The United States of Paranoia (5 page)

The Ghost Dance, meanwhile, was a messianic movement centered on a Northern Paiute Indian named Wovoka. Around 1869, Wovoka’s father, Tavibo, claimed that the Great Spirit had told him a new world was coming, one where the whites would all be swallowed by the earth, the ghosts of dead Indians would return, and everyone would be immortal. To bring this day, Indians needed to perform a sacred ritual called the Ghost Dance, which Tavibo began to teach.

Tavibo’s movement faded fairly rapidly, and he died when Wovoka was in his teens. His son was adopted by a white family, who renamed him Jack Wilson and gave him a conventional Christian upbringing. He took in other Christian ideas as well, studying the tenets of groups ranging from the Shakers to the Mormons. In the late 1880s, he announced that he too had encountered the Great Spirit, and he started preaching doctrines that drew at least as much on Christianity as they did on traditional Indian spirituality. The son of God would usher in the new age, Wovoka promised. Many of his followers decided that the son of God was Wovoka himself.

There were other differences between Wovoka’s vision and his father’s. Most notably, Wovoka did not teach that the white people were all to die. But he still saw the end of the familiar world and the arrival of a new one, the return of the dead and the immortality of the living. To bring that day, he proclaimed, Indians of all tribes must set aside their differences, give up guns and alcohol and idleness, dance the Ghost Dance, and spread the good news.

Since the new faith was transmitted orally, it mutated and adapted rapidly, absorbing different attributes in different places as different tribes encountered it. Among the recently defeated Sioux, living hungry and resentful lives in the Dakotas, the religion took on a militant flavor. The idea that the whites were to be wiped out crept back into the creed, and the notion took hold that special ghost shirts would make the wearers impervious to bullets.
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All the same, it remained an explicitly nonviolent religion. Indeed, it may well have tamped down the impulse to attack the whites, since it allowed angry Indians to believe that the intruders would soon be removed by supernatural means. Nonetheless, when Sitting Bull endorsed the Ghost Dance he broke a peace pipe in public and announced that he was ready to fight and die for the faith. And with the old chief’s reputation, that was enough for the local Indian agent, Major James McLaughlin, to fire off a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs. After insisting that he was not “an alarmist” and did not expect an “immediate” Indian attack, McLaughlin went on to describe

the excitement existing among the Sitting Bull faction of Indians over the expected Indian millennium, the annihilation of the white men and supremacy of the Indian, which is looked for in the near future and promised by the Indian Medicine men as not later than next spring. . . .

Sitting Bull is high priest and leading apostle of this latest Indian absurdity; in a word, he is the chief mischief-maker at this agency, and if he were not here this craze, so general among the Sioux, would never have gotten a foothold at this agency. Sitting Bull is a man of low cunning, devoid of a single manly principle in his nature or an honorable trait of character, but on the contrary, is capable of instigating and inciting others (those who believe in his powers) to do any amount of mischief. He is a coward and lacks moral courage; he will never lead where there is danger, but is an adept in influencing his ignorant henchmen and followers, and there is no knowing what he may direct them to attempt.
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The McLaughlin letter leaked to the papers, which couldn’t resist the combination of a mysterious ritual and an infamous superchief. The
Chicago Daily Tribune
published a version of the document under the headline “
TO WIPE OUT THE WHITES:
What the Indians Expect of the Coming Messiah.”
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The Philadelphia
Evening Telegraph
fretted that “Army officers may be perfectly well informed of Sitting Bull’s intrigues, but they can do nothing until he deliberately perfects his rascally plans and gets ready to start his young bucks on a raid.”
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The New York Times
announced that “the redskins are dancing in circles,” then quoted a “half-breed” courier as to what such symbolism must mean: “The Sioux never dance that dance except for one purpose, and that is for war.”
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At one point the
Tribune
reported that a battle with the Indians had already left sixty people dead or wounded. In fact the clash had never occurred.

By that time the more nervous whites were begging the government for greater protection, steeling themselves for a fight of their own, or in some cases simply fleeing. More responsible papers attempted to debunk the rumors. (The
Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer
editor L. Frank Baum, later to become famous as the author of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, wrote that “the Indian scare” was “a great injustice” fanned by “sensational newspaper articles.”
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Baum was no friend of the Indians—he would soon call for their extermination—so you can’t accuse the man of special pleading.) But fear carried the day, particularly after President Benjamin Harrison sent the military to suppress the dancing. On December 15, 1890, a botched attempt to arrest Sitting Bull ended with the chief, several of his supporters, and some of the arresting officers dead. Fearing retaliation, hundreds of the Hunkpapa fled. The Seventh Cavalry caught up to them and took them to Wounded Knee Creek on December 28. The soldiers ended up killing between 170 and 190 of the Indians, including at least 18 children. More than two dozen whites died too, largely from friendly fire. And with that the great dancing conspiracy was
eliminated
.

