The United States of Paranoia (14 page)

Alleged leftist conspiracies evolved in the other direction. America’s first Red Scare began with the brief reign of the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871. It gradually grew as the depression set off labor unrest at home, including much of the activity attributed to the Mollies, and it peaked with the railroad strike that swept several states in 1877.
46
The strikers were imagined as a classic Enemy Below, but they were frequently tied to an Enemy Outside as well. After the Tompkins Square Riot of 1874, in which New York police beat thousands of demonstrators who had gathered without a permit, the
New York Herald
did not merely blame the rally on “dangerous conspirators against society.” The paper suggested that the protesters had received “the material aid to carry on these nefarious projects” from “the booty of the plundered churches of Paris,” the Commune’s tendrils apparently extending into the United States three years after the French revolutionaries had been defeated.
47
After the Russian Revolution, the focus shifted further. The popular image of the domestic Communist enemy looked less like a union organizer and more like a spy, and the spy in turn was less likely to be imagined as an immigrant. The Red foe was now conceived as an imperial Enemy Outside allied with a subversive Enemy Within.

But the older narrative wasn’t forgotten. As in the antebellum days, the black underclass could be cast as the beast below. Sometimes its supposed plots were small-scale affairs. During World War II, black “Bump Clubs” were rumored to be organizing covert carnivals of aggression, specially designated days on which black women would deliberately bump into white women who were shopping. “Because of the tensions of the war,” one study of racial rumors later reported, “both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police departments felt it necessary to investigate these white beliefs.” Not surprisingly, they didn’t find any evidence that the tales were true.
48

Other black threats that haunted the white imagination were much larger. And in the absence of John Murrell and John Brown, new outside agitators were tapped to fill their shoes.

In 1919,
The New York Times
blamed race riots in Chicago and Washington on an organized campaign of “Bolshevist
agitation
. . . among the negroes,” even though the violence in both cities had been launched by whites against blacks, not the other way around.
49
In 1943, Texas Congressman Martin Dies reacted to a race riot in Detroit by suggesting that Japanese Americans released from internment camps had made their way to Michigan and fomented the disorder. Meanwhile, across the South, blacks were rumored to be covertly aligned with the Japanese, perhaps via a secret organization called the Black Dragon Society, or with the Germans, perhaps via a secret organization called the Swastika Club. “Hitler has told the Negroes he will give them the South for their help,” one informant told the sociologist Howard Odum, who collected rumors in the southern states during World War II. “Hitler will make the white people slaves and the Negroes the leaders,” declared another. One person claimed that black churches were “receiving Nazi propaganda. They can arise and attack the whites whenever they want.”
50

By the 1960s, the Axis powers were no longer in a position to be charged with kindling racial violence. But the Communists were still available.

On August 11, 1965, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, the California Highway Patrol pulled over a young black man named Marquette Frye on suspicion of drunk driving. A brawl broke out between the cops and some of the locals, and the fighting grew worse when a rumor radiated through the crowd that the police had beaten a pregnant woman. Soon Watts was engulfed in a full-scale, five-day riot. Residents burned entire blocks, fired guns, hurled bricks, looted stores. It was the first of many riots that would shake America’s cities in the sixties.

While Watts burned, rumors circulated that the violence had been planned by street gangs, Communists, the Nation of Islam, or some other ghetto menace. In 1965, unlike in 1741, some people in positions of authority tried to tamp down the fears: In December the governor’s commission on the riot rejected the idea that there had been “outside leadership or pre-established plans for the rioting.”
51
Two years later, nonetheless, a widely distributed tract described Watts as a subversive “Plan to Burn Los Angeles.”

