The United States of Paranoia (17 page)

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.

The face of the Enemy Above is usually either a large
institution
—a hospital, a government, a powerful corporation—or a secret society. In black America, the secret society that has traditionally loomed largest is the Ku Klux Klan. The real-world Klan hasn’t been a unified organization since the 1940s, and it was only barely united then. But the Klan of legend is a mighty empire that includes everyone who has ever described himself as a part of the KKK, plus quite a few who never did. As late as 1993, when the Klan had been reduced to a bundle of tiny squabbling splinter groups, the folklorist Patricia Turner found that many blacks were willing to blame pretty much any racially tinged crime on Klansmen. Various businesses have been rumored to be affiliated with the Klan, notably Church’s Chicken, said not just to be a Klan front but to be preparing its food in a way that will make black men sterile. “When I asked one black female student if she didn’t think the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would have tried to stop the Klan from doctoring the chicken,” Turner recalls, “she speculated that, on the contrary, the KKK would have had no problem gaining control of the FDA.”
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The rumor about Church’s is absurd, and so are some of the other conspiracy tales that have floated through black America. (In one version of the night doctor story, manholes were “a design, you see, to capture persons,” opening and swallowing pedestrians at night.)
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But even ridiculous stories can be rooted in real experiences. Just as the night doctor legend reflected actual medical misbehavior, the chicken legend took hold in a world where, not so many decades before, many states had sterilized low-income blacks without their consent, sometimes without even informing them. (In one infamous case, doctors cauterized a mother’s fallopian tubes after she gave birth. She didn’t discover till years later that the extra procedure had been performed.)
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North Carolina social workers were still strong-arming African Americans into vasectomies or tubal ligations as recently as 1973; Virginia and California didn’t repeal their sterilization laws until 1979. True stories of abuse make the false tales more tenacious.

The race riots of the sixties are especially interesting in this light, because they allow us to compare the paranoid stories told by blacks and by whites. “During a riot in Boston in June 1967,” the media scholar Terry Ann Knopf noted, “local black self-help organizations distributed mimeographed ‘survival kits’ throughout the community. The kits came complete with instructions for preserving water and keeping rations, all in the belief that the police were determined to ‘exterminate’ the black community.”
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Notice the mutual reinforcement at work here. A Bircher would look at those handouts and see a plot to inflame suspicions of the police, just as Gary Allen and Sam Yorty were warning people. A Black Panther would listen to Mayor Yorty downplaying reports of police brutality and hear a clumsy attempt to conceal the war on the ghetto.

Knopf and her colleagues compiled a collection of riot rumors from the 1960s and early ’70s, with a total of 181 from black sources and 178 from whites. Thirty-three of the black rumors and 48 of the white ones involved conspiracies. “Whites were extremely afraid that the existing order was in danger,” Knopf noted, so “various plots were attributed to blacks involving plans to destroy downtown business areas; ransack suburban shopping centers; invade white neighborhoods; do away with vital services (electricity, gas[,] telephone, etc.); even burn entire cities.” Blacks, by contrast, centered their attention on brutal, insulting, or otherwise unjust behavior. Before a Pennsylvania riot, for example, “black students were angered by a report that some young whites had gathered together to form an organization called the ANA—Anti-Negro Association.” And in Louisville, when the militant leader Stokely Carmichael didn’t appear at a rally, “Many blacks were convinced that whites were preventing his airplane from landing, an unverified rumor which helped set off a disturbance.”
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Two groups glare at each other, frightened and bewildered, one seeing the Enemy Above, the other the Enemy Below. A city is consumed by flames.

Enemy Above theories are the underground literature of power: lurid, often distorted, and inevitable as long as imperious institutions exist. The larger, more powerful, and more opaque those institutions are, the more common Enemy Above stories will be.

These are the most disreputable sort of conspiracy narrative, since they challenge rather than reinforce the social order. In the media, the phrase “conspiracy theory” is often used as though it refers
only
to Enemy Above stories. You needn’t even invoke a conspiracy to earn the conspiracy-theorist tag, as long as you entertain suspicions about the people in charge. In one book about political paranoia, the neoconservative historian Daniel Pipes essentially treated any critique of U.S. power as an allegation of conspiracy. At one point he took a swipe at a foreign policy analyst for writing that “today’s proponents of global leadership envision a role for the United States that resembles that of a global hegemon.”
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For Pipes, this mild comment constituted a conspiracy theory.

