Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present 9783110346930, 9783110307597

Citation preview

Michael Butter Plots, Designs, and Schemes

linguae & litterae

Publications of the School of Language & Literature Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Edited by Peter Auer, Gesa von Essen, Werner Frick Editorial Board Michel Espagne (Paris), Marino Freschi (Rom), Ekkehard König (Berlin), Michael Lackner (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Per Linell (Linköping), Angelika Linke (Zürich), Christine Maillard (Strasbourg), Lorenza Mondada (Basel), Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen), Wolfgang Raible (Freiburg), Monika Schmitz-Emans (Bochum) Editorial Assistants Sara Landa, Frauke Janzen

Volume 33

Michael Butter

Plots, Designs, and Schemes American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present

ISBN 978-3-11-030759-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-034693-0 ISSN 1869-7054 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

For Irina

Acknowledgements This book would not have been written without the support of the School of Language & Literature at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) which provided me for four years with intellectual stimulation and logistical support of the kind that left nothing to be desired. Since institutions depend on the people who fill them with life I particularly wish to thank Peter Auer, Melanie Börries, Hauke Busch, Jörn Dengjel, Simone Erdenberger, Anna Ertel, Monika Fludernik, Werner Frick, Andreas Gelz, Martin Hilpert, Henning Hufnagel, Thomas Klinkert, Tilmann Köppe, Olav Krämer, Fabian Lampart, Heike Meier, Maurus Reinkowski, Anja Stukenbrock, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Gesa von Essen for the various ways in which they made my time at FRIAS the most fruitful and delightful of my academic life so far. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the University of Freiburg’s English Department where I taught while I finalized the manuscript. Jan Alber, Gert Fehlner, Johannes Fehrle, Benjamin Kohlmann, Sieglinde Lemke, Stefanie Lethbridge, Miriam Nandi, Ulrike Pirker, Wibke Schniedermann, Andrea Strothmann, Christine Vogt-William, and Ulrike Zimmermann were a pleasure to work and lunch with. Special thanks are due to Wolfgang Hochbruck, who supervised the Habilitation on which the book is based, for his guidance and many helpful suggestions. I am also indebted to Barbara Korte and Achim Aurnhammer for their willingness to serve as second and third readers of the Habilitation and for supporting me in every imaginable way over the past years. My research assistants at FRIAS and at the English department, Regine Egeler, Amelie Sing, Katharina Thalmann, and Heike-Lena Schässburger, did a wonderful job compiling bibliographies, verifying references, formatting, and proof-reading. So did Lara Schweiger at the University of Wuppertal. Sara Kathrin Landa, the editorial assistant responsible for the series in which this book is published, then skillfully put the finishing touches to the manuscript. All remaining errors, of course, are mine. My take on conspiracy theory was significantly shaped by the students who attended the classes that I taught on the subject in Bonn and Freiburg. Their ideas, questions, and comments have been an invaluable help for me. I especially wish to thank Lisa Heyn for introducing me to 9/11 conspiracy theories and collaborating with me on an article. Among the friends who supported me in many different ways (and who surely heard more about conspiracy theory over the years than they cared for) three stand out: Hannes Bergthaller made many helpful suggestions on several of my chapters. Dorothee Birke kept me company for years in the KG IV library, and I could always bounce off ideas of her over our morning coffee. Birte Christ read everything I wrote in various drafts. But more importantly, I simply would not know how to live my life without her.

VIII

Acknowledgements

As always, and although I had settled on another weird topic, my parents and my brother had my back. My biggest thanks, however, are for countless reasons reserved for my wife, one of them being that it only slightly unsettles her when conspiracy theorists call our house at 8am on a Sunday morning to reveal their insights to me. As these people are usually obsessed with secret codes and hidden messages, it is only appropriate to express my gratitude and love for her in the language that only she and I understand and that sets us apart from the rest of world: D H L.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

VII

1

Chapter 1 Mapping American Conspiracism 32 Source I: The Epistemology of Causality 37 Source II: The Ideology of Republicanism 44 Source III: The Heritage of Puritanism 49 Excursion: Conspiracy Theory, Religion, Secularization A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

54 56

Chapter 2 Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory 68 Living in the “Devil’s Territories”: The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory “The Devil Hath Been Raised Among Us”: The Destabilizing Variant “Church-members […] You & I May Be, & Yet Devils for All That”: The Sermons of Samuel Parris 88 “To Countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil”: Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World 96 “A Distrustful […] Man, Did He Become”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” 105

72 77

Chapter 3 Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory 113 From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism 118 The Invasion Detected: Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy 124 Dramatizing the Threat to the Republic’s Future Mothers: The Convent Captivity Narrative 137 Ambivalent Anti-Catholicism: George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall 154

X

Contents

Chapter 4 Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power: Antebellum Conspiracy Theories 167 The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory 174 The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory 187 A Partisan Leader and a Few Rebellious Slaves: Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery 201 The Meaning of the Knot: Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” 209 Chapter 5 “Masters of Deceit”: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s 223 Something Old and Something New: The Communist Conspiracy Theory 232 “Damaged Souls”: Communism and Other Deviancies 243 Preachers in a Moral Struggle: J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy McCarthy’s Mommies: The Manchurian Candidate 264 Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?) Works Cited

302

283

248

Introduction Conspiracy theories hold that a group of evil agents, the conspirators, has assumed or is currently trying to assume control over an institution, a region, a nation, or the world.1 In recent years, such suspicions have been ubiquitous in the United States. They have pervaded the culture to such a degree that most Americans, no matter whether they believe these theories or not, know what conspiracy theorists have in mind when they refer to places like Area 51 (where an alien spaceship supposedly crashed in 1947), Ruby Ridge (where federal agents killed the wife and son of white separatist Randy Weaver in a 1994 shooting that conspiracy theorists find highly suspicious), and the grassy knoll (where most conspiracy theorists place the second gunman in their accounts of the Kennedy assassination), or express fears of the ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government) or NWO (the New World Order). The conspiracy theories in which these and many other places and organizations play a role circulate on the Internet and are frequently reported on by the mainstream media, especially when they pertain to current political issues, as theories do that hold the government responsible for the attacks of 9/11 or claim that Barack Obama was ineligible for the office of President of the United States. Conspiracy theories are also impossible to escape in popular culture. The novels of Dan Brown and Michael Crichton, TV series such as The X-Files or Homeland, and movies

1 A few words on terminology: I use the term “conspiracy theory” as I just defined it. When I speak of a specific conspiracy theory such as the “Catholic/Masonic/Slave Power conspiracy theory,” I mean that this is a conspiracy theory that accuses Catholics, Masons, or the Slave Power of secret plotting; it is not a conspiracy theory held by Catholics, Masons, or the Slave Power. The only exception to this rule is the “Puritan conspiracy theory,” as this expression refers to the conspiracy theory that the Puritans believed and not to one that targets them. Synonyms for “conspiracy theory” that I occasionally employ are “vision of conspiracy” and “belief in conspiracy.” I use the expression “conspiracy theorizing” to refer to the practice of formulating and/or articulating a specific conspiracy theory or conspiracy theories more generally. The adjective “conspiracist,” as, for example, in “conspiracist accounts of the election of Obama” stresses that such accounts are conspiracy theories. By contrast, the adjective “conspiratorial” refers to an activity connected to an actually existing conspiracy. Throughout this book we will encounter such “conspiratorial activity” mostly in conspiracist texts that imagine conspiracies. People who believe or even formulate conspiracy theories are “conspiracy theorists.” Occasionally, I also refer to them as “countersubversives” in order to emphasize that they fashion themselves as those who resist a plot carried out by “subversives,” that is, the “conspirators.” Finally, the noun “conspiracism” denotes a worldview that is prone to “conspiracy theorizing” and therefore detects conspiracies everywhere.

2

Introduction

like The Bourne Identity or Salt dramatize plots, designs, and schemes of all kinds. But conspiracy theories are, of course, not restricted to the United States. They have for quite a while been very popular in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, and they occur, albeit far less frequently, also in Northern, Western, and Central Europe. The assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 sparked conspiracist accounts, and so did the death of Uwe Barschel in 1987, or the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn for rape in 2011, as this arrest made it impossible for him to run in the upcoming French presidential elections. Other conspiracy theories, circulating on both sides of the Atlantic, blend European and American elements to ever larger visions of subversion, claiming, for instance, that the New World Order killed both Olof Palme and John F. Kennedy, ordered the attacks of 9/11, and orchestrated the election of Barack Obama. Such scenarios must appear absurd to most of my readers (this, at least, is what I hope), but despite the derision by journalists and political commentators that such claims usually provoke, there is a considerable number of people all over the world who believe them and many more who are familiar with them. Although specific accounts of conspiracy often assume distinctively national forms, and although the practice is at the moment far more popular in some regions of the world than in others, conspiracy theorizing is a global phenomenon. Extant research on conspiracy theory – a body of work coming from a variety of disciplines that has steadily grown since the 1960s and in particular over the past two decades – reflects both the global nature of conspiracy theorizing and the fact that it is more prominent in certain cultures than in others. While there is, for example, no monograph that deals with conspiracy theories in contemporary German culture, a couple of studies address the phenomenon with regard to the Middle East, and many more discuss American conspiracy theories or draw on U.S. examples to make larger points about conspiracy theory in general. Analytical and political philosophers have discussed the question if there is anything intrinsically wrong with the logic of conspiracy theories, and tried to define criteria in order to distinguish between exposures of real conspiracies and unwarranted suspicions. Psychologists have either related conspiracy theorizing to forms of mental illness, especially paranoia, or, in a less pathologizing approach, attempted to identify groups and personality types particularly likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Sociologists have investigated the status of the knowledge that conspiracy theories produce, the formation of counter-publics around conspiracy theories, and how new media, such as the Internet, facilitate the distribution of these theories and thus the construction of conspiracy communities. Scholars from

Introduction

3

communication studies have explored the rhetoric of conspiracy theories. Historians have traced the history of conspiracy theorizing and examined its impact on processes of social exclusion and political decision-making in the past.2 By far the most prolific area in conspiracy theory research, however, has been literary and cultural studies, and in this field the bias toward the United States is even more pronounced than in others. There are a couple of studies on conspiracy scenarios in German, English, and even Roman literature, but their number pales vis-à-vis the many books and articles that have been written on American fiction.3 Moreover, addressing topics as diverse as films and TV series, alien abduction narratives, feminist and African-American activism, board games, political discourse, or the 9/11 Truth Movement, while paying close attention to the strategies, tropes, and interpretive practices of conspiracy narratives, scholars such as Timothy Melley, Peter Knight, and Mark Fenster have since the late 1990s expanded the focus of such research to the culture as a whole. While many scholars from the disciplines mentioned above consider conspiracy theorists mentally ill or even dangerous and therefore approach their object of study with sometimes thinly veiled disgust, these studies are characterized by the conscious attempt to take conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists seriously. Melley, Knight, and Fenster do not believe the conspiracy theories they discuss, but they argue convincingly that conspiracy theories deserve attention, not because they are dangerous, but because they are believed by so many people and often point to real social grievances and flaws in the political order. Considering conspiracy theories expressions of larger

2 For studies on the Middle East, see Fathi, Gray, and Pipes, Hidden. Most research on conspiracy theories in analytical and political philosophy has been collected in Coady’s volume. In addition, see Bale, Buenting and Taylor, Pidgen, and Räikkä. For an overview of psychological studies on conspiracy theory, see Swami and Coles; for individual studies, see Abalakina-Paap et al., Goertzel, Jaworski, Maaz, Moscovici, and Wulff. For sociological studies, see Anton, Heins, and Schetsche and Schmied-Knittel. For contributions from communication studies, see Hasian, S. Miller, and Zarefsky. For historical studies, see, among others, Roisman (on ancient Athens); Pagán (on ancient Rome); Coward and Swann (on Early Modern Europe); Rogalla von Bieberstein (on eighteenth-century Germany); Campbell, Kaiser, and Linton; and Cubitt, Jesuit (on eighteenthand nineteenth-century France); Bailyn, Ideological; Barkun, Culture; Davis, Fear; Goldberg; Hünemörder; Olmsted; and Wood, “Conspiracy” (on American history). 3 For German literature, see Klausnitzer whose bibliography lists earlier studies on the Geheimbundroman; for Roman literature, see Pagán; for English literature, see Bullard, Pionke, and Wisnicki. For American literature, see, among many others, Bradshaw, Brandt, Coale, Fulcher, Levine, O’Donnell, and Vacha.

4

Introduction

cultural concerns, these studies offer highly nuanced symptomatic readings of conspiracist visions that are not denigrating, because they do not pathologize conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. As a review of Fenster’s book puts it, they thus make “a strong case that even while we do not believe, we should nevertheless listen” (“Nonfiction”). Plots, Designs, and Schemes, which investigates American conspiracy theories from the seventeenth century to the present, would have been impossible without these important books. They triggered my interest in the subject in the first place, and decisively shaped my understanding of it. I consider my contribution to the field as complementing their findings in that I provide the historical perspective that they are lacking. Melley, Knight, and Fenster only consider the time after World War II, and most of their chapters focus even more narrowly on the past twenty or thirty years. If they mention earlier periods of American history at all, they do so in passing, suggesting that contemporary conspiracy theories are far more widespread and significant than those of earlier ages. This exclusive focus on the present in Melley, Fenster, and Knight may at first sight appear somewhat surprising since these studies take as their point of departure the urtext of American conspiracy theory research, Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In this essay, Hofstadter devotes much space to tracing “the grandiose theories of conspiracy” he is interested in from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s (4). Among others, he discusses the Illuminati scare of 1798, concerns about a Masonic plot in the 1820s and 1830s, and fears of Catholic subversion in the 1830s to 1850s before he draws general conclusions about what he famously labels the “paranoid style.” However, it is because of their detailed engagement with Hofstadter’s essay that Melley and Knight – matters are slightly different with Fenster – neglect the central role that conspiracy theories have played in previous ages. Hofstadter argued that the “paranoid style” had always been “the preferred style only of minority movements” in America (7; his emphasis), and, by casting conspiracy theorizing as a paranoid practice, he linked and likened it to clinical illness. While Fenster rejects this association altogether (cf. 8–9), Melley and Knight take issue with this pathologization of conspiracy theory only to a limited degree. They accept that there is indeed a connection between conspiracy theory and paranoia, but they re-evaluate paranoia with regard to the present age, suggesting that under the conditions of postmodernity there are, unlike before, good reasons to be paranoid. Radicalizing Fredric Jameson’s claim that conspiracy theorizing is “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age” (356), they contend that, since the 1960s, it has become a perfectly rational way of thinking totality

Introduction

5

and imagining social relations. As Knight argues, “A certain kind of world-weary paranoia has become the norm” (Conspiracy 2).4 What is more, arguing that this new reasonableness of paranoia explains why conspiracy theories have entered the mainstream in recent decades, Melley and Knight also accept Hofstadter’s claim that before 1960, when it was not yet reasonable to be paranoid, conspiracy theorizing was indeed restricted to the fringes of society. Knight makes this stance rather explicit when he writes that “conspiracy theories are no longer necessarily the mark of – in order – a delusional, right-wing, marginal, political, dogmatic mindset” (Conspiracy 24). Moreover, Melley and Knight also argue that this move into the mainstream has made conspiracy theories more prominent and influential, as they are now believed not only by more people than ever before, but also by people of a higher social and intellectual standing. As Melley puts it, “Conspiracy theory has a long history in the United States. […] But its influence has never been greater than now” (Empire vii). Even more pointedly, Knight argues that “conspiracy theories have become far more prominent, no longer the favoured rhetoric of backwater scaremongers, but the lingua franca of many ordinary Americans” (Conspiracy 2). However, these two claims – conspiracy theories were restricted to the margins of society in previous ages, and they are now more widespread and influential than ever before in American history – are highly debatable, to say the least. Hofstadter’s own examples – he quotes, after all, among others, a United States senator (Joseph McCarthy), a highly regarded New England minister (Jedidiah Morse), and mainstream newspapers such as the Texas State Times – already suggest that he was wrong to relegate the “paranoid style” to the margins of society. That Melley and Knight overlook the obvious contradiction between Hofstadter’s material and the interpretation he imposed on it is remarkable. It is even more astonishing since Knight and Melley also mention and include in their bibliographies the works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and David Brion Davis, who have convincingly demonstrated how pervasive and important conspiracy theories were during the American Revolution and throughout the nine-

4 Cf. Melley, Empire 11–14 for a very similar argument. See also Marcus’s introduction to a collection of anthropological essays, tellingly entitled Paranoia within Reason, and Knight’s introduction to the volume Conspiracy Nation where he states even more explicitly: “the last few decades have witnessed the emergence of popular paranoia marked out by its half-serious, halfcynical suspicion” (6). In his contributions to this volume, Skip Williams makes the same point, suggesting that “paranoia is not just for the right-wing lunatic fringe” (32). Referencing Marcus’s volume, Clare Birchall also suggests that “sometimes paranoia is the most reasonable response to a political situation” (71). Jodie Dean, in her analysis of alien abduction narratives, stresses “the lack of widespread criteria for judgments about what is reasonable and what is not” (Aliens 9).

6

Introduction

teenth century, and that they were voiced by American presidents, presidential candidates, and many other political and spiritual leaders. Especially Davis’s 1971 The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, a collection of pamphlets and political speeches that testifies to the long history of conspiracist visions from the colonial to the post-World War II period, makes abundantly clear that throughout American history conspiracy theorizing has never been a minority phenomenon engaged in (only) by lunatics on the margins of society, but rather a mainstream phenomenon undertaken not only by “normal” people, but habitually by the nation’s leaders. In fact, the only scholar who acknowledges this is Fenster. He stresses that “conspiracy theory has always been a significant element of American political rhetoric” (9). However, entitling one section of his introduction “We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now” (7), he, too, suggests that conspiracy theories are now more prominent, mainstream, and influential than ever.5 The reason why, despite so much evidence that suggests the opposite, these otherwise meticulous scholars insist that suspicions of conspiracy have proliferated as never before in recent decades is, I believe, in the final analysis a strategic one. As I have argued elsewhere (cf. Butter, “Caught”), cultural studies is still characterized by a strong presentist bias. There are of course analyses that go back to the nineteenth century or earlier times, but especially as far as analyses of American culture are concerned, such studies are rare. The bulk of work focuses on the twentieth century, and often even more narrowly on contemporary culture. In other words, cultural studies scholars are more or less expected to work on contemporary culture, especially when they are working on their first books, as Melley, Knight, and Fenster were when they first researched conspiracy theories. In such a situation, claiming that conspiracy theories are now more mainstream and popular than ever transforms an institutional requirement – a cultural studies analysis should focus on the contemporary – into a choice suggested by the object of study itself. American conspiracy theories before 1960, however, have received some attention from historians over the past forty years. These works are of immense value for my purposes, and I will draw on many of them extensively in subsequent chapters. In general, though, these studies also suffer from a number of,

5 For reasons for fairness it needs to be pointed out that Knight and Melley are hardly alone in claiming that conspiracy theories have moved into the mainstream and are thus now more prominent than ever. For similar arguments, see Goodnight and Poulakos 299, Kravitz 23, Palmer and Riley 21, Stewart and Harding 293. For the argument that conspiracy theorizing has always been an influential mainstream practice, see, for example, Critchlow, Korasick, and Sherman xi; Horn and Rabinbach 1; Hünemörder 65; and S. Miller 40.

Introduction

7

often related, shortcomings. To begin with, especially older studies lack the theoretical equipment to adequately deal with conspiracy theory. Until recently, when historians began to draw on the concepts developed by Knight and Fenster, the only model available to theorize conspiracy theory was Hofstadter’s “paranoid style.” But for scholars who saw that the conspiracy theories they were tracing were not at all restricted to a minority on the fringes of society this model was less than helpful. Many of them therefore – I am thinking here, for instance, of Hugh Brogan’s chapters on the antebellum period in The Pelican History of the United States – did not mention Hofstadter at all when discussing conspiracy theories and their considerable impact. Thus, they challenged his thesis, but did so only implicitly, missing an opportunity to set the record straight. Those historians who have explicitly challenged Hofstadter’s argument have by and large done so – and this is the second shortcoming of historical work on conspiracy theory – not in general terms, but merely for the one period or issue their often highly specialized studies focus on. In a seminal essay that I discuss in detail in chapter 1, Gordon Wood, for example, shows that conspiracy theorizing was a highly reasonable practice that produced generally accepted knowledge throughout the eighteenth century, but then goes on to claim (mistakenly, as we will see) that it moved to the fringes of society early in the nineteenth century. In similar fashion, Michael Pfau bends over backward in his study of antislavery conspiracy theories to distinguish between a “paranoid style” of conspiracy theorizing on the margins and a strategically deployed “political style” at the center, presenting (mistakenly, too, as we will see) mainstream conspiracy theorists as an exception to the rule. There are, of course, studies with a more diachronic approach that address the larger history of American conspiracy theories. All of them, however, only outline this history in very general terms and then focus on the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, and this is the third problem of historiographic work on conspiracy theory, these studies tend to reproduce the argument made by cultural studies scholars that conspiracy theories are now more widely-spread than ever before. Thus, although Robert Alan Goldberg’s survey of conspiracy theories before the Cold War demonstrates that virtually all important national figures believed in one or the other conspiracy theory during the nineteenth century, he nevertheless calls his final chapter “Mainstreaming Conspiracism” (232). In similar fashion, Michael Barkun argues that the influence of conspiracy theory has, in recent years, “increased dramatically through the mediation of popular culture” (Culture 33). Finally, historiographic studies on conspiracy theory usually do not pay enough attention to the formal dimensions of the individual texts in which these theories are articulated. As cultural studies scholars know well, the texts’ narra-

8

Introduction

tive structures, their dominant tropes, and the strategies by which they present their evidence as coherent and conclusive are essential for the successful on interpellation of their audiences as conspiracy theorists. Hofstadter was aware of this, and while his characterization of conspiracy theorizing as paranoid is problematic and needs to be rejected, his awareness of the particular style that characterizes the articulation of such suspicions must not be discarded. With the exception of Wood and Pfau, however, this is what historians usually do. They draw on a huge variety of texts, thus demonstrating how pervasive a specific conspiracy theory was, but they explore no text in detail, and thus do not arrive at an adequate understanding of how individual texts convinced their audiences that they were the victims of devious plots. For different reasons, then, neither cultural and literary studies nor history have yet explored American conspiracy theories before 1960 in the manner that their evident importance merits. Accordingly, there remains “a real need to historicize conspiracy thought” (White 2), and it is the purpose of this study to at least partly answer this need. I trace how American conspiracy theorizing has developed, and how its status, its concerns, its functions, and its rhetoric have changed. Obviously, such a diachronic approach cannot focus on one specific conspiracy theory or period alone. But since cultural studies analyses of contemporary conspiracy theories have shown how complex they are, and since historical studies of older conspiracy theories have shown how important it is to reconstruct the contexts in which these theories circulated, this study cannot simply treat the major American conspiracy theories of the past centuries in cursory fashion. And since it is obviously beyond the scope of any individual study to explore each of these major theories in the detail they require, I have decided to tread a middle path. I first provide an overview of the general developments of these theories, and then go on to conduct detailed case studies of four specific conspiracy theories in the subsequent chapters. Out of the many conspiracy theories that circulated in American culture before 1960 – and of which I provide an overview in chapter 1 – I have selected the late seventeenth-century Puritan conspiracy theory about witchcraft, the Catholic conspiracy theory of the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and the Communist conspiracy theory of the 1950s as case studies. In each chapter, I combine more abstract considerations of the concerns that inform the specific conspiracy theory and the functions it performs with close readings of important texts that spin it. Thus, while there remain, of course, gaps to be filled by other studies, these chapters, when taken together, map the development of American conspiracy theories from the seventeenth to the second half of the twentieth century. They show which dimensions of conspiracy theorizing have remained unchanged and which ones have undergone transformations.

Introduction

9

Most importantly, they prove that throughout American history conspiracy theories were never restricted to the fringes of society or indicative of a paranoid disposition. As a legitimate form of producing and representing knowledge, they were believed and voiced not only by “normal” people, but frequently by the country’s elites. Among the conspiracy theorists this study discusses are presidents (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower), senators and congressmen (Charles Sumner, Joseph McCarthy, George Dondero), religious leaders (Cotton Mather, Lyman Beecher), and intellectuals (Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph). My study thus shows that the claim that conspiracy theories have never been as widespread and influential as during the past fifty years is wrong. Conspiracy theories have always been widespread and influential. This is the major argument of my study. However, over the course of my work, as the parts of the puzzle fell into place, another result emerged – one that has made it necessary to discuss at least in cursory fashion the post-1960 era, which I originally did not intend to touch upon at all. This result amounts to a major revision of extant research on contemporary conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories, I contend, have never been less important in American culture than during the past fifty years. I am aware that, at this point, such a claim must sound completely off. It is wholly counterintuitive, because conspiracy theories are indeed, as I said at the very beginning, ubiquitous at the moment. They have flooded the Internet, permeate all forms of popular culture, are circulated in the mainstream media, and are, quite obviously, not only believed by lunatics on the fringe. However, they have definitely never been less influential, because their status as knowledge changed during the 1960s. Until then, they were regarded as a legitimate form of knowledge; since then they have become a form of counterknowledge that is attractive to many, but whose claims are, by even more people, per se dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” In fact, the term “conspiracy theory” only came into wider usage during the late 1960s (cf. McKenzie-McHarg, “How”) and, in mainstream discourse at least, it immediately signals that the claims of the mental construct thus labeled are unjustified and removed from reality. I address this transformation in my conclusion where I also argue that many of the phenomena that scholars like Melley, Knight, and Fenster regard as indicators of conspiracy theory’s increased importance – the metaphorical figurations of conspiracy that we find in many social analyses since the 1960s, conspiracy theory’s omnipresence in popular culture and in many works of high literature, or the ironic fashion in which many people engage with them – appear from the larger diachronic perspective that my study provides as indicators of its increased marginality. This transformation would merit – and in fact needs to be explored in – a study of its own. My short remarks on it in this book are merely an

10

Introduction

appendix to an investigation which is primarily concerned with demonstrating the unbroken prominence and importance of conspiracy theories in American culture from the seventeenth century to the 1950s. This is what its five main chapters do, and the remainder of this introduction lays the foundation for this undertaking. I first discuss the general features of conspiracy theories as they emerged with the Enlightenment; in a second step, I discuss the theoretical assumptions that inform my study, and identify conspiracy theories as a form of populist discourse that articulates cultural conflicts and anxieties in a very specific fashion; then I argue that conspiracy theories are, in different senses of the term and on different levels, narratives and have to be treated accordingly; and, finally, I explain why I have selected my case studies, and how they contribute to a larger understanding of the history of American conspiracy theories. *** Discussing previous research on conspiracy theories, I have referenced studies on contemporary American culture, earlier episodes in American history, early modern and modern Europe, the Middle East, and classical antiquity. This may have created the impression that I side with those scholars who consider conspiracy theories an anthropological given. The position of this branch of conspiracy theory research has been most pointedly expressed by Dieter Groh, who claims in a much quoted essay that conspiracy theories “spread universally through time, social structures of some duration, and through classes.” They “cannot be clearly assigned only to the elite culture or only to the folk-culture,” and they occur “in so-called primitive cultures as well as in high culture” (“Temptation” 11).6 I am, however, highly skeptical of such an approach to conspiracy theories, because it does not explain much. It only works when conspiracy theories are defined in the broadest possible fashion, and, when faced with individual examples, it tends to downplay historical and cultural specificities in the attempt to find the same patterns and mechanism at work in each case, as happens in Groh’s own case studies (cf. “Case Studies”). For the same reason, I also have reservations with regard to those psychological and philosophical studies that insist on the transhistorical and transcultural sameness of conspiracy theories. In the worst case, the claims of these studies are plainly wrong – conspiracy theories, for example, do not always target minorities that can be cast as alien, as Serge Moscovici contends (151); in the best case, the claims are, again, so general that they are not

6 This argument has been reiterated by, among others, Ruth Groh and Rex Rexheuser.

Introduction

11

very helpful and require specification. It is true that, by way of othering, conspiracy theories always construct a specific collective identity, as Pfahl-Traughber argues (36), but conspiracy theorizing is only one of many forms of inclusion and exclusion, and the othering it performs occurs in highly differentiated fashions. This is not to suggest that we cannot make general claims about conspiracy theories, and I do so repeatedly in this study. But just as we may find it hard to say anything meaningful about, say, the novel in general, and much easier to comment on the features of, say, the American antebellum novel, we should aim at a lower level when generalizing about conspiracy theory. To do this, it is crucial to acknowledge that conspiracy theories have undergone considerable transformations over time and assume different shapes in various cultures. In fact, I side with scholars like Daniel Pipes, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, and Gordon Wood who have argued that conspiracy theories as we commonly think of them (that is, as large-scale plots of groups like the Masons, Jews, or Communists) are a product of the Enlightenment. They first emerged during the seventeenth century and assumed the form we associate with them today in the second half of the eighteenth century. Conspiracy theories as we know them today, then, are a distinctly Western phenomenon, however attractive this way of perceiving the world has proven for other cultures as well.7 Conspiracy theories as they emerged with the Enlightenment are concerned with human actors and usually not with supernatural ones; they target a large number of conspirators and not only a handful of them; they detect the conspiracy by means of inference and deduction, envisioning highly complex plots that are in most cases of national or even global significance; and, considering history as a series of conspiracies, they function as all theories do in that they explain the past and predict the future. Their focus on human actors distinguishes them from metaphysical visions of conspiracy, as they were prominent in Medieval Europe where Jews, the children of the devil, and witches, the mistresses of the devil, were repeatedly accused of vicious plots orchestrated, in

7 See Pipes, Conspiracy 59–66; McKenzie-McHague, “Transfer”; and Wood, “Conspiracy” which I discuss in detail in chapter 1. The relationship between conspiracy theories as they emerged with the Enlightenment and their precursors would need far more attention, though, than these studies offer. So would the relationship between Western conspiracy theory and its transfer to nonWestern cultures where it merges with preexisting indigenous templates and figures of thought (cf. West and Sanders, “Introduction” 5). So far, the few existing works on non-European cultures all focus on the twentieth century. The issue of transfer to the Arab world in particular deserves more attention, since the conspiracy theories circulating there today often accuse the Western powers of continuing to exert imperialist influence through secret machinations of power. If, as I am firmly convinced, this form of conspiracy theorizing is of Western origin, such accusations would not be devoid of a certain irony.

12

Introduction

the final analysis, by the devil himself (cf. Tschacher; Wippermann 46). However, the distinction between such metaphysical conspiracy theories and secular ones is not clear-cut, as the latter retain many of the elements of the former. Both envision a Manichean struggle between good and evil, and imbue those who fight the conspiracy with a sense of mission that is often cast as doing God’s will. What is more, especially in the United States, as we will see in chapter 1, metaphysical scenarios of conspiracy continue to exist and often merge with secular ones. Another feature of post-Enlightenment conspiracy theories is the huge scope of the plots and the complex set of relations among conspirators that they detect. No matter whether they ascribe national or global goals to the plotters, as most of these theories do, or only regional ones, as the theories discussed by Christopher Herbert do, they are invariably concerned with schemes carried out by a large number of conspirators and postulate complex relations between the masterminds of the conspiracy, their knowing allies, and unwitting dupes. This truly distinguishes these “modern” conspiracy theories from pre-modern versions. Suspicions of subversion in ancient Rome and Greece invariably revolved around a small number of conspirators (cf. Roisman; Pagán), and so did virtually all medieval indictments of witches (cf. Tschacher). As a consequence, these accounts never reached the level of complexity that we encounter in the conspiracy theories I am concerned with here. The Jews, of course, were accused in general fashion at times, but even in these cases the accusations did not revolve around complex relations and nets of communication among them, but were grounded in the assumption of their innate evilness. The development toward large-scale and complex conspiracy scenarios is traced by the volume on Early Modern Europe edited by Coward and Swann. Arranged in diachronic fashion, the individual pieces are concerned with conspiracies of increasing scope and complexity. The first essays discuss small-scale witch schemes and court intrigues, the last ones large-scale plots about the French Revolution. Taken together, the contributions to this volume also bring to the fore that the way conspiracies are detected changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In earlier times the detection of conspiracies hinged mostly on confessions, which were often gained by way of torture. Such confessions, usually provided by renegades, remain an important ingredient of countersubversive discourse, as we will see in subsequent chapters, but the heightened complexity of post-Enlightenment conspiracy scenarios has produced new modes of detection. As the actions of the conspirators are often no longer directly observable, the relations among them complicated, and as even their motives are far from clear, they have to be inferred and deduced by way of interpreting circumstantial evidence. Much like the Jews during the Middle Ages, Catholics were per se

Introduction

13

suspicious to nineteenth-century Americans, but that they were actually conspiring against the liberty of the United States had to be proven in detailed accounts rich with footnotes and quotations. Finally, as Richard Hofstadter puts it, conspiracy theorists do not merely “see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but […] they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events” (29; his emphasis). This distinguishes these modern visions of conspiracy further from ancient or medieval ones. For the Greeks and Romans, fate or chance ultimately had a role to play (cf. Wood, “Conspiracy” 412); and in the metaphysical accounts of conspiracy popular during the Middle Ages, as I will discuss in more detail in chapter 1, the conspirators were God’s instruments and used by him in order to punish sinners on Earth. But since the eighteenth century, conspiracy theories have usually claimed that the conspirators are in control, that, in other words, history unfolds according to their plan. Conspiracy theories, then, explain the past and, as the conspirators have usually not yet achieved all their goals, they also predict the future that will come to pass, if the plotters are not stopped. They produce this knowledge by way of a specific method of understanding the world: they deduce motives by looking at the outcome and asking the question “who benefits?” and infer connections between conspirators by interpreting other kinds of evidence in similar fashion. Therefore I contend that the label “theory” is entirely appropriate for such conspiracist visions. We may not agree with conspiracy theories’ basic assumptions – nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, everything is connected (cf. Barkun, Culture 3–4) –, the way in which they interpret human behavior, construct connections between seemingly disparate events and people, or their findings. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that these assumptions and the interpretations they generate are in themselves not less well-founded than those of other “theories” that we are much less skeptical about. As Hofstadter already saw, conspiracy theorizing is “if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic” (36). Accordingly, I will not forego the term in favor of “conspiracy myths” or “conspiracy ideologies,” as other scholars have done, but continue to use it. We also need to acknowledge that conspiracy theories do not merely reduce the complexity of reality – a charge famously raised by Dieter Groh, who regards this as their major function (cf. “Temptation” 5). While it is true that they simplify reality by reducing the relations between people, nations, and other entities to dichotomies of good and evil, they simultaneously also create complexity. They postulate complicated relations between those in the camp of evil, and unveil schemes that are sometimes so subtle that the conspirators need decades to reach their goals. To give just one example: the official account of the Kennedy assassi-

14

Introduction

nation, according to which the president was killed by a lone gunman for whatever personal reasons, is straightforward and simple. By contrast, the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was merely a pawn in a coup d’état carried out by the military-industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and politicians is infinitely more complicated. And if the assassination is integrated, as it frequently has been in recent years, into accounts of the New World Order conspiracy, which some theorists trace back to the Illuminati of the late eighteenth century, the picture gets even more complex. Thus, one could just as well argue that conspiracy theories should not be called “theories,” because they postulate an unrealistic complexity of social relations and human actions (cf. Aaronovitch 6–7). Conspiracy theory’s complexity also sets them apart from rumors and urban legends, two genres to which conspiracy theory is related but not identical with. Conspiracy theories, as Ralf Klausnitzer has pointed out, often travel by rumor (cf. 139), and a rumor can be the origin of a conspiracy theory. But in order to be successful, a conspiracy theory needs at least one comprehensive account that explains in detail the conspirators’ plans and motives. Thus, online rumors circulating in 2010 that held that Michelle Obama was using her White House vegetable garden – a highly symbolic part of the first lady’s campaign to make American children eat healthier – to poison children do not yet constitute a conspiracy theory.8 A symbolic expression of the feeling that has fueled many conspiracy theories that surround the election of Barack Obama, namely that he is bad for the country, these rumors could be integrated into conspiracist accounts that question the legitimacy of his presidency, but they do not amount to a conspiracy theory in themselves, because they do not address the Obamas’ motives, their ultimate goals, or their allies, and do not offer any evidence, as conspiracy theories invariably do. This predilection for details and concreteness also distinguishes conspiracy theories from urban legends. As sociologists and anthropologists have demonstrated, urban legends are modern morality tales that perform functions similar to those of fairy tales in previous centuries in that they serve to instill general moral lessons.9 This is why they are not set in a specific time and place, and why their characters are usually not individuals but types such as the girlfriend, the hitchhiker, or the bachelor. Urban legends such as “The Hook,” in which a young couple escapes narrowly from a one-armed murderer, or “The Boyfriend’s Death,” in 8 The origin of these rumors was that the lead concentration in the soil was slightly higher than usual (cf. Alexander). 9 On urban legends, see the classic study by Brunvand; on their function as modern morality tales, see Zacher; on the relationship between urban legends and 9/11 conspiracy theories, see Harding 109–17.

Introduction

15

which only the girl survives, warn against the dangers of premarital sex, calling on teenagers, among whom these stories often circulate, to remain abstinent. While this may seem far removed from conspiracy theory, urban legends can merge with conspiracy theories in much the same way as rumors do. A variation of the “Thankful Stranger” motif, for example, in which a person is rewarded for a good deed by a mysterious stranger with the warning not to be in a certain place at a certain time, has become part of many 9/11 conspiracy theories.10 More important for my purposes here, however, is that urban legends, while not literally true, are indicative of the issues and anxieties that preoccupy a culture. Thus, the proliferation of urban legends about parasitic infections or alligators in the sewers after 9/11 hints at deep-seated concerns about physical integrity and reflects fears that dangers to the community are no longer situated on the outside alone (cf. Harding 102). In this sense, urban legends function just as conspiracy theories do. Conspiracy theories are also not literally true, but nevertheless, to use Mark Fenster’s phrase, “on to something” (90). *** To be perfectly clear: I do not mean to imply that there are no real conspiracies. They have occurred in the past, and they will occur in the future. Sometimes conspiracy theorists are even right to point out that official accounts dismiss the possibility of conspiracy too quickly. For example, conspiracy theorists investigating the Kennedy assassination have pointed out the holes in the official account of the killing and offered good reasons to assume that at least one other shooter beside Lee Harvey Oswald must have been involved (cf. Prouty 295–300). However, the large-scale plots that the conspiracy theories this study is concerned with revolve around are, I am quite confident, wrong. Kennedy may have been the victim of a conspiracy in the sense that two or more people joined forces to assassinate him, but conspiracy theories about his death rarely stop there. Usually, they go on and try to prove that he was eliminated by the military-industrial complex, the New World Order, or some other sinister organization that is seeking to control or already controls the United States and maybe even the world (cf. Prouty; P. Scott). And this, I am firmly convinced, is not the case.

10 In the most famous version, San Francisco mayor Willie Brown received a phone call that advised him not to fly into New York City on September 11, as he was scheduled to do. The first two versions of the Loose Change films, for example, consider this one of several occurrences that prove that the attacks were orchestrated from the inside. A viciously anti-Semitic version of this legend holds that Jews were warned not to go to work in the World Trade Center that day (cf. Harding 110).

16

Introduction

When I say that conspiracy theories are “on to something,” I take my cues from Mark Fenster who has convincingly argued that conspiracy theories are “a non-necessary element of populist ideology,” because all conspiracy theories are populist, but that not all populism assumes conspiracist form (84). Richard Hofstadter already recognized this, but whereas he rejected populism as a “frequently dangerous cry and rage from the margins” that endangered the proper workings of democracy (83), Fenster operates with a different notion of populism that is indebted to the neo-Marxist work of Ernesto Laclau. As Laclau puts it in a passage that Fenster quotes, “Populism […] ‘simplifies’ the political space, replacing a complex set of differences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise” (Populist 18). As I explained above, I would contend that such a move produces complexity as well, but this does not need to concern us here. What is important is that the construction of these two poles “involves the drawing of an antagonistic frontier” along which differences are recast as oppositions (Fenster 78; cf. also Laclau, Politics 174). In this dichotomy, “‘the people’ [are placed] on one pole, and its Other, the power bloc […], on the other” (84). By way of what Laclau calls the “logic of equivalence” (Populist 78; his emphasis), everything associated with the people is “made equivalent and necessary and part of that which is good, while every element linked to the Other is equivalent and wicked.” Thus, “disparate elements” eventually appear “to form a natural unity” (Fenster 85). As Fenster adds in a footnote, in British cultural studies “this linkage is called articulation; that is, […] the tenuous (in the sense of nonpermanent) linkages between social practices that come together at a specific historical moment” (311n54; his emphasis). Such articulations, then, replace the logical connections between elements by “formal principles external to their logical nature” (Laclau, Politics 9). Accordingly, populism always, though to varying degrees, involves a misrepresentation of reality and social relations. But since it is characterized not by a particular content, but by a certain form, it “has no necessary political valence,” so that its relationship to democracy cannot be known in advance (85). In fact, drawing on Bonnie Honig’s work, Fenster argues that “populist logic is an inevitable and necessary part of democratic political order, a challenge produced by the democratic promise of popular sovereignty and self-rule” (90): Democratic politics relies on a gap between the public and its elected representatives that is mediated by established political institutions; populism emerges when this gap constitutes a problem, or even a crisis, and when a movement can plausibly offer some more direct or “authentic” means of representation in the name of the people. A populist challenge to an established order, then, has neither a necessary content nor a necessary relationship to that order. It could be reformist or revolutionary; it could embrace a seemingly more participatory form of democracy, or it could reject democratic processes entirely. (86)

Introduction

17

This does not mean, however, that populism, much like conspiracy theory, as we will see, necessarily challenges those in power. As Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg, for Britain and the United States respectively, have shown, populism can also occur in authoritarian variants that silence oppositional elements integral to the proper workings of democracy by fueling “fears of immigrants, crime, bureaucracy, and cultural elites” (Fenster 88). As a specific form of populist discourse, conspiracy theories, too, can both question and confirm existing power relations, can be both harmful and beneficial to democracy, and just as populist movements more generally, should not be dismissed right away. As Fenster puts it, overarching conspiracy theories may be wrong or overly simplistic, but they may sometimes be on to something. Specifically, they may well address real structural inequities, albeit ideologically, and they may well constitute a response, albeit in a simplistic and decidedly unpragmatic form, to an unjust political order, a barren or dysfunctional civil society, and/ or an exploitative economic system. (90)

This understanding of conspiracy theories, I believe, is not only applicable to the contemporary forms that Fenster focuses on but speaks to older variants as well. That it can be brought to bear on American conspiracy theories of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is immediately apparent, because the United States was a democracy then already. It should therefore come as no surprise that in the ensuing case studies devoted to this period the notion that the people are being robbed of their rights will play a prominent role. Laclau’s theory of populism is, however, not restricted to democracy – in fact, he devotes much space to discussing the populisms of fascist and socialist systems (cf. Politics 81–142) – but is applicable to modern societies in general, as is for this reason, I would contend, Fenster’s theory of conspiracy theory. In any case, Fenster’s theory can be usefully applied to Puritan society, in many ways a society about to become a modern one, whose conspiracy theories I discuss in chapter 2. In order to lay the foundation for this and my other case studies, I would like to elaborate here on three aspects where I think that Fenster’s ideas can be pushed a little further. First, in stressing that populist movements arise when the relationship between the people and their representatives appears to be “in crisis,” Fenster hints at but never develops the idea that conspiracy theories emerge from a perceived crisis of political representation which these theories articulate as visions of subversion. This subversion can be imagined as having occurred already, as in the case of the Slave Power which was said to have successfully undermined all political institutions, or it can be anticipated as about to occur, as in the case of the Catholic conspiracy theory. Yet, conspiracy theories are an expression not only of a supposed political crisis of representa-

18

Introduction

tion, but of a semiotic one as well. After all, they are concerned with secret plots and hidden actions, not with open attempts, however reactionary, to reform the existing system of representation. As the conspirators constantly disavow the intentions that conspiracy theorists ascribe to them, they are producing signs which – from the perspective of the conspiracy theorist – are supposed to mislead their unsuspecting victims. With regard to conspiracy theories, then, the connection between political and semiotic representation, always postulated by cultural studies and New Historicist approaches, is particularly strong. Any attempt to foil a conspiracy must therefore be understood as an attempt, on the one hand, to ensure or return to the proper political representation of the people, and, on the other, to reestablish a transparent order of signification in which verbal and other signs are expressions of people’s real intentions and not means to veil them. Significantly, conspiracy theorists usually do not doubt that this is possible. They do not assume that just political representation is impossible or that democracy as such is flawed, but “merely” that the system has been or is about to be corrupted. Likewise, they do not consider signification per se problematic, but hold on to a very optimistic model of semiotic representation in which signs can function as reliable indicators of people’s intentions. In fact, once the conspiracy theorist has understood what is going on, all signs produced by the conspirators become legible and signify their evil intentions. Moreover, when the conspirators have been defeated, and people really mean again what they say, even this interpretive effort will not be necessary any longer. Second, I would like to propose a model that captures the relationship between cultural concerns and the conspiracy theories that arise in reaction to them more exactly than Fenster does when he remarks that such theories are “on to something.” What Fenster implies is that conspiracy theories are symptoms of pressing issues and anxieties, but since he is not interested in identifying the root causes that give rise to conspiracy theories, he never elaborates on the relationship between symptom and cause. His choice of words – “on to something” – and his use of the concept of articulation, however, indicate that he conceives of this relationship as indirect and imprecise. As I stressed above already, Laclau suggests that every articulation to a certain degree obscures the real state of affairs, because it replaces logical by formal links and translates differences into antagonisms. The question, then, is how conspiracy theories, as a special form of populist discourse, misrepresent the issues at stake. For the Marxist Laclau, populism invariably misrepresents class conflicts, which he locates at the center of all social struggles. Since “the strictly populist moment [cannot] be linked to the discourse of a determinate social class” (Politics 174), populist discourse cuts across class boundaries. Therefore, it always more or

Introduction

19

less detracts from the fights that, from a Marxist point of view, really should be fought. This is an important observation because it suggests that class antagonism and economic struggle are at the heart of conspiracy theories. This, of course, has been fervently denied by Richard Hofstadter, who, following the traditional line that the United States is a classless society, argued that, in the United States, “ethnic and religious conflicts […] have plainly been the major focus for militant and suspicious minds […], but elsewhere class conflicts have also mobilized such energies” (39). Yet, as my case studies will show, class struggles are often at the bottom of American conspiracy theories, but these theories frequently articulate economic conflicts as religious or ethnic ones. Still, Hofstadter is right in so far as, to my mind, Laclau’s argument is too one-sided. Populism in general and conspiracy theories in particular are not always, or at least not always exclusively, related to class conflicts, but arise from different kinds of social tensions as well. They are articulations of quite different struggles for hegemony. What I would like to suggest is that conspiracy theories invariably articulate, that is, misrepresent or recast, these struggles for hegemony in one of two ways. Conspiracy theories either distort the issues at stake to a larger or smaller degree, or they deflect from these issues altogether. In the first case, conspiracy theories target the groups that conspiracy theorists really have a problem with, but not for the actual reasons at the heart of the conflict but because of an allegedly devious plot.11 For example, during the late 1820s and early 1830s, anti-Masons opposed Masons not because of their divergent religious views and membership in a more privileged class, but because they allegedly plotted the abolition of liberty. In the second case, a group uninvolved in the actual conflict gets targeted. This is what happened to the Catholics between the mid-1830s and 1850s. During these two decades conspiracy theories about Catholic infiltration deflected from economic and religious conflicts among Protestants of different denominations. Deflection and distortion are of course not diametrically opposed, but must be understood as two ideal types that, in practice, can co-exist and overlap. The Salem witchcraft crisis and the Great Red Scare of the 1950s, for example, are characterized by such a co-presence of distortion and deflection, and in the case of the latter the two can only heuristically be kept apart. Equally important to note is that deflection is usually more long-lived. The Masonic conspiracy theory and the Catholic conspiracy theory were articulations of largely the same social

11 My notion of distortion must not be confused with the way Hofstadter uses the concept. For him, the conspiracy theorist’s “distorted style” of perceiving the world and articulating his concerns is indicative of a pathological disposition (6). As I said before, I reject such a denigrating approach. My approach has more in common with Shane Miller’s understanding of conspiracy theory as “coded social critique” (51).

20

Introduction

concerns, but whereas the one disappeared after a few years, the other lasted for more than two decades. The reason for this is that deflection is usually less destructive to the community. As a form of scapegoating, deflection tends to externalize the conflict (although not during the Great Red Scare), and thus stabilizes a community by easing existing social tensions. Distortion, by contrast, tends to escalate the conflicts within a community, because it translates differences into an antagonism of good and evil. It can push communities to the brink of disintegration, as with the Puritans, or even beyond, as with conspiracy theories about slavery that were instrumental in bringing about the Civil War. They destroyed the Union, but, by doing this, created new communities as well. This leads me to my third and final point. Like populisms in general, conspiracy theories do not merely affirm existing collective identities, but, as “the equivalential logic [cuts] across new and more heterogeneous social groups” (Laclau, Populist 77), they also construct new communal identities. Fenster is perfectly aware of this (cf. 85; 159–63), but although he devotes two chapters to conspiracy communities, he never elaborates on this process theoretically. The reason for this seems to be that Fenster is very skeptical of conspiracy theory’s power to beget stable communities. As he puts it, “The conspiracy community is at any particular moment a rickety contraption” (163). This might be true for many contemporary conspiracy communities whose members have problems to limit suspicion, and thus are often unable to trust anybody. As we will see, however, earlier ages found it much easier to distinguish between potential conspirators and the unsuspicious, as their conspiratorial visions were often organized along national, regional, religious, or ethnic lines. Accordingly, the communities these theories constructed were relatively stable and capable of collective action. The Puritan community in New England, for example, was founded on and for many decades stabilized by a conspiracy theory, before the events of 1692 transformed this stabilizing conspiracy theory for a short time into a destabilizing force. Similarly, the idea of a Slave Power plot united a number of different people who otherwise disagreed on almost everything, even their attitude toward blacks. Conspiracy theories, however, do not merely construct an identity for those opposing the conspiracy, the people, but they impose an identity on those considered conspirators, that is, those allegedly striving for or already wielding undue power. In fact, ascribing to one group the identity of subversives is the precondition for projecting another group as countersubversives. Due to this pronounced othering, the identity formation that conspiracy theories perform must be understood as a particularly powerful form of inclusion and exclusion. Conspiracy theories produce exceptionally strong notions of Self, the people, and Other, the conspirators, because they imagine the Other not only as different and

Introduction

21

hostile but as already plotting the Self’s destruction or enslavement. And it is this move that serves to naturalize and stabilize the notion of Self. In a time when Protestant denominations were multiplying and becoming increasingly diverse, anti-Catholics re-created a collective notion of Protestantism by claiming that a Catholic plot against all Protestants was underway. Moreover, in their accounts of the Popish plot, the notion of Protestant often merged with that of American so that this conspiracy theory also forged a specific national identity. This, indeed, is quite typical of the conspiracy theories I will be concerned with in this study. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conspiracy theories in particular must be understood as part of the larger project of imagining national communities that Benedict Anderson has so convincingly described. As Jodie Dean puts it, “one might say that conspiracy thinking produces America as a nation; it provides narratives that tell Americans who ‘we’ are” (“Declarations” 291). Throughout this study I refer to this construction of communities as well as to the distortion of or deflection from the issues at the center of the conflict as the cultural work that conspiracy theories perform. There are two reasons why I use the concept of “cultural work.” The first is that the concept, which I adopt from Jane Tompkins, allows me to cut across the two major functions of conspiracy theories that I have just outlined in order to bring to the fore that they are always mutually dependent. Accordingly, whenever I speak of the cultural work of a specific conspiracy theory I refer both to its forging of identities and its articulation of a certain conflict. Occasionally, though, when focusing on one of the two functions, I also speak of, say, the cultural work of distortion or othering. The other reason is that the concept of cultural work signals that this study is not only informed by ideas from cultural studies but by those of the New Historicism as well. These two scholarly traditions can, of course, be easily combined, because they share the same founding texts – Foucault, Derrida, and the neo-Marxist works of Althusser and Gramsci, among others. Moreover, both conceive of the relationship between a text and its contexts as open and reciprocal, and demand close attention to individual texts, while never losing sight of the larger ideological formations these texts are part of, and the cultural functions they perform.12

12 Strictly speaking, my approach here could be labeled post-New Historicist, because I investigate more than one epoch and am interested in diachronic developments and continuities as much as in the specificities of a particular age. However, as Sabine Sielke points out, German academics have from the very beginning given the “New Historicism credit for most attractive readings of arbitrarily connected cultural material, [but found] the focus on synchronic analyses, which tends to relegate continuities to the periphery, too exclusive” (80). As a consequence, German American Studies, and this probably goes for European American Studies in general, has since the 1980s tried to have its synchronic take and diachronize it, too, exploring ways to

22

Introduction

*** The cultural work of conspiracy theories hinges on the fact that these theories are narratives both on the level of individual texts and on a more abstract level when the arguments of several texts are presented in highly condensed fashion. Even a conspiracy theory reduced to a single sentence – say, the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11, because it wanted to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and restrict civil liberties at home – is a narrative in the sense in which the concept has been used since the narrative turn of the 1980s. As “an instrument of the mind in the construction of reality,” a narrative transforms the chaos that is unmediated reality into a well-ordered account of what happened, why it happened, and who made it happen (Brunner 6). In fact, as “a model of historical storytelling” (Fenster 123), conspiracy theories are particularly strong narratives, because they leave no room for coincidence and contingency. As Jerome Brunner stresses, all narratives display a tendency “for converting post hoc into propter hoc” and for representing “things happening at the same time [as] connected” (19). But with conspiracy theories, this penchant becomes the rule, since they are, as I discussed above, built on the assumptions that nothing happens by accident and that everything has been planned. Accordingly, the one-sentence account of conspiracy just mentioned contends that the Bush administration did not merely capitalize on the attacks of 9/11, taking the opportunity that event offered to implement the policies it favored, but that it planned the attacks in order to create the situation in which they could be implemented and that everything happened as the administration had planned it. This one-sentence conspiracy theory condenses the arguments of a broad variety of individual texts of all kinds – from Thierry Meyssan’s Hunt the Boeing website to Andreas von Bülow’s book Die CIA und der 11. September: Internationaler Terror und die Rolle der Geheimdienste (2003) to the immensely successful online documentaries of the Loose Change series – which try to prove in much detail that the Bush administration was ultimately behind the attacks by laying bare its motives and reconstructing how it proceeded.13 At the same time, abstract versions like this fuel the production of individual texts, as the unsubstantiated claims of the one-sentence conspiracy theory might motivate somebody who comes across it to investigate the claims on their own and eventually produce another account. Naturally, even if their claims can be condensed to a more

reconcile these contradictory demands and often favoring, in the end, continuity over rupture. My study continues this tradition. 13 For an overview of how 9/11 conspiracy theories developed, see Knight, “Outrageous” 167–71.

Introduction

23

abstract version, individual accounts can vary considerably. Thus, in some versions of the 9/11 conspiracy theory, the Pentagon was hit by a plane, in others by a cruise missile, and in yet another variant by laser beams fired by a secret weapon (cf. Fenster 252). Accordingly, whenever I talk about a conspiracy theory in general fashion (as I frequently do in this study), I temporarily downplay the differences that may exist between the individual texts that, taken together, spin the conspiracy theory in its abstract form. On the level of these individual texts, conspiracy theory, as my examples should already have made clear, is not restricted to a specific genre, but cuts across generic boundaries and even the distinction between factual and fictional texts. In contemporary culture, we encounter conspiracy scenarios in film, TV shows, and novels as well as in video documentaries, articles that circulate on the Internet, and in lengthy exposés with innumerable footnotes available from specialized publishers or books-on-demand. In the earlier periods that I am interested in here, conspiracy is, as we will see, less frequently a topic in fictional texts and even more rarely absolutely central to the plot. But as a legitimate form of knowledge, conspiracy theory is omnipresent in factual genres of all kinds: in sermons, political speeches, pamphlets, history books, essays, radio addresses, congressional debates, and confessional tales by renegades, for example, apostate nuns and former Communists, who relate their experiences as members of the conspiracy and whose stories are often so exaggerated and obviously fabricated that it may be surprising at first sight that contemporaries considered them true accounts. With regard to the contemporary conspiracy narrative, Mark Fenster has argued that fictional and factual texts share the same characteristics. According to Fenster, in both its openly fictional and allegedly factual form, “the conspiracy narrative is compelling in its rapid, global movement, its focus on the actions of both the perpetrators of the evil conspiracy and the defenders of the moral order, and in its attempt to explain a wide range of seemingly disparate past and present events and structures within a relatively coherent framework” (119). Fenster specifically emphasizes three elements that he considers essential to all conspiracy narratives: their high “narrative speed” and “velocity,” the centrality of moments he calls “narrative pivots,” and the restoration of agency that such narratives enact. By “narrative speed,” Fenster means that the narrative is fastpaced, that “a multiplicity of events [is depicted] in brief scenes encompassing a few pages or terse scenes” (133). By “velocity,” he refers to “the geographic, geopolitical, and cognitive aspects of the conspiracy narrative’s movement” which is “both global and increasingly rapid as the narrative progresses” (134). “Narrative pivots” are turning points in the narrative that occur when “the protagonist gleans the single piece of information that enables him to realize the

24

Introduction

real nature of the forces that oppose him” (135), when, in other words, he finally manages to connect the dots. In fictional texts, pivots occur within the narrative; in factual accounts they are often recounted in the preface or an introductory chapter where the author relates how “the conspiracy reveal[ed] itself to him/ her” (125). Finally, “restoration of agency” refers to the fact that the publication of a factual account about a conspiracy constitutes a first step toward defeating it, as more people will become aware of it now; fictional narratives go even a step further and usually stage how “the hero or heroes arise triumphant through the ultimate defeat of the conspiracy” (124). Fenster’s theory works excellently for contemporary fictional narratives, especially for the popular fiction of Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown, and others, and Hollywood thrillers like The Bourne Identity, The International, or Salt. These narratives truly move at breathtaking speed across continents as the protagonists fight the conspirators, collect information, and finally put the puzzle together so that, in most but not in all cases, they eventually defeat the conspiracy. The theory also works well for video documentaries like Loose Change or The Obama Deception which move quickly back and forth in time and join footage of all kinds in such rapidly edited sequences that the viewers have no time to reflect on what they are actually watching, and thus are easily convinced by the interpretation that the voice-over narration imposes on the images (cf. Butter and Retterath). In fact, conspiracy theory’s tendency, discussed above, to replace logical with formal coherence is particularly pronounced in these films. Fenster’s theory, however, does not properly capture the characteristics of books and articles where the readers determine the pace of consumption and where they are often confronted with lengthy discussions of little details and endnotes that can run up to more than 100 hundred pages, as they do, for example, in Robert Welch’s The Politician. Accordingly, Fenster’s theory is only of limited value for the historical case studies that I undertake here. As attempts to alert an unsuspecting public to what is allegedly really going on, the pamphlets, sermons, and addresses that I analyze in this book aim at a restoration of agency, calling on “the people” to actively resist the conspiracy. These texts also often feature narrative pivots, though not always in the way and to the effect that Fenster postulates. But if Fenster’s theory of the pivot still proves useful for describing older conspiracy narratives, the categories of speed and velocity do not. The conspiracy theories that I will focus on often imagine global plots, and individual texts frequently reference events that occurred in the past or in distant countries, but these accounts entirely lack velocity – a category that is difficult to measure anyway – and are sometimes even lengthier than Welch’s exposure of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s complicity in the Communist conspiracy.

Introduction

25

The major problem with Fenster’s account of the conspiracy narrative is, however, that it disregards an important distinction that should be made for texts that revolve around conspiracy. With regard to conspiracy texts, I contend, it is crucial to distinguish between discursive texts that expose an alleged conspiracy by gathering and presenting evidence that is supposed to convince readers that a dangerous conspiracy exists, and texts that dramatize conspiracy scenarios. Both types of texts are narratives in the sense described above. They have a plot and follow a specific dramatic structure that in the case of discursive texts always and in the case of dramatizing texts often is that of the republican jeremiad, a template that I will describe in more detail in chapter 1. However, discursive and dramatizing conspiracy narratives differ in their degree of what Monika Fludernik has called “experientiality.” Discursive texts may not merely offer facts, but appeal to emotions as well by providing vivid examples of the conspiracy’s misdeeds and painting bleak pictures of a future in which the plot has succeeded. Still, they do not feature characters with whom the readers can identify and through whose eyes they experience the conspiracy. This, however, is what texts that dramatize conspiracy scenarios, often but not always openly fictional texts, offer their readers. Of course, as with all distinctions I have introduced so far, there are examples that defy this classification in that they combine elements from both categories, but such mixed cases are surprisingly rare throughout American history.14 The distinction between discursive and dramatizing texts is crucial for understanding the historical development of conspiracy theories and their narrative forms. Since the late eighteenth century, discursive conspiracy texts have been

14 The distinction between discursive and dramatizing texts might also prove helpful for a better understanding of contemporary conspiracy narratives. Fenster’s account of it, as my short discussion should have shown, is biased toward fictional texts, the only kind of texts in which, in the present, conspiracy scenarios are dramatized, and is less applicable to allegedly factual texts, which, for the past few decades, have invariably been discursive texts. Acknowledging this distinction, it seems to me, would allow for an even better account of contemporary forms of narrating conspiracy than Fenster offers. For example, dramatizing and discursive texts usually differ in the number of their pivots as dramatizing texts usually feature two narrative pivots. At the first one, the protagonist realizes that something is going on and starts to investigate; at the second one, s/he finally understands what is going on, as all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Discursive texts, by contrast, usually feature only one narrative pivot, namely when the author describes how s/he became a conspiracy theorists. But the sole purpose of discursive texts is to create the same effect in their audiences. In dramatizing texts, this happens more implicitly, as the audience usually experiences the action through the eyes of the protagonists and thus shares their realizations to a much stronger degree. Moreover, the recent success of discursive conspiracy narratives such as the Loose Change films can be explained by the fact that they adopt narrative strategies that used to be the exclusive property of dramatizing narratives, namely high speed and velocity.

26

Introduction

remarkably stable both in terms of structure and how they present their arguments. The modes of inference and deduction, the conviction that nothing happens by coincidence and that everything has been planned, and the establishment of connections between seemingly disparate events and people are as characteristic of eighteenth-century pamphlets that indict the Illuminati as they are of video documentaries and books that claim that 9/11 was an inside job. There are, of course, developments in the way the material is arranged and what kinds of witnesses are regarded as particularly trustworthy, but the overall structure of these discursive conspiracy narratives has hardly changed.15 What is more, the tropes that dominate conspiracy theory are even older. Firmly anchored within a religious framework, the seventeenth-century Puritan texts I discuss in chapter 2 still argue differently than later secular texts, but, casting the conspiracy either as an act of invasion or as an infection, they already use the imagery that dominates conspiracy discourse until today. As we will see, military metaphors are always used in conspiracy discourse, whereas tropes of disease are drawn on whenever one needs to explain, as in the cases of the witchcraft crisis and 1950s Communist subversion, why members of the targeted community collaborate with its external enemies. If discursive conspiracy narratives are characterized by much continuity, there is hardly any with regard to texts that dramatize conspiracy scenarios. Today this happens mostly in thrillers where the conspiracy is usually absolutely central to the plot. The thriller, however, is a relatively young genre that only fully emerged during the twentieth century. During the periods I focus on, conspiracy is a topic in a variety of very different genres, for example, in variations of the captivity narrative, the sensational novel, or the plantation novel, but in none of these texts is conspiracy narrated in any way similar to the twentieth-century thriller. We never encounter characters that detect a large-scale conspiracy against the liberties of the United States and set out to foil it. The reasons for this, as I argue in more detail in chapters 3 and 4, is that the complex conspiracy scenarios exposed in discursive texts of the time cannot be properly dramatized until late in the nineteenth century. Until then, dramatizing texts either integrate visions of conspiracy in discursive fashion – a character, in a lengthy speech, or the authorial narrator, in a comment, expose the conspiracy in exactly the same

15 Richard Hofstadter correctly perceived this continuity and therefore opened his seminal essay on the paranoid style with a series of quotations from conspiracy narratives from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries (cf. 7–9). While he correctly observed the conspiracy theorists’ obsession with documentation and footnotes, his anxiety to cast conspiracy theorizing as a dangerous minority phenomenon prevented him from exploring the narrative structures and tropes of conspiracy discourse.

