The United States of Paranoia (3 page)

Because these are tales of masks and puppeteers and events that are not what they initially seem, the cabals can shift their shapes over time. Plotters at the bottom of the social hierarchy are suddenly discovered to be manipulated by plotters at the top; or the plotters at the top turn out to be agents of a foreign conspiracy; or, conversely, it’s the foreign conspirators who are controlled by plotters at home. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society, which had attracted notoriety by accusing eminent Americans of being agents of international communism, changed course and started arguing that international communism was controlled by powerful U.S. capitalists. The society also suggested that black and student protesters in the United Sates were pawns of the same cabal, a setup the Birchers described as “pressure from above and pressure from below.”
46
And those shifts took place within the worldview of a single organization. Conspiracy tales can change even more dramatically when a story leaks from one social group to another. Different people adopt and adapt these myths for their own needs, keeping the scaffolding of a story line in place while changing the content.
47

There are few pure examples of those five core myths. But there are prototypical tales that tell us a lot about how each category functions. In the first half of the book, we will watch those stories take hold in early American history, and we will see some of the ways they have echoed through the centuries that followed. In the second half, we’ll move from the deep end of history into the more recent past, watching those primal tales in action as Americans react to events from Watergate to Waco to today. Throughout the book, we will also see the myths manifest themselves in stories that do not pretend to be true—in fiction, film, television, songs, comics, games—and watch as those overtly imaginary tales influence accounts that are supposed to be accurate. We will also observe the rise of an ironic style of American paranoia, a mind-set that is less interested in believing conspiracy theories than in playing with them.

But before we do any of that, I should make three things clear, both to prevent misunderstandings and to distinguish my project from some of the other conspiracy books that are out there.

First:
I’m not out to espouse or debunk any particular conspiracy theories
. It would be absurd to deny that conspiracies can be real. Spies, terrorists, and mafias all exist. Alger Hiss really did engage in espionage for the Soviet Union. The Central Intelligence Agency really did plan a series of coups and assassinations. At the very moment that you’re reading this, someone somewhere is probably trying to bribe a politician. The world is filled with plots both petty and grand, though never as enormous as the ancient cabals described in the most baroque conspiracy literature.

It will sometimes be obvious, as with John Smith Dye’s yarn about the plan to poison James Buchanan, that I think a conspiracy story is untrue. There will also be times, particularly in chapter 7, when I discuss conspiracy stories that clearly
were
true. Often a theory will have elements of truth and elements that are more fanciful. But this is ultimately a history of the things people believe, not an assessment of whether those beliefs are accurate. This book has nothing to say about who killed the Kennedys or what UFOs might be. It has plenty to say about the stories we tell about assassins and aliens.

Second:
This book isn’t exhaustive
. Every significant event in U.S. history has inspired at least one conspiracy theory, and plenty of insignificant events have done the same. I will describe a lot of them, but it would be impossible to cover them all. Still, if I’ve done my job, you will not simply come away from this book having learned about the stories I’ve told. You’ll come away with a tool kit that will help you make sense of the stories I
didn’t
tell, including the yarns that have yet to emerge.

Similarly, I will generally ignore the political paranoia found in the rest of the world, though I will occasionally cover a foreign story if it has had an influence on these shores. I do not believe that the United States is unusually paranoid in comparison with other countries, and I’m sure a fine book could be written comparing and contrasting the conspiracy theories that flourish in America with the tales told elsewhere. But this is not that book.

Finally:
When I say
paranoia
, I’m not making a psychiatric diagnosis
. I hope it’s obvious that I’m using the word
paranoia
colloquially, not clinically. But it’s worth stressing the point, because there’s a long history of people using psychiatric terms to stigmatize political positions they oppose. I wish a better word than
paranoia
were available, but I don’t think such a term exists. (
Conspiracism
comes close, but it doesn’t quite cut it, since political paranoia can take the form of a dread that is broader than the fear of a cabal.)