Yet the same mainstream that maligns Enemy Above stories sometimes trumpets them too. It is a long-standing American tradition to imagine yourself as the scrappy rebel and your enemies as the establishment. Hence the standoff between the Jeffersonians and the Federalists, each side casting the other as an aristocratic foe of freedom. Something similar happened while Andrew Jackson was denouncing the Second Bank as a monster: His critics argued that his war on the bank was a pretext to concentrate more power in the presidency. Jackson, declared Senator Henry Clay, sought “a power which was greater than that possessed by any king in Europe.”
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(Some of his critics preferred to blame a conspiracy of courtiers—in Clay’s phrase, “a deep and dark, and irresponsible cabal composed of individuals lean, lank, lantern-jawed, hollow-hearted, and with empty purses, who, to the exclusion of his best and wisest friends, have surrounded and taken possession of the President.”
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Like King George before him, King Andrew was viewed alternately as an ally or a dupe of a shadow government.)

The same thing happened during the Civil War. Republican rhetoric about the Slave Power, with its theme that whites too could be reduced to bondage, certainly owed a lot to the idea of the Enemy Above. Yet northern Democrats drew on the same tradition when they condemned the draft, the suspension of habeas corpus, and military interference in Maryland and Kentucky elections, seeing not just encroachments on American freedoms but a systematic plot to erase the country’s liberties. “What is the purpose of this?” the
Chicago Times
asked. “Can any man doubt it for a moment? Look at Maryland and Kentucky. Let your readers contemplate in those states the despotism to which all the states are hastening.”
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In the twenty-first century, rank-and-file Republicans attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaire George Soros while rank-and-file Democrats attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaires Charles and David Koch. We’re told that only the fringe believes in the Enemy Above, yet tales of his machinations have become a routine part of partisan politics. The Devil’s cleverest trick is to persuade you that hardly anyone believes he exists.

6

CONSPIRACIES OF ANGELS

I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

—J. D. Salinger
1

H
ere’s the story:

An ancient brotherhood of wise men got here first. They knew they were losing ground to savagery as selfishness and superstition spread through the Old World, so they hatched a plan to build an enlightened empire in the West, a new nation devoted to the pursuit of the common good.

For centuries the adepts had been founding esoteric orders—Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Knights of the Holy Grail—and inserting their agents into the halls of power. “All the petty princes of Europe in medieval times had their Merlins, wise old men who in many instances were the actual rulers of the State,” all “bound together, in the secret society of unknown philosophers, moving the crowns of Europe as on a mighty chessboard.”
2
Behind those alchemists and cabalists and seers and spies stood the Order of the Quest, the grandest secret society of them all, keeping the flame of wisdom alive and preparing the world for “a perfected social order . . . the government of the philosopher-king.”
3
Periodically they published hints about their designs. Plato’s
Republic
, Thomas More’s
Utopia
, Francis Bacon’s
The New Atlantis
: All anticipated the coming society.

But dark forces were at work as well, undermining the adepts’ efforts. Ambassadors of the order had visited the Americas in the golden age of Greece, and their successors had kept in contact with the secret societies that governed the Indians. Now they cast their eyes westward again, aware that they needed space to create their perfect state and from there to build the world commonwealth of their dreams.

So the order guided Christopher Columbus, sending a mysterious counselor to join him on his first voyage to America. The explorers who charted the new land were also assisted by initiates of the order or sometimes were members of the secret society themselves; they “operated from a master plan and were agents of
re
discovery rather than discoveries.”
4
Francis Bacon, a leader of the order, directed the English settlement of America. “Word was passed about through secret channels that here in the Western Hemisphere was the promised land of the future,” and settlers from secret societies ensured that America was “conditioned for its destiny—leadership in a free world.”
5
When the time was right, the order’s agents unleashed the revolution against England. Some of the initiates who battled the British were well known, among them Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. But more often they acted anonymously, dropping in at just the right moment to influence events and then disappearing into the void.

That’s what happened on July 4, 1776, when the patriots assembled in Philadelphia began to have doubts about signing the Declaration of Independence, knowing full well that if their fight for freedom was unsuccessful they could be executed for treason. There was fearful talk of scaffolds, of axes, of the gibbet. Suddenly a stranger started speaking.