Introduction

27

fashion as pamphlets or sermons do – or they stage the conspiracy threats that circulate within the culture at that time symbolically. Fiction’s inability throughout most of the nineteenth century to dramatize comprehensive visions of conspiracy in a literal fashion is one reason why I focus on discursive texts in the chapters that follow. My other reason for concentrating on speeches, sermons, and pamphlets is that I want to show how firmly anchored conspiracy theorizing was in the mainstream and to what substantial degree it influenced the perceptions and actions of political and religious leaders. In chapters 3 and 4, however, I also devote some space to discussing texts that dramatize the conspiracy scenarios, such as the convent captivity narrative or the plantation novel. Moreover, each of my case studies concludes with a close reading of a more or less canonical fictional text characterized by an ambivalent attitude toward the conspiracy theory discussed in the chapter. As these texts lay bare and criticize the mechanisms of conspiracy theorizing, they testify to literature’s ability to provide particularly nuanced insights into a culture’s concerns. But as they at least partly confirm the suspicions of conspiracy circulating within the culture at the time, they also show how pervasive and accepted conspiracy theories and the knowledge they produced were. *** All that I have said so far about the populist dimension of conspiracy theories, their cultural work of deflection, distortion, and identity construction, as well as their structure, rhetoric, and mode of reasoning applies, I would contend, to secular conspiracy theories as they arose with the Enlightenment in general. I have, however, already predominantly drawn on American examples to illustrate my arguments. There are specific reasons why conspiracy theories have always been so prominent in the United States and why they assumed the form they did (such as that of the republican jeremiad, which is a specifically American variation of the common structure of the conspiracy narrative). Using conspiracy theories about the American Revolution as my point of departure, I discuss these reasons in chapter 1. I argue that the American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to three factors: an epistemological paradigm that postulates a direct relationship between people’s intentions and their actions and denies the possibility of unwarranted and accidental outcomes; the ideology of republicanism according to which republics are fragile entities perpetually endangered by conspirators within and without; and the heritage of Puritanism which firmly divides the world into good and evil and insists on America’s mission in a struggle of cosmic dimensions. These three factors have been mentioned before by scholars who have tried to explain the popularity of con-

28

Introduction

spiracy theories in American culture, but they have never been treated in combination. None of them alone would have been enough to make conspiracy theories as prominent as they have proved to be. But the epistemological paradigm, republicanism, and the Puritan heritage fueled each other, merged in parts, as in the republican jeremiad, and, for reasons I also discuss, proved to be long-lived, providing the basis for a veritable culture of conspiracy theorizing in which such theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge until far into the twentieth century. The second part of chapter 1 reviews classifications that have been proposed to chart American conspiracy theories. The distinction I consider most useful is that between theories concerned with conspiracies directed against the government and theories concerned with conspiracies conducted by the government. As I show by way of a short overview of the most important conspiracy theories that have preoccupied American culture over the past two centuries and close readings of George Washington’s and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Addresses, the first type, imagining plots against the state carried out by internal or external enemies or, frequently, a combination of both, is the dominant variant until about 1960. Since then, such visions of conspiracy have not completely disappeared, but most conspiracy theories of the past five decades have revolved around plots carried out by the government. Significantly, this shift occurs at the exact historical moment when conspiracy theories lose their status as officially accepted knowledge and move increasingly to the margins of society. The next four chapters are devoted to specific moments in the history of American conspiracy theorizing until 1960. I do not intend to preview in detail here the structure and line of argument of each of these case studies, as I do this at the beginning of each respective chapter. I would like to quickly explain, however, why I selected them, and how each case study contributes to an understanding of American conspiracy theories in general. There are two major reasons why I devote chapter 2 to conspiracy theories among the Puritans and particularly to the Salem witchcraft crisis. First, unlike the other two important sources of American conspiracism that I identify in chapter 1 – the specific epistemological paradigm and the ideology of republicanism – Puritanism and its conspiracy theories have never been explored in detail by scholars of conspiracy theory so far. Second, the Puritan conspiracy theories allow us to observe in highly condensed fashion many of those elements that we encounter in other conspiracy theories in isolation. The Puritan community had for a long time been stabilized by a conspiracy theory, but during the Salem witchcraft crisis, the conspiracy theory became a destabilizing force that brought the community to the brink of destruction. The conspiracy theory that fueled the Salem witchcraft crisis was spun both by the community’s leaders and those at

Introduction

29

the other end of the social spectrum, albeit for very different reasons. As it simultaneously distorted and deflected from a number of pressing social and economic conflicts, the conspiracy theory made it almost impossible for the Puritans to limit their suspicions. At one point it became possible to regard virtually anybody as in league with the devil, a moment captured in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), which returns to the Salem of 1692 from the perspective of the 1830s and which, I argue, offers an analysis of the pitfalls of conspiracy theorizing in general. Chapter 3 explores the Catholic conspiracy theory of the 1830s to 1850s, because the cultural work of deflection that conspiracy theories can perform comes to the fore there particularly well. Suspicions about Catholics had a long tradition in America, but they only assumed a conspiracist garb when an economic and religious conflict running along denominational lines threatened the coherence of the Protestant community. Articulating these concerns as the fear of a Catholic plot, the conspiracy theory re-created and affirmed the Protestant community. Moreover, as it merged the idea of Protestantism with that of liberty, it worked to define the United States as a nation that is democratic because it is Protestant. The Catholic conspiracy theory is largely forgotten today, but it was far more long-lived than the Masonic conspiracy theory, which arose from the same conflict, but only distorted the issues at stake and thus further destabilized the community. Just how influential the Catholic conspiracy theory was for a while is apparent from the fact that it was considered a huge disappointment when the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party, which was founded in the early 1850s, won only about 25 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election of 1856. In fact, for more than two decades conspiracist suspicions of Catholics were so pervasive that not even George Lippard fully escaped them. His The Quaker City (1845) exposes the hypocrisy that informs Protestant indictments of a Catholic plot, but simultaneously confirms these suspicions. The power of conspiracy theories to determine the course of the country is most pronounced with regard to the antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery that I analyze in chapter 4. The Civil War, I show, is ultimately the result of two competing conspiracy theories. Resistance to an alleged plot by the so-called Slave Power to nationalize slavery was the founding ideology of the Republican Party whose election success in 1860 caused the secession of the slave states. In this decision, slaveholders were heavily influenced by the perception that radical Republicans were secretly planning to abolish slavery everywhere. Thus, the two conspiracy theories held by opposing parties destroyed one community, the Union, but created two others at the same time. Importantly, the two conspiracy theories did not deflect from but “merely” distorted the issues at stake. In fact, the Slave Power conspiracy theory is arguably the least distorting of all those that I

30

Introduction

address in this study. Its proponents were well justified to complain about the undue influence of slaveholders, who, however, only aggressively pursued their goals but did not resort to conspiracy. What is more, the concerns about political representation that inform every conspiracy theory are quite obvious with regard to these two conspiracy theories. The antislavery camp felt that the slaveholders were directing political affairs against the wishes of the people, but continued to trust in the political process; the proslavery camp, by contrast, left the Union in 1861 largely because they felt that the Republicans had hijacked the nation and that their votes did not matter anymore. That both the Slave Power and abolitionist conspiracy theories (the former until 1860, the latter from 1860 onward) claimed that the conspirators had already captured the federal government sets them apart among American conspiracy theories before 1960, as both, at least for a while, imagined plots by the government and not against it. That the take-over of power has already happened is dramatized in Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno,” whose symbolic and ambivalent negotiation of conspiracy theories revolving around slavery as well as Catholicism I examine in the chapter’s last section. My final case study in chapter 5 explores the Great Red Scare of the 1950s. As most cultural studies analyses of conspiracy theory use the 1950s as their point of departure, paying close attention to this period allows me to complement some of the findings of these studies and to lay the foundations for the revision of some of their claims that I undertake in the conclusion. From the larger diachronic perspective that my study assumes, the Communist conspiracy theory of that decade emerges as the culmination of the nineteenth-century theories I investigate in the two preceding chapters. Anti-Communists claimed that the plot targeted both the highest levels of government (as conspiracy theories about slavery did) and the foundation of the republic, the family (as the Catholic conspiracy theory did). Moreover, as fears of Communism got linked to fears of alleged social and sexual perversions, such as momism or homosexuality, distortion and deflection merged to such a degree that they can only be heuristically disentangled. Most importantly, the Great Red Scare was the last time that a major conspiracy theory envisioned the government as targeted but not yet captured by a conspiracy. It was also the last time that such a conspiracy theory was accepted as official knowledge. Still reflecting this status of conspiracy theory, both Richard Condon’s novel and John Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate (1959, 1962) criticize some aspects of the hunt for Communist subversion, most notably the ruthlessness of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but on the whole confirm fears of a Communist plot and especially those larger cultural anxieties that the Communist conspiracy theory articulated. Some readers might be slightly surprised that I do not discuss any antiSemitic conspiracy theory in detail and that I have not mentioned anti-Semitism

Introduction

31

at all so far. After all, some scholars, most vocally maybe Daniel Pipes, have argued that anti-Semitism is a standard ingredient of American conspiracy theories (cf. Conspiracy 27–28). This is true for contemporary conspiracy theories that circulate outside of mainstream discourse among the extreme right, but it does not apply for American conspiracy theories in general. In fact, emerging on a larger scale only in response to Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the final decades of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism is a latecomer to the United States. Its most vocal spokesmen in the first half of the twentieth century were Henry Ford and Father Coughlin, who both also propagated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Ford even had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion translated and published in the Dearborn Independent in 1920 (cf. Davis, Fear 228). In recent decades, as American culture transformed the Holocaust into an “American memory” (Novick 207), anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been restricted entirely to the margins of society. They may inspire horrible crimes such as the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, but when compared to the conspiracy theories that I explore in my case studies, suspicions of Jewish plots have been of little influence in the history of the United States. Articulating concerns about race, class, gender, and religion, the visions of subversion that I focus on were believed and spun by presidents, senators, religious leaders, and some of America’s most famous authors. Until the 1960s, when, as I explore in my conclusion, conspiracy theories became more marginal, they persistently and considerably shaped the course of the nation.

Chapter 1 Mapping American Conspiracism The nation that we today refer to as the United States of America was founded largely because of a persuasive conspiracy theory. This at least is the influential argument Bernhard Bailyn has made in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and in the introduction to the accompanying five-volume edition Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750–1776. “[T]he fear of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world – a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption, and of which, it was felt, oppression in America was only the most immediately visible part – lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement,” Bailyn writes in the “Foreword” to Pamphlets (x).1 Over the course of the 1760s and 1770s, the colonists became increasingly convinced of the existence of what George Washington in 1774 described as “a regular, systematic plan […] to make us tame and abject slaves” (“There” 34). This plot, the colonists eventually claimed, was carried out by the king, his ministers, parliament, the Church of England, and the crown’s representatives in the colonies. What is more, the colonists believed that, beginning in America, the conspirators wanted to abolish liberty everywhere. As Bailyn suggests, this perception was of “the utmost importance to the colonists” because “it transformed [their demands] from constitutional arguments to expressions of a world regenerative creed” (“General Introduction” 82). As one pamphleteer put it, the cause of America “is the cause of self-defense, of public faith, and of the liberties of mankind” (qtd. in Bailyn, “General Introduction” 83).2 Faced with a comprehensive conspiracy, the colonists felt that their revolt was justified. The perceived plot thus fueled and legitimized the revolution. The conspiracy theory harbored by the colonists shows that the approach to the forms and functions of conspiracy theory that I outlined in the introduction is not only applicable to contemporary conspiracy theories but to older ones as

1 Bailyn’s argument remains largely unchallenged. Some scholars have rightly pointed out that he, as well as other proponents of the approach later called “republican synthesis,” neglected the role hard economic factors played in fueling the rebellion, but such approaches rather complement his claims and do not disqualify them. For a discussion of studies that stress the importance of republicanism for understanding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, see Appleby; Rodgers, “Republicanism”; and Shalhope, “Toward.” 2 Many of the primary texts that I draw on in this study make heavy use of italics on word, sentence, and even paragraph level. Unless especially indicated, all italics in quotations are in the originals.

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

33

well. To begin with, the revolutionary movement was populist in the sense defined there. The conspiracy texts of the time regularly constructed the colonists as “the people” who were being robbed of their rights and liberties either by a “ministerial power” acting against the king’s desires, as Baptist minister John Allen claimed in 1773 (29), or by a conspiracy spearheaded by the king himself, as most other texts and especially the Declaration of Independence contended.3 In addition, the processual dimension of populism, its ability to link hitherto unconnected issues and people, is observable here as well. That the conspiracy theory created “unanimity” in the colonies, as George Washington claimed (“There” 34), is surely exaggerated. But it surely helped construct a collective identity for inhabitants of thirteen quite diverse colonies (East and West Florida and the Canadian colonies did not join the rebellion), a group of people that had, apart from living on the same continent as British subjects, little in common until the perception that they were the victims of a conspiracy moved them closer together. As Jodie Dean puts it, “Distrust of British authority helped produce a new ‘we,’ a ‘we’ constituted out of those sharing a fear of corruption and ministerial conspiracy, a ‘we’ hailed in the Declaration as those who might believe that the king was plotting against their liberty” (“Declarations” 297). Accusing the king, the ministers, and parliament, of conspiring against their liberties, the colonists, as is characteristic of conspiracy theorists in general, misperceived what one might, with all due caution, call the “real” state of affairs. While it is true that George III was trying to turn back the clock, so to say, and reduce the power of parliament and people, he was not the mastermind behind a conspiracy. The crown did not act according to a secret plan whose ultimate goal was to enslave the colonists. Put in the terminology I proposed in the introduction, then, the colonists distorted the issues at stake. They did not deflect from the actual conflict and scapegoated a third, hitherto uninvolved party, but targeted those they fundamentally disagreed with and who withheld from them what they demanded, translating what were “merely” opposite interests and beliefs into a conspiracist vision. The conspiracy did not exist but the colonists sincerely believed that it did. Indeed, the British government perceived the conflict in exactly the same, if reversed, fashion. As Bailyn writes, “Officials in the colonies,

3 Bailyn, quoting yet another pamphleteer, argues that by “1774 the idea that ‘the British government – the King, Lords, and Commons – have laid a regular plan to enslave America, and that they are now deliberately putting it in execution’ had been asserted, Samuel Seabury wrote wearily but accurately, ‘over, and over, and over again’” (“General Introduction” 74). The Declaration of Independence focuses almost exclusively on George III, listing among his many misdeeds “a design to reduce [the colonies] under absolute despotism.”

34

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

and their superiors in England were persuaded as the crisis deepened that they were confronted by an active conspiracy of intriguing men whose professions masked their true intentions” (“General Introduction” 88). Moreover, the conspiracy theories circulating at the time also share with most other conspiracist visions a deep-seated concern about both semiotic and political representation. As Thomas Gustafson has shown, these two dimensions of the concept of representation were inextricably connected in the minds of the colonists. They envisioned the republic they aimed to establish as a place where “a sovereign political language” purged of “artifices and false entitlements” would “represent not the dictates of a monarch but the common sense of the people and would act as a chart for guiding the ship of state safely between the Scylla and Charybdis of tyranny and anarchy” (6). But the counterpart of this utopian vision was the conviction that at the present moment words were used to veil one’s real intentions and thus to further plans that endangered the system of just representation. This worry is palpable in many texts from both sides of the conflict, for example in John Adams’s comment on the British response to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 and George III’s statement to Parliament in October 1775. Adams considered the British parliament’s actions in the two months after the Tea Party as the moment when the enemy “threw off the mask” and finally revealed its true intentions, thus implying that the crown had until then systematically deceived its colonial subjects. George III referred to the colonists as “[t]he authors and promoters of this desperate conspiracy” and asserted that “They meant only to amuse, by vague expression of attachment to the parent state and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt” (qtd. in Bailyn, “General Introduction” 73, 88). What both sides veiled by means of false linguistic representations in the eyes of the respective other was inextricably connected to the issue of political representation – an issue central to the conflict between crown and colonies. In fact, as Gordon Wood has argued, “of all the conceptions of political theory underlying the momentous development of the American Revolutionary era, none was more important than that of representation” (Representation 1). What clashed in the conflict between crown and colonies were two different understandings of political representation. The colonists demanded real, or what one might, in rhetorical terms, call metonymic, representation: they wanted to send representatives elected among them to the parliament in London. The crown, by contrast, upheld the principle of what has been called “‘virtual’ representation” (Bailyn, “General Introduction” 94), and what one could also refer to as symbolic representation. It argued that the colonists were already represented in parliament because its members represented all British subjects, including the vast majority that was not allowed to vote.

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

35

But this controversy was rarely addressed as a difference in political theory; far more frequently it was recast in conspiracist terms. As the British saw it, the colonists made undue demands and were well aware of this. Their true aim was to create outrage that would provide a veil of legitimacy for the revolt they had been plotting all along. The colonists, in turn, perceived the crown as denying them the political representation they were entitled to, and they believed that this was merely the first step in a larger plot aimed at turning them all into “slaves” (Allen 30). As a result of these mutual accusations, the conflict continued to heat up until it escalated – with the familiar outcome. The example of the conspiracy theories that fueled the Revolutionary War already proves the major point that I will be making again and again in this study: while many scholars claim that conspiracy theories have never been more popular than during the past forty years, exactly the opposite is true. Conspiracy theories were far more central to American culture in the past than they are now. During the Revolutionary Period they were obviously considered a legitimate form of knowledge and not the kind of popular counterknowledge, ridiculed by experts, as which they are usually regarded today. Contrary to what scholars like Michael Rogin have argued for whom conspiracy theories are always strategically deployed (cf. Intellectuals), they were sincerely believed by some of the nation’s most revered leaders, among others by the Founding Fathers George Washington and John Adams. These figures could not be further removed from the fringes of society to which, according to scholars like Richard Hofstadter and his followers, belief in conspiracy theories has always been restricted in American culture and where, indeed, they mainly thrive today. The status of conspiracy theory as a widely accepted way of generating knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century and, as we will see in the following chapters, throughout the nineteenth and far into the twentieth century, raises a couple of questions. Why were conspiracy theories considered a legitimate form of knowledge in the past, and why did they retain this status in the United States until the 1950s? And how can we account for the continued popularity of conspiracy theories in American culture where even today they are far more widely spread and believed than in most other Western countries? The first three sections of this chapter address exactly these questions. Without fostering any notion of American exceptionalism, I discuss what I consider the three most important factors that have contributed to the undeniable American propensity to perceive the world in conspiracist fashion: 1) the specific eighteenth-century epistemology of cause and effect that, because of a belief in individualism and strong aversion to structural explanations, has proven particularly long-lived in the United States; 2) an equally persistent republican ideology according to which republics are in perpetual danger of being destroyed by

36

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

conspiracies; and 3) the influence of Puritanism with its belief in America’s mission in a Manichean struggle of cosmic dimensions between the forces of good and evil. Considering the importance of the Puritan heritage for American conspiracy theorizing will also lead me to a discussion of the dominant narrative form that conspiracy texts have assumed throughout the centuries: the republican jeremiad. Puritanism as well as republicanism and the specific epistemology have all been discussed before by scholars of conspiracy theory, but usually in isolation. What I would like to suggest in this section, instead, is that it is the copresence and interplay of these three factors that has made conspiracy theories so prominent in the United States. In conjunction, they led to the American propensity for conspiracy theorizing that characterizes the culture until today. In a short excursion I then elaborate on the complex relationship between religion, secularization, and conspiracy theory, suggesting that the distinction between metaphysical and secular conspiracy theories is not as clear-cut as, among others, Karl Popper and Gordon Wood have claimed, and that in contemporary America religious and secular accounts of conspiracy frequently merge. Returning to the questions addressed in the first section I therefore argue that secular conspiracy theories thrive particularly well in contexts where religious worldviews remain popular. In the chapter’s final section I discuss a number of typologies that have been proposed in order to map the field of American conspiracy theories. I argue that, valuable as many of these categorizations heuristically are, it is important to take into account that most conspiracy theories cannot be assigned to one specific category but rather tend to cut across them. This ultimately also applies to the distinction between conspiracies against the government and conspiracies by the government. However, this distinction is particularly useful because it facilitates a historical trajectory of American conspiracy theories from the eighteenth century to the present. Until far into the twentieth century, I contend, almost all American conspiracy theories have revolved around the fear of plots against the government, a concern prototypically expressed in George Washington’s Farewell Address. Washington’s argument that the government was endangered by external and internal enemies alike has been echoed by virtually every conspiracy theory until around 1960. Only then did accounts of conspiracy begin to emerge that claim that the conspirators – Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” or other sinister groups – have already managed to gain control over the government and transformed it into an agency of conspiracy.

The Epistemology of Causality

37

Source I: The Epistemology of Causality Some scholars have argued that the reason why conspiracy theories exist and why so many believe them is simply that conspiracy theories constitute an anthropological given. They offer, in Dieter Groh’s famous phrase, an explanation for why “bad things happen to good people” (“Temptation” 1). The basic weakness of this approach is not only that its proponents operate with an extremely wide definition of conspiracy theory; moreover, it cannot explain the obvious fact that conspiracy theories (no matter how loosely they are defined) flourish more in certain cultures than in others and more at certain historical moments than at others. In order to account for a specific culture’s or age’s propensity to perceive the world through the lens of conspiracy theory, another group of scholars has pointed to the experience of real conspiracies. This argument is more plausible. In the Middle East, in ancient Rome and Athens, and throughout the early modern period in Europe, the occurrence of intrigues that were not only imagined fueled conspiracist worldviews.4 The American settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely familiar with the various allegations of intrigue that circulated in England during the Restoration period and after the Glorious Revolution. But this is hardly the whole story. After all, throughout the nineteenth century visions of conspiracy were far more prominent in the United States than in Britain – a discrepancy that cannot be explained by the occurrence of conspiracies in the United States during that time. The two most prominent American plots of the nineteenth century – John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – were small in scale and, more importantly, merely fueled already existing conspiracy theories. As we will see in the conclusion, though, the experience of secret plots carried out by their own government was a factor in making Americans redirect their fears of conspiracy in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then Americans have been predominantly concerned with conspiracies by the government and no longer with plots against it. Scholars who try to explain a propensity for conspiracy theorizing through specific historical events also point to social upheavals like revolutions whose enormous transformative impact, they suggest, cannot be accounted for unless one assumes conspiratorial forces to be at work. For the American context, this argument has been made by David Brion Davis. “Is it possible that the circum-

4 For the Middle Eastern context, see Gray; for ancient Athens, see Roisman; for Roman history, see Pagán; and for Early Modern Europe, see Bullard and virtually all contributions to the collection edited by Coward and Swann.

38

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

stances of the Revolution conditioned Americans to think of resistance to a dark subversive force as the essential ingredient of their national identity?” he asked in an introductory section to his important volume The Fear of Conspiracy (23). Did the specificities of the revolution require Americans to become conspiracy theorists and thus establish this way of making sense of the world in American culture? There is certainly some truth to this, especially since the country’s history, unlike that of most European countries, has been a continuous one since then. But while the memory of the Revolution is probably a factor that helped render plausible at least nineteenth-century conspiracy theories, it is, again, hardly the whole story. After all, conspiracy theories caused the American Revolution and not the other way round. Thus, if we want to understand America’s “special relationship to conspiracy theory,” as Kathryn Olmsted has called it (3), we have to search elsewhere. We have to look for the underlying, culturally specific factors that made Americans conceive of the Revolution and so many other events in conspiracist fashion. A first major step into this direction was taken in the early 1980s by Gordon Wood in his essay “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century” (1982). Wood takes up Davis’s implicit suggestion and rejects it, arguing that belief in conspiracies was so pervasive in the eighteenth century – a point, in fact, already made by Bailyn – that the colonists, just as the British, had no choice but to understand the conflict in this fashion. I want to recapitulate Wood’s argument at some length here because it helps to understand not only why the colonists believed in conspiracies but, more generally, the American penchant for conspiracy theorizing. However, while Wood’s approach is highly enlightening, he overlooks that the epistemological paradigm he identifies – a mechanistic worldview that excludes coincidence and ascribes all effects to intentional human action – remained dominant in the United States far longer than he suggests and than it did in Europe. According to Wood, it was disqualified early in the nineteenth century. I will argue, however, that it remained hegemonic until the 1950s and that, albeit now producing illegitimate knowledge, it survives until today. Wood begins by stressing the “ubiquitousness” of “conspiratorial interpretations […] on both sides of the Atlantic” in the eighteenth century (407). He also insists that these visions of conspiracy differed from “classical and Renaissance accounts of plots” (409) in important ways. In the past, he suggests, conspiracies real and imagined had been rather limited in scope, comprising only a small ruling elite of monarchs, aristocrats, and politicians. By the eighteenth century, however, the conspiracies allegedly detected were much larger and far more difficult to pin down: “Accounts of plots by court or government were no longer descriptions of actual events but interpretations of otherwise puzzling concatena-

The Epistemology of Causality

39

tions of events.”5 Thus, while earlier conspiracies had been rather easy to spot, their detection now required more cognitive effort: they “became less matters of fact and more matters of inference” (410). What Wood hints at here is, as I already suggested in the introduction, indeed a decisive moment in the development of conspiracist visions, because it is, among other aspects, this mental operation that distinguishes what I would call a conspiracy theory in the narrow sense from other, premodern visions of conspiracy. Moreover, what is implicit in Wood’s argument is another important observation: whereas earlier conspiracies were usually detected and described once they had achieved their goals or had failed, the conspiracies that have captured the Western imagination since the seventeenth century are usually still incomplete; the conspirators have made good progress, but they can still be stopped. It is not yet too late. Due to his specific focus, however, Wood is far more interested in another novelty of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of conspiracy: their exclusive focus on human actors. In the conspiracy revelations of “classical and Renaissance writers,” he suggests, the conspirators can never fully control the outcome of events, for they compete against the forces of “unknown fortune”: “Ultimately, the world seemed uncontrollable and unpredictable, ruled by mysterious forces of fate or chance.” He concedes in passing that “Protestant reformers invoked divine providence and the omnipotence of God” in order to insist on an ordered universe where things happened for a purpose and not simply by chance, but he downplays the impact of this position. Instead, he focuses on “the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century” and “the new Western consciousness” that, as he sees it, emerged with the Enlightenment (412). This consciousness, he argues, postulated not only “a world of mechanistic cause and effect”; it also “brought [man] to the center of human affairs” (413). Excluding both the hand of God and the forces of fate, chance, or coincidence, this new worldview considered “Men’s motives or will […] the starting point in the sequential chain of causes and effects in human affairs. All human actions and events could now be seen scientifically as the products of men’s intentions” (416). Moreover, since “cause and effect were so intimately related […] they necessarily shared the same moral qualities”: “Good intentions and beliefs would therefore result in good actions; evil motives caused evil actions” (417, 418). The epistemological model allowed for accidents and coincidences, but only on an occasional basis. As Wood writes, “a series of events that seemed to form a

5 The collection of essays edited by Coward and Swann on conspiracy theory in Early Modern Europe shows this nicely. Arranged in diachronic fashion, the individual pieces are concerned with conspiracies of increasing scope and complexity.

40

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

pattern could be no accident.” Hence, “the most enlightened of the age could only conclude that regular patterns of behavior were the consequences of concerted human intentions – that is, the result of a number of people coming together to promote a collective design or conspiracy” (419). In other words, when there was an apparent gap between words and deeds, when somebody’s actions proved consistently harmful to another party, he, she, or they could not only be held morally responsible for these actions; one could also deduce that the actor(s) had intended exactly these effects, even if the actor(s) denied this. “Deduce” is the key word here because the way by which one arrived at a conclusive interpretation of somebody else’s true intentions was the method of inference already mentioned: “Because 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” (423). Deducing the other’s real motives, Wood argues, was particularly pressing in the eighteenth century because, in the eyes of many contemporaries, “Masquerades and hidden designs formed the grammar and vocabulary […] of the age” (422). In fact, as Wood also suggests, the epistemological paradigm, the method of inference, and the feeling that hypocrisy was ubiquitous fueled each other. Inferring that one was deliberately deceived “became the means by which the Augustan Age closed the gaps that often seemed to exist between causes and effects, between men’s proclaimed intentions and their contrary actions.” In this context Wood stresses that “the Augustans, of course, did not invent the notion of deception,” but “because of their assumption of man-made designs lying beneath the surface of seemingly contingent events, they made much more of it than other ages” (425). Accordingly, the colonists were perfectly in line with their age’s major way of reasoning when they interpreted the actions of the British government as indicative of a systematic conspiracy. Indeed, throughout the Western world (the examples that he provides are mostly British or American, but he talks about France as well [cf. 408]), Wood concludes, “The belief in plots was not a symptom of disturbed minds but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men.” And since he is arguing not only against Davis, but also against scholars that apply the Hofstadterian notion of a “paranoid style” to the revolutionaries, he adds: “This mode of thinking was neither pathological nor uniquely American” (429). Wood’s argument is immensely valuable for my purposes because it explains why the colonists conceived of the conflict with the mother country as they did. It shows that conspiracy theories were widespread in eighteenth-century America and beyond, not because people were collectively deluded, but because such theories arose logically from the dominant epistemological paradigm of the time. Conspiracy theories produced and represented officially accepted knowledge. If

The Epistemology of Causality

41

we want to understand why Americans continued to perceive the world in this fashion, however, Wood’s argument needs to be extended. As it stands, it is too narrow, because Wood restricts himself to the eighteenth century and even claims that while the American Revolution, fueled by a conspiracy theory, was unfolding, “alternative ways of explaining events were taking form” and quickly replaced the epistemological paradigm that engendered conspiracy theories with such frequency (429). Wood considers the French Revolution the turning point in this development. “Although […] conspiratorial interpretations of the Revolution were everywhere,” he argues, “the best minds […] now knew that the jumble of events that made up the Revolution were so complex and overwhelming that they could no longer be explained simply as the products of personal intentions” (432). However, while Wood draws on a plethora of sources for his earlier observations, he offers no evidence at all for this claim. Moreover, he implicitly admits that the majority of people on both sides of the Atlantic continued to think on the basis of the old paradigm and that only some thinkers moved on to a different one. Throughout his essay, Wood is concerned with what was generally accepted as true at a certain time and insists that we should not judge and dismiss a previous age’s “truths” by today’s “more advanced” views – but, in this passage, he himself introduces such a transhistorical standard. He clearly favors the perspective on history, agency, and causality taken by some of the, as he calls it, “best minds” of the nineteenth century, because it appears to him as a step toward the “complicated causal linkages offered by sophisticated social scientists” that we have come to accept as more accurate representations of reality and that he clearly favors. What is more, in closing, Wood claims that this best-minds paradigm became the dominant one quite early in the nineteenth century: “Conspiratorial interpretations of events still thrived but they seemed increasingly primitive and quaint.” What Wood suggests, then, is that conspiracy theories were neither “marginal nor irrational” during the eighteenth century, but that they became increasingly so during the first decades of the following century and that this has been the case ever since (441). This claim, however, is debatable, to say the least, and several scholars have taken issue with it. As Geoffrey Cubitt pointedly puts it in his analysis of antiJesuit conspiracy theories in nineteenth-century France, “Quite simply, this recession [that Wood postulates] shows very little signs of having happened during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (“Conspiracy Myths” 18). Ralf Klausnitzer comes to the same conclusion in his study of conspiracy theories in continental Europe and especially in Germany between 1750 and 1850. Klausnitzer does not even mention Wood, but makes largely the same argument, albeit in far more detail. Much like Wood, he views conspiracy theories in the form in which they

42

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

emerged in the seventeenth and century eighteenth centuries as attempts to eliminate chance and contingency and to explain the events that took place in an increasingly complex and differentiated social reality without recourse to divine providence (cf. 59, 606). He thus convincingly demonstrates that the epistemological paradigm from which such conspiracy theories arose remained dominant far longer than Wood suggests. It was only disqualified, he suggests, by the emergence of the modern social sciences whose origins he discusses with a particular focus on the writings of Marx and Engels. Marxism and other social theories, he argues, destroyed the foundations of conspiracist projections by explaining events in quite different and, to their contemporaries, increasingly convincing fashion (cf. 559). Yet, in closing, he concedes that conspiracy theories continued to thrive even after the insights of the social sciences had come to be largely accepted (608–09). With regard to the United States, I would contend that the paradigm identified independently by both Wood and Klausnitzer remained largely unchallenged even longer. Today conspiracy theories are far more marginal than in the eighteenth century, but the disqualification of the paradigm that rendered them legitimate knowledge only occurred around 1960. Throughout the nineteenth century, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, conspiracy theories were as firmly rooted in the mainstream as during the preceding one. Conspiracist thinking is as prominent in Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech as it is in George Washington’s Farewell Address, which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. In fact, the retrospective and inferential attribution of hidden motives to observable actions that Wood identifies as the modus operandi of the eighteenth century is far more pronounced in Lincoln and his contemporaries than it is in Washington and his. This is hardly surprising given the fact that the worries about deception and hypocrisy that Wood detects in the eighteenth century were as pressing, if not more so, in the nineteenth. They permeated all aspects of daily life and all kinds of interpersonal relationships and are addressed in countless factual sources and fictional ones from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, as several scholars have shown (cf. Gustafson; Halttunen). Moreover, as we will see in chapter 5, even during the Great Red Scare of the 1950s, conspiracy theorizing was still a completely accepted practice of producing knowledge, and it was performed by presidents, senators, and other community leaders. In fact, Klausnitzer’s suggestion that the epistemological paradigm that so easily generated suspicions of conspiracy lost acceptance in Europe because of the rise of the social sciences offers an explanation for why the paradigm retained its hegemonic position in the United States. The idea that events can ultimately be traced back to the intentional designs of human actors proved far

The Epistemology of Causality

43

more enduring in the United States than in most European countries because of the logic of individualism so deeply ingrained in American culture. Of course, stressing the American belief in individual agency amounts to reiterating a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they contain at least a grain of truth. After all, American culture has proven very resilient to all kinds of social, psychological, and psychoanalytical theories that question or even deny the ability of individuals to be aware of their desires and intentions and to put them into practice. Indeed, much of the American resistance to Marxism – besides its hostility to religion and capitalism – can be traced to the fact that it challenges the power of the individual to impose his or her will on history. As we will see in chapter 5, the resistance to structural explanations of individual and collective behavior was still so great during the 1950s that many serious social scientists claimed that brainwashing was possible because it allowed them to discuss systemic effects on individuals without giving up the belief in a selfcontained, autonomous self (which was seen as being manipulated by an even stronger self, that of the brainwasher). It is therefore no coincidence that at exactly the same time those concerned about a Communist conspiracy could not accept that the Cold War was going less than well, that China had been “lost” because of systemic constraints and not because subversives in the government were betraying their country. As Senator Joseph McCarthy, one of America’s most notorious conspiracy theorists of that period, put it, “History does not just happen. It is made by men – men with faces, and the only way the course of history can be changed is by getting rid of the specific individuals who we find are bad for America” (qtd. in Olmsted 107). Since then, the epistemological paradigm that stimulates such a view of history has lost credibility among scientists and intellectual elites. As a consequence, conspiracy theories are now no longer regarded as producing legitimate knowledge. But the belief in the power of individuals to shape history and thus in the possibility of large-scales conspiracies still appeals to many Americans. In fact, one major function that conspiracy theories now perform is that they uphold the increasingly challenged notion that individuals can impose their will on history. As Peter Knight has recently demonstrated, such faith in the power of individuals to put their intentions into practice without any unwarranted sideeffects both informs and is confirmed by the official (al-Qaeda did it) and unofficial (the government did it) conspiracy theories about 9/11. The two narratives of what happened that day and who is responsible for it may be diametrically opposed as far as the allocation of guilt is concerned. Structurally, though, both rely “on a traditional model of highly efficient individual intentional action” and thus affirm “a vague ideological disposition toward understanding causality and responsibility in terms of pure intentional agency” (“Outrageous” 176, 178).

44

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

Another reason why a considerable number of Americans continues to endorse a model of agency and causality derided by official discourse is the strong American tradition of anti-intellectualism. Since the Jacksonian period, with its emphasis on the “common man,” Americans have tended to be highly suspicious of positions held by educated elites (cf. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism). Hence, the fact that a specific mode of thinking, namely conspiracy theorizing, has been given up by intellectuals in favor of more “sophisticated” structural explanations makes it probably even more attractive to those who habitually reject elite positions and maybe even harbor suspicions against intellectuals. In fact, since post-1960 conspiracy theories frequently accuse the country’s elite, politicians, academics, and the mainstream media, of being part of a conspiracy that has already hijacked the nation, this elite’s dismissal of conspiracy theorizing as illegitimate knowledge often appears to conspiracy theorists as the strategic silencing of those who have discovered the “truth.” The very fact that intellectuals ridicule this epistemological paradigm thus makes it more attractive to those who ridicule intellectuals. However, the unbroken popularity of an epistemological paradigm that arose in the seventeenth century is, when taken alone, not enough to account for the American propensity to detect conspiracy theories everywhere. A second factor that I turn to now is the ideology of republicanism. If the dominant epistemological paradigm already furthered the detection of conspiracies, its interplay with the ideology of republicanism made the repeated discovery of conspiracies almost inevitable.

Source II: The Ideology of Republicanism Republicanism is a political theory that has classical roots in the writings of Aristotle but assumed its modern form in Renaissance Italy where it was theorized most thoroughly by Niccolò Machiavelli. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it was the dominant form of thought among the English country party, the Whigs, who opposed the court and its ruling Tory Party almost as much as the Americans colonists eventually did. J. G. A. Pocock, one of most important scholars of republicanism, sums up the “values and concepts” cherished by the Whigs as follows: a civic and patriotic ideal in which the personality was founded in property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia), established churches (opposed to the

The Ideology of Republicanism

45

Puritan and deist modes of American religion) and the promotion of monied interest. (Machiavellian Moment 507)6

The state that republicanism envisioned was, as Michael Pfau puts it, “conceived as the embodiment of a political community and defined by its capacity to secure liberty for its citizens and ensure the public good” (40). The basis of liberty and the public good was the virtuous behavior of citizens in both their private and public lives. Republicanism postulated a direct connection between private and public virtue, with the latter depending on the former. It required citizens to have the welfare of all people in mind at all times, and therefore rejected the competition of interest groups and the idea of political parties as such, conceiving of them as factions that favored special over general interest and thus endangered the republic. When faced with the actual existence of parties, as the Whigs were in England and as Americans were from the 1790s onward, proponents of republicanism usually argued that the other party was a dangerous faction while their own one expressed the will of the whole people. Historians have always been aware that Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were familiar with republican ideas. But traditional interpretations of American history claimed that republicanism was of little importance and that Americans’ political ideas were primarily shaped by the liberal tradition of John Locke.7 Since the 1960s, however, a number of scholars, among them not only Pocock, but Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, have overturned this hierarchy. They have convincingly argued that republicanism was far more important than liberalism during the colonial period and the Early Republic. But whereas Bailyn and Wood claim that liberalism replaced republicanism as the dominant political ideology at the end of the eighteenth century – Wood, for example, sees republicanism lose importance with the Federalist-Republican debate of the 1790s, which, in The Creation of the American Republic, he therefore calls the “the end of classical politics” (606) –, Pocock insists that it

6 Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment offers a thorough discussion of the classical and Renaissance forms of republicanism and the transformations the ideology underwent as it traveled first to England and then across the Atlantic. 7 The classic study that proposes such an understanding of American history is Hartz. The liberal tradition to which most European democracies can be traced back, considers party competition as integral to the survival of the republic, whereas republicanism perceives such competition as dangerous.

46

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

remained influential. A generation of younger scholars, among them Jean H. Baker, Daniel Walker Howe, Linda Kerber, Robert Levine, Jeffrey Ostler, Michael Pfau, Robert Wiebe, and Sean Wilentz, have followed him and demonstrated that republicanism continued to shape American thinking until far into the nineteenth century. When their work touches on suspicions of conspiracy, as it frequently does given their ubiquity in the nineteenth century, these scholars invariably argue that there is a close relationship between republicanism and conspiracy theory. In fact, they frequently suggest that republican beliefs conditioned Americans to perceive plots all around them. Robert Levine, for example, writes that “Republican ideology and discourse […] played a crucial role in perpetuating the fear of conspiracy in early national and antebellum culture” (10); Michael Pfau makes exactly the same point: “civic republican ideology […] encouraged the first generations of Americans to think about political life in terms of conspiracy” (40); and Daniel Walker Howe even speaks of a “conspiracy paradigm” when discussing republican ideas among the American Whigs (79). The reason why republican ideology engendered suspicions of conspiracy is captured by Pocock in the passage quoted above in the phrase “perpetually threatened by corruption.” In the ideology of republicanism, “corruption” figured as diametrically opposed to the one value the success of a republic hinged on: “virtue.” As Robert Levine explains, even more than their Renaissance predecessors, whose examples they had thoroughly studied, Americans were only too aware that “traditionally republics were short-lived, subject to cyclical decline, and vulnerable to the plottings of internal and external enemies” (10). Because of their form of government, their openness when compared with autocratically ruled nations, and the absence of standing armies, republics were seen as all too quickly destroyed through the conspiracies of corrupted individuals and groups on the inside and outside. Enemies within and without conspired against the republic, so the adherents of republican ideology believed, because they lacked virtue. As we saw earlier, the colonists legitimized their rebellion by casting England as corrupted beyond repair and claiming the task to carry on the torch of liberty. But conspiracies, republican ideology also held, could only be successful if the majority of the citizens had already been corrupted as well, albeit in different fashion, that is, if they had not resisted “the fall into luxury and self-interest” (Levine 10). Only those citizens who were virtuous in their private as well as public lives could exercise the necessary vigilance that would guard the republic against its conspiring enemies. This is what the colonists prided themselves with having achieved in the War of Independence. And this is why they and later generations ascribed such a high value to virtue and why they continuously projected their republic as

The Ideology of Republicanism

47

endangered by internal and external conspiracies, some of which I discuss in detail in subsequent chapters.8 Republican ideology, it is important to note, was influential not only among the male elite who had enjoyed a classical education, as scholars have charged who doubt that republicanism can explain the social dynamics of the class society that the United States developed into in the first decades of the nineteenth century. As several studies have shown, republicanism’s assumptions spoke to Americans in general, including the working classes and women. Daniel Walker Howe and Michael Pfau, for example, have demonstrated that republicanism explains why Americans remained suspicious of political parties as such at least until the Civil War. As Pfau puts it, “parties were naturally suspect because they represented only a part of the people – a faction – that was likely to look to its own good in preference to the good of the whole” (41). In fact, as we will see in chapter 4, the Republican Party was founded by those who felt that the will of the people had been betrayed by corrupted Southern slaveholders. After the Civil War, as liberal pluralism began to exert greater influence on the understanding of the political system, party competition became increasingly accepted. But as late as the 1890s, as Jeffrey Ostler has shown, suspicions of parties in general fueled the formation of Kansas Populism – a movement that claimed that the Republican Party was now not only corrupted by monied interests but also in league with the British. A couple of decades earlier, the emerging New York working class conceived of its struggle with employers similarly. Adopting the ideology of republicanism for their purposes in a fashion that Sean Wilentz, in Chants Democratic, calls “artisan republicanism,” workers cast their employers as corrupt aristocrats who were robbing them of their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Wilentz’s study has wider implications for my argument here, because it draws attention to a fact I already highlighted in the introduction: at the heart of nineteenth-century American conspiracy theories are often class struggles that, due to the culture’s unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of classes, are frequently translated into attacks on liberty, citizens’ rights, and the republic as such. In the case Wilentz discusses, the class dimension is immediately apparent, as we are faced with workers who accuse their employers of conspiring, but the economic conflict is already recast in different terms here. This tendency is even more pronounced in two cases that I discuss in chapter 3. The Masonic conspiracy theory addresses the class conflict at its center only in highly

8 For a discussion of the republic’s founders’ attempts to make sure that public offices would be filled with individuals that were privately and publicly virtuous, see Hart and Smith.

48

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

distorted fashion, whereas the Catholic conspiracy theory deflects from this conflict to such a degree that some texts even manage to project the notion of class unity when projecting a vision of conspiracy that is, in fact, indicative of class conflict. But republicanism not only worked to displace class conflicts, it also restricted middle- and upper-class women to the domestic sphere. The gendered assumptions of republicanism have been stressed by Linda Kerber, who has argued in Women of the Republic and subsequent writings that republicanism excluded women from the public sphere by paradoxically projecting them as the embodiment of the values necessary for the survival of the republic. As wives and especially mothers – Kerber refers to this phenomenon as “republican motherhood” – women were banned from direct political activity and instead assigned the important task of instilling civic virtues in their sons, the future leaders of the republic, and to rekindle them in their husbands whenever necessary. Kerber’s observations may at first sight seem far removed from conspiracist visions, but in fact they highlight once again how closely republicanism and conspiracy theories are connected. As I will argue in chapter 3, the concept of republican motherhood is that the heart of the Catholic conspiracy theory I just mentioned. Since the republic’s future mothers guaranteed its endurance, anti-Catholics conceived of the alleged corruption, both moral and physical, of Protestant girls in Catholic convents as a concerted attack on liberty. The conspirators, the argument went, wanted to destroy the very foundation of the virtues necessary for protecting the republic. Republicanism, then, changed, and to a degree split into a variety of republicanisms, over the course of the nineteenth century. The “artisan republicanism” that Wilentz describes is far from identical with the one that informed the actions of the Founding Fathers, and Kerber’s work shows that while virtue as a concept remained important, the role of its guarantors changed. For the colonists, only men could embody civic virtues in the purest form, but a few decades later this role was ascribed to women. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, “[t]hough varying in precise meaning and function among different social groups, and no longer strictly classical, republicanism nevertheless offered many Americans a system of beliefs, a conceptual paradigm, for defining their ideal community and identifying conspiratorial threats to it” (Levine 10). In fact, as my case study on 1950s anti-Communism shows, republicanism, much like the epistemological paradigm discussed above, remained powerful far into the twentieth century, permeating the speeches and writings of J. Edgar Hoover as well as Joseph McCarthy. Bernd Ostendorf has even suggested that republicanism is a major ingredient of conspiracy theories until today (cf. 176). Pocock, then, was correct when he argued in the 1970s that “the vocabulary of

The Heritage of Puritanism

49

virtue and corruption persisted in American thought” (Machiavellian Moment 526).9 Republican ideology and the epistemological paradigm of cause and effect strengthened each other and, taken together, fueled a belief in the ubiquity of conspiracies throughout the nineteenth and far into the twentieth century. In fact, in the essay I have discussed at length here, Gordon Wood already hints at the connection between the epistemology of the age, the ideology of republicanism, and the predilection to detect conspiracies, when he observes that the colonists “even developed a politics of sincerity, with which republicanism became associated” (“Conspiracy” 426), but he does not spell out that the epistemological paradigm forced people to infer hidden motives and republicanism channeled these deductions into visions of large plots against the republic. However, in order to truly understand the unbroken popularity of conspiracy theory far into the twentieth century we have to take a third factor into account: the heritage of Puritanism.

Source III: The Heritage of Puritanism When discussing how the colonists came to think of themselves as victims of a conspiracy, Wood briefly acknowledges the Puritan influence. “There is no denying the importance of this religious tradition in preparing American Protestants to detect a British ministerial plot,” he writes (“Conspiracy” 420), but then goes on to distinguish sharply between religious and secular visions of conspiracy. Implying that the secular visions of conspiracy emerged independent of religious contexts, he focuses only on them. Wood has to downplay the importance of the Puritan heritage because his essay tells a progressive story of secularization in which secular conspiracy theories function as an intermediate step between religious worldviews that stress divine Providence and the sophisticated theories of the social sciences that downplay the intentions of individual actors and emphasize systemic and structural factors instead. Wood, however, is not the only scholar who underestimates the influence of Puritan thought on the Revolution. When Bernard Bailyn explains why the colonists considered America as destined to preserve liberty for mankind, he, too, mentions “the covenant theories of the Puritans,” but he considers Puritanism 9 In another essay, Pocock even suggests a connection between the form of republicanism that survived into the twentieth century and that age’s conspiracy theories when he likens the agencies of corruption that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson fought to “‘the military-industrial complex’ of President Eisenhower in our own time” (“Civic Humanism” 97).

50

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

merely one of several sources that nourished this view (“General Introduction” 83). That Bailyn misjudges the importance of the Puritans is more understandable, as he made this argument during the 1960s when scholarly consensus held that Puritanism, unlike the experience of the frontier, had not decisively shaped American culture (cf. Bercovitch, American 10–11). In recent years, though, and mainly influenced by the work of Sacvan Bercovitch, historians as well as literary and cultural studies scholars have stressed the lasting impact of Puritanism on the United States. Of course, critics have correctly pointed out that Bercovitch has, at times, overstated this point and, in turn, neglected other important traditions, but I am convinced that neither the conspiracy theory that caused the American Revolution nor American conspiracy theories in general can be properly understood without acknowledging the heritage of Puritanism.10 The Puritans can be labeled conspiracy theorists, but it is important to note that they believed in a different kind of conspiracy theory, namely in a metaphysical one. This metaphysical conspiracy theory shares many features with and, in fact, largely prefigures the secular visions of subversion and infiltration that this study focuses on. But although critics often stress the connection in passing, the relationship between Puritanism and conspiracy theory has – unlike the two other sources of American conspiracy theories that I have discussed in this section – never been explored in any detail.11 This is why I dedicate the next chapter to the Puritans and their conspiracy theories. Accordingly, I focus here on how the Puritan rhetoric merged with republican ideology to create the republican jeremiad, that is the narrative form that most indictments of conspiracy have taken ever since. The conspiracist visions of the Puritans and secular American conspiracy theories are “structurally analogous,” as Ruth Groh has observed for premodern and modern conspiracy theories in general (43; my translation). To begin with, like secular conspiracy theorists, who operate under the epistemological paradigm outlined here, the Puritans rejected coincidence and contingency. Everything that happened, they believed, was intrinsically meaningful, but they considered Providence and not human intentions as the ultimate cause of events.

10 Besides The American Jeremiad, see also Bercovitch’s The Puritan Origins of the American Self. For evaluations of Bercovitch’s argument that confirm his thesis about the impact of Puritanism but reject some of his more exaggerated claims, see McKenna’s The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism and the volume The Puritan Origins of American Sex, edited by Fessenden, Radel, and Zaborowska. 11 Levine offers one of the more thorough discussions of the link between Puritanism and conspiracy theory (6–8). Most other scholars, some of whom I engage in the introduction to the next chapter, do not even devote three pages to the issue.

The Heritage of Puritanism

51

Moreover, and again much like later countersubversives, the Puritans were convinced that all their enemies were collaborating and they considered themselves part of a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil. In secular versions, this struggle usually plays out on a national or even global level, but for the Puritans it reached cosmic dimensions, as they saw themselves on God’s side and their enemies on that of the devil. Unlike secular accounts of subversion, then, their conspiracy theory revolved not only around human actors but focused heavily on supernatural ones, which is why I call it metaphysical. What is more, since God was all-powerful: he and not, as in the secular version, the conspirators, ultimately controlled the course of events. The forces of evil could only afflict their community, the Puritans believed, if and when God allowed it in order to punish them for their sins. Accordingly, a fear of declension, of having fallen among the sinners, permeated Puritan culture. It was most powerfully voiced in the jeremiad, “a ritual designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal,” as Bercovitch defines it (American xi). The jeremiad derives its name from the biblical prophet Jeremiah who lamented that the “chosen people had sinned and continued to sin, had been punished with exile and were being threatened with more severe punishments unless they reformed,” but who also confirmed that “they remained chosen nonetheless, still the keeper of the ancient promise to Abraham” (31). For the Puritans, who considered themselves the new chosen people, the jeremiad was therefore a mode of “denunciation” as well as of “affirmation and exultation” (6). God’s chastisements, they believed, “were corrective, not destructive” (8; emphasis in the original). That God punished them, by allowing a conspiracy against them or other means, signified that they had, in fact, declined, that they had sinned, that they were no longer living the life that God expected them to live, and that they had to reform. But that God took the trouble to punish them also indicated that they were still the chosen people; it reaffirmed the covenant between them and God. Accordingly, the jeremiad, which found its most frequent expression in sermons but is best understood as a narrative template that cuts across genres (cf. xiv), testifies, despite its harsh indictment of the community, to an “unshakable optimism” (7). In the end, conspiracies and other punishments imposed on them ultimately confirmed the Puritans in their sense of election and mission.12 The connection between the Puritan jeremiad and the ideology of republicanism should already be apparent from this short description. Both Puritanism and

12 Goldberg even considers this religiously derived “sense of mission” the most important factor in accounting for the American propensity for conspiracism (1).

52

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

republicanism blame a decline in virtue – religious virtue in one case and civic one in the other – for the conspiracies they are faced with, and complaints about this situation are in both cases voiced as stories of a (political) culture’s fall from grace that also articulate the promise of a return to the original state. The jeremiad in its purely religious form calls on community members to return to the virtuous life of the Pilgrim Fathers. Similarly, the narrative of republican decay, as Michael Pfau puts it, tries to bring about “a return of the first principles” of the republic; in the American context, it calls on citizens to remember the example set by the Founding Fathers. Accordingly, what Pfau concludes about narratives of republican decline applies equally to jeremiads: they raise the specter of “degeneration” in order to bring about “regeneration” (160). As a consequence (and contrary to what Pfau argues, as we will see in chapter 4), I contend that the narrative of the decay of the republic never existed independently of the jeremiad. This argument is to a certain degree anticipated by J. G. A. Pocock’s observation that “[t]he jeremiad – that most American of all rhetorical modes – was merged with the language of classical republican theory to the point where one can speak of an apocalyptic Machiavellism” (Machiavellian Moment 513), but I would go even further. As Bercovitch has demonstrated, the jeremiad survived the decline of Puritanism and developed into the dominant form to “establish[] the typology of America’s mission” (American 93). No longer speaking merely to Puritan New England, the jeremiad became “a nationwide ritual of progress.” Merging the sacred and the secular, and fostering consensus among divergent groups who could at the very least agree on America’s missionary character, the jeremiad, as Bercovitch puts it, “contributed to the success of the republic” in manifold forms (xv). Accordingly, the jeremiad is the larger structuring principle at work here, a fact Bercovitch captures nicely with the expression “republican jeremiads” (128). All conspiracy theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that I discuss in detail here assume the form of such republican jeremiads in individual texts. These jeremiadic conspiracy narratives confirm the national mission by projecting it as imperiled. They call on the people – a designation that in the United States, as Bercovitch contends, always to some degree echoes the Puritan notion of the “chosen people” (cf. 152) – to remember their duties as citizens, to open their eyes to the conspiracy that is endangering their liberties and the republic as such – and, in many accounts, also God’s plan for the country. In some texts, the sacred dimension is more pronounced than the secular one; in others, exactly the opposite is the case. But as they invariably cast the conspiracies they expose as endangering both the nation’s spiritual mission and the security of its citizens, the sacred and the secular are always co-present in these texts. Accordingly, I will, in the chapters that follow, occasionally point out which

The Heritage of Puritanism

53

dimension is dominant in a particular text, but what is most important is that all relevant texts adopt the structure of the republican jeremiad.13 In fact, as Mark Fenster’s analysis of the structure of contemporary conspiracy theories implicitly shows, the republican jeremiad remains the vehicle to articulate fears of conspiracy until today. Fenster does not mention the jeremiad, Puritanism more generally, or the republican tradition, and draws instead on Hayden White’s model of modes of emplotment in order to characterize the movement of the typical conspiracy narrative. “A tragic present, coupled with the possibility for a comic future resolution,” he observes, “is central to conspiracy theory’s mode of interpretation.” He goes on to specify that the destruction of the conspiracy, the “resolution” envisioned by those who expose it, does not lead to the creation of a new order but instead to the “restoration of political order” (124; my emphasis). Just as conspiracy narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, the contemporary variant detects degeneration and attempts to bring about regeneration. The visions of conspiracy may have changed, and so has the identity of the alleged conspirators, but the jeremiad remains the form in which conspiracy theorists call on their communities to foil the plot. As my discussion has shown, and as the concept of the republican jeremiad exemplifies prototypically, the three factors I have focused on here fueled each other and merged in so many ways that it is sometimes only heuristically possible to keep them apart. Each in itself would not have been enough to generate a culture of conspiracism, which is why neither Scotland nor Swabia, for instance, where forms of Puritanism also survived, is known for the prominence of their conspiracy theories. Only because they existed at the same time and in the same place, these factors – an eighteenth-century epistemology of cause and effect that proved particularly resilient in the United States, the equally enduring ideology of republicanism, and the continued impact of Puritanism – created the specific climate that has made conspiracy theories so persistently central to American culture. Puritanism, republicanism, and the specific epistemology also take us a long way in understanding the American predilection for conspiracy theory because they encompass many smaller concepts and ideas that scholars have traditionally brought forward to explain their great frequency: a sense of election and national mission, a fear of parties in general that persisted far into the nineteenth century, anxiety about an overly powerful federal government, the high value ascribed to liberty, or the belief in the ability of individuals to shape the course of history. But what is more, these three factors also explain the origins

13 Levine (238n25) and S. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism (295) also suggest that visions of conspiracy are usually projected in jeremiadic form, but do not further develop these thoughts.

54

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

of conspiracy theory’s specific mode of reasoning: inference and deduction; the central concepts around which it revolves: a binary logic of good vs. evil, corruption vs. virtue, etc.; and its characteristic narrative form: the republican jeremiad. I hasten to add, though, that there are surely factors I have not mentioned that have further promoted the American tendency for perceiving the world through the lens of conspiracy theory. And there are, as the next chapters will show, other factors that have shaped specific conspiracy theories. Similarly, my argument is not meant to fuel any American exceptionalism. As various scholars have argued, conspiracy theories were very popular in most European countries in the past and are at the moment still widely-spread in the former Soviet Union, other countries in Eastern Europe, and throughout the Arab world.14 Accordingly, until much more of the comparative work has been conducted that Peter Knight has identified as a valuable avenue for future conspiracy theory research (cf. “Plotting”), we will not be able to truly understand why conspiracy theories thrive more in one particular culture than in another.

Excursion: Conspiracy Theory, Religion, Secularization Gordon Wood, in the essay discussed at length in the previous section, overstates the differences between a belief in Providence and the conviction that human actors alone are responsible for the course of history for strategic reasons. Wood considers the conspiracy theorizing of the eighteenth century as an intermediate stage in a linear development from religious superstition to the sophisticated explanatory models of the modern social sciences which largely ignore the intentions of individuals and stress systemic and structural factors instead. This is why he downplays the role of the Puritan heritage for the colonists’ perception of the conflict with Britain as one between good and evil, with George III figuring in many accounts as the Antichrist (cf. Goldberg 5). This is also why he contends that conspiracy theories rapidly moved to the fringes of society when the social sciences emerged in the nineteenth century. Although he never mentions him, Wood thus basically reiterates an argument made by Karl Popper, who popularized the term “conspiracy theory” in the first substantial critique of the conspiracist worldview in the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper defines what he calls the “conspiracy theory of society” as the mistaken conviction that “an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery

14 For a discussion of conspiracy theories outside the United States, see Gray, and the collections edited by Fathi, Marcus, West and Saunders, and Butter and Reinkowski.

Conspiracy Theory, Religion, Secularization

55

of men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of the phenomenon […] and who have planned and conspired to bring it about” (94; his emphasis). He understands such conspiracy theories as “a typical result of the secularization of religious superstition”: “The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups” (95). Despite emphasizing the structural analogy between a belief in Providence and post-Enlightenment conspiracy theories, which the quotation from Popper nicely brings to the fore, both Wood and Popper insist that secular conspiracy theories are clearly set apart from religious explanations. By contrast, I would like to suggest that because of this structural analogy, the distinction between secular and metaphysical conspiracy theories is not at all clear-cut and the two frequently collapse into each other – a fact Mark Fenster never explicitly addresses but hints at when he speaks of “seemingly nonreligious conspiracy theory” (200). Many secular conspiracy theories that do not imagine direct interference by God or the devil and focus on human actors alone are firmly grounded within a religious framework. Thus Samuel Adams cast the colonists’ foiling of the British conspiracy as “the fulfillment of God’s plan” for America (Bercovitch, American 123). As he put it, “God does the work, but not without instruments, and they who are employed are denominated his servants” (qtd. in Bercovitch 122). But humans are not only capable of doing God’s will by defeating conspiracies; they can also help the devil to bring it about. If metaphysical and secular conspiracy theories tend to merge, it is also important to note that they nevertheless operate on different levels. Secular accounts of conspiracy cannot integrate supernatural actors into scenarios where ultimately human conspirators are pulling the strings. By contrast, metaphysical conspiracy scenarios can easily encompass secular scenarios. They can project the conspirators as either doing the devil’s work without him ever interacting with them, or as being directly allied with him. They thus can effectively contain the move toward secularization that Popper and Wood correctly, albeit too simplistically, ascribe to conspiracy theories as they emerged with the Enlightenment. In recent decades, metaphysical conspiracy theories have been particularly popular among fundamentalist Christians in the United States. What Fenster calls “popular eschatology” – “an accessible and comprehensible, all-encompassing narrative frame or metanarrative that can explain the past, the present, and the future” by positing a satanic conspiracy carried out by human actors (198) – is especially prominent among dispensational premillenialists who believe that Christ’s second coming will be preceded by the Antichrist establishing his realm on earth. As they consider themselves among those who will be “ruptured” to heaven and thus spared the experience of the devil’s rule, it is absolutely logical

56

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

from their point of view that they want the Antichrist’s conspiracy to succeed as quickly as possible. In their accounts of the conspiracy, the individual is therefore not called upon to foil the conspiracy, but “to become part of the body of Christ, to ensure that she [or he] takes her [or his] place in the more desirable part of the narrative, the rupture rather than the tribulation” (214). Frequently, these Christian fundamentalists consider an internationalist conspiracy of the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, or other institutions the vehicle through which the Antichrist will rise to power. In other words, these Christian conspiracy theorists are as obsessed with the ominous New World Order as many of their secular counterparts are, but they add a metaphysical dimension to the already complex picture painted by conspiracy theorists who see humans and not the devil as the masterminds of this plot (cf. Barkun, Culture 9–11; Fenster 220–21; Ostendorf). Unsurprisingly, then, metaphysical and secular accounts of the New World Order, as, for example, provided by Pat Robertson or Alex Jones, are consumed by believers in either version and thus fuel each other.15 This shows once more that the distinction between metaphysical and secular conspiracy theories is important and helpful, but that it is by no means always easy to draw. What is more, returning to the topic of the previous section for a moment, one could speculatively add another reason for why conspiracy theories have always been so prominent in the United States. They may often be indicative of secularized patterns of thought, but they seem to flourish particularly well in cultural contexts where the process of secularization has not been uncontested, where religious worldviews remain attractive and powerful, as they do in the United States.

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories The distinction between metaphysical and secular conspiracy theories just discussed is one of several categorizations that have been proposed in order to map the field of American and other conspiracy theories. A variety of scholars distinguish between external and internal enemies. This distinction is useful and I draw on it occasionally in this study, but, in the final analysis, the categories become fuzzy here as well. Conspiracy theories not only frequently project secret coalitions of external and internal foes, they also invariably “other” internal conspira15 See, for example, Robertson’s book The New World Order (1991), and virtually all of Jones’s movies, most of which are available on his website infowars.com. For an extended discussion of how metaphysical and secular versions of the New World Order conspiracy theory fuel each other, see Barkun, Culture 39–64.

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

57

tors by casting them, literally (as with the Communists) or metaphorically (as with Catholics, abolitionists, and many others) as “un-American” in attempts to externalize the threat and to keep the body politic pure. Two other ways of categorizing American conspiracy theories have been suggested by Michael Barkun. He argues that “conspiracy beliefs involve two distinguishable forms of secrecy” (Culture 4). On the one hand, conspiracy theorists often believe that there are groups that officially do not exist (such as the New World Order) or do no longer exist (such as the Illuminati who disintegrated in the eighteenth century) who pursue their conspiratorial goals through equally secret actions. On the other, conspiracy theorists just as often accuse groups like the Masons or the CIA of working toward aims that are not at all those they publicly profess. Most of the conspiracy theories I focus on in this study target conspirators who belong to this second category: the Catholic Church, the abolitionists, the “Black Republicans,” and the slaveholders. Yet, not all groups of conspirators fit neatly into one of the two categories. The Communist Party, for example, existed in the open and was accused of harboring sinister plans that it publicly denied. But at the same time, these plans were said to be enacted by secret party members who infiltrated and subverted educational institutions as well as the federal government. Communism thus cuts across both categories. By the same token, contemporary conspiracy theories that accuse the government of viciously deceiving the people often oscillate between claiming that government officials with secret intentions are to blame (such as the idea that George W. Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks) and alleging that the government is controlled by a secret group that pulls the strings from backstage (the New World Order, or, in other accounts, aliens, ordered the government to conduct or allow the attacks). In many cases, therefore, the distinction between these two types of secrecy is ultimately even blurrier than that between metaphysical and secular conspiracy theories. This is also true for the second set of distinctions that Barkun proposes, that between conspiracy theories concerned with “[e]vent conspiracies,” “[s]ystemic conspiracies,” and “[s]uperconspiracies” (Culture 6; his emphasis). Event conspiracy theories hold the conspirators “responsible for a limited, discrete event or set of events” like the Kennedy assassination or the attacks of 9/11; systemic conspiracy theories accuse a specific group of conspirators, such as the Catholic Church, the Masons, or the Jews, of having “broad goals, usually conceived as securing control over a country, a region, or even the entire world.” In superconspiracy theories, finally, “Event and systemic conspiracies are joined in a complex way, so that conspiracies come to be nested within one another” (6). The John Birch Society’s claim that the post-World War II Communist conspiracy was a continuation of the Illuminati subversion of the late eighteenth century is a

58

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

typical superconspiracy theory, as it blends two systemic conspiracy theories – the Illuminati and the Communist one – that previously existed independently of each other. The distinction between event and systemic conspiracy theories is more difficult to maintain than it might seem at first sight. While it is true that most conspiracy theories are initially focused either on a specific event or a particular group of actors, the two cannot be clearly separated. Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, for example, only emerged and gained a broader currency as distrust toward the American government grew over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, when, in other words, systemic conspiracy theories became more popular and provided the background for the event conspiracy theory. By contrast, conspiracy theories that blamed the government for the attacks of 9/11 emerged much quicker because the culture was already saturated with systemic conspiracy theories that accused the government of a series of sinister deeds. The conspiracy theories about 9/11, then, made already existing systemic ones reciprocally more believable as well. Similarly, specific events have always fueled systemic conspiracy theories. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 further convinced countersubversives like Abraham Lincoln that the country was truly under the control of the Slave Power. Similarly, the “loss” of China in 1949 confirmed anti-Communists like Joe McCarthy in their opinion that the State Department had fallen under the control of Soviet agents. However, since it is nevertheless of heuristic value to keep these three types of conspiracy theories apart, Barkun’s typology is far more valuable than Daniel Pipes’s often quoted distinction between “petty” and “world” conspiracy theories. For Pipes, petty conspiracy theories are an anthropological given, “going back to the earliest forms of social life, existing in all places,” whereas world conspiracy theories are a product of the Enlightenment and always revolve around a particular group’s strife for “global power” (Conspiracy 22). While Pipes is certainly on to something when he stresses the significance of the Enlightenment for the emergence of a type of conspiracy theory, there are many important conspiracy theories that are not covered by these two categories. For example, the antebellum fear of a Slave Power plot plays out solely on the scale of the nation, as not even the most fervent anti-Slave Power activist ever claimed that the slaveholders were aiming for global dominion. Barkun’s typology, by contrast, has the additional advantage that it draws attention to the diachronic development of both specific accounts of conspiracy and American conspiracy theories in general. Inevitably, event conspiracy theories, after a certain time, are integrated into or generate new kinds of systemic conspiracy theories. Accounts of the New World Order conspiracy, for example, have long integrated the Kennedy assassination into their narratives (often claim-

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

59

ing that Kennedy was killed because he was too slow in implementing the measures he had been ordered to take or that he actively resisted the conspirators), and in recent years they also habitually project 9/11 as just another episode in the deception and enslavement of the American people. In similar fashion, systemic conspiracy theories can eventually develop into superconspiracy theories. As Barkun observes, such alleged superconspiracies “have enjoyed particular growth since the 1980s” (Culture 6). This is not true for Europe where conspiracist visions about Masons, Jews, and Communists began to merge during the nineteenth century already. But with regard to the United States, the claim is correct. In fact, with the exception of the late eighteenth-century idea that contended that the Illuminati had infiltrated Masonic lodges, such superconspiracy theories are entirely absent from American culture until the second half of the twentieth century. Systemic conspiracy theories have always been structurally analogous, but they only begin to merge after 1960, at exactly the historical moment, as I will argue in the conclusion, when conspiracy discourse as a whole begins to move more toward the fringes of society. At exactly the same time American conspiracy theories undergo another significant change that I want to address in more detail here. As Kathryn Olmsted has pointed out, “American conspiracy theories underwent a fundamental change in the twentieth century. No longer were conspiracy theorists chiefly concerned that alien forces were plotting to capture the federal government; instead, they proposed that the federal government itself was the conspirator” (4). This distinction between conspiracies against the government (or state) and by the government (or state) has the advantage that it encompasses the other typologies discussed so far and that it grasps an important diachronic development of American conspiracy theories. However, to my mind, Olmsted dates the shift too early. She argues that it occurred because of World War I. This war, she contends, “was a watershed moment in the development of the U.S. government.” Because of the war the federal government expanded and became more and more powerful – powerful enough, Olmsted argues, to engage in clandestine actions against its citizens. As she puts it, “Sinister forces in charge of the government could do a lot more damage in 1918 than they could have done a few years earlier; in fact, in the view of some conspiracists, the state was the sinister force” (4; her emphasis). She goes on to argue that subsequent events throughout the century – Pearl Harbor, the Pentagon Papers, the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, the IranContra affair, etc. – merely confirmed and intensified distrust toward the federal government. However, I would contend that the shift from conspiracies against the government to those conducted by it occurred much later, namely only during the 1960s

60

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

and 1970s.16 It coincides with the first emergence of American superconspiracy theories and, more importantly, with the disqualification of the epistemological paradigm of causality that I have discussed in the first section of this chapter. Since this simultaneity is hardly a coincidence, I would also contend that growing distrust in the federal government was only one of the factors that brought about a transformation of American conspiracy theories at that historical moment. I will discuss the connection between conspiracy theory’s shift in status from legitimate to illegitimate knowledge and changes in its internal structure in the conclusion; in the remainder of this section I want to demonstrate that until the 1960s almost all American conspiracy theories have been concerned with the threat to the government posed by conspirators inside and outside the country. I want to show this by first discussing George Washington’s Farewell Address which can be considered the “urtext” of this kind of fear and by providing an overview of the most important American conspiracy theories until 1960 by way of a chart. Structurally, Washington’s Farewell Address of September 1796 draws on the template of the republican jeremiad that I have discussed in the previous section. Unlike most other conspiracy narratives, however, Washington’s Address does not try to expose a specific conspiracy that has already progressed quite far, but warns of the danger of such conspiracies in general. Accordingly, he does not, or only very indirectly, criticize the people for a decline in virtue and not guarding their liberties enough, but tries to pre-empt such a decline by reminding the people of what would happen should it occur. “The Unity of Government which constitutes you one people is […] now dear to you,” Washington writes, casting this union as the “main Pillar” of the citizens’ “Liberty.” And he continues: But it is easy to foresee, that from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed […]. (140)

This sentence already contains many elements that we will encounter repeatedly over the course of this study. It draws on military metaphors to project the community as threatened by invasion, it maintains that enemies exist both within and without the country, and it holds that the enemy will try to create dissent and quarrels among the victims of the conspiracy in order to weaken their resolve. The

16 Peter Knight, although in a quite different context, also holds that the “The 1960s […] witnessed a broad shift […] to conspiracy theories proposed by the people about abuses of power by those in authority” (Conspiracy 58).