The pamphlet, which had originally appeared as an article in the John Birch Society journal
American Opinion
, claimed that the riot had been “a rehearsal for a nationwide revolution.”
52
According to the author, Gary Allen, the

board of revolutionary strategy which planned, engineered, and instigated the Watts Rebellion was composed of some forty to fifty Negroes sent by the Communists in the Los Angeles area from all over the United States. Included in the group were Black Muslims, Black Nationalists, representatives from the paramilitary Deacons of Defense, the Communist Revolutionary Action Movement (R.A.M.), and professionals from other such militant and Marxist groups. These men are not hoodlums or criminals in the ordinary sense, but are drawn from among an intellectual elite of the Negro community. . . . This small revolutionary group, which is referred to in Watts and by the Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department simply as “The Organization,” has three common denominators among its members: high intelligence, hatred of “The Man” (Caucasians), and a disciplined commitment to the interests of the International Communist Conspiracy.

This curious coalition of Muslims and Marxists had picked Watts, Allen wrote, because blacks were actually rather well off there: “[I]f Watts could be exploded they could do it anywhere else in America.” So they had flooded the area with propaganda, most notably a “publicity campaign rivaling the Advertising Council’s promotion of Smokey the Bear” aimed at “the construction of the myth of
police brutality
.” With that meme installed, the conspiracy’s agents had been able to spread the rumors that had set off the riot, which the mesmerized locals embraced uncritically: “The denizens of the area had been conditioned by the years of prior propaganda to accept such fairy tales without question.”

The Organization had incited teenagers to throw bottles and burn cars, Allen continued, and over the next few days had been seen “directing the chaos [while] wearing red armbands and using electric megaphones.” They had made a special effort to loot and burn liquor stores (“keeping the mob intoxicated so it could be more easily led”), supermarkets (so residents would “suffer a lack of food” and blame the authorities), pawnshops (“to acquire large supplies of firearms”), and department stores (so the Organization could get more “guns, ammunition, merchandise, and money”). Gullible outsiders might have assumed the looting was unorganized, but Allen assured us that “as much as 90 percent” of the stolen guns and money found its way to the Organization, with Organization snipers covering Organization looters as they stole the goods, which they would use “NEXT TIME.”

When NEXT TIME comes, Allen warned, the Organization will begin with a mass assassination of police officers. Then it’ll launch the campaign it calls “Burn Los Angeles, Burn.” It’ll start fires in the oil fields near the harbor and the foothills that surround the city; then it’ll set the Civic Center ablaze and put a torch to the Wilshire neighborhood. After that, “ ‘The Organization’ hopes to herd its ‘ghetto’ mobs into Beverly Hills.” As simultaneous riots break out in San Diego, Long Beach, Compton, Pasadena, Bakersfield, Fresno, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and Sacramento, the National Guard will be unable to contain all the revolts at once. The plotters hope that whites will be roused to “invade Negro neighborhoods in retaliation,” thus forcing “the ninety percent of the Negroes who want no part of the revolution” to join the fighting in self-defense.
53

The John Birch Society’s account, unlike the rumors that had seized Manhattan in 1741, came from a group outside the political mainstream. But the mode of thinking that Allen’s article represented wasn’t confined to the outer circles of politics. In 1966, it was possible for an Iowa congressman to go to a Farm Bureau meeting expecting queries about agriculture policy and instead be grilled about the waves of black Chicago rioters that his constituents were convinced were planning to invade the state “on motorcycles.”
54
A year later, when the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence surveyed seven northern cities, 77 percent of the whites interviewed believed that outside agitators were at least partly responsible for the riots.
55

Some officials believed the same thing. LAPD Chief William Parker spouted some of the same theories as Gary Allen (attributing them, as Allen did, to the force’s Red squad). The mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty—a man with more direct authority over Watts than anyone involved with the governor’s commission on the riots—shared Parker’s take on the era’s urban violence. Testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on November 28, 1967, Yorty warned that “subversive elements” liked to “plan incidents that they would hope would spark a riot.” Even when a disturbance was apparently unplanned, he added, the radicals’ “broad propaganda campaign” had created “an atmosphere where a riot may break out spontaneously, in appearance, but actually where there has been a great groundwork laid for it.”
56
For Yorty, as for Allen, the chief aim of the propaganda was to spread the idea of police brutality, a social problem that by Yorty’s account barely existed at all.

