The United States of Paranoia (44 page)

12
. The Mohegan leader named Uncas used this tactic repeatedly to get military assistance from the colony of Connecticut. See Drake,
King Philip’s War
, 64–65.

13
. Samuel Gorton, letter to John Winthrop, Jr., September 11, 1675, in
Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society
, 4th ser., vol. 7 (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1865), 628. Lest I give the impression that
every
settler held such beliefs, I should point out that Gorton himself rejected them firmly, writing: “[F]or my own part I feare no such thing” and “People are apt in these dayes to give credit to every flying and false report.”

14
. Samuel Gardner Drake,
The Present State of New-England with Respect to the Indian War
(Dorman Newman, 1833 [1675]), 30.

15
.
Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 1755–1794, with a Selection from His Correspondence
, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (Yale University Press, 1916), 232.

16
. Pedro de Feria, quoted in Fernando Cervantes,
The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain
(Yale University Press, 1997), 35. For a detailed account of this episode, see Kevin Gosner, “Caciques and Conversion: Juan Atonal and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Post-Conquest Chiapas,”
The Americas
49, no. 2 (October 1992).

17
. William Hubbard,
A General History of New England from the Discovery to MDCLXXX
(Massachusetts Historical Society, 1815 [1682]), 26.

18
. William S. Simmons, “Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans’ Perception of Indians,”
The William and Mary Quarterly
, 3rd ser., 38, no. 1 (January 1981).

19
. See Alfred A. Cave, “Indian Shamans and English Witches in Seventeenth-Century New England,”
Essex Institute Historical Collections
, 128 (1992).

20
. Drake,
King Philip’s War
, 70.

21
. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Native Americans,” in
Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia
, vol. 2, ed. Peter Knight (ABC-CLIO, 2003), 523–24. Pasley borrowed the word
superchief
from Russell Bourne,
The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675–1678
(Oxford University Press, 1992), 202. But the identification of the broader pattern was Pasley’s, not Bourne’s.

22
. See Alden T. Vaughan,
New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675
, 3rd ed. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 157–60.

23
. Daniel Wetherell, letter to John Winthrop, Jr., June 30, 1675, in
Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society
, 3rd ser., vol. 10 (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1849), 119.

24
. Daniel Gookin,
An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677
(Kessinger Publishing, 2003 [1677]), 494.

25
. Harvard Charter of 1650, library.harvard.edu/university-archives/using-the-collections/online-resources/charter-of-1650.

26
. Increase Mather,
An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New-England, To hearken to the voice of God in his late and present Dispensations As ever they desire to escape another Judgement, seven times greater than any thing which as yet hath been
(John Foster, 1676), 12.

27
. Ibid., 6.

28
. Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence
, 68.

29
. People who think the space where cultures mix is “wholly foreign,” the political scientist Anne Norton has written, “exhibit the same symptoms: fear of conspiracy and a sense of omnipresent danger.” Anne Norton,
Reflections on Political Identity
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 55. Riffing on Norton, James David Drake noted that the Puritans most eager to exclude Indians from the New England community were the ones who held “the most paranoid fears of attacks from all Indians, regardless of the relationship of those Indians to other English colonists.” Drake,
King Philip’s War
, 78.

30
. William Hand Browne, ed.,
Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1687/8–1693
(Maryland Historical Society, 1890), 77.

31
. It wasn’t the first time Coode had played a role in spreading such rumors. After some Indian raids in 1681, he had helped circulate the story that the natives were attacking the Protestants on behalf of the Catholics. When Coode and company took power in 1689, they stood by those earlier stories, maintaining that the “incursion . . . of the said Northern Indians in the year 1681” had been “conducted into the heart of this Province by French Jesuits.” Ibid., 106.

32
. Quoted in Mary Beth Norton,
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 97. Andros, in turn, blamed his political troubles on a conspiracy of Boston merchants.

33
. Increase Mather,
Early History of New England; Being a Relation of Hostile Passages Between the Indians and European Voyagers and First Settlers: And a Full Narrative of Hostilities, to the Close of the War with the Pequots, in the Year 1637; Also a Detailed Account of the Origin of the War with King Philip
(J. Munsell, 1864 [1677]), 217.

34
. “An Act Against Jesuits and Popish Priests in New York,” passed July 31, 1700.

35
. John Perceval, summarizing a letter from Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe, in
Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of the First Earl of Egmont (Viscount Percival)
, vol. 2 (His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1923), 246.

36
. Quoted in Peter Silver,
Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America
(W. W. Norton, 2009), 98.

37
. Maria Monk,
Awful Disclosures, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed
(privately published, 1836).

38
. Though the Enemy Outside is more likely to turn up in prowar rhetoric, some elements of the story are standbys in antiwar arguments too. The image of the outside world as a hostile wilderness best avoided has an obvious appeal to opponents of military intervention. Though there’s a long tradition of imperialists denouncing the devils outside our borders, there is also John Quincy Adams’s oft-quoted admonition not to go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” And if there have been conspiracy theories, some accurate and some fanciful, about foreign plots to attack Americans, there have also been conspiracy theories, some accurate and some fanciful, in which foreign powers try to draw Americans into their conflicts abroad.

