The United States of Paranoia (8 page)

A rich example appears in the best-selling
Female Life Among the Mormons
(1855), which presented itself as the memoir of a woman hypnotized into marrying a Mormon elder. (A more accurate description was offered by the historian David Brion Davis, who called the book a “ridiculous fantasy.”)
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At one point in the narrative the author asks another ex-Mormon how Joseph Smith had managed to master Franz Mesmer’s mind-control method before “its general circulation throughout the country.” Her informant, Anna Bradish, replies that “Smith obtained his information, and learned all the strokes, and passes, and manipulations, from a German peddler, who, notwithstanding his reduced circumstances, was a man of distinguished intellect and extensive erudition. Smith paid him handsomely, and the German promised to keep the secret.” What’s more, “You, madam, were subjected to its influence. So have ten thousand others been, who never dreamed of it. Those most expert in it, are generally sent out to preach among unbelievers.”
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The church started promoting polygamy privately in 1843, and it acknowledged the practice to the outside world in 1852. That heightened the sexual dimension of
Female Life Among the Mormons
and stories like it. In the popular imagination, Mormon men were out to add Gentile women to their harems, by hypnotic seduction if possible and by force if necessary. Like Shaker celibacy, plural marriage was perceived as a threat to the traditional family, and the anxieties it inspired unleashed a flood of fantasies about the other sorts of sexual nonconformity that the Latter-day Saints might be up to. The excommunicated Mormon John C. Bennett spread stories of a “secret lodge of women” who serviced church officials, going into great detail about the orders within the lodge and the duties and depravations identified with each. The Consecrates of the Cloister, for example, was an order “composed of females, whether married or unmarried, who, by an express grant and gift of God, through his Prophet the Holy Joe, are set apart and consecrated to the use and benefit of particular individuals, as
secret, spiritual wives
. They are the
Saints of the Black Veil
, and are accounted the special favorites of Heaven.”
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As with the anti-Catholic tracts, there’s a lot of projection involved here. In Davis’s words, readers “took pleasure in imagining the variety of sexual experiences supposedly available to their enemies. By picturing themselves exposed to similar temptations, they assumed they could know how priests and Mormons actually sinned.” Bennett, he added, had been “expelled from the Church as a result of his flagrant sexual immorality.”
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When Mormons clustered in a single location, the fear that they might steal Christian bodies and souls through kidnapping and conversion was joined by another anxiety: the fear that Mormons would steal American institutions by voting en masse, installing a government that would replace the republic with a theocracy. And since you couldn’t expect such a subversive menace to limit its efforts to the ballot box, another story began to take hold: that the church commanded an army of assassins, dubbed the Danites, to inflict its will by force.

The historical Danites were a vigilante group created in 1838 to compel dissenting Mormons to exit the area and, subsequently, to protect Missouri Mormons from their neighbors’ attacks. It has never been proved that the organization lasted longer than a year, but it became a central part of anti-Mormon rhetoric for decades afterward, its reputation growing ever more fearsome with time. When Brigham Young set up a group of minutemen in Utah, saying that they were to battle rustlers and hostile Indians and the like, the group was quickly nicknamed the Destroying Angels, conflated with the old Danites, and feared as a secret squad of hit men. In 1859, the frontiersman John Young Nelson could casually (and inaccurately) assume, on meeting a Mormon painted like an Indian, that the latter was one of the church’s “fanatical renegade-destroying angels, whose mission was to kill every white man not belonging to the sect, and particularly those who were apostates.”
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Those whose fears of the Danites were grounded in more than mere rumors could point to a memoir written by the outlaw William “Wild Bill” Hickman after he was arrested for murder in 1871. Hickman, who had been excommunicated from the Latter-day Saints a few years earlier, claimed to have carried out several murders on Young’s orders. There’s no consensus on how much of what he wrote was accurate and how much was blame shifting or braggadocio, but all of it was incorporated into the anti-Mormon lore.