Yorty and Parker were not the only influential figures who saw a hidden hand behind the riots of the 1960s. The Peace Officers Research Association of California, one of the country’s biggest law enforcement lobbies, released a film denouncing a pair of black politicians as “the two leading Communists in the state and the instigators of the Watts riot.”
57
The popular evangelist Billy Graham declared that “a small hard core of leftists” were using the fires as “a dress rehearsal for a revolution.”
58
When riots hit San Francisco in 1966, Mayor John Shelley told the press that he suspected “outside agitators” might have been responsible.
59
(According to one of Shelley’s aides, the agitators were rumored to have come from—where else?—Watts.)

And in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson asked his cabinet if the Communists were behind the country’s riots. Attorney General Ramsey Clark replied that there wasn’t any evidence of that, but Johnson wasn’t convinced. “I have a very deep feeling that there is more to that than we see at the moment,” the president commented. He pushed the FBI for evidence that the Reds were behind the turbulence, and when the Bureau came up empty-handed, he just pushed harder.
60

Allen’s article did include one note that was missing from the more mainstream accounts of a riot conspiracy, an especially incendiary echo of the antebellum insurrection scares. When NEXT TIME rolls around, he told us, the conspiracy plans “the shooting on sight of all white men and children.” But not the women. “The women,” Allen explained, “are to be utilized as a reward for the insurrectionists.”

5

PUPPETEERS

. . . a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.

—Boston Town Meeting, 1770
1

H
ere’s the story:

The conspiracy against America began as a conspiracy against England. A faction had formed in the back rooms of the British government, a “junto of courtiers and state-jobbers” who would “sculk behind the king’s authority,”
2
amplifying their influence by bribing legislators and spreading self-serving lies. They aimed not just to enrich themselves but to destroy the freedoms won in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. To that end, this “set of intriguing men,” as the polemicist and philosopher Edmund Burke called them, decided to create a secret government. Now “two systems of administration were to be formed,” Burke wrote: “one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible.”
3
The power of the state would be extended over the country, and the power of the puppet masters would be extended over the state.

They were wildly successful. By the 1760s, the cabal controlled Parliament, and the king was either their ally or their dupe. But the Western Hemisphere was a threat to the would-be tyrants’ schemes: Their subjects could always flee across the Atlantic, leaving the rulers with no one to obey their commands. If the colonies could be subdued, one pamphleteer warned, the plotters “might open their batteries with safety against British Liberty; and
Britons
be made to feel the same oppressive hand of despotic Power.” The alarm was sounded: “a PLAN has been
systematically
laid, and persued by the British
ministry
. . . for enslaving
America
; as the STIRRUP by which they design to
mount
the RED HORSE of TYRANNY and DESPOTISM at home.”
4

Alert Americans found the conspirators’ fingerprints everywhere. In 1762, when Anglican missionaries created a Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge Among the Indians of North America, the colonists understood that the evangelists’ real target wasn’t the natives; it was the rival faiths that had taken root in the colonies. The secret plan, John Adams explained, was to “establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches.”
5
When the Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a tax on printed paper, Joseph Warren of Massachusetts announced that the law had been “designed . . . to force the colonies into a rebellion, and from thence to take occasion to treat them with severity, and, by military power, to reduce them to servitude.”
6
The Boston Massacre of 1770, the Tea Act of 1773, the Intolerable Acts of 1774: All were evidence of the dark design. One isolated act of oppression “may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day,” Thomas Jefferson acknowledged, but America was undergoing “a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers.” And that meant it faced “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”
7

If you were to poll the founding fathers, you would hear slightly different accounts of who was a part of this conspiracy and what exactly the conspirators were up to. But when it came to where the enemy was taking them, they agreed with Jefferson. George Washington wrote that “a regular Systematick Plan” threatened to reduce the colonists to “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”
8
Alexander Hamilton concurred: A “system of slavery,” he said, was being “fabricated against America.”
9
When the revolutionaries formed a Continental Congress, the body denounced the “ministerial plan for enslaving us” and issued a warning to the people of Great Britain: “May not a ministry, with the same armies, enslave you?”
10