To his credit, Hofstadter insisted that he had “neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics,” adding that “the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
48
But you still can come away from his article with the sense that large swaths of the American past have just been put on the psychoanalyst’s couch. And not every writer in his tradition has been as careful with his caveats as Hofstadter was. The same fall that
Harper’s
published “The Paranoid Style,” with its opening declaration that “the Goldwater movement” showed “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority,”
Fact
magazine announced that “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!”
49
Naturally, those irresponsible diagnoses from afar included the claim that the candidate had “a paranoid personality.”

Like Hofstadter, I’m not limiting my scope to certifiable lunatics. Unlike Hofstadter, I’m not limiting my scope to minority movements either. By the time this book is over, I should hope it will be clear that when I say virtually everyone is capable of paranoid thinking, I really do mean virtually everyone, including you, me, and the founding fathers. As the sixties scare about the radical Right demonstrates, it is even possible to be paranoid about paranoids.

And to illustrate that last possibility, I’ll tell one more story before we plunge into those primal myths.

On October 30, 1938, at 8
P.M.
, the CBS radio network transmitted “The War of the Worlds,” a special Halloween edition of
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
. The broadcast, directed and narrated by Orson Welles, was based on H. G. Wells’s famous novel about a Martian invasion of Earth, but the action was moved from Victorian England to contemporary New Jersey. The first half of the story jettisoned the usual format of a radio play and adopted a more adventurous form: a live concert interrupted by ever more frightening bulletins. It was and is a brilliant and effective drama, but the broadcast is famous today for reasons that go well beyond its artistic quality.

You might think you know this story. In popular memory, hordes of listeners mistook a science fiction play for an actual alien invasion, setting off a mass panic. That’s the tale told in one of the most frequently cited accounts of the evening, a 1940 study by the social psychologist Hadley Cantril. “For a few horrible hours,” Cantril wrote, “people from Maine to California thought that hideous monsters armed with death rays were destroying all armed resistance sent against them; that there was simply no escape from danger; that the end of the world was near. . . . Long before the broadcast had ended, people all over the United States were praying, crying, fleeing frantically to escape death from the Martians. Some ran to rescue loved ones. Others telephoned farewells or warnings, hurried to inform neighbors, sought information from newspapers or radio stations, summoned ambulances and police cars.” At least six million people heard the broadcast, Cantril claimed, and “at least a million of them were frightened or disturbed.”
50

The truth was more mundane but also more interesting. There were indeed listeners who, apparently missing the initial announcement that the story was fiction, took the show at face value and believed a real invasion was under way. It is not clear, though, that they were any more common than the people today who mistake satires in
The Onion
for real newspaper reports. Cantril’s numbers are dubious, and the people interviewed in his book were not a representative sample of the population. “Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the broadcast,” the media scholar Michael Socolow noted. “Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry. . . . Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn’t handle the load, but it appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for
Life
magazine.”
51

Of the people who
did
mistake the fictional news bulletins for real reports, a portion were under the impression that the invaders were not extraterrestrials but Germans, a less implausible scenario. Even the spikes in telephone calls didn’t necessarily represent public panic. The press critic W. Joseph Campbell has pointed out that the calls could be “an altogether
rational
response of people who neither panicked nor became hysterical, but sought confirmation or clarification from external sources generally known to be reliable.” Campbell added that the call volume must also have included “people who telephoned friends and relatives to talk about the unusual and clever program they had just heard.”
52

If Welles’s broadcast derived some of its impact from Americans’ anxieties about international tensions, the exaggerated reports about the response have persisted because they speak to another set of fears. After the play aired, the prominent political commentator Walter Lippmann took the opportunity to warn against “crowds that drift with all the winds that blow, and are caught up at last in the great hurricanes,” adding that those “masses without roots” and their “volcanic and hysterical energy” are “the chaos in which the new Caesars are born.”
53
As Socolow put it, the legend of the Mars panic “cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists—or incendiary demagogues—could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation.”
54

To
capture consciousness
: what a chilling image. It’s an idea that appears when dissidents warn that our leaders are using the mass media to brainwash us. But you can also find the fear among those leaders themselves, who have a long history of fretting over the influence of any new medium of communication. If Orson Welles was cast as a wizard with the power to cloud men’s minds, his listeners were imagined as a mindless mob easily misled by a master manipulator. The social order is disrupted; riots are sparked from afar.