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

61

function of conspiracy theory to stabilize a community – what Washington refers to as “the immense value of your national Union” (140) – thus comes to the fore very pointedly here. Because of the historical moment when it was written and received, that is, when the first party system of Federalists and Democratic Republicans had emerged, Washington’s Farewell Address devotes more space to internal than external enemies. Perfectly in line with the republican ideology of the time, his intention is to “warn […] in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party” (146). Anticipating the conflict that led to the Civil War, Washington is especially concerned that parties founded on “Geographical discriminations” could eventually destroy the union because “designing men may endeavour to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views” (143). In traditional republican fashion, Washington expresses worries about the danger that parties in general pose to the newly founded republic. To him, all parties are “factions” that “put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the Community” that disregards the will of the people and only works to promote its own selfish ends (144). For Washington, party rule therefore already constitutes “a frightful despotism,” but he also stresses that it has, in the long run, even worse consequences. “The disorders and miseries” which result from the “alternate domination of one faction over another […] gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual.” In other words: factionalism “leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism” and thus to the end of the republic (146).17 Even in the Farewell Address, however, the dangers from within and without are already intimately connected. According to Washington, another reason why factionalism is so dangerous to the republic is that “[i]t opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion” (146). Domestic parties may thus become “the tools and dupes” (151) of “foreign Intriegue [sic]” (153) and more or less unwittingly help alien plotters to destroy the republic. Washington thus reiterates a lesson republicans had learned from history, namely that “foreign Influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government” (151). Employing the

17 In this context it is important to remember that the Farewell Address is not as disinterested as it may seem at first sight. Washington’s sympathies lay with the Federalists, and the Address was at least in part written by their leader, Alexander Hamilton (cf. Knox 84). In fact, since “[e]ach faction believed that it spoke for the people and that its opponents were plotters against the Commonwealth” (8), the Address must have appeared from the perspective of many Democratic Republicans as just another clever ploy of the Federalists.

62

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

metaphor of wakefulness which would become a standard ingredient of countersubversive discourse, Washington admonishes Americans in what is probably the most quoted sentence of the speech that “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealously of a free people ought to be constantly awake” (151). Washington’s warning about the dangers lying in store for the new republic did not go unheard but proved extraordinarily prophetic. Displaying the “uniform vigilance” (147) that Washington demanded, conspiracy theorists worried about the same dangers Washington had worried about until the early 1960s. In the 160 years after the issuing of the Farewell Address, American conspiracy theories revolved around plots conducted by domestic or foreign agents or a coalition of both that aimed at undermining the government. Almost invariably in these accounts, the government is in great peril but has not yet fallen to the conspirators. The following chart provides on overview of the most important of these conspiracy theories.18 Chart 1: The most important conspiracy theories from the 1790s to the 1950s Decade

Conspiracy Theory

Internal Enemies

External Enemies

1790

Illuminati conspiracy

Democratic Republicans

European Illuminati

Democratic Republicans

France

1800s/1810s Federalist conspiracy

Federalists

Britain

1820s

Bankers

none

1820s/1830s Masonic conspiracy

Masons

none

1830s–1860s Mormon conspiracy

Mormons

none

1830s–1850s Catholic conspiracy

American Catholics

the Pope, the Catholic monarchs of Europe, Catholic immigrants to the U.S.

1830s–1860s Abolitionist conspiracy

Abolitionists, later also Republicans

Britain (especially in early accounts)

1800s/1810s Democratic Republican conspiracy

Money Power conspiracy

18 For narrative, and thus more extensive, versions of this overview, see Barkun, “Conspiracy Theories”; Davis, Fear; and Goldberg 6–21. The most thorough treatment of the Illuminati scare is still Stauffer. For a recent analysis of how this conspiracy theory traveled from Europe to the United States and the transformations it underwent along the way, see McKenzie-McHarg, “Transfer.” The best overview of the mutual accusations raised by Federalists and Democratic Republicans is Knox.

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

Decade

Conspiracy Theory

Internal Enemies

External Enemies

1830s–1860s Slave Power conspiracy

Southern slaveholders none and their Northern helpers, esp. Democrats

1890

Republican Party, bankers Britain, international Money Power

Republican conspiracy (Populist movement)

1890s–1920s Catholic conspiracy

American Catholics

Pope, Catholic immigrants

1890s–1920s Jewish conspiracy

none

Jewish immigrants, international Jewish Money Power

1910s

German Americans

German spies

1930s/1940s Fascist conspiracy

none

German spies

1930s–1950s Communist conspiracy

American Communists

Soviet Union

German conspiracy

63

Obviously, this chart is reductive and does not adequately reflect the often complex relations between conspirators within and without that countersubversives detected. In fact, as I already observed at the beginning of this section, the distinction between internal and external enemies is often difficult to draw since internal enemies were usually othered as “un-American” and thus externalized. This tendency was particularly pronounced with regard to Catholics between the 1830s and 1850s, because many of them had indeed only recently arrived in the United States. It is also observable in the fear of all things German that pervaded American culture during World War I. Moreover, I would like to stress that I have not forgotten the Red Scare of 1919–20 but excluded it consciously from the chart. Whereas Davis and Goldberg include it in their historical trajectories of American conspiracy theories, I side with scholars of anti-Communism like Fried who have convincingly argued that the Red Scare was about a fear of open agitation and insurrection and not about a fear of conspiracy. It is also worth pointing out that the motives ascribed to foreign powers accused of conspiracy varied. The Illuminati were said to be plotting against the United States because of an anarchic desire for the destruction of the social order. By contrast, Napoleonic France and Britain were accused of planning the destruction of the United States in order to disqualify the unwelcome example in republican democracy that the country was setting to the population of European countries, who was, in the eyes of the Americans, suffering under autocratic regimes. Those concerned about an abolitionist plot often claimed that Britain manipulated the opponents of slavery in order to instigate a civil war that would destroy the economic threat that the South allegedly posed to Britain.

64

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

Finally, it must be noted that the conspiracy theories revolving around slavery are the odd ones out here. Especially the Slave Power conspiracy theory does not fit the pattern of conspiracies against the government because its proponents claimed that the Slave Power, which was allegedly plotting to nationalize slavery and extend it to the white working class, had already brought the federal government under its control. Presidents, congressmen, and Supreme Court judges were either members of the Slave Power or its powerless puppets. In the accounts of the opponents of the Slave Power, then, we no longer encounter a conspiracy directed against the state but one conducted by it. Apart from this deviation, though, even the Slave Power conspiracy theory has a lot in common with those conspiracy theories of the time that regarded the state as not yet quite captured. Even though Lincoln and others contended that the Slave Power controlled all branches of government, they retained faith in the democratic process and held that change for the better could be brought about by elections. In fact, the Republican Party was founded largely because of and in order to foil this conspiracy. This confidence in elections distinguishes the opponents of the Slave Power from post-1960 countersubversives who usually claim that elections are only staged by those who control the government and thus offer no possibility to amend things, and aligns them with other conspiracy theorists of their own time, for example the anti-Masons and anti-Catholics who both founded new parties to further their ends. What is more, accounts of the Slave Power written after the election of Lincoln followed the familiar pattern, suggesting that the conspirators were now plotting against the government. In analogous but inverted fashion, accounts of abolitionist and Republican plots before 1860 cast them as conspiring against the government; accounts from after Lincoln’s election suggested that they had now succeeded in capturing the government. That Slave Power and abolitionist plots, depending on when exactly they are discussed, figure either as conspiracies against or by the government, shows that, as with all distinctions discussed in this section, the line between conspiracies against and by the government is ultimately blurry. In the final analysis, plots against the government and by it are two sides of the same coin. Which category a particular conspiracy theory falls into depends on when the alleged conspiracy has been detected, whether it has already assumed control over the state or is still in the process of achieving this. Another good example of this is the fate of the concept “military-industrial complex,” which was coined by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address of 1961. As the concept figures prominently in many post-1960 conspiracy theories, I want to quickly discuss the speech and its reception in closing. Somewhat surprisingly at first, Eisenhower’s Farewell Address is not concerned with the threat of a Communist conspiracy. Eisenhower devotes a large

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

65

part of his speech to the Cold War, casting it as a conflict “with liberty at stake,” but although the Great Red Scare reached its peak under his presidency, fueled to a considerable degree by the comprehensive security program for federal employees initiated by his administration, he does not express fears of conspiracy. The only moment in his speech that could be taken as a slight hint at a Communist conspiracy occurs when he labels “the hostile ideology” America is faced with “insidious in method.” What he worries about instead is the possibility of armed conflict with the Soviet Union, a nuclear war that “could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years.” To avoid such a disaster he calls on his audience to judge carefully how they will react to “every provocation,” and reminds them that “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.” Eisenhower’s speech thus reflects yet another shift in the United States’ understanding of the nature of the Communist menace that occurred at exactly this time. Until the late 1980s the Soviet Union remained a source of anxiety for Americans, but from the late 1950s onward, most of them, especially politicians, regarded the Soviet Union primarily as a military threat and hardly worried about the Moscow-directed infiltration and subversion of key American institutions. But even if Eisenhower does not fear a Communist plot, and even though his Address is less jeremiadic than Washington’s, he is nevertheless concerned with two threats that can be considered at least potential conspiracies – although he does not use the term “conspiracy” or “intrigue” or any related one to characterize them. What he warns against is, in fact, an updated version of exactly what Washington warned against 165 years earlier. Eisenhower may not be afraid of political parties anymore, but he is concerned that other kinds of factions might establish a minority rule. The first of these threats has not got hold of the public imagination and is largely forgotten today. Eisenhower worries that, because the government has recently begun to invest on a large scale in research of all kinds that is related to security and defense issues, “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” By contrast, the second threat that Eisenhower is concerned about has since then become a standard ingredient of American conspiracy theories: the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower reminds his audience that the Cold War has not only compelled the United States to establish “a standing army,” something Washington also cast as a threat to the republic in his Farewell Address, but “to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” as well. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” of what has been labeled the national security state, Eisenhower argues, constitutes a potential danger to democracy:

66

Chapter 1: Mapping American Conspiracism

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of our defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Eisenhower worries that the armament industry will be interested in selling their products and the military in buying them, and that both will try to influence decision-makers accordingly. He does not explicitly cast this collusion as a conspiracy, but the language he employs to alert Americans to the danger harks back to the established countersubversive discourse, projecting the workings of this “military-industrial complex” as a danger to democracy and liberty. In his invocation of “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” central tropes of republicanism surface, testifying to the continued importance of this ideology in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, his call for alertness echoes Washington’s admonition that only “eternal vigilance” would preserve the republic. Most importantly, though, his argument is as preemptive as Washington’s. He does not claim that the military-industrial complex has already undermined democratic institutions but envisions this as a future danger. Thus, he is still concerned with a conspiracy against the government. Post-1960 conspiracy theorists have frequently referred to Eisenhower’s warning. Oliver Stone’s film J.F.K., one of the most important conspiracy narratives of the past decades, even opens with footage from Eisenhower’s televised speech, quoting the exact sentences mentioned above. But Stone and other conspiracy theorists have been far more pessimistic than Eisenhower. J.F.K., for instance, claims that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the moment when the military-industrial complex took over power. Not all conspiracy theorists agree with this historical narrative, and many have proposed different dates for the take-over, some even suggesting that it far predates Eisenhower’s Address. All conspiracy theories of the past 50 years that revolve around the military-industrial complex, however, hold that it has been controlling the country for quite some time. Since the conspirators use the means of the state – its law-enforcement agencies, secret services, and armed forces – to achieve their sinister goals and silence countersubversives, these accounts are no longer concerned with conspiracies against the government but effectively with plots conducted by it. However, the military-industrial complex is not the only institution that contemporary conspiracy theories accuse of secretly controlling the government. Other accounts expose the secret machinations of the New World Order, the ZOG

A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories

67

(the Zionist Occupied Government), the United Nations, the Illuminati, or the Antichrist. Most recently, conspiracy theories have charged that Barack Obama illegitimately assumed the office of President of the United States, supported by, depending on the specific account, the New World Order, or new conspiracies of Islamists, Communists, or fascists. The farewell addresses by Washington and Eisenhower, then, bracket almost exactly the period during which plots against the government were the dominant focus of American conspiracy theories. These theories have not completely disappeared and they can be found in reality as well as in fiction, as the Bush administration’s allegation that Iraq conspired with al-Qaeda or the film Salt (2010), in which Angelina Jolie realizes that she is a key player in a large-scale Russian plot against the United States, show. But since the 1960s American conspiracy theories do no longer predominantly revolve around conspiracies conducted against the state.

Chapter 2 Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory A conspiracy theory thrived among the Puritans and performed important functions for their community, but its distinctive form and cultural functions have not yet been satisfactorily analyzed. Scholars interested in conspiracy theory have so far not focused on the Puritans, while scholars of Puritanism have not yet approached them with the concept of conspiracy theory in mind. Scholars of conspiracy theory often touch briefly upon the Puritans in their introductions, but then quickly move on to the more modern periods they wish to explore in detail. Robert Levine, for example, devotes three pages to the Puritans in Conspiracy and Romance, arguing that “conspiratorial fears helped the Pilgrim and Puritan colonists to create and define their community” (6). Similarly, in Enemies Within, Robert Alan Goldberg casts a quick glance at the Salem witch trials which, as he puts it, were “fueled [by] the fire of conspiracy thinking” (6), before he dissects twentieth-century conspiracy theories in great detail. Scholars of Puritan New England, by contrast, regularly use the term “conspiracy” in their detailed analyses of the culture in general and especially its witchcraft crisis of 1692. In their seminal study Salem Possessed, for example, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum speak of the “comprehensive vision of conspiracy” that dominated people’s minds (151), and in The Enemy Within, John Demos observes that during the early stages of the crisis the “overheated rhetoric” of several ministers “enhance[d] a sense of conspiracy” that contributed to the escalation of events (163). Thus, these and other scholars have implicitly cast the Puritans as conspiracy theorists. Since the heritage of Puritanism is an important source of secular American conspiracy theories, this chapter intends to fill the gaps thus left by previous scholarship. I argue that the foundation of the Puritan settlement in North America was an all-encompassing metaphysical conspiracy theory that projected the different enemies the Puritans faced – among others, Native Americans, Catholics, heretics, and witches – as part of a unified attack orchestrated by the devil himself. Drawing a clear line between inside and outside, friend and foe, in terms of absolute good and evil, this conspiracy theory stabilized the Puritan community to a considerable degree. However, as I also wish to argue, this socially stabilizing conspiracy theory evolved into a destabilizing variant during the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692. The vision that the devil and his allies had

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

69

infiltrated the community unleashed a socially destructive force that the authorities could hardly contain.1 The first section of this chapter introduces some of the key concepts of Puritan culture such as the errand into the wilderness or the siege mentality and describes the stabilizing conspiracy theory that informed the Puritan worldview. The next section focuses on the Salem witchcraft crisis and the destabilizing twist it gave the existing conspiracy theory. For this I draw on Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed (1974) and Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare (2002). These highly acclaimed studies have brought to the fore the two dimensions that are, in my opinion, at the heart of the witchcraft crisis and the conspiracy theory by which it was fueled. Boyer and Nissenbaum have shown that the initial pattern of accusations within Salem Village can be explained through a conflict of interest between farmers on the one side and emerging merchants on the other. Norton has shown that the witchcraft accusations, particularly as they spread to other places, were inextricably tied to the so-called Second Indian War that the Puritans had been waging against the tribe of the Wabanakis since 1690 and from which Essex County, of which Salem was part, was suffering particularly badly. Drawing on these accounts and recasting their findings in my terminology, I argue that the Salem witchcraft crisis was characterized by a combination of distortion and deflection. For “ordinary” members of the community accusations of witchcraft were a distorted response to two issues that could not be addressed openly: an economic conflict in Salem Village, and a general dissatisfaction with the way in which the colony’s leadership handled the war. For the colonial leadership, in turn, the idea of a widespread witch conspiracy offered an explanation for why the colony was not winning the war. As it thus held people who had nothing to do with the actual fighting responsible for repeated defeats, it deflected from the actual concerns. With the Puritans, then, we encounter already many of the forms and functions that conspiracy theories assume and perform. The stabilizing Puritan conspiracy theory was a theory promoted from above, and its destabilizing version was also in parts fueled from above. However, the destabilizing version was also a theory spun from below – a response by the weak and powerless to the hardships befalling them. As we will see, it was this combination that made it both powerful and destructive. Moreover, how the Puritan conspiracy theory affected

1 As I argue below, the authorities eventually, and only retrospectively, managed to arrive at an interpretation of the witchcraft crisis that integrated it into the socially stabilizing conspiracy theory. As a consequence, the Salem witchcraft crisis was clearly not the beginning of the end of Puritanism, as George Bancroft has so controversially suggested. For a rejection of Bancroft’s argument from a different point of view, see McWilliams 174–78.

70

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

the community is characteristic of the potential effects of both metaphysical and secular conspiracy theories in general. Conspiracy theories can stabilize and affirm all kinds of communities, and they have done so at many different moments throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. But conspiracy theories also always have the potential to destroy communities by creating unbridgeable antagonisms between different parts of them. In extreme cases they can even create such deep-seated distrust that everybody becomes suspicious and that those who believe the conspiracy theory are unable to maintain ties to anybody else, as seems often to be the case with contemporary conspiracy theorists located at the margins of society. While the first two sections of this chapter explore Puritanism and the Salem witchcraft crisis in general, the following two sections investigate how visions of conspiracy were projected in individual texts and how these texts either fueled or tried to control the crisis. Section three analyzes the sermons that Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village, delivered before and during the witchcraft crisis; section four engages the most famous contemporary account of the crisis, Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692). Reading these two texts against each other allows me to cover very different responses to the witchcraft threat and to identify a variety of strategies employed in narrating conspiracy at the time. Parris’s sermons enable me to capture the important oral dimension of Puritan culture and the position of somebody involved in the conflicts within Salem Village.2 Mather’s Wonders allows me to include the position of somebody located at the colony’s center and writing with the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts in mind. As we will see, Parris and Mather addressed very similar issues, but they arrived at vastly different answers and thus diverging evaluations of the witchcraft crisis. What unfolds in Parris’s sermons between 1689 and 1692 is a vision of conspiracy that increasingly detects possible conspirators everywhere. As Parris found it in the end impossible to irrefutably distinguish between sinners and saints, he implicitly rejected the idea of visible sanctity – the notion that the community was able to identify those among them who had been elected by God – and thus one of the founding tenets of Puritan society. For him, the Puritan project, the creation of a true community of saints, could no longer be realized on earth. In their radical skepticism and the atmosphere of mutual distrust they helped create, Parris’s sermons thus project a conspiracy theory far more extreme than all other theories that I discuss in subsequent chapters. Indeed, his radical

2 In the absence of newspapers, sermons “served as the primary medium of communication and the sole avenue of spiritual interpretation of community affairs” (Cooper and Minkema 2).

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

71

vision has more in common with the conspiracy theories of the second half of the twentieth century than with any of those that dominated American culture from the Revolution to the Cold War. While Parris, by spinning a conspiracy theory harmful to the community, fueled the crisis, Cotton Mather sought to stabilize the disintegrating community. Commissioned by the Governor and published in October 1692 when support for the trials was already eroding, his controversial text constituted the colonial leadership’s attempt to justify the legal proceedings and to keep the crisis from spiraling further out of proportion. Wonders of the Invisible World, too, stressed the reality of an immense and dangerous conspiracy, but in accordance with Puritan orthodoxy Mather gave the threat a positive twist. Grafting the events on the template of the jeremiad, he stressed that the Puritans were targeted because they were God’s elect and that the fervor of the devil’s attack indicated the approaching millennium. Mather’s confidence in God’s grace also affected his stance on spectral evidence – a concept crucial to the understanding of the witchcraft crisis. Like many Christians of different denominations at the time, the Puritans believed that when a human entered into a covenant with the devil, he gained the power to employ a specter, that is, an apparition of that person, to do evil. These specters were invisible to anybody but those whom they harassed or tempted, which is one reason why scholars of witchcraft generally argued against the admission of spectral evidence in court. Apart from the fact that they knew that witnesses could not always be trusted, scholars also debated whether or not the devil had the power to impersonate people who were not in league with him. In the American colonies, spectral evidence was generally not admitted when alleged witches stood trial, but during the Salem witchcraft crisis, it was and thus led to the convictions of many accused who denied all charges. When it was later disallowed, the trials led to acquittals, and the crisis ended. In Wonders, Mather, in highly contradictory fashion, both rejects and defends spectral evidence. As a scholar familiar with the literature on the topic, he cautions in general terms against its use, but at the same time he insists that spectral evidence can be trusted because God would never allow the devil to use the specters of good Christians. As I wish to argue, Mather assumes this stance because he has the Puritan project in mind. Although he never makes this explicit, he was fully aware, I contend, that doubting the reliability of spectral representations would have put into question the reliability of representations of sanctity as well and thus would have shaken Puritan society in its foundations. Since the Puritans themselves did not produce texts that dramatized the events of the witchcraft crisis, I end this chapter with an interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), one of

72

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

numerous literary responses to the Salem witchcraft crisis and one closely linked to both Parris’s and Mather’s texts. Hawthorne quotes from Wonders several times, and he even likens his protagonist to Cotton Mather at one point to make clear that both share a similar faith in spectral evidence. At the same time, Brown’s all-encompassing doubt at the end of the story is reminiscent of the comprehensive skepticism Samuel Parris finally arrived at. But I have also chosen Hawthorne’s short story because it allows me to bridge the gap between my discussion of a metaphysical seventeenth-century conspiracy theory and the secular conspiracy theories of later centuries that the following chapters are concerned with. After all, Hawthorne wrote “Young Goodman Brown” while the Catholic, abolitionist, and Slave Power conspiracy theories that subsequent chapters explore were gaining momentum. Written at a historical moment when conspiracy theories were instrumental in forging collective identity, the story dramatizes what happens when distrust can no longer be contained and when everybody appears as a possible suspect. Thus, the story not only indicts Puritan culture for the over-arching suspicion that the witchcraft crisis brought to the fore; it also dramatizes the harmful effects that conspiracy theories can have on individuals who think that everybody around them is part of a plot, as has been frequently the case with conspiracy theorists since the 1960s.

Living in the “Devil’s Territories”: The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory “The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories,” Cotton Mather writes in an early section of Wonders of the Invisible World (13), nicely summing up how the Puritans conceived of themselves and the continent where they had come to settle.3 The Puritans – and when Mather speaks of the New Englanders he means the Puritans – thought of themselves as a chosen people and confidently modeled themselves after the Israelites of the Old Testament. Dissenters from the Church of England who began to migrate to New England in considerable numbers after 1630, they constantly confirmed their sense of election through typological readings of biblical and historical events and conceived of their life in New England as an errand into the wilderness anticipated, and in fact prefigured, by the people of Israel’s settlement

3 Puritan authors followed different orthographical rules. The editions of their works that I quote from generally preserve these peculiarities and only occasionally correct spelling or punctuation.

The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory

73

in Canaan.4 They were convinced that they had come to a continent to which, as all denominations believed at the time, the devil had fled after Christianity had spread through Europe, and that it was their task to expel him from the New World. The belief in their own superiority, though, did not only hinge on this perceived mission but primarily arose from the conviction that they had purified the church of meaningless rituals and false doctrines. The Puritans rejected both the Catholic covenant of works and the Lutheran covenant of faith in favor of a covenant of grace. For them, all humans were innately depraved sinners, and God could not be moved in favor of any of them by confession, good deeds, or unshakable faith. Sovereign and inscrutable, God bestowed his grace on some humans, the group of the elect, while damning all others.5 Somewhat paradoxically, the Puritans insisted on a highly personal relationship between the individual and God that nevertheless required social recognition. On the one hand, nobody was to stand between God and the individual soul whose primary means of revelation on its spiritual journey toward salvation was the bible. Ministers therefore did not mediate between God and the members of their congregation but provided spiritual leadership and assisted their congregants in understanding the bible’s complicated passages. On the other hand, those who thought that they had completed their journey toward God had to prove their election by relating a convincing narrative of their inner struggles and subsequent conversion. On the basis of this autobiographical account and the person’s general behavior and reputation, the community decided whether to grant them the status of a visible saint. Only after this had been accomplished did they qualify for full membership in one of the Puritan churches, which were completely independent of each other. Those who were still trying to find their way to God were welcome to attend sermons and public prayer, but were refused baptism and excluded from taking communion. In other words, then, despite the postulated inscrutability of God’s will and the specific relationship between him and each individual, the Puritans believed that they could identify those who had been touched by God’s grace by closely examining their lives and those of others.

4 See Bercovitch, Typology, on this mode of interpretation in general, and American 38–44 for this particular typology. 5 As recent scholarship has highlighted, Puritanism was more complicated and diversified as my straightforward account makes it sound, and much of the culture’s collective energy was consumed in theological discussions. However, if not outright monolithic, Puritanism was a relatively homogenous movement. This is particularly true concerning the attitude toward the devil and his plot against New England that I am interested in here because it is at the heart of the Puritan conspiracy theory. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra puts it, “When it came to the threat represented by Satan as an enemy of the polity, there was indeed a ‘Puritan’ orthodoxy” (18).

74

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

This system worked reasonably well for the first generation of New England Puritans, who tended to travel to the New World after they had experienced conversion, but it later led to considerable conflict. Until they had a conversion experience of their own, which some never did, the children of church members could not join their parents’ churches. Looking for a way to ease the tensions thus arising, some Puritan churches introduced the so-called Half-Way Covenant in 1662 which allowed for the baptism of infants who had at least one parent in full communion with the church. Other churches, though, among them that of Samuel Parris in Salem Village, rejected this move as an aberration of the true faith. In New England and especially in Massachusetts, where the Puritan settlers enjoyed a large degree of independence from the crown until James II revoked their charter in 1686, the harsh restrictions on church membership also had concrete political consequences. Convinced that they were governed directly by God, the Puritans rigidly tied eligibility to all public offices for the Massachusetts Bay Colony – from that of a simple town magistrate to that of the colony’s governor – to church membership. Firm believers in patriarchal order, the Puritans banned women from occupying any of these offices. Ministers were not eligible either, but the system ensured that the secular authorities ruled in accordance with the clergy’s positions, and thus the ministry exerted great influence on the course of the colony. The Puritans, Avihu Zakai observes, “aimed neither at unification nor at complete separation of church and state. Rather, they thought of church and state as two different means to the same end” (237). Both were “complementary instruments […] to defeat Antichristian institutions and governments and realize [the] pursuit of the millennium” (232). In American cultural memory, the representatives that were chosen among the spiritually elect figure as firm believers in authority and social control.6 The stereotypical images of stern and inhuman judges and magistrates transported by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, and other writers are exaggerated and onesided but not wholly devoid of truth. One reason for the rigid law enforcement and the imposition of sometimes draconian punishments for crimes such as adultery or public drunkenness was that such misdemeanors were not only seen as personal crimes but perceived as endangering the community’s privileged relationship with God. Transgressions by (those aspiring to become) church members put the Commonwealth in peril because they provoked God’s wrath. Angered by his chosen people, God might “let Loose” the devil and allow him to torment New England more than usually (Mather, “Wonders” 61).

6 On the way the Puritans were remembered and imagined during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Adams and McWilliams.

The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory

75

Just as for most other denominations at the time, the devil was real for the Puritans. Next to the visible, physical world, there existed, they believed, an invisible world of demons and magic. While the Puritans usually spoke and wrote about the devil in the singular, referring to “the Existence of such a Devil” or “this Devil” (Mather, “Wonders” 43), they also firmly believed that there was not only one devil but many different devils. These devils were particularly active in the “American Desart” (11), both the Spanish and the various kinds of English colonizers agreed, because Satan and his minions had fled to the New World when Christianity spread across Europe. Finding a wilderness devoid of churches but full of easily seduced heathens, the devil “had reign’d without any controul for many Ages” over the country, and, “Irritated” by the Puritans’ arrival, “immediately try’d all sorts of Methods to overturn [their] poor Plantation” (74, 13). He tempted individual souls, and he conjured up “powerful ‘external’ enemies – both human and non-human – dedicated to destroying the polity: storms, earthquakes, epidemics, pirates, foreign enemies, heretics, witches, imperial bureaucrats, Amerindians, and African slaves” (Cañizares-Esguerra 17). Interpreting each environmental disaster and each conflict with any enemy as yet another episode in the cosmic battle against the forces of evil, the Puritans developed a veritable “siege mentality” (29). They felt that they were completely surrounded by enemies in league with the devil, the most dangerous among them being the Catholic French located in Quebec and the Native Americans living in the vicinity. The Puritans, it needs to be stressed, often did not distinguish between the different tribes they were dealing with – Narraganset, Wampanoag, Pequot, Wabanaki, and Haudenosaunee. That the Haudensaunees and, in the conflict relevant for understanding the witchcraft crisis, the Wabanakis (for obvious strategic reasons) occasionally joined forces with the French confirmed the Puritans’ conviction that they were the target of a concerted attack orchestrated by the devil and that all Native Americans were potentially his allies. However, the Puritans also considered internal quarrels part of the devil’s attack, especially if they coincided with an attack from the outside. Their community, most Puritans were convinced, not only needed to be defended against a range of external enemies, it also occasionally had to be purged of enemies that had arisen on the inside. The Antinomian controversy of the 1630s, for example, which eventually led to the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson and some of her followers, was, in the minds of the Puritans, closely tied to the war against the Pequot. As Ann Kibbey has shown, the metaphorical violence contained in Puritan leaders’ indictments of the Antinomians mirrored the actual violence used against the external Pequot enemy. Thus, the indictments carried the constant threat that verbal violence might turn into physical one. However, as the treatment of the Antinomians also shows, internal enemies were rarely physically

76

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

hurt but routinely banished and thus turned into “geographically external enemies” (100). Scholars of conspiracy theory like Robert Levine have this siege mentality and the cosmic struggle at its core in mind when they describe conspiracist fears as an integral part and maybe even the organizational principle of Puritan culture. Indeed, although the Puritans never used the term “conspiracy” – they spoke of “Hellish Intrigue” and “confederacy” with the devil instead (Mather, “Wonders” 22, 28) – their worldview obviously qualifies as a conspiracy theory. It was based on the assumption that quite diverse enemies were secretly acting in unison and, controlled by one mastermind, the devil, were plotting to destroy their community. Hence, just as secular conspiracy theorists do as well, Puritans divided the world into absolute good and evil and imagined themselves at the forefront of a global struggle. What is more, since except for the occasional alliance between the French and native tribes, their many enemies were never openly in contact with each other, the Puritans had to “prove” their conspiracy by way of complex typological readings that integrated diverse events and situations into a single frame. They thus performed an operation that is different from but structurally analogous to the inference and deduction characteristic of secular conspiracy theories. The Puritans’ metaphysical conspiracy theory performed the cultural work of stabilizing their community, providing them with an overarching interpretational framework to make sense of disparate experiences and hardships: They were surrounded by enemies in league with the devil whom they had to keep at bay, and, at times, the devil even managed to create internal enemies such as the dissenters Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williamson. But these heretics were usually small in numbers, quickly identified, and swiftly banned from the colony. This enabled the Puritans to maintain a clear distinction between an evil outside and a healthy inside. However, the community was in practice much less homogenous than I depict it here. In fact, the longer the Puritan experiment lasted and the more successful the settlement proved to be, the more non-believers – African and Native American slaves and whites of other denominations – lived among the “visible saints.” These “heathens,” though, were clearly identifiable; they did not qualify for church membership and were thus banned from access to public office. As, what Barbara Babcock has called, with reference to Aldous Huxley, “a tolerated margin of the mess,” they posed no threat to the Puritan community. On the contrary, it seems safe to assume, that by openly representing deviance, their presence confirmed the superior status ascribed to the “real” members of the community, and especially to church members. Until 1692 the same was true for witches. The relatively few witches that were brought to trial and sentenced in New England throughout the seventeenth

The Destabilizing Variant

77

century were usually elderly women of low social status who were not church members but often had a reputation of being difficult, strange, and quarrelsome. Although located inside the community, they could easily be cast as outsiders collaborating with the devil toward the destruction of the community.7 Few in numbers and rather unsuccessful in their assaults, their existence did not unsettle but rather confirmed the stabilizing Puritan conspiracy theory. Their detection proved that the mechanisms of social control were functioning, that God still guarded his people, and that the community commanded the means of identifying witches and thus, by implication, also saints. With the Salem witchcraft crisis all this changed. Suddenly, hundreds of people were accused, and among those accused – and even among those sentenced and executed – were church members and other highly regarded members of the community. This astonishing development occurred because the established Puritan conspiracy theory temporarily evolved into a socially destructive variant. The Salem witchcraft crisis was produced by and helped produce this variant.

“The Devil Hath Been Raised Among Us”: The Destabilizing Variant The basic “facts” of what happened in Salem and Essex County between January 1692 and May 1693 are quickly related.8 The witchcraft crisis began in the household of Samuel Parris of Salem Village when two girls – Parris’s daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail Williams – began to suffer from fits which Parris and a doctor he consulted identified as affliction by witchcraft. Soon, other girls joined the ranks of the afflicted, and the group accused a number of women of torturing them through their specters. When one concerned parent, Thomas Putnam, filed an official complaint a few weeks later, the authorities began to investigate the accusations. During the first hearings they conducted, several of the accused, heavily pressured by the magistrates, confessed to having bewitched the girls. This set in motion an avalanche of further accusations that transformed a not uncommon occurrence into a veritable crisis. The afflicted girls, now “supported” by other children as well as adults of both sexes who also claimed to be afflicted,

7 On this stereotype and the social functions that it served, cf. Karlsen. 8 The rough chronicle of events I present here is uncontested and can be extracted from all contemporary studies of the witchcraft crisis. I have drawn chiefly on Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare, however, as hers is not only the most comprehensive study of the crisis but also the only one that is organized along the chronological order of events.

78

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

began to accuse more and more people of witchcraft. While most accusations targeted the old women typically associated with witchcraft, a considerable number of the accused were “unusual suspects”: church members, male, and/or of higher social status. On April 24, for example, Philip English, one of the wealthiest merchants of New England, and, in late May, Captains John Floyd and John Alden were accused of witchcraft. Moreover, among the accused were also individuals not personally known to the core group of afflicted girls, who still issued most of the accusations and who quickly accused the village’s former minister, George Burroughs, as “the Head & Ringleader of all the Supposed Witches in the Land” (Newman qtd. in Norton, Devil’s 131). While Burroughs denied all charges, several others of the accused, probably for reasons I discuss below, confessed. Many of them talked about attending large witch-meetings at Salem and in the surrounding forests and thus further fueled fears that a largescale conspiracy of witches was undermining the Puritan community. On June 2 the trials against the first accused began. They did not start earlier because, when the first hearings began in February, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was still without a charter and thus without a functioning legal system. It was only on May 14 that the new Governor William Phips arrived in Boston and brought the new charter with him. On May 27 Phips established a Court of Oyer and Terminer (to Hear and to Determine), presided over by Chief Judge William Stoughton, which took up work a few days later. As the courts ignored the caveats of several ministers and admitted spectral evidence, all accused were quickly sentenced. Those who confessed were kept in jail for the time being; those who did not were quickly hanged. The determined actions of the authorities, however, proved unable to destroy the witch conspiracy. More and more accusations were issued from all over Essex County, and especially from the village of Andover, and more and more of the accused confessed to witchcraft and to having attended meetings of up to two hundred witches. As summer turned into fall, the trials continued to enjoy widespread popular support, but an increasing number of the colony’s leading figures began to grow skeptical of the proceedings. The careful treatise “Cases of Conscience” in which Increase Mather, the colony’s most respected spiritual leader, dismissed the validity of spectral evidence while simultaneously avoiding any criticism of the judges in the Salem trials was probably published too late in fall to influence Governor Phips. But Mather’s position must have reflected that of many with whom the governor consulted during these weeks because on October 29 he finally dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer. A new court which no longer admitted spectral evidence took up its work in early December. The new trials were conducted in an atmosphere of skepticism, as the position that there had never been any witches and that the devil had deluded afflicted and confessors

The Destabilizing Variant

79

alike was gaining currency. As a result, the new court acquitted most of the accused, and those who were convicted were finally pardoned by the governor in May 1693. The witchcraft crisis was over, but twenty people were dead. One man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death because he refused to acknowledge the court that was trying him, and nineteen convicted “witches” – fourteen women and five men – had been hanged. These “facts” beg a lot of questions, especially if one compares the events of 1692–93 to earlier cases of New England witchcraft from which they differ in many ways. Why did the suspicion of witchcraft, initially restricted to a few households in one village, spread over Essex County, reaching a dimension compared to which all other crises pale? Were the afflicted girls and those who later joined their ranks merely pretending or really suffering from something? Why were so many “unusual suspects” among the accused? Why did so many of the accused willingly confess their alleged crimes? Why were the authorities, traditionally very careful when it came to witchcraft, so eager to prosecute suspects, basing their investigations on presumptions of guilt and, for a while, admitting questionable evidence that made acquittals virtually impossible? These and related questions have puzzled historians since the mid-nineteenth century. Over the past 150 years a variety of explanations have been proposed, most of them concisely summed up in John Demos’s The Enemy Within. Reviewing theories that range from actual magic to encephalitis, from hysteria via patriarchal repression to acid trips (cf. 189–212), Demos concludes that two theories stand out among the many proposed: “rising capitalism and fear of Indians” (215). These are the theories put forth in Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed (1974) and Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare (2002). I agree with Demos that these explanations allow for a thorough understanding of the Salem witchcraft crisis. What is more: although neither Boyer and Nissenbaum nor Norton employ the concept of conspiracy theory, their findings lend themselves to be recast in such terms. Boyer and Nissenbaum investigate the social contexts from which the first accusations of witchcraft emerged. Their point of departure is the observation that almost all inhabitants of Salem Village who were accused at some point of witchcraft came from the eastern part of the village, while the overwhelming majority of their accusers, for example the family of Thomas Putnam, which issued more accusations than any other group involved, lived in its western part. Drawing on a variety of previously unknown sources, Boyer and Nissenbaum reconstruct the lives of these inhabitants of Salem Village both prior, during, and after the witchcraft crisis. Above all, they compellingly demonstrate that this eastwest divide is not a coincidence but the result of a conflict that had been swelling ever since the late 1660s. Salem Village was torn between those inhabitants

80

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

located in the east and thus closer to the Town of Salem, who wanted to remain a full part of the town, and those, located in the west, who wanted complete independence. At the heart of this factionalism was an economic conflict.9 The villagers from the western part were mostly farmers who resented paying taxes to and providing services for a town they rarely visited. The town was increasingly dominated by merchants who tended to look more toward Europe, Africa, and the West Indies, than inland. The villagers from the eastern part, by contrast, were entrepreneurs small and large who benefited from the economic climate the town provided and who had not very much in common with the farmers from the western part. Instead, they also wanted to profit from the emerging pre-industrial capitalist system that was making Salem Town, one of the major ports of trade in Massachusetts, rich at the time. As a result, the one part of the village constantly campaigned for independence, a meeting-house of its own, and its own congregated church with a fully ordained minister, while the other part of the village fervently opposed all these measures. This conflict only intensified after 1672 when Salem Village was granted partial but not full independence from Salem Town, since there never was a stable majority in the village meeting that would steer it into one direction. Instead, the meetings were alternately dominated by one of the factions, and the decisions could never be enforced for long. Hence, Boyer and Nissenbaum conclude: “What made Salem Village disputes so notorious, and ultimately so destructive, was the fact that structural defects in its organization rendered the Village almost helpless in coping with whatever disputes might arise” (51). What is important to note is that this dispute was not merely a conflict of interest, but, especially on the farmers’ side, perceived as a moral struggle. While the authorities in Salem Town and Boston were unable to acknowledge the economic conflict that was tearing the village apart and persistently cast it as a quarrel between individuals who simply did not get along with each other, the farmers “treated those who threatened them not as political opposition but as an aggregate of morally defective individuals” (109). To them, “the merchant capitalists who controlled the Town – and to an extent the Village too – were not merely outsiders; they were outsiders whose careers could be seen as a violation of much that is contained in the word ‘Puritan’” (106). As a consequence, the farmers readily picked up on the notion of a witch attack on the village once the first

9 Cf. Heyrman on how the advent of commerce affected Massachusetts’s maritime communities. As her analysis shows, most communities managed this transition without suffering the strains that affected Salem Village due to the special circumstances applying there.

The Destabilizing Variant

81

accusations emerged. For those like the Putnams who economically found themselves on the losing side in a historic transition, the “comprehensive vision of a witch conspiracy against Salem Village as a whole” offered the perfect explanation of what had gone wrong in recent years (151). Unsurprisingly, they tended to accuse those on the merchant side of the conflict, and they did not stop after a few witches had been arrested. Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed thus convincingly answers some of the questions posed above. It explains the initial pattern of the accusations and accounts for some “unusual suspects.” However, due to its focus on Salem Village alone, it also leaves crucial questions unanswered. The study does not explain why the accusations spread from Salem Village to the whole of Essex County, and why authorities everywhere were so eager to prosecute and try the accused. These questions can only be answered if one takes the ongoing so-called Second Indian War into account as well, a conflict from which the whole colony was suffering and that confirmed to many the impression that their community was in deep crisis. The Second Indian War was the last of three major armed conflicts in which the Puritans were involved during the seventeenth century. After the defeat of the Pequot in the first of these conflicts during the 1630s, there was no war with native tribes or the neighboring Dutch and French for almost four decades. As a result, the Massachusetts Bay Colony prospered, and the Puritans took their success as confirmation that they were pleasing God. The so-called First Indian War of 1675–76, or King Philip’s War, as the Puritans referred to it, and the events that followed changed this perception. During the almost two years of armed conflict with the Wampanoags, large numbers of Puritan settlers were killed during raids and skirmishes. Many other colonists fell prey to a smallpox endemic or starved to death, because crops had been destroyed or could not be brought in.10 Moreover, weapons had to be paid for, towns had to be rebuilt, and the colonies’ economic output was severely affected by the hostilities. As a result, poverty and disaffection spread among the inhabitants of Massachusetts. King Philip’s War was the first but by no means the last disaster that hit the colony in the two decades prior to the Salem witchcraft crisis. In 1686 the English crown revoked Massachusetts’s charter, which had given the colony a large degree of independence. The Puritans regarded this act by James II, whom they had eyed suspiciously from the beginning of his reign onward because of his

10 As Richard Godbeer reports, “One in every sixteen men of military age died as a result of the war.” In terms of relative loss, this makes the conflict the most devastating war in American history (183).

82

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

Catholic faith and sympathies for France, as part of the same devilish plot that was behind the war and the epidemics that accompanied it. The Glorious Revolution brought only temporary relief, since the Puritans realized quickly that William III, in whom they had initially placed high hopes, was unwilling to restore the previous charter or grant them similar independence under a new one. Their fears were borne out by the new charter that the crown eventually decided on and that Governor Phips and Reverend Increase Mather brought with them when they arrived in Boston on May 14, 1692. As it forced the Puritans to grant freedom of worship to all religious dissenters, the charter confirmed their perception that their project was in peril. Finally, while the new charter was still being discussed in London, another smallpox epidemic occurred, and then the Second Indian War hit Massachusetts. While it was mainly a conflict between the Wabanakis, who had already been involved in King Philip’s War, and the Puritans, the Puritans referred to this war as King William’s War. Convinced that, once again, all their enemies were secretly aligned under the leadership of the devil, they regarded the conflict with the natives a direct result of the Glorious Revolution. When William became King of England in 1688, Louis XIV of France declared war on the country, and this war, the Puritans thought, was fought not only in Europe but also in America. This perception was not entirely wrong since French officers participated in the raids on New England’s northern colonies that the Wabanakis undertook from fall 1688 onward, but the natives were of course not simply the tools of the French but had motives of their own for fighting. To the Puritans, however, this did not matter. They saw themselves as the target of a joint assault that appeared even deadlier than King Philip’s War, especially from 1691 onward when the attacks were no longer restricted to Maine and spread to Essex County in Massachusetts. From the 1670s onward, then, for the Puritans, their colony “was under attack – physically, politically and spiritually” (Godbeer 186), and many of them located the ultimate reason of the assault in the community’s sinfulness. “A Variety of Calamity has long follow’d this Plantation,” wrote Cotton Mather in his assessment of the state of the colony before the witchcraft crisis at the beginning of Wonders, “and we have all the Reason imaginable to ascribe it unto the Rebuke of Heaven upon us for our manifold Apostasies” (12–13). He demanded: “[We] must humbly confess to our God, that we are miserably degenerated from the first Love of our Predecessors” (11). Mather thus drew on the established Puritan trope of “declension” (Demos 189) and adopted the equally widespread and closely related narrative form of the jeremiad, which I have discussed in the previous chapter already. As I have stressed, this narrative template was highly popular among the Puritan clergy because it allowed ministers to chastise their congrega-

The Destabilizing Variant

83

tions for a decline in morality and religiosity, while simultaneously affirming their sense of election. The Puritans believed that God was punishing them because they were no longer as firm in their faith as their forefathers had been, but also that he was chastising them so severely because they were still his chosen people. As a result, the siege mentality I have described above reached a new level. Pressed hard by several enemies simultaneously, the Puritans turned to other aspects of their lives that might be affected next, probably in a movement to head off dangers. In this climate of fear, the detection of a witch conspiracy hardly came as a surprise, especially since the witchcraft crisis was from the very beginning closely tied to the war against the Indians, as Mary Beth Norton has convincingly argued. Norton shows that the war was not only responsible for the general mood in which the crisis unfolded. Through a minute reconstruction of the events in Essex County and the lives of those involved, she demonstrates that both the most important accusers and many of the accused had close ties to the frontier where the war was taking place, and that public discourse forged a strong connection between events in the war and disclosures of witchcraft. Norton contends that the initial accusation, nothing too unusual in seventeenth-century New England, only developed into a veritable crisis due to the conflict within Salem Village and the larger conflict on the Northeastern borders. Without the local conflict, the accusations would have stopped rather sooner than later, and without the regional conflict, the authorities would have ignored if not the first then the following accusations. As it was, however, there were accusers who feared a conspiracy against their village, and authorities who immediately perceived a conspiracy against the colony. Significantly, the very first “witch” to confess and to talk about witches still practicing their evil arts undetected in the community was Tituba, Samuel Parris’s West Indian slave. A little later, Abigail Williams, his niece, claimed that, while she was examined, “a black man” had been whispering into Martha Corey’s ear (qtd. in Norton, Devil’s 58). All present took Corey’s secret adviser to be the devil. More importantly, by describing him as “black,” Williams employed a term that was commonly used to refer to the natives at the time. The connection between the Native Americans and the witches thus grew stronger, and it was finally forged through the confession of Abigail Hobbs in mid-April. She told the magistrates that the devil had recruited her four years ago in Maine, exactly in that area where a few weeks later the natives had begun the attack that now threatened Essex County. From that moment onward, Norton suggests, the idea of a concerted attack by the devil through Native Americans and witches was established in people’s minds. Through gossip and rumor the local witchcraft affair spread to other towns

84

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

and villages and developed into a regional crisis, with new accusations focusing on people with frontier ties. Norton thus manages to explain why in the following months many “unusual” suspects were accused. George Burroughs was accused, for example, because he had lived on the frontier and allegedly bewitched Puritan soldiers during the winter of 1688–89. The wealthy merchant Philip English was charged because he had traded with Indians and French, and Captains Alden and Floyd were targeted because they had commanded militia troops who had failed miserably in the fight with the Natives. “And given the logic that lay behind such charges,” Norton writes, “it was not surprising that the accusers also identified councilors and wealthy merchants as among the demonic conspirators. Even though most such names were never publicly recorded, several contemporary accounts reported the allegations” (301). What is more, Norton also concludes that “accusations of the colony’s leaders and their spouses [or others close to them] were possibly the most obvious ones of all.” Because the war against the Native Americans was going badly and because tactical mistakes had clearly been made, “Residents of the northeastern frontier believed that their leaders had betrayed them, and they readily conflated visible traitors with invisible attackers” (301). The authorities, in turn, and especially the judges, Norton argues, had good reasons to believe in a witch conspiracy, too. Nearly all of them, from Chief Judge Stoughton to the Salem Town magistrates Hathorne, an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Corwin who oversaw the first hearings, had been involved in botched operations and failed missions in connection with the war. If the responsibility for these failures lay with the devil whom God had allowed to attack the colony through Indians and witches, then their “lack of success in combating the Indians could be explained without reference to their own failings” (299). If this was the case, it was their chief task to pacify God by returning the community to its righteous path – through purging it of its sinful elements. The vision of conspiracy held below – by the farmers of Salem Town and those who suffered most from the Indian war – thus coincided with a vision of conspiracy entertained above – by those responsible for trying the witches. This concurrence explains why the witchcraft crisis developed as it did. As the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692–93, then, can be described as the product of conspiracy theorizing, it also lends itself to be conceptualized in the terminology of distortion and deflection. The “common” people, the farmers of Salem Village and those throughout the colony who were concerned about the course of the war with the natives, distorted the issues at stake; the community’s leaders deflected from them. Standing on the losing side of history, the farmers of Salem Village could not express their dissatisfaction with the economic development of their world openly, maybe because such a concern was unspeakable, maybe, and more likely, because they did not consciously understand the historic transformation

The Destabilizing Variant

85

they were subjected to. As Boyer and Nissenbaum have shown, the economic basis of the conflict that was tearing the village apart was not addressed explicitly in an official document until 1752 (cf. 102). In this situation, casting their opponents as witches offered both an explanation for their own misery and a way to act against it. Similarly, accusations of witchcraft were a way – maybe the only way available – to voice complaints about the colony’s leadership and their handling of the war. The authorities responsible for the war had been recruited from among the ranks of church members, and they conducted their service in close cooperation with the clergy. To accuse them of betraying the colony and thus the Puritan project without casting them as witches might have been easily construed as an act of heresy and was therefore unthinkable. By contrast, the colony’s leaders held people who had nothing at all to do with the military effort responsible for the colony’s defeats in the Second Indian War. But since all three groups articulated their concerns as accusations of witchcraft, these contradictory motivations remained unexpressed and fueled each other, as the authorities above readily took the truth of accusations voiced from below for granted. Whereas throughout the seventeenth century, then, the idea of a satanic conspiracy had stabilized the Puritan community, the witchcraft crisis turned this conspiracy theory into one harmful to the community. While the witches’ attack could, on the one hand, be conceptualized as merely another of the devil’s maneuvers, it was, on the other hand, of an entirely different quality than earlier ploys. While the Puritans’ enemies were usually located outside the community or – like the Antinomians or witches detected among the “tolerated margin of the mess,” that is, witches who fit the traditional pattern of the quarrelsome older woman – could easily be purged from the community by turning them into external foes or executing them, the scope of the witch conspiracy detected in 1692 suggested that the evil forces had taken considerable hold on the inside, and people feared that many of them were still undetected. Being aware that their community was not immune to hypocrisy and that appearances could be misleading, for the Puritans, now almost everybody became a possible suspect, especially since the devil, as Cotton Mather put it, liked to target people of “High Stations” (“Wonders” 186). Therefore it is entirely believable that even the governor’s wife, Lady Phips, was accused at some point, as some sources claim.11 Finally, in the Salem witchcraft crisis we can also discern the crisis of semiotic representation that I have identified as characteristic of conspiracy theories in general. As at other historical moments, it was not representation in

11 The most notable and also notorious source for this claim is Calef. For a discussion of the veracity of this claim, see Norton, Devil’s 279–80.

86

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

general that was distrusted but only certain kinds of representations. Like later, more secular countersubversives, the Puritan magistrates and judges – and, as the trials enjoyed for a long time considerable public support, many “ordinary” members of the community as well (cf. Norton 283) – doubted professions of innocence and favorable reports by neighbors and friends, but they trusted admissions of guilt and accusations. They believed that many people who confessed to practicing witchcraft were telling the truth and were not deluded by the devil, and, in violation of established customs, they admitted in court spectral evidence provided by the afflicted. The authorities put so much trust in confessions, I would suggest, for the same reason that so many people confessed so readily. To be sure, some of the accused most probably confessed because they were pressured by magistrates and judges convinced of their guilt, and because confession was the only way to escape quick execution. While condemned “witches” who had not confessed were hanged shortly after their trials, those who had confessed were kept in prison but remained otherwise unharmed. Yet, while such pragmatic considerations certainly played a role, they do not account for the willingness with which many of the accused confessed. This phenomenon can only be explained if one takes into account the central role that confessions of all kinds played in Puritan culture. As Boyer and Nissenbaum stress, for the Puritans, public confession was an important “social ritual,” “a mechanism for self-purgation as well as for selfdefinition” (214), and many social transgressions were no longer persecuted once the guilty party had confessed and thus been reintegrated into the community. Admittedly, Boyer and Nissenbaum also stress that “The offense of witchcraft was certainly too serious to permit confession alone to stand for justice” (215), and since nobody knows if the authorities already had an idea how they would later deal with those who had confessed, it may well be that they were kept in prison to be severely punished or even executed at some later point. But it is also possible that they would have escaped with some less severe punishment once the crisis was over. After all, the confessants performed an important role for the community that went far beyond the confirmation of suspicions of conspiracy and the identification of new witches. By admitting their guilt, they also made an important step to overcome it and turned from the devil toward the community again, thus confirming its special status in the fight against evil. Moreover, if those who had made a pact with the devil could at least partly be redeemed, it meant that the community, which through the attack of the witches, as the Puritans thought, was punished for its sins, could be redeemed as well. Accordingly, the cultural work of the confessions was not that different from that performed by captivity narratives whose social function consisted in metonymically representing the fate of

The Destabilizing Variant

87

the community as a whole.12 This, I would like to suggest, is why so many people, eager to demonstrate their allegiance to the community, were ready to confess, and why the authorities trusted these confessions. Assuming that the devil had deceived those who confessed would have meant to doubt a social mechanism central to the Puritan project. This explanation for the frequency and centrality of confessions is confirmed by a look at the larger history of conspiracy theory. As Richard Hofstadter already stressed, renegades such as the apostate nun or the former Communist, whom we will both encounter in subsequent chapters, are crucial to conspiracist discourse (cf. “Paranoid” 34–35). More specifically, such renegades usually perform two important functions for the countersubversive effort: they provide crucial information about the scope, aims, and identities of the conspirators, and, by turning their backs on the conspiracy, they affirm the community that is being conspired against of its ultimate superiority. Those who confessed to witchcraft during the crisis of 1692 fulfilled both these functions. Admitting spectral evidence in court served to an even greater degree to validate that God had not abandoned the community and that the Puritan project was still valid. During earlier accusations of witchcraft in the colonies the accused had come from “the tolerated margin of the mess.” Thus, these cases had not really threatened the community, as the accusations merely confirmed what people had thought about these suspects anyway. In these cases, legal and scientific considerations could take preference and spectral evidence was not needed in court. During the Salem witchcraft crisis, however, not only the “usual suspects” but respected members of the community and even “visible saints” 12 On the Puritan captivity narrative, see Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, and Slotkin. In captivity narratives, the individual at the center of the account was first captured by natives and then delivered from captivity. In the eyes of the Puritans, this signified that their community was chastised by God but would be forgiven if they only returned to the right path. Admittedly, the status of those who had been released or freed from captivity among the natives was less precarious than that of those who had confessed to witchcraft. They had not entered into a contract with the devil but had been held against their will. This, at least, is the notion projected by seventeenth-century captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty & Goodness of God. But the highly standardized tropes of the genre often misrepresented the actual encounter with the Native Americans, which in many cases appears to have been far less hostile than the accounts suggest. Wolfgang Hochbruck, for example, has demonstrated that Mary Rowlandson understood the language of the Wampanoag far better than she admits (cf. ‘I Have’ 56). Rumors that some Puritans had been on dangerously friendly terms with their captors almost certainly circulated within the community, and in some cases the written accounts of captivity were probably also attempts to contain the subversive force of such gossip. Accordingly, the status of the “redeemed captive,” as Reverend John Williams called himself in his 1701 account of his captivity by the Mohawk, was not entirely different from that of the “redeemed witch.”

88

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

were accused of and confessed to witchcraft. In this situation, allowing spectral evidence was an understandable but fatal move. After all, the use of spectral evidence was only possible if one assumed that God did not allow the devil to use innocent people as specters. Thus, by admitting spectral evidence, the Puritans assured themselves that they had not lost God’s grace, that God was “merely” punishing them very severely. What is more, by preventing the devil from deceiving the Puritans with specters of innocents, God confirmed that they were not only still his chosen people, but also that they still commanded the means of distinguishing between sinners and saints (cf. Norton, Devil’s 69). However, because of the use of spectral representations the spiral of accusations and convictions could not be stopped. Trying to purge their community, the Puritans brought it to the brink of collapse, and they only managed to stabilize it again when spectral representations, a form of providing evidence that could not be controlled, was disallowed.

“Church-members […] You & I May Be, & Yet Devils for All That”: The Sermons of Samuel Parris Samuel Parris, most critics agree today, considerably fueled the witchcraft crisis and brought the community of Salem Village, where he was minister between 1689 and 1696, to the brink of destruction. Boyer and Nissenbaum hold that he played a “crucial role” in the unfolding of events (177); James Cooper and Kenneth Minkema, who edited his sermon book, argue that he created “a propitious climate for witchcraft accusations” in which the crisis could develop (3); and his biographer Larry Gragg regards him as the “decisive factor” in bringing about the crisis (125). While, in light of what I have argued here, this last evaluation seems exaggerated, I agree that through his behavior and especially through the cosmic interpretation he imposed on both his personal and the village’s problems Parris considerably heated up the conflict and contributed to its escalation. The sermons he preached before and during 1692 helped create the climate of suspicion that dominated the crisis. They show how socially harmful the idea was that the enemy was no longer outside but had infiltrated the community. In this section I read his sermons as an episodic conspiracy narrative in which the enemy continuously progresses into realms that have seemed safe up to then, until, finally, only the transcendental promise of a pure church in heaven remains. Unlike contemporary conspiracy theorists, who usually claim that they stumbled over a piece of evidence and thus experienced a sudden transformation of their worldview, Parris gradually arrives at a position that equals that of his twentiethcentury counterparts (who are suspicious of everybody) and that has much in

The Sermons of Samuel Parris

89

common with the overarching doubt and passivity that overwhelms Young Goodman Brown in Hawthorne’s short story.13 Parris’s arrival in Salem Village alone was bound to deepen the rift between the village’s factions. His ordination in September 1689 meant that the village now had its own church, an important and welcomed step toward complete independence for the farmers, and a development into the wrong direction for the merchants. Unsurprisingly, membership in the village church reflected this factionalism. Of those in favor of independence, many joined the new church; of those against it, hardly anybody did. Parris was aware of the quarrel that had long engrossed the village because it had made his negotiations with the Village Committee extremely difficult.14 Yet, in his ordination sermon he reached out to both parties. “Hince learn Ye at this place (the village),” he told the congregation, “yt God hath graciously brought you to a good day this day. This is the day wherein God is giving you hopes yt he will roll away ye Reproach of Egypt from off you” (48). As his clarification in parentheses makes clear, the “you” that Parris addresses throughout the sermon is not a particular faction but the village as a whole. Moreover, by typologically relating the villagers’ experience to that of the Israelites, Parris not only confirms their sense of election, he also provides a theological explanation for their conflict: “Now wt an Egyptian-like disgrace & Reproach was it for such a number of people […] in such a land as New-England, so long to continue unlike their professing Neighbours, without ye signs & seals of the blessed Covenant of Grace? In ye eyes of God & in the eyes of godly persons this was your Reproach” (48). For Parris, then, the internal struggles result from the village’s previous lack of a covenanted community; they are both a divine punishment and the result of a spiritual rift through the village where the majority suffers from the “Reproach,” while “some few persons were exempted from it” (48). What is more, Parris’s analysis of the situation also carries the promise that these quarrels are a thing of the past now that a church has been established. And he projects himself as the one who has brought about this new era. Just as God

13 Any reconstruction of how Parris’s thoughts developed during the crisis is necessarily incomplete, as not all his sermons from that period have survived. A meticulous and systematic worker, Parris usually copied the sermons he delivered about once a month to his congregation from the loose sheets on which he apparently composed them into a sermon book which has been preserved and which was published in 1993. However, of the sermons he delivered during the witchcraft crisis only those of March and September 1692 have survived. Apparently he lacked the time to copy those of May, June, and July, and he recorded only the biblical passage they were based on in the sermon book, together with the exact date of their delivery and the direction “See loose papers” (Parris 199). These loose papers, however, have been lost. 14 Cf. Gragg 47–51 on these negotiations.

90

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

delivered the Israelites from evil, and just as Christ saved all mankind, Parris suggests that he is the one to deliver the village. Although he may not have been aware of this at the time, Parris did not assume a neutral stance in the village conflict, but took sides with the faction that favored independence and had pushed through his ordination. It thus seems safe to assume that those favoring close ties with the town did not receive his words as a promise of salvation but rather as a threat. This is particularly true for that part of the sermon in which Parris describes his and the congregations’ duties. He demands that they accept him as their spiritual leader and that they “obey” him and “bear [him] a great deal of love” (51). He, in turn, promises, among other things, “to make a difference between ye clean, & unclean: so as to labour to cleanse & purge the one, & confirm & strengthen the other” (50). While this rigidity is far from unusual for a minister at the time, and while Parris clearly intended it as a promise that he was concerned with the spiritual wellbeing of every villager, his words must have appeared menacing to some in the audience. If Parris thus initially regarded the whole village as the community he was responsible for, the opposition he soon encountered – a considerable part of his salary was withheld by the Village Committee – made him rethink his position.15 Conceiving of his personal experience as part of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, Parris, over the course of the next two years, became convinced that the Puritan community he lived in had been infiltrated by enemies in league with the devil. As a consequence, the church became for him the only stronghold against satanic subversion. Maybe this growing conviction already informed the Salem Village church’s rejection of the Half-Way Covenant in February 1690. Ruling that only children under twelve years who had at least one parent who was “in full communion” with the church qualified for infant baptism, the church assumed one of the most rigid positions in New England (cf. Salem-Village 271). Clearly, this was an attempt to keep the church clean of those whose godliness was in doubt. At a time when the siege mentality shared by the rest of the colony still located the enemy outside of the Puritan community, Parris and his church redrew the lines of the conflict and introduced an internal frontier by arguing that the enemy had already infiltrated the community and that only the church was safe. Parris made this position explicit in two sermons delivered on January 3 and February 14, 1692. Through the institution of the church, he argues in the first sermon, Christ has detached “the Elect from the rest of Mankind” (182). While not completely “without sin” (183), church members are nevertheless separated from the world, and since they are superior to non-members in their values and

15 On the dispute over his salary, see Boyer and Nissenbaum 156–60, and Gragg 91–97.

The Sermons of Samuel Parris

91

behavior, they provoke “hatred & persecution […] opposition, more or less, open or secret” (184). They are reviled by “the men of the world,” “Wicked & Reprobate men” who are “the assistants of Satan” whose very nature it is “to afflict the Church” and try to undo Christ’s work (184, 185). What Parris does here, then, is lay the basis on which accusations of witchcraft would soon begin to thrive. Those who oppose church members in any way, he suggests, are doing the devil’s work. That Parris has the village’s merchants in mind is clear from the language he employs to make this point. When he describes how the wicked “prosper,” and how the saints might begin to doubt that there is any “profit” in serving God (186), he uses words that carry a strong economic meaning and thus go to the heart of the conflict that was tearing the village apart. Moreover, as Boyer and Nissenbaum convincingly argue, the term “lust” that he uses as well (Parris 188) designates for him not “sexual desire but greed” (172). For Parris, then, the economic tensions in the village were just the outward manifestation of its division into good and evil, into church members and others. For farmers such as the Putnam family, this reading of events surely was as convincing as it was comforting, as it offered a theological explanation for their problems. The major difference between the January and the February sermon is that Parris’s rhetoric of encirclement and menace is even more pronounced and urgent in the latter. The church, he stresses now, is currently “in the midst of its enemies” (191), and at such a moment of crisis it is more important than ever for ministers “to endeavour a true separation between the precious & the vile” to retain “a pure Church” of true saints (190). Significantly, it is in this sermon – the last he delivered before the affliction of his daughter and niece was recast as the work of witchcraft – that Parris for the first time openly advocates the use of force against the church’s enemies. The bible, he argues, “teacheth us to War a good warfare, to subdue all our Spiritual enemies” (190). If the use of the personal pronoun “you” in his ordination sermon comprised the whole village, his deployment of the pronoun “us” here makes clear that Parris has redrawn the boundaries since then, that he is now only referring to and counting on those in full communion with his church. For the members of his church, however, he has not only a threatening scenario to offer but also some comfort in store. The church, he assures them, “may meet with storms, but it shall never sink” (193). And although he stresses that church membership does not immunize against sin, he holds that Christ “will not suffer any of his sheep to be pluckt out of his hands” (192). Thus, in February 1692, the church was still a fortress against enemies for him. However, he lost confidence in this institution a few weeks later, when the crisis gained momentum. Since their minister had told them for more than two years that their village had been infiltrated by evil forces, the arrest of the first suspected witches only

92

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

two weeks after the February sermon “merely signaled the open eruption of a satanically inspired conspiracy” for the inhabitants (Boyer and Nissenbaum 172). What must have come as a surprise, however, to them as well as to Parris, was that among the first witches accused were a member of their own church, Martha Corey, and a member of the town’s church, Rebecca Nurse. Parris reacted to this unexpected turn in his sermon of March 27, which he based on 6 John 70: “Have I not chosen you twelve, & one of you is a Devil” (194). This sermon continues but modifies Parris’s ongoing identification with Christ that began in his ordination sermon.16 Instead of the delivery from evil, being the victim of betrayal now functions as the common denominator. The identification climaxes in the phrase “here in Christs little Church” with which Parris concludes a longer reflection on the presence of devils in every church and makes a transition to the situation in Salem Village (196). Throughout the sermon, Parris does not use the word “witch” a single time. Instead, he equates witches with devils, with “notorious sinners.” Such sinners, “Hypocrites,” as he also calls them, are “the very worst of men,” because they operate in secret and do not face their adversaries openly (196). Significantly, he again employs economic metaphors to characterize the devils that have infiltrated the church. They are “the free-holders of hell, whereas other sinners are but Tenants,” and they “prefer farms & Merchandize” over Christ (196). Thus, while ultimately only Jesus knows who these secretly operating devils are, prosperity can function as an indicator of wickedness. That Parris uses a capital letter for “Merchandize” but not for “farms” indicates, once again, whom he has in mind: not the farmers of the village, but the merchants. This reading gains further force through the fact that Parris’s identification with Christ ultimately implies that, like Jesus, he “knows how many of these Devils there are” and who they are (196). His argument that “Church-members […] you & I may be, & yet Devils for all that” (197) is thus at this point no more than lip-service as far as he is concerned. His faith that, despite the infiltration of the church, it is still possible to distinguish between devils and saints also surfaces in his short remarks on the controversial issue of spectral evidence. Anticipating Mather’s position in Wonders, Parris argues that “it is not easy to imagine that [the devil’s] power is of such extent” that he can make use of the specters of innocent people (198). If that were the case, it would mean the complete withdrawal of God’s grace and thus the “ultimate hazard of the Church” (198). On the whole, Parris’s March sermon is far less structured and coherent than his texts usually are. This is probably due to the fact that, busy with the unfolding

16 See Boyer and Nissenbaum 165–66 for a more extensive discussion of this identification.

The Sermons of Samuel Parris

93

crisis, he had less time than usual to compose it. But it also indicates his own confusion about the turn of events, his still trying to make sense of the new situation. For two years he had projected the church as a secure fortress, and now this stronghold had proven to be penetrable and unsafe after all. It is therefore hardly surprising that Parris’s response in both words and deeds was contradictory. On the one hand, abandoning the strict separation between inside and outside that had organized the Puritan conspiracy theory until then, he acknowledged that every church could be infiltrated by devils; on the other, he insisted that it still made sense and was still possible to purify the church of its sinners by either excommunicating them – as was done with Martha Corey later – or by making them confess and return to the Lord – as he did that day in March with Mary Sibley, a church member, who had used “magic” to determine if the afflicted girls were bewitched and who had thus helped trigger the crisis. In a statement he gave after his sermon he admonished Sibley for “going to the Devil for help against the Devil” (Salem-Village 278). Later, when Sibley had related her sin personally to the congregation, Parris, satisfied with the outcome, noted in the Church Records that she had acknowledged her guilt “with tears and sorrowful confession” (279). An important service for the community had been performed. Over the summer, however, Parris’s already shaken confidence that the church might be purged of witches must have collapsed completely. In his sermon on September 11, 1692 – the only other sermon he delivered during the crisis that has survived – he paints an apocalyptic vision that denies the possibility of a pure church on earth and places all hope in the afterlife. Drawing on a semantic field that, as we will see, figures prominently in many conspiracy texts throughout the ages, he casts the devil’s attack as an act of military invasion: “The City of Heaven,” Parris declares, “provided for the Saints, is well-walled, & well-Gated, & well-Guarded, so that no devil or their Instruments shall enter therein” (202). In this life, however, no place is safe anymore. Using “Wizards, & Witches,” the devil is leading a war “against the Lamb & his followers” (202). The enormous scale that this war takes on is apparent from the fact that the witches now operate in “the Civilest & Religious Parts” of the world, and no longer “only [in] Barbarous Desarts” (203) – a suspicion that Parris had harbored for a long time as his drawing of a boundary between church members and the rest of the village shows, but which he never expressed as explicitly before. Moreover, the witches recruited by the devil are no longer only “silly ignorant old Wom[e]n” but people of “both Sexes, who professed much Knowledge, Holiness, & Devotion” (203). In the war which the devil and the witches lead against Christ and his followers, there “are no Newters,” Parris holds (203) – everybody takes a side. Apart from the Manichean thinking so typical of conspiracy theorists that Parris thus displays, two aspects are remarkable in this comprehensive vision of

94

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

conspiracy. To begin with, the September sermon makes for the first time explicit the global dimension of the struggle that Parris sees played out in the village. He integrates the problems the village is facing into a long history of the devil’s war against Christ and his church that began with Herod’s persecution of all new-born babies and lasts until the present: How industrious & vigorous is the Bloody French Monarch & his Confederates against Christ & his interest? Yea, & in our Land (in this, & some neighbouring Places) how many, what Multitudes, of Witches & Wizards has the Devil instigated with utmost violence to attempt the overthrow of Religion? (201)

The French king Parris refers to is Louis XIV, who in 1685 had revoked the Edict of Nantes which had granted French Protestants the right to exercise their religion. More importantly, the Puritans also considered him responsible for the Wabanakis’ attacks on Essex County, as this fight was understood as part of the war that Louis had brought on England and her colonies after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Significantly, Parris uses the term “Confederates” to describe the relationship between Louis XIV and, among others, the Wabanakis – exactly the same term that Cotton Mather employs to characterize the witches’ alliance with the devil, a threat that Parris of course mentions as well. By juxtaposing both threats – witches and Native Americans – Parris causally links the evils befalling Salem. As it suffers from both external and internal enemies, he thus implies, Salem Village is not only part of a larger struggle but located at the forefront of this conflict. What is more, with his claim that a pure church can only be realized in the afterlife, Parris arrived at a position of radical skepticism that anticipates that of many twentieth-century conspiracy theorists. He still maintained his belief that there were saints as well as sinners among the Puritans, but he no longer believed that it was possible to determine with certainty who was on which side. Since there existed no valid way to contain suspicion for him, he implicitly abandoned the concept of visible sanctity, one of the cornerstones of Puritan ideology that held that the community, and especially its clergy, commanded the means to identify those touched by God’s grace. Like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, Parris now distrusted all displays of piety and, conversely, trusted spectral representations of evilness. As a result, he suffered from exactly the same allencompassing doubt that takes possession of Brown at the end of the story. While Parris, a real person who had to get on with his life, probably never lived this doubt as extremely as the fictional Brown does, he nevertheless never got entirely beyond it. Whereas many others involved in the witchcraft crisis soon afterward began to regard the whole affair as a delusion by the devil and even apologized for their mistakes, Parris never offered an explicit public apology. Instead, he continued to emphasize the sinful nature of mankind and never again returned to

The Sermons of Samuel Parris

95

the vision of an untainted earthly church, let alone a healthy congregation. Since the satanic conspiracy he had detected could not be defeated in this life, closure could only be achieved in heaven. Parris’s despair was thus even more extreme than Boyer and Nissenbaum realize when they suggest that his continual emphasis on man’s innate depravity during the last years as minister of Salem Village was nothing more than the insistence on one of the core doctrines of Puritanism: “Parris had come to conclude what John Calvin could have told him all along” (177). But Parris, as I would like to suggest, actually went beyond Calvin’s doctrines in that he doubted the possibility to identify visible saints. Thus, Boyer and Nissenbaum’s remark is not quite to the point, but it draws our attention to how the rhetorical form of Parris’s narrative differs from that of later conspiracy theories. Not only is his transformation a gradual and not a sudden one; what is of equal importance is that whenever Parris develops his vision of conspiracy – when he gives up first the community as such, then the church on earth, and finally sets all his hope on the church in heaven – he can always draw on biblical passages to develop and confirm his argument. In a way, then, what Parris voices has been discovered and written down long before, and all he does is to demonstrate the relevance of a certain biblical passage for the current situation. Unlike secular conspiracy theorists of later ages, he does not need to amass and interpret evidence from a variety of sources and thus deduce that there really is a conspiracy. He can present God’s word as proof. This explains why there are no overt narrative pivots in the conspiracy narrative he concocts during his time at Salem Village, as there usually are in conspiracy texts from later periods. Parris never tells his congregation that he has discovered something and that this has changed his worldview. The revelations that he clearly experienced between 1689 and 1692 are only indirectly inscribed in his narrative. He leaves his own thought processes almost completely out of his sermons, and, interpreting relevant passages from the bible, projects the new positions he has arrived at as ones he has always held. Instead of the explicit narrative pivots characteristic of secular conspiracy theory narratives, his account is thus organized around several implicit narrative pivots. Through his sermons, his listeners are repeatedly called upon to change their worldview and their understanding of their community, but this call is never made explicit. On the whole, then, Parris’s conspiracy narrative already contains many of the important ingredients of later conspiracy narratives, but it does not emplot them as those later texts do. The division of the world into good and evil is one of the foundations of the Puritan worldview and thus present from the very beginning, although it gets more pronounced as the narrative progresses. In similar fashion, the global dimension of the struggle, surely present in Parris’s thinking from the

96

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

very beginning, is only foregrounded in the September sermon. Narrative pivots structure his account just as much as they organize later conspiracy narratives, but they are never made explicit. Since saints can only be separated from sinners in heaven, there is no closure on earth. However, Parris’s conspiracy narrative does not stage any restoration of agency, as twentieth-century conspiracy narratives usually do, but instead dramatizes the complete loss of agency. While Parris initially considers himself the one to divide the saints from the sinners and still believes in purging the church of infiltrators in March 1692, in the September sermon he finally realizes that he cannot perform this task, because it is impossible to distinguish between real believers and devils in disguise. Thus, Parris’s narrative of conspiracy shares with its twentieth-century counterparts a radical skepticism, but it is devoid of the latter’s utopian promise of restored agency. Socially harmful, it ends in total passivity – symbolized by the fact that Parris, at least for us, falls silent after 1694. Although he continued to preach in Salem for another two years, he stopped copying his sermons into the sermon book. This pessimism distinguishes his vision of conspiracy, despite several parallels, from the one developed in Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World.

