The United States of Paranoia (43 page)

NOTES

Chapter 1: The Paranoid Style
Is
American Politics

  1
. William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas,
The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs
(Knopf, 1928), 572.

  2
. “Case of Richard Lawrence,”
Niles’ Register
, February 14, 1835.

  3
. Quoted in Edwin A. Miles, “Andrew Jackson and Senator George Poindexter,”
The Journal of Southern History
24, no. 1 (February 1958).

  4
. See Richard C. Rohrs, “Partisan Politics and the Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson,”
Journal of the Early Republic
1, no. 2 (Summer 1981).

  5
. John Smith Dye,
The Adder’s Den; or the Secrets of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America
(privately published, 1864), 29.

  6
. Ibid., 94.

  7
. On the medical mistreatment of William Henry Harrison, see Will Englund, “Remember the Flu of ’41,”
The National Journal
, October 10, 2009.

  8
. Naturally, Dye’s revised book blamed Lincoln’s murder on the same culprits. Dye’s son, Sergeant Joseph M. Dye, wound up testifying as a witness in the trial that followed the Lincoln assassination, claiming to have seen Booth and his confederates conferring outside Ford’s Theatre.

  9
. “New Books,”
The New York Times
, October 8, 1864; “Poisoning Presidents,”
Chicago Tribune
, June 28, 1866.

10
. Favorable reviews from the
Philadelphia Daily Telegraph
, the
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
, the
Philadelphia Daily Press
, the
Harrisburg Daily Telegraph
, the Trenton
Daily State Gazette
,
The New York Daily Tribune
, the
Easton Express
, and
The New York Evening Express
are reprinted in John Smith Dye,
Life and Public Services of Gen. U.S. Grant: The Nation’s Choice for President in 1868
, 10th ed. (Samuel Loag, 1868), 93–96.

11
. David Wylie, letter to Abraham Lincoln, January 25, 1861, in
The Lincoln Mailbag: America Writes to the President, 1861–1865
, ed. Harold Holzer (Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 4.

12
. A Maine Country Girl, letter to Abraham Lincoln, 1860, memory.loc.gov/mss/mal/maltext/rtf_orig/mal012f.rtf.

13
. See George Duffield,
The Nation’s Wail
(Advertiser and Tribune Print, 1865), 10–11; William Goodwin,
A Discourse on the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, April 14, 1865
(David B. Moseley, 1865), 9. Beecher’s article is quoted in John Smith Dye,
History of the Plots and Crimes of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America
(privately published, 1866), 305.

14
. Quoted in David O. Stewart,
Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy
(Simon & Schuster, 2009), 101.

15
. “By the Bullet and the Bowl,”
New-York Tribune
, May 16, 1868.

16
. Russel B. Nye, “The Slave Power Conspiracy: 1830–1860,”
Science & Society
10, no. 3 (Summer 1946).

17
. Abraham Lincoln, “Draft of a Speech” (1858), in
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858
, ed. Don E. Fahrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), 488.

18
. There is, for example, this elaborate metaphor for the policies that allowed slavery to extend westward:

We cannot absolutely
know
that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in—in
such
a case we find it impossible not to
believe
that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.

      Abraham Lincoln, “ ‘House Divided’ Speech” (1858), ibid., 431.

19
. Henry Wilson,
The Death of Slavery Is the Life of the Nation: Speech of Hon. Henry Wilson (of Massachusetts,) in the Senate, March 28, 1864. On the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution Prohibiting Slavery Within the United States
(H. Polkinhorn, 1864), 8.

20
. The article originated as a lecture delivered at Oxford in November 1963, just a few days before the assassination of John F. Kennedy; it was then published in the November 1964
Harper’s
. A revised version appeared in Richard Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
(Harvard University Press, 1965). Unless otherwise noted, my quotes are drawn from the 1965 version of the essay.

21
. Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
, 5, 7.

22
. That is, the
Harper’s
version.

23
. Thomas Hargrove, “Third of Americans Suspect 9-11 Government Conspiracy,” Scripps Howard News Service, August 1, 2006.

24
. “John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Leaves a Legacy of Suspicion,” ABC News press release, November 16, 2003.

25
. Frank Newport, “What If Government Really Listened to the People?” Gallup Poll, October 15, 1997. As this book went to press, Public Policy Polling released a survey asking Americans about a wide variety of conspiracy theories. The results showed a smaller but still substantial portion of the public—51 percent—believing that a conspiracy larger than Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the
Kennedy
assassination, with 24 percent unsure. Just 11 percent believed that the U.S. government knowingly allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen, with 11 percent unsure. These changes from the earlier polls could be a product of a greater distance from the events being discussed. (The anger that led people to blame 9/11 on Washington, for instance, may have cooled somewhat since George W. Bush left office.) It is also possible that the different numbers reflect different methodologies. People may, for example, be less inclined to embrace JFK and 9/11 theories when they are proposed alongside such obvious kook-bait questions as “Do you believe Paul
McCartney
actually died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike so that the Beatles could continue, or not?” and “Do you believe that shape-
shifting
reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power to manipulate our societies, or not?” For the full results, see Public Policy Polling, “Democrats and Republicans Differ on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs,” April 2, 2013, publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf.

