The United States of Paranoia (10 page)

In Condon’s book, the brainwashed soldier becomes an unwitting assassin, an Enemy Within manipulated by an Enemy Outside who, by the end, is revealed to have been manipulated in turn by an another Enemy Within. Condon clearly despises both the Communists and the McCarthyists, but his book is ultimately more about the evils of manipulation than the evils of any particular gang of manipulators. The author was a former public relations man with a cynical view of his old job, and his book gleefully draws parallels between brainwashing and advertising; at one point his Communists condition their captives “to enjoy all the Coca-Cola they could drink, which was, in actuality, Chinese Army issue tea served in tin cups.”
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Later the chief brainwasher in Korea casually informs an audience that “any of you who are interested in massive negative conditioning” should read “Frederic [
sic
] Wertham’s
The Seduction of the Innocent
, which demonstrates how thousands have been brought to antisocial actions through children’s cartoon books.”
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Condon’s chronology is skewed—Wertham’s book wasn’t published until after the Korean conflict ended—but, as is often the case with conspiracy stories, the impossible connection makes a poetic sort of sense.

While anti-Communists and anti-McCarthyists worried about enforced conformity, the Communists and McCarthyists themselves sometimes felt the same fear. A Soviet-style dictatorship is no place for a nonconformist, but the average American Marxist was deeply aware that he was out of step with society. And though the Red Scare made it harder to express unorthodox opinions, the era’s most infamous scaremonger was, in the words of his biographer Richard Rovere, “closer to the hipster than to the Organization Man.” Senator Joseph McCarthy, Rovere wrote, “denounced the very institutions that are customarily thought of as the fortresses of American conformity: the Army, the Protestant clergy, the press, the two major parties, the civil service. And of course he attacked by his very existence the conformities of U.S. politicians. He never affected the pieties of a Dwight Eisenhower. He made little pretense to religiosity or to any species of moral rectitude. . . . He didn’t want the world to think of him as respectable.”
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Jack Kerouac spoke favorably of McCarthy, and his fellow Beat scribe William Burroughs’s favorite columnist was the pro-McCarthy pundit Westbrook Pegler.
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If it’s odd to see Communists and McCarthyists concerned about conformity, it should be odder still to see the professed enemies of totalitarianism endorsing authoritarian measures. Instead it is common, and it has been for as long as totalitarianism has existed. The historian Leo Ribuffo coined the term
Brown Scare
to describe a wave of countersubversive activity in the 1930s and ’40s, when an understandable fear of Nazis unleashed some much less defensible calls for restrictions on the far Right’s freedoms of speech and assembly. In the process the authorities conflated very different people, leading to surveillance not just of people who sympathized with Germany but of reputable conservatives.
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Like the better-known Red Scares but pointing rightward rather than leftward, a Brown Scare both exaggerates the threats at hand and obscures the distinctions between genuinely violent plotters, radical but peaceful activists, and members of the mainstream.

The Brown Scare of the Roosevelt years didn’t just resemble the Red Scare of the late 1940s and the ’50s; it paved the way for it. In the aftermath of World War II, having expanded its surveillance powers, the FBI didn’t find it hard to shift the focus of its spying from the Right to the Left. Likewise, when Congress voted in 1938 to recharter the House Committee on Un-American Activities, many liberals voted with the ayes because they wanted to investigate fascists. Later, the committee would take the lead in the anti-Left crusades of the Cold War.

Something similar happened with the Alien Registration Act of 1940, better known as the Smith Act, which criminalized advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. Passed with liberal support, the law was quickly used against alleged fascists, most infamously in the great sedition trial of 1944, an ill-fated effort to imprison thirty antiwar writers and speakers as the pawns of a Nazi conspiracy. The law was also used against antiwar Trotskyists, with the Communist Party supporting the prosecution. Just a few years later, the Communists would become the act’s chief victims.