The “War of the Worlds” story is usually told as a parable about popular hysteria—of a sudden spike in the sort of fear that Hofstadter’s essay decried. But at least as much, it is a parable about elite hysteria—of the antipopulist anxiety that Hofstadter’s essay exemplifies. No history of American paranoia can be complete unless it includes the latter.

2

THE DEVIL IN THE WILDERNESS

Indians were the first people to stand in American history as emblems of disorder, civilized breakdown, and alien control. . . . The series of Red scares that have swept the country since the 1870s have roots in the original red scares.

—Michael Paul Rogin
1

H
ere’s the story:

Satan got here first. He knew he was losing ground to God as the Gospel spread through the Old World, so he “drew a Colony out of some of those barbarous Nations dwelling upon the Northern Ocean” and promised the pagans “a Countrey far better than their own.”
2
Those disciples became the Indians, and with those savages as his servants Satan established an empire in the American wilderness. And there, “like a
dragon
,” the dark lord waited, “keeping a guard upon the spacious and mighty
orchards
of America.”
3

When Christian settlers eventually arrived, they found “a World in every Nook whereof, the devil is encamped,” his “
Bands of Robbers
” ready to menace the European arrivals. The American air was “fill’d with
Fiery flying serpents
,” and there were “incredible Droves of Devils in our way”;
4
hostile Indian tribes were led by “ministers of Satan,” all “actuated by the Angel of the bottomless pit.”
5
The Puritans established their colonies, and they did all they could to keep Satan beyond their walls. But the Devil’s Indians constantly conspired against them.

Some Indians were more than the Devil’s pawns: They were devils in disguise. After one clash with the natives and their French Catholic allies, the influential minister Cotton Mather suggested that some of the shadowy figures firing on his countrymen were not men but “daemons in the shape of armed Indians and Frenchmen.”
6
You thought you were watching a western, but that was just a mask: It was a horror movie all along.

You’re never quite safe from the Enemy Outside, even when you’re at home. And when you
leave
your home, you take your life and soul into your hands. From 1682 onward, the American colonies saw a flood of captivity narratives, printed accounts by settlers who had been held prisoner by the natives. In the archetypal captivity story, as the literary historian Richard Slotkin described it,

a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. . . . In the Indian’s devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian’s “cannibal” Eucharist. To partake of the Indian’s love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.
7

To be un-Englished: to be made alien. The Devil built his New World, Mather said, by “seducing the first inhabitants of America into it.”
8
Given a chance, he would seduce the new Americans as well.

The Puritans were aware of those dangers when John Sassamon arrived in the New England town of Marshfield one December day in 1674. Sassamon was no stranger to the colonists. He was a Christian convert from the Massachuset tribe, and he had served the English as an interpreter. He had even attended Harvard for a spell in the 1650s. But this wasn’t a social call. He had grave news for Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth Colony.

Sassamon had just been to the camp of the Wampanoag leader known as Philip, he told the governor. He had heard something terrible: Philip was plotting to combine his forces with the other tribes in the area and to lead an assault on the English. The colonists were in danger, and so, Sassamon added, was he.

It wasn’t the first time such a story had circulated about Philip. In 1667, some members of his tribe had informed the English that he was plotting an attack. He had defended himself by claiming that their story was itself an Indian conspiracy, aimed at undermining Philip’s power and manipulating the colonists. The Puritan authorities had accepted his explanation that time. They were less trusting in 1671, when they again heard that Philip was planning for war. That time, Philip was forced to surrender his weapons and pay a fine.

But in 1675, Winslow dismissed Sassamon’s story. Increase Mather—Cotton’s father—would later offer an explanation for why the warning had been disregarded: It had come from an Indian, “and one can hardly believe them,” even “when they speak truth.”
9
Sassamon was sent on his way.