“To Countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil”: Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World Memory has not been kind to Cotton Mather. Over the past two centuries most scholars and authors interested in the Salem witchcraft crisis have tended to accept the negative judgment cast on him by his contemporary Robert Calef, a Boston merchant, who presented Mather in his More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700) as a fervent witch-hunter whose fanaticism was chiefly responsible for the shedding of innocent blood. Among academics, Mather has by now been largely rehabilitated – especially through the major biographies of Kenneth Silverman and David Levin –, but scholars still struggle to explain his obviously ambiguous stance on the use of spectral evidence. What I wish to argue in this section is that this and other ambiguities that permeate his Wonders of the Invisible World, published in October 1692 and based on a sermon of the same title delivered on August 5, resulted from his attempt to contain the threat that the crisis constituted to the community and to project the witchcraft attack as an event confirming instead of challenging the Puritan sense of election. Struggling to contain the crisis’s socially destructive potential, Mather presents it as both an ordinary and an extraordinary event, thus producing a conspiracy narrative that at the same time highlights and downplays the seriousness of the danger.

Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World

97

Wonders of the Invisible World is much more than the official account of the witchcraft trials that Governor Phips ordered Mather to write. Driven by the desire “to countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil, against New-England, in every branch of it,” as he puts it in his “Author’s Defence” (4), Mather draws on the template of the jeremiad in order to relate a story of all the hardships that have befallen the colony since its inception – wars with Native Americans and the French, natural disasters, famines, etc. – and to suggest that every single one of them was the devil’s work, allowed by God to test the Puritans’ faith and to punish them for their sinfulness. The actual account of the trials begins very late in the book and makes for only about one fifth of the narrative. Mather carefully selects a few cases to focus on, and he frames them even more carefully. They are preceded and followed by chapters not only on the history of New England but also on European witchcraft outbreaks and the means to detect witches. There is, I wish to argue, a political and a larger theological reason for this arrangement which results in a text that appears at first sight completely unstructured and repetitive, but which, despite all remaining contradictions, is nevertheless characterized by what Hans-Joachim Lang has aptly called a “strategic unity” (71). The political reason is that it allows Mather to defend the legal proceedings against growing criticism and to suggest that everything was handled according to custom and with great care. The “Narrative of an Apparition which A Gentleman in Boston, Had of His Brother Just Then Murthered in London” (107–09), for example, that immediately precedes Mather’s account of the trial of George Burroughs is meant to show that the dead can really appear to people in order to indict their murderers, as the wives of George Burroughs allegedly did to some of the afflicted girls, and that the judges were therefore justified to accept these pieces of evidence. In similar fashion, the frequent references to European witchcraft crises serve to show that such things happened elsewhere, too, and that the judges are ruling as did the best judges confronted with witchcraft before them. Most importantly, in order to imply that nothing too unusual is happening in New England, Mather also downplays the existence of “unusual” suspects and convicts. While he mentions once or twice that among the many accused are people of “Quality” (24; cf. 83), the section he devotes to the trials focuses on only five carefully chosen suspects, four of whom fit the pattern of the prototypical witch – the elderly quarrelsome woman of low social status that has been surrounded by rumors of witchcraft for many years. Describing the trials of Bridget Bishop, Susanna Martin, Elisabeth Howe, and Martha Carrier, Mather implies that what he says explicitly about Bishop applies in each case: “There was little occasion to prove the Witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders” (129). In order to corroborate this suggestion, Mather recounts in great

98

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

detail the rumors of witchcraft that have accompanied each woman for many years. The only man whose trial Mather describes is George Burroughs, and he does so only because “the Government require[d] some Account of his Trial to be inserted in this Book” (120). But Burroughs can also easily be cast as an outsider and thus as a prime suspect because he lived on the frontier in close contact with the devilish “Indians,” and rumors spoke of his “Antipathy to Prayer” (124), his supernatural strength, and his “keeping his two Successive Wives in a strange kind of Slavery” (126).17 Singling out such “clear” cases and inscribing them into Christianity’s longstanding struggle with the devil allows Mather to perform the function of legitimizing the legal proceedings assigned to him by Governor Phips and to downplay the controversial role of spectral evidence in sentencing these and other suspects. But there is also a larger theological reason why Mather proceeds this way. Confirming prejudices based on class and gender in the case of the women and against an outsider of a different kind in the case of Burroughs enables Mather to project the witchcraft crisis as very serious but ultimately not threatening the community at large, as just another chapter in the devil’s war against New England. Accordingly, Mather repeatedly emphasizes that the crisis has not yet reached the heart of the Puritan community and that it will not if the right measures are taken. Just like Samuel Parris, Mather holds that in the “MeetingHouse wherein we Assemble for the Worship of God […] if our Eyes were so refined as the Servant of the Prophet had his of old, […] we should […] see a throng of Devils.” Like Parris in his September sermon, Mather stresses that “Only, when we come to Heaven, we shall be out of [the devil’s] reach for ever.” However, while Parris suggests that the church as a spiritual community has been infiltrated by witches in league with the devil, Mather focuses on the church as a space where this community comes together. “I am to tell you,” he says, “that the Devil will visit those Places and best Persons there. No Place, that I know of, has got such a Spell upon it, as will always keep the Devil out” (183–84). For Mather, then, the devil is present in the church building because he tries to tempt believers there, but Mather does not suggest that he manages to seduce any of them: the community of saints is harassed everywhere by the devil, but it remains intact and pure. Ignoring that several church members were among the accused and convicted of the witchcraft crisis, he continues to project the church as a stronghold against the forces of evil – a stance Parris gave up in March.

17 It is one of the text’s many remaining contradictions that the emphasis Mather puts on rumors here runs counter to the dismissal of gossip as valid evidence in the scholarly literature on witchcraft that he discusses and approves of elsewhere (cf. 30–37).

Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World

99

If the devil has not yet managed to infiltrate the spiritual centers of the community, he has, according to Mather, also not yet reached its physical center. Whereas for Parris, located in Salem Village, the witches have already progressed to the center of his world, for Mather, writing in Boston and assuming the perspective of the colony as a whole, the witches are still situated on the periphery. Mather was doubtlessly familiar with testimonies by confessing witches that stated that they had chosen Salem to begin an attack on the whole colony “by reasons of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers” (qtd. in Norton, Devil’s 259). Metaphorically looking from Boston to the North where Salem and Essex County are located, he writes: “I see the Spectres, from the Top of the Chimneys to the Northward, threatning to scatter Fire, about the Countrey” (91). But he maintains that while the witches may have invaded the colony and spread throughout Essex County, they can and will be stopped before they progress to the center of Puritan power if New England’s inhabitants abandon their sinful way and stop being “Devils one unto another for Slanderings, for Backbitings, for Animosities” (89). Throughout most of his text, then, Mather suggests that God is punishing New England for its sins, but that he has not withdrawn his grace completely. At some moments in the narrative, however, Mather, albeit unwillingly, acknowledges that the witchcraft attack constitutes a new dimension in the devil’s war against New England, that it is not simply another “ordinary” attack on the community but an extraordinary danger that, although he never spells this out explicitly, challenges “the eschatological identity of New England” (Colacurcio 308). While he denies that the enemy has reached the community’s spiritual and physical centers yet, he nevertheless admits at times that the devil’s latest ploy is “an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprizing, more snarl’d with unintelligible Circumstances than any we have hitherto Encountred” because the enemy is now no longer on the outside but has entered the community: “An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place” (14), and “The Walls of the whole World are broken down!” (79). Just like Parris in his September sermon, then, he draws on the language of warfare and invasion to describe the devil’s activities. Highlighting the global dimension of the devil’s attack on New England, for example, an aspect far more prominently explored in his text than in Parris’s, Mather refers to the devil’s minions as “French Dragoons” (45) or the “French Leviathan” (79), thus connecting the fight against the devil to the “present French War” (75) and thus to world history. Significantly, though, while he speaks of armies and soldiers with regard to all of the devil’s maneuvers, he also employs the language of infection to explain his latest ploy: the infiltration of the community. The people, he writes early on, have become “Infected and Infested with […] Daemons” (15), and later he describes witchcraft as a “Plague” and a “Poison […] that can’t be cured” (83, 97),

100

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

and calls on God to “heal” them (37). He thus draws on a trope that later countersubversives also habitually use when they have to explain why previously highly regarded members of the community have joined the conspiracy, why “real Americans,” for example, are plotting together with “un-American” foreign subversives. This shift to a new semantic field indicates most clearly what Mather tries to veil: the detection of so many witches within the community has to a certain degree transformed his worldview. Their discovery thus constituted a pivot, a moment of revelation, in his own understanding of the devil’s plot against the Puritans. In his account of the conspiracy in Wonders, however, much like Parris, albeit for different reasons, he does not make this realization explicit. While Parris, through references to the bible, presents each new understanding of the devil’s progress that he has arrived at as known all along, Mather attempts to downplay the significance of the witch conspiracy for the community. His powerful imagery, though, gives him away and indirectly reveals what he goes to great lengths to deny: that the witches’ attack not only differs in degree but also in kind from previous satanic assaults. As Mather only involuntarily acknowledges that the witchcraft crisis falls into a different category than other crises, he never attempts to give this recognition a positive twist. In true jeremiadic fashion, however, he tries to impose a positive interpretation on what he openly acknowledges: that the community is currently afflicted more severely than ever before. Repeatedly he insists that “never were more Satanical Devices used for the Unsettling of any People under the Sun” (13) since New England is the “locus of eschatology” (Lang 86), since its inhabitants are trying to re-conquer for God the wilderness where the devil ruled unchallenged for such a long time. The witchcraft crisis thus becomes, for Mather, a sign of the Puritans’ election; they are attacked so fervently because they are still God’s chosen people. Moreover, Mather stresses several times that God and not the devil is ultimately in control of the situation, reminding his readers that the devil can only do what God allows him to do. “Offended” by the sins of New England’s inhabitants (55), God has “horribly lengthened out the Chain” through which he usually restrains the devil (86), but he has not let him loose completely and still “restrain[s his] Overwhelming wrath” (63). Finally, if Parris is apocalyptic in that he insists that the community of saints cannot be realized on Earth, Mather is apocalyptic in a traditional sense in that he regards the devil’s heightened activity as a sign that the end of times is approaching: “It is true, That Thro’ much Tribulation we must enter in the Kingdom of God; but a little before our Entrance thereinto, our Tribulation may have some sharper accents of Sorrow, than ever were yet upon it” (63). Contrary to Parris, Mather thus integrates the hardships currently befalling New England into a larger narrative of eventual salvation.

Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World

101

Mather’s Wonders, then, is a highly contradictory text that projects the witchcraft crisis both as an ordinary and an extraordinary event, and the Puritans as both responsible for and guiltless of the hardships that have befallen them. Throughout his narrative, though, Mather argues that the situation is not hopeless, that the witch attack confirms rather than challenges the status of the Puritans as the elect. It is the motivation to maintain this notion that informs his equally ambiguous stance on and eventual approval of spectral evidence, an issue that does not feature prominently in his depiction of the trials, but that he addresses repeatedly in other passages. As a scholar, Mather mistrusts spectral evidence, as do all scholars whose studies on witchcraft he discusses (cf. 30–37). Accordingly, he, too, speaks of “the Great and Just Suspicion, that the Dæmons might Impose the Shapes of Innocent People in their Spectral Exhibitions upon the Sufferers” (15). As a spiritual leader of the Puritan community, however, Mather wants to maintain faith in spectral evidence and refuses to believe that God has allowed the devil and his witches to impersonate innocent people, since “such an Invasion upon Mankind, […] may well raise horror in us all” (101). Accordingly, he stresses that “the wonderful Providence of God” has provided “other evidences” (84) and that many of those initially indicted due to spectral evidence later confessed – and thus provided what all authorities on the issue regard as the best possible evidence. Tellingly, Mather also dismisses the idea that the devil has been given the power to confuse the confessors so that they admit to crimes they have not committed – “a thing prodigious, beyond the Wonders of the former Ages, and it threatens no less than a sort of a Dissolution upon the World” (16) – because this would mean that God has abandoned the Puritans completely. In the final analysis, then, Mather’s defense of spectral evidence goes far beyond legitimating the proceedings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. His decision to maintain faith in representations – spectral ones as well as confessional accounts – is motivated by his desire to affirm the Puritans’ eschatological identity as God’s chosen people. Whereas Samuel Parris finally arrives at the point where he no longer trusts any representation or appearance except spectral evidence and thus regards virtually anybody as a potential witch, Cotton Mather continues to trust representation in general in order to contain the danger of “Dissolution” to the Puritan community. Positing God as a transcendental signifier that guarantees the stability and truthfulness of the system of signs is, for him, a way out of the contemporary conspiracy theorist’s conundrum that when all representations are considered unreliable and potentially replete of hidden meanings, everybody is a potential suspect. To counteract the socially destructive effects of the witchcraft crisis, Mather insists that the Puritan community still commands the means to identify witches as well as saints.

102

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

This latter dimension – the identification of visible saints – is never openly addressed in Wonders. I would argue, however, that the principle of visible sanctity, a key concept of the Puritan community, constitutes what, drawing on Louis Althusser, one could call the problematic of Mather’s text, its “central and structuring absence” (Storey 72) that the text cannot mention because, in the context of a discussion about the trustworthiness of representations, this would cast doubt on the possibility of visible sanctity.18 Despite frequent protestations by Puritan thinkers that visible sanctity was difficult to establish and always provisional in nature, in sociological terms the community was founded, as Michael Colacurcio explains, on the “rather confident attempt to locate by profession, institutionalize by covenant, and monitor by discipline Christian experience as such” (309). Accordingly, a community that prided itself on its ability to identify saints should be able to identify witches as well. If witches could not be conclusively identified, and they could not if spectral evidence was distrusted as Mather well knew, the ability to identify saints was called into question, too. This is why Mather leaves behind all scholarly precaution and defends spectral evidence and why he also admonishes the Puritans to “maintain a kind Opinion one of another” (23). In order to preserve their community, they are to trust in representations of goodness and piety, and not only, as Parris does, in spectral evidence of evilness. Ironically, Mather seeks to contain the danger the crisis poses to the community by endorsing exactly that which was chiefly responsible for turning an incident of witchcraft into a veritable crisis. Without the admission of spectral evidence before the magistrates and later in court, the whole crisis would never have escalated. But magistrates and judges, as we have seen, were willing to consider spectral evidence because they found the idea of a witch conspiracy convincing – and their suspicions were fueled through spectral evidence in turn. Hence, despite Mather’s intention to prevent the crisis from further spiraling out of control, his Wonders would probably have had exactly that effect – had it not been published at a time when other figures of authority were already considering abandoning the trials. Moreover, Mather’s “solution” was impractical: he underestimated both the desire of the authorities to prosecute and the social dynamics of a crisis where rumors of witchcraft fed into the spectral visions of the afflicted whose testimony then made other long-harbored suspicions which the authorities had so far been unwilling to follow suddenly appear persuasive. Furthermore, his “solution” was theoretically unsound: if spectral evidence was trusted, it necessarily took precedence over non-spectral appearances of the suspect in question, as

18 On the concept of the problematic, see Althusser and Balibar, and Storey 72–77.

Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World

103

it was assumed to reveal his or her true nature. That a writer like Mather, who is generally known for his intricate and meticulous arguments, did not see this contradiction indicates how much he struggled to impose a positive interpretation on the witchcraft crisis. Equally ironically, Mather explicitly dismisses that understanding of the crisis that eventually allowed the Puritans to integrate the witchcraft crisis into the stabilizing Puritan conspiracy theory: the idea that the devil had deluded and misled everybody involved. For Mather, this constitutes the ultimate horror, because it would signify the withdrawal of God’s grace. For the community, however, it was the most suitable solution, as it allowed to reconstruct the strict binary between inside and outside, good and evil so central to the Puritan worldview. If the devil had temporarily been allowed to confuse righteous Puritans in order to punish the community as a whole for its sinful behavior, this was bad enough. But it was much better than the conviction held during the crisis that the forces of evil had managed to infiltrate the community and to infect a considerable number of its members. The numerous confessions of people involved in the prosecution of witches that followed in the years after the crisis have to be seen in this context. They all implicitly reaffirmed the established conspiracy narrative which had been so dangerously twisted by the detection of witches. Tellingly, Mather never publicly apologized for his role in the crisis; the reason might well be that he continued to regard a devilish delusion as more threatening to the community than a widespread witch conspiracy because it threatened to unhinge the principle of visible sanctity. In sum, then, Wonders of the Invisible World articulates a vision of conspiracy that shares some features with that of Parris’s sermons and differs from them in other respects. What is more, like Parris’s sermons, Mather’s text already contains many of the elements characteristic of later secular conspiracy texts of the discursive kind. Like Parris’s sermons and many of these later texts, Mather’s narrative moves rapidly through European and New England history to capture the global dimension of the Manichean struggle it is concerned with. But as in Parris, the narrative pivot is much less pronounced in Wonders than in later conspiracy texts. While Parris does not make the gradual transformation of his worldview explicit because the typological readings of the bible require him to present each new realization as already known all along, Mather actively veils the single pivot his narrative contains in order to downplay the dangers of the witchcraft crisis. It is only his metaphors – the shift from a language of invasion to one of infection – that make this pivot recognizable. Parris is closer to contemporary conspiracy texts in terms of the limitless suspicion and complete distrust in representations that he finally arrives at. For him, all appearances are potentially misleading, and thus everybody could be a witch. Mather does not share this

104

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

radical skepticism, which aligns him with conspiracy theorists from the eighteenth century to the 1950s. Finally, Mather and Parris also differ with regard to what humans can do to foil the satanic conspiracy. In Parris, there is eventually no agency left; all the righteous individuals can only wait for the afterlife where God will protect them from devils. In Mather, too, there is an all-powerful God ultimately in control of both human and satanic actions. And yet, limited as it may be, there is room for human agency. Wonder of the Invisible World is driven by the conviction that has inspired most conspiracy theorists throughout the centuries: that exposing the conspiracy is a first step toward restoring one’s agency and defeating the conspirators. Accordingly, Mather’s text is a call to collective action. The Puritans, he holds, have to stop fighting among themselves and must “unite in everything” but in particular to “wrangle the Devil out of the Country” (27, 26). Once they have overcome their internal divisions, Mather suggests, they can heal the infection, that is, end the infiltration and thus return to the siege mentality that stabilized their community before the outbreak of witchcraft. Mather clearly sees his own text as the first move in this collective effort, as a weapon in the war against the devil. His aim is not simply to expose the devil’s maneuvers, but this act of revelation is conceived of as already working against the satanic attack. This intended function is made explicit in the endorsement by Judge Stoughton, the chief judge on the Court of Oyer and Terminer and a fervent believer in spectral evidence. After expressing his approval of Mather’s account of the trial, Stoughton ends by declaring that “all Good Men […] will greatly rejoyce, that the Spirit of the Lord has thus enabled you to lift a Standard against the Infernal Enemy” (7). Mather’s book is much more than an account of the trials. It not only exposes the devil’s plot but actively “countermine[s]” it as well (4). Consequently, Mather’s and Parris’s conspiracy theories also differ in the cultural work they perform. Mather recognizes the threat that the witchcraft crisis poses to the Puritan conspiracy community and tries to work against it. Arguing from the position of those in power for whom the witchcraft crisis offered an explanation for the colony’s hardships and their own failures to improve the situation, he implicitly acknowledges that the witches’ attack signifies a new chapter in the devil’s war with New England, as it proves that the enemy has infiltrated the community. But he simultaneously projects the witchcraft outbreak as an event that confirms the Puritans’ special relationship with God and tries to channel its harmful potential into a reading meant to affirm the community. He thus conceives of the alleged plot against the Puritans in the fashion characteristic of conspiracy discourse until the late 1950s. By contrast, Parris’s vision of a conspiracy that has even subverted the Puritan churches anticipates the socially

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

105

destructive conspiracy theories of the second half of the twentieth-century in which the conspirators have already assumed power on the inside and taken over control of the social entity in question. As the enemy in his vision is already everywhere, every earthly community disintegrates. His sermons thus bring to the fore the destabilizing social potential inherent in all conspiracy theories and twists the Puritan version of it that way.

“A Distrustful […] Man, Did He Become”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” Few texts have generated as many interpretations as Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown,” which was first published in 1835, at exactly the moment when anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, mobilized in order to re-affirm the Protestant community of the young United States, were gaining momentum. The story, however, is not concerned with contemporaneous issues but engages the Puritan past. While it is “not ‘about’ the infamous witch trials of 1692” (Colacurcio 285), it is set explicitly in “Salem Village,” and the forests surrounding it, at the time of the trials (Hawthorne 74). Most interpretations, however, remove the text more or less completely from this context and focus either exclusively on formal aspects, such as Hawthorne’s famous deployment of symbolism and ambiguity, or present the psychology of Young Goodman Brown’s discovery and development not as the specific experience of a third-generation Puritan but as that of a prototypical human being. The only major interpretations I am familiar with that resist such universalizing readings are the ones by David Levin (cf. “Shadows”) and Michael J. Colacurcio, who both insist that, by dramatizing the pitfalls of spectral evidence, the story explores historically specific problems that haunted Puritan society at the time. Reading the story as a comment on conspiracy theory, I attempt a synthesis of historical and ahistorical interpretations in this section in so far as I insist that, by analyzing a specific historical situation, the story makes a more general point. “Young Goodman Brown,” I wish to argue here, not only dramatizes the dangerous tendency of the Puritan conspiracy narrative to transform into a variant that destabilizes the community, as it did during the Salem witchcraft crisis. As the story highlights the isolation and unhappiness of somebody who suspects that everybody around him might be part of a vast conspiracy, it also brings to the fore a problem that, at least in theory, all conspiracy theorists face. With the notable exception of Salem, however, the problem of containing and limiting suspicion became a really pressing issue only during the twentieth century. For reasons I discuss in subsequent chapters, the various conspiracy theories circulating at the

106

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

time when Hawthorne wrote “Young Goodman Brown” had little difficulty to distinguish between those who could and those who could not be trusted. Thus, the story not only understands well what happened at Salem 140 years ago, it also anticipates what would happen with conspiracy theories circulating 140 years later. While “Young Goodman Brown” is set in Salem Village and makes frequent reference to inhabitants involved in the trials, its village is not a faithful representation of the real place but a fictionalized version that the story projects in order to explore the larger implications of suspicions of witchcraft for the Puritans. In fact, in the Salem Village of the story, it seems, there never has been a witchcraft crisis. The story is not set after the trials, since Sarah Cloyce, whose amicable conversation with the devil makes Brown first suspect that pious appearances may be misleading (cf. 78–80), is throughout the story kept in high esteem by the village community, although, in real life, she was among the first accused and only narrowly escaped conviction (cf. Norton, Devil’s 366n53). At the same time, the story is also not set before the trials, since in a passage focalized through Brown, Martha Carrier, the other historical figure he encounters on his journey into the forest, is described as the one “who had received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she!” (86). This characterization is almost literally taken from Cotton Mather’s account of her trial in Wonders of the Invisible World, and, taken in isolation, would therefore suggest that Brown knows about her alleged part in the conspiracy. On the whole, then, the story takes place not in the world of the trials but in a world permeated by the knowledge of and fears about witchcraft that fueled the trials. What is more, the story condenses the crisis of a whole community into the internal crisis of one person, Young Goodman Brown, whose name and station in life suggest that he prototypically stands for the group as a whole. The story employs these strategies, I argue below, because it negotiates a weakness in the Puritans’ theory of election which the witchcraft crisis brought to the fore but that caused much anxiety before and after this crisis. Put simply, “Young Goodman Brown” stages the transformation of its protagonist’s worldview. When he departs for his rendezvous with the devil, he still is a firm believer in the traditional Puritan conspiracy theory. Convinced that those inside the village are good and pious, and anxious about the evil lurking outside its borders, he feels uncomfortable in the forest, fearing that “There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree” (75). But when he returns home a few hours later this siege mentality has become entirely obsolete. What he has seen in the forest at night has persuaded him that it does not make sense to distinguish between inside and outside, as his fellow Puritans, “both pious and ungodly” (82), appear to be just as much in league with the devil as the

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

107

natives. From that day onward until the end of his life, Brown mistrusts everybody. Proponents of ahistorical psychological interpretations often highlight that this outcome is independent of the question, raised by the narrator, if Brown really witnessed a black mass in the forest or if he has “only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting” (89). What these critics overlook, however, is that Brown has been deceived even if he really attended a black mass. As David Levin has convincingly argued, Brown’s errand into the wilderness is “a perfectly clear, consistent portrayal of a spectral adventure in evil” (347). All the people Brown hears and sees on their way to and at the witch-meeting, from “Goody Cloyse” and “Deacon Gookin” (78, 81) to “the lady of the governor” and “his Faith” (85, 87), are not really there. The devil himself assumes the “shape of old Goodman Brown” (79), Goody Cloyse is depicted as a “figure” that moves “with singular speed for so aged a woman” (78, 79), and Brown finally identifies “the slender form of a veiled female” as his wife (86). Even the “pink ribbon” (83) that flutters down through the air halfway through the story to finally convince Brown that everybody and everything he has so far believed in, including his Faith, are already of the devil’s party is an apparition conjured up by the devil. When Brown returns home the next morning, Faith is still wearing the ribbon (89) – a clear indicator that, contrary to appearance, she did not attend the black mass in person and that only her specter did. Brown never believes, as Levin also correctly observes, that Faith or “the church members are present in their own persons” in the forest (352); he is completely aware that what he sees are specters. After all, the whole forest episode is told from his point of view, so that the frequent references to “shapes” or “figures” must be attributed to his consciousness. That he knows that the devil is conjuring up specters also explains why he is not too surprised to see “the shape of his own dead father” at the witch-meeting (86). However, this does not explain why he takes the specters’ actions and statements at face value and, after his return, abhors the pious behavior of the real people. To understand this reaction, an earlier, and more detailed, description of how the devil appears to Young Goodman Brown needs to be taken into account: [T]he second traveler was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank in life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still, they might have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as simply in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would not have felt abashed at the governor’s dinner-table, or in King William’s court, were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. (76)

108

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

This passage can be read as a description of Cotton Mather’s father, Increase.19 Born in 1639, Increase Mather was “about fifty years old” in 1692, and he was the colony’s most respected spiritual leader who, just like his son, regularly dined with the governor. Yet, officially at least, he and his son were “in the same rank in life,” sharing the position of minister of the First Church of Boston. During the early stages of the witchcraft crisis, however, Cotton occupied this office alone, as his father was still in England at “King William’s court,” unsuccessfully lobbying for a charter that would give the colony as much independence as possible. By turning Brown and his father through this description into Cotton and Increase Mather for a moment, the story offers an explanation for why Brown so uncritically accepts the spectral evidence he is later provided with. Like Cotton Mather, like Chief Judge Stoughton or, in fact, like Hawthorne’s own ancestor, Salem Town magistrate Hathorne, who conducted the first hearings in the matter, Young Goodman Brown believes that the devil can only command the specters of those who have given their soul to him. This is why he trusts the specters he encounters in the forest and stops believing in public displays of piety. Cotton Mather, I have argued above, held that spectral apparitions could generally be trusted because he regarded the idea that the devil had been given the power to impersonate innocent people as an even more serious threat to New England’s sense of election than the outbreak of witchcraft itself. In Hawthorne’s story, Brown’s sense of his own election is temporarily shaken but never completely destroyed and, in fact, restored in the end, since he resists the devil’s temptation. His pious identity is shaken when the ribbon he beholds convinces him that his “Faith is gone,” both in the literal and in the allegorical sense, and that “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name.” Following this revelation, he gives himself over to the devil for a while and becomes “the chief horror” of the forest (83). At the black mass, however, he eventually backs away from joining the witches’ circle, calling on his wife, his Faith, to do the same. This is why, at the end of the story, his Faith is still with him, and why she stays with him to his end. Brown’s loss and recapture of Faith lend themselves to be read in terms of conspiracy theory. His realization that all humans are innately depraved and thus potentially in league with the devil clearly constitutes a narrative pivot, a moment of revelation much more pronounced than similar instances in Mather or Parris and thus indicative of how such pivots, only implicitly present in Puritan texts,

19 With the notable exception of Colacurcio, this historical reference seems to have gone unnoticed in Hawthorne scholarship. This shows the amazing degrees to which interpretations of the story tend to remove it from the specific historical context it engages.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

109

become ever more integral to the structure of the conspiracy narrative over time. As in contemporary conspiracy texts the narrative speeds up before and after this pivot; in fact, Brown literally speeds up with the help of the devil’s staff moving through the forest at an incredible pace. However, whereas in contemporary texts the awareness of a vast conspiracy almost automatically leads to the resolution that this conspiracy must be fought, Brown temporarily gives himself over to the satanic conspiracy he has detected and allows the staff to transport him to the witch-meeting (83). Only there does he eventually resist by calling on his Faith to “resist the Wicked One” (88) – which immediately breaks the spell cast over him and makes the specters disappear. Compared to the protagonists of contemporary conspiracy narratives, his restoration of agency arrives belatedly, and it is merely a partial restoration, since apart from calling on Faith and saving a child from a suspected witch he never acts against the conspiracy. Unlike his contemporary counterparts, Brown therefore does not even partly destroy the conspiracy he has unveiled. Instead, his experience epitomizes a problem that all contemporary conspiracy theorists at least potentially face. As Leland S. Person puts it, “Brown out-Puritans the Puritans, concluding that he remains the only good man in a society of sinners” (43). I would like to add: he out-conspiracy-theorizes the conspiracy theorists. Not only is he sure that everybody he has seen in the forest, except for his wife who may or may not have “obeyed” his command to return to God (88), is of the devil’s party. He also suspects everybody living in Salem Village of being part of the devilish conspiracy. While the protagonists of contemporary conspiracy narratives usually overcome the vast conspiracies they are facing by acting (almost) alone and thus fulfill the promise of restored agency this narrative form holds, Brown does not undertake anything to foil the conspiracy, because it is too vast and there is absolutely nobody he could turn to. Unable to trust even his family he turns into “a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” who “mutter[s] to himself” whenever others display tokens of faith (89). Highly skeptical of visual displays of piety around him and sure that it would be futile to display his own piety, we can assume that he is taken by his fellow Puritans as somebody who is far from sure about his own election. They misunderstand him as much as he misunderstands them. But Cotton Mather not only demanded that the Puritans should trust spectral evidence, he also called on them to retain a charitable opinion of each other, to trust displays of sanctity in order to counteract the dissolution of communal structures caused by multiplying accusations of witchcraft. The historical record shows that this did not work, that accusations had to be ignored and spectral evidence to be dismissed to end the crisis. “Young Goodman Brown” demonstrates why this was the case. As the experience of Hawthorne’s protagonist

110

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

shows, spectral evidence necessarily takes precedence over real-life displays of goodness and piety: if one believes in the former, the latter necessarily appears as a deception. Convinced that the forces of evil were indeed targeting them, the Puritans chose to trust the specters and refused to give anybody who had come under suspicion the benefit of doubt. Brown is even more extreme in the conclusion he draws: “Having begun by assuming that all visible sanctity was real sanctity and by presuming his own final perseverance in faith, having next despaired of all virtue, he ends doubting the existence of any unblighted goodness but his own” (Colacurcio 302). He mistrusts even those whom he has not seen at the witch meeting and whom he has absolutely no ground to suspect. For him, by the end of the story, every member of the community is eo ipso a possible conspirator. Brown’s rejection of all visible displays of piety, however, is more than an individual’s paranoia, and it is more than a comment on the harmful effects of the witchcraft crisis on Puritan society. As a representative of Puritan culture in general, and – the devil’s reference to Boston’s “Old South” makes this perfectly clear (75) – the generation of the Half-Way Covenant in particular, Brown’s experience shakes Puritanism to its roots because it points to a fundamental weakness in the Puritans’ theory of election.20 What Brown learns from his experience in the forest is, after all, that the principle of visible sanctity, the belief that one can identify those who are in a state of grace through their deeds and behavior, can never produce any secure knowledge. It is impossible to tell a saint from a sinner; the only way to dispel these doubts is through spectral evidence which would identify the person in question as a witch. Brown thus ends exactly as Samuel Parris did, whom the witchcraft crisis convinced that the pure church could only be realized in heaven. Parris had to accept that there were witches in his church, and Brown thinks he has learned in the forest that those he considered saints are actually siding with the sinners. Brown’s and Parris’s desperation and isolation bring to the fore that, despite the frequent emphasis that nobody should interfere between the individual and God, the Puritan’s faith needed a social framework to function satisfactorily. Those convinced that they were among the elect needed their community’s acknowledgment of this status: they needed to be recognized in the Hegelian sense by people that they, in turn, also recognized. But neither Brown nor Parris can, in the end, recognize those who could recognize them. Exactly like contemporary conspiracy theorists, they have come to realize that the social order they

20 Old South is the tower of the Third Church of Boston, established in 1669, because the First and Second Church rejected the Half-Way Covenant.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

111

used to believe in is a sham. But they end even more isolated than their presentday counterparts, for there is no counterculture and no conspiracy community that recognizes them, cherishes their insights, and allows them to feel superior to the unenlightened masses. This is why Brown’s “dying hour [is] gloom” (90). Significantly, neither Brown nor Parris need(ed) to revise their opinion of people they thought were sinners all along. For them, as for the Puritans in general, it is only displays of goodness that are suspicious – an imbalance that puts particular pressure on the principle of visual sanctity. This is why Cotton Mather went to such great lengths to provide an “elaborately contrived and meretriciously rationalized defense of the premise” in his Magnalia Christi Americana, a text designed to confirm that there have been visible saints in New England that can be identified (Colacurcio 312). As I already mentioned above, this is also why he does not discuss visible sanctity at all in Wonders of the Invisible World. It surfaces implicitly when he admonishes his readers to observe the rule of charity and to preserve a good opinion of each other, that is, not to doubt those who should be beyond doubt. But he does not address the issue openly, because his insistence that spectral evidence is more often than not reliable severely challenges the idea of visible sanctity once recognized saints are, via spectral evidence, identified as witches, as they were quite frequently during the crisis. Instead, he projects the witchcraft attack as a confirmation of New England’s eschatological identity, and he argues that it would be far worse for the colony if it all turned out to be a devilish delusion. Retrospectively, then, in Magnalia and other texts in which he adopts the prevailing interpretation that there were no witches and that the devil deluded New Englanders, he can present the witchcraft crisis as proof of New England’s election and the principle of visible sanctity: not only has the colony withstood the devilish attack, but some visible saints, first and foremost Governor Phips, have looked through the devil’s plot and foiled it by excluding spectral evidence from the trials.21 In contrast to the despair that takes hold of Parris and Brown, Mather’s writings are characterized by his persistent attempt to uphold the principle of visible sanctity and thus to affirm the organizing principles of the Puritan community. Accordingly, Brown and Parris have much more in common with contemporary conspiracy theorists than Mather does. Their despair and feeling of isolation anticipates the experience of many of their post-1960 counterparts who, in fiction as well as in real life, have (almost) nobody they can turn to because they suspect 21 See, for example, Mather’s “The Life of Sir William Phips” in the Magnalia where he downplays Phips’s part in establishing the Court of Oyer and Terminer and projects him instead as someone who rejected spectral evidence from the outset and who merely “first Reprieved, and then Pardoned many of them that had been Condemned” (245).

112

Chapter 2: Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory

that the conspiracy is always already (almost) everywhere. Consequently, the problem of identifying visible saints can be conceptualized in general terms as a problem that all conspiracy theorists face. How can one trust anybody once the naïve confidence in surfaces and appearances has been shattered? The eighteenth, nineteenth, and even the early twentieth centuries, as we will see, limited distrust through various forms of othering by placing people of a certain religion, ethnicity, class membership, or party affiliation beyond suspicion. Until the Salem witchcraft crisis, Puritan culture, too, had such a mechanism at its disposal, as members of the community, and especially church members, were usually beyond doubt, whereas everybody on the outside – Native Americans, Catholics, Quakers, and devils – was regarded as a conspirator. With the events of 1692, this stabilizing conspiracy theory collapsed and temporarily gave way to one that did away with the neat distinction between inside and outside, demonic enemies and visible saints. After the crisis, the Puritans reconstructed the binary of inside and outside by casting what had happened as a delusion by the devil, thereby suggesting that none of them had really conspired with their arch-enemy. Hence, the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 brings to the fore the potential of conspiracy theories to both stabilize and destabilize, to construct and to destruct communities. As we shall see, over the next three centuries American conspiracy theories were to perform both of these functions.

Chapter 3 Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory One of the bestsellers of 1855 was Charles W. Frothingham’s Six Hours in a Convent: or, The Stolen Nuns! The forty-page novella, which went through ten editions that year, is the first-person narrative of a young man from Boston’s upper class, called Charles Frothingham, who returns from his travels in Europe to find that his younger sister has joined the Convent of St. Ursula in Charlestown and that his mother is a prisoner in her own house, held captive by Irish servants and Catholic priests, who are trying to lure her into the convent as well. In fact, the narrator arrives just in time to prevent his mother from donating his sister’s substantial fortune to that institution. He throws the priests out of the house, dismisses the Irish domestics, and – together with one of his former servants – eventually manages to free his sister and a friend of hers from the convent just before they are raped by lecherous priests. Published at a historical moment when it seemed certain that the antiCatholic Know-Nothing Party would win the next presidential election, Six Hours both expressed and fueled the nativist mood that dominated large parts of the United States at the time.1 The text dramatizes a conflict between “real” Americans, who are Protestants, and “foreign foes” (44), who may be living in America, who may even be Americans nominally, but whose values are at odds with American values such as democracy or liberty because they are Catholic. This dichotomy – Protestant Americans, on the one side, and Catholic foreigners, on the other – overrides all other possible distinctions and allegiances. The upperclass narrator and his working-class servant join forces to defeat an enemy that wears the garbs of both the poor Irish immigrant and the aristocratic French Canadian priest. Frothingham’s Six Hours, one of several such novellas he published during the 1850s, then, makes explicit what various scholars have identified as the shared cultural function of the countless anti-Catholic texts published between the 1830s and 1850s. Texts such as Samuel F. B. Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (1835), Rosamond Culbertson’s Rosamond; or, A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under 1 According to its preeminent scholar, John Higham, nativism opposes “an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., ‘un-American’) connections” (4). I would go even further, though, and argue that in the case of the Catholics and others it is the minority itself, and not only its connections, that is cast as foreign and “un-American.”

114

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

the Popish Priests (1836), Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), Harry Hazel’s The Nun of St. Ursula; or, The Burning of the Convent: A Romance of Mt. Benedict (1845), Andrew B. Cross’s Priest’s Prisons for Women; or A Consideration of the Question, Whether Unmarried Foreign Priests Ought to Be Permitted to Erect Prisons (1854), or Edward Beecher’s The Papal Conspiracy Exposed and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (1855), texts that combined “eighteenth-century titles and seventeenth-century bigotry,” as Susan Griffin has put it (Anti-Catholicism 1), had one common effect: according to scholars such as Ray Allen Billington, Robert Levine, Jenny Franchot, or David Bennett, they forged a notion of American Protestantism, and thus a vision of American nationalism, that transcended both denominational divides and class lines through the specter of a shared Catholic enemy. At a time of enormous social, economic, and religious change, anti-Catholicism countered the experience of fragmentation and diversification produced by these changes and created a sense of unity and community for a substantial part of the American population. The reason why I want to add to this body of scholarship is that most scholars, once they have claimed that anti-Catholicism had this unifying effect, focus on how the anti-Catholic discourse could not quite contain the innerProtestant tensions it tried to submerge, or how it gave vent to all kinds of anxieties. In Roads to Rome, for example, Jenny Franchot suggests that “antiCatholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers […] indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture” (xvii). In quite similar fashion, Susan Griffin has argued that many anti-Catholic narratives, but especially those focusing on escaped nuns, functioned “as a form of Protestant self-critique” (Anti-Catholicism 28).2 While I will challenge Griffin’s argument later, I do not want to deny the general validity of such scholarship, least of all because these studies have shaped my approach to the issues at stake to a considerable degree. But such analyses have left crucial questions unanswered. For example, why did these texts manage to successfully construct a Protestant community in the first place, however fragile and precarious it eventually proved to be? The only studies that I am aware of that focus on the construction and not on the deconstruction of this community are Billington’s classic The Protestant Crusade (1938) and Jody Roy’s far more recent Rhetorical Campaigns (2000). Based on a wealth of material, Billington paints an overall accurate picture of the anti-Catholic movement, but

2 The most extreme example of this approach is Fenton, who contends that anti-Catholic discourse did not forge Protestant unity but accelerated diversification (30–31, 69).

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

115

largely ignores the specific forms of its discourse.3 Interested in the rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, Roy pays more attention to the genres, structures, and tropes that dominate this kind of writing. Moreover, apart from David Brion Davis, she is the only critic who has used the concept of conspiracy theory in order to describe nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism.4 But since she does not situate the Catholic conspiracy theory in the larger context of American conspiracy theorizing, she misses some of its specificities and cannot explain why it was more long-lived and widely-spread than competing theories that targeted Mormons or Masons. In this chapter, therefore, I aim to arrive at a more thorough understanding of the Catholic conspiracy theory that dominated American culture from the 1830s to the 1850s, and I want to link the cultural work that this theory performed to the specific genres and tropes through which it projected Catholicism as a threat. Anti-Catholicism, of course, was neither restricted to nineteenth-century America, nor did it emerge for the first time during this period in the United States.5 On the contrary, anti-Catholicism had been part of American culture ever since the Puritan settlement of New England. For the Puritans, the Catholic Church represented the ultimate other, as its strict hierarchy, its belief in a covenant of works, and its splendid rituals were exactly what they rejected and what Christian faith, to their minds, had to be “purified” of. In the conspiracy against the community that they imagined, the French Catholics from Quebec figured, next to Native Americans and witches, as one group of the devil’s helpers. The Puritan distrust of Catholics survived throughout the eighteenth century and even gained new momentum at the time of the American Revolution when some colonists suspected that the Catholic Church was part of the conspiracy against their liberty they were sure to have detected. However, for the generation of the Founding Fathers, Catholics were not only suspicious because they appeared to

3 Cf. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism 2 for a critique of such an approach and a discussion of the relationship between literary forms and ideology. 4 Cf. Davis, “Themes.” Hofstadter touches upon anti-Catholicism when he defines the “paranoid style,” but does not engage this specific conspiracy theory in any detail (cf. “Paranoid” 19–23). 5 Anti-Catholic sentiments surfaced in many European countries throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They arose not only in countries with strong Protestant roots such as England and Switzerland but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in Catholic countries such as Italy or France. In those latter countries, it was usually not Catholicism as such that caused suspicion, but more specifically Jesuitism, as Geoffrey Cubitt has demonstrated meticulously for France (cf. Jesuit). Obviously, these different national anti-Catholicisms fueled and influenced each other. Manuel Borutta’s recent study explores this dimension for Italy, Germany and – to a lesser degree – France, but does not discuss the United States. How American anti-Catholicism was shaped by European discourses and shaped them in turn has not yet been explored. Unfortunately, such an endeavor is beyond the scope of this study.

116

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

be secretly in league with the British crown, but also because of the Vatican’s power claims. In the eyes of Protestant Americans, the Catholic Church controlled its members’ lives to such a degree that it was impossible to be a member of the church and simultaneously to be loyal to any other entity, be it the British king or the newly founded American republic. These prejudices survived until far into the twentieth century, forcing, for example, John F. Kennedy to explicitly reject allegations that he was taking orders from the Vatican. However, what sets the period I focus on here apart is that between the mid1830s and the mid-1850s these long-standing American suspicions of Catholics temporarily developed into a conspiracy theory that did not merely project the Catholics as part of a conspiracy against religious and political liberty, but that projected Catholics as the sole perpetrators of this plot.6 A populist response to economic and other changes, the Catholic conspiracy theory, I argue, performed a variety of functions for different groups of society. For example, for members of the working classes, the theory was a way to express dissatisfaction with their own growing powerlessness in the allegedly classless Jacksonian society, while for Protestant ministers like Lyman Beecher, who struggled with the rapid diversification of the religious marketplace, it was a means to insist on the necessity of Protestant unity. These diverse interests were veiled by the fact that it was one master narrative – that of the imminent Catholic take-over – that catered to all of them. Just as at the time of the Salem witchcraft crisis, different groups were thus spinning one theory, but this time, the various groups involved did not – not even in distorted fashion – target each other. Instead, the theory externalized the conflicts and projected them onto a different group, the Catholics, who were cast in the role of a foreign intruder. It was this deflection that enabled the construction of a Protestant community that grew and functioned for two decades. Then the controversy over slavery became too pressing, and the competing conspiracy theories that this issue generated placed Protestants with diverging opinions on it at odds with each other.

6 For the history of (anti-)Catholicism in the United States, see Bodo 61–84; Cogliano; Gillis; Jenkins; Massa; A. Moore 48–71; Nordstrom; and Welter. On the anti-Catholic dimension of the conspiracy theory that helped to bring about the American Revolution, see Bailyn, “General Introduction” 61. Virtually all scholars of anti-Catholicism agree, however, that it was never more potent than in the decades I focus on here. Cf. among others, Bruce 97; Davis, “Themes” 205; and Roy 2. While there are a variety of factors that contributed to the attractiveness of the Catholic conspiracy theory during this period – factors that this chapter explores – it would surely never have been that prominent without the constant influx of Catholic immigrants into the country: “54,000 Catholics arrived in the 1820s, 200,000 in the 1830s, 700,000 in the 1840s, and 200,000 in the year 1850 alone” (Levine 108).

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

117

In short, this chapter describes how the narrative of a Catholic conspiracy against America united Protestants of all denominations and from all classes for a considerable period of time, despite all the factors that were positing them against each other. In the first section of the chapter I outline the conflicts that were tearing American society apart in the first decades of the nineteenth century. I discuss how the Masonic conspiracy theory emerged as a reaction to these problems, and how it was replaced by the Catholic conspiracy theory, which proved a better outlet for the tensions and anxieties that had given rise to antiMasonry in the first place. In the next two sections, I examine how texts of all kinds – sermons, pamphlets, newspaper articles, novels as well as allegedly factual accounts of escaped nuns – articulated the image of a large-scale Catholic conspiracy. Working towards unifying American Protestants, these texts, I argue, formed a community of their own – a community of texts in which each individual member synecdochically represented the whole conspiracy, but in which different kinds of texts focused on different aspects of the papal plot. Discursive texts tried to reveal the overall plot; dramatizing texts focused on one aspect of the ongoing infiltration, which, however, metonymically represented the attack on the community as a whole. The two discursive texts that I focus on in section two of this chapter are Lyman Beecher’s A Plea for the West and Samuel F. B. Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, which were both published in 1835. Beecher’s collection of sermons and Morse’s collection of newspaper articles can be rightfully labeled the master texts of the Catholic conspiracy theory. They were reprinted several times over the next two decades and thus significantly shaped the conspiracy theory. Moreover, reading these two texts against each other brings to the fore to which degree religious and political anti-Catholicism converged during the period I am interested in here. Beecher and Morse make almost exactly the same argument, employ on the same tropes, and draw on the template of the republican jeremiad to articulate their warnings. In the third section I then examine the most popular genre of anti-Catholic discourse, the so-called “convent captivity narrative” which revolves around the either openly fictional or allegedly factual “confession” of a young Protestant woman who had been lured into and then managed to escape from a Catholic convent. This genre, I suggest, was so tremendously successful because it answered to a variety of cultural needs, and it was so effective in spinning the conspiracy theory because it gave concrete shape to the abstract threat to the nation by refiguring it as a menace to the institution that contemporaries regarded as the most important safeguard of the American republic: the family and particularly its young mothers.

118

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

In the final section of the chapter I return to Frothingham’s Six Hours in order to discuss how during the 1840s and 1850s narratives about young Protestant men who rescue their sisters or lovers from convents contributed to the Catholic conspiracy theory. My main focus in this section, however, is on George Lippard’s sensationalist novel The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845). Lippard’s attitude toward anti-Catholicism, I wish to suggest, was highly ambivalent. On the one hand, his novels parody the dominant tropes of this discourse in order to expose how blaming the Catholics distracts from more pressing social issues and from identifying those really responsible for the injustices that the Catholics tend to get blamed for. On the other hand, however, they also confirm anti-Catholic sentiment and, especially the later novels, project the image of a Catholic conspiracy quite explicitly.

From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism In an often-cited essay David Brion Davis highlights the parallels in the representations of Masonic and Catholic conspiracies in the nineteenth century. For many Americans, he argues, these groups represented “the precise antitheses of American ideals,” they were “an inverted image of Jacksonian democracy” whose dominant values they challenged (“Themes” 208).7 What Davis does not spell out, then, but what he suggests is that – in the terminology I employ in this study – the Masonic and Catholic conspiracy theories are responses to the most pressing problems U.S. society was facing at that time: those of class stratification and religious diversification. As historians have shown over the past few decades, the “common man” may have been the ideal of the Age of Jackson, but, as Edward Pessen writes, “The Jacksonian era witnessed no breakdown of a class society in America. If anything, class lines hardened, distinctions widened, tensions increased” (qtd. in Roy 39). In fact, one can even argue that modern classes as we know them only came into existence with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society that the United States underwent in the years before and during the Jackson presidency (cf. Goodman 42).8 If economic change thus threatened social cohesion, developments in the religious sphere intensified real and perceived antagonisms and increased the feeling that society at large as well as its various communities were 7 I omit the third group that Davis is concerned with, the Mormons, from my discussion here, because the Mormon conspiracy theory never achieved the national significance that the Masonic one enjoyed for a short period of time and the Catholic one for considerably longer. 8 For an insightful analysis of the emergence of the working class in New York City, see Wilentz.

From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism

119

disintegrating. The first decades of the nineteenth century were a time of religious revival and of the “explosion of denominationalism” (Bruce 110). Established Protestant churches splintered into ever smaller denominations, who often fervently opposed each others’ doctrines and beliefs. As Bruce puts it: “The result was a religious environment marked by schisms and competition” (110).9 What intensified such tensions further was that many of these denominational splits “took place along class lines” (Schultz, Introduction viii), effectively putting people of different economic status further at odds with each other.10 In this situation, many people joined new organizations of all kinds. In doing so, they were probably motivated by conflicting desires. On the one hand, they joined groups such as unions, social clubs, or similar organizations in order to unite with those facing the same problems and to further their special interests (cf. Goodman 42–43). On the other hand, they were also motivated by a desire for “overcoming individual self-interest” and engaging in “meaningful group activity” (Davis, “Themes” 209). In the end, though, membership of these emerging organizations tended to be fairly homogenous, reflecting and hardening rather than transcending existing religious and economic divisions. As a consequence of this constellation, conflicts of class and religion could be played out in disguise, as conflicts between organizations, or between one organization and the rest of the population. This is what happened with the Masons. For two closely interrelated reasons did the Masons for a short period of time become a prominent target of popular misgiving: their insistence on secrecy and ritual raised suspicion about what was really going on inside their lodges, and they were perceived as a group whose values contradicted those engrained in the Constitution. As Karen Halttunen has demonstrated, transparency, already valued highly in the eighteenth century, as we have seen in chapter 1, became even more important in the nineteenth century, precisely because the shift from a stable, agrarian to a mobile, industrial society fueled apprehensions about sincerity and authenticity.11 The Masons’ insistence on secrecy thus rendered them automatically suspicious, prompting questions about their real intentions. This distrust was intensified by the social structure of their group. Members of Masonic lodges tended to come from the higher classes of society and thus from Protestant sects that had recently broken away from the more orthodox denominations.

9 For a discussion of the disintegration of the established Protestant denominations, see also Butler 236–56; Finke and Stark; Hatch; and Schultz, Introduction viii. 10 See also Goodman 61–64. 11 Somewhat ironically, transparency is also a key trope of Transcendentalism in general and in particular of Emerson, who during an early stage of his life was a Unitarian minister and thus a key member of a group habitually associated with Masonic secrecy.

120

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

Accordingly, to members of the working and lower middle classes, that is, those suffering most from the social transformations of the time, they appeared as “a monied, Unitarian-tending [or otherwise non-orthodox] aristocracy” (Goodman 36).12 Put differently, the Masons, whose members were assigned degrees such as Royal Arch Mason, were perceived as an elitist, hierarchical organization that wore a benevolent and philanthropic face to the outside but that, in reality, was plotting to undermine the country’s democratic system in order to abolish the civil liberties the generation of the Founding Fathers had fought for. In addition, Masonry was seen as the sworn enemy of Christianity, and suspicions claiming that Masons had been the driving force behind the French Revolution and thus of the Jacobins’ assault on Christian faith still circulated in America. Finally, just as the Catholics later, the Masons appeared as opponents of the values of domesticity, as bad husbands who abandoned their wives and children in order to spend more and more time at the temple and who were prone to molest the wife of anybody who did not belong to the brotherhood. In other words, they were cast as corrupting forces that, according to republican ideology, endangered the private and public virtue that alone guaranteed the survival of the republic.13 The Masonic conspiracy theory that gained prominence in New England between 1826 and 1836 and that even led to the establishment of, albeit shortlived, political parties must therefore be understood as an indirect response to the economic and religious conflicts that were tearing society apart at the time. Cast as the morally depraved and politically evil enemies of everything dear to Americans, the Masons were held responsible for all social problems – problems that were not addressed and negotiated openly but only under the disguise of a conspiracy theory. As the Masonic conspiracy theory simplified the issues at stake, it tended to reconcile those suffering from the transformations underway with the system responsible for these changes. After all, the conspiracy theory suggested that nothing was fundamentally wrong with Jacksonian democracy. If class conflicts were increasing, it was because the Masons were subverting the system and not because the system as such was problematic. This interpretation was corroborated by the fact that the Masonic conspiracy appeared to be controlling large parts of the system already. How else could it be explained that Masons brought to trial tended to get off lightly or acquitted? While in reality such rulings were probably a proof that the legal system was functioning well, such sentences 12 Formisano also observes that especially in Massachusetts “a Unitarian-Orthodox division often was the essence of Masonic-Antimasonic polarity” (218). 13 Cf. Goodman’s excellent study of anti-Masonry for a thorough discussion of these diverse accusations.

From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism

121

confirmed anti-Masonic “apprehensions that Masons exercised powerful influence in high places” (Goodman 21). On the whole, however, anti-Masonry proved an unsatisfactory outlet for social tensions. Masonry was a European invention, but it could not that easily be cast as something “un-American” since it had existed on American soil for decades and had drawn a large number of members without raising any suspicion. Moreover, it was well-known that national heroes such as George Washington had been members of the organization. Thus, the Masons were neither an “external” enemy nor “a tiny elite” (Goodman 20, 12) but, as Davis himself stresses, “a group thoroughly integrated in American society” (“Themes” 206). As a consequence, the Masonic conspiracy theory, by distorting the issues at stake, still pitted Protestant against Protestant and American against American. As it increased divisions and tensions instead of alleviating them, it made a further disintegration of society likely and more unity unlikely. I contend that this is the reason why the movement was so short-lived and disappeared quickly when antiCatholic feelings gained momentum during the mid-1830s. Anti-Catholicism provided a more long-lived outlet for the tensions and conflicts between classes and denominations that dominated American culture from the 1820s onwards. The crucial difference between the Masonic and the Catholic conspiracy theories that scholars have overlooked so far, stressing commonalities instead of differences, is that the Catholics made for much better conspirators because they could be more easily cast as foreign foes. After all, the Catholics that American culture had been deeply suspicious of since its Puritan beginnings had usually been located on the outside. During the Salem witchcraft crisis, for instance, the Catholics who were said to have joined forces with the devil and his Native American allies were French Canadian. Thus, the Catholic immigrants, most of them from Ireland, who arrived in great numbers in the United States from the 1830s onward and thereby further increased competition in the workplace, were cast as foreign intruders, as a papal army whose ultimate goal was the conquest of the Protestant nation. Both the Masonic and the Catholic conspiracy theory must, then, be understood as populist articulations of the troubles of Jacksonian society. As we will see in more detail later, and as scholars such as Davis or Bruce have rightly stressed, the Catholics were blamed for exactly the same issues that the Masons were blamed for slightly earlier: secrecy, ritual, hierarchy, hostility to democracy, and lack of morality (cf. Davis, “Themes” 207–10; Bruce 110). But if the Masonic subversion was perceived as already quite far progressed, the Catholic conspiracy was cast as still being in its initial phase. The conspirators were said to have reached some of their goals already, but they had not yet infiltrated the judicial system or the higher levels of government, and thus the real take-over of power

122

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

was still to come. Both conspiracy theories reacted to the same social problem, an experienced loss of power. But whereas the one focusing on the Masons offered an explanation for this loss, the one focusing on the Catholics only anticipated this loss of power, denying that it had already occurred. Moreover, in the Catholic conspiracy theory, deflection rather than distortion was at work. The internal problems of the 1830s were externalized; they were projected onto a group that appeared not as home-grown but as a bunch of foreign intruders, as “un-American” and, quite obviously, non-Protestant. It was this set of clear-cut distinctions that enabled anti-Catholic discourse to successfully push the inner-Protestant and economic struggles more and more into the background over the next two decades and forge a community for the earliest stage of the industrial age.14 Of course, the shift from anti-Masonry to anti-Catholicism was not the result of a conscious decision. But it is quite telling how quickly anti-Masonry disappeared when long-standing prejudices against Catholics developed into a genuine conspiracy theory. Even more significant, though, is that in the first notable outbreak of anti-Catholic violence on American soil, the destruction of the Charlestown convent in 1834, the anti-Masonic dimension was still present. What is more, the burning of the convent was directed not only against Catholics but also against upper-class Protestants. The inner-Protestant economic and denominational antagonisms that the Catholic conspiracy theory would soon deflect from entirely were still palpable at this point in time. The burning down of Mount Benedict, an Ursuline convent and girls’ boarding school in Charlestown near Boston, occurred in August 1834 when rumors spread through the city that a young woman was detained against her will inside the convent by the Mother Superior and the bishop supervising the institution.15 I discuss in detail in section three why such tales of convents and endangered womanhood fell on particularly fertile ground in these years and why, of all Catholic establishments, Protestants distrusted convents most. And since other scholars have minutely reconstructed what happened before and after that night in

14 In her otherwise excellent analysis of anti-Catholic rhetoric Roy overlooks this externalization. As a consequence, she falsely concludes about anti-Catholic political parties that it “seems more than ironic that anti-Catholics sought to combat the conspiracy they described by working within the political system that they themselves claimed had already been corrupted” (108). While there may have been texts that alleged that the Catholics were already exerting some influence over the government, the conspiracy theory usually held that the country’s institutions had not yet been subverted. 15 In reality, the captured girl was a middle-aged teacher who temporarily left the convent and then returned voluntarily (cf. Schultz, Introduction ix–x). While nobody was harmed during the burning, it caused considerable material damage for which the Catholic Church was never compensated.

From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism

123

Boston and Charlestown, I do not need to go into a discussion of the details of the mob attack on the convent here.16 But what I want to stress is that several persons that stirred anti-Catholic feelings in Boston at that time had previously been fervent anti-Masons (cf. M. McCarthy 137–38). Even more importantly, virtually all scholars who have investigated the incident agree that the working-class Protestants who conducted the attack were not only targeting a foreign intruder who had erected a stronghold on their soil but also the members of the upper classes whose daughters attended the boarding school. As Billington has shown, the families who sent their daughters to these and other convent schools were mostly Unitarians unhappy with the “rigid Congregationalism of the public school system” (Protestant 69). What the rioters were openly attacking, then, was the unholy allegiance of two groups that did not share their religious convictions and whom they regarded as “aristocratic” (Franchot 141). Significantly, though, in Charles Frothingham’s novella Six Hours in a Convent from 1855, with which I opened this chapter, there is no trace any more of this inner-Protestant conflict, even though the narrative is set in 1834 and alludes to the burning of the convent through its subtitle already: A Tale of Charlestown in 1834. On the very first page of the story the narrator tells the reader that he may come from a rich family, but that he and his father always “detested the mushroom aristocracy” of the New World (7). If the possibility of class antagonism is thus dismissed explicitly, inner-Protestant religious differences are downplayed implicitly. By the early 1830s most members of the upper class were Unitarians, whereas the working classes remained predominantly Congregationalist. But the narrator never mentions a denominational divide between him and his servant, and only ever uses the designation “Protestant” to refer to their religious affiliation. The vision of Protestant unity across classes and denominations he thus projects marks the endpoint of a process of deflection that began in the immediate aftermath of the Charlestown riot. The beginnings of this deflection are observable already in Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835), the text to which the title of Frothingham’s story alludes. Reed’s narrative, the first real convent captivity narrative, is the allegedly factual account of how she was mistreated during the months she spent as a novice in the Charlestown convent in 1831–32. Six Months in a Convent was published a few months after the riot took place, but her story circulated orally in Boston and Charlestown before the convent was burnt down and probably contributed to the stirring of anti-Catholic sentiment (cf. M. McCarthy 114–16). Reed’s anonymous editors declare at the beginning of their preface that the purpose of the text is to

16 Cf. M. McCarthy; and Schultz, Fire and Roses.

124

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

“open the eyes of Protestants” (5) as to what Catholics are doing to the children entrusted to them, but the text never indicts any specific group of Protestants for sending their children to the convent school. In fact, any discussion of innerProtestant economic and religious conflict is notably absent from the rest of the preface and the narrative itself. Instead, both the paratext and the actual text focus on the evils of Catholicism – especially on its exotic rituals, which, as Jenny Franchot has demonstrated, both attracted and repelled Protestants – and on its anti-democratic nature. Reed describes at length, and in a fashion bound to cause abhorrence in readers valuing their democratic system and habeas corpus, the strict hierarchy of the convent and how she and the other novices and nuns were submitted to a regime of humiliating penances. As I discuss in more detail below, for a culture that regarded mothers as the guardians of civic virtue and democracy, the fact that potential mothers were exposed to such an anti-democratic education was already frightening in itself. But Reed not only projects Catholicism as a threat to the foundation of American republicanism, the family, she also casts it as a menace to the nation’s symbols and thus to the nation itself. For instance, at one point she relates that the bishop has plans to erect “a college for young men on Bunker Hill” (127–28), thus effectively turning Catholicism into an attack on those principles that her and her readers’ forefathers died for in the War of Independence. When Reed’s text came out in March 1835 it substantially transformed the discussion about the convent and the riot, and Reed was called forth to testify in the trial against the rioters, who were all acquitted. Just as Six Months in a Convent, the countless articles dedicated to the riot and its aftermath barely ever touched upon class conflict and denominational divisions. Focusing solely on the evils of Catholicism, these texts sparked a national discussion about this “foreign” religion and its various institutions. Over the next twenty years countless texts of all kinds and genres engaged the dangers of Catholicism and developed the vision of a veritable Catholic conspiracy. How this conspiracy theory was spun, and how the specter of papal infiltration contained innerProtestant conflicts and forged a Protestant community is the topic of the next two sections.