When Elbridge Streeter Brooks’s book describes the death of Sitting Bull, there is no reference to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Wovoka’s religion rates only a passing allusion, when an Indian character mentions that he had caught “the Messiah craze and the ghost-dance fever.” The explanation for the superchief’s death is much simpler: “Sitting Bull had stirred up his followers—Strong Hearts, most of them, you know.”
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Once the Enemy Outside story line was established, it could be applied to all kinds of alleged villains, not just popes and superchiefs. When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, joining the alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary, its battles were fought far away in Europe, but much of the country was seized by a fear that the enemy’s long tentacles had entered the U.S. heartland.

The domestic struggle against the alien octopus was sometimes horrifying, sometimes comic, sometimes a bit of both. Some towns prohibited performances of German music. Pittsburgh banned Beethoven. There was a vigorous crackdown on German-owned breweries. The comic strip
The Katzenjammer Kids
retconned the title characters’ national origins, reassuring readers that the boys were really Dutch.

Harold H. Knerr, the Katzenjammer family revises its origins

German books were burned at rallies around the country. Vigilantes seized and tortured German immigrants and vandalized their property. In Collinsville, Illinois, a mob lynched a German-American miner on a groundless suspicion that he was a spy. A jury quickly acquitted the killers, following a trial in which the defense attorney described the crime as a “patriotic murder.”
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The town’s mayor argued that the whole episode could have been avoided if only Congress had done more to prevent disloyalty.

Some of this was simply traditional ethnic bigotry brought to new heights by war fever. But the hysteria represented paranoia as well as prejudice. Germany’s head of state, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was imagined as the monstrous Beast of Berlin, and every adult American with German blood was suspected of being a spy in his employ. “On the assumption that all were potential enemy agents,” the historian Frederick Luebke wrote, German Americans “were barred from the vicinity of places deemed to have military importance, such as wharves, canals, and railroad depots. Moreover, they were expelled from the District of Columbia, required to get permission to travel within the country or to change their place of residence, and forbidden access to all ships and boats except public ferries. . . .
Subsequently
several thousand were interned in concentration camps as minor infractions of the rules were exaggerated into major offenses.”
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Shades of Deer Island.

Lutheran parochial schools, with their overwhelmingly
German
-American student bodies, were rumored to be hotbeds of subversion. Several states banned the schools from using the German language, and many states and cities ordered their public schools to stop teaching German too. (If you were eager to stop espionage, you’d think you’d want
more
Americans to understand the spies’ language. Evidently not.) Three states established committees to probe for German propaganda in textbooks. When a flu pandemic swept the country, killing approximately 675,000 Americans, a story spread that the outbreak had been caused by Bayer—a German company—contaminating its aspirin.

The fountainhead of paranoid literature was the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda agency created by President Woodrow Wilson. Along with traditional agitprop painting the German soldier as a savage—“the Hun”—who committed terrible atrocities abroad, the committee brought the war home with literature that reimagined ordinary American environments as a domestic battleground haunted by the enemy. “German agents are everywhere, eager to gather scraps of news about our men, our ships, our munitions,” warned one advertisement. “It is still possible to get such information through to Germany, where thousands of these fragments—often individually harmless—are patiently pieced together into a whole which spells death to American soldiers and danger to American homes.”

Vigilance, the ad continued, didn’t merely mean maintaining discretion:

[D]o not wait until you catch someone putting a bomb under a factory. Report the man who spreads pessimistic stories, divulges—or seeks—confidential military information, cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.

Send the names of such persons, even if they are in uniform, to the Department of Justice, Washington. Give all the details you can, with names of witnesses if possible—show the Hun that we can beat him at his own game of collecting scattered information and putting it to work. The fact that you made the report will not become public.

You are in contact with the enemy
today
, just as truly as if you faced him across No Man’s Land.
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Committee on Public Information, National Archives

At this point you might be thinking of Hofstadter’s remarks about the paranoiac’s “projection of the self” and “imitation of the enemy.” You should also note that, contra Hofstadter, the Committee on Public Information was anything but a “minority movement.” Not only was it run by the federal government, but it helped inspire a host of public and private vigilance efforts on the local level. And those, in turn, had the blessing of the country’s establishment.
The Washington Post
spoke for much of the American elite when it editorialized, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”
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The committee’s efforts didn’t net many actual spies. But the authorities did do a capable job of rounding up people who cried for peace, for an end to conscription, or for anything else that might be construed as undermining the war effort. (A German-American filmmaker, Robert Goldstein, was imprisoned under the Espionage Act because he included scenes of English atrocities in a picture about the American Revolution. The government argued that the movie might undercut audiences’ support for Great Britain, our wartime ally.) In
Words That Won the War
, a sympathetic account of the committee’s work, James R. Mock and Cedric Larson acknowledged that the spy hunt could get out of hand. “Captain Henry T. Hunt, head of the Military Intelligence counterespionage section during the war, has told the authors that in addition to unfounded spy stories innocently launched there were many started with the apparent object of removing or inconveniencing political, business, or social rivals,” they reported. At one point “two of his own men were taken into custody by the Department of Justice, while seeking to determine the loyalty of the headwaiter in a Washington hotel.”
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