by Jesse Walker
60. Quoted in Perlstein, Nixonland, 199. On Johnson’s push for the FBI to find a Communist conspiracy behind the riots, see Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (Free Press, 1989), 229ff.
Chapter 5: Puppeteers
1. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1967), 94.
2. Oliver Noble, Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story Recorded in the Book of Esther, Shewing the Power and Oppression of STATE MINISTERS Tending to the Ruin and Destruction of GOD’s People:—And the Remarkable Interpositions of Divine Providence, in Favour of the Oppressed (E. Lunt and H. W. Tinges, 1775), 6.
3. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (J. Dodsley, 1770), 15–16.
4. Noble, Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story, 26.
5. John Adams, letter to Henry Niles, February 18, 1818, in The Works of John Adams, vol. 10, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 288.
6. Quoted in Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 101.
7. Quoted ibid., 119–20.
8. George Washington, letter to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774, gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/revolution/letters/bfairfax3.html.
9. Quoted in Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 119.
10. First Continental Congress, “Address to the People of Great Britain,” September 5, 1774.
11. It’s the Declaration of Independence. Do I really need to footnote the Declaration of Independence?
12. Alexander Hamilton, letter to George Washington, February 7, 1783, in Hamilton: Writings, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (Library of America, 2001), 122.
13. Cassius [Ædanus Burke], Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati; Lately Instituted by the Major-Generals, Brigadiers, and Other Officers of the American Army (A. Timothy, 1783), 8, 28–29.
14. Abraham Yates, quoted in Bill Kauffman, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (ISI Books, 2008), 27.
15. Luther Martin, “The Genuine Information, Delivered to the Legislature of the State of Maryland, Relative to the Proceedings of the General Convention, Held at Philadelphia, in 1787” (1787), oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1787&chapter=96564&layout=html&Itemid=27.
16. Quoted in Kauffman, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet, 75.
17. Quoted in Donald Henderson Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (State University of New York Press, 1969), 490.
18. Quoted in Louise Burnham Dunbar, “A Study of ‘Monarchical’ Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801,” University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 10, no. 1 (March 1922).
19. Quoted ibid.
20. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 56.
21. George H. Smith, “ ‘That Audacious Document’: Notes on the Declaration of Independence,” November 8, 2011, libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/audacious-document-notes-declaration-independence.
22. J. L. De Lolme, The Constitution of England, or An Account of the English Government (privately published, 1777), 203. Americans who used the phrase included Richard Henry Lee, who quoted it in a 1787 letter to George Mason; and Samuel Bryan, who invoked it around the same time in an Anti-Federalist essay.
23. Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39, no. 3 (July 1982).
24. Quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (Oxford University Press, 1962), 215–16.
25. Those reasons are laid out in William M. Hogue, “The Religious Conspiracy Theory of the American Revolution: Anglican Motive,” Church History 45, no. 3 (September 1976).
26. Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Washington, April 16, 1784, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Penguin Books, 1975), 368.
27. Quoted in Markus Hünemörder, The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy and Distrust in Early America (Berghahn Books, 2006), 46.
28. In case you were wondering: The city in Ohio was named for the Society of the Cincinnati, not the other way around. The group took its name from the Roman dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.
29. The most extreme advocates of Tory-style hierarchy and privilege—the group that would become the Essex faction of the Massachusetts Federalist Party, derided by Jeffersonians and moderate Federalists alike as a conspiratorial “Essex Junto”—were dissatisfied with the Constitution from the other political direction, arguing that the document was too democratic. Nonetheless, they supported ratification, believing it the best politically realistic option. See David H. Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 2 (April 1964).
30. This is not the same argument as Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of the Constitution, which attempted to reduce the framers’ motives to narrow financial self-interest and which has been pretty much refuted.
31. R. Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War, from Its Commencement to the Year 1783 (Wilkinson & Courtney, 1809), 8.
32. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 151.
33. Quoted in Marshall Smelser, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” The Review of Politics 13, no. 4 (October 1951).
34. The group was called the German Union and its founder was a theologian named Charles Frederick Bahrdt. It was basically a moneymaking scheme, and it did not last long.
35. For an argument that Illuminist ideas (as opposed to Illuminist agents taking orders from Adam Weishaupt) influenced revolutionaries in France and elsewhere, see James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (Basic Books, 1980), 93–99. Billington notes that one way this influence was transmitted was through conservative conspiracy theories: “As the fears of the Right became the fascination of the Left, Illuminism gained a paradoxical posthumous influence far greater than it had exercised as a living movement.”
36. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, 4th ed. (George Forman, 1798), 14.
37. Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present Dangers, and Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the United States of America (Samuel Etheridge, 1799), 17. The sermon was originally delivered on May 9, 1798.