The Invasion Detected: Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy Rebecca Reed was not the only one accused of stirring anti-Catholic feelings prior to the Charlestown riot. To a lesser degree, but maybe more deservedly, this charge was also raised against Lyman Beecher, the father of the novelist

Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy

125

Harriet Beecher Stowe. An evangelical minister of the Presbyterian denomination who toured several eastern cities in order to raise funds for his church’s missionary work in the western part of the country, Beecher delivered three sermons in Boston the day before the convent was attacked. In these sermons Beecher cast the Catholics as a threat to the spiritual and civil well-being of the nation and thus did his part in heating up the atmosphere in the city. Together with the rumors about Reed’s experience and those about the abduction of a girl that eventually led to the riot, Beecher’s sermons testify to the importance of oral communication in spreading the fear of subversion on a local level in this period. However, without the country’s thriving book and magazine culture antiCatholicism would never have turned into a national phenomenon. Printed texts were crucial to disseminating this discourse throughout the country, and the way these texts were received nationwide then often reflected back on the local contexts from which they had originally emerged. This is true for Reed’s Six Months, for Beecher’s sermons, which he published in a revised version as A Plea for the West in 1835, and it is true for the text that was arguably most influential in transforming anti-Catholic prejudices into a conspiracy theory: Samuel Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, which was originally published as a series of letters in the New York Observer between August 30 and November 22, 1834 (cf. Billington, “Anti-Catholic” 364).17 Morse, whose authorship was revealed only after the series had concluded, signed his contributions to the newspaper “Brutus,” assuming the persona of a Roman politician whom Americans of the post-revolutionary era considered a hero because, to their minds, he had tried to kill Cesar in order to restore democracy.18 Due to the great success his letters enjoyed in New York, Morse published them under his real name as a book in 1835. This book became a national bestseller and went through seven editions until 1855. With each new edition, Morse added endnotes and appendices that finally made up one third of the original text. His main argument, however, never changed: he considered Catholicism a threat to the republican system of the United States. Beecher’s Plea and Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy are in a close intertextual dialogue with each other, as Beecher quotes several times from the second edition of Morse. Nevertheless, it cannot be entirely ruled out that Beecher’s sermons also influenced Morse, since news of his sermons surely reached New

17 Roy notes that the publication of Morse’s text “marked a critical rhetorical moment for antiCatholicism” (67). 18 On Brutus as a hero of the Early Republic, cf. Hannemann 92–94.

126

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

York and thus Morse through newspaper reports or gossip. Far more important than disentangling this relationship, however, is that both texts develop exactly the same conspiracy theory and employ the same narrative structure and a very similar rhetoric. Yet, there are certain differences. Beecher’s Plea, which has a lot in common with the texts by Cotton Mather and Samuel Parris that I analyzed in chapter 2, is more overtly religious. Not only does it preserve the structure of the sermon even in its written form, it is also informed by a millennialism quite similar to Mather’s. Just like Mather, Beecher openly considers the papal plot he discloses a confirmation of America’s divine mission. He is convinced that the triumph of democracy is the precondition for the second coming and that the nation is attacked because it is “destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world” (11). Unlike Mather, however, Beecher no longer casts supernatural forces such as the devil and his demons as the project’s principal foes but human agents such as the Pope and his priests. Thus, his vision of conspiracy is, in the final analysis, a largely secularized one. This secularization is even more pronounced in Morse who does not explicitly talk about the millennium, and who amasses far more evidence and eye-witness reports to back up his claims, producing a text that has even more in common with contemporary conspiracy discourse. Yet, his is not an entirely secularized argument, as the sense of a divine mission endangered by the papal plot permeates his text as well. In fact, the devil is far more prominent in his text than in Beecher’s – albeit on a metaphorical level alone. Repeatedly, he casts Rome as the “cloven foot” (93, 94) and likens Catholicism to the “serpent which has already commenced his coil about our limbs” (99). Thus, Beecher’s text may be more religious and Morse’s more political, but they are both republican jeremiads in which secular and sacred elements merge. Arriving from different points of departure at the same conclusion, that a Catholic conspiracy endangers the divine mission of the American republic, these two texts mark exactly the moment when religious and political antiCatholic discourses converged. Beecher and Morse employ largely the same rhetorical strategies to alert their readers to the large-scale Catholic conspiracy they have detected. Much like their twentieth-century counterparts they rely both on eye-witness reports, preferably on those of “intelligent American[s]” who have been to Rome (Beecher 58), and on “official documents” (Morse 40) from which they quote. However, as Beecher implies and Morse says explicitly, most of these documents were written “with great care to avoid any unnecessary exposure of covert political designs” (Morse 43). Accordingly, both authors have to interpret these documents to bring the Catholics’ real designs to the fore. As is typical of conspiracy discourse as it emerged with the Enlightenment, they deduce and infer the existence of the

Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy

127

conspiracy.19 Moreover, in order to convince their readers that the conspiracist interpretation of the sources is indeed the correct one, both rely heavily on rhetorical questions. In typical ministerial fashion, Beecher usually asks a set of rhetorical questions and then provides the answers that his readers have probably already come up with in declarative statements himself. Morse, by contrast, often states what he believes directly, but far more frequently, he ends the presentation of a specific set of incriminating evidence with a number of questions that force the readers to draw these conclusions themselves.20 Echoing George Washington’s admonition “to be constantly awake” (“Farewell” 151), Beecher and Morse want their readers to “wake up” – a biblical metaphor that both employ repeatedly – and face the fact that a vast Catholic conspiracy is underway.21 Catholicism, they insist, is not merely one religion among many, but a political project disguising itself in a “religious garb” (Morse 79).22 Strictly hierarchical in itself, Catholicism is the natural ally of the monarchs of Europe (cf. Beecher 60–61; Morse 108–09); it is inextricably linked to “despotism” (Beecher 81; Morse 49), and abhors everything that republicans hold dear – freedom of conscience, opinion, or the press. Protestantism, by contrast, they suggest, is naturally linked to republicanism and all of these freedoms. In order to establish this connection both associate the Catholic threat the country is facing

19 In slightly paradoxical fashion, Morse claims at the same time that the evidence is “not even well concealed” (122). Such a claim is quite typical of conspiracy theorists in general and indicative of their faith in a transparent order of semiotic representation. On the one hand, they stress the cognitive efforts it takes to discern the conspiracy; on the other, they claim that for those who know of the conspiracy the evidence is actually quite obvious. 20 For example, Morse ends one of his letters as follows: “Now, if some political effects are already avowed, as intended to be produced by this society, and that, too, immediately after reiterating its purely spiritual design, why may not that particular political effect be also intended, of far more importance to the interests of despotism, namely, the subversion of our Republican institutions?” (78–79). 21 The metaphor of waking up is a well-established one in conspiracy discourse. For instance, in Oliver Stone’s J.F.K., Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) comments on his new awareness of a conspiracy that killed Kennedy: “I have been asleep for three years.” At that moment, his project to awake the nation begins. Beecher and Morse also want the nation to wake up: “We must awake, or we are lost,” Morse insists (100; cf. also 107, 112), and Beecher declares: “[T]his giant nation sleepeth and must be awaked” (76; cf. also 114). However, at other moments both imply that there are already “tokens of a national waking up” (Beecher 44), that the country is “waking up” (Morse 114). 22 To provide further evidence of this claim, Morse also refers to the St. Leopold Foundation, a society that tried to spread the Catholic faith in the New World. “If this Society be solely for the propagation of the Catholic faith, one would think that Rome, and not Vienna, should be its head quarters!” Morse argues, and he concludes: “this ostensibly religious society covers other designs than religious” (42).

128

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

with the Revolutionary War.23 Beecher casts the Pope as another “George the Third” (57), while Morse seeks to resuscitate the “Spirit of ‘76” (131) and even suggests that Martin Luther challenged the divine right of the Pope “on the fourth of July” for the first time (56). Constructing a dichotomy in which Protestantism is aligned with democracy and Catholicism with monarchy, Beecher and Morse not only project the Manichean worldview typical of conspiracy theory in general, they also politicize the religious and religionize the political. Accordingly, the Catholic conspiracy they imagine is an attack on both political and religious values. Its objective is the abolition of all “civil and religious liberty” in the United States and the establishment of “the union of church and state” forbidden by the Constitution (Beecher 9, 79). The vision that Beecher and Morse paint is that of a country in which power no longer rests with the people but where, just as in the absolute monarchies of Europe, “The Ruler is Master, the People are Slaves” (Morse 51). Beecher and Morse also agree why the religious and political rulers of Europe want to subvert the political system of the United States. The young nation poses a threat to the Catholic despots, they insist, because the idea of liberty is spreading from America throughout the world. “Every revolution that has occurred in Europe for the past half century has been, in a greater or less degree, the consequence of our own glorious revolution,” Morse explains (39).24 This is why the European monarchs want to “extinguish every spark of liberty in this country” (47), a plan that, if successful, would have the additional advantage of allowing the Catholic Church to make “reprisals abroad for what liberty conquers at home,” that is, for those countries in Europe that have escaped the grip of the Church due to religious or political reformation (Beecher 117).25 For Beecher and Morse, the masterminds behind this plot are located inside the Austrian government, and both single out Archduke Metternich as the arch-conspirator (cf.

23 The link between Catholicism and the Revolutionary War was also established during the Charlestown riot. Feeling that they were attacking a foreign aristocratic enemy as their forefathers had done, rioters dressed up as Native Americans and thus just as Bostonians had done for the Boston Tea Party, Schultz reports (Introduction xi). 24 Beecher puts the same thought as follows: “It is the powerful mind, roused by our example from the sleep of ages and the apathy of despair, which is sending earthquakes under the foundations of their thrones, and they have no hope of rest and primeval darkness, but by the extinction of our light” (53). 25 This idea of the Church making up for influence lost in Europe by Catholicizing the U.S. echoes the Puritans’ belief that the devil fled to the New World when Christianity spread throughout the Old one. Here again, we can observe the secularization of conspiracy theorizing. The motives remain largely the same, but now they are ascribed to human and no longer to supernatural agents.

Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy

129

Beecher 53–54; Morse 44–46). Metternich, they argue, controls the Austrian emperor – he is “the master of his Master,” as Morse puts it (44) –, and together they control the Pope and thus the Catholic Church. To back up this claim, they offer exactly the same piece of evidence, namely that Gregory XVI had barely taken office “before the revolution in his states gave him the opportunity of calling Austria to take possession of the patrimony of St. Peter, which his own troops could not keep for an hour” (Morse 67; Beecher 58).26 However, America’s enemies know that they cannot conquer the country in an open attack, as the nation is too powerful already. “No armed bands of a conqueror flushed with victory could give us a moment’s alarm,” Morse claims (35), and Beecher agrees: “By fleets and armies they cannot do it” (53). Yet, “Nations may be attacked, and conquered too, with other weapons than the sword” (Morse 37). Allegedly, there are two strategies by which Metternich and his allies want to bring the United States under their control. The first is immigration. Both Morse and Beecher discuss at some length the dangers of uncontrolled Catholic influx into the United States. They claim that it does not occur by chance but “at the bidding of the powers of Europe” (Beecher 52). Immigration, then, is invasion by different means – a point that Beecher and Morse make again and again by either likening the two or by casting the former metaphorically in terms of the latter. “Shall we watch only the outer walls, while sappers and miners of foreign despots are at work under our feet, and steadily advancing beneath the very citadel?” Morse asks rhetorically (100), and in a crucial passage Beecher puts it in much the same fashion: But if, upon examination, it should appear that three-fourths of the foreign emigrants whose accumulating tide is rolling upon us, are, through the medium of their religion and priesthood, as entirely accessible to the control of the potentates of Europe as if they were an army of soldiers, enlisted and officered, and spreading over the land; then, indeed, should we have just occasion to apprehend danger to our liberties. (57)

The only difference between Morse’s and Beecher’s descriptions of immigration is that, because his is a more overtly religious discourse, Beecher also compares immigration to a natural disaster. In passages such as the one just quoted he repeatedly casts immigration as a “tide” (cf. also 52) and “inundation” (51). Echoing the Puritans’ belief that such disasters were one of the devil’s favorite weapons, he thus indirectly re-introduces the notion of a metaphysical struggle into his text.

26 Both provide this information in a footnote, and Beecher quotes this passage word for word from Morse, but does not refer to him by name, calling him an “intelligent American” instead (58).

130

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

In addition, the passage quoted above reveals who is in control of the attack on American soil and how this attack is exerted. For Beecher – and Morse makes exactly the same argument – the vast majority of immigrants are innocent of conspiring against the United States. “They are not to be regarded as conspirators against our liberties” (188), he writes later. They are “of dark mind,” that is, too ignorant to understand the larger struggle that they are part of (95).27 But, just as with an army that fights against whomever its officers choose, there are “governing minds” that control the army of the immigrants (cf. 188), and the officers of the immigrants are the priests. Since Catholicism abhors the Protestant freedom of conscience, the Catholic immigrants depend on their priests for their spiritual well-being. The highly suspicious institution of the confessional in particular, Beecher and Morse contend, gives the priests total power over the Catholic community: not only do they know their parishioners’ innermost thoughts, they also have the “right to refuse absolution to those who do not comply with their commands” (Morse 61). As a consequence, Catholic immigrants are controlled by “a police of priests” that can conjure and dispel mobs at will (Morse 91). Removed from the control of the democratically legitimated American authorities, the immigrants are thus a foreign army within the country that will take up arms both literally and metaphorically whenever the priests decree.28 Morse and Beecher believe that, mainly because they are ignorant and have no preconceived notions about the right system of government, the mass of Catholic immigrants could be turned into democratic Americans if they were removed from the influence of their priests and provided with instruction and encouragement. However, they harbor no such illusions as far as the priests are concerned. The priests, and especially the Jesuits on which both focus, are the active agents of the Austrian-Roman plot to conquer the United States. They may profess to respect or even approve of American values, but this is just a façade. They can never be assimilated into American society because they are “in the pay and employ of a despotic government […]; they are foreigners, who have been schooled in the doctrine of passive obedience” to their masters, as Morse puts it (61). Beecher stresses their lasting dependence “upon a foreign temporal prince [the Pope]” as well (57). The priests are foreigners, and they will remain foreigners

27 Morse makes the same point: “The secret plans […] may be confined to a few bosoms, it is by no means necessary that the mass of the sect [Catholicism] have any knowledge of the plot” (18). 28 Tellingly, both Morse and Beecher refer to the Charlestown riot – where Protestants destroyed a Catholic convent – in order to raise the specter of Catholic mobs. Rewriting the history of this incident, both quickly condemn Protestant violence in order to focus then on the Catholic mobs that formed to avenge the attack. Both are outraged that these mobs supposedly could only be contained by the Catholic bishop (cf. Morse 94; Beecher 94–95).

Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy

131

forever, because “they are foreigners under vows of perpetual celibacy, and having, therefore, no deep and permanent interest in this country” (Morse 61). Since they will never have families in the United States, they will never become part of the American nation. Celibacy and the rejection of marriage alone were already suspicious enough for a culture that regarded the family as the stronghold of American democracy.29 But by linking it to foreign allegiance, Beecher and Morse effectively “other” the priests, suggesting that they will remain “another nation within the nation” and thus a danger to American democracy. While Helen became a Trojan when she married Paris, the Catholic priests will always be “the Greek [sic] in the midst of Troy” (Beecher 59). Both Beecher and Morse, then, see the Trojan horse of Catholic immigration already beyond the doorstep. Besides stricter immigration and naturalization laws, both consider education the decisive factor in the struggle with Catholicism, since education, or rather mis-education, is the second strategy pursued by the Catholic conspirators. It is here, Beecher and Morse contend, that Protestants can and must confront their foes. For both of them, Protestantism is naturally aligned with education, as it requires individuals to read the Bible, think for themselves, and search their own conscience. Thus, Protestant education is the safeguard of democracy: “Hid[ing] the Bible for fifty years,” Morse declares, “would amply suffice to give victory to the despotic principle, and realize the most sanguine wishes of the tyrants of Europe” (104). Because it is synonymous with despotism, Catholicism, by contrast, is cast as “the natural enemy of G ENERAL education.” Its objective is to keep the masses “arbitrarily shut out by law from all knowledge” (Morse 106), as they are not supposed to think for themselves but follow blindly the orders of their political and religious masters. Accordingly, the many Catholic schools throughout the country are not philanthropic, truly educational institutions but means to subvert the beliefs and values on which the American republic depends. Although they profess otherwise, the nuns and priests running these establishments “cannot help interfering with the religion of their pupils” (Beecher 97). In fact, as both Beecher and Morse try to demonstrate, their sole intention is to interfere with their students’ beliefs, to keep the Bible away from them, and to impress “upon the youthful mind […] that lesson of old school sophistry which distorts it forever” (Morse 104): “In short, they receive as perfect a Catholic education as the Catholic children themselves who are educated among them” (Beecher 101). 29 The convent captivity narrative, as we will see in the next section, takes this argument a step further, suggesting that priests only profess to be celibate, but that, in reality, they are uncontrollably promiscuous and constantly molest and morally corrupt the young Protestant girls entrusted to them for their education.

132

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

It is easy to imagine how such rants against Catholic schools contributed to heating up the atmosphere in Charlestown, when Beecher delivered his sermons in Boston shortly before the riot.30 The purpose of his visit to Boston, however, was to raise awareness and money for the educational efforts that had to be undertaken in the new western states. For Beecher, the West was where “the religious and political fate of our nation is to be decided” (11), because most new immigrants, both Catholic and Protestant, settled there, and since the Protestants were neglecting their duty to provide education, the Catholics were currently successfully doing it. Therefore, Beecher calls on Protestants to take countermeasures, and Morse demands this of the nation as a whole. They must shield their own children against the harmful effects of Catholic “education” and try to provide Protestant education for as many Catholic children as possible. “We must educate! We must educate! or we must perish,” Beecher declares a few pages into his text (31–32), and in closing, he returns to the military imagery he has used to cast Catholic immigration as an invasion and likens the schools that are to be built to “the revolutionary war[’s …] forts and munitions” (186). Significantly, the “we” that Beecher employs here comprises all Protestants, as “Every denomination [is to] organize its willing multitude to give and toil” until the Catholic enemy has been defeated (186). Morse has exactly the same in mind. Drawing on the same imagery, he envisions a union of Protestant denominations: “Will each sect awake to the feeling of its being a corps of the great Christian army, marching under the command of no earthly leader, fighting with no earthly weapons, and against no earthly foe?” (121). It is in passages like these that the concerns that drive the authors shine through. Undoubtedly, both truly considered Catholicism a threat to the civil and religious liberties of the United States. But what they were certainly at least as worried about were party quarrels, class antagonism, and the rapid diversification of Protestant sects. Their vision of a vast Catholic conspiracy deflected from and worked to overcome this sectarianism, which still, however, occasionally surfaces in their texts, albeit in differing degrees of explicitness. In Beecher, it is palpable only in the repeated complaint that the country is now particularly open to a foreign attack because Americans are no longer a “homogeneous people” (179; cf. also 132), in his fear that the Jesuit agents will manage “to divide us” (149), and in his concession that there are even now “nominal Protestants,” who might buy the Catholic bloc vote from the priests in order to foster their special 30 We see here already how the convent captivity narratives that I focus on in the next section interacted with the larger visions of conspiracy provided by Beecher and Morse. The latter texts accused the institutions in general; the former dramatized their harmful effects by focusing on specific cases, adding gruesome details to the larger picture.

Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy

133

interests (150). The only time when he mentions the existing divisions explicitly he uses a Catholic mouthpiece, quoting a bishop who observes “division and disorder” among the Protestants (165). In Morse, these concerns about internal divisions are more openly voiced, for example, when he discusses party quarrels (cf. 74–75; 115–17) or declares that unity among Protestants is the precondition for defeating the Catholics and preserving democracy: “If they [the Protestant denominations] have no common bond to unite them in repelling common enemies, then let us boast no more of religious liberty” (110). In fact, how worried Morse is about diversions among Protestants is apparent from the preface that introduces the second and all later editions of his text. There, he accuses a “Unitarian paper” of willfully ignoring clear evidence of the conspiracy (19) and expresses surprise “at the blindness of any one who professes not to see it” (20). Articulating the Manichean worldview constitutive of all conspiracy theories, he implies that whoever is not of his opinion must be siding with the Catholics. Beecher and Morse also differ in the degree of explicitness with which they express the need for Protestants to unite. Since Beecher never acknowledges that Protestants are divided in the first place, he cannot voice the need to unite openly. Instead, he gives the differences among them a positive twist. There is, he declares, “no danger of a church and state union” as long as the country is a Protestant one because “all denominations cannot unite” (79). Morse, by contrast, expresses the need to unify more openly and also more aggressively. When he speaks of the “religious community” and its duty to fight Catholicism he adds that in this “I mean to include Protestants of every name who profess a religious faith” (111–12). It is the “I mean” that gives his intention away. It reveals that it is far from natural to include every Protestant in one religious community and that this community does not exist yet but has to be brought about. In fact, Morse’s whole text is an attempt to construct this community, and this move finally climaxes in the image of the different denominations as various corps of a Christian army. The Protestant sects do not have to become one church, Morse argues in powerful language, but they must overcome their “petty jealousies” and recognize what they all have in common. God, their “great Captain,” may allow them “to act separately and independently within certain limits,” but now is the time to form a “united phalanx […] in his single service” (121), since the common enemy can only be defeated by concerted and unified action. What Beecher and Morse are doing in their texts, then, is constructing a consensus among American Protestants. In fact, they define what it means to be a Protestant and which Christian sects this term encompasses and which not. Throughout, they play out Protestantism against Catholicism and homogenize both during this process. Catholicism appears in their texts as entirely without internal divisions or branches – Austria, Rome, the Jesuits, American priests, etc.

134

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

all pursue the same goal and never disagree on any piece of doctrine. By the same token, the differences among Protestant denominations are relegated to the status of much-welcome diversity within the larger framework of the commonalities that both authors persistently emphasize. What is more, in Plea for the West and Foreign Conspiracy we can observe how America is imagined and defined as both a Christian and a Protestant republic, because in both Beecher and Morse the terms “Christian,” “Protestant,” “republican,” and “American” ultimately become synonyms. “[W]e all, as Americans and republicans,” Beecher writes, must acknowledge the danger of Catholicism (149). When on the last pages he addresses one last time “Americans, republicans, Christians,” it is clear that he has not three different groups in mind (188). In analogous fashion, these designations merge in Morse. The “Protestant community” can also be referred to as “Christian patriots” (115) or “American Christianity” (120). Thus, in Beecher and Morse, as well as in anti-Catholic discourse in general, we get a glimpse at the nation “as it is written” (Bhabha 2; his emphasis).31 This vision of America as a Protestant nation has proved highly successful and, to a certain degree, endures until today. The attempt undertaken by Beecher and Morse to overcome the economic and religious divisions among Protestants was equally successful for about twenty years, as the success of the KnowNothing Party during the 1840s and 1850s shows. Until the issue of slavery became too pressing, the Catholic conspiracy theory could function as a unifying force for Protestants of all classes and denominations. Anti-Catholicism was much more successful than anti-Masonry in providing social cohesion because it did not distort the issues at stake – class antagonism and religious diversification – but deflected from them altogether by projecting them onto an external Other. The notion that Catholicism is a foreign threat, and that Catholics remain foreigners forever, permeates both Morse’s and Beecher’s texts as well as those that followed in their vein. Thus, if the Masonic conspiracy theory increased divisions among Protestants and destabilized society, the Catholic one rendered such divisions unimportant, thereby constructing and stabilizing a community. Moreover, and this is the second reason for its temporary success and popularity, the Catholic conspiracy theory performed a variety of functions for different groups of people. For example, for somebody like Samuel Morse, whose deep concern about political and religious factionalism is palpable throughout the text, the theory provided a means of overcoming what he regarded as petty differences and quarrels. For a Congregationalist minister like Lyman Beecher, whose once

31 Griffin makes exactly the same point (cf. Anti-Catholicism 11).

Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy

135

dominant denomination was losing much ground during the first half of the 1850s, the conspiracy theory was a means to place his denomination, due to its missionary work, at the forefront of the struggle against Catholicism. In the words of Beecher, it allowed him to fashion his flock as the “corps [which] first marshal[ed] itself for action” (124) and enabled him to reclaim, at least for a little while, for the Congregationalists the leadership role that diversification had cost them. For those suffering most from the transformations of American society in the Jacksonian period, that is, those members of the lower classes who had previously voiced their dissatisfaction through anti-Masonry, the Catholic conspiracy theory functioned both as explanation and reconciliation. It not only explained the constant influx of cheap Catholic labor with which they had to compete; more importantly, compared to the strict, aristocratic hierarchy of the Catholic church, and the powerlessness of simple Catholics whom texts such as Beecher’s and Morse’s cast as “slaves” (Morse 44; Beecher 153), the society they were living in appeared, despite its shortcomings, as truly democratic. This conciliatory populist function of the Catholic conspiracy theory is most obvious in a revealing endnote in which Morse explicitly addresses the problem of social and economic inequality and holds the Catholics responsible for the growing class antagonism. Under the system of despotism that the Catholics want to establish, he argues, the lower classes are not treated as equals. Deliberately banned from education, they cannot move up in society but “are considered as the natural slaves of the wealthy and learned” (154).32 By contrast, in a republic like the United States, the “various classes into which human society must ever be divided” are “knit together by a mutual confidence, and a mutual interest” (152, 153). According to Morse, all of them share an interest in the greater good and the preservation of the values of their society with the “mechanics and artisans” actually being the backbone of “the wholesome substantial democracy of the country” (154). The lower classes support the system because they know that class lines are permeable, that “there are no artificial obstacles in the way of any man’s becoming the richest or most learned in the state” (152–53). Thus, Morse concludes, “In a moral and intelligent Democracy, the rich and poor are friends and equals” (157). Currently, however, he argues, the Catholics are plotting to destroy this unity of the classes. Because members of the upper classes might not distinguish between Catholic and Protestant workers, he argues, rioting mobs controlled by

32 The metaphor of slavery is used in both Beecher (153) and Morse (44, 51). I will discuss this imagery in more detail in the final section of this chapter where I argue that one additional function of anti-Catholic discourse may have been to voice and displace anxieties over slavery.

136

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

priests are bound to “alienat[e] the minds of one class of citizens from the other” and “kindle the flames of civil strife” (156), thus creating an atmosphere of disagreement among Protestants that the Catholics aim to exploit. He concludes: “Let the working-men, the laboring classes well consider that their liberty is in danger, and can be preserved only by their encouragement of education and good order” (157). What Morse does here, then, is that he, for once consciously, displaces the shortcomings of U.S. society. Current class struggles do not occur, he suggests, because something is wrong with the system, but because the Catholics have begun to undermine it. Moreover, he admonishes the lower classes to keep the peace and casts this as a significant contribution in the fight against Catholic subversion, thus making the unifying and stabilizing function of the Catholic conspiracy theory visible for a short moment. One might think that Morse’s appeal to the lower classes, voiced in a text that hardly any of them could afford to buy, never reached them. But even if most members of the working class never read his book, it seems safe to assume that almost all of them quickly became familiar with the argument he and Beecher made. People could learn about the Catholic conspiracy that was underway through extensive reviews of Morse’s and Beecher’s text in one of the, primarily religious, newspapers many of which also reprinted considerable parts of his text. They could also hear about the papal infiltration by word of mouth, from people who had read one of the texts or knew somebody who had,33 or they read one of the countless other anti-Catholic texts of all kinds that were published over the next two decades and that were impossible to avoid. These texts constantly alluded to or even quoted each other and presented a single argument about the Catholic conspiracy.34 This collaboration is quite remarkable, especially with contemporary conspiracy theories in mind. As Mark Fenster has demonstrated, today’s conspiracy theorists are often extremely jealous of each other. They may quote each other occasionally, but usually they compete for the correct version of what is really going on and accuse other conspiracy theorists of either missing important clues or deliberately distorting the truth. According to Fenster, this is one of the reasons why today’s conspiracy communities are fragile and mostly short-lived (cf. 162– 63). The anti-Catholic conspiracy community also fell apart eventually, but it was fairly long-lived. One reason for this almost certainly was the agreement among the various texts that promoted the idea of a Catholic conspiracy. These texts 33 As Billington demonstrates in his overview of anti-Catholic literature of the period (Protestant, 345–79), it was virtually impossible for Protestants to escape stories and treatises about papal plots. 34 Franchot (148) observes this intertextual network as well.

The Convent Captivity Narrative

137

could construct a community of people because they formed a community of texts. They may have focused on different aspects of the Catholic conspiracy and, often conditioned by generic rules, treated the subject in different fashions, but they also were in a relationship with each other that “was most likely reciprocal,” as Roy, who anticipates my argument, puts it (75). Discursive texts such as Beecher’s and Morse’s offered the larger picture, while dramatizing texts usually revolved around individual cases or local situations and thus made the threat more concrete. In the next section I focus on the convent captivity narrative and especially on Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures as the most popular and influential example in order to demonstrate how these dramatizing narratives depended on the discursive texts to be believed and how they legitimated these other texts in turn.35

Dramatizing the Threat to the Republic’s Future Mothers: The Convent Captivity Narrative While Samuel Morse and Lyman Beecher identified education in general as the area where the fate of the nation was to be decided and did not distinguish between education for boys and girls, the discussion that their texts helped spark almost exclusively focused on convent schools that provided “education” for Protestant girls. This narrowing down of the issue is hardly surprising. For Protestants of the 1830s to 1850s, convents as such already appeared both threatening and fascinating. They were spaces of secrecy and strange rituals, closed to the general public and inhabited by a large number of unmarried women, nuns, who owed obedience to a small number of unmarried men, the priests. The question of what was happening behind closed doors, of how nuns and priests organized their “alternative lifestyle” was both appealing and appalling. These anxieties were multiplied when convents hosted boarding schools for Protestant girls. Removed from both literal and metaphorical Protestant parental

35 It is worth noting that anti-Mormon texts formed a similar, albeit much smaller and less influential community of texts in which discursive treatments such as William Swartzell’s Mormonism Exposed (1840), Tyler Parson’s Mormon Fanaticism Exposed (1841), or John Cook Bennett’s History of the Saints; or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism (1842) were supplemented by narratives such as Metta Victoria Fuller’s Mormon Wives (1856) or Maria Ward’s Disclosures: Female Life among the Mormons (1856). The latter texts revolve exactly around the same issues as the convent captivity narrative and project Mormon polygamy in the same fashion in which tales of escaped nuns depict life in a convent.

138

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

control, these girls were frequently imagined as the helpless victims of indoctrination, physical and sexual abuse, rape, torture, and even murder. Tales of the moral and sexual corruption of young Protestant women, conducted behind closed doors by Catholics, resonated powerfully within American culture at that time, because such crimes were bound to shake the republic to its foundations. As Linda Kerber and others have argued, republican ideology assigned the women of the Early Republic and antebellum period a paradoxical role for their culture and society. On the one hand, women were excluded from public life, confined to the home, and subjected to patriarchal control. On the other hand, these women were perceived as performing a vital function for the greater public good. They were seen as the guarantors of civic virtue, as those who instilled the values crucial to the preservation of the republic in their sons and reminded their husbands of them whenever necessary. Thus, since the functioning of the family guaranteed the functioning of the republic, the corruption of young girls in convents was not merely considered an attack on individuals; as an attack on the future mothers of the nation, it was an attack, and an efficient one at that, on the republic itself. Accordingly, Protestant advocates of education for girls habitually pointed to competing Catholic efforts in order to justify and raise money for their endeavors. As Carol Mattingly and Amanda Porterfield have demonstrated, many Protestant institutions for the education of girls and young women were established in response to the perceived threat of the convent school, and champions of female education such as Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, or Sarah Josepha Hale consciously drew on anti-Catholic sentiments in order to promote their projects. Thus, they surely benefitted from a body of texts that dramatized vividly what happened to those unfortunate Protestant girls who fell prey to Catholic educators: the convent captivity narrative.36 Convent captivity narratives relate the experiences of young Protestant women who are lured into convents under false pretenses, suffer incredible hardships at the hands of their Catholic tormentors, but eventually escape so that they can disclose what is really going on behind convent walls. Seduced by the Catholic exoticism and the friendly face this religion wears to the outside world, they stay after their education is completed in order to become novices and eventually nuns. Once they have made this fatal decision, they are forbidden any further contact with friends and relatives outside the convent; they are threatened with sexual abuse, or even suffer it, and are subjected to severe and degrading

36 I employ this designation, and not the term “the escaped nun’s tale” that Griffin and others use, because I want to stress the origins of this narrative template.

The Convent Captivity Narrative

139

punishments if they disobey the priests, the Mother Superior, or elder nuns. In the end, however, they manage to flee from the convent and – usually after some persuasion from their friends – reluctantly decide to go public to ensure that others do not make the same mistake they made and that their fellow citizens learn about the sinister motives of the Catholic Church. The most popular genre of anti-Catholic discourse of that period, the convent captivity narrative comprises both openly fictional texts such as George Bourne’s Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents (1833) and allegedly factual ones that profess to be true accounts such as Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835) or Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836). However, as Jenny Franchot has convincingly argued, within anti-Catholic discourse, the distinction between factual and fictional texts collapses to a considerable degree: “Thus, fictional accounts like Frothingham’s Convent’s Doom or Reed’s autobiography and spiritual confession both represent themselves as factually responsible history, whereas much of the trial testimony [after the Charlestown riot], as oral history, is frankly saturated with references to various anti-Catholic fictions” (148). Thus, the distinction between fictional and “factual” narratives is of some importance, as – with the notable exception of Lorette – allegedly factual texts tended to be the more commercially successful, but both kinds of texts claimed to reveal the truth about Catholic education and were widely accepted and cited as evidence for its fatal effects on girls. Convent captivity narratives dramatize and thus make vivid those aspects of Catholicism that are depicted in abstract terms only in texts such as Morse’s or Beecher’s. For example, nearly all convent captivity narratives stage confession scenes in order to demonstrate how priests abuse the allegedly purely religious institution of the confessional to exert control over their confessants. Moreover, with regard to the evils of confession and other central tropes of anti-Catholicism, narratives such as Monk’s or Bourne’s bring to the fore further dimensions that are often only implicit in more general treatments. For example, both Monk and Bourne project confession not only as an act of control but also as one of moral corruption in which the priest often rapes the confessing girl and at the very least plants indecent ideas in her innocent mind through his biased and detailed questions.37 The often explicitly sexual content of convent captivity narratives has led Ray Allen Billington to the conclusion that they were mostly read by members of the

37 Scenes like these have led Jennifer Blair to the conclusion that one of the functions of such narratives was to impart sexual knowledge to their readers.

140

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

“lower classes” (Protestant 142). More recently, however, Maureen McCarthy has convincingly argued that these texts were primarily consumed by middle-class audiences. They were too expensive for working-class readers – Reed’s narrative, for example, sold for fifty cents (133) – and, more importantly, the challenge to domesticity that these narratives stage resonated especially with middle-class readers, with members of families, that is, where women could, in the literal sense of the word, afford to stay at home and let the husband earn the family’s living. This does not mean that members of the working classes did not know these narratives, but I would venture to say that they knew the stories rather than the texts. They were familiar with the stories because newspapers and magazines of all kinds printed excerpts from bestselling convent captivity narratives and discussed their claims, and these claims were also the talk of the day (cf. M. McCarthy 235). Anti-Catholicism, then, was even more successful in constructing a Protestant community than Billington acknowledges, since the middle classes’ appetite for such narratives suggests that they joined what he has labeled the “Protestant Crusade” not in the 1840s but already a decade earlier. The convent captivity narrative was particularly apt to dramatize the evils of Catholicism because of the particular cultural significance ascribed to accounts of captivity since Puritan times when narratives of white settlers who were abducted by Native Americans constituted a very popular genre. As Jenny Franchot reminds us, narratives of captivity and successful escape functioned “as a primary index of [God’s] loving concern” for the Puritans (94), and as such they confirmed not only the individual’s election but that of the culture as a whole. Nineteenth-century accounts of convent captivity still transport this notion, but supplement it with an additional, yet closely related meaning: “they portray the capture of the whole culture by hostile others” (Helminski 20). As future mothers of the nation, the Protestant girls these stories revolve around synecdochically represent the community as a whole, and their fates signal what could happen to the community. Thus, the final sentence of the first part of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures – “Down the stairs I hurried, and making my way through the door into the yard, stepped across it, unbarred the great gate, and was at liberty” (200) – achieves closure for her story (at least until the sequel was published). For her readers, however, this sentence’s intertextual link to Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States – established by Monk’s final word – underlines one last time the function of her narrative as a whole: it is a warning issued to make sure that Protestants take the appropriate measures to preserve their liberty. It is this strong synecdochic relationship between the individual experience related and the community for which this experience was related that enabled the convent captivity narrative to provide an especially powerful solution to a problem faced by all texts that were to dramatize conspiracy until the late nineteenth

The Convent Captivity Narrative

141

century. Discursive texts, as we have seen in the last section, could easily paint the image of a large-scale, globally operating conspiracy against the United States. Dramatizing texts, however, could not stage this threat directly, as, for example, twentieth-century thrillers and related forms do, because the genres available during this period – the historical romance, the sentimental novel, the adventure novel, the gothic novel, the melodrama, and even the sensational novel – were unable to project such a plot in the realm of politics.38 What authors like Charles Brockden Brown, James Fennimore Cooper, and those that I address in detail in this study did, then, was that they dramatized the conspiracy in symbolic fashion. As Robert Levine has shown with regard to Brown and Cooper (and as I show for, among others, Herman Melville and George Lippard), their texts usually stage a conspiracy against a small entity, usually the family, that symbolically represents the nation. This way, they could graft the conspiracy plot onto one of the genres available.39 Sometimes their texts also address the larger picture of the conspiracy they are concerned with by including discursive passages during which the narrator or a character alerts the audience to the dangers of the conspiracy in a lengthy comment or speech. For their effect, though, these texts depended primarily on their readers’ recognition that the experience of the family or protagonists at the center of the plot signified on the nation as a whole. This is why convent captivity narratives could dramatize the Catholic conspiracy so effectively. The Puritan captivity narrative, however, was not the only genre actualized in the tales of Monk, Reed, and Bourne. Like most mega-blockbusters of today’s cinema, the convent captivity narrative was a hybrid conglomerate of various popular genres. The Puritan captivity narrative provided the overall template and determined the narrative’s move from freedom to captivity and back to freedom. But the gothic novel, the novel of seduction, and the melodrama were of equal importance for it, as all three genres “explored issues of the sexual and social dangers facing women” (M. McCarthy 205).40 The convent interiors that the heroines explore are invariably the labyrinthine, unsafe spaces familiar to nine-

38 This, of course, goes only for American literary genres of the time. In British sensationalist fiction of the nineteenth century, an important forerunner of the modern thriller, the conspiracy scenarios already reached a much higher degree of complexity (cf. Wisnicki). The same is true for Germany where novels about secret societies – Geheimbundromane – projected equally complex conspiracy scenarios from the late eighteenth century onward. 39 Cf. Levine 15–103 for a discussion of the negotiation of conspiracy in Brown and Cooper. The question of when and why texts finally became able to dramatize political plots more directly has not yet been satisfyingly answered. First steps into this direction have been undertaken, however, by Jerry Palmer (cf. 93–135), and Adrian Wisnicki. 40 Cf. M. McCarthy 199–205 for a more detailed analysis of how these genres merge in convent captivity narratives.

142

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

teenth-century audiences from the gothic novels of Ann Radcliff, Matthew Lewis, and others. And just as these fictions frequently do, the convent captivity narrative embodies the threats of rape and torture that it constantly evokes in the figures of male Catholics. Quite tellingly with regard to anti-Catholicism’s translation of the economic into the religious, these priests occupy the structural role that sentimental seduction novels since Richardson’s Pamela (1741) usually reserved for the scheming aristocrat – with the crucial difference that the heroine of a sentimental novel either preserves her innocence or dies, whereas heroines like Monk live on as “fallen women.” The influence of melodrama, finally, is palpable in the strict division of the world into absolute good and pure evil that is characteristic of all convent captivity narratives. The proximity of the Catholic priest to the villain of melodrama is brought particularly pointedly to the fore in a self-reflexive scene in Frothingham’s Six Hours in a Convent. When he has knocked the evil priest unconscious, the protagonist’s working-class ally draws “a respectable pair of whiskers on the man’s cheek, and also paint[s] a fierce moustache on his upper lip” (41). Because it was by far the most successful convent captivity narrative and the only one still used today to generate anti-Catholic sentiment, I will focus on Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures in the remainder of this section, although I will occasionally refer to other texts as well.41 Most of Maria Monk’s life is shrouded in mystery. She turned up in New York City in 1835 where she presented herself as a fugitive from the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal where she allegedly spent several years as a student and later as a novice and nun. Even these basic claims, however, are impossible to verify. What is certain is that Monk’s account of her time in the convent is mostly fabricated, even if she did indeed spend time in this institution. What also seems sure is that Monk did not write her narrative herself, but that it is the joint product of four fervent anti-Catholics: William K. Hoyt, George Bourne, the author of the fictional convent captivity narrative Lorette, which David Reynolds has called “the prototype” of the genre (Faith 181), Theodore Dwight Jr., the nephew of Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, and John Jay Slocum, who later claimed to have written down the text alone from Monk’s dictation and who assumed the role of editor for subsequent editions of Monk’s narrative (cf. M. McCarthy 266–82). The first doubts concerning Monk’s authorship were raised almost immediately after the publication of her Disclosures in January 1836. The debate her narrative sparked, however, focused largely on the veracity of her claims and her

41 Even today excerpts from Awful Disclosures are used on some websites to alert readers to the evils of Catholicism.

The Convent Captivity Narrative

143

character. Many Catholics and even some Protestants tried to disprove her accusations by stressing that the Hotel Dieu Nunnery did not look at all as Monk described it; others cast her as a prostitute, and even her mother stepped forward and declared that her daughter had been hallucinating ever since an accident suffered during early childhood had damaged her brain. Interestingly, twentiethcentury critics have largely taken these claims to be the truth, and even the otherwise careful Ray Allen Billington once calls Monk “an immoral tart” (qtd. in M. McCarthy 306).42 The Protestant public of the 1830s, however, believed Monk. She was well received in New York society and even rumored to be “romantically involved” with Samuel Morse at one point (Roy 66). Those who cast doubt on her and her narrative were attacked by her supporters and brandished as harboring hidden sympathies for Catholicism or being even more directly associated with the alleged conspiracy (cf. M. McCarthy 332–33). In a fashion typical of conspiracy theory discourse, efforts to dismiss the specter of conspiracy thus were seen as evidence that the conspiracy really existed. In fact, Awful Disclosures caused a veritable publication battle, as both supporters and opponents published lengthy pamphlets trying to prove or disprove Monk’s claims, wrote parodies ridiculing her alleged experiences, or published parodies parodying the parodies.43 At the beginning, Monk’s supporters clearly had the upper hand in this debate. As time passed, though, Monk’s public image deteriorated, mostly because she gave birth to another child out of wedlock in 1838, and after trying to rob a customer in a brothel she was sent to prison in 1849 where she died a few months later (cf. M. McCarthy 304). Somewhat curiously, though, the trust in the veracity of her Awful Disclosures was not affected by this. Immediately after publication, the book became a bestseller and continued to sell exceptionally well throughout the nineteenth century but particularly until the end of the 1850s. Allegedly, the book sold 20,000 copies within one week and 300,000 until 1860 (cf. Roy 25). While these numbers cannot be verified beyond doubt, Monk’s was clearly by far the most popular convent captivity narrative, the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of KnowNothingism,” as Billington has called it (Protestant 108). Throughout the period that I am interested in here, then, many people regarded Awful Disclosures as a trustworthy account of the true nature of Catholicism.44

42 M. McCarthy 302–67 offers the most comprehensive account of what is known about Monk and how various parties tried to manipulate her public image. 43 For an overview of these texts, cf. Billington, Protestant 104–07; and M. McCarthy 238–39. 44 Walt Whitman, as Reynolds reports, re-read Monk’s Disclosures on his death-bed, apparently untroubled by the turns her life had taken after her short time in the limelight (Beneath 65).

144

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

This observation alone is bound to cast some doubt on Susan Griffin’s argument that escaped nuns were regarded as fallen women and that their status was therefore a highly precarious one. According to Griffin, the major cultural function of convent captivity narratives was to call “the testimony of the religious woman into doubt” (“Awful” 94). The escaped nun, she argues, was a fundamentally untrustworthy and unreliable witness, one who had not only turned Catholic at one point but committed various sins of the flesh in addition to this. As the most obvious embodiment of the problems of female spirituality, the figure of the unreliable escaped nun, Griffin contends, voiced anxieties concerning the culture’s increasing tendency to regard women as the prime representatives of religious and civil virtues. From this vantage point, convent captivity narratives functioned as means of resistance against the process that Ann Douglas has called the “Feminization of American Culture.” However, Monk was no social outcast, and, as her reception in society indicates, she was not regarded as a prototypical fallen woman – at least not until she had her second child. Instead, the way she and her story were received testifies to the high value that American Protestants ascribed to conversion, to “a profession of true faith resulting from a genuine religious experience.” Monk had clearly sinned, but she had found her way back to God. Moreover, as a renegade nun with insider knowledge, she was not only “best equipped to expose the insidious work” of the Catholic Church (Davis, “Themes” 221), “her willingness to risk honor and life for the sake of her country and the dignity of all womankind was [also] eloquent proof of her redemption” (222).45 Still, Griffin is right in so far as assuming the position of public witness against one’s former church was more difficult for female renegades than for male ones, because women in general were regarded as unfit for the public sphere at that time (cf. “Awful” 101). William Hogan, a former priest who became a fervent anti-Catholic, faced considerably less criticism than Maria Monk, Rebecca Reed, or Rosamond Culbertson for his indictment of Catholicism in pamphlets such as A Synopsis of Popery; As It Was and As It Is (1847). Accordingly, escaped nuns employed a variety of strategies in order to justify their stepping forward and telling their story and to confirm their credibility. Monk, Reed, and others assumed the pose of “reluctant” witnesses (Roy 36), always emphasizing that they did not seek popularity but had only gone public to warn others. Thus, in the sequel to her Disclosures, Monk relates how she confessed her sins to a Protestant reverend because she thought that she was dying. However, “My anticipations of

45 On the importance of renegade figures for conspiracy theory, cf. Hofstadter, “Paranoid” 34– 35.

The Convent Captivity Narrative

145

death proved unfounded; for my health afterward improved.” And she continues: “[H]ad I not made my confession on that occasion, it is very possible that I never might have made them” (293). As it is, though, the reverend converts her to Protestantism and, together with others, finally convinces her that she has to go public. Hence, Monk implies that the only reason why she did not suffer the fate befitting all fallen women was that God intervened and rescued here. He wanted her to live in order to testify to the evils of Catholicism. The female witnesses’ reluctance to become public figures was also underlined by the male editors whose marks are omnipresent in allegedly real convent captivity narratives. These editors confirmed the women’s claims that they did not seek popularity and defended them against attacks by reacting to or trying to preempt criticism. Early on in her narrative, for instance, Monk relates how, still as a novice, she becomes temporarily disaffected with the nunnery and leaves it. A little later, though, she is overcome with the desire to return. Knowing that the Mother Superior will only accept her again if she presents her with a sum of money, Monk “resolve[s] to obtain money under false pretences,” telling people that it is for her mother’s pension. From the second edition onwards, the paragraph in which she makes this confession is accompanied by a footnote in which her editor, John Jay Slocum, reminds the reader that when she was stealing, Monk “was a Roman Catholic, and was only acting out the principles of her religion” (38). The episode, he suggests, does not invalidate Monk’s testimony. On the contrary, confessing how dishonest she was then makes her appear even more honest and reliable now. Thus, the passage works to increase Monk’s credibility – and incriminates Catholicism for condoning theft and betrayal. Even more importantly, the editors did not only comment on individual passages and sought to control their reception. In most cases, they also framed the narratives by providing introductions and appendices. In these paratexts, which often equal the actual narratives in length and which tend to get longer with each edition, they defend “their” escaped nuns against more general accusations and try to dismiss the claims of publications written in response to earlier editions. Moreover, these frames often provide the big picture of the Catholic conspiracy, which the convent captivity narratives themselves as dramatizing narratives cannot paint. Thus, when one takes their paratexts into account, most convent captivity narratives, and Monk’s in particular, are hybrid mixtures of dramatizing and discursive bits and pieces, and as such they are already small communities of texts in themselves.46 This certainly added to their effectiveness.

46 In openly fictional narratives, there is usually no editor figure. But these texts, too, tend to provide additional information in footnotes and appendices (cf. Griffin, “Awful” 97).

146

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

Just as the power of anti-Catholic discourse as a whole hinged on the interplay of (primarily) discursive and (primarily) dramatizing texts, the power of its most popular genre was multiplied by the collaboration of narrator and editor, the simultaneous presence of the dramatizing and the discursive mode. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the credibility of the escaped nuns depended solely on male paratextual framing. Of at least equal importance were a variety of strategies the women’s narratives themselves employ in order to convince readers that they paint an accurate picture of life in a convent. To begin with, all convent captivity narratives are obsessed with details. From the second edition onward, Monk’s Disclosures includes detailed maps of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, and even in the first edition, she devotes one chapter to listing and describing its many rooms, dwells for paragraphs on where cupboards are placed in various rooms, which items certain drawers contain, or lists the names and family allegiances of fellow novices and nuns. Since many of these characters and things never reappear in her narrative, they are exactly the kinds of seemingly superfluous details that, according to Roland Barthes, create a “reality effect” for the reader and thus render the textual world believable. In some cases, though, Monk mentions specific details more than once. For example, when first talking about gags used to punish nuns, Monk writes, “These were kept in one of the community-rooms, in a drawer between two closets” (166). Later in the chapter, when she discusses various penances in detail, she repeats exactly this information about the location of the gags, saying that they were kept “in their depository, which is a drawer between two closets, in one of the community-rooms” (176). As Roy, who refers to this example as well, has shown, such repetitions are fairly frequent in Awful Disclosures; they create the impression of a “consistent narrative” and enforce the text’s claim to relate the truth (30). Another strategy that Monk employs to enhance her credibility is that she admits repeatedly that only she can vouch for many of the things she describes: “Many things of which I speak, from the nature of the case, must necessarily rest chiefly upon my word” (149). Such admissions can also frequently be found in fictional convent captivity narratives. In Larned’s The American Nun, for example, the protagonist replies to somebody questioning her story: “It is true, I have no vouchers for the truth of my story” (117). According to Susan Griffin, such passages make the skepticism toward the escaped nun’s testimony explicit and thus prove that her account was usually doubted. I would suggest, however, that such admissions have exactly the opposite effect. As they highlight the honesty of the escaped nun, they increase her credibility. There is, however, a slight difference between openly fictional and allegedly factual texts here. Fictional texts such as The American Nun can prove their protagonist right through the further course of the narrative so that by the end the text itself can vouch for the veracity

The Convent Captivity Narrative

147

of her claims. In allegedly factual narratives such as Monk’s, by contrast, such admissions stress that further investigations into this particular convent are needed. Thus, in such texts, admissions that the truth hinges on the narrator’s words alone are almost invariably followed by a phrase like “until further evidence can be obtained” (149). Accordingly, in the Conclusion to her Disclosures, which precedes the first edition as a Preface, Monk asserts: “I feel perfect confidence, that any facts which may yet be discovered, will confirm my words” (324). This confidence that other investigators will corroborate her claims goes hand in hand with Monk’s repeated assertions that there is information about the Hotel Dieu Nunnery she did not obtain. When she informs the reader that there are cells in a secret cellar where some nuns have been kept as prisoners for years, she hastens to add that “their names, connexions, offences, and everything else relating to them, I could never learn” (139). While this again stresses the trustworthiness of the details she offers, Monk also stresses that there must be further secrets she does not know anything about. Strategically deployed, these hints increase toward the end of the account of her time inside the convent walls. A few pages before she relates her eventual escape, she mentions that “There are three rooms in the Black Nunnery which I never entered” (192). She continues: “I am sure they must have been designed for some purpose of which I was intentionally kept ignorant, otherwise they would have never remained unknown to me so long” (193). Such remarks, quite obviously, are to invite further investigation into the convent, but they also encourage readers to fill these gaps for themselves and imagine what goes on behind closed doors. Readers are also invited to imagine things for themselves with regard to “the strategic omissions of information” which is also characteristic of Monk’s and other narratives of this genre (Griffin, “Awful” 99). This strategy goes hand in hand with the pose of reluctance that escaped nuns habitually project concerning their testimony. They may sacrifice their modesty and incriminate themselves by going public, but they have enough modesty left to not dwell on scenes of sexual abuse and rape. Accordingly, Monk emphasizes that the priests of Montreal have “an equal right to enter the Black Nunnery whenever they please” and that they have “complete control over the nuns,” but she then declares: “To name all the works of shame of which they are guilty in that retreat, would require much time and space, neither would it be necessary to the accomplishment of my object” (180). Withholding some information but offering more than enough hints, Monk preserves her modesty while simultaneously inviting “reader participation in the pornographic construction” of what she and other nuns suffered (Griffin, “Awful” 99). Her readers, she can be sure, will search their mental archive of priestly misdeeds for the worst images they can come up with, and thus Monk manages to

148

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

indict the priests without violating standards of what can be said more than necessary. Another strategic omission to be found in Monk’s and other convent captivity narratives is that they never talk about the Catholic Church in general and the threat it poses to the nation. They restrict themselves to the convent life they have, allegedly, experienced and never claim explicitly that there is a Catholic conspiracy underway aimed at conquering the United States. Monk only relates “specific abuses” and does not “risk claiming to have overheard conspiratorial conversations between Cardinals and the Pope” (Roy 33), because such claims would render her account less trustworthy. How, her readers might ask, could a simple nun learn of these plans and manage to escape alive? Moreover, including discursive passages in order to outline the larger picture of the conspiracy is completely unnecessary, as countless other texts and the editorial frames do this. The task of the escaped nun is to provide the gruesome details of the effects of Catholicism on individuals and, as she synecdochically embodies the nation, to represent the danger to America not directly but in symbolic fashion. Yet, even convent captivity narratives occasionally hint at the bigger picture. Rebecca Reed, for example, once mentions that the Bishop of Charlestown receives a letter in which the Pope congratulates him on converting so many Protestants (cf. 115–16). Monk, too, stresses that converting American Protestants is regarded as a particularly high achievement (136), and she also mentions a letter from the Pope once. The Pope, she writes, “request[s] that those nuns who possessed the greatest devotion and faith, should be requested to perform some particular deeds” which the Pope details in his letter, but “of which no decent or moral person could ever endure to speak” (182). This, in fact, is one of only two moments at which Monk’s narrative moves beyond the walls of the Montreal convent.47 Not only does she cast the Pope as indecent and immoral, she also implies that there is a purpose behind the abuses she and others suffer, that the attack on female virtue, whose details she once again refuses to spell out, is part of a larger scheme – a plot against the virtues of the republic.

47 The other moment occurs quite early in the narrative, when Monk reports that the nuns produce a beautiful carpet which is “sent to the King of England, as an expression of gratitude for the money annually received from the government” (27). As Beecher and Morse did before, Monk thus artfully aligns American democracy’s newest enemy with the oldest one, suggesting that the Pope poses a threat similar to the one the King of England posed in 1776. Moreover, it echoes claims of the revolutionary period that the Catholic Church was part of the British plot against the colonies. Finally, insinuating that the King finances the Catholic Church raises the specter of a union of church and state that all anti-Catholic discourse projects as the ultimate peril.

The Convent Captivity Narrative

149

The most powerful claim to the truthfulness of the escaped nun’s account, though, is made not by anything particular she writes but by the way in which she presents her story. The effectiveness of the convent captivity narrative hinges to a considerable degree on its rhetoric, that is, on the apparent absence of rhetoric and structure. As Jenny Franchot observes, in this case with regard to Reed’s Six Months in a Convent, the “narrative denies any interest in formal composition, offering instead a fractured structure whose very defects oddly mimic the authentic voice of victimized childhood” (146). The convent captivity narrative thus functions exactly like another nineteenth-century variety of the Puritan captivity narrative that also became prominent during the 1830s: the slave narrative. According to Maureen McCarthy, the readers of convent tales and slave narratives had very similar expectations. They did not expect sophisticated psychological accounts but authentic articulations of captivity. She concludes with regard to Monk’s account: “Many of the factors which make this work so boring for modern readers (the lack of a plot, and the frequent repetitions, for example) may have served to augment its authenticity for readers in the 1830s” (207). In other words, the more artless the tale, the more authentic it appeared. This lack of form and structure, however, does not at all come “naturally” but is the result of artful composition, as I would like to demonstrate through a quick analysis of the first part of Monk’s Disclosures, which ends with her escape from the convent. This part is almost exactly 200 pages long and comprises twenty chapters. The opening chapters of the narrative are devoted to Monk’s childhood and her time as a student and novice in the convent; they relate how she is seduced by the pleasant face that Catholicism wears to the outside world. One quarter into the text, then, in chapter six, Monk describes at length the ceremony in which she is made a nun. The most important events, however, take place once the ceremony is over and Monk is alone with the Mother Superior: The Superior now informed me […] that one of my great duties was, to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them. […] I now felt how foolish I had been to place myself in the power of such persons as were around me. […] She gave me another piece of information which excited other feelings in me, scarcely less dreadful. Infants were sometimes born in the convent: but they were always baptized and immediately strangled! […] Into what a place and among what society had I been admitted! How differently did a convent now appear from what I had supposed it to be! (48–49)

Just as Monk’s narrative reveals the true nature of the convent in this scene, the way of narration reveals that her account only poses as artless. What structures the scene, after all, is a carefully constructed chiasm: as she becomes, at least nominally, part of the conspiracy, her text enacts one of the central tropes of anti-

150

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

Catholic discourse; it is when Monk recounts the moment of taking the veil that she can do what authors like Beecher and Morse did on a larger scale, namely “lift the veil” through which Catholicism obscures its true designs (Beecher 125). In the terminology that Mark Fenster has developed to describe the structure of contemporary conspiracy narratives, this scene clearly constitutes a narrative pivot – a moment at which the protagonist realizes that things are fundamentally different from how s/he expected them to be. In late twentieth-century conspiracy films and novels such a pivot also usually occurs about one quarter into the story. There is, however, a crucial difference between what Monk experiences and what the heroes of Dan Brown’s novels or Hollywood films experience. These latter narratives usually feature two major narrative pivots. At the first the protagonist realizes that something is going on, but only at the second does s/he realize what is really happening and who is responsible for it. Thus, Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s J.F.K., for example, realizes thirty minutes into the film that Kennedy must have been killed by a conspiracy, but it takes him another two hours to identify the conspirators and their motives. Monk’s Disclosures, by contrast, features only one major narrative pivot. Because Monk is now a member of the convent, and as such part of the conspiracy, so to say, she is voluntarily provided with the information that investigators like Garrison have to piece together for themselves. There are various reasons why Monk does not attempt to flee from the convent right away once she has learned what is really happening there. To begin with, as Monk repeatedly points out, there is no opportunity to escape. The convent is like a prison, and the nuns are treated as inmates. Moreover, the fact that she does not even attempt to escape for a long time testifies to Catholicism’s control over her mind. Once the initial shock has passed, she begins to doubt that her own reaction is adequate and begins to wonder whether the Mother Superior is not right after all. “I must acknowledge the truth,” she writes, “and declare the truth, that all this had an effect on my mind” (49). She offers the following explanation: “I had been several years under the tuition of Catholics, and was ignorant of the Scriptures, and unaccustomed to the society, example, and conversation of Protestants” (50). During her time as a student and novice she has been so thoroughly indoctrinated that her value system is now entirely twisted, that she has lost almost all natural sense of good and evil, even in the face of horrific crimes. On the most basic level she knows that what is happening is wrong, but she does not trust her own feeling and instead relies on deceiving authority figures. Thus, her reaction dramatizes the harmful effects of Catholic education on Protestant girls and makes the reader wonder which values mothers who were educated in convents are passing on to their children. Finally, there is a narrative reason why Monk cannot attempt to escape just yet. So far, she has only heard about the crimes committed in the

The Convent Captivity Narrative

151

convent, but she has not observed any capital crime herself. She is thus not yet a good enough witness against Catholicism. Accordingly, a substantial part of the remainder of her narrative is devoted to corroborating what she has heard already, providing eye-witness accounts of the crimes she already knows are being committed. As Monk explores the “convent’s maze of secret chambers” (Griffin, “Awful” 95), she witnesses shocking crimes roughly every fifty pages: she has to helplessly observe the murder of a nun (cf. 102), sees how a newly born baby is baptized and killed (cf. 155), and eventually finds a book that chronicles all births, baptisms, and – by implication – also murders that have occurred in the convent, making her realize that such killings are almost daily occurrences (cf. 195). Between these detections connected to murder she frequently alludes to the priests’ sexual crimes. She suggests that she is raped at her first confession after taking the veil and implies that the priests habitually use the confessional to satisfy their carnal desires (cf. 108–09). While she always only hints at the sex crimes, she details at length the various humiliating penances that are frequently imposed on disobedient nuns and describes in detail the instruments of torture available for the more severe cases (cf. 166–70, 175–79). Most parts of Monk’s narrative, however, do not expose gruesome crimes, but chronicle either the minute details of convent life or how Monk and her friend Jane Ray, the only nun who is not intimidated by her superiors, subvert the orderly proceedings occasionally. Especially the long descriptions of prayers, needle work, and other daily routines are bound to confuse and bore today’s readers.48 For Monk’s contemporaries, however, I would argue, these passages were extremely effective. Since Monk often switches seamlessly from discussing murder and torture to prayer, she, first of all, suggests that the former is as common in a convent as the latter. Second, her detailed description of daily rituals projects convent life as a perverse travesty of the ideal of domesticity cherished by her readers and brings to the fore Catholicism’s “antidomesticity” (Franchot 128). Third, the description also makes clear how fundamentally Catholic religiosity differs from Protestant versions, and how elements considered crucial by all Protestants are abhorred by Catholics. In particular, Monk stresses that reading the “Protestant Bible” is specifically forbidden and considered “dangerous to [the] soul” (17). Especially during the 1840s when Protestants and Catholics in many cities publicly debated about the use of bibles in public schools these passages must have resonated powerfully with readers.49 Finally, the 48 As students with whom I read Awful Disclosures would readily confirm, I suspect. 49 Unsurprisingly, Monk does not fail to mention that she once “got a leaf from an English Bible” and committed the passage printed there to memory, thus proving that she has never been completely corrupted (39).

152

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

repeated depiction of the mindless tasks the nuns have to carry out effectively deglamorizes the Catholic rituals that many Protestants found strangely attractive, as Jenny Franchot has shown. Here, again, the effect hinges on Monk’s style, which is invariably merely descriptive and highly repetitive in these passages. By contrast, the regularly interspersed accounts of how Monk and Jane Ray repeatedly fool the priests or the Mother Superior, or how they steal blankets and sweets from other nuns offer moments of comic relief in the bleak world of the convent. However, they perform two more serious functions as well. Jane Ray is, on the one hand, the only nun who cannot be controlled by the rigid regime imposed on the nuns. Hence, as Schultz suggest, “Her character may be read in some ways as a metaphor for unruly democracy which undermines monarchical institutions” such as convents (Introduction xxvi-vii). She never completely loses her agency and thus makes sure that Monk does not lose hers either. On the other hand, though, Jane Ray also represents the horrible effects that convent life has on the female inmates. She is clearly mentally deranged, and her body is scarred from cruel penances. As such, she does for Monk what Sister Mary Magdalene does for Rebecca Reed in Six Months in a Convent: both are “‘body doubles’ […] for the narrators,” whose bodies display the effects of convent life that cannot be inscribed onto the body of the protagonists, who need their mental and physical health in order to step forward and tell their stories (xxiv). The variety of themes covered by Monk’s and other convent captivity narratives further explains the genre’s immense popularity. These narratives catered to very different needs. For most readers, they surely confirmed suspicions of conspiracy by revealing what was happening inside convents, but they simultaneously performed other functions as well. For some, they may have simply satisfied curiosity about Catholic rituals, while for others, they provided sexual stimulation. As David H. Bennett has pointed out, reading convent captivity narratives was the only socially acceptable way for middle-class readers to consume texts that revolved around sexuality (cf. 44). Accordingly, Richard Hofstadter has generalized that “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan” (“Paranoid” 21). Of course, the convent captivity narrative, as Franchot and Griffin have argued, also voiced anxieties over female spirituality and, through the figure of the Mother Superior, raised a “specter of female authority [that] disturbed many antebellum Protestants” (Franchot 130). However, I would contend that convent captivity narratives did not challenge the Protestant middle classes’ ideal of domesticity but confirmed it. After all, Monk’s narrative and other texts suggest that women are born mothers, as it is Monk’s maternal instinct that finally makes her flee from the convent. When she realizes that she is pregnant, the worry about what is going to happen to her unborn child overcomes her fear of punishment and the powerful indoctrination she has been

The Convent Captivity Narrative

153

submitted to. Problems thus only arise when women are put into an unnatural setting where they cannot act according to these instincts. Female authority, the text implies in similar fashion, is only a problem when it is directly exerted in such an unnatural setting – and by an unnatural woman who is not married but answers to and, as Monk implies, has sexual relations with more than one male authority figure. Within the confines of the family, though, where women exert authority only indirectly and where they are subjected to benevolent patriarchal control, it does not pose a problem. Accordingly, the convent captivity narrative projected domesticity not as the problem but as the solution to the perversions caused by convent life. If the genre thus contained anxieties about gender relations, the same is true for the issues at the heart of the Catholic conspiracy theory: class antagonism and religious conflicts among Protestants. These issues are displaced in Monk and others even more than in Beecher’s and Morse’s texts, as the narratives persistently suggest that the conflict that is going to decide the fate of America is the one between Protestants and Catholics. In fact, the externalization at work here can also be observed in many of the narratives’ settings. Bourne’s Lorette and Monk’s Disclosures are set in Canada, and Rosamond Culbertson’s allegedly true Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests (1836) is set on Cuba. To a certain degree, of course, this spatial displacement is motivated by the genres that converge in the convent captivity narrative. The gothic novel usually featured exotic, Southern European settings, and many Indian captivity narratives of the eighteenth century revolved around the abduction of Americans to Canada. Monk clearly evokes this context and, in fact, the allegiance between Catholic Canadians and Native American feared by the Puritans, when she stresses that many Indians are “remarkably devoted to the priests” (80).50 But more importantly, the Canadian setting underlines the nature of the Catholic threat that the convent captivity aims to project. The enemy is located on the outside and thus appears as “un-American” in the literal sense. However, the enemy is very close and has already begun to infiltrate the country. This is made perfectly clear in the second part of Monk’s Disclosures, which chronicles her flight to the United States and the attempts of the Catholic Church to capture her. Monk can cross the border, and so can the priests persecuting her. Moreover, the sequel adds an ethnic dimension to the previously entirely religious conflict, as Monk stresses that there is a group of immigrants to the United States that is blindly devoted to the priests and follows their every order: the Irish (cf. 288, 314). As Monk thus successfully translates the conflicts among American

50 On this connection, cf. Franchot 72–73.

154

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

Protestants into a struggle with a religious and ethnic Other, she actualizes a formula that would inform countless other anti-Catholic texts and sustain American nativism for more than two decades.