To see the hold that lore had on the American imagination, read Mark Twain’s 1872 account of an evening supposedly spent with a Mormon assassin, a tale calculated to puncture the minutemen’s image as a sinister elite. “ ‘Destroying Angels,’ as I understand it, are Latter-day Saints who are set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens,” Twain wrote in
Roughing It
. “I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one’s house I had my shudder all ready. But alas for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive old blackguard! He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have
any
kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders?”
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The Mormons might not have maintained an order of covert killers, but they did build their own institutions: schools, temples, courts of arbitration, an elaborate private welfare system, a network of cooperatives. Those were the sorts of voluntary organizations that Americans often celebrate, but they appeared to be entwined with civil government in predominantly Mormon areas out west, with the same figures dominating both church and state. Sometimes they were more influential than the formal institutions of government.

This stoked still more fears of subversion, and it led to some stunning restrictions on the Saints’ civil liberties. In 1884, the Idaho territory made it illegal for Latter-day Saints to vote, hold office, or serve on a jury. Legislators invoked the standard anti-Mormon conspiracy theories, but lurking behind those exotic charges were more ordinary resentments: opposition to plural marriage, jealousy of the Mormon co-ops’ economic clout,
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and, above all, Republicans’ eagerness to disenfranchise a group that in Idaho voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats.

There were fears as well that Mormon practices—and Mormon weapons—were finding their way to the local Native Americans.
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Meanwhile, in the face of Gentile harassment, many Mormons started to identify with the Indians. But that had its limits, as one group of natives learned on September 11, 1857.

It was the middle of the conflict called the Utah War. The federal government thought the Latter-day Saints were plotting a rebellion. The Mormons thought the feds, who had dispatched more than 2,500 troops to the region, were plotting to eliminate them. In that tense atmosphere of mutual distrust, a group of Mormons—it is not known whether they were following Brigham Young’s wishes or acting on their own—combined forces with a group of Paiute Indians (or, by some accounts, simply posed as Paiutes) and slaughtered around 120 unarmed emigrants passing through Mountain Meadows, Utah, including about 50 children. Afterward the Mormon hierarchy tried to scapegoat the natives, claiming that the assault had been committed by the Paiutes acting alone. Evidently, a church that identified with the persecuted red man wasn’t above appealing to anti-Indian prejudice.

By that time Mormon conspiracies were a staple of popular culture. Dozens of lurid novels depicted Danite assassinations, church-sanctioned white slavery, and other alleged LDS crimes. On the other side of the Atlantic, the first Sherlock Holmes story, Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Study in Scarlet
(1887), featured a Danite plot to force a woman into an unwanted marriage. The most famous American yarn about Mormon conspirators is probably Zane Grey’s
Riders of the Purple Sage
(1912), a book often credited with setting the mold of the formula western.

Grey’s story is set in the devilish wilderness: the “wild country”
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of Utah in 1871, in a Mormon town afflicted by rustlers. The book is built around a captivity plot, with Mormons and outlaws in the captor role filled elsewhere by Indians and white-slavery rings. Indeed, the tale contains several captives. There is Milly Erne, an eastern woman abducted and forced to marry a Mormon elder; there is Fay, a little Gentile girl the Mormons kidnap near the end of the novel; there is Milly’s daughter, Bess, raised in captivity by the rustlers (who are secretly in cahoots with the church elders). But the book’s most important captivity involves no imprisonment at all. Jane Withersteen has been enmeshed in Mormon society since her birth. In theory, she occupies a high place in the community: Her father founded the settlement, and she is one of the town’s wealthiest citizens. But she refuses to marry an elder who wants her, and the consequences of that decision demonstrate just how little autonomy she has.