26
. Monica Crowley,
Nixon in Winter: His Final Revelations About Diplomacy, Watergate, and Life Out of the Arena
(Random House, 1998), 309.

27
. Webb Hubbell,
Friends in High Places: Our Journey from Little Rock to Washington, D.C.
(William Morrow, 1997), 282. Hubbell insisted that Clinton “was dead serious.”

28
. Stanley Cohen,
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
, 3rd ed. (Psychology Press, 2002), 1.

29
. Erich Goode, e-mail to the author, November 9, 2001.

30
. Cohen,
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
, 47.

31
. Clifford Griffith Roe,
The Girl Who Disappeared
(World’s Purity Federation, 1914), 200.

32
. For a comparison between the Bureau’s role in stoking fears of vice rings during the white-slavery panic and its role in stoking fears of Communist conspiracies after the First World War, see Regin Schmidt,
Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States
(Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 83–86.

33
. Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
, 9.

34
. Quoted in Norman Pollack,
The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought
(Harvard University Press, 1962), 129.

35
. “What Does It Mean?”
Winfield Daily Courier
, October 4, 1888.

36
. “Clinched!”
Winfield Daily Courier
, October 18, 1888.

37
. Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
, 32–33. Hofstadter here is elaborating on an argument in an earlier essay: David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
, September 1960.

38
. Walter Reuther, Victor Reuther, and Joseph Rauh, “The Radical Right in America Today,” December 19, 1961.

39
. Rick Perlstein,
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
(Hill and Wang, 2001), 157.

40
. Ibid., 149.

41
. David Frum, “What Is Going On at Fox News?” March 16, 2009, web.archive.org/web/20100317185437/http://www.frumforum.com/ what-is-going-on-at-fox-news.

42
. David Graeber,
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
(Prickly Paradigms Press, 2004), 25–26.

43
. Ibid., 27.

44
. Sam Smith, “America’s Extremist Center,”
The Progressive Review
, July 1995.

45
. As I was writing my manuscript, another book that treats conspiracy theories as a modern mythology appeared. I enjoyed it, though its approach was ultimately rather different from mine. See Robert Guffney,
Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form
(TrineDay, 2012).

46
. The term comes from the Czech Communist Jan Kozak, who used it to describe how his party came to power. For an influential example of the idea being used in a Birchite context, see Gary Allen with Larry Abraham,
None Dare Call It Conspiracy
(Concord Press, 1972), 113–27.

47
. “Brief lesson for paranoiacs: setting your open-ended conspiracy metaphors loose upon the world, they become (like anything) eligible for manifold repurposing. Free your mind and an ass may follow.” Jonathan Lethem,
They Live
(Soft Skull Press, 2010), 43.

48
. Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
, 3–4.

49
.
Fact
, September–October 1964.

50
. Hadley Cantril,
The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic
(Transaction Publishers, 2005 [1940]), 3, 47.

51
. Michael J. Socolow, “The Hyped Panic over ‘War of the Worlds,’ ”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, October 24, 2008. Socolow also described Cantril’s methodological problems in detail, showing why the numbers in
The Invasion from Mars
are doubtful.

52
. W. Joseph Campbell,
Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism
(University of California Press, 2010), 36.

53
. Walter Lippmann, “The Modern Malady” (1938), in
The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy
, ed. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare (Harvard University Press, 1963), 174–75.

54
. Socolow, “The Hyped Panic over ‘War of the Worlds.’ ”

Chapter 2: The Devil in the Wilderness

  1
. Michael Paul Rogin,
Ronald Reagan: The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology
(University of California Press, 1987), 50.

  2
. Joseph Mede, letter to William Twisse, March 23, 1635, quoted in
Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society
, 2nd ser., vol. 6 (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1815), 680–81.

  3
. 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. 1 (Silas Andrus and Son, 1853 [1702]), 41.

  4
. Cotton Mather,
The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England
(John Russell Smith, 1862 [1693]), 63.

  5
. William Hubbard,
A Narrative of the Indian Wars in New England
(William Fessenden, 1814 [1677]), 323.

  6
. Cotton Mather,
Magnalia Christi Americana
, vol. 2 (Silas Andrus and Son, 1853 [1702]), 623.

  7
. Richard Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 94.

  8
. Mather,
Magnalia Christi Americana
, vol. 2, 42.

  9
. Increase Mather,
Relation of the Troubles Which Have Happened in New England by Reason of the Indians There
(Kessinger Publishing, 2003 [1677]), 74.

10
. James David Drake,
King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 70.

11
. For a discussion of the questions left open about the physical evidence, see Yasuhide Kawashima,
Igniting King Philip’s War: The John Sassamon Murder Trial
(University Press of Kansas, 2001), 88–100.