Ambivalent Anti-Catholicism: George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall Unlike the Masonic variant, the Catholic conspiracy theory did not disappear quickly. While the fear of a papal infiltration slightly subsided during the early 1840s, the end of the decade witnessed two events that renewed American Protestants’ fears of foreign subversion. Due to the Irish potato famine, the number of uneducated, often not even English-speaking Catholic immigrants increased even more in these years so that by 1850 Roman Catholicism was the largest Christian denomination in the United States (cf. Reynolds, Faith 180). At the same time, the failure of the European revolutions of 1848 and the Vatican’s alleged role in foiling them seemed to prove Catholicism’s anti-democratic nature yet again. But, as I have emphasized throughout this chapter, the attraction of the Catholic conspiracy theory has more to do with internal American events and inner-Protestant struggles. At a time of rapid change and diversification, the image of a religious and ethnic Other offered a vision of “national homogeneity” and worked to “reconfirm and authenticate […] American identity” as Protestant and classless (Griffin, Anti-Catholicism 94). Unsurprisingly, then, the convent captivity narrative remained popular. The texts of the 1830s were reprinted again and again, and new ones were published continuously. But during the 1840s and 1850s the tales of nuns who escaped from convents on their own were supplemented by a number of narratives that related how Protestant men freed their sisters and future wives from convent captivity. This group of texts, in turn, has a lot in common with another genre of antiCatholicism popular at the same time: with stories that revolve around the “contest between the Catholic fathers (lay and clerical alike) who imprison [a young girl] and the Protestant youths who seek to rescue her” (Griffin, Anti-Catholicism 95–96). Both kinds of texts empower men, as they turn them from helpless observers into active agents of liberation. Thus, they react to a crisis of masculinity that, during the 1850s, affected the sons of those who had fought in the American Revolution (92). Apart from this “special task,” though, the form and function of these tales of rescue from a nunnery is largely identical with that of the convent captivity narrative proper. This is particularly apparent with regard to Charles Frothingham’s Six Hours in a Covent, with which I opened this chapter. Six Hours not only

George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall

155

consciously refers back to Reed through its title; just as all convent captivity narratives, the novella is a hybrid text. On the one hand, Six Hours is clearly marked as fiction. It is, according to its subtitle, A Tale of Charlestown Life in 1834, and the publisher’s “Preface to the Eighth Edition” underlines this status when it refers to “[a]ll of Mr. Frothingham’s ‘convent stories’.” On the other hand, though, the publisher also stresses the text’s truth claim, arguing, somewhat curiously, that “The single fact that a near relative of [Frothingham’s] was an inmate of the Convent at Charlestown, in 1834, is deemed sufficient to substantiate all statements presented the public as facts” (n. pag.). This confusion of fact and fiction is further increased by the autodiegetic narrator bearing the name of the author, Charles Frothingham, although his life story differs considerably from that of his creator. As they imagine men of the upper and lower classes collaborating in order to rescue Protestant girls, texts such as Frothingham’s successfully erase religious as well as class differences among Protestants in a manner nearly identical to the convent captivity narrative proper. However, the very effort “to seduce American readers into submerging their […] antagonisms for the sake of acquiring a ‘native’ American identity” causes the conflicts that the texts work to deflect from to surface occasionally (Griffin, “Awful” 104). For instance, on the very first page of Six Hours in a Convent the narrator stresses that his father “heartily detested the mushroom aristocracy that was continually springing up” on American soil in an effort to mimic that of Europe (7–8), and thus implicitly, and probably unwittingly, acknowledges that class antagonism does in fact exist. While such an admission is most likely an accident in Frothingham, the notion of a moneyed elite that exploits the lower classes is central to the writings of an author whose books outsold Frothingham’s by large: George Lippard. Several of the novels that Lippard wrote during the 1840s and 1850s explore the exploitation of the working classes at the hands of what Lippard regarded as America’s new aristocracy, the merchants. Since Lippard does not attempt to deflect from the reality of class struggle but openly acknowledges it, he is also far more critical of the Catholic conspiracy theory than many of his contemporaries. In fact, as I would like to argue here, large parts of his greatest bestseller The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1844–45) can be read as a parody of the anti-Catholic discourse, as Lippard lays bare the functions that such accusations performed for the Protestant community. However, criticizing the Protestants’ motives for voicing them does not mean that Lippard dismisses such suspicions entirely. In fact, The Monks of Monk Hall is a highly ambivalent text, since parts of it, as I would also like to show, affirm the Catholic conspiracy theory. These passages anticipate the more explicit exposure of Catholic plots in some of Lippard’s later texts, especially in his last novel New York: Its Upper Ten and

156

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

Lower Million (1854) where he projects an image of Catholic conspiracy that has much in common with that of Lyman Beecher or Samuel Morse. The Monks of Monk Hall was published in Philadelphia, the Quaker city of its title, in ten installments in the fall and winter of 1844 and 1845 (cf. Denning 88). The novel belongs to the international genre of the city mystery that proliferated in Europe and the U.S. after the enormous success of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43), and as is typical of this genre, The Monks of Monk Hall comprises a multitude of intertwined plots related in discontinuous and often confusing fashion.51 What holds the narrative together is the strict unity of time and place that Lippard adheres to in this and all his subsequent novels – the action comprises three nights and days and takes place only in Philadelphia and mostly inside of Monk Hall. Almost equally important, however, is that the various plotlines all revolve around intrigue, betrayal, murder, as well as seduction and rape. As Lippard’s narrator puts it in a programmatic passage, he is especially concerned with the double standard that regards the seduction of a girl from a good family as a “horrible […] crime” but considers “a poor girl, a servant, a domestic […] fair game” (417). According to Michael Denning, it is especially the centrality of rape and seduction that distinguishes Lippard from other mystery writers of the time and places him in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and the gothic novelists (cf. 93–94). Like these predecessors, Lippard employs these tropes to dramatize and expose class antagonism and exploitation; they are “metaphor[s] for political oppression” (Ashwill 308).52 In addition, together with the title – The Monks of Monk Hall – the tropes of rape and seduction already hint at Lippard’s indebtedness to anti-Catholic discourse. Critics have noted this influence before but have not fully explored it. Jenny Franchot, for example, mentions that Lippard “lavishly multiplie[s] the forces of imprisonment” familiar from anti-Catholic discourse by projecting the characters as “helpless captives of capitalism, libertinism, and religious (Protestant, Catholic, and visionary) opportunism” (105). In similar fashion, Michael Denning and David Reynolds observe in passing that the novel “condemn[s …] nativism”

51 Ridgely 81–84 offers a concise overview of the novel’s major plots and subplots. In an often quoted passage, Reynolds describes the experience of reading Lippard as follows: “the typical Lippard novel is like Monk Hall [the convent-like mansion that gives one novel its title], a labyrinthine structure riddled with trap doors that are always opening beneath the reader’s feet and sending him tumbling into another dimension” (George Lippard 44). 52 In addition, rape and seduction in Lippard also express a critique of the ideals of domesticity and true womanhood. All of his novels feature at least one upper-class girl who is seduced or raped, thereby suggesting that it is the ignorance and innocence of bourgeois girls that makes them the ideal victims for seducers (cf. Denning 97).

George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall

157

(Denning 114) or that it performs a “wide-ranging attack on religious hypocrisy” (Reynolds, Faith 190). The most sustained analysis of the way in which Lippard engages anti-Catholicism is Carl Ostrowski’s analysis of how the Ravoni episode evokes and subverts fears of Catholicism. But since Ostrowski focuses only on one chapter of the novel, his analysis is, as I will argue below, too one-sided. However, Ostrowski’s more general observation that The Monks of Monk Hall is a “pastiche” of anti-Catholic exposé literature is very convincing (6). After all, the novel opens with a short preface in which the author claims that the following events have a basis in fact and promises “to lift the cover from the Whited Sepulchre” and to prove that “Philadelphia is not so pure as it looks” (4, 3). The desire that drives the narrative, then, is exactly the one that informs the antiCatholic texts of Beecher, Morse, or Monk – with the crucial differences that The Monks of Monk Hall revolves even more obsessively around the tropes of disclosure, unveiling, and revelation, and that the sins it aims to expose are not primarily those of Catholics but of Protestants.53 Significantly, most of these sins are committed in Monk Hall, an old mansion whose very name immediately evokes associations with Catholicism in general, and Maria Monk’s Disclosures in particular, when the reader encounters it on the title page. This first impression is confirmed fifty pages into the book where Lippard dedicates a complete chapter to the history and appearance of the place. Monk Hall, we learn, was erected “long before the Revolution […] by a wealthy foreigner” (47). This, however, is all we know for sure about the place, as everything else is shrouded in mystery. Various rumors describe the original owner as “a libertine, a gourmand, an astrologer [or] a wizard [who] consulted his friend, the Devil, at night.” Accounts also differ with regard to who inhabited the place after him. Some say it was a “Catholic Priest,” others claim that the mansion functioned “as a Nunnery [or] as a Monastery” for a few years and that “the mass had been said within its walls” (47). What these rumors have in common, of course, is that they all play on nativist fears of the foreign, the aristocratic, the pagan, and the Catholic – concepts that converge in the Catholic conspiracy theory. The anti-Catholicism thus evoked is corroborated by rumors about Monk Hall’s architecture. The building is said to consist not only of three levels above ground but also of “three stories of spacious chambers below the level of the earth,” chambers that later Catholic inhabitants “converted into cells” (46, 47). In short, Monk Hall can not only be read as a “transformed Gothic castle” (Denning

53 In the first of the novel’s six books, forms of the verb “to disclose” are used at least eight times (cf. 4, 26, 27, 32, 58, 79, 108, and 137).

158

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

92) but also as a Catholic convent – a secluded space hidden from public view in whose subterranean passages horrible crimes are committed. The further descriptions of Monk Hall and its inhabitants, spread throughout the novel, sustain this reading, as virtually all tropes of anti-Catholicism are evoked at some point. A place of “secrecy” (53), Monk Hall is populated each night by libertine “Monks” (49) who perform strange rituals before they seduce innocent girls; it is guarded by a “police” that evokes the specter of the priest police so feared by Morse and Beecher; it boasts a “Lady Abbess” called “Mother Perkins” (76), who rules over the Monks’ female victims as the Mother Superior does in Monk’s Awful Disclosures; it has several torture chambers where hapless victims can be questioned with the aid of “the poker and the tongs heated to a white heat” (326); and, as in the cellar of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, at its bottom is a “Pit” where murdered victims can be made to disappear (304). However, in convent captivity narratives and other anti-Catholic texts, convents are not representative of their surroundings, especially when they are located on American soil. They are habitually cast as the fortresses of foreign intruders, as the advance guard of an invasion that has only begun. In The Monks of Monk Hall, though, Monk Hall synecdochically represents both “Philadelphia and, by extension, the United States” (Ashwill 298). The building’s façade combines “one plain mass of black and red brick” with “heavy pillars” (46), thus appearing, as Samuel Otter observes, “to be both an anti-Independence Hall (which was famed for its stately Georgian brick design) and a travesty of neoclassical civic pride” (173). Even more importantly, as Lippard’s narrator makes perfectly clear in another chapter, the Monks of Monk Hall are not “old men with beads around their necks and crucifix in hand”; they are no foreigners but come from “the eloquent, the learned, and – don’t you laugh – from the pious of the Quaker city” (55). Members of Philadelphia’s upper classes come to Monk Hall each night to drink, gamble, seduce, rape, and even murder. It is the moneyed elite of the city, its new aristocracy, its “Merchant Prince[s]” (425), who wear the garb of monks in order to “cloak” their crimes. The very men who rescue girls from convents in Frothingham are responsible for their doom in Lippard. Monk Hall, then, is a place where Protestants temporarily assume the alleged habits of Catholic priests and playfully also their identities to sin with impunity. Its Catholic name “ironically marks the sight of Protestant crime” (Ostrowski 12). But what is more, the novel reverses one of anti-Catholicism’s most central mantras – namely that the pious surface that Catholics present to the world hides their immoral and undemocratic intentions. The Monks of Monk Hall is as concerned with the difference between appearance and reality as Beecher, Morse, Reed, or Monk are. What the novel “unveils,” however, is that the crimes usually

George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall

159

associated with Catholics are committed by Protestants. The novel thus highlights the class conflict deflected from by the Catholic conspiracy theory. It suggests that Protestants of the upper classes are literally and symbolically raping those of the lower ones, and it exposes how the specter of a Catholic conspiracy distracts attention from these internal and more pressing issues, how it keeps the people from turning against those really responsible for their suffering. Fully aware of the soothing power of the Catholic conspiracy theory, Lippard’s novel takes on this theory on various levels, exposing how it not only submerges other conflicts but also how it simplifies complex relations. To begin with, those who come to Monk Hall each night to do evil may well be described as conspirators. However, ingeniously solving the problem that the single largescale plot that discursive texts expose cannot be properly dramatized anyway, there is no master plot that all evil characters advance with quasi superhuman determination and complete disregard to their personal benefits in The Monks of Monk Hall. Instead, the novels’ conspirators are only too human. Their efforts frequently fail and their plans go wrong, most often because the satisfaction of their immediate desires foils the achievement of their long-term goals – something that never happens to the priests in Monk or Morse, who appear otherwise as passion-ruled as Lippard’s fake monks. Since the conspirators have no unified agenda but different and often conflicting ones, they form a variety of short-lived and shifting alliances over the course of the novel. At times, some of them are allies, at other moments they are bitter enemies because their plans are at odds. Since some of them thus prevent crimes planned by others, the novel ultimately challenges a Manichean worldview that firmly divides the world into good and evil: “Few characters are wholly evil, but neither are any totally good” (Ashwill 307). For instance, Devil-Bug, the hideous master of Monk Hall, eventually helps a girl escape from the mansion because he once loved her mother. When he remembers the time he spent with her, even this “devil in human shape” appears “beautiful” for a moment (339). The novel’s critique of anti-Catholic discourse is arguably most obvious in a chapter located almost exactly in the middle of the book that describes the meeting of “The Universal Patent Gospel Missionary Society” (262), an evangelical society formed in order to convert the Pope to Protestantism. The name of the reverend who heads the society, “F.A.T. Pyne,” (261) prepares from the outset for the satire that is to follow, and indeed, the whole scene must be understood as a parody of Protestant conspiracy theorizing that drives anti-Catholic discourse over the top and exposes its selfish motivations. Echoing Beecher’s Plea for the West, Pyne explains that the Pope intends to “bu[y] up the state of Missouri, in order to erect a Papal Kingdom on American soil.” Unlike Beecher, though, who presented the Catholics as succeeding in gaining control over the West, this

160

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

conspiracy theorist claims that this plan “has fell through – been nullified” by the work of the society (266). Typical of the 1840s, the religious conflict thus spelled out is also ethnicized, as Pyne calls on his followers to “discharge” all Catholics they might employ, but “especially an Irish Pagan hired girl” (267). If Pyne offers the complete picture of the papal plot as Beecher and Morse did in their pamphlets, another speaker dwells on the gloomy details that are to confirm the anti-democratic and brutal nature of Catholicism in the fashion of the convent captivity narrative. He relates how a group of American missionaries were ordered “to kiss the Pope’s toe” when they went to the Vatican to take “a view of old Anti-Christ” – an act of submission that recalls the humiliating penances described by Maria Monk, such as kissing the floor or drinking the water in which the Mother Superior has washed her feet. As upright democrats and Protestants, the Americans refused to do this – with the result that they were never seen again. The speaker insinuates, however, that they have been turned into “Bologna sausages” in a factory “next door to the Vatican” (265) – an accusation that echoes Rosamond Culbertson’s claim that priests on Cuba were killing little black boys in order to sell their meat as sausages (189). What is important to note here is that the satire of this scene targets antiCatholic discourse, but does not exonerate Catholicism as such. Neither here nor anywhere else does the novel claim that the Catholics are not conspiring. What it does instead is that it exposes the motives of many Protestants for promoting such a conspiracy theory. Accordingly, the satire of anti-Catholicism culminates in an event that bitterly unveils the power of the anti-Catholic conspiracy theory to disqualify critics and opponents and to deflect from one’s own wrongdoings. At the end of the meeting of Pyne’s gospel society, an old man, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, points out that the Missouri area is not the only place where a reform of manners is much needed and that “the Missionary of Jesus [might] find room for much well-doing in our Courts, our Churches, our Streets, our Homes.” When he concludes with the exclamation “Down with Pagan Rome by all means, but down with the Paganism of Protestant Philadelphia!” Pyne and the others dismiss his demand in exactly the same fashion in which supporters of Maria Monk tried to destroy the reputation of those who doubted her account or even dared to offer evidence that it was forged: They call the old man “A Catholic! […] A Roman!” and throw him out of the building (269). That Pyne, “the Foe of Pagan Rome” (271), goes from the meeting straight to Monk Hall where he gambles away the money collected for fighting the Pope and decides to seduce his foster daughter, proves that the old man was all too right and scathingly exposes the hypocrisy of many Protestants. For Pyne as well as for others, the novel implies, a firm anti-Catholic stance is the best shield to hide their sins.

George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall

161

If the deflector function of the anti-Catholic conspiracy theory is most apparent in the chapter just discussed, the novel’s critique of the upper classes climaxes in Devil-Bug’s dream, which constitutes the most potent scene in the novel. In his dream, Devil-Bug is transported 100 years into the future, to the Philadelphia of 1950 and to the “anniversary of the death of Freedom” (386). All pretense at democracy has long been abandoned, the American flag – prime symbol of independence and republicanism – has been banned, the people have been officially enslaved to “the cotton Lord and the factory Prince” (389), and a new king is being enthroned, who in “royal pomp” and accompanied by his “sacred Clergy” parades through the streets (388). This scene, which ends with the divine destruction of this new “SODOM” (393), powerfully dramatizes Lippard’s concerns about the decline of the American republic and the values that the forefathers – and his personal hero, Washington, in particular – fought for. It expresses complete dissatisfaction with the status quo, suggesting that the revolution has not truly brought about democracy but simply empowered a new aristocracy that upholds the pretense of republicanism while exploiting the workers in a fashion akin to that of feudal masters. However, The Monks of Monk Hall does not project such a clear-cut vision of class antagonism, as this scene might suggest. As Michael Denning has argued, Lippard subscribes to “the vocabulary and rhetoric of an artisan republicanism,” but ultimately his novel fails to empower its working-class readers because it offers them no characters to identify with (103). Not only is there no working-class hero in the novel, the novel even largely “exclude[s] the city’s working masses,” as it focuses almost exclusively on social outcasts like Devil-Bug or members of the upper classes (105). Moreover, the class antagonism central to Devil-Bug’s dream and various authorial commentaries is also contained by the narrative’s moderately happy and openly conciliatory ending. Byrnewood, the son of a rich merchant and to a certain degree the novel’s protagonist and hero, kills Lorrimer, another member of the upper classes who has abducted and raped Byrnewood’s sister Mary. Moved by his sibling’s fate, Byrnewood returns to Annie, a servant girl whom he has seduced earlier, and marries her. Thus, while the upper-class girl ends mentally deranged and dishonored, the upper-class man’s desire for the working-class girl, just as is the case for Richardson’s Pamela, ultimately proves to be the trigger of her upward mobility. The place to which Byrnewood and Annie retire at the end of the novel, a cottage in the forest, evokes associations with both the pastoral and the frontier, two settings in which class distinctions traditionally dissolve, and thus underlines the vision of transcending class divides that the novel’s final pages project. I have already stressed that the novel satirizes not as much anti-Catholicism as the reasons why Protestants promote it. That the text as a whole assumes, at

162

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

best, an ambivalent stance on anti-Catholicism can be observed in condensed form in the Ravoni episode. Ravoni the Sorcerer enters the story rather late, in the fourth of the novel’s six books. A master of magnetism, Ravoni has been using his hypnotic powers and rhetorical talent to gather a group of devoted followers with whose aid he plans to eventually overthrow the existing social order. He is therefore another of the novel’s many conspirators, but he differs from most other plotters in that his plans are presented as benevolent ones. He bemoans that the U.S. has not lived up to the high hopes its founders had – “And what is that New World which they fondly hoped would become the Ararat on which the Ark of a World’s Salvation was to find a rest at last?” (423) – and intends to help America fulfill its promise of democracy and equality after all: “War shall be buried. Anarchy forever dethroned; all Treason against the Life of man, shall be eternally crushed. Men shall live, love and die in their peaceful beds. Priestcraft shall be no more!” (424). Ravoni’s plans for the future thus strikingly correspond to those of the Brotherhood of the Union, a secret society founded by his creator, George Lippard, a few years after the publication of The Monks of Monk Hall. As Carl Ostrowski has demonstrated, the scene in which Luke Harvey and Devil-Bug rescue the girl Mabel from Ravoni’s “temple” consciously draws on the tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon discourse and, in a fashion similar to the way in which Pyne’s missionary society is ridiculed, drives them over the top. The space that the Protestant rescuers enter is a “cloistered” one, where “columns of incense […] vei[l] the forms of beautiful women” (526, 524). The women that Ravoni has gathered around him from all over the world, the narrator observes, “were worthy of Moslem’s heaven” (528). In other words, the temple is a harem where, as the Protestant imagination has it, young and beautiful women are held captive. According to Ostrowski, though, Luke and Devil-Bug misinterpret Ravoni’s intentions. He argues that by exaggerating and undermining familiar tropes, Lippard “positions Ravoni as a humane reformer” who does not hold the women against their will (11). Since Devil-Bug eventually kills Ravoni, Ostrowski concludes that he “must be read at least in part as the victim of Protestant religious intolerance” (17). While I agree with this reading to a certain degree, the scene is far more ambivalent. To begin with, rescuing Mabel is characterized as one of Devil-Bug’s few good deeds in his life. Luke is certainly not a flawless character, but one of the most positive in the whole novel. He genuinely cares about Mabel, too, and marries her in the end. Moreover, Ravoni is not at all the pure idealist and benefactor as whom Ostrowski presents him. When he is first introduced by the narrator, he is described as dressing in the manner of “the Chevaliers of France […] before the night of the Revolution” complete with “the red-heeled shoe […] worn by the French nobility” (421). Ravoni thus appears from the outset as the embodiment of both the libertine and the elitist foreigner, as somebody who is not

George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall

163

at all unlike a Catholic priest. Moreover, that he is still wearing the garb of antidemocratic monarchism fifty years after the French Revolution casts serious doubt on his professed intentions. Lippard surely agreed with what Ravoni says that he plans – establishing an egalitarian society –, but it is never quite clear whether this is what Ravoni really intends, or if he only strategically deploys this utopian vision in order to augment his personal power and wealth. In any case, the means that he uses to impress his followers are more than questionable. He is a scheming manipulator who drugs Mabel to stage her resurrection. When Luke demands the girl from him, he only professes to offer her a free choice. As she is about to say that she “will go with [Luke],” Ravoni casts a hypnotic spell on her that makes her fall into his arms and declare that she will stay “[w]ith [him] forever!” (533). Finally, it is important to remember that the whole Ravoni episode is rendered by an authorial narrator. Whereas characters expose themselves as hypocrites because their words and actions are at odds in the Pyne episode, it is not only Luke’s and Devil-Bug’s perception that the temple is like a convent, but the impression that the narrator projects. The novel draws on anti-Catholic tropes to render Ravoni suspicious and to project Luke’s and Devil-Bug’s rescue mission as a legitimate and much-needed enterprise. Accordingly, The Monks of Monk Hall both critiques and fosters anti-Catholic prejudice at the same time. An early reader of Lippard’s to realize this was the mayor of Philadelphia who banned a stage version of the novel from being performed in November 1844. At that time, the novel had not even been completely published, and the Ravoni plot in particular had not yet been written. But what he had seen of the book was enough for the mayor to fear that a performance might lead to a new wave of anti-Catholic riots in a city that had been shaken by such violence only a few months earlier (cf. Denning 99).54 Maybe the mayor had missed the parody of anti-Catholicism that Lippard undertakes especially in the first third of the novel. Maybe he saw the parody but did not trust the men on the streets to get it as well. If the latter was the case, the mayor’s fears may have been well-founded, as believers in conspiracy theories frequently read parodies of such theories as confirmations of their suspicions. For instance, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) in which they satirically merge all existing conspiracy theories into an all-encompassing one is often cited online as proof of the fact that a world conspiracy has been underway for quite some time.55

54 The most thorough discussion of the cancellation of the performance is Curtis. 55 For example, in an article for conspiracyarchive.com, one of the largest online resources for conspiracy theorists, one contributor quotes extensively from the novel’s opening, claiming that it

164

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

It is therefore highly likely that readers who already believed in a papal plot found further evidence of a Catholic conspiracy in Lippard. Maybe, though, the mayor had simply noticed the ambivalence in Lippard’s treatment of Catholicism. This ambivalence is also palpable in Lippard’s subsequent novels, but it tends to assume a different form in the later texts. In his last novel New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million, for instance, the Catholic conspiracy that aims at subverting the liberties of the United States undoubtedly exists, which is why Susan Griffin includes the text in her discussion of nativist novels of the 1850s (cf. Anti-Catholicism). However, just as The Monks of Monk Hall is no clear-cut condemnation of anti-Catholicism, New York is no outright denunciation of Catholicism either. Instead, the novel postulates that one needs to distinguish between Catholics. As Lippard has a Catholic prelate explain (still, a large-scale plot can only be represented in discursive fashion), there are those Catholics plotting an empire in the American West, but there also is – and has always been – “another Church of Rome, composed of men, who, when the hour strikes, will sacrifice everything to the cause of humanity and God” (73). While it is a Catholic dignitary who presents this distinction, in most of Lippard’s novels of the 1850s, the division appears to run between simple believers and those holding an office in the church. As Shelley Streeby puts it, “Increasingly, Lippard distinguished Catholic laymen from rulers and claimed that although the former were most often true Christians and citizens, the latter threatened the republic” (American 50).56 Denning and Streeby have suggested that Lippard’s attitude toward Catholicism darkened in response to the Vatican’s role in the failed European revolutions of 1848.57 I am not convinced by this argument, not because the Catholic Church actually lost power as a result of these failed revolts (which did not register with many Americans, though), but because New York is not more ambivalent than The Monks of Monk Hall in its attitude toward Catholicism. After all, what Lippard undertakes in The Monks of Monk Hall is not a defense of Catholicism but an indictment of Protestant hypocrisy. He exposes how the anti-Catholic conspiracy theory deflects from internal conflicts, but he does not question the reality of papal designs as such. In other words – and to slightly modify the mantra of contemporary conspiracy theorists –, just because the Protestants are hypocrites

constitutes “perhaps the most honest and succinct introduction to the Illuminati as you’ll ever come across” (cf. Melanson). 56 Streeby claims elsewhere that, combined with “the belief that Jesuits were conspiring to take over the west,” Lippard’s rather positive opinion of Catholics in general led him to “support the Mexican War” as an apt way to compensate the loss of land in the West (“Haunted” 457). 57 Cf. Denning 114; and Streeby, American 49.

George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall

165

does not mean that the Catholics are not out to get them. In Lippard’s novels, then, there are two conspiracies at work – a Catholic and a capitalist one. The former is a real plot designed and furthered by scheming human beings, the latter is a system of oppression whose effects feel as if there was a master plan – an impression powerfully dramatized in Devil-Bug’s dream where the new nobility forms one front and their slaves the other. Consequently, the words of the veteran thrown out of Reverend Pyne’s meeting can be read as an authorial comment, as they neatly sum up Lippard’s own position: “Down with Pagan Rome by all means, but down with the Paganism of Protestant Philadelphia!” (269). In sum, then, Lippard has more in common with Frothingham than is immediately apparent. In both texts Protestant men – Frothingham and Jack in Six Hours, Luke and Devil-Bug in Monks – secretly unite in a countersubversive effort to rescue young women from the clutches of real or metaphorical Catholics. Both novels therefore reflect the tendency of nativist conspiracy theorists first observed by Davis to “curiously assum[e] many of the characteristics of the imagined enemy” (“Themes” 223). On a small scale, the novels thus enact what Protestants did on a far larger scale at exactly this time: they became conspirators themselves who united in secret societies to fight the Catholic subversion and eventually even united in a political party. Founded in the early 1850s, the American Party had its origins in such secret Protestant societies. It is still better known under the name Know-Nothing Party today, because, allegedly, its members were obliged to declare that they “knew nothing” about such a party when questioned by outsiders.58 The rapid ascent and decline of the Know-Nothing Party, which achieved enormous electoral successes throughout the country in 1854 and 1855 and which seemed destined for a few months to win the presidential election of 1856, continues to puzzle scholars. To my mind, the explanation offered by Billington still largely holds true. The party was initially successful because it was antiCatholic and neutral on the issue of slavery: In the south the hope of compromise [over slavery] and fear of Popery were probably equally important, in the border states Know-Nothings were actuated more by the hope of preserving the union than by alarm over Catholicism, and in the north hatred of Rome seemingly was responsible for most of the success the American party enjoyed. (Protestant 397)

What Billington does not spell out but what follows directly from the logic of deflection I have described here is that the Know-Nothing Party could remain neutral on slavery because it was so staunchly anti-Catholic. As several scholars

58 Cf. Billington, Protestant 380–436 for the classic account of the rise and fall of Know-Nothingism.

166

Chapter 3: Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory

have suggested, the discourse of anti-Catholicism displaced anxieties over slavery, because it raised the specter of an enslaved white nation.59 In all the texts I have discussed here in detail – Monk, Reed, Beecher, Morse, Frothingham, and Lippard – slavery is positioned as the ultimate peril of a Catholic take-over. For Morse, the inhabitants of Catholic countries are slaves; for Monk, the inmates of convents are slaves; and for Lippard, working-class whites are as much slaves to northern factory owners as the blacks in the South are to the proprietors of the plantations where they are put to work. As such, their texts obsessively revolve around the issue of slavery on a metaphorical level without ever tackling its institutionalized reality.60 Even anti-Catholicism, however, could not contain this issue indefinitely, as various events of the 1840s and 1850s made it ever more pressing. Thus, the forces that were tearing the country apart also eventually began to work on the KnowNothing Party. Northern party members began to openly assume an antislavery and sometimes even abolitionist stance, while delegates from the South increasingly argued that slavery was not an issue to be decided on the federal level but by each state alone. The southern branch of the party prevailed in this conflict, and northern members began to leave the party in large numbers from the middle of 1855 onward. A few months later, the party nominated Millard Fillmore, who was also the candidate of the Whig Party, as its candidate for the presidency. Fillmore was very unpopular in the North because he had signed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Consequently, the party, whose base for success had always been the North, suffered a severe blow in the presidential election of 1856 from which it never recovered (cf. Billington, Protestant 423–30). As Americans became more divided over slavery than ever, the precarious Protestant union that the Catholic conspiracy theory had constructed since the 1830s collapsed. One major factor in this development and, in fact, in the coming of the Civil War were conspiracy theories about abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and slaveholders that now gained an enormous popularity. These theories are the subject of the next chapter.

59 Cf. Franchot 104; and Fenton 123. 60 This is not to deny that there were some anti-Catholics, most notably maybe George Bourne, the author of Lorette and ghostwriter of Maria Monk, who were also fervent abolitionists and who regarded the struggle against the evils of Catholicism and slavery as inextricably connected. Cf. Bruce 98–100.

Chapter 4 Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power: Antebellum Conspiracy Theories By the time of the Know-Nothing Party’s demise, slavery had been a contentious issue for decades. This is not the place to recapitulate in detail the complex history of the conflicts and short-lived “compromises” that led to the dissolution of the Union and the outbreak of the Civil War. But in order to contextualize the argument I make in this chapter – that conspiracy theories were crucial in fueling the conflict between those for and those against slavery – I would like to remind my readers of how differently some of the most important events of the period were perceived by the supporters of slavery and its opponents. Moreover, while it is true that most supporters of slavery were located in the South and most of those who opposed it in the North, a positionality reflected by the fact that many of the texts I discuss here project the conflict as one between regions, one must be careful not to spatialize what is essentially an ideological conflict.1 The Missouri Compromise of 1820 convinced both the proslavery and the antislavery camp that they were losing ground and conceding too much.2 For opponents of slavery, the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state signified that slavery was not a dying institution as they had long hoped and that the slave interest was indeed a powerful one. Supporters of slavery considered the part of the bill that forbid the introduction of slavery north of the parallel 36° 30′ an infringement on a state’s right to self-determination. Moreover, since the expansion of slavery to much of the vast western territories was now blocked, they worried that the slave states would soon be in the minority and thus defenseless against laws passed by the Free States. The annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Mexican War after which Mexico was forced to yield what are today California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico were attempts of the proslavery faction to preserve their influence in the Union by adding new slave states to it. The antislavery faction, however, regarded the apparent ease with which the slaveholders got the federal government to do whatever they wanted as a worri-

1 In order to acknowledge that there is a certain correlation of ideology and geography, I refer to these conflicting positions throughout this chapter as “proslavery” and “antislavery” but also as “southern” and “northern.” 2 This and the following paragraph are based on Brogan 294–314. For a more extended analysis of how the antislavery camp perceived the events described, see Richards, Slave Power; for the slaveholders’ perception, see Ashworth 132.

168

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

some indicator of their increasing control over the nation. Accordingly, the debate over what should happen with the vast territory seized from Mexico divided the country. However, the crisis was for some time contained by the Compromise of 1850. Texas was admitted as a slave state and California as a free one although it extended south of the parallel 36° 30′. The slave trade was banned from the District of Columbia, but at the same time a stricter Fugitive Slave Law was passed. Finally, the New Mexico and Utah Territories were established, and it was agreed that its inhabitants should eventually decide whether they wanted slavery or not. The compromise eased tensions for the moment but did not dissolve them, since, once again, both sides felt that the other had got the better deal. The sectional crisis finally began to culminate with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Passed after much lobbying by Illinois’ Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, it extended the principle of popular sovereignty already applied to the New Mexico and Utah Territories to the territory that is today occupied by the states of Kansas and Nebraska. This outraged the antislavery faction in the North because it effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, as Kansas and Nebraska were part of the territory to which its regulations applied. After years of civil war-like conflict between proslavery and antislavery settlers who entered Kansas en masse in order to tip the balance toward their position, the antislavery interest won out, and Kansas was admitted as a free state in 1857. This, however, did not relieve the fears of the opponents of slavery, who thought that they had only won a battle but were losing the war against the powerful slave interest, which seemed to be able to overturn compromises whenever it suited its own goals. Moreover, earlier that year, the Supreme Court, in its decision in the Dred Scott case, had finally declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, as Congress, according to the majority ruling, did not possess the power to forbid slavery in federal territories. While advocates of slavery welcomed this decision, many of its opponents were shocked because the slaveholders now appeared to control not only the executive but also the judiciary branch of the federal government. Opponents of slavery began to fear that soon the right of states to abolish slavery might be declared unconstitutional. To halt this development, more and more people began to support the Republican Party and elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. Lincoln’s election in turn convinced the slaveholding interest that what they perceived as a continued infringement on their rights could no longer be borne and not resolved by political means. Even before Lincoln’s inauguration, the first slave states seceded from the Union, and on April 12, 1861 the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter. As we have seen in previous chapters, conspiracy theory was a privileged, and entirely legitimate, way of making sense of the world for Americans until far

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

169

into the twentieth century. But at probably no other moment in American history were conspiracy theories believed by as many people and as influential in shaping public opinion as during the years before the secession of the slave states. Even historians otherwise reluctant to recognize the significance of conspiracist visions frequently concede their importance during the antebellum period. Hugh Brogan, for example, talks of perceived “plots,” detected “conspiracies,” and collective “paranoia” on nearly every other page once he has reached the 1830s in the chapter “Slavery and its Consequences 1800–1861” in The Pelican History of the United States (cf. 294, 296, 298, 302, 303, 306). Brogan’s point has been reiterated by many other scholars over the past decades: Slaveholders became more and more convinced that their way of life was under attack by a conspiracy that wanted to abolish slavery. Opponents of slavery came to believe that slaveholders were plotting to not only extend slavery everywhere but to enslave whites as well.3 In this chapter I discuss these two competing conspiracy theories in which slavery, which looms as the ultimate peril in most conspiracy scenarios I analyze in this study, finally comes to the forefront. In the first section I analyze what I would like to call the abolitionist conspiracy theory which captured the southern imagination and that of the region’s northern supporters from the 1830s to the 1860s. Maybe because it never became quite as influential as the conspiracy theory that emerged predominantly in the North, it has not received much scholarly attention. David Brion Davis devotes a section to it in The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (cf. 32–50), and Leonard L. Richards treats it on a couple of pages in “Gentleman of Property and Standing,” his study of antiabolition mobs of the 1830s (cf. 65–71). While they do not dwell on this point, both scholars imply that the conspiracy theory remained rather stable over time. In fact, in an extensive footnote in which he lists some of the texts that project it, Richards explicitly suggests that “later works filled in details, but the basic ‘plot’ remained” as outlined by the earliest texts (66). However, I wish to propose a different understanding of the abolitionist conspiracy theory here. Conspiracy texts targeting abolitionists, I contend, fall broadly into two groups. The first group of texts was published between 1836 and 1838 in response to the activities of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS); the second group of texts came out from the mid-1850s onward as a reaction to the emergence and success of the Republican Party. It seems safe to assume that between these two phases people did not stop believing in an abolitionist plot,

3 Cf., for example, Davis, Slave Power and Fear; Foner; Holt; Howe; Richards, “Gentleman” and Slave Power; and Zarefsky.

170

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

but hardly any texts focusing on such a conspiracy were published between 1840 and 1853.4 As I will demonstrate, anti-abolitionist texts from the 1830s suggested that American abolitionists were the unwitting tools of the British aristocracy who wanted to disunite Americans in order to disqualify the democratic example America was setting to the world and to weaken an economic competitor. Accordingly, these texts performed a deflection function similar to the one I identified for anti-Catholic writing. Attempting to contain the destabilizing effect the debate about slavery and abolitionism had for the Union, they externalized what was effectively an internal conflict by holding the British responsible. As they focused on a domestic enemy, most anti-abolitionist texts published from the mid-1850s onward, by contrast, no longer deflected from the internal conflict but “merely” distorted it. These texts cast the members of the Republican Party as the masterminds of the conspiracy, constantly referring to them as “Black Republicans” in order to suggest that they were abolitionists in disguise who wanted to outlaw slavery everywhere. The later these texts were published, the more alarmist their tone became, until, after Lincoln’s election, they argued that the federal government had now been captured by the conspiracy. The Republican Party was certainly not a conspiracy, but supporters of slavery perceived correctly that its agenda was diametrically opposed to their own. As Brogan puts it, the new party’s “guiding principle was […] implacable opposition to any further expansion of slavery” (303). What is important to note here is that the Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery, not the institution as such. Its spokesmen stressed again and again that the party had no intention to meddle with slavery in states where it already existed, but those who cast the party as a vehicle of abolitionism ignored this just as regularly. The vast majority of the Republican Party’s members and supporters fought not against slavery but against what they called the “Slave Power.” As Larry Gara writes, “They feared the effect of continued national rule by slaveholding interests on northern rights, on civil liberties, on desired economic measures and on the future of free white labor itself.” He continues: “The distinction between slavery and slave power is crucial to an understanding of the sectional tension which led to civil war. It also helps explain how Americans could repress a rebellion led by a slave oligarchy and at the same time perpetuate a racist bias” (6). Other scholars have built on Gara’s argument and convincingly suggested that the notion of the Slave Power explains how resistance to slaveholding inter-

4 Richards list only two texts from the 1840s (cf. “Gentleman” 66). Davis does not mention any conspiracist texts about abolitionism from that decade in The Slave Power Conspiracy.

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

171

ests could eventually emerge as a majority position in the North. The abolitionists, who opposed slavery on moral grounds, always remained a minority and lacked the political influence to effect any significant change. If they alone had fought slavery, there would not have been a Civil War in the 1860s, and slavery would not have been abolished toward its end. But from the 1840s onward, more and more northerners who had no moral problem with slavery and who were often outright racists began to harbor concerns about the seemingly unstoppable expansion of slavery to new states. In this situation, the notion of the Slave Power, “a symbol for all the fears and hostilities harbored by northerners toward slavery and the South” (Foner 91), was crucial for uniting diverse groups such as abolitionists, conscience Whigs, or renegade Democrats under the umbrellas of the Free Soil Party in the 1840s and the Republican Party a decade later. As Leonard Richards puts it, “Men and women could differ on scores of issues, hate blacks or like them, denounce slavery as a sin or guarantee its protection in the Deep South, and still lambast the ‘slaveocracy’” (Slave Power 3). Accordingly, resistance to the Slave Power must be considered the founding ideology of the Republican Party.5 Warnings about the dangerous influence of the Slave Power usually assumed conspiracist forms, and the second section of this chapter explores what I will refer to as the Slave Power conspiracy theory. This conspiracy theory is remarkable because it is an exception among the conspiracist visions of the nineteenth century: it assumed from the outset that the enemy was not merely trying to but had already conquered the country. Slaveholders were said to have been controlling the federal government for years, sometimes even for decades, and many accounts claimed that most of the nation’s presidents had been either conspirators themselves or their helpless puppets. While some conspiracy theorists already began to “expose” the Slave Power plot during the 1840s, the conspiracy theory truly gained momentum and widespread acceptance with the Kansas crisis and the outrage over the Dred Scott decision. Its rise to prominence thus coincided exactly with the emergence of the second wave of anti-abolitionist conspiracy writings so that it is safe to assume that the two conspiracy theories fueled each other. Significantly, as these theories became prominent, the Catholic conspiracy theory began to lose in importance. The specter of a foreign foe plotting the downfall of the whole country could no longer deflect from the growing

5 Ashworth offers an excellent overview of recent explanations for the rise of the Republican Party. Critically assessing the approaches by Eric Foner, Michael Holt, and William E. Gienapp, he concludes that “Republicans saw a slave power where Democrats did not, because their faith in the northern social system was so great that they could explain the success of slavery in the South and even (to some extent) in the West only by claiming that normal democratic processes had been subverted or overturned” (142).

172

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

sectionalism within that country which found expression in two competing but, as we will see, structurally similar conspiracy scenarios.6 Due to its importance for the emergence of the Republican Party, the Slave Power conspiracy theory has received far more critical attention than its antiabolitionist counterpart. Virtually all studies on the origins of the Civil War or the rise of the Republican Party acknowledge its significance, and some scholars have even devoted monographs to the subject. As so often in the realm of American conspiracy studies, David Brion Davis was the first to explore it in detail. In The Slave Power and the Paranoid Style (1970) he approaches it on the basis of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style,” and thus, unsurprisingly, arrives at the conclusion that northern allegations had little foundation in truth. More than thirty years later, Leonard L. Richards made exactly the opposite argument. In The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination 1780–1860 (2000) he contends that northerners exaggerated southern unity and scheming, but that they had much cause to complain since the three-fifths rule of the Constitution, “whereby five slaves were to be counted as three whites in determining the number of seats each states would have in the House of Representatives” (32), secured an undue influence for the slave states on the federal level.7 Most recently, Michael Pfau has devoted a book to the Slave Power conspiracy theory. In The Political Style of Conspiracy (2005) he analyzes how Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, and Abraham Lincoln spun this theory in their political speeches. I build on but also critique this extant research here.8 By situating the Slave Power conspiracy theory within the larger history of American visions of subver-

6 Of course, both conspiracy theories were also fueled by a number of real conspiracies that occurred during the period. After the slave revolt on Saint-Dominique, which many northerners and southerners believed to have been “instigated by radical French abolitionists,” slaveholders became increasingly concerned about slave uprisings. The revolts led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 and Nat Turner in 1831 not only increased these fears but were often blamed on foreign or northern instigators (Davis, Fear 106). The Civil War was framed by two conspiracies, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. Moreover, fears about plots by “copperheads,” as the North’s Democrats were called, that circulated during the Civil War, were not at all unfounded. In 1864, for example, a group of Democrats who called themselves the Order of the Sons of Liberty “conspired to overthrow the governments of Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri” (Churchill 295). For an overview of perceived and real plots against the Lincoln administration, see Klement, Dark Lanterns. 7 Richards thus resuscitates in modified form an approach prominent in histories of the Civil War between 1865 and 1920 when “the Slave Power thesis became a formidable tool of historical explanation” for historians like Horace Greeley, Henry Wilson, or Eduard von Holst (16). 8 For general studies that address but do not focus on the Slave Power conspiracy theory, see, for example, Foner; Holt; and Grant, who situates resistance to the Slave Power within the larger context of an emerging northern nationalism.

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

173

sion I seek to bring to the fore a number of aspects that previous analyses have missed. I would like to emphasize here already, however, that I agree with Richards’s overall assessment. Of all the conspiracy theories that I examine in this study, the Slave Power conspiracy theory is the one that distorts the issues at stake the least. It still distorts them because the slaveholders were not involved in a conspiracy so that, in this sense, the Slave Power did not exist. But the slaveholders were a powerful interest group that, though not acting in secret accord, actively sought the expansion of slavery. In this sense, then, there really was a Slave Power. The first two sections of this chapter thus investigate two conspiracy theories that could well be described as mirror images of each other. The abolitionist conspiracy theory initially externalized the threat, something the Slave Power conspiracy never did, but with regard to the texts of the 1850s, when antiabolitionists focused on an internal enemy as well, there are important commonalities that my analysis will focus on. Both conspiracy theories were predominantly spun by what Daniel Walker Howe calls “oral literature” (cf. 25–26) – religious and political speeches that were later printed and thus made available to a larger audience in more or less revised form. In the fashion characteristic of the republican jeremiad, these texts – much like the anti-Catholic pamphlets by Lyman Beecher and Samuel Morse – invariably merged the sacred and the secular. They insisted on America’s divine mission, claimed the heritage of the Founding Fathers for their side and charged the other side with violating the Constitution. Even more importantly, and this is unusual for conspiracy theorizing before 1960, both theories focused on an enemy who was about to or had already managed to subvert the government. Assuming that the federal government was working against the interests of the people, both theories were overtly populist and far more explicitly concerned with the crisis of political representation than conspiracy theories targeting an external enemy such as the Catholics. Finally, both conspiracy theories performed a community-building function: the specter of abolitionist or “Black Republican” subversion strengthened cohesion among slaveholders; the vision of a Slave Power plot constructed a collective that had not existed before. In light of the important cultural work done by both conspiracy theories, it is initially surprising that there are virtually no literary texts that helped spin these theories – especially since fiction of the antebellum period is usually credited with exerting a huge impact on the formation of public opinion. But as I already suggested in the previous chapter, large-scale conspiracy scenarios, and this goes especially for the take-over of the federal government, could be dramatized only in symbolic fashion. Therefore, as I argue in the third section of the chapter, the one text that attempts to stage this conspiracy directly, Beverly Tucker’s The

174

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

Partisan Leader (1836), remains a fragment. The conspiratorial scenario that could be best staged in fiction was that of a slave insurrection. However, the few texts that dramatize such a rebellion, among them Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), do not blame northern abolitionists for the revolt but vicious individuals or the blacks alone – probably because the authors were worried about losing their white middle-class female readers in the North, many of whom leaned toward abolitionism. There is, however, one text that, dramatizing conspiracy in symbolic fashion, powerfully explores the impact that conspiracy theory had on the public mind at the time. Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1854), I argue in the chapter’s final section, turns its predominantly northern readers into conspiracy theorists who, after initial confusion whether they are faced with a Catholic, Slave Power, or abolitionist plot, have to embrace the conspiracy theory that probably appealed least to them, that of a slave insurrection. By way of this strategy, the novella brings to the fore how impossible it was to escape conspiracist thinking during the 1850s, while also laying bare the mechanism and attractions of this way of making sense of the world. In the final analysis, however, Melville’s narrative is as ambivalent as Lippard’s Monks of Monk Hall, which I addressed in the last chapter. Like Lippard, Melville analyzes conspiracy theory from a distance while at the same time spinning one himself.

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory The birth of the abolitionist conspiracy theory is a wonderful example of how directly technology can impact on conspiracist thinking. It emerged shortly after the steam press had been introduced to the United States. Due to this innovation, which made printing considerably cheaper, new magazines and newspapers were founded everywhere, but especially in the New England states, and the number of pamphlets published increased immensely. Many of the anti-Catholic texts that I discussed in the last chapter probably would not have been published without the steam press, but the new technology was even more important for the abolitionist conspiracy theory. Like the nativists, William Garrison’s American AntiSlavery Society made use of the new press to produce more and more propaganda material. While “they distributed 122,000 pieces of literature” in 1834, this number “rose to 1,100,000 pieces” with the help of the steam press in 1835 (Davis, Fear 107). Using mailing lists provided by sympathizers, they virtually flooded the South with abolitionist writings and drawings, hoping that the addressees could be won over to the cause and thus would further distribute the material (cf. Richards, “Gentleman” 50–52; Wyatt-Brown). Southern slaveholders were deeply concerned about this campaign. Since they largely failed to take into considera-

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory

175

tion the role of the new technology, they wondered how the relatively small group of abolitionists had the means to produce and distribute their material in such numbers. The answer they came up with was that the abolitionists received money from abroad and that therefore abolitionism was part of a foreign plot that pursued goals quite different from those it publicly professed to. One of the first to formulate this conspiracy theory was a later president of the United States. On August 22, 1835, John Tyler, in a short speech delivered in Virginia, for which he was serving as a senator at that time, attacked George Thompson, the English abolitionist, who was campaigning with Garrison at the time, as “a reptile who had crawled from some of the sinks of Europe.” The biblical imagery – Thompson is associated with the shape the devil assumed when he caused Adam and Eve’s fall from grace – echoes the rhetoric Cotton Mather employed when he described the Salem witch conspiracy. Like Mather, but also like anti-Catholic writers such as Lyman Beecher and Samuel Morse, Tyler draws on the trope of invasion to dramatize that a foreign foe has penetrated the community. He casts Thompson as an “unexpected evil” that “has invaded our firesides, and under our own roofs is sharpening the dagger for midnight assassinations.” According to Tyler, the purpose of Thompson’s actions is not at all philanthropic but “to sow the seeds of discord among us” (576). The abolitionists, he holds, are “fanatics” – a designation that will also appear again and again in these texts – who are being deceived by a British plotter whose agenda it is to estrange the North from the South. Tyler ends with an appeal and a metaphor also familiar from other conspiracy scenarios. “The attention of the whole people of the North,” he demands, “must be awakened to a knowledge of the true state of things” (578), as only the realization of what is really going on will enable them to foil the conspiracy. Tyler’s conspiracy theory, however, differed from other versions of the 1830s in one crucial aspect. While in his account Thompson appears as the sole seducer and mastermind of the plot, James Kirk Paulding’s Slavery in the United States (1836), William Drayton’s The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (1836), and W. W. Sleigh’s Abolitionism Exposed! (1838) all cast the British abolitionist as an agent of his country’s aristocracy. In these pamphlets the British aristocracy plays exactly the part that the Austrian nobility and the Catholic Church are assigned in anti-Catholic conspiracy texts. Moreover, the British are said to be conspiring for exactly the same reason. As “the cradle of republicanism” (Sleigh 22), the United States is “the bugbears [sic!] of despotism in Europe” – the threatening example of a shining democracy that “in some way or other must be divested of its fascinations” because its existence endangers “those royal and aristocratic privileges on which the thrones of Europe are supported” (116). But whereas Austria and Rome are seen to be trying to

176

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

conquer the United States by way of immigration, the British aristocrats are said to have settled on a different approach. According to Paulding, Drayton, and Sleigh, they are feigning concern for the well-being of American slaves, because they have discovered that the debate about slavery is America’s “weak point” and will prove “imminently dangerous to the union of the states” (Sleigh 123). In other words, the alleged goal of the British “abolition conspiracy” (Drayton 168) is to fuel and escalate the dispute over slavery in order to bring about “the dissolution of the American Union, the degradation of the American name,” and thus disqualify the example that America is currently setting the world (167). Unlike their Catholic counterparts, however, the British aristocrats are supposedly also pursuing an economic goal by instigating a civil war. Drawing on the rich archive of stories about piracy on the British southern coast during the late eighteenth century, Drayton casts them as a nation of pirates: “[T]hey are anxious to decoy our vessel on the rocks, that they may be enriched by the spoil of the wreck. Our ruined commerce and manufactures, would afford Great Britain a new and boundless source of affluence” (288). He suggests, maybe not entirely mistaken in this regard, that the British have abolished slavery in their colonies and the slave trade only because it yields them economic advantages: “[T]he English government, as it was induced by avarice to sanction the trade for centuries, was at length induced by the same motive, under a change of circumstances, to abolish it” (62). Significantly, the southerner Drayton and his American proslavery readers were not the only ones who believed this. According to Davis, “Brazilian slaveholders were similarly convinced that England employed philanthropy as a cunning pretext for economic imperialism” (Slave Power 44). Since anti-abolitionist conspiracy texts of the 1830s thus held the British chiefly responsible for abolitionist agitation, they needed to explain why a small group of Americans – and abolitionism always was a fringe phenomenon – were betraying “that goddess (Liberty)” and had joined forces with the enemies of American values (Sleigh 22). Generally speaking, the pamphlets cast abolitionists both as misled and deceived idealists and, more frequently, as insane. One the one hand, W. W. Sleigh suggests that American abolitionists are “actuated by the purest motives of doing good to all” and manipulated by “some crafty, designing persons […] behind the curtain” (20, 21), while William Drayton, in much the same vein, sees them driven by “honest stupidity.” On the other hand, though, Drayton casts them in the same sentence as motivated by “[h]eated fanaticism” (xiv). This concept, already employed by John Tyler in the speech discussed above, is crucial to conspiracy theories about abolitionism during the 1830s. Paulding, for example, dedicates a whole chapter to the “Fanaticism of the Abolitionists,” which, he suggests, was “instigated and directed” by the British enemy and has harmful consequences for society because it runs counter to the reasonable

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory

177

discourse that civic republicanism demands in order to contain party struggles and factionalism (281). Moreover, as Drayton’s definition makes clear, in antiabolitionist texts, “fanaticism” is a synonym for mental derangement. “[F]anatics,” he writes, “mistake the promptings of their overheated fancy – the vapours that rise from the molten lead of their own seething brains – for the dictates of inspiration” (xiv). He concludes: “They are a troublesome race, to whom the tranquilizing chair or straight jacket is the only effective argument” (xiv–xv). For the conspiracy theorists, then, it is primarily the abolitionists’ insanity, their “monomania,” as Sleigh puts it (22), that explains why they have become – and this is another central trope that occurs in many texts – the “tools” of the nation’s foreign enemies (4).9 Hence, what we can observe in these texts is an early instance of how the emerging modern discourse on insanity can be employed for othering opponents and disqualifying their agenda, while simultaneously explaining why they act as they do. While this strategy occurs here for the first time within the context of conspiracy theory, it would become even more important almost a century later. During the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, as we will see in the next chapter, American communists were frequently cast as well-meaning but mad fanatics who had been manipulated by foreign foes through mysterious techniques such as brainwashing. Since such a conceptualization of the transmission of ideas invited comparisons with the transmission of diseases, it does not come as a surprise that many movies of the 1950s, most famously maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), dramatized ideological indoctrination as infection. What is more surprising, maybe, is that, as Davis first observed (Slave Power 48), we encounter such language of infection already in the anti-abolitionist conspiracy texts of the 1830s. Drayton’s reference to “vapours” in the passage just quoted, for example, suggests that fanaticism is an infectious disease that spreads like cholera and yellow fever. Later in the text, he makes this idea more explicit when he writes about the “pestilential materials” that have twisted the minds of the abolitionists

9 All of these texts therefore dedicate considerable space to demonstrating how “mad” and harmful to the nation the abolitionists’ plans actually are. They stress that the slaves are better off “than nine-tenths of the laboring class of white free persons in any part of Europe” (Sleigh 30), that their standard of living would deteriorate if they were set free, that, for example, “a large portion of the free blacks would be perishing” quickly if left unsupervised and unsupported by their white masters (Paulding 59), that emancipation would lead to the “emigration of the whites” from the South (Drayton 155), and that “the whites would be exposed to all the consequences of revenge and malice” from the blacks (Sleigh 27). Finally, they also raise the specter of miscegenation, or, as they call it, “amalgamation” (Drayton 156; Paulding 61).

178

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

and that are now spreading further, and, so he implies, thereby infecting others with their mistaken beliefs (158). In similar fashion, W. W. Sleigh casts abolitionism as such as a “Pestilence” (28). Such tropes, however, not only anticipate antiCommunist texts, they also echo the language that Cotton Mather used when he tried to explain how the agents of evil whom the Puritan community had for a long time kept outside had managed to enter the community. For the abolitionist conspiracy theory, I would like to suggest, they performed exactly the same function. If casting abolitionists either as misled idealists or insane fanatics explained why they believed what they believed, the trope of infection, bridging the gap between the healthy inside and the decayed outside, explained how they had fallen prey to the ideology of abolitionism and had come to act against their own country’s interests. Significantly, such images of disease and contagion are completely absent from anti-Catholic texts. The reason for this is not difficult to discern. If these tropes are employed to explain how a foreign conspiracy finds domestic allies, they were unnecessary for nativist discourse. For writers such as Beecher, Morse, or Monk, the Catholic immigrants remained foreigners; they had entered the territorial realm of the nation but were not part of its community. Ironically, though, and this is another difference between the two conspiracy theories, nativist writers asserted over and over again that Catholic immigrants could become valuable American citizens and believers in liberty and democracy if they were only given the right education. By contrast, for abolitionists, much better educated but misled or mad, there was no such hope – at least according to writers such as Paulding, Drayton, or Sleigh. Apart from such differences, however, there are a number of important commonalities between anti-Catholicism and the anti-abolitionism of the 1830s. Imagining a foreign aristocratic conspiracy against core American values, both conspiracy theories performed very similar functions. Just as the anti-Catholic conspiracy theory externalized inner-Protestant religious and economic conflicts by projecting them onto a foreign Other, the abolitionist conspiracy theories of the 1830s attempted to contain the emerging domestic conflict over slavery by casting antislavery agitation as a foreign plot against the nation. Accordingly, anti-abolitionist conspiracy texts were produced across the country – not only in the South but also by northern authors such as Paulding, who in his novels had helped to create the myth of the Old South, or Samuel Morse, the nativist writer whose contribution to anti-abolitionist literature I discuss below.10 Moreover, since the Catholic conspiracy theory eased class tensions in the North, it is likely

10 On Paulding’s relationship to the South, see Watkins.

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory

179

that the vision of a foreign conspiracy that made northern radicals its unwitting tools performed a similar function for the South, enhancing a sense of unity in a region where the interests of slaveholding and non-slaveholding whites frequently clashed.11 If, in the terminology I employ in this study, the abolitionist conspiracy theory of the late 1830s thus mainly performed the cultural work of deflection, it also contained a significant element of distortion. As Leonard Richards has shown, anti-abolition mobs in the northern states consisted to a considerable degree of elite members of society, the “gentlemen of property and standing” that give his book its title (132). As representatives of an older “mercantile economy,” these rioters’ position in society was threatened by the progress of industrialization (139). Therefore, casting the abolitionist movement as a conspiracy did for them exactly what resisting the Masonic conspiracy had done for members of the working and lower middle classes a few years earlier. It was a distorted response to changes in society and a perceived loss of influence, which, in the case of the anti-abolitionists had the additional advantage that it could be construed as resistance to a conspiracy of foreign aristocrats. Like all conspiracy theories I examine in this study, then, the fear of abolitionist subversion is inherently populist both with regard to the deflection of growing national and southern conflicts as well as to the distortion of a northern conflict. The conspiracy theory enabled its proponents – supporters of a system that its opponents, as we will see, often labeled “aristocratic,” too – to fashion themselves as the defenders of democratic values, as those who stood up for the rights of the people against the agents of the English despots. Unlike the visions of Catholic intrigue, however, this first variant of the abolitionist conspiracy theory was fairly short-lived. After the publication of Sleigh’s book in 1838, hardly any texts devoted to the detection of a British plot were published until the 1850s. One reason for this seems to be that during the 1830s, anti-Catholicism probably forged national union and contained the controversy over slavery more effectively than anti-abolitionism because it targeted an entirely external enemy. What is more, when Sleigh’s pamphlet came out abolitionism appeared far less dangerous than it had done only two years earlier. The panic of 1837 had caused one of the severest economic crises in the history of the country and had hit the AASS as badly as many others. The Society could no longer afford to print as much material as in previous years – and since it had

11 On the relationship between slaveholding and non-slaveholding whites in the South, see Norton, People 265–66; and Watson. On the equally complicated relationship between poor whites and slaves, see Forret.

180

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

been the sheer quantity of their pamphlets which had fueled visions of conspiracy in the first place, the decrease in absolute numbers probably soothed some of these fears. Moreover, the many local abolitionist societies that had grown out of the AASS increasingly focused on areas where their claims fell on fertile ground and kept out of districts where the population was aggressively proslavery. Their campaigns thus lost much of their earlier potential to provoke either mob violence or conspiracy theorizing. Finally, by 1838, political antislavery action was well underway and had already begun to bear fruits. The controversial “gag rule,” first instituted in 1836, ensured that abolitionist petitions were “tabled” and not discussed in Congress, and the U.S. Mail Service, pressured by Democratic politicians and the federal government, refused to distribute abolitionist writings in the South.12 In short, then, by the end of the 1830s, abolitionism seemed under control and appeared no longer as a threat to the system of slavery. In fact, it had never been one. Over the whole period I am concerned with in this chapter, abolitionism never appealed to more than a minority of people in the North or South. As I argued above, what eventually motivated a majority of northerners to support an antislavery party were not concerns about the institution of slavery as such but about the influence and aims of the Slave Power – concerns that were fueled by the events of the 1840s and 1850s. Many in the South, however, interpreted the same events exactly the other way round. As early as 1850, northern Whig Robert C. Winthrop observed that “The Southern men have worked themselves up into a real belief that their rights are invaded” (qtd. in Gara 12). The Kansas crisis and the emergence of the Republican Party, which united the various efforts to stop the extension of slavery, cemented this feeling. While many in the North bemoaned the seemingly unstoppable progress of the Slave Power, southerners and their now fewer and fewer remaining northern sympathizers increasingly came to regard recent history as a series of successful attacks on slavery, as a set of concerted actions that threatened their way of life. In this situation, the abolitionist conspiracy theory gained new currency, but it had to be adjusted in order to function meaningfully in a transformed political landscape where it was now

12 Cf. Richards, “Gentlemen” 157–59 for a more detailed analysis of these developments. Richards discusses these changes in order to account for the rapid decrease in anti-abolition mobs after 1838. Besides the production of less material and the new focus on areas inclined toward abolitionism he also mentions a certain exhaustion of anti-abolitionism and a growing concern about slavery’s infringement of the civil liberties of white men (160–66). These additional factors, however, only affected the North and therefore do not help to explain why anti-abolitionist conspiracist texts disappeared so suddenly from the South as well.

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory

181

Republicans, rather than abolitionists, who appeared as the biggest threat to the South’s “peculiar institution.” Arguably the most representative text of the second phase of anti-abolitionist conspiracy theorizing is Conspiracy Disclosed! Kansas Affairs. Read! Read! Read! (1856), a collection of articles from newspapers and journals such as the Washington Union, the New York Day Book, or the Cincinnati Enquirer published over the course of that year. Arranged in montage-like fashion, sometimes with a short introduction by the anonymous editor but mostly juxtaposed without any comment, the articles touch on a broad variety of topics and offer competing visions of conspiracy. Some passages still paint the picture familiar from the 1830s, holding “British aristocrats” responsible for the growing conflict between North and South and considering Republican politicians as the new abolitionists and “the dupes and tools of the enemies of our institutions” (8). But most of the time the British no longer play any significant role in the plot anymore. Instead, the articles focus on various conspiracies masterminded by the Republicans, who are persistently referred to as “Black Republicans” (3, 6, 9) – a derogatory term used to suggest that the Republicans do not really care about the rights of whites and do not only want to stop the spread of slavery but are, in reality, eager “to affiliate or equalize with negroes” and outlaw slavery everywhere (8). This shift in focus is characteristic of the texts of the 1850s and 1860s. In almost all of them the British are mentioned at some point, but – with the notable exception of Samuel Morse’s The Present Attempt to Dissolve the American Union (1862) – all of them are chiefly concerned with the Republicans, thus replacing the external enemy with an internal one. Some of these texts suggest that the Republicans want to destroy the Union in order to permanently rule the North, and others argue that they want to preserve the Union but are plotting to subdue the South forever. All of them cast the Republicans as traitors, as “wicked and ambitious men” (Moore 7) who value power more highly than the preservation of the Union and the rights of the slave states. In short, the Republicans are projected as the embodiment of the destructive spirit of factionalism that Washington had warned against in his Farewell Address. Besides revealing the overall shift toward an internal enemy, Conspiracy Disclosed! allows for a number of other observations about the abolitionist conspiracy theory of the 1850s and 1860s. Because the pamphlet presents articles previously published in widely-read publications from all over the country, it serves as a reminder that the abolitionist conspiracy theory may have been particularly prominent in the South, but that it was promoted and believed in other parts of the country as well. Moreover, the collection brings to the fore that by the 1850s conspiracy theories about slavery had become an important instrument of party warfare. All articles in Conspiracy Disclosed! are from papers closely

182

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

aligned with the Democratic Party, and the collection as a whole functions as a campaign ad that warns in no uncertain terms against voting for Charles Frémont, the Republican candidate for the presidency that year.13 This, of course, raises the question to what degree Democrats strategically deployed accusations of conspiracy and to what extent they really believed that Republicans were abolitionists in disguise who were planning to violate what proslavery writers regarded as the “compromise” of the Constitution (Washington Despotism 19). But it is moot to speculate about the intentions of individual authors. There were almost certainly some who did not believe the charges they voiced, however, their accusations only proved effective because readers sincerely believed them. Moreover, since conspiracy theories were considered an entirely legitimate form of knowledge, it is safe to assume that many people, including the authors and speakers, found the accusations plausible. Finally, the different and sometimes competing versions of external and internal subversion that converge in Conspiracy Disclosed! show that even with regard to the 1850s and 1860s it is possible to speak of a single abolitionist conspiracy theory after all. The narratives juxtaposed in Conspiracy Disclosed! and projected in texts as diverse as Morse’s The Present Attempt, Benton’s Thirty Years View (1854), the anonymously published The Washington Despotism Dissected (1864), or George Lunt’s The Origins of the Late War (1866) do not form a close-knit community of texts in which individual members relate to others intertextually in various ways and where all project exactly the same version of the conspiracy theory. All texts, however, share a concern that the South and its “peculiar institution” are increasingly under attack by abolitionists, and they express this fear through a number of identical tropes and narrative strategies. One common feature of all texts of this second wave of anti-abolitionist conspiracism is that they offer a far broader historical perspective on the conspiracy they are exposing than their 1830s counterparts. Whereas the earlier texts are almost exclusively concerned with the present, the later ones either situate the conspiracy historically by linking it to earlier efforts, or relate the story of a conspiracy that has been going on for a while. Morse’s The Present Attempt to Dissolve the American Union, for example, does not only relate the familiar story that the foreign abolitionist Thompson is an agent employed by the English nobility, but seeks to lend further validity to this claim by relating the story of a

13 Arguably, the most famous strategic recasting of Republicanism as abolitionism occurred during the 1858 Illinois senatorial race when the incumbent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas insinuated that his challenger Abraham Lincoln did not merely oppose the extension of slavery but intended to abolish it everywhere. Cf. Zarefsky 69–74 for an analysis of this claim and its effectiveness.

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory

183

similar British effort “to divide the Union” in 1809. Back then, Morse argues, the British deployed an agent “for the purpose of taking advantage of the high party excitement between Federalists and Democrats” (23), and he implies that the fact that Britain tried to divide the country once is a particularly good reason to believe that they have tried it again, and more successfully, a second time. Texts that focus on domestic foes add historical depth to their analyses by claiming that the conspiracy they are exposing has been underway for some time. While Alabama congressman Sydenham Moore claimed as late as 1858 that the conspiracy had been going on for only “a few years” (5), most other writers pointed to the heated debate about the admission of Missouri to the Union and thus to the time around 1818. In 1850 Virginia Senator Robert Mercer Hunter said in a speech that “The warfare really commenced […] at the time of the agitation of the Missouri question” (145), and Senator Benton in his personal recollections (cf. I: 5) and later George Lunt in his history of the war made the same point (cf. 68). The choice of this particular historical moment was hardly a coincidence. As Davis observes, already at the time of the Missouri controversy, “Southern leaders denounced antislavery arguments as a hypocritical mask concealing a Federalist plot to dissolve the Union” (Slave Power 15). The proslavery activists of the 1850s thus actualized a conspiracy narrative that preceded abolitionism and the emergence of the antislavery parties they were targeting, suggesting that Republicans were continuing – and far more successfully than their predecessors – the Federalist treachery of the 1790s and 1800s. An almost logical consequence of the belief that the enemy has been conspiring for several decades is the idea that the conspiracy has by now progressed considerably and reached most of its goals already so that it is almost too late to foil it. While this idea is one of the most common characteristics of conspiracy theory in general – a concern that informs the writings of Cotton Mather and Lyman Beecher as much as those of their counterparts today –, it is not really developed in anti-abolitionist texts of the first phase. For writers like Paulding, Drayton, and Sleigh, the abolitionist conspiracy has just recently begun and the foreign foe has so far managed to seduce only a small number of Americans. Accordingly, they press for swift and determined action, but they are very optimistic that the conspiracy can be thwarted with relative ease. “Now it may be stopped without blood,” Sleigh writes, implying that in the future it might take a greater effort and more sacrifice, but that even then the conspiracy could still be destroyed (24). By contrast, texts from the 1850s paint the picture of a conspiracy that has continuously gained ground in recent years and claim that time is running out. The final article collected in Conspiracy Disclosed! from 1856, for example, holds that “We have but a short time left to us to cure this impending calamity” (24).