When the colonies declared independence, the plot against America was detailed in the new country’s founding document. The Declaration of Independence did not merely describe “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” It argued that those abuses added up to “a design” to bring the colonists “under absolute Despotism.”
11

After the Americans defeated the puppet masters in London, they had to contend with like-minded marionetteers at home. A cabal of nationalists were dissatisfied with the young country’s constitution, called the Articles of Confederation, with its limits on the central government’s powers; they wanted to bring the country under more centralized control, replicating the old order in the now independent United States. They saw an opportunity in 1783, when Congress was unwilling to impose an import duty to fund a standing army. With one hand the cabal encouraged officers to plot a military coup; with the other they counseled the country’s leaders “to keep a
complaining
and
suffering
army within the bounds of moderation” by adopting Alexander Hamilton’s economic agenda.
12

The plot, known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, fell apart after George Washington intervened to stop it, but the nationalists merely moved on to new schemes. The soldiers among them created the Society of the Cincinnati, an aristocratic military order that hoped to establish itself as a parallel government in each state, eventually superseding the elected legislatures. The society had “a fiery, hot ambition and thirst for power,” one patriot warned, and America’s government “will be in a few years as fierce and oppressive an aristocracy as that of Poland or Venice, if the Order of Cincinnati be suffered to take root and spread.”
13

When the conspirators finally struck, though, the blow came from a different direction. In 1787, they persuaded twelve of the thirteen states to hold a constitutional convention. In theory the conclave was merely going to propose some revisions to the Articles, fixing some widely acknowledged defects in the document. Instead, the nationalists “turned a
Convention
into a
Conspiracy
.”
14
Behind closed doors, the delegates ignored their assignment and instead set to work replacing the Articles with an entirely new constitution, one that would concentrate far more power in the national government. Of the fifty-five people participating in the meeting, twenty-one belonged to the Society of the Cincinnati.

The extent of the new design did not become clear until a dissenting delegate, Luther Martin of Maryland, broke the convention’s code of silence and revealed the coming new order in a long address to his state’s House of Delegates. The nationalists, he warned, were “covertly endeavouring to carry into effect what they well knew openly and avowedly could not be accomplished”: a plan “to abolish and annihilate all State governments, and to bring forward one general government, over this extensive continent, of a monarchical nature.” Allying themselves with figures from the larger states, who didn’t share the conspirators’ grand design but did share their interest in reducing the smaller states’ power, the delegates had dreamed up a document that would enact the oppressions the colonists had fought a revolution to prevent: the power to impose direct taxes, the power to raise a standing army, and, in general, “the most complete, most abject system of
slavery
that the wit of man ever devised, under the
pretence
of forming a government for free States.”
15

Other Anti-Federalists, as the foes of the new Constitution were called, praised the speech. A Pennsylvania writer exulted that Martin had braved “the rage of the conspirators” and “laid open the conclave, exposed the dark scene within, developed the mystery of the proceedings, and illustrated the machinations of ambition.”
16
But the exposé wasn’t enough: Running roughshod over normal legal procedures, the conspirators rammed through the Constitution in what amounted to an illegal coup d’état. Revising the Articles was supposed to require the thirteen states’ unanimous consent, but the nationalists invented a rule allowing the document to be replaced entirely with the backing of only nine states. Even so, the Constitution still had to attract public support, so the nationalists appeased the Anti-Federalists by adding a Bill of Rights to the document.