The fear of mass culture had an authoritarian side too. It was shot through with distrust of ordinary people, who were often described in terms that suggested they weren’t fully human. Erich Fromm’s influential
Escape from Freedom
(1941) argued that while some of us had achieved a “genuine individuality,” monopoly capitalism had created a “compulsive conforming” in which “the individual becomes an automaton, loses his self, and yet at the same time consciously conceives of himself as free and subject only to himself.”
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Not every critic of mass culture would go that far, but they all contrasted the individual man with the amorphous mass.

Such ideas don’t
have
to lead to authoritarian conclusions. But if you see the average voter as an automaton, it’s obviously easier to support laws that might otherwise seem like restrictions on his freedom. And if you think he’s being manipulated by occult forces—advertisers, broadcasters, comic book publishers—it’s easier to rationalize those restrictions as an act of liberation.

That brings us to our final entry in the Eisenhower-era body-snatching cycle. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is an episode of
The Twilight Zone
that first aired on March 4, 1960. Written by Rod Serling, the tale is set on the deliberately generic “Maple Street, USA.” It begins with a mysterious roar and a flashing light passing overhead. Then the street loses power. The residents are mystified, particularly since it’s not just a grid failure—cars and portable radios have stopped working too. But a boy feels confident about what’s going on: The outage was caused by monsters from space, he says. After all, that’s how it always happens in science fiction. “He’s been reading too many comic books or seeing too many movies,” a woman declares.
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The boy persists. In the story he read, the aliens sent an advance party who “looked just like humans.” The crowd pooh-poohs the idea, but then someone’s car starts by itself. One of the neighbors notes that its owner didn’t seem concerned with “that thing that flew overhead.” Someone else says, “He always was an oddball. Him and his whole family.” A woman recalls that she’s seen him looking up at the sky at night.

One man tries to stop the panic, mocking the idea of “fifth columnists from the Great Beyond.” It’s no use: The suspicions just start to fall on him too. Then a mysterious entity starts to approach from the distance. “It’s the monster!” cries the boy.

The leader of the mob fires a gun, and the approaching figure falls dead. It turns out to be a neighbor who had gone to the next block to see if the power had failed there too. The lights come on in the shooter’s house, and then the mob turns on him: Maybe
he’s
the monster. Soon everyone is accusing everyone else, and the streets are filled with shouts and gunfire as the camera pulls back on the scene.

The story ends with one of
The Twilight Zone
’s trademark twists. Two aliens have been watching the entire time. “Understand the procedure now?” one asks. “Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then sit back and watch the pattern.”

“And this pattern is always the same?” his companion asks.

“With few variations,” the first invader answers. “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch.” As the aliens return to their spaceship, one describes their plan: “Their world is full of Maple Streets. And we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves.”

Like
It Came from Outer Space
, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” subverts the body-snatchers formula, but it does so in a very different way and with very different results. In
It Came from Outer Space
, extraterrestrials pose as human beings but are not actually plotting against us. In “Monsters,” the aliens
aren’t
posing as human beings but
are
planning to conquer us. “Monsters” is a critique of paranoia, but it is also extremely paranoid; and the paranoid vision it adopts should seem familiar. The setting is suburban. The boy who sets off the hysteria has been reading comic books. The neighbors are quick to shed their individuality and form a mob. And an alien cabal is able to guide their behavior with a few remote signals. In real-world America, sociologists have shown that it’s rare for people to panic or riot in a disaster, particularly in a community with few serious social divisions.
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In “Monsters,” all it takes to induce the collapse of civilization is to arrange a few inexplicable mechanical failures.

Yes, it’s an allegory; you shouldn’t expect
The Twilight Zone
to give you a sociologically sound portrait of a community in distress, any more than you’d expect the pod people in
Body Snatchers
to follow the laws of botany. But it’s an allegory that reflects a particular vision of society: one where people are easily maneuvered from afar, individuals lose their identities in crowds, and mass culture is a stepping-stone to fascism. A vision, in other words, where the pod people are already here.

