McCarthy himself. See Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 2005).

  78. Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 183–84.

  79. Quoted ibid., 187.

  80. Ibid., 188.

  81. Harry R. Jackson, Jr., quoted in Van Smith, “Holy War,” City Paper (Baltimore), October 3, 2012.

  82. Quoted ibid.

  Chapter 4: The Beast Below

  1. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2007), 413.

  2. The North River is now known as the Hudson River.

  3. Quoted in Daniel Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America and Murdering the Inhabitants (John Clarke, 1
747), 100. The first printing of Horsmanden’s book appeared in 1744.

  4. Quoted ibid., 26.

  5. Quoted ibid., 14. In the text, “goddamn” is rendered as “–damn.”

  6. Quoted ibid., 16.

  7. For a detailed accounting of the accused and their fates, see Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 248–59.

  8. “Great Newes from the Barbadoes” (1676), in Versions of Blackness: ‘Oroonoko,’ Race, and Slavery, ed. Derek Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 341. Jill Lepore has argued that the Barbados conspiracy charges were an early example of what the English thought “a slave plot looked like,” with elements of the story reappearing in subsequent crackdowns through the years. “In Barbados in 1676,” she wrote, “slave rebels sent signals using trumpets made of elephant tusks; in Antigua in 1736, dancing plotters swished an elephant tail. The New York confessions seem so formulaic that, if pachyderm tusks and tails were plausibly to be had on the banks of the Hudson, they might have made an appearance in John Hughson’s tavern,” if not in fact then at least in the accusers’ imagination. Lepore, New York Burning, 10–11.

  9. Nathaniel Saltonstall, “A Continuation of the State of New-England” (1676), in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 73.

  10. Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy, 18.

  11. Ibid., 20.

  12. Ibid., 300.

  13. Ibid., 340.

  14. For an early example of a skeptical take, see the 1810 edition of Horsmanden’s own book, released just thirty-two years after the author’s death. Horsmanden had written his account to defend the prosecutions, but a new preface declared that the conspiracy’s “extent could never have been so great as the terror of those times depicted.”

  15. See, for example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s lively The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000), 174–210.

  16. Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy, vii.

  17. Ibid., 378.

  18. Quoted in Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (W. W. Norton, 1984), 91.

  19. See William Johnson, “Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement” (1822), in Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822, ed. Robert S. Starobin (Prentice-Hall, 1970), 68–70.

  20. Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford University Press, 2010).

  21. George Baca, Conjuring Crisis: Racism and Civil Rights in a Southern Military City (Rutgers University Press, 2010), 48.

  22. Quoted in T. C. Parramore, “Conspiracy and Revivalism in 1802: A Direful Symbiosis,” Negro History Bulletin 43, no. 2, April–June 1980. For more on the suppression of independent black churches, see Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 60–62.

  23. Herself [Harriet Jacobs], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (privately published, 1861), 98.

  24. Ibid., 99.

  25. Ibid., 102.

  26. Baca, Conjuring Crisis, 48. According to Jacobs, some whites protected slaves from the mob by putting them in jail for the duration of the riot.

  27. Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (University Press of Kansas, 2003), 23–25.

  28. Quoted in “Monthly Record of Current Events,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1860.

  29. Mark Twain, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories (University of California Press, 2011), 142–43.

  30. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Penguin, 1984 [1883]), 211. The Murrell gang is invoked in Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy too, though there it’s called “Burrell’s Gang.”

  31. Joseph S. Williams, Old Times in West Tennessee: Reminiscences—Semi-Historic—of Pioneer Life and the Early Emigrant Settlers in the Big Hatchie Country (W. G. Cheeney, 1873), 200–1.

  32. Augustus Q. Walton, A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel, the Great Western Land Pirate (George White, 1835), 26–27.

  33. Quoted in Edwin A. Miles, “The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835,” The Journal of Negro History 42, no. 1 (January 1957).

  34. At about the same time, an Anti-Gambling Committee in Vicksburg, Mississippi, expelled the town’s gamblers from the city limits. The men who refused to go were hanged without a trial. It is unclear to what extent that outbreak of lynch law was connected to the Murrell lynchings, but the two events were linked afterward in public memory, and subsequent accounts sometimes treated the Mississippi gamblers as part of the conspiracy. In one historian’s words, “the terms ‘Murrell,’ ‘gambler,’ and ‘abolitionist’ became essentially interchangeable.” Thomas Ruys Smith, “Independence Day, 1835: The John A. Murrell Conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg Gamblers in Literature,” Mississippi Quarterly 59, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2006).