“Gibbet!” he cried:

They may stretch our necks on all the gibbets in the land; they may turn every rock into a scaffold; every tree into a gallows; every home into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can never die! . . . Sign that parchment! Sign, if the next moment the gibbet’s rope is about your neck! Sign, if the next minute this hall rings with the clash of falling axes! Sign, by all your hopes in life or death, as men, as husbands, as fathers, brothers, sign your names to the parchment, or be accursed forever! Sign, and not only for yourselves, but for all ages, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the bible of the rights of man forever. . . .

Methinks I see the recording Angel come trembling up to that throne and speak his dread message. “Father, the old world is baptized in blood. Father, look with one glance of Thine eternal eye, and behold evermore that terrible sight, man trodden beneath the oppressor’s feet, nations lost in blood, murder, and superstition, walking hand in hand over the graves of the victims, and not a single voice of hope to man!”

He stands there, the Angel, trembling with the record of human guilt. But hark! The voice of God speaks from out the awful cloud: “Let there be light again! Tell my people, the poor and oppressed, to go out from the old world, from oppression and blood, and build My altar in the new.”
6

When the speech was over, the delegates rushed to sign the Declaration. But when they turned to thank the speaker for his stirring words, the mysterious man had disappeared. No one knew who he was, and no one knew how he had entered and departed the locked and guarded room.

The order steered us through the Civil War and the fight against fascism, and it is still at work today, guiding the world from behind the scenes: an Invisible Government whose powers can only be described as magic. Some say this Great White Brotherhood is headquartered here on Earth—in the mountains of Tibet, in the barren Gobi Desert, or perhaps beneath the slopes of Mount Shasta in California. Others say it has a more ethereal home. Any stranger you encounter might be a member of the order, subtly intervening in our lives, perhaps keeping a protective eye on you.

Or that’s the story, anyway.

It isn’t always terrifying to see yourself as a pawn in a grand design. Sometimes it’s a comfort. People say, “This was meant to be” or “Everything happens for a reason” or “It’s all God’s plan” to soothe you, not to scare you. It can be calming to think that all the setbacks in your life are more than mistakes and bad breaks, that a divine purpose will someday reveal itself.

It’s just a small step from there to a worldview where the grand design is executed not by God Himself but by a Benevolent Conspiracy. In some tellings the cabal is in league with the Lord, and in some it takes the Almighty’s place. But it’s the same essential story: a small group of highly evolved beings intervening to improve our earthly affairs. It is an especially advanced example of
pronoia
, a condition the Grateful Dead lyricist and Internet guru John Perry Barlow defines as “the suspicion the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.”
7

As with many stories one hears in the United States, the tale has Old World roots. In Kassel, Germany, in 1614, an anonymous pamphlet titled “Fama fraternitatis” appeared. A follow-up booklet surfaced a year later, and a third, not necessarily from the same source, was published a year after that. The series told the story of the Rosicrucians, an invisible college of alchemists and philosophers working quietly to bring on a new age of enlightenment. The order’s founder, Christian Rosenkreuz, was said to have gone two centuries before on a pilgrimage to the East, where adepts imparted occult wisdom to their visitor. He then allegedly lived to the ripe age of 106; and when his tomb was opened twelve decades after his death, his body was supposedly discovered “whole and unconsumed.”
8
The pamphlets were an evocative mix of home-brewed legends and hints of great secrets, and they set the European intelligentsia aflame. Many readers tried to find and join the Rosicrucians, while others waited eagerly for the fraternity to reveal itself.

It never did, and most historians doubt that the order existed. With the horrors of the witch hunts and the Thirty Years’ War, stories started circulating that the Rosicrucians had retreated from Europe, regrouping in India or Tibet. Other rumors linked the Rosicrucians to Freemasonry. In 1795, another variation on the archetype appeared in the work of Karl von Eckartshausen, a German mystic who has the distinction of having joined the actual historical Bavarian Illuminati, though he later left the group. Eckartshausen described “a hidden assembly, a society of the Elect,” that operated not as a secret society but as an “interior illuminated circle” that preceded all secret societies.
9

In both Europe and the United States, various visionaries and/or con men claimed to be initiates of the Rosy Cross.
10
The Utica-bred medium P. B. Randolph, who advertised himself as a Rosicrucian miracle worker in the years following the Civil War, later wrote frankly about why he had worn that particular mask. Randolph, who was part black, knew that his ancestry hindered his “usefulness and influence,” so he “called myself The Rosicrucian, and gave my thought to the world as Rosicrucian thought; and lo! the world greeted with loud applause what it supposed had its origin and birth elsewhere than in the soul of P. B. Randolph.”
11

