The United States of Paranoia (47 page)

22
. J. L. De Lolme,
The Constitution of England, or An Account of the English Government
(privately published, 1777), 203. Americans who used the phrase included Richard Henry Lee, who quoted it in a 1787 letter to George Mason; and Samuel Bryan, who invoked it around the same time in an Anti-Federalist essay.

23
. Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,”
The William and Mary Quarterly
, 3rd ser., 39, no. 3 (July 1982).

24
. Quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh,
Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775
(Oxford University Press, 1962), 215–16.

25
. Those reasons are laid out in William M. Hogue, “The Religious Conspiracy Theory of the American Revolution: Anglican Motive,”
Church History
45, no. 3 (September 1976).

26
. Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Washington, April 16, 1784, in
The Portable Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Penguin Books, 1975), 368.

27
. Quoted in Markus Hünemörder,
The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy and Distrust in Early America
(Berghahn Books, 2006), 46.

28
. In case you were wondering: The city in Ohio was named for the Society of the Cincinnati, not the other way around. The group took its name from the Roman dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.

29
. The most extreme advocates of Tory-style hierarchy and privilege—the group that would become the Essex faction of the Massachusetts Federalist Party, derided by Jeffersonians and moderate Federalists alike as a conspiratorial “Essex Junto”—were dissatisfied with the Constitution from the other political direction, arguing that the document was too democratic. Nonetheless, they supported ratification, believing it the best politically realistic option. See David H. Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,”
The William and Mary Quarterly
, 3rd ser., 21, no. 2 (April 1964).

30
. This is not the same argument as Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of the Constitution, which attempted to reduce the framers’ motives to narrow financial self-interest and which has been pretty much refuted.

31
. R. Lamb,
An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War, from Its Commencement to the Year 1783
(Wilkinson & Courtney, 1809), 8.

32
. Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, 151.

33
. Quoted in Marshall Smelser, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,”
The Review of Politics
13, no. 4 (October 1951).

34
. The group was called the German Union and its founder was a theologian named Charles Frederick Bahrdt. It was basically a moneymaking scheme, and it did not last long.

35
. For an argument that Illuminist ideas (as opposed to Illuminist agents taking orders from Adam Weishaupt) influenced revolutionaries in France and elsewhere, see James H. Billington,
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
(Basic Books, 1980), 93–99. Billington notes that one way this influence was transmitted was through conservative conspiracy theories: “As the fears of the Right became the fascination of the Left, Illuminism gained a paradoxical posthumous influence far greater than it had exercised as a living movement.”

36
. John Robison,
Proofs of a Conspiracy
Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies
, 4th ed. (George Forman, 1798), 14.

37
. Jedidiah Morse,
A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present Dangers, and Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the United States of America
(Samuel Etheridge, 1799), 17. The sermon was originally delivered on May 9, 1798.

38
. Ibid., 14.

39
. Ibid., 15–16. Morse’s son Samuel, the cocreator of Morse code and the inventor of an early telegraph, kept the family tradition of conspiracy hunting alive: He wrote a book alleging an Austro-papal plot to put the United States under the thumb of the Hapsburg Empire. See Brutus [Samuel Morse],
Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States
(Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835).

40
. Quoted in Vernon Stauffer,
New England and the Bavarian Illuminati
(Columbia University Press, 1918), 283.

41
. Sally Sayward Wood,
Julia and the Illuminated Baron: The Critical Edition
(Library of Early Maine Literature, 2012 [1800]), 59.

42
. Ibid., 207. Charles Brockden Brown, the preeminent novelist of the early republic, also drew on the Illuminati legend in his fiction, though he avoided the I-word. For more on Brown’s interest in the Illuminati story and its influence on his writing, see Charles C. Bradshaw, “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland
,”
The New England Quarterly
76, no. 3 (September 2003).

43
. The Declaration also accused the English of having “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages”—another alliance between the Enemy Above and the Enemy Outside.

44
. Quoted in Harry Ammon, “The Richmond Junto, 1800–1824,”
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
61, no. 4 (October 1953).

45
. Quoted in James M. Banner, Jr.,
To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 40–41.

46
. Joseph Tufts,
An Oration, Pronounced Before the Federal Republicans of Charlestown, Massachusetts, July 4, 1814, Being the Anniversary of American Independence
(Samuel Etheridge, 1814), 9.

47
. Banner,
To the Hartford Convention
, 44.

48
. From the trial records: “[T]he prisoner . . . came to his house at dusk or dark where he was cutting wood, and asked him if he would join a free-mason society; this deponent replied no, because all free-masons would go to hell; upon this, the prisoner said it was not a free-mason society he wished him to join, but a society to fight the white people for their freedom.” Quoted in Corey D. B. Walker,
A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America
(University of Illinois Press, 2008), 96.

49
. The Anti-Masons were the first American political party to hold a nominating convention, assembling in Baltimore in 1831 to select a candidate for the following year’s election. This was, in turn, the first nominating convention to sell out a party’s principles: The nominee selected, former U.S. attorney general William Wirt, was a former Freemason—not an ex-Mason who had turned his back on the secret society but an ex-Mason who didn’t really find the order objectionable at all. In a letter to the convention, Wirt denounced the men who had murdered Morgan but added that “in the quarter of the Union with which I am acquainted,” Masonry included many “intelligent men of high and honourable character” who would never privilege their oaths to the order over “their duties to their God and their country.” William Wirt, letter to the Anti-Masonic Party Convention, September 28, 1831, in
Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States
, vol. 2, ed. John P. Kennedy (Blanchard and Lea, 1849), 355.