  35. Compare: “The central idea of slavery, from the masters’ point of view, was the absolute submission of the slave to the master. Theoretically, the slave represented no more than an extension of the master’s will.” Eugene Genovese, “Class, Culture, and Historical Process,” Dialectical Anthropology 1, no. 1 (November 1975).

  36. Annalee Newitz, “A History of Zombies in America,” November 18, 2010, io9.com/5692719/a-history-of-zombies-in-america.

  37. Zombies became extremely popular in the early twenty-first century. Some stories played with the notion of sympathizing with the zombies, an approach that dates back at least as far as Romero’s 1985 film Day of the Dead but became increasingly common in this period. Other storytellers stuck with the idea of the undead as feral subhumans who deserve to be dispatched. Some survivalists refer to postapocalyptic looters as “Mutant Zombie Bikers.” The term is tongue-in-cheek; the fear isn’t.

  38. “Outrages by Tramps,” The World, October 4, 1879.

  39. The World, October 24, 1879.

  40. Quoted in “The Vagrant Class,” The New York Times, September 7, 1877.

  41. Horatio Seymour, “Crime and Tramps,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1878.

  42. Galveston Daily News, August 25, 1877.

  43. Earlier in the century, one legal weapon the government had used against unions had been to prosecute them as criminal conspiracies. You didn’t have to be a slave to have something to fear from the broad application of conspiracy law.

  44. Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. Kenny credited Benjamin Bannan, the nativist editor of The Miners’ Journal, with introducing the term to the anthracite region, using it as what Kenny calls “a shorthand term for the various aspects of ‘the Irish character’ he found most objectionable and threatening.”

  45. Quoted in Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, 2nd ed. (G. W. Dillingham, 1905), 521.

  46. As capitalists worried about labor conspiracies, union activists sometimes fretted about conspiracies bubbling among the immigrants who competed with them for jobs. Denis Kearney, the Irish-American leader of the Workingmen’s Party, saw the “debauched, offal-eating, devil-worshipping, leprous Chinese” as the pawns of a capitalist plot to undercut white wages and undermine the republic. Quoted in “John Chinaman in America,” All the Year Round, December 10, 1881.

  47. “The Communists of New York—Their Secret Meetings and Movements,” New York Herald, January 18, 1874.

  48. Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (University of California Press, 2001), 48.

  49. “Race Riots,” The New York Times, July 28, 1919. The editorial’s gallery of villains also includes Germany and the Industria
l Workers of the World.

  50. Quoted in Howard W. Odum, Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1943]), 133, 135. Odum also collected rumors in which the secret power behind a black conspiracy was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who supposedly lent her name to subversive “Eleanor Clubs.” The clubs’ purported motto: “A white woman in every kitchen by 1943.” Ibid., 73–80.

  51. Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? December 2, 1965, usc.edu/libraries/archives/cityinstress/mccone.

  52. Gary Allen, “The Plan to Burn Los Angeles,” American Opinion, May 1967. All subsequent Allen quotes in this chapter come from this article.

  53. There is more than a faint parallel between Allen’s fear of what white retaliation might bring and the antebellum planters’ fear of a black insurrection setting off white lawlessness. Allen, like the planters, preferred that the suppression of the Enemy Below be channeled through the state. On a related note: In the 1960s, the John Birch Society believed that the international conspiracy was manipulating not just the civil rights movement but the various Klan and neo-Nazi groups as well, with the aim of using both sides to incite a race war. In later years, Bircher accounts of the civil rights era would assign their most heroic role to the FBI infiltrators who targeted the Klan.

  54. John Schmidhauser, quoted in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner’s, 2008), 142.

  55. Terry Ann Knopf, Rumors, Race, and Riots (Transaction Books, 1975), 131.

  56. Subversive Influences in Riots, Looting, and Burning, Part 1: Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, First Session, October 25, 26, 31, and November 28, 1967 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 835.

  57. Quoted in Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (University Press of Virginia, 1995), 267.

  58. Quoted in “Hard-Core Leftists Exploit L.A. Negroes, Says Graham,” The Spartanburg Herald, August 18, 1965.

  59. Quoted in “Outside Agitators Took Part in Riots, Says Frisco Mayor,” St. Joseph News-Press, October 1, 1966.