And then those rights fell under attack as the same gang of nationalists, now headquartered in the Federalist Party, took power. Patriotic printers warned the public: A “detestable and nefarious conspiracy” in the government aimed to undo the revolution and make the president a king.
17
The Federalist president began to surround himself with pomp and ceremony, as though the office were more royalist than republican—an insidious scheme “to familiarise us with the forms of monarchy.”
18
Congress began to impose internal taxes, and when frontiersmen protested a particularly onerous whiskey levee, the government smashed their rebellion. John Adams’s administration pushed through the speech-squelching Sedition Act, and under the new law’s powers it rounded up some of the government’s most vocal opponents. Then the original English monster reentered the picture as word spread that Adams planned to “unite his family with the Royal House of Great Britain, the bridegroom to be King of America.”
19

Or that’s the story, anyway.

If you take words such as
design
and
plan
and
plot
as metaphors, a great deal of that story is accurate. As Bernard Bailyn pointed out in a widely cited 1967 study,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, the revolutionary generation tended to see the world as an ongoing conflict between Liberty and Power. “ ‘Power,’ ” he wrote, “to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion.”
20
When revolutionary pamphleteers discussed Power, they liked to personify it: It would creep and encroach, grasp like a hand, and consume like a cancer. That is a literary device, and there is nothing innately conspiracist about it.

But
design
and
plan
and
plot
were not metaphors. They were concrete charges against the colonists’ foes in the ministry, in Parliament, and eventually on the throne. Such charges, the intellectual historian George H. Smith has explained, played “a key part of the Whig theory of revolution: Before revolution can be justified, it must be shown that the injustices of a government are not merely isolated and unrelated events but are part of an overall
plan
to establish despotism.”
21
Combine encroaching Power with a plan, and you get the fourth of our archetypes, the manipulative and privileged Enemy Above: to borrow a phrase from the founders’ day, “the silent, powerful, and ever active conspiracy of those who govern.”
22

The revolutionaries believed that when power is unchecked, the powerful will conspire to expand their wealth and influence. As political philosophy, this is a perfectly defensible position: If power can corrupt, it isn’t unreasonable to expect corruption from powerful people. The theories go wrong only when the accusations leap beyond the evidence—a leap that, alas, was a little too easy to make. At the time it was widely believed, as the historian Gordon Wood has summarized it, that since “no one could ever actually penetrate into the inner hearts of men, true motives had to be discovered indirectly, had to be deduced from actions. That is, the causes had to be inferred from the effects.”
23
Since the effect of British policy was to reduce the colonies’ liberty and self-government, the cause was presumed to be a plot to reduce the colonies’ liberty and self-government. Under modern standards of evidence, that isn’t enough.

But if the story at the beginning of this chapter isn’t always an accurate account of what America was undergoing, it’s a good guide to how a lot of Americans felt. England really was extending its power over the colonies in ways that interfered with the colonists’ autonomy. The Constitution really did concentrate more power in the central government. The Federalists really did have authoritarian inclinations. There is truth in those stories, even when they’re false.

It is undeniable, for example, that some American Anglicans wanted their faith to be the officially established religion. Some of them dreamed of more than that: At one point the president of King’s College, Cambridge, complained to the archbishop of Canterbury that Americans “are nearly rampant in their high notions of liberty,” suggesting that if the colonies’ “charters were demolished and they could be reduced under the management of a wise and good governor and council appointed by the King, I believe they would in a little time grow a good sort of people.”
24
But such skylarking hardly proves that the king’s ministry and the Anglican ministry were in cahoots, and there are good reasons to believe that the state’s attempts to extend its power over the colonies and the church’s attempts to extend its reach among the colonists were pursued independently.
25

Similarly, it’s easy to see why men who had just fought a revolution would be alarmed by the Society of the Cincinnati, with its aristocratic trappings and its tendency to support nationalist policies. Jefferson himself distrusted the order and urged General Washington to “stand on ground separated from it.”
26
But even if the society had, as the
Boston Gazette
put it, “all the formal parade and arrangement of a
separate government
,”
27
it never did
act
as a shadow government; it was a gathering spot and pressure group for the young country’s nationalists, but it was not an instrument through which they governed. It even included a few figures who wound up rejecting the Federalists and joining the party of Jefferson.
28