It was the last time any Englishman would see him alive. Sassamon disappeared that day, setting off for the village of Namasket but never arriving. On January 29, 1675, his body was found under the ice of Assawompset Pond. The colonists concluded that he had been murdered, noting that his neck had been broken in a way that suggested someone had deliberately twisted it. An Indian witness came forward to swear that he had seen three Wampanoag assassins killing the informer and concealing his body under the ice.

Or that’s the story, anyway.

The allegations in that tale operate on two different scales. At one end you have the mysterious death of John Sassamon, which may well have been a genuine murder committed by a genuine conspiracy. At the other end there is the legend of Satan and the Indians, a story that is larger, more mythic, and to modern eyes offensive and absurd.

This distinction will become familiar as we move through American history. There are conspiracy theories about particular crimes, many of which are plausible and some of which are true, and there are grander visions of long cosmic struggles, which might resonate on a metaphoric level but do not have much empirical grounding. It will always be possible to accept one of the smaller theories while rejecting a larger theory associated with it, and it will usually be possible to do the reverse. Believing that Philip was behind the death of John Sassamon did not require you to believe that Satan was behind the activities of Philip, and believing that Satan was directing Indian conspiracies did not require you to believe in any particular plot by the Indians.

Let’s start with the smaller allegations. In this case, that means starting with uncertainty. To this day, it is unclear whether Sassamon’s death was an accident or an assassination. If it was an assassination, it is unclear whether the three Indians accused of the crime were guilty. If they were guilty, it is unclear whether Philip, who denied all involvement, was a party to the crime. “After years of Philip’s appearing relatively ineffectual in controlling the English,” the historian James David Drake pointed out, “some Wampanoags, especially male youths, undoubtedly would have been tempted to take matters into their own hands.”
10

Today a Kennedy assassination theorist can spend a lifetime poring over autopsy photos of the president’s head wounds. In 1675, Sassamon did not receive an autopsy at all, and no official record of the inquest into his death was made; if you have questions about, say, the condition of his broken neck, you’re out of luck.
11
Meanwhile, the prosecution’s star witness, a Christian Indian, owed money to the three men he fingered as the culprits—a fact leading some historians, though hardly all, to doubt his testimony.

Nor is it clear what to make of the plot that Sassamon allegedly uncovered at Philip’s camp. Was he telling the truth about what he had heard, or was he spreading false reports for his own reasons? Sassamon was a former aide to Philip who had established a power base of his own, and even before his mission to Marshfield some of the Wampanoag considered him disloyal and deceitful. And it was not unprecedented for an Indian to extract assistance from the English by dishonestly accusing other natives of plots against the colonists.
12

A reasonable person can read the surviving evidence and conclude that John Sassamon was probably the victim of a conspiracy. Another reasonable person can read the same evidence and conclude that he probably wasn’t. In 1675, a New England jury concluded that he was. The alleged assassins were executed. Within three days there were rumors of Philip’s men taking up arms, and within three weeks the Wampanoag were battling settlers in the town of Swansea. It was the beginning of King Philip’s War, one of the bloodiest chapters in American history—a war more lethal, in proportion to population, than any other conflict involving either the English colonies or the independent United States.

In wartime, the fear of conspiracy grew still stronger. On September 11, a Rhode Island settler relayed a rumor that “all the Indians were in combination and confederacie to exterpate and root out the English.”
13
This was surely untrue, given that many tribes, having their own differences with the Wampanoag, took the colonists’ side in the war. But with such suspicions we have started our transit out of the territory of ordinary empirical claims and into the realm of cultural myth, where the competing interests of real-world Indians are obscured by the image of “all the Indians.”