184

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

Texts written after Lincoln’s election and the outbreak of the Civil War go even further and relate the story of a successful take-over of the federal government and the destruction of the Union. In these accounts, the actions taken by the Lincoln administration invariably figure as proof of the South’s worst fears and suspicions. The Emancipation Proclamation, for instance, confirmed the conspiracy theorists’ suspicion that the Republicans had always been abolitionists, that they had only veiled their true designs until they could put them into practice, and that the Civil War was in reality an “abolition war,” as one newspaper put it late in 1863 (qtd. in Washington Despotism 86). All texts that project a successful conspiracy that has been long in the making also express nostalgia for a golden past, a time when foreign agitators could not drive a wedge between Americans or where political parties placed the welfare of the Union above their partisan interests. Invariably, the conspiracy theorists refer back to the Founding Fathers, fashioning themselves as their true heirs and accusing their enemies of betraying what Washington, Jefferson, and the other heroes of the American Revolution believed in. George Lunt, for example, writes in his introductory remarks that in the past “Wise and patriotic citizens […] kept [party] interests at the proper balance” but that “As those great men passed away, self-seeking and ambitious demagogues, the pest of republics, disturbed the equilibrium” (xi). Later he clothes the same accusation in different language and compares the fatal trust that Americans put in their recently elected representatives with the worship of “an idol” by “the Children of Israel, at the foot of Mount Sinai” (84). Similarly strong language can be found in the final article in Conspiracy Disclosed!: Patriotism is banished in the reign of licentiousness; treason is stalking abroad unmasked; fratricidal blood is staining the land; fanaticism is strewing its baleful influence, the pulpit is desecrating its divine office by embracing the worst elements of political heresy; and these combined powers are pulling down the pillars of our great national temple, erected by Washington and his associates. (24)

Lunt and Conspiracy Disclosed! draw on political and religious language in order to diagnose the present state of affairs. Lunt employs first the one and then the other register, but the article draws on both frames simultaneously – a blending that culminates in expressions such as “political heresy” and “national temple.” Accordingly, both texts are republican jeremiads in the purest form imaginable. Since the jeremiad, as I explained in chapter 1, raises the specter of “degeneration” in order to bring about “regeneration” (Pfau 160), conspiracy narratives usually exude optimism that the conspiracy can still be foiled. This optimism is also palpable in anti-abolitionist texts of the 1850s and 1860s. Although the conspiracy is said to have progressed enormously and, in accounts written during

The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory

185

and after the Civil War, already controls the federal government, the texts remain confident that the plot can still be foiled. Thus, an article in The Washington Despotism Dissected from 1864, which was originally published in the Metropolitan Record, New York’s most important newspaper for Copperheads at that time, finds proof in recent developments that the despotic Lincoln administration “has lost its power, and we venture to say that it is at the present time in a state of trepidation and nervousness” that make its overthrow possible (79). The conspiracy theorists retain their optimism even after the South’s complete military defeat. As late as 1866, George Lunt suggests that “American freemen” can still “exercise their reason, rise above a partisan Congress […] and whatever other obstacles may be in their way, and place their country once more upon the free and solid foundation of the Constitution and the Union” (463). For anti-abolitionist conspiracy texts of the second phase, then, as for most conspiracy narratives throughout history, it is always almost but never really too late. Apart from the narrative template that these accounts are grafted upon, another reason for this seemingly unshakeable optimism is that all conspiracy theorists remain convinced that the circle of conspirators is relatively small. The texts differ in their assessments who the masterminds behind the conspiracy are and how they have managed to betray or control so many others.14 Some cast the conspirators as “aristocrats,” some consider them “demagogues,” and yet others employ both concepts.15 Morse believes that all Americans are “the dupes of a long concocted and skillfully planned intrigue by the British aristocracy” (38); the Washington Despotism Dissected holds Lincoln personally responsible and casts him as an “autocrat” who has converted the republic into a “military despotism” (7, 9); Lunt, by contrast, argues that Lincoln is too weak to resist the designs of “the extreme radical wing” of the Republicans (449); finally, the anonymous

14 Accordingly, the imagery of “tools” that already figures prominently in the texts of the late 1830s is important for these later texts as well. The texts do not agree who is using who as a tool, but they all employ this metaphor (cf. Washington Despotism 10; Conspiracy Disclosed 12; Morse 9). 15 “Aristocrats” and “demagogues” were favorite targets of conspiracy theories throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many of the conspiracy theories I have charted in chapter 1 deploy these designations. Michael Pfau has suggested that aristocrats in their various guises were the favorite enemies of Democrats during the antebellum period, while everybody who could be labeled a demagogue was particularly suspicious to American Whigs (39). While this observation is on the whole correct, the anti-abolitionist conspiracy texts show that Democrats, too, cast their enemies as demagogues. Thus, the articles from Democratic newspapers collected in Conspiracy Disclosed! consider the Republicans sometimes the tools in a British aristocratic plot and sometimes “political demagogues” (13). In similar fashion, George Lunt, whose history of the conflict is a vindication of the actions of the Democratic Party, repeatedly casts the Republicans as “demagogues” (xi, 68).

186

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

author of Interior Causes of the War seriously suggests that, “through a president and his advisers, whom they control,” demons “are hurrying the country on to its destruction” (5).16 Most importantly, however, they all agree that the majority of the people do not want what the conspirators aim for. Accordingly, the populism characteristic of all conspiracy theories is very pronounced in these texts. Again and again, books, pamphlets, and speeches contend that the administration is acting against the will of the people. After exposing the treasonous motives of the Republican conspirators, Lunt, for instance, writes: “Upon the grounds, therefore, it was, and from such motives, that the country, against the decided and general wishes of the people, was finally betrayed into a war for the Union, by conspirators against the Union” (453). In much the same vein, the Washington Despotism Dissected diagnoses a “most criminal violation of the sovereignty of the people” (8) and calls on them to restore true democracy: “Let the people tell the administration there has been enough blood-letting” (25). Even the author of Interior Causes of the War makes the same point and demands that “the people assemble in great and imposing meetings, and in the majesty of their sovereign power, denounce this the most groundless, as well as the most deplorable of civil wars” (95). There is a simple reason why the crisis of political representation that has always been at the center of American conspiracy theories is much more openly addressed in these texts than in those I have analyzed so far in this study. The Puritans could express fears about their community only in highly distorted fashion by accusing their leaders or those close to them of witchcraft. The earlier anti-abolitionist as well as the anti-Catholic texts were concerned with a conspiracy directed against the government: they raised the specter that the people might be robbed of their rights in the future, as the conspirators were plotting to subvert the government, but even in their bleakest visions they never claimed that this had already happened. The anti-abolitionist texts of the second phase, and especially those from the 1860s, by contrast, paint the picture of a conspiracy that already controls the government. From the perspective of these texts, therefore, the elected representatives do no longer represent the people, and the government itself is conspiring against them. In search of a historical precedent, these

16 At first glance, the argument offered in Interior Causes of the War: The Nation Demonized, and Its President a Spirit-Rapper appears completely absurd. As Davis has suggested, however, it makes sense to read the text as a literalization of prominent metaphors, such as abolitionism as a manifestation of evil, that remained on the figurative level in other texts (cf. Slave Power 49). Thus, on a purely structural level, the pamphlet is remarkably similar to other anti-abolitionist conspiracy texts. In Lunt, Lincoln is controlled by fanatics from his own party; in Interior Causes he is the puppet of demons; and both texts suggest that the people have been deceived.

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

187

texts return to the time before the Declaration of Independence, when the colonists became convinced that the British government – representatives they were not allowed to elect – was conspiring against them. Drawing a close parallel to the events about 90 years ago by associating the Republicans with the British and reserving for the South the role of the thirteen colonies enables them to claim the heritage of the Founding Fathers in yet a different fashion. As the British thus figure in one way or another in all versions of the conspiracy narrative, a text like Morse’s that considers the Republicans the tools of the British and those that focus on “Black Republicans” have more in common than is apparent at first glance. There is, however, a crucial difference in the cultural work that these two versions of the conspiracy theory perform. Like the texts from the 1830s, Samuel Morse’s Present Attempt seeks to externalize the conflict in an almost desperate attempt to re-create a national unity that has been lost. Texts that attack the Republicans, by contrast, “merely” distort the issues at stake. They focus on the opponents that their authors have an issue with and not on scapegoats, and they vindicate the proslavery position. However, they do not address the conflict directly and for what it is but through the exposure of an imaginary conspiracy. As such texts dominate the anti-abolitionist discourse of the 1850s and 1860s, we can conclude by saying that the conspiracy theory not only developed from detecting a conspiracy against the government to exposing one by the government, but also from deflecting from the issues at stake to distorting them. In this later form the abolitionist conspiracy theory has a lot in common with the conspiracy theory held by the very people it attacked: the Slave Power conspiracy theory.

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory As with the abolitionist conspiracy theory, there is no single version of the Slave Power conspiracy theory. Indictments of undue southern influence on national politics existed in “a variety of forms” and in “many complexities and variations” (Pfau 43; Davis, Slave Power 19).17 Some accounts offer the complete history of the conspiracy, some focus on individual episodes of subversion, others take the existence of a conspiracy for granted and describe its effects, and yet others integrate a short account of the conspiracy into a larger discussion of the evils of slavery or the state of the republic. What these texts share, I would like to suggest,

17 Richards makes the same point: “Not only were most of [the conspiracy theory’s] spokesmen vague and elastic, but the few who attempted precision never spoke with one voice” (25).

188

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

is the common deployment of the term “Slave Power,” and that they perform the same cultural function. What is more, as far as their specific vision of the conspiracy is concerned, they are characterized by a family resemblance in the Wittgensteinian sense. Hardly any two texts project exactly the same version of the conspiracy, but some accounts share many features, and all of them share at least a handful of features with other texts that also seek to expose the workings of the Slave Power. This mapping of the field of Slave Power conspiracy texts is at odds with the one proposed by Michael Pfau in his recent study of the rhetoric of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. Pfau argues that both with regard to the Slave Power theory in particular and conspiracy theories in general it makes sense to distinguish between an extreme version believed at the fringes of society and a more moderate one held at the center. He suggests that Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” aptly describes conspiracy theorizing on the fringes, and he proposes the term “political style” for the related phenomenon at the center (169). In his reading, the Republican politicians Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln represent the center and the abolitionists around William Garrison the fringe. According to Pfau, there is a “vast gulf separating [the conspiracy narratives of Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln] from the conspiracy narratives of Garrison and the radical abolitionists” (156). Specifically, he identifies five major differences. First, conspiracy theories on the fringe, he holds, imagine “an all-powerful demonic conspiracy” (156), while those at the center imagine “banal conspiratorial enemies” (168). Second, the fringe imagines a conspiracy that has been going on for a long time; the center detects one where the enemy has just recently begun to plot: “proximity to the fringe [is] associated with an earlier key cardinal function of the conspiracy – the point in the narrative at which the slave power [is] said to have gained control of the nation […], proximity to the center of political mainstream […] with much later key cardinal functions of conspiracy” (168). Third, drawing on Hayden White’s typology of historiographic templates, he suggests that the fringe “emplot[s] American political history tragically,” whereas the center emplots it “in a distinctly comic manner” (156). In other words, since the fringe envisions an almost supernatural enemy that has been successfully conspiring for decades it has virtually no hope for the future. The center, by contrast, remains optimistic that the conspirators can “be defeated by the ordinary political means of coalition building and electioneering” (157). Fourth, he associates the pessimism of the fringe with “the jeremiad” and that of the center with “civic republican ideology” (159). The fifth and final difference is never really spelled out by Pfau but surfaces at many moments in his analysis. Representatives of the fringe, he implies, really believe what they say, but those at the center employ the conspiracy narrative

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

189

primarily for tactical reasons: it is “an important instrument” to seek “electoral support” and create “unity within their own ranks” (163). While Pfau offers many valuable insights into a number of conspiracy texts, the strict binary he constructs does not hold. Quite apart from the more general problems that such a mapping of the field creates, it is wrong to assume that Slave Power conspiracy texts neatly fall into two categories. Pfau’s approach as such is problematic because it perpetuates, albeit in modified form, a pathologizing take on conspiracy theory. Moreover, his notion of fringe and center is flawed because he treats these concepts as stable and never shifting. Thus he assumes that “Chase and Sumner gradually moved [from a position toward the fringe] closer to the center of American political institutions and ideologies” by recasting their earlier visions of conspiracy in the fashion he regards as typical of the center (157). I would argue, however, that it was the other way round. Chase’s and Sumner’s visions of conspiracy remained rather stable, but they became more “central” because during the 1850s more and more Americans became convinced that the Slave Power really existed.18 As I will show here, the texts that Pfau places at the “center,” texts by Sumner, Chase, and Lincoln, have a lot in common with texts by William Goodell or George Washington Julian that he places on the “fringe.” There are a limited number of tropes and templates that structure the majority of Slave Power texts, and I discuss them on the following pages. The texts I draw on in particular are Chase’s “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States” from January 19, 1854, which Eric Foner has called “the textbook of the conspiracy theory of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise” (94); Sumner’s “The Crime against Kansas,” a speech, delivered in the U.S. Senate on May 19 and 20, 1856, in which he, too, “exposes” the conspiracy that tried to turn Kansas into a slave state and which led to his caning by Preston Brooks, a Representative from South Carolina; and Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech which he delivered on June 16, 1858, accepting his party’s nomination for the senatorial race against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois.19 However, I will not discuss

18 What is more, William Garrison is a particularly bad example to represent the “paranoid style” of the fringe because he was not a conspiracy theorist. Garrison was not concerned with the Slave Power but with the institution of slavery as such. In the Selections from the Writings and Speeches that Pfau draws on, Garrison never projects anything close to a conspiracy theory. In fact, he only started to employ the term “Slave Power” during the 1850s when his audiences probably expected him to do so, and even then he used it only a couple of times (204, 207, 209, 287, 294, 300, 309, 313). This is why I will not draw on any text by Garrison in this section. 19 For an account of how the attack further turned public opinion in the North against the Slave Power, see Richards, Slave Power 195–97. For a discussion of Lincoln’s speech, see Zarefsky 43–46.

190

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

these texts one after the other but put them into a dialogue with a host of other conspiracy texts from the 1850s. This will allow me to identify the structure and argument of the average Slave Power conspiracy text, and it will bring to the fore how many of its narrative and rhetorical strategies this conspiracy theory shares with its anti-abolitionist counterpart.20 Virtually all Slave Power conspiracy texts cast the slaveholders as an aristocratic enemy robbing the people of their constitutionally guaranteed rights. The synonyms that writers occasionally substitute for “Slave Power” and the definitions of the concept they offer make this abundantly clear. The anonymous author of Five Years Progress of the Slave Power claims that almost immediately after the founding of the republic “an aristocracy has come in and established itself” (4), William Goodell writes of the “petty oligarchy of slaveholders” (223), Charles Sumner, too, speaks of the “Slave Oligarchy” to refer to the group “sometimes called the Slave Power” in a speech from 1855 (“Slave Oligarchy” 533), Theodore Parker calls the rule of this group a “Despotocracy” (“Nebraska Question” 315), and Abraham Lincoln speaks of a “dynasty” (467). Chase does not define the “slave power” in his co-written “Appeal” (151), but he makes the notion of despotism it evokes explicit by claiming that the slaveholders want to transform Kansas into yet another “dreary region of despotism” (455).21 What is more, the conspiracy theorists usually agree that the Slave Power has been controlling the federal government, the Supreme Court, and even the presidency for a considerable time. While George W. Julian carefully criticizes the repeated “unjustifiable interference of the Federal Government” in favor of slavery (“Slavery” 22), Frederick Frothingham and Salmon Chase do not mince words. For Frothingham, “A Republic exists no longer” (18), and Chase bluntly speaks of “a Federal Government controlled by the slave power” (“Appeal” 151). Other accounts focus on the president and cast him as a member of the conspiracy or as its tool. The

20 The overview I provide here is to a certain degree reconcilable with Davis’s observation that “attacks on the Slave Power were preoccupied with three broad themes […]. The first theme involved the meaning of American history […]. A second theme dealt with the moral ambiguities of American expansionism […]. The third theme emphasized the need for elevating and purifying society” (Slave Power 64). 21 Some accounts of the Slave Power underline both its danger and its aristocratic nature by aligning it with the “Money Power” – a favorite enemy of Jacksonian Democrats during the 1830s (cf. Parker, “Nebraska Question” 338; Dye 27); others go even further and regard the Slave Power as completely controlling the Money Power (cf. Five Years Progress 29; Goodell 328). Interestingly, not only admirers of Andrew Jackson like Dye actuate this Democratic template but also people without any Democratic affiliations like Goodell. This shows once more that conspiracy discourse, in the nineteenth century as much as today, is highly flexible. Certain groups or parties may well have favorite enemies, but the narratives they produce are frequently adopted by others as well.

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

191

anonymous Complaint of Mexico (1843) implicates men “from the lowest of the rank and file to the President of the United States” (20). A decade later, in his “Crime” speech, Sumner makes almost exactly the same point, arguing that the conspiracy is so powerful “that none, from the President to the lowest border postmaster, [could] decline to be its tool” (592). Yet a decade later, in his History of the Plots and Crimes of the Great Conspiracy (1866), John Smith Dye writes that, among many others, President Buchanan “became more than ever the tool of the slave power” after the plotters threatened to assassinate him if he refused to cooperate (94).22 Arguably, this indictment of government and president climaxes in Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech where he suggests that Senator Stephen Douglas, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan have all been collaborating to further the goals of the Slave Power. Lincoln uses the metaphor of the house – a trope he employed earlier to famously argue that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free” (461) – to insinuate that these four have been acting according to a secret plan: But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have 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 […] – 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 […]. (465–66)

Pfau argues that Lincoln’s carefully worded language – “We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert,” he says immediately before the passage quoted here (465) – should be read as an indicator that Lincoln himself was not convinced that such a conspiracy really existed (131). However, as far as the effect of his words is concerned, this surely made no difference. To begin with, all conspiracy arguments, as we have seen, employ to some degree the method of inference, as it is the nature of a conspiracy that the motives of the plotters are unknown and can only be inferred from their actions. Just as “a house divided against itself cannot stand” (461), Lincoln implies, a house built by more than one builder without a common plan could not stand either so there must have been such a plan. More importantly, though, Lincoln’s apparent carefulness increases rather than diminishes the force of the accusation. By making his audience privy to his chain of thoughts, and including them as “we” into the 22 This is just a small sample of the use of the “tool” imagery. For other examples, cf. Five Years Progress 45 and 54; Parker, “Present Crisis” 478; Channing 63; and Wilson, Death 6. For a discussion of how dissident Democrats employed the metaphor to indict their party for supporting the South, cf. Earle 197.

192

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

argument, the passage is bound to (further) convince the inclined listener that a conspiracy exists and that the nation’s highest representatives are part of it. This idea that the conspiracy has completely undermined the government sets the Slave Power conspiracy theory apart from all other conspiracy theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and aligns it with the visions of subversion that have become dominant since the 1960s. Admittedly, the capture of the state and its institutions is also presented as a fait accompli in anti-abolitionist texts written after 1860s. At earlier moments of American history the reigns of the Federalists and the Jacksonians had both been projected by their opponents as the result of conspiracies. But in these other conspiracy theories the domestic plotters are habitually associated with foreign foes such as the French or the British, even though these allies fade to the background in anti-abolitionist texts of the second phase. Moreover, in none of these earlier accounts, and not even in the contemporaneous anti-abolitionist one, is the take-over of the government as complete – the plot has subverted all three branches – and has been going on for such a long time. Accordingly, all Slave Power conspiracy texts provide historical narratives of the emergence, progress, triumph, and – in the case of those texts written after 1860 – also the defeat of the conspiracy. While the accounts of various conspiracy theorists differ with regard to the question when the Slave Power gained control over national politics, these differences have nothing to do with any distinction between fringe and center, as Pfau claims. True, abolitionists like George W. Julian, William Goodell, or Theodore Parker tell a long history because they usually consider the compromise of the Constitution or the Louisiana Purchase the root of the Slave Power’s influence (cf. Julian, “Slavery” 15; Goodell 223; Parker, “Present Crisis” 463), but they are not the only ones to do so. Broadly speaking, as Richards has shown, party affiliations determined how long the conspiracy detected was said to have been underway. Dissident Democrats “who came out of the Jacksonian tradition purveyed a short history of the Slave Power” because they could not believe that Jackson had been a part or a tool of the conspiracy (Slave Power 23). By contrast, writers of the “New England Federalist tradition” projected a much longer history of the conspiracy, tracing it back “sometimes to the very foundation of the new nation in 1783” (25). Thus, their narratives reach as far back as those of the more radical abolitionists. In general, then, Slave Power conspiracy texts tell stories that go back in time much further than anti-abolitionist visions of subversion, several decades at least, and sometimes even more.23

23 To give some more examples, Channing argued in 1861 that the Slave Power controlled the country’s fate for “nearly half a century” (9), Frothingham regarded the annexation of Texas as

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

193

Even the conspiracy narratives of Sumner and Lincoln are not as short as Pfau suggests. For pragmatic reasons – the context is, after all, a Senate debate – Sumner focuses only “on the Crime against Kansas” in his most famous speech and not on “the conspiracy beyond” (608), but he relates the earlier chapters of his plot in other speeches. In “The Slave Oligarchy and its Usurpation” from 1855 he argues that the Slave Power’s moves began “[e]arly in [the nineteenth] century” (536), and in a speech from 1861 he suggests that “the seeds of the conspiracy were latent in [the Union’s] bosom” since the 1820s (Rebellion 7). Similar pragmatic considerations, I would contend, are responsible for Lincoln focusing only on the history of the past five years in his “House Divided” speech (461). Speaking in 1858 he tells the history of the country since 1854 – and thus since the struggle over Kansas that led to the founding of the Republican Party, which he is addressing at this very moment. At no point, however, does he explicitly say that the conspiracy began that late. His take on the conspiracy, then, is like that of the anonymous author of Five Years Progress who deals exclusively with the years between 1846 and 1851 but clearly implies that the Slave Power has been plotting for much longer.24 Even more importantly, in Lincoln’s speech, conspiracy theory’s character as “theory” pointedly comes to the fore. For Lincoln, the assumption that there is a conspiracy functions both as a tool of historical explanation and as a means to predict the future. After relating how events of the past five years prepared the scene for the extension of slavery to all territories, he says: “Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring” (465). As for the conspiracy theorist in general, everything in the past makes sense for Lincoln once he has understood that there is a conspiracy – and this knowledge allows him to foretell the future, too. He draws his audience’s attention to the fact that, according to the Nebraska Bill, “the people of a State as well as a Territory, were left ‘perfectly free’ ‘subject only to the Constitution’” and asks “Why mention a State?” when the bill was only concerned with a territory (466). A few moments later he provides the answer himself: “Put that and that together, and we have another little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits” (467). Understanding the past

the moment of its take-over of power (11), Cairnes singled out the Missouri Compromise as the decisive moment (109), and Weston suggested that its ascendancy began with the nullification crisis of 1835 (216). 24 Chase’s “Appeal” indeed restricts itself to a discussion of the Kansas question. However, it seems likely that this is done for the same pragmatic reasons that make Sumner focus on this episode in his “Crime” speech.

194

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

thus enables Lincoln to chart the possible future course of the conspiracy to nationalize slavery – again, in much the same fashion as it is done in Five Years Progress where the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850 is presented as a step toward enslaving white members of the working class as well (cf. 79–80). Closely connected to the historical account of the conspiracy, most Slave Power narratives display the tendency to project the image of a golden past and first principles that have been corrupted. Since he focuses only on the past five years, this element is absent from Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, but in general it is as typical of the Slave Power texts as it is of the abolitionist conspiracy theory of the 1850s and 1860s. Dye, for example, claims that “Among the enemies of slavery could be counted Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, Livingston, Patrick Henry, Madison, Hancock, Morris, St. Clair, the Randolphs – John and Thomas. Add to the above the rest of the signers of the Declaration, backed up by the great document itself” (6). In similar fashion, Weston writes that “Washington and Jefferson were abolitionists” (Progress of Slavery 245), Sumner argues that “all the grandest names of our history were arrayed openly against it” (“Slave Oligarchy” 528), Chase declares in his “Appeal” that “The original settled policy of the United States, clearly indicated by the Jefferson Proviso of 1784, and by the Ordinance of 1787, was non-extension of slavery” (146), and Julian contends that “There is not one syllable of evidence, either in the Constitution itself, or the history of its formation” that indicates that the Founding Fathers approved of the expansion of slavery. Rather, these conspiracy theorists claim, the Founders grudgingly accepted the existence of slavery in the southern states because they considered it a “perishing institution” (“Slavery” 13) whose “perpetuation […] even in any State, it is quite obvious, was not then even thought of” (Chase, “Speech” 55). Such passages clearly serve the purpose of projecting the opponents of slavery’s expansion as the true heirs to the Founding Fathers – a strategy that culminates at times in the claim that the current struggle “is a continuance of the American Revolution” in which the slaveholders act the part of the British (Sumner, “Speech” 261). Unsurprisingly, therefore, indictments of the Slave Power assume invariably the form of the republican jeremiad. Individual texts emphasize either the sacred or the secular implications of the conspiracy, but they always contain both dimensions.25 An early example of this is the Complaint of Mexico. For thirty pages the author exposes political intrigues and bemoans the decline in “moral 25 Writing that “appeals for communal regeneration retraced patterns that had descended from the Puritan jeremiad sermons to evangelical revivals,” Davis recognizes the importance of the religious template, but he neglects that it had long merged with republican thought (Slave Power 79).

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

195

posture […] which has, till lately, characterized the intercourse and affairs of this nation with all others” (12). In the final paragraph, however, he addresses God and calls on the “Most Mighty” to “rule in this our land, that, out of the darkness, shall shine a great light, and that, out of the abundance of iniquity, may proceed that righteousness which exalteth a nation” (32). If this text thus caters first to the secular and then the sacred, the two are entirely inseparable in most other texts and speeches. Theodore Parker casts the South as both “anti-Christian and undemocratic” (“Present Crisis” 450), Frederick Frothingham calls the existence and advance of slavery a “national sin” (4), and Salmon Chase blends religious decline and republican decay in a key sentence early in the “Appeal”: We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as a part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the old world, and free laborers from our own states, and covert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves. (145)

Echoing the final sentence of the Declaration of Independence, the first part of the sentence with its focus on a “sacred pledge” accentuates the sacred tradition, the second part with its emphasis on endangered civic “rights” stresses the secular dimension, and the final part spells out what the “violation” and “betrayal” consist in. Here, again, the political and the religious merge, as the space from which the immigrant and the laborer are excluded is both real and devoid of democracy and, since the imagery also evokes associations with hell, metaphysical. As the structure of the republican jeremiad requires, all speakers and writers are highly confident that the conspiracy can be foiled. Hence Lincoln declares at the end of his “House Divided” speech that “The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail” (468), Parker is sure that “We shall not toil in vain” (“Nebraska Question” 372), the “Appeal” closes with the assertion that “We will not despair; for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God” (152), and Sumner predicts that “the Slave Power […] will be swept into the charnel house of defunct Tyrannies” (“Crime” 695). The source of the “National Regeneration” (Channing 97) thus commonly envisioned is invariably the people. Just as those targeting Catholics and “Black Republicans,” Slave Power conspiracy theorists remain convinced that only a minority is guilty and that the majority of the people are innocent victims of the plotters. As Howe has argued, the “conspiracy paradigm […] reveals trust as well as fears” (80), and this trust is inextricably tied to conspiracy theory’s populist dimension, its confidence in and calls on the people. Speakers either simply predict that “the People will unite once more, with the Fathers of the Republic” (693) in order to destroy the conspiracy, or they explicitly ask them to do so. It may be only Chase’s text that is called an “Appeal to the People,” but almost all of the texts I have drawn on here could be described as such. William Goodell appeals to “THE PEOPLE”

196

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

(584), and so do, among others, Theodore Parker (“Nebraska Question” 372), Frederick Frothingham (15), and James W. Hunnicutt (181). At first glance, however, it is surprising that speakers and writers do not call on the people to foil the conspiracy by taking up arms against the usurpers or demanding the secession of northern states from the Union, but only by voting for the right parties at the ballot box. After all, most of the texts were written before the Civil War when, according to the picture they paint themselves, an omnipotent conspiracy of southern slaveholders was controlling the fate of the nation and its institutions. What is more, Slave Power conspiracy texts of the 1850s were concerned with a crisis of political representation far more explicitly than other conspiracy narratives. They rarely ever analyzed the real reasons for the proslavery factions’ political might – the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, the arrangement of voting districts in many slaveholding states which favored slaveholders over non-slaveholders, and the structure of the U.S. Senate where each state has two seats independent of the size of its population –, but they stressed again and again that it was a severe violation of democratic principles that a small group of slaveholders (the numbers the speakers provide vary between less than twenty and a few hundred thousand) controlled the fate of millions of people.26 Why, then, did the people in the free states – both the authors of the speeches and pamphlets and their addressees – remain confident that the conspiracy could be overthrown politically, whereas the southern states lost this faith and seceded from the Union immediately after, as they saw it, a conspiracy had brought about the election of Abraham Lincoln? The answer, as Michael Holt has convincingly argued, is to be found in the underlying causes of the collapse of the Second Party System. According to Holt, “What destroyed the Second Party System [of Democrats and Whigs] was consensus, not conflict,” as is commonly assumed. For those in the North who became increasingly concerned about the Slave Power neither Whigs nor Democrats were eligible, since the South was perceived as a united front beyond party lines that ruled the country with the help of northern “doughfaces” who voted with it whenever it mattered.27 However, these people had one option left: “Once competing groups in society decided that the party system no longer provided them with viable alternatives in which they could carry on conflict with each other, they repudiated the old system by dropping out [or]

26 Apart from Cairnes, a British author, who provides a truly insightful contemporary analysis of the origins of the Civil War and who also discusses the impact of the three-fifths clause (102), the only other texts that link this clause to the South’s domination are Goodell (322–23) and, ironically, Dye (10) whose history Davis has described as “a patently abnormal fantasy” (Slave Power 7). 27 For a discussion of the role and image of “doughfaces,” cf. Richards, Slave Power 85–88.

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

197

seeking third parties that would meet their needs” (13). Hence, northerners founded first the Free Soil and then the Republican Party, which eventually won the presidential elections in 1860. Southern slaveholders, however, did not have this option. With the Democrats, they had a party that represented their interests and that, after the demise of the Whigs, differed pointedly from the competing ones. But the election of Abraham Lincoln convinced them that the tide had finally turned and that the democratic process now put them at a severe disadvantage. They could win the vote in the South, but no longer nationwide, and therefore lost faith in the political process. As they saw it, the only option that remained was to leave the Union, and so they did – with the effect that, ironically, it was the slaveholders themselves “who finally destroyed the Slave Power” (Richards, Slave Power 215). The optimism, then, that I have identified in antiabolitionist texts of the second phase, was ill-founded. That they continued to express it even after the slave states had left the Union shows how the template available to narrate conspiracy, the republican jeremiad, shaped the discourse. The conditions for proslavery southerners and antislavery northerners, then, were very different – or at least appeared different to the respective sides. Opponents of the Slave Power could not break its hold over the South, but they could challenge its control over the nation and its institutions by ensuring that northern seats were no longer taken up by doughface collaborators. This is what virtually all of the conspiracy texts I have addressed here try to achieve, but depending on genre and contexts they do so with varying degrees of explicitness. In works of historiography, pamphlets, and Senate speeches the authors and speakers usually do not attack specific opponents. In speeches delivered during conventions or election campaigns, by contrast, the speakers are far more concrete. At a convention in Worchester, Massachusetts, in 1848, for example, Charles Sumner, who was then about to join the Free Soil Party, accused “Whigs and Democrats [of] being the representatives of the Slave Power” and called on all opponents of the expansion of slavery to find a new political home (“Speech” 256). A decade later, Abraham Lincoln launched an outright attack on his opponent in the Illinois senatorial race, Stephen Douglas, in the final moments of his “House Divided” speech. He denied that Douglas had broken with the Slave Power – in best countersubversive fashion he employs the nebulous “they” for the plotters and implies that “They wish us to infer […] that he now has a little quarrel with the present head of the dynasty” – and cast him as its “aptest instrument,” as a “doughface” who no longer appeared to be one (467).28

28 Lincoln later repeated this charge in several of the debates that he and Douglas had during the campaign. For a detailed discussion, see Zarefsky 80–93.

198

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

As Michael Pfau has correctly observed, Lincoln’s attack was effective in uniting the ranks of the Republican Party in Illinois (151). As such, Lincoln’s speech is typical of the major function that exposures and indictments of the conspiracy performed in general. But whereas the Catholic and abolitionist conspiracy theories affirmed or re-affirmed communities that had existed before, stopping or at least slowing down their disintegration, the vision of the Slave Power constructed an entirely new community. As I already stressed in the introduction to this chapter, it united people in the North who otherwise disagreed on most other issues. Moreover, as the founding ideology of the Republican Party, the idea of the Slave Power conspiracy had a profound political impact. Together with the conspiracy theory that contributed significantly to the coming of the American Revolution, it is the most important counterexample to Fenster’s claim that conspiracy theorists always remain caught in a vicious circle of endless interpretation and proof-finding and never move on to meaningful political action. Furthermore, just as the theories that helped trigger the War of Independence, the Slave Power conspiracy theory is apt to cast doubt on Richard Hofstadter’s claim that such visions of subversion or infiltration have “a greater affinity for bad causes than good” (5). In fact, Daniel Walker Howe has turned this evaluation around and argued that throughout American history conspiracy theories have had more positive than negative effects: “the achievement of independence and the antislavery movement are of greater significance than the John Birch society and other such organizations” (80). While I am not sure that these two episodes are not exceptions to the rule, I entirely agree with Howe’s evaluation of the Slave Power conspiracy theory. As David Davis has put it, “the image of the Slave Power was a necessary means for arousing the fears and galvanizing the will of the North to face a genuine moral and political challenge” (Slave Power 85). Davis ascribes this positive effect to the Slave Power conspiracy theory, although he regards the claims of its proponents as basically unfounded and regards the belief in a Slave Power conspiracy as one of many “paranoid visions” that, alongside belief in Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, or other conspiracies, have thrived throughout American history. This view, however, has rightly been challenged by other critics. According to Eric Foner, “there was much truth in Republican charges that slavery had become the ruling interest of the national government and that southerners were bent on dominating the western territories” (99). Of course, like all conspiracy theories, this particular theory, too, projected “a distorted view of the world” (Richards, Slave Power 26) in that it overestimated southern unity and, more importantly, in that it translated the political advantages the South enjoyed for various reasons and that southerners of course defended and exploited into the image of a gigantic conspiracy. Moreover, the

The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory

199

conspiracy theory also deflected from at least one problematic issue and enabled northerners to ignore their own complicity in it. As Davis himself observes, northerners could “project on the Slave Power all the guilt and negative connotations of imperial expansion” (78). If the Slave Power alone was behind the Indian Removal Act, the Annexation of Texas, or the Mexican War, northerners could not be blamed for it. On the whole, however, of all the conspiracy theories I address in this study, the Slave Power conspiracy theory is the one that comes closest to the truth. To modify one of Fenster’s key observations just a little bit, it is really on to something, as it only slightly distorts the issues at stake. As Richards puts it, its proponents merely “failed to see the world about them as later generations of historians would see it. They were, in short, no different than scores of other groups historians have studied” (26). Fascinatingly, though, some accounts of the Slave Power at least hint at an understanding that is well worthy of modern historians. A number of texts at times project the Slave Power more as an abstract force and less as a conspiracy whose members coordinate their actions in secret meetings and have a long-term plan they all try to put into practice. The slaveholders, it seems at certain moments, are not conspirators but driven by common interests as well as factors beyond their control. Thus, they merely appear to act in unison and according to a shared plan. This tendency is difficult to prove by quoting short passages, but it is palpable in the anonymous Five Years Progress and in Henry Wilson’s monumental The History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America where, according to one observer who shares my impression, Wilson hardly ever offers any “specifics about this putative conspiracy” (Perman 7). It is arguably most pronounced in Cairnes’s The Slave Power from 1862 where the Slave Power is defined at one point as a “system of interests” (25) and in Carl Schurz’s “The Irrepressible Conflict” where Schurz argues that “The slave power is impelled by the irresistible power of necessity” (130). This propensity toward abstraction is not as surprising as it might seem at first. After all, the Slave Power did not lend itself to being cast as a conspiracy quite as easily as other groups of alleged subversives did. Anti-Catholic texts, for example, could always paint a clear picture of the conspiracy because there was a church hierarchy they could draw on to present the Pope and Duke Metternich as the masterminds of the plot, the Jesuits or the whole clergy as their willing agents, and the Catholics immigrants as their unwitting soldiers. The structure and even the size of the Slave Power, by contrast, remained perpetually vague, and those authors and speakers who attempted to fill in some details hardly ever agreed. “By the Slave Power, I understand that combination of persons, or, perhaps, of politicians, whose animating principle is the perpetuation and extension of slavery,” Charles Sumner once said, leaving open if the Slave Power comprised

200

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

all slaveholders, only some of them, or merely those actively seeking the advancement of slavery by way of politics (“Speech” 252). Similarly vague, he claimed in a different speech that “not many more than 100,000” people belonged to the Slave Power (“Address” 321). Yet, in a fashion that may remind the contemporary reader of Joseph McCarthy’s changing figures, he provided different numbers in other speeches: once he spoke of “three hundred and forty-seven thousand” (“Slave Oligarchy” 532), and then suddenly claimed that the conspiracy began with “fewer than twenty men” (Rebellion 12). Other writers were equally inconsistent and suggested yet different figures.29 However, in the final analysis, this vagueness was probably no disadvantage but made the conspiracy theory even more effective. The shared term “Slave Power” allowed people who had radically different notions of who the enemy actually was to join forces in countersubversive action. With the notable exception of Carl Schurz in “The Irrepressible Conflict,” however, the texts that occasionally evoke the idea that the Slave Power is more of an abstract force are noticeably uncomfortable with this notion and seek to contain it by describing the Slave Power in conspiracist terms for most of the time. Cairnes offers quite a different take on the Slave Power in other passages of his book, defining it once – in obvious contradiction to the definition quoted above – as “a small body of men” who have “deliberately, resolutely, and unscrupulously [devoted themselves] to the accomplishment of their ends” (129). Other texts are even more precise and identify individual actors. As we have seen, they frequently implicate the current or past presidents in the conspiracy, suggesting that they are either members of the Slave Power or its tools. Another individual that texts – among them Five Years Progress and a speech by Henry Wilson – repeatedly single out is John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who is sometimes cast as the conspiracy’s mastermind and sometimes as its chief executor.30 Another strategy out of the conundrum that the notion of the Slave Power is so vague and abstract is to recast the concept itself as a human-like actor. Admittedly, this tendency can be observed in texts about quite different conspiracies as well where the abstract “the conspiracy” at times metonymically comes to stand for the conspirators. In Slave Power texts, though, this tendency

29 George W. Julian speaks once of “two hundred thousand slaveholders” (“Slavery” 24) and then of “two hundred and fifty thousand” (“Strength and Weakness” 67). Theodore Parker identifies “three hundred thousand” members of the Slave Power (“Nebraska Question” 338), and W. H. Channing “Forty or Fifty thousand” (86). Richards also observes this tendency and provides examples of further writers and even more figures (Slave Power 21). 30 For texts that project Calhoun as the mastermind of the conspiracy, see, for example Five Years Progress 43; Channing 7; and Dye 15–24. For Calhoun as chief executor of the conspiracy, see, for example, Sumner, “Slave Oligarchy” 558; Goodell 334–36; and Wilson, Death 7.

Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery

201

is far more pronounced than usual, and it often occurs in connection with adverbs and concepts usually reserved for human beings. To give but a few examples: for Sumner, the Slave Power pursues “its purposes” (“Speech” 256), for Frothingham “[i]t knew instinctively” that Garrison posed a threat, and it “beats us in cunning” and “has no conscience” (12, 15), and Parker even personifies it as “she,” claiming that “She wishes to gain a direct power in Congress” (“Nebraska Question” 354). Accordingly, one could say that these texts invest a lot of effort to project a “conspiracy theory of society,” as Karl Popper, whom I touched upon in chapter 1, called it in The Open Society and Its Enemies (94; his emphasis). Popper, of course, meant this term derogatorily and used it to describe a wrong understanding of how human societies work. He criticized “Vulgar Marxists” for casting capitalists as conspirators “that cunningly and consciously create war, depression” and the like, and demanded that they should regard capitalists as Marx himself had done, as “mere puppets, irresistibly pulled by economic wires – by historical forces over which they have no control” (100, 101). In comparable fashion, Slave Power texts seek to portray slaveholders as conspiring villains, and they manage to do so most of the time. They thus demonstrate how pervasive the epistemological paradigm discussed in chapter 1 still was by the middle of the nineteenth century, and how official and unquestioned the knowledge produced by conspiracy theories therefore was. At some moments, however, they project a different notion of the Slave Power – one that today’s readers are likely to find more convincing but that the texts themselves are not at all comfortable with.

A Partisan Leader and a Few Rebellious Slaves: Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery The antebellum era is a period during which literature exerted a huge impact on the formation of public opinion – an importance nicely captured by the invented anecdote according to which Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), with the words “So you’re the little woman who started this big war.”31 Yet, I have not said anything so far about how fictional texts spun the various conspiracy theories connected to the question of slavery. There is a simple explanation for this: unlike the anti-Catholic variant, conspiracy theories about the Slave Power, abolitionists, and “Black Republicans” left hardly

31 For a discussion of this anecdote and its history, see Vollaro. On literature’s influential role in shaping public opinion in the antebellum period, see Tompkins.

202

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

a mark on literature. While there are a few texts that allude to or even stage slave insurrections, there are none that dramatize the fear of Slave Power or “Black Republican” plots to bring the federal government under their control. To understand this lack of fictional engagements it is first of all important to remember the important distinction between slavery and the Slave Power. As we have seen, most conspiracy theorists targeted not slavery but its expansion, which, to their mind, went hand in hand with an infringement on the rights of free whites. By contrast, many of the important literary texts of the time, most notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did not indict the Slave Power but the institution of slavery as such, which they cast as a moral evil. The same goes for non-fictional narratives such as the accounts of fugitive slaves like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs. The slave narratives, too, do not expose larger schemes by the slaveholders but the inhumanity of the system of slavery itself. Hence, their relationship to speeches and pamphlets about the Slave Power is more indirect than that of fictional and allegedly factual convent captivity narratives to the rest of anti-Catholic discourse. In stories about escaped nuns the young girls synecdochically stand for the culture they belong to, and the attacks on them – frequently projected as invasions of their bodies and minds – represent the imagined invasion of the country initiated by the Pope. Instances of humiliation, torture, and rape in slave narratives and antislavery novels like Stowe’s surely vindicated those already believing in abolition in their convictions, won others over to the cause, and convinced champions of white rights not in favor of emancipation that slavery must not be allowed to spread. But since the violations of black bodies staged by Stowe and others did not carry the same implications for white culture as those projected onto white bodies by the convent captivity narrative had for Protestant culture, the abuse of slaves could not function as the synecdoche of an attack on whites. Moreover, it is important to remember what I argued in the preceding chapter about literature’s difficulties to dramatize the political dimension of complex conspiracy scenarios. While anti-Catholic writers could at least draw on formulas available through the Gothic tradition and symbolically stage the Church’s plot against the country by projecting it as an assault on young Protestant women, no such templates were available for the plots of slaveholders and “Black Republicans,” which were also far more firmly situated in the political world of Congress, the Supreme Court, or the White House. That literature was unable to narrate a conspiracy against or by the government can be observed in The Partisan Leader because this novel, one of the most unusual texts of the period, tries to do it, but fails. The Partisan Leader: A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy was written by the Virginian Beverley Tucker and originally published in 1836. It was then re-published in 1862, and it is only this

Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery

203

edition that is available today. As we know from the “Introduction” to this second edition, the 1836 edition “[bore] in its imprint the date of 1856” (iii). While this surely struck readers then and now as odd, it makes perfect sense with regard to the genre that the novel belongs to. The Partisan Leader is an early specimen of “future history,” a genre that thrived especially during the 1930s and 1940s when texts such as Martin Hawkin’s When Adolf Came (1943) or Fred Allhoff’s Lightning in the Night (1940) raised the nightmarish visions of an imminent Nazi invasion of Great Britain and the United States. Future histories, in other words, tell dystopian, and less frequently also utopian, tales of the future from the perspective of the past in order to influence politics and public opinion to prevent or promote the future they project.32 While most texts of the genre are either clearly dystopian or utopian, The Partisan Leader contains elements of both. The novel’s action begins in the mountains of Virginia in 1849 where a group of partisans is conducting a guerilla war against the troops of the federal government. The novel’s fourth chapter, then, relates how it could come to this by going back to 1836 – the original reader’s presence – and the election of Martin van Buren to the presidency. In the world of the novel, van Buren, who in real life served as President of the United States between 1836 and 1840, has been president ever since, and has assumed quasi-monarchical powers. The elections that are still held every four years are a sham, a pretext that merely serves to legitimize his claim “to the presidential throne.” Having borne “northern cupidity and northern fanaticism” for twelve years, the southern states finally secede in 1848 (23). What ensues is not yet a full-scale civil war but a fight over Virginia whose people want to join the southern confederacy but which van Buren wants to keep in the Union by use of military force. Tellingly, now, the novel cannot provide any details of the conspiracies by which Martin van Buren gained, and maintains, control of the country. Moreover, while the rest of the novel makes frequent use of scenic arrangements, extended dialogues, and inserted letters, what little information the reader is given about van Buren’s rise to power is provided by the omniscient narrator in a few distanced and convoluted sentences. The federal government’s control over Virginia, for example, is described as follows: “By the steady employment of the same pernicious influences, the elections throughout the state had been so regulated, as to produce returns of a majority of members devoted to the views of the usurper” (22). This description of van Buren’s measures leaves more questions open than it answers, especially since it is not at all clear what the “pernicious influences” refer to. But this is all the readers learn about the regime of control

32 For a discussion of future histories, see Butter, Epitome 56–57; and Helbig 132–41.

204

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

imposed on Virginia, and as this passage is representative of how the novel treats van Buren’s conspiracy, its details remain extremely vague. The Partisan Leader is obsessed with conspiracy but cannot relate its mechanisms as far as the level of government is concerned. In order to talk about conspiracies at all, then, the novel, in the typical fashion of nineteenth-century fiction, translates the political into the personal. It focuses on the history of the Trevor family whose one son, Douglas, becomes the novel’s eponymous hero, and whose other son, Owen, is sent by the president to capture him. To a certain degree, Douglas therefore performs the same function for the novel the escaped nun performs for the convent captivity narrative, as the plot against him synecdochically represents the plot against Virginia. However, while the heroine of anti-Catholic stories becomes the victim of intrigue because she is an American Protestant, Douglas is conspired against for purely personal reasons. He has offended the son of the president’s chief advisor, who, in order to avenge his son, makes the president believe that Douglas has offended him, which sets the whole plot in motion. Accordingly, The Partisan Leader is not, as its title and first chapters might suggest, a political novel but a mixture of adventure story and romance which, while vindicating slavery and the way of life of the southern aristocracy along the way, devotes as much time to its various love plots as to the military campaigns of the two hostile brothers. The big political intrigue that serves as its starting point thus gives way to a myriad of small-scale conspiracies: the president plots against Douglas, the Trevor brothers scheme against each other, and Douglas is part of a secret effort to unite Virginia with the now independent South, which prospers due to a trade agreement with Great Britain. While a utopian future thus seems to lie in store for Virginia, it does not come to pass in the novel. The Partisan Leader is a fragment. It ends with Douglas betrayed, captured by his brother, and brought to Washington. His father and wife go to see the president in order to beg for his mercy, unaware of the fact that parts of the president’s troops have decided to rebel and liberate Douglas. On the novel’s final page the president, who apparently has a scheme against them in mind, first has his spies follow the father and the wife, and then receives an anonymous note informing him that an attempt to save Douglas is underway. His ominous warning, “Wo [sic] to the traitor if it prove so” (219), is the novel’s last sentence. Thus, The Partisan Leader ends at exactly the moment where it tries to shift the focus back to the political level and where the conspiracy scenarios multiply in a fashion the narrator – and the author, we can assume – cannot control. Intrigues against individuals can be easily related, but the conspiracy that, for the novel, is the Washington government remains unnarratable. A conspiracy scenario better suited for fictional narration was the slave insurrection, since this plot could be related by grafting it onto the familiar

Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery

205

formulas of the adventure story or the plantation novel. However, while slave revolts were hinted at and at times even dramatized in a couple of texts, even here the absence of a large body of such narratives is more remarkable than the existence of a few. Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection was vividly remembered in the South during the 1850s and frequently discussed in non-fictional texts about slavery, but, except for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, whose focus is not conspiracy at all, as the insurrection never comes to pass, there is no major American antebellum fictionalization of the revolt.33 While it is maybe not surprising that there are no texts in which the British instigate slave rebellions, as such a scenario may have been too complicated to relate, it is, at least at first sight, astonishing that there are hardly any texts in which abolitionists do so. Especially the fact that John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry left virtually no traces in novels of the 1860s indicates the unwillingness to engage the topic in fiction.34 Another case in point is how the story of Mississippi River pirate John A. Murrell was translated into fiction during the antebellum era. Murrell was arrested in July 1834 and charged with planning a huge slave insurrection that was to take place on Independence Day the next year. According to the prosecution, he and his co-conspirators wanted to use the mayhem thus created to rob banks throughout the South. Although scholars now agree that these accusations were probably groundless and that Murrell was just a small crook, panic spread through the South as the day of the alleged uprising approached, fueled by the publication of pamphlets that provided details of the expected plot. Significantly, and most probably in reaction to the abolitionists’ pamphlet campaign that began that summer, these exposés cast Murrell no longer as merely motivated by lust for money but also associated him with abolitionism (Luce 254–55n6). Yet, as Dianne Luce has shown (240), William Gilmore Simms’s novelizations of the Murrell story, Richard Hurdis (1838) and Border Beagles (1840), do not exploit this connection but virtually erase all hints at the allegedly intended slave rebellion instead.35

33 Cf. M. Davis for a discussion of Stowe’s and later novels. Turner’s insurrection is also hardly ever mentioned in slave narratives. The only exception that I am aware of is Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which contains a chapter “Fear of Insurrection” in which she describes the tighter regime of control and repression that slaveholders imposed once news of Turner’s revolt spread (583–87). 34 The Library of Congress lists eleven plays – one from 1859 and ten from the twentieth century –, four novels from the twentieth century, and fourteen poems – two from the 1860s and twelve published after 1900 – that deal with John Brown. 35 The pamphlets that exposed Murrell’s plot were August Q. Walton’s A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel, the Great Western Land Pirate (1835) and H. R. Howard’s The History of Virgil A. Stewart, and His Adventure in Capturing and Exposing the Great

206

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

Why, then, were novelists so reluctant to represent intended or actually occurring slave uprisings? This question is difficult to answer in any general manner. Luce speculates that Simms’s “sense of social responsibility may have made him reluctant to present an outline for such a ‘loathsome’ scheme to be read by criminals – or by abolitionists” (241). In other words, she assumes that Simms did not want to provide the enemies of the South with a manual. While this explanation cannot be fully discarded, I do not find it convincing. After all, the pamphlets of which criminals and abolitionists could easily have got hold had reveled in the vision of a grand conspiracy. It seems more likely to me that Simms as well as other authors who chose not to write about slave insurrections did so because they were writing novels, and, unlike pamphlets, novels, even adventure tales, were consumed primarily by female readers whom they maybe wanted to spare disconcerting images of the South in turmoil. If this assumption is apt to explain why there are so few stories about slave insurrections that went beyond the planning stage, a look at the readership of the novels can also explain why they hardly ever project abolitionists plotting slave revolts. Novels set where slave revolts could theoretically take place, in the South, that is, were not only geared toward southern readers, but, in order to be successful, they needed to sell in the North as well. Many authors therefore may have decided that they could not, in the literal sense, afford to write about slave revolts, as this might have alienated northern readers who were sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and who were likely to be offended by the idea that abolitionists would instigate slave rebellions. If this worry was indeed at the heart of the striking absence of such scenarios in fiction, it was a worry well-founded, since, much to the dismay of defenders of slavery, opposition to this institution was particularly strong among the very group that was also the major consumer of such fictions, white middleclass women.36 Accordingly, in the only major text of the period that dramatizes how an abolitionist tries to instigate a slave rebellion, Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), the perpetrator turns out in the end to be no abolitionist at all but simply a villain intent on causing problems. Hentz’s text is one of several novels of the 1850s written to counteract the argument against slavery put forward by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was first published

“Western Land Pirate.” See Penick 3–4 and 151–57 for a discussion of how the abolitionist postal campaign affected the perception of the Murrell conspiracy so that soon “the terms ‘Murrell’ […] and ‘abolitionist’ became interchangeable” (T. Smith 130). I wish to thank Carolin Jenkner for drawing my attention to the Murrell conspiracy theory. 36 On readers of the antebellum period, see Baym and Tompkins. On women and abolitionism, see Lasser.

Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery

207

as a book in 1852. These novels, known as anti-Tom novels, all try to vindicate the system of slavery and the southern way of life and defend it against the accusations raised by Stowe.37 Hentz uses a device quite common in these novels and chooses for a heroine a northern woman who is initially full of prejudice against slavery but learns, together with the reader for whom she stands, over the course of the novel that she has been deceived by propaganda and that slavery is a system actually beneficial to the slaves. Eulalia, the daughter of a Massachusetts abolitionist, falls in love with Moreland, a plantation owner from the South whom business has brought to the North. When she is finally allowed to marry him, she follows him to the South where she quickly realizes that the slaves there are far better off than the laboring classes of the North because they have to work less hard and are clothed and fed and taken care of when they are sick and old. In fact, reversing Stowe’s powerful accusation that slavery is irreconcilable with the values of domesticity, The Planter’s Northern Bride suggests that slavery is the perfect system for such values to thrive, because unlike the capitalist system reigning in the North, it makes domesticity available to the poor as well. As Carme Manuel Cuenca puts it, “Hentz reverses the scheme and shows how slavery is the only political system that cares, nurtures and reconstructs – when torn apart – the white and black, Northern and Southern family with women at its core” (6–7). If the development of this stance dominates the novel for two-thirds, its last third is devoted to the foiling of a slave insurrection. The instigator of this revolt is a traveling preacher, Brainard, whom Moreland allows to take care of the needs of the slaves on his plantation while he stays with Eulalia and their infant child at the townhouse. Brainard uses the opportunity to “creat[e] the wildest excitement and confusion” among the slaves until eventually “the elements of insurrection beg[i]n to roar, in sullen murmurs, like subterranean fires” (II: 150, 156). The conspiracy comes to light when the wife of the local prison’s overseer accidentally overhears two slaves, who have been incarcerated for some minor misdemeanor for the night, discussing the plot. Of course, she is initially shocked by “discovering a conspiracy so dark and deadly” (II: 187), but since “[d]etected villainy is no longer to be feared” (II: 230), the plot is easily nipped in the bud. Moreland’s slaves genuinely repent and remember their affection for him when he steps among them and reminds them of his “vows of protection and kindness” (II: 202). While critics have devoted some attention to the novel, they have so far overlooked that the Murrell case appears to have significantly inspired the representation of the attempted slave rebellion and especially the figure of Brainard. Murrell sometimes pretended to be a “Methodist preacher” (Luce 241),

37 For a general analysis of anti-Tom novels, see Jordan-Lake.

208

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

and Brainard, too, poses as “a Methodist” (II: 111). Murrell allegedly wanted to use the chaos of the rebellion to rob banks, and Brainard has the same idea, convincing the slaves that “[t]he robbery of the bank [is] a step towards the kingdom of heaven” (II: 191). Like Murrell, then, Brainard is motivated by pecuniary interests alone and employs the rhetoric of humanitarianism only to achieve his ends. Furthermore, while Murrell’s accusers claimed that his rebellion had been scheduled for Independence Day, Brainard has chosen another festive occasion, “the Christmas holidays” (II: 190). However, Virgil Stewart, the young man from Tennessee credited for bringing down Murrell, initially claimed that the insurrection had been planned for “Christmas 1835” (Luce 237); only the pamphlets – one of which Stewart may have authored himself – later changed the date to the Fourth of July, maybe to add greater symbolic significance to the revolt.38 Finally, just as Morrell was seen as part of an infinitely larger conspiracy, the narrator at one point suggests that Brainard might be “a mere tool, a machine moved by the will of others” (II: 160). Brainard himself initially claims after his arrest that he “ha[s] been made the agent of others” (II: 218). A little later, however, it becomes clear that he has been the “ringleader,” and he even boasts to “have planned it all” (II: 231, 228) – a confession that can be read as a critique of those who believed that Murrell had been the head of a huge conspiracy. The fact that Brainard poses as an abolitionist moved by high motives, but that, in reality, he is “a dangerous, unprincipled, and lawless man” who has been in trouble with the law throughout his life (II: 270) could be read as a particularly harsh indictment of abolitionists, as a claim that like Brainard they are “serpent[s] under the dissembled innocence of the dove” (II: 181). By way of its ending, however, the novel undermines such criticism. For its final chapter The Planter’s Northern Bride brings Moreland and Eulalia back to New England, where, together with Eulalia’s abolitionist father, they attend an antislavery lecture delivered by Brainard, who has escaped from prison and poses as an abolitionist again. In a scene that once more foregrounds the novel’s agenda of correcting “calumny and animadversion” about the South (II: 280) and thus containing the growing sectional conflict, Eulalia’s father finally takes side with Moreland and declares that “Northern justice will protect the South from aggressions and slanders like [Brainard’s]” (II: 267–68).39

38 On Stewart’s authorship of the first pamphlet, see T. Smith 2. 39 A similar conversion of the abolitionist is staged in Vidi’s Mr. Frank, The Underground MailAgent (1853), a novel that describes in satirical fashion the various schemes of abolitionists to make slaves run away to the North. Like Eulalia’s father, Mr. Frank realizes in the end that slavery is a laudable institution and allows his daughter to marry a slaveholder. On the whole, however,

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

209

As we know from hindsight, Hentz’s and the other anti-Tom novels did not manage to turn around public opinion in the North. But they were only slightly less successful in influencing the course of events than Stowe herself and other writers who took an abolitionist stance. It was resistance to the Slave Power and not to slavery as such that eventually united a majority of the people in the North on an antislavery platform. In fact, in light of the almost complete absence of Slave Power or abolitionist conspiracy theories from antebellum fiction, we may conclude that literature in general was far less important in shaping the most important debate of that time than is commonly assumed. For the reasons discussed above, literature was sometimes unable and sometimes unwilling to engage the complex conspiracy scenarios that increasingly came to dominate many other forms of public discourse, from political speeches to sermons and from pamphlets to works of historiography. There is, however, one canonical text that escapes the conundrum that conspiracy theories circulated everywhere in the culture but that their implications for the nation could not be dramatized directly. Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” as we will see in the final section of this chapter, conflates the major conspiracy theories of the 1850s into one scenario where they are played out symbolically, and it also selfconsciously negotiates the attraction and the mechanisms of conspiracist thinking.

The Meaning of the Knot: Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” “Benito Cereno,” Herman Melville’s novella about a slave insurrection onboard a Spanish ship, is not so much concerned with the actual conspiracy but with Massachusetts Captain Amasa Delano’s inability to detect it while spending several hours in the company of Benito Cereno, the Spanish ship’s captain and the narrative’s eponymous hero.40 Generally, critics agree as to what is responsi-

this novel’s view of abolitionism is more negative than that of The Planter’s Northern Bride, since its abolitionists are not all misled, but some of them appear positively vicious. 40 As Dana Luciano says, “Critics of ‘Benito Cereno’ have long identified Amasa Delano’s interpretive dysfunction as central to Melville’s purpose in the narrative” (3). For discussions of his faulty interpretive efforts, see, among others, Craven 83; Trapp 38; Valkeakari 3; and Zuckert 243. One of the canonical texts of American literature, “Benito Cereno” is, as countless interpretations that focus on different aspects have shown, far more than an engagement with conspiracy and conspiracy theory. However, given the centrality of this topic for the novella’s plot it is nevertheless surprising that only one other scholar has previously explored this dimen-

210

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

ble for Delano’s failure to understand what is going on around him. As Ezra Tawil writes, “As is now widely understood in Melville criticism, ‘Benito Cereno’ everywhere suggests that the primary cause of Delano’s fatal self-deception is his own racism” (37). Obviously, Delano’s racism is impossible to dispute. He suffers from both “scientific racism” and “romantic racialism.” For him, blacks are mentally incapable of staging a large-scale deception and, due to their peculiar character, which he famously likens to that of dogs, too docile to do so.41 Curiously enough, however, scholars just as often tend to stress that, his racism notwithstanding, Delano has no chance to figure out what is going on. As Robert Levine puts it, the American captain faces the same problem that every “‘first time reader’” of the novella faces: “[N]o matter how many clarifying hints are offered over the course of the narrative, it is simply impossible to be absolutely certain about what is going on aboard the San Dominick until events have completely unfolded” (200). In other words, many scholars are somewhat contradictory in evaluating the possibility of solving the narrative’s riddle: they suggest that Delano cannot solve it because of his racist perspective, but they simultaneously insist that nobody could do better.42 I wish to propose a reading of the story here that resolves this contradiction. While most of the action is focalized through Delano, there is a crucial difference in perspective between him and the reader that previous interpretations have neglected. Published in three installments in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine between October and December 1855, “Benito Cereno” is, after all, as Levine stresses in a different context, a “historical novella” (199) whose action is set in 1799. Accordingly, the story was originally read in a cultural climate where political anti-Catholicism was peaking with the successes of the Know-Nothing Party and where, due to the struggle over Kansas, the Slave Power and the abolitionist conspiracy theories were gaining enormous momentum. As a consequence, Melville’s original readers brought very specific frames of knowledge to bear on what they perceived through Delano’s eyes and ears. Today’s first-time readers of the novella surely are, albeit for different reasons, as incapable of figuring out what is happening onboard as Delano is. But Melville’s contemporaries, I contend, were in a position to solve the riddle before the denouement. Like Delano, they were

sion in detail. In an excellent chapter in Conspiracy and Romance, Robert Levine links the southern fear of slave uprisings to northern fears of immigrants and the urban poor. 41 For a discussion of these two concepts, see Fredrickson. 42 Referring to Levine, Tawil himself, for instance, later writes that Melville keeps “the reader in suspense as to the true situation” and stresses that “if ever there were a tale that demanded rereading, it is this one” (49).

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

211

initially bound to be puzzled by what they saw, but not because they could make no sense of it, but because they could make “too much” sense of it. As we will see, the drama that unfolded before their eyes evoked all three prominent conspiracy theories of that period. By the end of the second installment, though, the attentive reader should have been sure that they were witnessing a slave insurrection. Hence, the story forced its predominantly northern audience to embrace the conspiracy theory they probably favored least and turned them for a couple of pages into alarmists inclined to but unable to warn Delano.43 It is this dramatization of the sheer impossibility to escape conspiracist thinking during the 1850s that makes “Benito Cereno” the most sophisticated and complex negotiation of the fear of conspiracy that permeated American culture at this time. Delano does not know any of the conspiracy theories of the 1850s, and it is more for this reason than for his much-commented upon “singularly undistrustful good-nature” (67) that he misses much and misunderstands all of what is happening around him. That the ship which emerges from the fog is called “SAN DOMINICK” (70), that it reminds him of “a whitewashed monastery,” and that its crew appears to him like “a ship-load of monks” and “Black Friars” (68) and its captain “like some hypochondriac abbot” (74) makes Delano worry slightly, because as a native of “Duxburry, in Massachusetts” (66) he has inherited his Puritan ancestors’ distrust of Catholicism. The ship’s name is bound to unsettle him a bit because it is that of a saint whose order was instrumental in setting up the Inquisition. But for Delano, the Inquisition is a thing of the past, and so is the possibility of Catholic intrigue as such. He lacks the template to make sense of his vague and floating observations and thus fails to construct a coherent threat against himself and his ship. Tellingly, the only thing that comes to his mind when he later suspects for a few moments that Benito Cereno is conspiring against him is a seventeenth-century plot against the British. “[T]he very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it,” he reflects, before immediately calming himself again: “And yet, I dare say, Spaniards in the main are as good folks as any in Duxburry, Massachusetts” (113). By contrast, 1855 northern readers of “Benito Cereno” probably arrived at an entirely different conclusion. Surrounded as they were by the texts of Maria Monk, Lyman Beecher, and Samuel Morse, Delano’s perceptions evoked for them not only “the role of the Catholic Church, the Dominicans in particular, in the initiation of New World slavery” (Sundquist 137) but, more importantly, the Catholic conspiracy theory that had been thriving since the 1830s. Delano lacks the frame

43 Levine, too, observes that “Benito Cereno” is “an implicating narrative” that “asks the reader to become a countersubversive attempting to make sense of a most problematic text” (168, 203).