50
. John Quincy Adams,
Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848
, vol. 8, ed. Charles Francis Adams (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876), 368.

51
. For a scholarly argument that some of those suspicions were justified, see Ronald P. Formisano with Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826–1827,”
American Quarterly
29, no. 2 (Summer 1977).

52
. Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Freemasonry and Community in the Early Republic: The Case for Antimasonic Anxieties,”
American Quarterly
34, no. 5 (Winter 1982).

53
. The fear of secret societies resembled many early Americans’ fear of political parties. The fact that people were meeting in order to influence politics was itself seen as suspicious, and critics found it easy to slip from the word
faction
to
junto
and then
conspiracy
.

54
. Andrew Jackson and Roger B. Taney, paper read to the cabinet, September 18, 1833, in
The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson
, vol. 5, ed. John Spencer Bassett (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1931), 194.

55
. Andrew Jackson, letter to Edward Livingston, June 27, 1834, ibid., 272.

56
. Frederick Robinson,
An Oration Delivered Before the Trades Union of Boston and Vicinity, on Fort Hill, Boston, on the Fifty-Eighth Anniversary of American Independence
(Charles Douglas, 1834), 6, 18.

57
. L. Frank Baum,
The Sea Fairies
(Reilly & Britton, 1911), 104–5.

58
. The octopus turns up in Enemy Below and Enemy Outside literature as well—it’s too powerful an image to be limited to just one form of fear. The social forces drawn or described as octopods over the years include capitalism, socialism, landlords, railroads, Harvard, the Pentagon, inflation, monopolies, drugs, Jews, Catholics, Mormons, organized crime, several different countries, several different corporations, and “the system.”

59
. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, quoted in Patricia A. Turner,
I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture
(University of California Press, 1993), 12.

60
. Quoted in William D. Piersen,
Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 7.

61
. William Piersen has suggested that African slave-traders did the same thing, spreading rumors of white cannibalism “to placate new captives by pointing out that their present situation was not so bad when compared to the fate they could suffer among alien masters.” He also cited evidence that white slave-traders applied the same strategy—informing their prisoners that though
they
weren’t cannibals, the pirates about to attack the ship were, so they had better join in the fight to defend the vessel. Ibid., 8–9.

62
. J. L. S. Holloman, quoted in Gladys-Marie Fry,
Night Riders in Black Folk History
(University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 178.

63
. Eva Francis Parker, quoted ibid., 184. In another D.C.-based version of the story, the experiments were conducted not in a hospital but at the Smithsonian.

64
. Lucille Murdock, quoted ibid., 191.

65
. Todd L. Savitt, “The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South,”
The Journal of Southern History
48, no. 3 (August 1982).

66
. Turner,
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
, 84.

67
. James Daniel Tymes, quoted in Fry,
Night Riders in Black Folk History
, 192.

68
. This story has been told in several places; for a good, short primer, read David Zucchino, “Sterilized by North Carolina, She Felt Raped Once More,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 25, 2012.

69
. Terry Ann Knopf,
Rumors, Race, and Riots
(Transaction Books, 1975), 143–44.

70
. Ibid., 222.

71
. Quoted in Daniel Pipes,
Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From
(Free Press, 1997), 117. For a critique of Pipes’s book, see Jesse Walker, “Conspiracy,”
The Independent Review
, Summer 1998.

72
.
Register of Debates in Congress, Comprising the Leading Debates and Incidents of the First Session of the Twenty-Third Congress
, vol. 10 (Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1173.

73
.
Register of Debates
, May 24, 1834. On the broader subject of suspicious rhetoric in the battle over the bank, see Major L. Wilson, “The ‘Country’ Versus the ‘Court’: A Republican Consensus and Party
Debate
in the Ba
nk War,”
Journal of the Early Republic
15, no. 4 (Winter 1995).

74
. Quoted in Robert Churchill,
To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement
(University of Michigan Press, 2009), 117. Both sides feared the Enemy Below, too. Just as southerners fretted about insurrectionist slave conspiracies, northern Republicans accused propeace Democrats of organizing subversive secret societies. See Frank L. Klement,
Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War
(Louisiana State University Press, 1984).

Chapter 6: Conspiracies of Angels

  1
. J. D. Salinger,
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
(Little, Brown, 1963), 88.

  2
. Manly P. Hall,
The Secret Destiny of America
(Jeremy P. Tarcher/
Penguin
, 2008), 70. This edition includes not just the full text of
The Secret Destiny of America
, originally published in 1944, but also the follow-up book
America’s Assignment with Destiny
, originally published in 1951.

  3
. Ibid., 57.

  4
. Ibid., 187.

  5
. Ibid., 92, 94.

  6
. Ibid., 120–21.

  7
. Quoted in Rob Brezsny,
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
(Frog Books, 2005), 16.