38. Ibid., 14.
39. Ibid., 15–16. Morse’s son Samuel, the cocreator of Morse code and the inventor of an early telegraph, kept the family tradition of conspiracy hunting alive: He wrote a book alleging an Austro-papal plot to put the United States under the thumb of the Hapsburg Empire. See Brutus [Samuel Morse], Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835).
40. Quoted in Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (Columbia University Press, 1918), 283.
41. Sally Sayward Wood, Julia and the Illuminated Baron: The Critical Edition (Library of Early Maine Literature, 2012 [1800]), 59.
42. Ibid., 207. Charles Brockden Brown, the preeminent novelist of the early republic, also drew on the Illuminati legend in his fiction, though he avoided the I-word. For more on Brown’s interest in the Illuminati story and its influence on his writing, see Charles C. Bradshaw, “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” The New England Quarterly 76, no. 3 (September 2003).
43. The Declaration also accused the English of having “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages”—another alliance between the Enemy Above and the Enemy Outside.
44. Quoted in Harry Ammon, “The Richmond Junto, 1800–1824,” The Virginia Magazine of Histo
ry and Biography 61, no. 4 (October 1953).
45. Quoted in James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 40–41.
46. Joseph Tufts, An Oration, Pronounced Before the Federal Republicans of Charlestown, Massachusetts, July 4, 1814, Being the Anniversary of American Independence (Samuel Etheridge, 1814), 9.
47. Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 44.
48. From the trial records: “[T]he prisoner . . . came to his house at dusk or dark where he was cutting wood, and asked him if he would join a free-mason society; this deponent replied no, because all free-masons would go to hell; upon this, the prisoner said it was not a free-mason society he wished him to join, but a society to fight the white people for their freedom.” Quoted in Corey D. B. Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press, 2008), 96.
49. The Anti-Masons were the first American political party to hold a nominating convention, assembling in Baltimore in 1831 to select a candidate for the following year’s election. This was, in turn, the first nominating convention to sell out a party’s principles: The nominee selected, former U.S. attorney general William Wirt, was a former Freemason—not an ex-Mason who had turned his back on the secret society but an ex-Mason who didn’t really find the order objectionable at all. In a letter to the convention, Wirt denounced the men who had murdered Morgan but added that “in the quarter of the Union with which I am acquainted,” Masonry included many “intelligent men of high and honourable character” who would never privilege their oaths to the order over “their duties to their God and their country.” William Wirt, letter to the Anti-Masonic Party Convention, September 28, 1831, in Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States, vol. 2, ed. John P. Kennedy (Blanchard and Lea, 1849), 355.
50. John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, vol. 8, ed. Charles Francis Adams (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876), 368.
51. For a scholarly argument that some of those suspicions were justified, see Ronald P. Formisano with Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826–1827,” American Quarterly 29, no. 2 (Summer 1977).
52. Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Freemasonry and Community in the Early Republic: The Case for Antimasonic Anxieties,” American Quarterly 34, no. 5 (Winter 1982).
53. The fear of secret societies resembled many early Americans’ fear of political parties. The fact that people were meeting in order to influence politics was itself seen as suspicious, and critics found it easy to slip from the word faction to junto and then conspiracy.
54. Andrew Jackson and Roger B. Taney, paper read to the cabinet, September 18, 1833, in The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. 5, ed. John Spencer Bassett (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1931), 194.
55. Andrew Jackson, letter to Edward Livingston, June 27, 1834, ibid., 272.
56. Frederick Robinson, An Oration Delivered Before the Trades Union of Boston and Vicinity, on Fort Hill, Boston, on the Fifty-Eighth Anniversary of American Independence (Charles Douglas, 1834), 6, 18.
57. L. Frank Baum, The Sea Fairies (Reilly & Britton, 1911), 104–5.
58. The octopus turns up in Enemy Below and Enemy Outside literature as well—it’s too powerful an image to be limited to just one form of fear. The social forces drawn or described as octopods over the years include capitalism, socialism, landlords, railroads, Harvard, the Pentagon, inflation, monopolies, drugs, Jews, Catholics, Mormons, organized crime, several different countries, several different corporations, and “the system.”
59. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, quoted in Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (University of California Press, 1993), 12.
60. Quoted in William D. Piersen, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 7.
61. William Piersen has suggested that African slave-traders did the same thing, spreading rumors of white cannibalism “to placate new captives by pointing out that their present situation was not so bad when compared to the fate they could suffer among alien masters.” He also cited evidence that white slave-traders applied the same strategy—informing their prisoners that though they weren’t cannibals, the pirates about to attack the ship were, so they had better join in the fight to defend the vessel. Ibid., 8–9.