It’s just a short jump from there to that larger scale of cosmic conflict. At one point in the war, one New England writer claimed that the Indian enemy, by “worshipping the Devil,” had been able to conjure “a most violent Storm of Wind and Rain, the like was never known before.”
14
The vestiges of such folk beliefs persisted for longer than you might expect. Nearly a century later, the Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles—a cofounder of Brown University and later the president of Yale—casually included this detail in a description of Philip’s attack on the town of Bridgewater: “[T]he Devil appeared in the Shape of a Bear walking on his 2 hind feet; the Indians all followed him & drew off. The Indians said if the Appearance had been a Deer they would have destroyed the whole Town & all the English.”
15

The idea that Indians were Devil worshippers was common among the settlers, and not just in the English colonies. In sixteenth-century Chiapas, ruled by Spain, when the local bishop learned that some of the area’s Indians had maintained elements of their old religion, he construed the worshippers as a clandestine coven of witches, writing that they were “giving cult to the Devil and plotting against our Christian religion.”
16
(The secret sect’s beliefs, he added, resembled those of the Spanish heretics known as the
Alumbrados
, or Illuminati.) The notion that Satan had brought the Indians to America was advanced by the English theologian Joseph Mede, and in New England it was repeated by two of the most important figures in Puritan politics: William Hubbard, who found “the greatest probability of truth”
17
in Mede’s account; and Cotton Mather, whose history of New England included his own version of the story.

Not everyone agreed. Some settlers even thought that the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel, giving them godly rather than demonic origins. But that relatively benign theory still made the mistake of looking to the legends of the Old World to explain the people of the New. Europeans, having landed on strange shores, viewed what they found through the lenses of the worldviews they imported, and that sometimes led to deep misunderstandings of the cultures they encountered. The New England Indians’ tales of a Creator were often seen, the anthropologist William Simmons wrote, “as mistaken, confused, and desiccated vestiges of the Christian God.” Other spirits were believed to be the Devil, and powwows were perceived as Satanic ceremonies.
18
Some colonists managed to mistake puberty rites for ritual child sacrifice.
19

Such cultural projection wasn’t limited to the religious realm. The settlers tended to imagine their own social structures among the natives, mistaking decentralized networks for centralized states, loose alliances for empires, an influential Indian for a grand conspirator. The fighting that broke out in 1675 is called “King Philip’s War,” but Philip was actually a
sachem
, not a king; the Europeans had no exact counterpart of that position, and they didn’t always understand that the person who held it did not have anything akin to absolute authority in his own village, let alone outside it. Because colonists “feared organized Indian conspiracies,” Drake argued, they “probably attributed greater unity to the Wampanoags than the circumstances warranted. The label ‘King Philip’s War’ suggests an organization and structure for the conflict that is unsupported by evidence.” Philip the purported puppeteer “had quite possibly lost control by 1675,” Drake added. And even if he really was behind Sassamon’s death, “much of what ensued over the next fourteen months was out of his control.”
20
The war itself dragged on in some places for a year after Philip died.

When the English exaggerated Philip’s power, they were enacting another familiar pattern, one that the historian Jeffrey Pasley has called “the myth of the superchief.” From the first English colony at Roanoke to the closing of the frontier, Pasley wrote, “serious or widespread Indian resistance was usually attributed by Europeans and later chroniclers to the machinations of some preternaturally brilliant, all-powerful” leader. Often, “a widespread conflict was blamed on someone who was really only a major figure in some critical early encounter, or promoted himself as the primary conspirator in a later treaty with the white authorities.”
21

But even imaginary cabals can have real effects. In the early 1640s, in the wake of the Pequot War, dubious rumors of Indian plots helped inspire the creation of the New England Confederation, the first union of English colonies in the New World. The resulting regime remained in place for four decades.
22
And while King Philip’s War raged, the fear of a vast Indian conspiracy—in one colonist’s words, a “universall Combination of the Indians”
23
—had dreadful consequences for those natives who thought they had joined the colonists’ community. In August 1675, the Massachusetts Council confined all Christian natives to “praying towns,” fourteen villages of Indian converts that had been set up over the previous two and a half decades. In October, the government rounded up at least five hundred Christian Indians and interned them on Deer Island in Boston Harbor.