39
. Richard M. Dorson,
American Folklore
, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1977), 18.

40
. Rex Alan Smith,
Moon at Popping Trees: The Tragedy at Wounded Knee and the End of the Indian Wars
(University of Nebraska Press, 1981 [1975]), 98. Smith discusses the limits to Sitting Bull’s real-world authority on pp. 98–100.

41
. Elbridge Streeter Brooks,
The Master of the Strong Hearts: A Story of Custer’s Last Rally
(E. P. Dutton and Co., 1898), 50–52.

42
. This might have been inspired by the Mormon endowment robe, which weapons allegedly could not penetrate.

43
. James McLaughlin, quoted in
Sixtieth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior
(Government Printing Office, 1891), 125.

44
. Quoted in Smith,
Moon at Popping Trees
, 111.

45
. Quoted ibid., 112.

46
. Quoted ibid., 139.

47
. L. Frank Baum,
Our Landlady
, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Bison Books, 1999), 144.

48
. Brooks,
The Master of the Strong Hearts
, 305.

49
. Quoted in David M. Kennedy,
Over Here: The First World War and American Society
, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2004), 68.

50
. Frederick Luebke,
Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I
(Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 255–56.

51
. Committee on Public Information, “Spies and Lies” (1917), reprinted in James R. Mock and Cedric Larson,
Words That Won the War: How the Creel Committee on Public Information Mobilized American Opinion Toward Winning the World War
(Princeton University Press, 1939), 64.

52
. “Stamping Out Treason,”
The Washington Post
, April 12, 1918.

53
. Mock and Larson,
Words That Won the War
, 15–16.

54
. David Ignatius, “The bin Laden Plot to Kill President Obama,”
The Washington Post
, March 12, 2012.

55
. George Michael,
Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 127.

56
. For an extended argument along these lines, see Jason Burke,
Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror
(I. B. Tauris, 2004).

Chapter 3: The Devil Next Door

  1
.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, directed by Don Siegel, screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring, from a novel by Jack Finney, Allied Artists, 1956.

  2
. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), in
Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
, ed. Alfred Kazin (Ballantine Books, 1966), 102.

  3
. Ibid., 108–9.

  4
. Ibid., 110.

  5
. For an extended reading of the story along these lines, see David Levin, “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ ”
American Literature
34, no. 3 (November 1962).

  6
. John Putnam Demos,
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
(Oxford University Press, 1982), 11. The individual cases are listed on pp. 401–9. Demos’s count included six women accused of witchcraft in and near Stamford, Connecticut, in 1692, the same year the Salem witch hunt began. For a detailed discussion of that episode, which followed a rather different course from the Salem trials, see Richard Godbeer,
Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692
(Oxford University Press, 2005).

  7
. I’m relying here on the tally in Mary Beth Norton,
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 3–4.

  8
. Salem Village is now Danvers, Massachusetts. Salem Town became the modern Salem.

  9
. Hugh Trevor-Roper,
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change
(Liberty Fund, 2001 [1967]), 145. This body count, I should note, is not as well documented as the numbers we have for New England.

10
. John Hale, “A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft” (1702), in
Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648–1706
, ed. George Lincoln Burr (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 413.

11
. A few scholars have suggested that Tituba was of African descent, an idea that has also appeared in some literary accounts of the trials. Though I don’t find their arguments convincing, that hardly matters. The important issue for our purposes is what the Puritans believed, not whether they were right to believe it. And the contemporary record, to the extent that it engaged the issue at all, described Tituba as an Indian.

12
. Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” 101.

13
. Ann Putnam, Jr., quoted in
The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692
, vol. 1, ed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (Da Capo Press, 1977), 164.

14
. Cotton Mather,
Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England; From Its First Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698
, vol. 2 (Silas Andrus and Son, 1853 [1702]), 620.

15
. Cotton Mather, “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning” (1693), in Burr,
Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648–1706
, 282–83.

16
. Thomas Newton, quoted in Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(Harvard University Press, 1974), 32.

17
. Chadwick Hansen,
Witchcraft at Salem
(George Braziller, 1969). I think Hansen greatly overstated his case, but it was unquestionably true that some colonists attempted to harness magic for their own ends. In one illuminating pre-Salem deposition, a woman’s healing powers—that is, her skills as a white witch—were offered as evidence that she might be a “destroying witch” as well. Quoted in Samuel G. Drake,
Annals of Witchcraft in New England, and Elsewhere in the United States, from Their First Settlement
(W. E. Woodward, 1869), 281.

18
. Richard Weisman,
Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 121.

19
. Quoted in Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds.,
Salem Witchcraft Papers
, vol. 1, 66.

20
. Quoted in Eve LaPlante,
Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall
(HarperCollins, 2008), 2.

21
. Deodat Lawson, quoted in Charles Upham,
Salem Witchcraft; with An Account of Salem Village, and A History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects
, vol. 2 (Wiggin and Lunt, 1867), 525–26.

22
. Amos Taylor,
A Narrative of the Strange Principles, Conduct and Character of the People Known by the Name of Shakers: Whose Errors Have Spread in Several Parts of North-America, but Are Beginning to Diminish, and Ought to Be Guarded Against
(Isaiah Thomas, 1782), 3.