62. J. L. S. Holloman, quoted in Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 178.
63. Eva Francis Parker, quoted ibid., 184. In another D.C.-based version of the story, the experiments were conducted not in a hospital but at the Smithsonian.
64. Lucille Murdock, quoted ibid., 191.
65. Todd L. Savitt, “The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South,” The Journal of Southern History 48, no. 3 (August 1982).
66. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, 84.
67. James Daniel Tymes, quoted in Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 192.
68. This story has been told in several places; for a good, short primer, read David Zucchino, “Sterilized by North Carolina, She Felt Raped Once More,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2012.
69. Terry Ann Knopf, Rumors, Race, and Riots (Transaction Books, 1975), 143–44.
70. Ibid., 222.
71. Quoted in Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (Free Press, 1997), 117. For a critique of Pipes’s book, see Jesse Walker, “Conspiracy,” The Independent Review, Summer 1998.
72. Register of Debates in Congress, Comprising the Leading Debates and Incidents of the First Session of the Twenty-Third Congress, vol. 10 (Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1173.
73. Register of Debates, May 24, 1834. On the broader subject of suspicious rhetoric in the battle over the bank, see Major L. Wilson, “The ‘Country’ Versus the ‘Court’: A Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,” Journal of the Early Republic 15, no. 4 (Winter 1995).
74. Quoted in Robert Churchill, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2009), 117. Both sides feared the Enemy Below, too. Just as southerners fretted about insurrectionist slave conspiracies, northern Republicans accused propeace Democrats of organizing subversive secret societies. See Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 1984).
Chapter 6: Conspiracies of Angels
1. J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Little, Brown, 1963), 88.
2. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), 70. This edition includes not just the full text of The Secret Destiny of America, originally published in 1944, but also the follow-up book America’s Assignment with Destiny, originally published in 1951.
3. Ibid., 57.
4. Ibid., 187.
5. Ibid., 92, 94.
6. Ibid., 120–21.
7. Quoted in Rob Brezsny, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (Frog Books, 2005), 16.
8. “Fama fraternitatis, or, A Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Laudable Order of the Rosy Cross” (1614), trans. Thomas Vaughan, reprinted as an appendix to Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge, 2003 [1972]), 307.
9. Karl von Eckartshausen, The Clouds upon the Sanctuary, trans. Isabel de Steiger (Book Tree, 2006 [1802]), 16, 27.
10. A neo-Rosicrucian group in eighteenth-century Germany, the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross, became influential for a time, with one member, Friedrich Wilhelm II, ascending to the throne of Prussia. In a clash that must have been made in conspiracy-theory heaven, members of the order played a signif
icant role in the campaign against Weishaupt’s Illuminati. See Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and Its Relationship to the Enlightenment (State University of New York Press, 2011 [1992]).
11. Quoted in Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (State University of New York Press, 1994), 259.
12. Wallace, while serving as secretary of agriculture, persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to add the eye-in-the-pyramid symbol to the country’s currency, thus giving ammo to generations of conspiracists convinced that the Illuminati control the money supply.
13. Quoted in K. Paul Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (State University of New York Press, 1994), 10. The full letter can be read at blavatskyarchives.com/blavatskyhartmann6.htm.
14. Shambhala, which the Theosophists borrowed from a Buddhist legend, inspired Shangri-la, the hidden utopia in the book and movie Lost Horizon. Yes, it also inspired that Three Dog Night song.
15. For a wonderful take on this sort of organization, read Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). The hero of Portis’s satiric novel is introduced to the fictional Gnomon Society by a con man, fails to realize that the contact was a swindle, and guilelessly builds a Gnomon order of his own.
16. H. Spencer Lewis, Rosicrucian Questions & Answers (Book Tree, 2006 [1929]), 63–64.
17. The only portion of the story at the beginning of this chapter that does not appear in those two books involves the Invisible Government of the World. Hall alluded to the Invisible Government in America’s Assignment with Destiny, but he did not speculate about where it is located; that part of the story draws on other Benevolent Conspiracy texts.
18. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America, 44.
19. Even the British occultist Aleister Crowley fell prey to this, despite his antiauthoritarian reputation. Crowley, who had his own alleged encounters with the Secret Chiefs, was a radical individualist in many ways, famously proclaiming, “Every man and every woman is a star” and “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” But he was also able to propose a bizarre plan in which government-appointed experts would “work out, when need arises, the details of the True Will of every individual, and even that of every corporate body whether social or commercial, while a judiciary will arise to determine the equity in the case of apparently conflicting claims.” Quoted in Brian Doherty, “Do What I Wilt,” Reason, February 2001.