All those tales and trends combined in the mythos of the Russian-born globe-trotting occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Blavatsky moved to New York at age forty-two, in 1873, and founded the Theosophical Society there two years later. America was in the throes of the spiritualism fad, and Theosophy drew on that milieu, along with Eastern philosophy, Rosicrucianism, a peculiar take on evolution, the science fiction novels of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and much else. The resulting worldview was influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting figures ranging from L. Frank Baum to Vice President Henry Wallace,
12
and its ideas continue to echo in the New Age philosophies of today. One of Theosophy’s core doctrines held that Blavatsky had spent seven years in Tibet, where she had encountered a powerful lodge of adepts hidden in the Himalayas.

Theosophists described this Great White Brotherhood as the Inner Government of the World. Its members were said to have amazing powers, including the ability to materialize and dematerialize wherever they pleased. Blavatsky claimed that they continued to communicate with her through supernatural means, including letters that appeared unexpectedly in her cabinet. As Theosophy evolved, the list of the Brotherhood’s members came to include the Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Plato, Cagliostro, and the mysterious Count of Saint Germain, an eighteenth-century musician and magician who enjoyed fanning rumors that he was immortal. Blavatsky’s followers decided that he really
was
immortal, and various Theosophist writers claimed that the identities he had adopted over the years included St. Alban, Christian Rosenkreuz, and both Roger and Francis Bacon.

Skeptical investigators would later show that it was extremely unlikely that Blavatsky had ever had a seven-year stay in Tibet, let alone encountered any Secret Chiefs there. It is possible, as the historian K. Paul Johnson has suggested, that Blavatsky’s stories of the Ascended Masters were inspired by real people around the world whose identities she wanted to conceal—normal flesh-and-blood human beings, not astral immortals. There certainly are signs that she regretted the fantastic mythology that grew up around her stories. “I saw with terror and anger the false track they were all pursuing,” she wrote to an associate in 1886. “The ‘Masters,’ as all thought, must be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. . . . The idea that the Masters were mortal men, limited even in their great powers, never crossed anyone’s mind, though they wrote this themselves repeatedly.”
13

In any event, Hidden Masters based in a remote location became an evergreen theme for mystics. Theosophical lore identified the head of the lodge as the Lord of the World, an eternally sixteen-year-old superman who lives in the Gobi Desert, in Shambhala, the secret city of the Gods.
14
In Britain, one of the best-known occult groups of the day, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, claimed to have contacted the Secret Chiefs (and soon splintered as different members announced their own lines to the divine). In the United States, various esotericists published their own contact stories. Alice Bailey referred to the Benevolent Conspiracy as the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom. Max Heindel called them the Elder Brothers of the Rosicrucian Order; when he launched a group called the Rosicrucian Fellowship, he said he was spreading their teachings.
15

H. Spencer Lewis—the founder of another fauxsicrucian operation, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis—found a way to lay claim to a popular occultist while denigrating the group she had founded when he wrote that avatars “under the observation of the Great White Brotherhood” were allowed “to organize movements of their own befitting the time and development of the people with whom they were dealing.” Blavatsky, he suggested, was one of those avatars, and her “writings and teachings will remain as a monument to her contact with the Brotherhood.” But her organization had “accomplished its definite mission, and there seemed to be no need for its continuance under the name and form used by her.”
16
Message: Please join Lewis’s order instead.

The Theosophists themselves soldiered on, not at all convinced that their mission was complete. A Los Angeles Theosophist, Manly Palmer Hall, gave the legend of the Benevolent Conspiracy its most thoroughly American form. In two books,
The Secret Destiny of America
(1944) and
America’s Assignment with Destiny
(1951), he laid out the story I outlined at the beginning of this chapter: that the United States had been designed to be an enlightened empire and was being guided to this destiny by an ancient Order of the Quest. Columbus’s counselor, Bacon’s grand design, the speech that swayed the signers of the Declaration of Independence—Hall covered them all.
17

Hall’s books oscillate between paeans to liberty and suggestions that the ideal form of government is an enlightened oligarchy; he repeatedly calls for a “world democracy,” but the reader is left wondering just how democratic, let alone free, his world state would really be. He doesn’t help matters with his interpretation of Plato’s
Republic
, in which Hall describes rule by a wise elite as a “philosophic democracy,” since “all men had the right to become wise through self-discipline and self-improvement.”
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