Since a Mormon hierarchy controls every community institution, this may sound like an Enemy Above story. And indeed there are elements of that here. From Withersteen’s perspective, the conspiracy represents the eldritch forces of social control: “Above her hovered the shadow of grim, hidden, secret power.”
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But the conspiracy doesn’t just lurk
above
her. Like Goodman Brown at the witches’ Sabbath, Withersteen soon finds traces of the secret power at every level of the social hierarchy; it isn’t an authority bearing down on her so much as an all-enveloping system that’s almost impossible to escape. Her friends and servants inform on her, and her ranch is haunted by spies and assassins. Everyone in her Mormon community is a potential betrayer. Lassiter—Milly Erne’s brother, who rode west seeking revenge on the cabal that captured his sister—tells Withersteen just how few people she can trust:

“ . . . An’, Jane,” he went on, almost in a whisper, “I reckon it’d be a good idea for us to talk low. You’re spied on here by your women.”

“Lassiter!” she whispered in turn. “That’s hard to believe. My women love me.”

“What of that?” he asked. “Of course they love you. But they’re Mormon women.” . . .

There came a time when no words passed between Jane and her women. Silently they went about their household duties, and secretly they went about the underhand work to which they had been
bidden
. . . . They spied and listened; they received and sent secret messengers; and they stole Jane’s books and records, and finally the papers that were deeds of her possessions. Through it all they were silent, rapt in a kind of trance. Then one by one, without leave or explanation or farewell, they left Withersteen House, and never returned.
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Even apparently empty spaces are haunted. “There’s no single move of yours, except when you’re hid in your house, that ain’t seen by sharp eyes,” Lassiter tells Withersteen. “The cottonwood grove’s full of creepin’, crawlin’ men. Like Indians in the grass. When you rode, which wasn’t often lately, the sage was full of sneakin’ men. At night they crawl under your windows into the court, an’ I reckon into the house.”
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Worse yet: Because Withersteen occupies such an important position in the community, she herself is implicated in its conspiracies. Milly Erne was forced to marry Jane’s father, and even after she grows fond of Lassiter she refuses to tell him the identity of the man he’s after. She may recognize some of the rot at the core of her world, but she also feels compelled to defend it. Indeed, though her affection for Lassiter is real—and eventually blossoms into a sincere romance—she also befriends and flirts with him for the express purpose of dissuading him from carrying out his revenge. Jane isn’t just confined by the cabal that rules the region; she’s a volunteer agent of the same conspiracy that harasses her.

So
Riders
isn’t ultimately about Gentiles being seized and enslaved by Mormons. That
happens
in the story, but Withersteen, born Mormon, faces the same pressure—not to join the church but to submit to it sexually by becoming an elder’s wife. The woman-snatching conspiracy is willing to take Jane by force if it has to. “Your body’s to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into the world,” Lassiter tells her. “But your soul? . . . What do they care for your soul?”
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Forty-four years after Grey’s book appeared, the question was easily answered: When the enemy takes our bodies, it will dispose of our souls altogether. Or at least that’s the premise in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, a low-budget 1956 film that was released to little fanfare but would eventually establish itself as one of the most enduring artifacts of its era.

The story begins with Dr. Miles Bennell returning home from a conference to Santa Mira, California. Almost immediately, he encounters two people convinced that close relatives—an uncle, a mother—are imposters. Bennell’s secretary tells him that his office has been crowded with people desperate to see him, but when he arrives at work the patients have canceled their appointments. Miles and his girlfriend, Becky, run into Danny Kauffman, the local psychiatrist. He tells them that a mass hysteria has hit the town: A dozen people have told him the same story about imposters. It’s “a strange neurosis, evidently contagious,” he says.

A shadow does seem to have fallen over Santa Mira. Family members don’t trust one another. Formerly convivial public places have been deserted. A restaurant has had to lay off its house band and replace it with an emotionless invader: a jukebox. Eventually we learn that those patients weren’t neurotic at all: Extraterrestrial seeds have fallen to Earth, where they are growing into enormous pods with the power to adopt the form and engorge the minds of the creatures near them—including, as it happens, Danny Kauffman. “There’s no pain,” the doctor tells Miles after his alien identity is revealed. “Suddenly, while you’re asleep, they’ll absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.” Your replacement may have your memories, but its personality will be only a facsimile: Under the skin, everyone will be identical.