It was an outlook that the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann managed both to explain and to exemplify when he offered a theory of where scapegoating comes from. When people can’t accept the corruption within themselves, he argued in 1949, they project it instead onto others. So “evil is invariably experienced by mass man as something alien, and the victims of shadow projection are therefore, always and everywhere, the aliens.”
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For Neumann, presumably, the aliens were “mass man,” onto whom he could project his own propensity for scapegoating.

If we’re looking at supposed subversives who can’t easily be distinguished from other Americans, who are rumored to recruit young people into an underground society, who gather in forbidden places and communicate through code, there’s one more subculture we should discuss before leaving the Enemy Within behind. Even its members have been known to describe their lives with metaphors of conspiracy. “Occasionally two homosexuals might meet in the great world,” Gore Vidal wrote in
The City and the Pillar
. “When they did, by a quick glance they acknowledged one another and, like amused conspirators, observed the effect each was having. It was a form of freemasonry.”
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In the early 1940s, people sometimes joked about the “Homintern,” or Homosexual International—a play on the Comintern, a global network of Communist parties commanded from Moscow. It isn’t clear who coined the word, which has been attributed at different times to W. H. Auden, Maurice Bowra, Jocelyn Brooke, Cyril Connolly, Harold Norse, and no doubt others. The joke was probably obvious enough to be invented independently by several different people. But it didn’t take long for the idea to take hold among men and women who didn’t see it as a gag at all.

In 1952, the conservative weekly
Human Events
ran an article by Rose Waldeck headlined “Homosexual International.” Gay people, Waldeck argued, belong “by the very nature of their vice” to “a world-wide conspiracy against society.” This hydra “has spread all over the globe; has penetrated all classes; operates in armies and in prisons; has infiltrated into the press, the movies, and the cabinets; and it all but dominates the arts, literature, theater, music, and TV.” The threat it poses, she added, should be “evident to anyone who had an opportunity to observe the mysterious manner in which homosexuals recognize each other—by a glance, a gesture, an indefinable pitch of voice—and the astonishing understanding which this recognition creates between men who seem to be socially or politically at opposite poles.”
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Fear of homosexuality has always been an element of American culture, but it went into overdrive after World War II, when the country entered a period the historian David K. Johnson has labeled the Lavender Scare. Thanks to a wave of anxiety about sexual predators, twenty-one states and the District of Columbia adopted “sexual psychopath” laws in the decade after the war. These measures were promoted as a way to protect children from sexual assault, but they were almost immediately used in cases involving no one but consenting adults. Meanwhile in Washington, the sex scare was intersecting with the Cold War: When Waldeck warned that “the homosexual international has become a sort of auxiliary of the Communist International,” officials took the idea seriously. Representative Katharine St. George (R–N.Y.), best known today as an early advocate of laws against sexual discrimination, had Waldeck’s article entered into the
Congressional Record
.
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And the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, warned a House committee that “perverts in key positions” formed “a government within a government.” In a darker version of Vidal’s line about a gay freemasonry, Hillenkoetter testified that civil service homosexuals “belong to the lodge, the fraternity. One pervert brings other perverts into an agency, they move from position to position, and advance them usually in the interest of furthering the romance of the moment.”
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Gays and lesbians were presumed to be security risks, though the evidence for that assumption was slight.

The result was a great purge. Bureaucrats informed investigators that they suspected coworkers of being homosexual; interrogators pressured suspects into naming other gays and lesbians in the workforce. Many private companies imitated the crackdown in D.C., particularly when they had government contracts that required security clearances. By at least one measure, the Lavender Scare had a larger effect than the Red Scare. Johnson has estimated that the State Department fired about a thousand employees believed to be homosexuals in the 1950s and ’60s, far more than the number of alleged Reds who got the ax.
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That shouldn’t be surprising: the United States has always been home to far more gays than Communists.