212

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

to make sense of what he sees, but they certainly did not. Seeing Benito Cereno as an “abbott” had to remind them of the scheming Mother Superiors of the convent captivity narratives, who were frequently the masterminds behind a plot against innocent young girls whose corruption represented the corruption of the nation. It, too, must have reminded them of the cunning priests that were said to organize the conquest of the United States by subtly manipulating the masses of immigrants, who, in turn, could be seen as being represented by the blacks. But the historical readers did not simply read the signs of Catholicism differently, they were also bound to detect further hints at a Catholic conspiracy. For instance, Delano’s observation that the “San Dominick was in the condition of a transatlantic immigrant ship” (78) is for the captain devoid of any reference to Catholicism, as immigrants to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century were hardly ever of that faith. For the 1855 readers, however, immigration was inextricably linked to Catholicism and to nativist fears of invasion. Moreover, the narrator’s comparison of “house and ship” which both “hoard from view their interiors” (71) reminded them of the convent walls whose shielded interiors both appalled and fascinated Protestants. Protestants, as we have seen in the last chapter, imagined convents as places of immorality, and Delano’s observation of “prominent breaches […] of decency” onboard must have confirmed readers’ suspicions (77). In similar fashion, “the old oakumpickers [who] appeared at times to act the part of monitorial constables to their countrymen, the blacks” (77) evoked for them the “police of priests” that, according to Samuel Morse, controlled the Catholic masses (91). Against this background, Delano’s short-lived fear that the Spanish captain wants to conquer his ship must have appeared far more well-founded to the story’s readers than it does to himself. However, the Catholic conspiracy theory is not the only one that the narrative evokes. Reading the two ships and their respective captains as representing Catholic Europe and the Protestant United States was not the only option available to Melville’s contemporaries. They could just as well see them as symbols for and embodiments of the North and South of their country.44 For audiences that by 1855 heard about the sinister goals of the Slave Power to nationalize its “peculiar institution” on an almost daily basis, the idea that Cereno, representing the South, was plotting against his northern countryman must have been far more compelling than the idea of a plot by Cereno, representing the decaying Spanish empire, appears to Delano. After all, the narrative projects Cereno, “a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, and rather young man […] dressed with singular richness” (72–

44 See J. Richards 1, who lists some of the scholars who have suggested such a reading before.

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

213

73), as a plantation owner and thus – at least to the northern mind – as a proponent of the expansion of slavery. Delano’s repeated worries that Benito Cereno is an “impostor” (92) must have resonated with northern complaints about the unjust influence of the aristocratic slaveholders both in the South and on the national level. Cereno’s seemingly good relations with his cargo of slaves offered themselves to be read as the conscious projection of the plantation myth, which, to an increasing number of northerners, masked the evils of slavery, while his apparent infirmity begged to be read as disguising the South’s aggressive strength. Again, from such a vantage point, Delano’s vague suspicions that Cereno wants to capture his ship are likely to have appeared plausible to Melville’s readers, since this conquest would have symbolically completed the seemingly unstoppable movement of slavery to the West and to the North. Yet, it needs to be stressed that this conspiracy theory is the one least hinted at. Compared to the frequent references to a Catholic plot and, as we will see in a moment, also to a slave insurrection, the clues to a Slave Power plot are fairly rare. The reason might be that by 1855 it was so firmly anchored in the minds of the readers of Putnam’s that it required hardly any triggering. Reversely, however, it is possible that Melville wanted to hint at how the Catholic conspiracy theory even at that moment still deflected attention from the danger of the Slave Power by raising the specter of an external enemy, and that this is the reason why there are more passages that suggest a Catholic conspiracy than one by the Slave Power. Finally, it might be that for Melville, too, the Slave Power conspiracy remained unnarratable – even in the highly symbolic fashion employed in “Benito Cereno.” What fictional texts could narrate more easily, as we have seen in the last section, were slave rebellions – and such an insurrection is also hinted at in Melville’s novella from the very beginning in a fashion that readers of the 1850s could hardly miss. The ship’s name, San Dominick, was bound to actualize fears of racial war, as it referred not only to a Catholic saint but also to the slave rebellion that occurred on the island of Saint-Dominique during the 1790s. Moreover, the novella is set in “1799” (66) and thus in the very year when the rebels, under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, successfully established control over the island. The memory of this uprising was highly alive in antebellum America where it “inspire[d] fears among slaveholders and hopes among their slaves” (J. Beecher 49). As Eric Sundquist has argued, the “tales of terror” related by white fugitives “became deeply ingrained in Southern history” and “were reawakened with each newly discovered conspiracy or revolt – most notably, of course, those of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and [Nat] Turner” (140). It seems safe to assume, though, that northerners also remembered the revolution on Saint-Dominique without much prompting, just as they were, no

214

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

doubt, able to recall the slave revolts aboard the Amistad in 1839 and the Creole in 1843.45 One effect of the uprising on Saint-Dominique and the occasional revolts that occurred throughout the South during the first half of the nineteenth century was that the image of blacks held by whites became more complex and contradictory. Scientific racism, according to which blacks were mentally inferior to whites, and romantic racialism, according to which blacks were simple and peaceful creatures who were inherently good because they were less estranged from nature than whites, remained widespread and found a powerful expression in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). They were increasingly supplemented, however, and at times completely replaced by a more pessimistic understanding of the natures of blacks, one that saw them as vicious and cunning creatures who needed a firm hand and constant surveillance to be kept at bay.46 While even those among Melville’s original readers who did not believe in this theory were no doubt familiar with it, his eighteenth-century protagonist, Delano, of course, knows neither about this new stereotype of blacks nor, apparently, about the revolt on Saint-Dominique. Accordingly, the perspectives of characters and readers diverge further than ever when it comes to evaluating the behavior of the blacks. Due to his romantic racialism – as the narrator tells us in a famous aside, he takes to blacks “just as other men to Newfoundland dogs” (121) – Delano never really considers the possibility of a slave uprising. At one point he quickly reflects on the likelihood of Benito Cereno conspiring with the blacks, but dismisses it right away because the blacks are “too stupid” (108). Moreover, he never even ponders for a moment a scenario in which the blacks are controlling the ship and are now conspiring against him without the aid of the whites. Delano completely misunderstands Babo, the true mastermind of the conspiracy, who never leaves Cereno’s side in order to prevent any revealing communication between the two captains. While he admires Babo’s “steady good conduct” throughout (75), he is always, but always vaguely, suspicious of Benito Cereno. Even the breaches of discipline that Delano witnesses on the ship do not alert him to a black revolt. When he sees how “one of the black boys […] seize[s] a knife, and [… strikes a white] lad over the head” (85) or how “two blacks […] das[h a white sailor] to the deck” (100–01), his

45 For an analysis of how Melville inscribes these two revolts into “Benito Cereno,” see Zuckert 241–42. The revolt on the Créole was fictionalized by Fredrick Douglass in “The Heroic Slave.” In his narrative, of course, the conspiracy to capture the ship is projected as a fully justified measure to achieve liberty and does therefore not bear larger implications for the cultural discourse on conspiracy theory at the time. 46 For a discussion of these different stereotypes of blacks, see K. Scott.

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

215

preconceived notions about blacks prevent him from seeing anything close to an uprising. What he sees is a “spectacle of disorder” for which he blames Benito Cereno whom he consequently suspects to be “one of those paper captains” who is unable to keep his well-meaning but childish blacks under the control they need (101). By contrast, for the 1855 reader, black violence against whites on a ship named San Dominick in the year 1799 vividly recalled the Saint-Dominique and subsequent slave uprisings and strongly suggested that a black conspiracy was underway. This suspicion was enforced by a number of parallels between Melville’s Babo and Toussaint as nineteenth-century American culture imagined him in biographies and novels. As Jonathan Beecher has shown, these parallels concern their motives, ability to act, manner of death, and the diverging responses both provoked (cf. 55–57). While the novella thus offers a plethora of hints that suggest a slave insurrection under a black leader, it once also evokes the abolitionist conspiracy theory as southerners commonly projected it – warning of a joined plot of blacks and abolitionists or “Black Republicans.” Tellingly, it does so by way of negation, as this is something that Delano cannot imagine at all. He dismisses the idea that Cereno is conspiring with the blacks not only, as I discussed above, on the grounds that “blacks [are] too stupid,” but also because the very thought seems absurd to him. “Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatise from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?” he muses (108–09). Once again, however, Melville’s first readers must have had a different perspective, as they were, no doubt, aware of southern fears that whites would not only instigate slave rebellions but even fight alongside slaves – a fear not entirely unfounded as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry four years later would show. In sum, then, the events on the San Dominick leave both Delano and the readers puzzled. They are, however, puzzled for different reasons. Delano is confused because he can make no sense of what he sees; the readers are puzzled because they can make “too much” – and contradictory – sense of what they perceive. Due to his prejudices against Catholics and Spaniards, Delano harbors some vague suspicions against Benito Cereno, but he never manages to construct in his mind a theory of the conspiracy he is afraid of, since he lacks the templates that could give his fears a narrative shape. Due to his prejudices against blacks, he also never suspects Babo. He is thus unable to undo the “Gordian kno[t]” that one of the Spanish sailors throws him in a desperate attempt at symbolic communication that is to make him aware of the true state of affairs on the ship. This knot, “a combination of double-bowline-knot, treble-crown-knot, back-handedwell-knot, knot-in-and-out-knot, and jamming knot” (109) is a fitting symbol of

216

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

the confusion he feels. Neither does he understand why it has been given to him, nor is he able to undo it either literally or metaphorically. Yet, Delano’s inability “to comprehend the meaning of the knot” and the events on the ship (109), I would like to suggest, has less to do with his individual naïveté and racism than with the foundations of conspiracy theorizing in general, which the novella subtly exposes as historically determined and far from natural. Until the suspected plots are finally proven by foiling them, conspiracy theories are always based on shaky evidence, as it is in the very nature of the conspiracy that its actions take place in secret. Thus, the conspiracy theorist, as we have seen in this and the preceding chapter, has to rely heavily on inferences, ascribing hidden meanings to the things he sees and hears and formulating hypotheses about how these individual occurrences fit a larger pattern. For a full-blown conspiracy theorist this usually does not pose a problem. Since he assumes that there is a conspiracy to detect, he also assumes that its signs are everywhere and that everything that he perceives is meaningful and fits the template he already has in mind. Delano, however, lacks the conspiracy theorist’s conviction that all he sees is indeed meaningful. Thus, when yet another Spanish sailor tries to secretly alert him to the plot, Delano asks himself a question no conspiracy theorist would ever ask, namely if he has mistaken “some random, unintentional motion of the man […] for a significant beckoning?” (107). More importantly, as somebody still unaware of the Catholic, Slave Power, and abolitionist conspiracy theories, he also lacks the templates on which he could graft his observations. Accordingly, his interpretive efforts lead nowhere; he formulates a vague suspicion for a few moments, dismisses it, and starts again, constantly moving in circles and remaining ignorant of what is really going on until the very end. Instead of understanding that Benito Cereno tries to escape when he jumps after him into the boat that is to bring him back to his own ship, this act convinces him that Cereno is a “plotting pirate [who] means murder.” And when Babo jumps into the boat as well to kill Cereno, Delano thinks that he has come to “befriend his master to the last” (142). It takes Babo’s dagger pointed at Cereno and the interference of Delano’s men to finally make him understand: “That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelations swept, illuminating in unanticipated clearness, his host’s whole mysterious demeanour, with every enigmatic event of the day” (143). Clearly, what Delano experiences is, in Mark Fenster’s terminology, the narrative pivot that the conspiracy theorist always experiences toward the end of the twentieth-century classical conspiracy narrative when everything falls into place and finally and unambiguously makes sense. In the fictional narratives that Fenster describes, though, there are usually two major pivots, with the first setting off the investigation as the protagonist

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

217

realizes that something is going on and the second closing it off with the protagonist understanding exactly what is going on. Delano, however, has experienced no such previous pivot. Lacking knowledge of the language of conspiracy theory – tellingly, he has to be admonished by one of his men “to give heed to what [Cereno] was saying” and still finds it “incomprehensible” (143) – he has never set out on a real investigation but merely harbored and dismissed fleeting suspicions. Consequently, whereas the conspiracy theorist longs for and anticipates the moment of final revelation, this moment is completely “unanticipated” for Delano. The knot that Delano cannot undo does not only signify his incapability to understand; it is also an apt symbol of the problems the novella’s first readers probably struggled with. If Delano cannot formulate a coherent conspiracy theory of what is going on, the readers were puzzled because, faced with “an amalgam of conspiratorial languages” (Levine 201), they were invited by the narrative to make sense of the events aboard by actualizing mutually exclusive conspiracy theories. For them, the narrative evoked a Catholic plot against the United States, a southern plot against the free North, a slave insurrection conducted by the slaves alone, and a slave insurrection instigated by whites. What is more, the narrative often calls these conspiracy theories to mind simultaneously, suggesting that they are as contradictorily interwoven as the different types of knots that make up the big one given to Delano. For example, when Delano dismisses the idea of Cereno plotting with the blacks (and thus plants this idea in the readers’ minds), he uses the terms “renegade” and “apostatise” to describe a, for him unlikely, traitor of the white race. Besides referring to abolitionists and “Black Republicans,” however, these terms were bound to stir up the idea of a Catholic conspiracy, as the “renegade” or “apostate” nun was a stock character of antiCatholic discourse, a figure that in countless accounts functioned as an early victim of the papal plot to conquer the United States. Thus, the wording, on the one hand, confirmed suspicions of an abolitionist plot by reminding readers that renegades do exist, albeit in different contexts, and, on the other, it undermined such suspicions by reminding them that what was going was not necessarily a slave revolt but could also be a Catholic conspiracy. Unlike Delano’s confusion, however, the readers’ puzzlement was not to last until the very end, as I would like to demonstrate by looking closely at the endings of the first and second installment. The first installment, I wish to argue, left contemporary readers pondering all the possible conspiracies I have discussed, but by the end of the second installment the attentive reader would have known that Delano is faced with a slave conspiracy that does not involve the Spaniards. The third installment, finally, confirmed this suspicion but complicated the evaluation of the conspiracy the text dramatizes.

218

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

The first installment of “Benito Cereno” runs until Delano, “not without something of relief” sees his whale-boat approaching the Spanish ship again (100). Minutes before, he has reached and passed the height of his suspicions. Watching Cereno and Babo whispering with each other, that is, conspiring in the original sense of the word, Delano admits to himself finally that they have “the air of conspirators” (96), and he gets increasingly worried about “silent signs, of some Freemason sort” (95) that might indicate a “sinister scheme” (97). His fears climax in the “incredible inference” that if Cereno is lying then “every soul on board [… is] his carefully drilled recruit in the plot” (99). However, as he lacks the necessary templates, Delano has no clue what this plot might aim at. His reference to the Masons is particularly revealing in this respect. While vague rumors about Masons circulated in the United States during the 1790s, there was not for another 25 years a full-fledged conspiracy theory that implicated them. As his suspicions thus have no real goal, he quickly “explain[s them] away” (100), begins “to laugh at his former forebodings” (99), and gives in to a sequence of “tranquillising” thoughts (100). Melville’s readers, though, were probably not that easily put at ease, as the events fit the frames of various conspiracy theories they were familiar with. Moreover, Delano’s short-lived fear that the San Dominick might be “a slumbering volcano” (98) due to erupt soon would have intensified their worries, since the narrative employs a metaphor here that was frequently used during the antebellum period to describe the sudden outbreak of violence on Saint-Dominique. The readers’ problem at this point in the narrative, then, was not so much the question if there was a conspiracy but which conspiracy they were witnessing. The signs hinted at a range of directions and thus left readers not tranquilized as Delano but likely puzzled and excited to see how the story would continue. Since they had to wait for the next installment, it is not unlikely that some of them used the time to play out the various possible conspiracy scenarios in their minds.47 If the first installment closes with Delano at rest, the second one, which concludes with the two ships finally “lay[ing] anchored together,” ends with him being completely confused. He may by now be fairly, though not entirely, convinced that Cereno is not plotting against him, but he is nevertheless “[w]holly at loss to account for [the Spaniard’s] demeanour” (137). While Delano thus seems to have given up on understanding Benito Cereno, attentive readers of the 1850s, I contend, had by then figured out what was going on aboard the ship, because halfway through the second installment – almost exactly in the middle of the

47 On audience activity during serial breaks, see Hayward 3–4. For an empirical study of how readers hypothesize between installments, see Parchesky.

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

219

story, that is – the text no longer hints at a variety of equally likely conspiracy scenarios but begins to point rather firmly at a slave uprising. Throughout the installment, it becomes increasingly clear that the Spanish sailors are trying to communicate something to Delano. He realizes that “one or two of them retur[n his] glance and with a meaning” (102), and catches “an imperfect gesture” through which another Spaniard “ha[s] sought to communicate, unbeknown to anyone, even to his captain” (107), and he is asked “to undo” the knot by yet another sailor (109). Delano may not know what to make of this, but for the readers this surely suggested that a Catholic plot could be ruled out, as those who formerly performed the role of Catholic priests for the narrative are now obviously trying to alert the American captain to a different plot. What is more, the behavior of the blacks makes a Slave Power conspiracy more unlikely as well. They try to interrupt communication between Delano and the sailors – one of them, for example, takes the knot from Delano under a pretense, searches it for hidden messages in a fashion that reminds even Delano of “a detective custom-house officer,” and then throws it into the sea (110). In addition, their violence is now directed against Delano, too, who is “jostled” at one point, albeit “accidentally” (114). If all this already hinted at a slave uprising, the famous shaving scene settled the matter for good, and it also resolved the question whether Cereno was part of the conspiracy. In fact, in many ways the shaving scene functions as a mise-enabyme for the whole story. The novella’s first pages hint strongly at a Catholic plot, and so does the first paragraph of this scene, which describes the cuddy where the action takes place as a Catholic torture chamber with “crucifix,” “friars’ girdles,” and “inquisitors’ racks” (119). However, just as the novella as a whole more and more strongly suggests a slave revolt, so does the shaving scene – but this dimension of the drama performed for him is entirely lost on Delano whose image of blacks clashes here most obviously with the one that Melville’s readers were familiar with, even if they did not share it. What Delano sees is a faithful servant who takes care of his hypochondriac and utterly nervous master’s needs. What the readers saw was a black slave who put a knife to a white man’s throat and placed him under a sort of guillotine – a reading prompted by the “barber’s basin, which on one side is scooped out, so as accurately to receive the chin” (121–22). This hint at a beheading – corroborated by the fact that even Delano sees for a moment “in the black […] a headsman, and in the white a man at the block” (122) – was bound to set off a chain of associations that eventually made clear that what has happened is a slave revolt. To begin with, the revolution on Saint-Dominique was ultimately triggered by the French Revolution and the outlawing of slavery in the colonial mother country. Moreover, Americans were highly critical of the French Revolution and the

220

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

Jacobin terror it led to, and during the 1790s conspiracy theories that saw the Illuminati behind it gained some prominence in the United States. More importantly, though, blacks were sometimes cast as Jacobins by southerners fearing insurrections. Edwin C. Holland, for example, an editor from Charleston, once warned his readers that “our Negroes are truely [sic] the Jacobins of the country” (qtd. in Sundquist 33). Northerners maybe did not always accept this analogy, but they were no doubt aware of it. Hence, readers of Melville probably could not escape the notion that a black “‘Jacobin’ revolutionary conspiracy” was going on aboard the San Dominick once they had read the shaving scene (33).48 This reading of events was then confirmed by the rest of the installment. For once, Delano begins to explicitly reflect on slavery, and his thought that it “breeds ugly passions in man” must have sounded ominous to a reader who had by now identified Babo as the villain. A similar effect was for sure achieved by Babo repeating Delano’s commands to the blacks. While Delano sees Babo merely acting “his original part of captain of the slaves” and is glad about the “valuable” help (133), the now-knowing reader, realizing that the slaves would not heed Delano’s orders, received further proof of who was really in charge. And there was an even clearer hint at a black conspiracy. Back on deck, Delano tries once more to start a conversation with a sailor, but the Spaniard only replies “with an inward chuckle, grasping the tiller-head firmly,” obviously afraid to say something that the blacks around will not like. His fears are well-founded, as the next sentence shows. Here the narrator completely abandons Delano’s point of view and notes: “Upon this, unperceived by the American, the two blacks eyed the sailor intently” (134). Doubtlessly, this authorial comment finally vindicated the suspicions that contemporary readers were prone to harbor by then. Accordingly, when Delano, moments later, considers it a “vexatious coincidence” that a black arrives at Benito Cereno’s cabin just as he does so that, once again, he cannot talk to the Spanish captain alone (134), Melville’s 1855 readers certainly knew better. By the end of the installment, they were no longer confused by hints at various conspiracy scenarios, and they certainly were not “at loss” to account for Cereno’s behavior and other occurrences onboard (137). They knew what was going on.

48 In hindsight it is very tempting to read the way Melville arranges the order of conspiracy theories evoked in “Benito Cereno” and the shaving scene as a comment on their historical rise to prominence and relationship with each other. During the 1830s and 1840s the Catholic conspiracy theory was in the North at least far more important than the abolitionist and Slave Power ones. As I have argued in the previous chapter, suspicions of Catholics contained for a while the internal conflict over slavery – just as in the novella hints at a Catholic plot initially distract from what is really going on.

Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

221

As a consequence, the first part of the final installment was bound to turn them into alarmists wanting to warn Delano. It must have been vexing for them to see Delano, after a short moment in which he suspects the blacks, “[o]nce again […] smil[e] at the phantoms which had mocked him” (139). Readers realized that Delano simply does not speak the language of conspiracy and thus lacks the code to decipher what is happening. The trick the story thus played on its northern readers is that it offered them an ominous choice: they could either abandon the logic of conspiracy altogether, or they had to embrace that of the three initially evoked conspiracy theories which they probably found least appealing. In other words, they had to adopt the distinctly southern position according to which “Sambo in fact masked the savage” (Levine 211). However, just as it is wrong to read “Benito Cereno” as firmly antislavery, as a critique of racial stereotypes and the artificial nature of slavery, as most critics do these days, it would be wrong to read the story simply as a vindication of the abolitionist conspiracy theory and a dismissal of the Catholic and Slave Power ones.49 Instead, we need to acknowledge that “Benito Cereno” is a highly ambivalent text as far as all of these questions are concerned. It surely exposes white feelings of intellectual superiority and, through the drama that Babo stages for Delano, effectively denaturalizes slavery, but it also projects the image of a violent uprising replete with hints at torture and cannibalism.50 For this and other reasons I would agree with Faye Halpern, who has argued that “‘Benito Cereno’ does not offer evidence for what kind of stance it takes toward slavery, even if we want it to” (564). All we can say is that “it speaks honestly to a white author’s social and racial anxieties” (Levine 215). The same is true of the novella’s stance on conspiracy and conspiracy theory. Through the contrast between the perspectives of Delano and the readers it was written for, the narrative exposes the mechanisms of conspiracy theorizing and suggests that this mode of understanding the world is far from natural and hinges on the historical context. Yet, not only does the story force its readers to believe in a conspiracy theory they may have found unconvincing in other contexts, it also eventually confirms their suspicions, as there really is such a plot. This situation is further complicated by the fact that, independent of any judgment cast on conspiracy theory as such, the narrative’s evaluation of the conspiracy is far from clear. If the first part of the final installment drew 1855

49 For critical discussions of interpretations that read the story as firmly antislavery, see Bartley 447–50 and Meyer 243–44. 50 As Ezra Tawil has shown, “Benito Cereno” problematizes the romantic racialism projected in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin by having Babo put on a show for Delano during which the blacks behave as the slaves in Stowe’s novel do to “disguise [their] violent plot” (45).

222

Chapter 4: Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power

readers into the story and turned them into countersubversives unable to alert Delano to the danger he is in, the second half of the installment, which offers the court transcript of Benito Cereno’s deposition, in turn worked to distance them from the novella’s action through the formulaic use of reported speech and parallel sentence structures. Looking at the events on the San Dominick with some detachment probably made northern readers reject the Spanish perspective and experience a certain amount of sympathy for the blacks. In fact, one may safely assume that many readers were willing to grant the slaves on the ship the right to revolt against their masters. But the language of conspiracy that the narrator utilizes for most of the novella to relate the events complicates matters considerably. As the threat of conspiracy deeply worried Americans at the time, it rendered the blacks’ actions problematic even for those readers who, in theory, were willing to see the blacks as conducting a legitimate revolution. Moreover, their worries were surely intensified by the fashion in which the narrative interweaves different conspiracy scenarios, as this suggested that the conspirators might be a danger to northerners as well. In the final analysis, then, Melville’s “Benito Cereno” is as ambivalent in its stance on conspiracy theory as Lippard’s Monks of Monk Hall. Lippard analyzes the functions of anti-Catholic tropes and shows that they are often strategically deployed, but he does not suggest that there is no Catholic plot. Melville likewise analyses and participates in his culture’s conspiracist discourses, as he exposes both the attraction and the sense-making mechanisms of conspiracy theory and affirms them at the same time.51 There simply was no escaping the logic of conspiracy during the 1850s.

51 See Levine 215, whose interpretation of the story differs from mine, but who arrives at the same conclusion.

Chapter 5 “Masters of Deceit”: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s Whereas other episodes in the long history of American conspiracy theorizing are still vividly remembered today, the alleged Slave Power plot, which influenced the course of the country significantly, has been largely forgotten. One reason may have been that until the second half of the twentieth century the Slave Power conspiracy theory was the odd one out among American visions of subversion and infiltration. While it anticipates the pattern of post-1960 conspiracy theories, it diverged from the dominant pattern of nineteenth-century conspiracy theories in that it neither targeted an external enemy whose invasion had only just begun nor linked internal subversion to a threat from the outside. Instead, it focused on an exclusively internal enemy said to have already captured the federal government. As such, it could not be drawn upon whenever a new generation of nativists recycled and updated the resentments of previous decades. Equally important for this “forgetting” was surely the cultural work done by the countless post-Reconstruction representations of the conflict. Memoirs, novels, plays, and films celebrated the southern way of life and turned the secessionists into ragged rebels who had gallantly fought for a lost cause (cf. Hochbruck, Geschöpfe). Some cultural texts even projected the secessionists as the victims of a conspiracy. One of the most influential films that represented the conflict in this fashion was D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorifies both Lincoln and the Ku Klux Klan and vilifies Congressional leader Austin Stoneman, a tendentiously fictionalized version of the historical Thaddeus Stevens, as the mastermind of a conspiracy to destroy the South for good. As is well known, Griffith based his film on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman (1905), whose preface gives the term “conspiracy” a positive twist by claiming that the novel “develops the true story of the ‘Ku Klux Klan conspiracy,’ which overturned the Reconstruction régime” (n. pag.). What is maybe less well-known is that Dixon, in novels such as Comrades (1909), also addressed an alleged threat that would dominate the country’s most influential conspiracy theories at various moments throughout the twentieth century: Communism. Warning of the Communist menace during the 1900s, Dixon was an early but by no means one of the first American anti-Communists. Concerns about Communist influence had first emerged during the 1850s, the heydays of nativism, whose scapegoating of immigrants I discussed with regard to Catholics in chapter 3. For many years, Americans regarded Communism much like Catholi-

224

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

cism, as a foreign ideology brought to their country by those who had grown up in the class societies of Europe. In fact, until far into the 1920s anti-Communists believed that Communism predominantly appealed to foreigners. Both after the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and during the Red Scare of 1919–20 “foreigners […] embracing un-American ideas” were held responsible for the perceived attempts to overturn the social order (Bennett 194; cf. also Oshinsky 86–90). Moreover, “From the 1850s to the 1920s and beyond, the dominant image of the red menace within American society was one of violent insurrection” (Heale, Anticommunism 3). Anti-Communists believed that Communists as well as anarchists, two groups that easily merged in their perception, would instigate an uprising. Thus, what they worried about was open revolution, and not yet largescale subversion. They envisioned a number of small-scale plots that would prepare for the outbreak of open violence, and not a comprehensive infiltration of the federal government or the educational sector by Communists who could keep their true allegiances a secret. Accordingly, the fears of anti-Communists of these decades differed significantly from those usually harbored by conspiracy theorists. However, during the 1930s, the way the Communist menace was envisioned changed dramatically. Anti-Communists began to accept that Communism, for whatever reasons, appealed not only to foreigners but also to “native” Americans. Initially, they explained the appeal of the foreign ideology to them through the loss of faith in capitalism caused by the Great Depression and the Communists’ firm anti-fascist stance. During the late 1940s, however, as I discuss in detail below, anti-Communists began to offer quite different reasons for why Americans became Communists. Moreover, from the 1930s onward, anti-Communists stopped perceiving the Communists inside the United States as “a motley lot” (Hoover 54), and began to consider them a well-organized body that followed directions from the Soviet Union. Claiming that Moscow had realized that any open revolution was bound to fail and therefore had developed a new plan, antiCommunists began to emphasize “less the aspect of class revolt and more that of subversion by a foreign power” (Heale, Anticommunism 97). As the Report of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, issued by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), put it in 1939, “In 1935 the Communists changed their strategy and tactics to what is now known as the ‘Trojan Horse tactics’.” The Report went on to quote from a speech by Georgi Dimitrov to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow that year in which Dimitrov called on his comrades to “remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy.” The Report concluded that “The new tactics have proven to be very effective and successful” (27). This understanding of the Communist threat as a conspiracy gained force over the next couple of years, especially with the

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

225

emergence of the Cold War. It reached its peak during the 1950s, which is why I focus on this decade here. Throughout this chapter I use the term “Great Red Scare,” which I borrow from Ellen Schrecker, to refer to this period, and not the far more popular one “McCarthyism.” I discuss Joseph McCarthy’s speeches and writings at length, but, as scholars agree, “There was far more to the ‘McCarthy era’ than Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” Anti-Communism was not a minority phenomenon, but “there existed in Cold War America a broad anti-Communist consensus shared and seldom questioned by most liberals as well as conservatives, by intellectuals as well as plain folks” (Fried vii, 34).1 The climate of fear and suspicion that appears to us today inextricably linked to McCarthy existed before he entered the scene in 1950, and it endured after his censure by the Senate in 1954. McCarthy is thus best considered as the product of a cultural and political climate that he fueled further. He is the epitome of a specific moment in American conspiracy theorizing to which I devote this final case study. As I show in the first section of this chapter, there are both important parallels and differences between the Communist conspiracy theory of the 1950s and the conspiracy theories I have investigated in the previous three case studies. Postulating a plot directed from abroad but carried out by Americans at home, the Communist conspiracy theory combines the foreign threat that the Catholics posed with the domestic one posed by “Black Republicans” or the Slave Power respectively. What is more, while abolitionists were said to be plotting the secret take-over of the government, while slaveholders had allegedly already achieved this, and while Catholics were accused of destroying the foundations of the republic by corrupting the future mothers of the nation, the Communists were regarded as infiltrating both the government and the educational sector. At the same time, however, the enemy targeted by anti-Communist conspiracy theorists differed decisively from those their nineteenth-century counterparts had been concerned with. For writers like Morse, Beecher, Chase, or Lincoln, it was most important to prove that a Catholic or Slave Power conspiracy existed; discovering the conspirators was much less of a problem, since Catholics could be identified by their rites and sometimes, in the case of priests, even by their garbs and members of the Slave Power by their owning slaves or voting for slavery interests in Congress. By contrast, the anti-Communists of the 1950s had to find an answer to the question of how enemies could be identified 1 For exactly the same argument, see Schrecker xii; Griffith xi; and Oshinksy 85–86. Heale goes even further and, in a move that I consider exaggerated, contends “the irrelevance of Senator McCarthy to the movement which bears his name” (McCarthy’s xi). For a short overview of how anti-Communism affected all areas of daily life, cf. Fried 161–64.

226

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

that, as the countersubversives held, operated in secret and never publicly admitted their true allegiances. This is the same epistemological problem the Puritans faced during the Salem witchcraft crisis when those in confederacy with the devil were no longer found only outside or at the margins of their community. The Puritans, as we have seen, “solved” this problem by admitting spectral evidence, that is, by relying exclusively on the word of the accuser. The antiCommunists, as we will see, effectively linked Communism to a variety of perceived social and sexual deviances like homosexuality, divorce, and even “liberalism” in general. This made the “perverse” ideology of Communism visible – with terrible consequences for those whose “perversion” thus became an indicator of subversion. But the problem of how the conspirators could be identified not only recalls the Salem witchcraft crisis. It also anticipates one of the central concerns of conspiracy theories of the past fifty years. In these more recent accounts, the absence of outward markers of subversion frequently has the effect of rendering virtually everybody suspicious. As I argued in chapter 2, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” can be read as anticipating this problem. Contemporary conspiracy films and novels like Salt, The Bourne Identity, or The Da Vinci Code regularly capitalize on and dramatize its implication by eventually revealing that at least one of the closest allies of the protagonist is a member of the conspiracy. There is, however, a crucial difference between the Salem witchcraft crisis, the anti-Communism of the 1950s, and later conspiracy theories, no matter whether they are allegedly factual or openly fictional. In Salem as well as during the Great Red Scare, the government acted on the conviction that there really was a conspiracy underway. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations as well as Congress took a variety of measures that ranged from initiating loyalty and security programs to infringing on the civil rights of suspects and passing legislation that virtually outlawed the Communist Party. Yet, this was the last time that the government actively embraced and acted on the idea that there existed an internal conspiracy attempting to undermine it. Since then, there have been various administrations that embraced conspiracy theories and took the “appropriate” steps, most notably under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But the enemies blamed by these conspiracy theories were usually located outside the borders of the United States, in Moscow, Teheran, Kabul, or Baghdad. By contrast, contemporary conspiracy theories that are not endorsed by the government, such as those of the 9/11 Truth Movement (cf. Fenster 243–55), invariably project the government as the primary focus of the conspiracy, assuming that the administration has either been subverted already or that its members have from the very beginning been working against the people.

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

227

In recent decades, such claims have usually been quickly dismissed as figments of paranoid minds. In fact, it has often been enough to label an argument a conspiracy theory to disqualify it, as the term has, in popular discourse at least, assumed a derogatory quality, indicating a worldview that must be mistaken because it holds that there is no such thing as coincidence and that history unfolds according to a human plan. During the 1950s, such dismissals of conspiracy theory did not yet occur. The epistemological paradigm that, as I argued in chapter 1, has been a major factor in generating conspiracist visions since the eighteenth century had not yet been delegitimized. While there were many who insisted that there was no widespread Communist infiltration, not many challenged the foundations of the countersubversive worldview. Those who did often likened the search for Communists to the witch-hunts of the Puritans, thus implying that anti-Communists were driven by superstition as well as baser motives. The best-known text that forges such a connection is of course Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). I will touch on Miller’s play, set in Salem in 1692, in the conclusion where I read it as anticipating the scholarly discourse on conspiracy theories that emerged during the 1960s and that both was fueled by and fueled the delegitimization of conspiracy theorizing. As is well-known, for 1960s scholars of conspiracy theory like Richard Hofstadter, conspiracy theories were a symptom of status anxieties. Based on this premise, he and other pluralist historians like Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab developed an explanation of the Great Red Scare that has proven highly influential. In Hofstadter’s famous phrase, the anti-Communism of the 1950s was part of an anti-elitist “revolt against modernity” – a desperate attempt by a variety of social groups which felt threatened by change to turn back the clock and preserve the America they knew (Anti-Intellectualism 117). For the pluralists, “McCarthyism,” as they referred to it, was a profoundly irrational grassroots movement, a misdirected response to social and cultural changes that scapegoated innocents. However, as early as 1967, Michael Rogin challenged the pluralists’ account and offered a different explanation. He contended that “McCarthyism” – he, too, used this term – had never enjoyed any real mass support and thus lacked the populist dimension the pluralists ascribed to it.2 Effectively reversing the pluralists’ argument, he suggested that those backing McCarthy had been elites concerned about the Communist threat or Republicans

2 It is important to point out that Rogin as well as the pluralists operate with a notion of “populism” that is different from mine. As I explained in the introduction, I understand populism with Laclau as a particular form of forging connections between issues and individuals. It is not necessarily, as Rogin and the pluralists understand it, a mass phenomenon that starts at the bottom of society and exerts pressure on the elites from there.

228

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

who saw such accusations as a convenient means to bring down the New Deal and win back the White House and Congress after twenty years of Democratic rule (cf. Intellectuals 247–49). Rogin’s argument has proven even more influential than that of the pluralists. Scholars such as Robert Griffith soon corroborated his interpretation, and during the 1970s and 1980s, his position was shared by most historians. Thus, writing in 1990, Richard Fried still argued that “the origins of McCarthyism lay largely among the grievances and ambitions of conservative politicians, mostly but not solely of the Republican Party” (9). Since then, however, scholars from a variety of disciplines have significantly revised our image of the Great Red Scare. To begin with, historians and political scientists have proposed a synthesis of the two traditional approaches. In The Party of Fear, David Bennett contends that both the pluralists and their critics were partly right. Anti-Communism, he suggests, was both a mass and an elite phenomenon that had roots “in the domestic tensions of the time” as well as “in the international crisis and in the rhetoric of the Cold War struggle against communism” (314). In similar fashion M. J. Heale has suggested that “the populist-elitist dichotomy is largely a false one” (McCarthy’s xiv). For him, anti-Communism is best understood as a dynamic simultaneously fueled from below and above, and he suggests that it was this combination that made it so powerful (cf. 288–92). But scholars like Bennett or Heale have not only complicated the question of how much support anti-Communism actually enjoyed, they have also challenged the motives ascribed to anti-Communists. Heale has convincingly suggested that the status anxieties that fueled the Great Red Scare from below were not at all irrational, as the pluralists had it, but well-founded vis-à-vis the rapid social and economic changes that the 1950s witnessed (cf. 299–300). Moreover, Heale has also demonstrated that a tactical deployment of anti-Communist rhetoric does not necessarily mean that those who voiced accusations were not convinced of their truth, as Rogin had it. Among those who fueled the fear of Communists were of course some who did so for strategic purposes alone. But these cynics would not only have been completely powerless without those who really believed the conspiracy theory, they were also far fewer in numbers than earlier critics assumed. Joseph McCarthy, for example, certainly was “the perfect instrument of revenge” for some Republicans (Oshinsky 129), but he quickly came to believe in his cause. We do not necessarily need to believe the story McCarthy himself told about how his eyes were opened to the Communist conspiracy in December 1946, a moment that figures in his autobiographical account as the major narrative pivot, as I show in section 4. But we must take his anti-Communism seriously, if only because we cannot explain otherwise why he did not stop to “expose” Communists in government after the Republicans won the White House back in 1952 (cf. Schrecker 242).

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

229

In fact, McCarthy is an excellent example of a true believer who not only deployed his accusations with considerable strategic acumen, but who also cleverly exploited the conditions under which the American press was operating at the time. He knew that reporters were always looking for a sensationalist headline, and that they had to report his accusations as if there was any substance to them. As Heale explains, “The newspaper ethic of the day was ‘straight reporting,’ relaying news without adornment, which in this case meant confining a story to what McCarthy actually said, without injecting suspicions about his credibility or motivations” (Anti-Communism 152). When McCarthy’s accusations were dismissed, this usually happened in a much smaller article, and not on the front page. What is more, by this time, McCarthy had usually already moved on to a new case that made the headlines.3 Accordingly, just as during the antebellum period discussed in the two previous chapters, media conditions played an important role in creating and sustaining the fear of conspiracy. As we will see, however, the media, and especially television, eventually also helped to bring down McCarthy. Finally, traditional explanations of the Great Red Scare have in recent years also been complicated by cultural and gender historians. These scholars have shown that the enormous transformations that American society and culture underwent during the 1950s considerably shaped the anti-Communist movement. The 1950s, they argue, were not the period of stability and homogeneity as which they are generally remembered today, but a decade of “vexing contradiction” (Jacobson and González 33) where the changes that we usually associate with the 1960s began. While many Americans found these developments liberating, others were troubled by an apparent rise in homosexuality, allegedly dysfunctional families, the increased presence of women outside the domestic sphere, female emancipation in general, as well as the supposed feminization of the American man both through the influence of overbearing women and the emasculating effects of de-individualizing office work. They thought that these tendencies needed to be contained just as much as the Communist threat. In fact, as scholars such as Stephanie Coontz, K. A. Cuordileone, Joel Kovel, Ellen Tyler May, and many others have demonstrated, concerns about mass society, bureaucracy, sexual deviance, and, indeed, for some, liberalism in general, became inextricably connected with the Communist threat. The second section of this chapter therefore explores how and to what effects anti-Communism “became entangled with anxieties that had ultimately little to

3 Cf. Bennett 299; Oshinsky 186; and Schrecker 242–43. For an analysis of McCarthy’s relationship to the New York Hearst press that corroborates this view, see Tuck.

230

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

do with Communism” (Cuordileone xviii). Since Timothy Melley has investigated in detail how concerns about “organization men” became entangled with fears of conspiracy during the 1950s, I focus on how liberalism and behavior perceived as socially or sexually deviant became associated with the alleged Communist threat.4 Like others before me, I consider the Alger Hiss case of the late 1940s the decisive moment in the forging of this connection. Accused of membership in the Communist Party, Hiss, a former official of the Roosevelt administration and as such strongly associated with the New Deal, came not only to be regarded as a Communist. As the embodiment of everything that, in the eyes of conservatives, was wrong with the New Deal, he also rendered liberals as such suspicious of at least an inclination toward Communism. Since Hiss was widely considered homosexual, his conviction also directed the anti-Communists’ attention to the alleged links between what they regarded as sexual perversion, on the one hand, and ideological perversion, on the other. As I demonstrate, drawing on a wide variety of anti-Communist speeches and writings, after the Hiss case, anti-Communist discourse changed, as indictments of Communist infiltration also became indictments of, for example, homosexuality, divorce, and even modern art. The populist dimension of this conspiracy theory consists, then, not only in the fact that it primarily targeted East Coast liberal elitists like Alger Hiss, but also in its merging of a variety of actually unrelated concerns. Eventually, social and sexual behavior regarded as abnormal by conservatives came to function as indicator, cause, and effect of Communist ideology. This, I argue, had two effects: on the one hand, it solved the problem of how to detect Communists and thus limit suspicion, as not everybody was equally suspicious now; on the other hand, it also fueled the anti-Communist cause considerably, as it rendered new groups of people suspicious. Countersubversives looked for indicators of “deviant” behavior in those they suspected or thought they knew to be Communists in order to cement their suspicions, and they saw in everybody who displayed social and sexual behavior they disapproved of a potential Communist. Accordingly, the Communist conspiracy theory of the 1950s was characterized by a complex interplay of distortion and deflection that differs from the co-presence of these two modes during the Salem witchcraft crisis. With regard to 1692, it is possible to clearly distinguish between those who distorted and those who deflected from the issues as stake. With regard to the 1950s, this is, if at all, only heuristically possible. 4 Cf. Melley, Empire 1–6 and 47–69 for an extended analysis of how sociological work of the 1950s, such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) or William Whyte’s Organization Man (1956), negotiates threats to individuality that are also played out in conspiracist texts of the decade.

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

231

While sections 1 and 2 explore the Communist conspiracy theory in general, the following two sections considerably narrow the focus, offering close readings of important anti-Communist speeches and books that bring to the fore how concerns about conspiracy, social change, and sexual mores merged in individual texts. In section three I analyze discursive texts by J. Edgar Hoover, who in hindsight must be considered as the most important anti-Communist of the decade (cf. Kovel 87), and Joseph McCarthy. I focus first on Hoover’s Masters of Deceit (1958), where Hoover repeatedly aligns Communism and liberalism and spends much time to describe the allegedly harmful effects of Communism on family life, the development of children, marriage, and morality in general. In best countersubversive fashion, his text is a republican jeremiad that calls for a renewal of both Christian values and republican citizenship in order to defeat the Communist conspiracy. The same is true for Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 Lincoln Day Speech, as I argue in the second part of this section where I first discuss this speech and the Senate debate it triggered. With regard to these texts, my analysis focuses on how McCarthy repeatedly conflates liberalism, alleged elitism, and homosexuality, and links them to Communist subversion. I then turn to McCarthy’s indictment of General George Catlett Marshall as the mastermind of the Communist conspiracy in the United States in order to show how McCarthy projected himself as a careful interpreter of sources, while, in reality, he was fabricating evidence. Since McCarthy always also fashioned himself as the defender of decency, I close the section with a short discussion of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings at whose climactic moment McCarthy was famously accused of having no sense of decency at all. The chapter’s final section offers an extensive discussion of Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film adaptation. Much like the narratives by Lippard and Melville that I analyzed in chapters 3 and 4, The Manchurian Candidate is very ambivalent in that both the novel and the film simultaneously confirm and critique the Communist conspiracy theory. They ridicule McCarthy through the figure of Senator Iselin, but by staging a stark contrast between public and private selves they affirm McCarthy’s basic premise that appearances cannot be trusted. Moreover, both versions dramatize a conspiracy that is, somewhat paradoxically, at once pervasive and clearly circumscribed in scope, thus corroborating and dismissing anti-Communist fears of infiltration. Finally, the novel as well as the film establish and, to varying degrees, complicate the link between subversion and social and sexual deviance, especially the widespread cultural fear of the overbearing, emasculating, and potentially incestuous mother. While traditionally Frankenheimer’s film has been rated higher than the novel by critics, I conclude that it is the novel that is more critical of this link and the conspiracy theory in general.

232

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

Something Old and Something New: The Communist Conspiracy Theory In many ways, the Communist conspiracy theory of the 1950s can be considered the culmination of all conspiracy theories that I have discussed in detail in previous chapters. Many elements familiar from these earlier visions of infiltration and subversion reoccur combined and in modified form. By far the most parallels exist between the Communist and the Catholic conspiracy theory, although the latter is characterized by deflection alone, and the former, as I will argue, by a mixture of deflection and distortion. Anti-Communist texts usually focused on the struggle within the United States, but like anti-Catholic writing they were ultimately concerned with a foreign conspiracy whose masterminds were located in Moscow. As early as 1940, Martin Dies, chair of the House’s Special Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), wrote that “the Communist Party represents a foreign-controlled conspiracy which plans civil war in the United States” (215). A few years later, a report on Communists within the Government even defined Communists as those “who accept completely the discipline of a foreign power” (Chamber 31). As a consequence, the fear of Communists within the country was closely tied to international events. Just as the Catholic conspiracy theory gained new momentum after the church helped foil the revolutions of 1848, the Cold War fueled the Communist conspiracy theory.5 In fact, one major reason why the notion of a Communist conspiracy was so prominent during the late 1940s and the 1950s was that it offered an explanation for what many regarded as the disastrous course of the Cold War during these years. Just as in 1692 a considerable number of Puritans came to believe that the war against the native population was going badly because their leaders were betraying them, “America’s retreat from victory,” in Joe McCarthy’s phrase, was increasingly blamed on conspirators who had infiltrated the federal government and were now shaping U.S. foreign policy. As former Communist Louis Budenz put it in 1954, “The United States is in the sorry plight it is today because of the Red infiltration of the federal government which led us to agree to our own defeats” (Techniques 279). These conspiracy theorists distorted the issues at stake. They targeted those whose decisions they disapproved of, but they did so for the wrong reasons, since, of course, there was no Communist conspiracy that influenced, let alone determined, U.S. foreign policy.6 The politicians and civil servants whose deci5 Cf. Bennett 275; Doherty 7; Heale, Anticommunism 146–47; Schrecker 155. 6 While revisionist scholars like Haynes, Powers, or Weinstein and Vassiliev have argued that the data available after the opening of Soviet archives in recent years has confirmed the validity of anti-Communist claims, Oshinsky rightly emphasizes that the new sources show in fact the very

The Communist Conspiracy Theory

233

sions the conspiracy theorists found suspicious were no traitors. They may occasionally have been incompetent, but in most cases they simply had no other choice. There was nothing they could have done, for example, to keep China from becoming Communist – an inconvenient truth that the conspiracy theory allowed the anti-Communists to ignore. Retaining faith in individual and national agency, the conspiracy theorists claimed that China had fallen to Mao because of conspirators in the State Department. Moreover, the specter of the Communist enemy functioned very much like that of the Catholic foe a century earlier. Anticipating a binary that permeates virtually all later texts, the 1939 HUAC Report of the Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities defined America as religious and democratic and Communism as ungodly and undemocratic. “Americanism,” as the Report puts it, not only “recognizes the existence of God,” it also means that “The rights of the people are protected through laws and their strict enforcement” (10, 11). In Russia, by contrast, the report claims, “The people are puppets in the hands of ruling dictators” who aim at “the abolition of all forms of religion” (11, 12). Just as the Catholics had served as the Other against which the United States could be defined as Protestant, the “un-American” Communists provided a foil which brought American values into focus. It is therefore no coincidence that the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance at the height of the Great Red Scare in 1954 (cf. Heale, Anticommunism 170). In fact, Communism was frequently depicted as possessing a “conspiratorial nature” as such (Budenz, Techniques 125), even though individual anti-Communists disagreed about the reasons for this. Without offering any evidence for his claim, Martin Dies, for example, argued that there had been a “world communist plot” even before the enemy assumed its “Trojan Horse tactics” in 1935 (5); George Kennan, who first outlined the strategy of containment in his famous 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow, suggested that due to the “Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs” the Soviet government could perceive the world in conspiracist terms only and therefore automatically resorted to conspiring itself; and J. Edgar Hoover went back to Lenin’s advocacy of conspiracy to deduce that Communism and conspiracy were indeed one and the same (cf. 34). Due to the strictly hierarchical organization of the Communist parties in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the conspiracy could be conceptualized in much the same terms as foreign aristocratic attacks on the country had been

opposite (x). While there were attempts to infiltrate the U.S. government during the 1930s, they had been given up almost completely by the time the Communist conspiracy theory gained momentum. The fears of the anti-Communists were almost entirely unfounded.

234

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

during the nineteenth century. Therefore, just as earlier countersubversives, antiCommunists frequently drew on the ideology of republicanism and warned of “the fragility of republican institutions” (Heale, Anticommunism xii). Congressman George A. Dondero, for example, repeatedly used the term “republic” and not “nation” or “country” in a 1949 speech to the House aimed at alerting others to the Communist threat (“Modern Art” 11586). Another who framed his warnings in this fashion was Louis Budenz, whose call for a “revitalization of citizenship” (Techniques 304) capitalized on the traditional conviction that citizens had to be eternally vigilant to preserve the country’s democratic institutions. Against this background, it was almost logical that anti-Communists defined the American Communist Party “as a conspiracy to overthrow the republic” (Heale, Anticommunism 186) – with palpable effects in the realm of the law. In May 1950 the Supreme Court ruled in the case United Steelworkers of America et al. v. National Labor Relations Board that it was constitutional to require union officers to file affidavits that they were neither members of nor affiliated with the Communist Party and that they were not working toward the overthrow of the government. While the majority argued on rather formal grounds, Justice Robert Jackson explained his ruling with “the decisive difference between the Communist Party and every other party of any importance in the long experience of the United States” (qtd. in “United” 956). According to Jackson, the party was “incompatible with our constitutional system” because “behind its façade, the Communist party [was] a conspiratorial and revolutionary junta” (957). Rhetorically likening the Communists to the Catholics of the nineteenth century, Jackson cast its leadership as a “secret conclave” that was plotting to conquer and radically transform the country (961). The concern expressed by Jackson finally made it into law in August 1954, when the U.S. Senate, a couple of weeks after the travesty of the Army-McCarthy hearings and a month before McCarthy was censured by the Senate, passed the Communist Control Act, which made “membership in [the Communist party] clearly a crime” (Heale, Anticommunism 182). The concern about the conspiratorial nature of the Communist Party can be seen as the culmination of the long-standing fear of political parties in general. As I argued in previous chapters, because of the ideology of republicanism, Americans tended to be skeptical of parties until far into the nineteenth century, and they often conceived of the oppositional party in conspiracist terms. Yet, the worries about the Communist Party during the 1950s indicate that by then parties were no longer suspicious as such. After all, Jackson, who in this respect was surely representative of political views at the time, stressed the exceptional nature of the Communist Party, insisting on the “decisive difference” between the Communist and other American parties. Thus, as it dissociates parties from blanket

The Communist Conspiracy Theory

235

suspicions of conspiracy, his argument expresses a belief in the legitimacy of parties and the competition between them. Apart from such more general observations, the legal actions taken against the Communist Party also point to another remarkable dimension of the Great Red Scare: the complicity of the government – under both parties – in fueling the conspiracy theory, which comes close to the colonial government’s involvement with pursuing alleged conspirators during the Salem witchcraft crisis. We may today remember mainly Joe McCarthy’s vitriolic attacks on the Senate floor, but McCarthy was only one among many representatives involved in the hunt for Communist infiltrators. Moreover, both the judiciary, as we have just seen, and the executive branch contributed to the climate in which the hunt took place and to the hunt itself. President Truman’s loyalty program of 1947 may have partly been meant to appease anti-Communist Republicans but it provided the foundation for more and more accusations and thus for the intensification of the scare. So did the McCarran International Security Act of September 1950, which required all members of the Communist Party to register with the Justice Department, and the decision of the Eisenhower administration to ban all homosexuals from federal employment for security reasons in 1953. Furthermore, the many trials that alleged and real Communists had to stand during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s “transformed the vague and largely ideological threat of Communism into something much more concrete: real people taking real actions that seemed to be part of a Moscow-led plot” (Schrecker 130). Hence, M. J. Heale concludes correctly that “What made the second Big Red Scare so irresistible was the mutual reinforcement provided by the different branches of government” (Anticommunism 165). In a way, though, it is quite fitting that the government played such an active part in spinning the conspiracy theory, since it figured as a major target of the alleged plot in virtually all accounts of the Communist conspiracy. In fact, in terms of what institutions the conspiracy allegedly aimed to undermine, the Communist conspiracy theory is a blend of the Catholic conspiracy theory, on the one hand, and the ones directed against “Black Republicans” and the Slave Power, on the other. As all countersubversives stressed, the conspirators were less interested in bringing labor unions under their control than in infiltrating the educational sector and the government. As Louis Budenz explained to his readers, “With the overthrow of the United States government a major goal of the Red conspiracy, the agencies of that government are logically a chief target for infiltration” (Techniques 278). However, placing Communists in government was generally thought to serve not only the long-term goal of preparing the grounds for the eventual Communist take-over, but also to influence American foreign policy in a way favorable to the spread of Communism throughout the world. As

236

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

discussed above, the conviction that “Communists and their followers have achieved positions in our government where they can do immense harm to national welfare and security” (Chamber 6) was considered by anti-Communists the main reason why the Cold War was developing as it did. If the infiltration of the government and its agencies thus supposedly served both the short-term goal of supporting international Communism and the longterm goal of preparing for the take-over of the country, the attempts to infiltrate schools and colleges were perceived as facilitating this long-term goal by destroying the roots of the American republic. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the attempts to place Communists in schools and universities were “exposed” in several publications solely dedicated to this task such as George A. Dondero’s “Communism in Our Schools” or J. B. Matthews’s “Communism and the Colleges.” They also featured prominently in more general explorations of the Communist threat. Budenz’s Techniques of Communism, for example, devotes a chapter entitled “Invading Education” to the topic (208). Even Joe McCarthy’s 1952 “election-year broadside” The Fight for America (Cuordileone 61), which focuses on the infiltration of government throughout, turns to this issue on its final pages. There, McCarthy identifies the “efforts […] to infiltrate the educational system” as “a danger much greater than Communists in the State Department or any other branch of government – a danger much greater than any threat from Communist Russia” (200). Like the Catholics before them, then, the Communists allegedly tried to install their twisted values in young people in order to destroy the foundations of American society. The Communists were not said to focus on girls and young women, as the Catholics had supposedly done to corrupt the future mothers of the republic, but by all accounts they targeted boys and young men, too. In fact, as we will see, most indictments of Communist subversion were concerned with its effects on boys and men. Even more importantly, since they did not set up their own schools, as the Catholics had done, Communists were regarded as potentially operating within all schools – “without exposing themselves,” as a source quoted by Louis Budenz put it (Techniques 209). Since Communism was rhetorically cast as “un-American,” it does not come as a surprise that tropes of warfare and invasion occur in anti-Communist texts as frequently as they do in both anti-Catholic texts and Puritan writings about the devil’s attacks on Massachusetts. Harold Lavine insisted that all Communists were “soldiers” ready to fight for the cause of the Soviet Union (226), Martin Dies called those who supposedly had infiltrated the government “figurative parachutists” (303), J. Edgar Hoover spoke of “offensive shock troops” (83), and Louis Budenz wrote of the “invading armies of the Soviet fifth column” and cast Communist parties all over the world as “revolutionary armies […] engaged in political conflict today and armed uprising tomorrow” (Techniques 102, 25). The

The Communist Conspiracy Theory

237

day these armies were waiting for was Stalin Day, or “S-Day,” a term that echoed World War II’s D-Day and that Budenz employed to designate the day when the Cold War would turn hot and saboteurs inside the country would help the external enemy to achieve a swift victory (Men 159). But whereas the Catholic invaders of the nineteenth century and the Communists of the First Red Scare could be cast as foreigners, the anti-Communists of the 1950s had to come to terms with the fact that the enemies they were fighting were Americans who had been born in the United States. Some anti-Communists acknowledged that there were long-standing American members of the party who had joined “during the economic depression” or during the “early days of the fight against fascism” (Hoover 108, 109). However, trying to sever the appeal of Communism from social causes and attempting to locate it in the individual instead, writers also claimed that since the 1940s most members had joined for rather personal, if not outright psychological reasons.7 In general, there were two related ways in which authors explained why Americans had fallen prey to the “un-American” ideology of Communism. Frequently, anti-Communists employed the language of infection. Projecting Communism as a dangerous virus, the anti-Communists thus used imagery we already encountered when Cotton Mather tried to understand how the enemy had managed to corrupt formerly righteous members of the Puritan community and when slaveholders attempted to account for abolitionists’ radical opposition to slavery. At all three historical moments the trope of infection is drawn upon to explain how an evil that has formerly been located exclusively outside and in foreigners has come to affect members of the community, pious Puritans and “real” Americans. As Dondero put it, “A few of [the Communists] are aliens, but all of them are carriers of the same disease – the disease of Marxism,” and he went on to complain about its “cancerous growths” among Americans (“Communism” 3516). In virtually the same fashion, Dies cast Communism as a “drug which deadens the mind” (237), McCarthy claimed in his Wheeling Speech that the State Department was “thoroughly infested with Communists” (1956), and Budenz recommended McCarthyism “as an antidote” to the spread of the “proCommunist poison” (Techniques 318, 232). Other writers emphasized that Com-

7 This is why anti-Communists like Hoover fervently denied – for once, in accordance with the facts – that Communism appealed particularly to ethnic minorities such as blacks or Jews. In fact, Hoover went so far in his attempt to challenge any connection between ethnicity (or a specific religious belief) and Communism that he claimed that Jews who joined the party stopped being Jews. This is apparent from a passage in which he describes the attempts of “patriotic members of Jewish organizations” to “counteract the infiltration tactics in Jewish institutions by communists who were born Jews” (270).

238

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

munism was a mental illness. Characterizing those who had been “infected” as “fanatical devotees” (Hoover 81, 188) or, simply, as “fanatics,” they not only “distanced them from ordinary people” (Schrecker 145), but also employed exactly the same concept that proslavery writers had used a century earlier in order to suggest that abolitionists were insane.8 Another way to explain why good Americans had become Communists was to claim that they had been seduced just as many young women had been seduced to enter Catholic convents a century earlier. But if the girls back then had been lured by exotic rituals and the promise of female community, the seduction was now cast in explicitly sexual terms, especially when men were concerned. In 1948, for instance, Life ran a story about a young man who was drawn into the party chiefly by women “who went to bed in the same way they carried placards – as a service to the party” (qtd. in Cuordileone 76). As we will see later, J. Edgar Hoover, too, played heavily on the theme of Communist promiscuity and licentiousness in his Masters of Deceit. What is important to note here is that infection and seduction were not mutually exclusive explanations for why people became Communists. They did at times appear independently of each other, but just as frequently seduction, and the sexual intercourse it led to, figured as the way by which the virus of Communism was passed on. People who had successfully fought the virus of Communism, anti-Communists believed, were prevented from leaving the party by means of a strict regime of discipline. In fact, anti-Communists were as fascinated with this dimension of Communism as their nativist predecessors had been with the Catholic variant. Many discussed it, and Hoover even devoted a whole chapter of Masters of Deceit to the topic. Although a century had passed, he and others described this discipline in much the same terms as the nativists had done. Depictions of the punishments inflicted on those who had violated party rules or tried to disconnect themselves from the party echoed the ordeals Maria Monk and others had allegedly suffered for disobedience. Hoover, for example, discussed at length the case of a man who was “subjected to the basest indignities” such as having to stand naked in front of his judges (174), explaining that “The idea [of Communist discipline was] to drive the member to the lowest depths of humiliation” (179). Moreover, just as the Catholics, the Communists also resorted to more subtle thought-control mechanisms that did not work through the body but directly on the mind, and that were used on every member and not just on those who had already stepped out of line. These measures

8 Just as anti-abolitionist writers of the 1830s claimed that the abolitionists were controlled by Britain, anti-Communists held that their fanaticism made American Communists the “tool of Communist Russia” (McCarthy, “Wheeling Speech” 1956).

The Communist Conspiracy Theory

239

can be seen as updated versions of the bible-reading, prayers, and ritualized confessions that filled the days of Monk’s nuns. As Louis Budenz revealed, Communists had not only to regularly criticize themselves as well as others, their meetings were also characterized by the perpetual “repetition of phrases” that aimed at a “constant conditioning of the comrades to a remembrance of the authority of the Party” (Techniques 112). In short, then, Communism was, as Hoover put it, characterized by “a discipline that enforce[d] uniformity” (173). Hoover’s phrase already suggests that – for reasons I will explore in detail below – concerns about Communism often got mixed up with concerns about the state of society that had little or nothing to do with Communism. In this case, it was anxieties about the loss of individuality and independence in a mass society where most men no longer did autonomous work but labored for large corporations and where members of the middle class lived in identical houses in nearly identical suburbs. Sociologists like David Riesman and William Whyte “saw the suburbs as extensions of the corporate world, with their emphasis on conformity” (E. May 16), populated by what Whyte famously called “organization men.”9 But if the conformity that these sociologists worried about resulted from systemic factors, the “uniformity” that Communists wanted to create was the effect of intrigue and manipulation. The most powerful, and also most subtle, means of such manipulation was brainwashing, with which scientists as well as the public became quite preoccupied during the 1950s because it allowed for the recasting of systemic social conditioning as intentional manipulation and thus worked to preserve the notion of an autonomous, albeit threatened, self (cf. Melley, “Brainwashing”). This obsession with brainwashing was both fueled by and parodied in Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and John Frankenheimer’s movie version from 1962, both of which I discuss in this chapter’s final section. Frankenheimer’s film is a successor to 1950s alien invasion films that dramatize brainwashing and other aspects of the Communist conspiracy in symbolic fashion. In fact, one could even argue that these films, especially Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, brought the crucial characteristics of the Communist attack far better to the fore than more realist films like Big Jim McLain (1952), starring John Wayne, or My Son John (1952).10 In the alien invasion film, the threat is of foreign, even extraterrestrial, origin and tries to assume control of the United States not by open attack but through infiltration. In Invaders from Mars (1953) people are one after another lured to the place where the spaceship 9 For a short overview of these sociological studies, see Jacobson and González 35–36. 10 Cf. Kovel 184–88; and Seed, Science Fiction 132–44. For an overview of how Hollywood negotiated the Communist threat across the genres, see Sayre. For a discussion of how Russians were represented from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, see Strada and Troper.

240

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

has landed. After they have been captured, a small electronic control device is inserted into the back of their necks which takes away their free will and individuality and turns them into soldiers for the alien cause. As they bring more and more people to the invaders, the alien ideology spreads rapidly, as in an epidemic. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), too, projects the invasion as a disease that has the potential to affect everybody. Here the deployment of the disease trope is even more pronounced, as the protagonist is a doctor who puts two and two together when various people complain to him that family members who appear outwardly normal have started to behave in a fashion that nobody can quite pin down or describe adequately. The doctor eventually finds out that vegetative pods from outer space are attacking the small Californian town where the action is set. These pods secretly enter the homes of “normal” Americans where they develop into externally exact replicas of the people living there. Once the people fall asleep, the replicas come alive and assume their places. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is far more disturbing than Invaders from Mars because in the latter film there are at least small visible signs by which those working for the alien cause can be identified. There is the small wound in the neck, and the infected move in a robotic fashion that can be fairly easily spotted once one knows what to look out for. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by contrast, there are no outward markers that allow such identification. As a consequence, the doctor and his girlfriend repeatedly seek help from and are deceived by those who are already working for the enemy. This, of course, is a trope familiar from the political conspiracy thrillers so popular since the late 1960s. That we find it already in Invasion of the Body Snatchers shows that the film negotiates a central problem that arose with the Great Red Scare and that has preoccupied countersubversives ever since: how can the conspirators be identified?11 According to David Bennett, the task of identifying the conspirators posed a new challenge during the Great Red Scare because for the first time, countersubversive anxieties centered not on “ethnic or religious enemies but on ideologi-

11 As I discuss in the next sections, conservatives feared but also desired conformity. On the one hand, they worried about the uniformity of family life in the suburbs, but, on the other, they wanted everybody to have a family and a home in the suburbs and were deeply suspicious of those who rejected this way of life. Hence, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like other science-fiction films, can not only be read as a dramatization of the fear of Communist infiltration, but “could be read from the other end of the ideological spectrum as well, as a critique of the overly restrictive imperative to conform dictated by the anticommunist struggle” (Jacobson and González 79). Cf. Booker 64–71 for a similar reading. For an overview of important interpretations of the film and the ideologies that inform it, see Sanders.

The Communist Conspiracy Theory

241

cal ones” (285). In other words, during earlier times, it was crucial to prove that a specific group was indeed conspiring. Once this had been achieved, the major work had been done because the conspirators were easily identified by their religion or ethnicity. Catholics, for example, attended mass, ate fish on Friday, and their leaders, the priests, even dressed in a specific way. The Communists, however, as Bennett rightly points out, posed a particular challenge, as they were indistinguishable from “ordinary” Americans but for the values they secretly clung to. As Angela Calomiris, who infiltrated the Communist party for the FBI, put it in her memoirs, “Communists are all sorts and conditions of men, and they are careful not to wear their red badges in public” (126). Bennett’s argument, however, requires two modifications. First, American countersubversives have always attacked the conspirators on ideological grounds, casting them as, literally or metaphorically, “un-American.” Catholics were, after all, suspicious because their religion was seen, by writers such as Lyman Beecher or Samuel Morse, as an ideology irreconcilable with republican values. Accordingly, ethnicity, religion, or nationality functioned during earlier times merely as handy instruments to identify those whose ideology was said to endanger American values. Second, due to his study’s focus on nativism, Bennett neglects nineteenth-century conspiracy theories that revolved around purely ideological enemies, be it the oppositional party in general, or, more specifically, the Slave Power or the “Black Republicans.” Yet, just as with the Catholics there were visual markers that made these conspirators recognizable. Slaveholders owned slaves, northern “doughfaces” voted for the slave interest whenever it mattered, and “Black Republicans” opposed at least the expansion of slavery publicly, even if they might have secretly harbored more sinister goals. By contrast, and this is the crucial issue that Bennett identifies correctly, the Communists of the post-World War II era bore no distinctive visual markers that hinted at their beliefs. Moreover, they operated in secret, veiled their goals, and did not admit that they were Communists even when explicitly asked. Whereas, back in 1940, Martin Dies could still claim that there were “no good reasons why any American should be deceived” by a Trojan Horse organization or an individual Communist if he or she knew some basic facts (297), later writers stressed “the impossibility of proving today that any person or group is a Communist Party member” (Budenz, Techniques 268). The Communists that the countersubversives of the 1950s imagined were cunning and controlled. They were, as the title of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous 1958 book put it, “masters of deceit.” Accordingly, the central concern of the anti-Communist conspiracy theorists was to find ways to discover covert Communists. One major way to identify infiltrators and subversives was through the testimony of renegades, who were as important for the Communist conspiracy

242

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

theory as their predecessors had been for the Catholic one. Louis Budenz was a renegade who exposed Communist conspirators in several book-length studies, and so did John Burnham in Web of Subversion (1954) and Elizabeth Bentley in Out of Bondage (1951), a sensationalist exposé in the tradition of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures. If Catholic renegades provided access to what was happening behind convent walls, Communist renegades performed a similar task. They confirmed that there was indeed a Communist conspiracy and explained its goals and means. For example, they decoded the “Aesopian language” the Communists allegedly employed to veil their true interest and to pass on secret directives to cells throughout the country through open channels such as the various papers published by the official, and visible, branch of the Communist Party (cf. Budenz, Techniques 42–46; Schrecker 194).12 However, the function which renegade Communists fulfilled for the countersubversive effort went further than that of the former Catholics. When apostate nuns like Monk provided the names of priests and nuns it was one among various strategies to strengthen their own credibility, to convince others that they had really been inside the convent from which they claimed to have escaped, but it did usually not serve the purpose of exposing as Catholic those who pretended to be Protestants. The Communist renegades, by contrast, had to expose individuals as part of the conspiracy, because this was the only way to make the enemy knowable. Thus, the infamous practice of “naming names” was not entirely informed by malice. When renegades such as Louis Budenz or J. B. Matthews exposed alleged Communists one by one (Techniques 331–32; “Communism” 118–25), they did what the logic of the conspiracy theory they put forward and the nature of the alleged enemy required. But of course, such exposures also conveniently confirmed their credibility as witnesses, performing, in the end, a function similar to the renegade Catholics’ naming of names after all. As Alan Nadel has observed, “In a truly Orwellian inversion, the ‘true’ test of loyalty became betrayal. Unless someone was willing to betray friends, no oath was credible” (78).13

12 As Fried has shown, seeking to confirm the suspicions they harbored anyway, countersubversives took a paradoxical stance toward the literalness of Communist language. On the one hand, the conspiracy theorists, among them federal attorneys in court, “proved” the subversion of American Communists by insinuating that they followed the core texts by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin to the letter. On the other, they also claimed that explicit commitments to non-violent change were Aesopian language. Thus, the countersubversives “contradictorily implied that Communists took Marxist-Leninist classics literally – but not those which clashed” with their suspicions (94). As in all conspiracy theories, then, evidence was twisted to confirm what had been known all along. 13 It should also be noted that the necessity to name names was not entirely new to American culture. Because the Illuminati were so well concealed, Jedidiah Morse also published lists of those he considered part of the conspiracy (cf. Kovel 126). Since the Illuminati can thus to a certain

Communism and Other Deviancies

243

But since the Communist conspiracy was so immense, and since the strict discipline exerted within the Party made leaving it almost impossible, anti-Communists were convinced that the few renegades could not do all the work. Accordingly, another means had to be found to identify those who secretly harbored Communist convictions. Anti-Communists could not rely on spectral evidence, as their Puritan ancestors had in 1692, but they eventually found an effective means by linking Communism to social and sexual behavior that appeared, from a conservative point of view, as deviant and immoral. In fact, due to a process I outline below, liberals in general became suspicious. According to the countersubversives, they were both morally and psychologically weak and thus easily infected with the virus of Communism, or they were seduced into joining the party by those who promised to fulfill their perverted sexual desires. As Ernst and Loth put it in their Report on the American Communist, Communists not only came primarily from among “the college-educated and […] the upper-income bracket,” but they were, generally, “damaged souls” who suffered from various psychological disorders that affected their personality and their sexual and social life (142, 127). What one had to look out for in order to identify secret Communists, then, was deviant behavior of all sorts. This, in turn, made deviant behavior even more suspicious and problematic than it already was in the eyes of many Americans.

“Damaged Souls”: Communism and Other Deviancies The association of Communism, liberalism, and alleged forms of social and sexual deviancy did not come out of the blue. Although complaints about the dangerousness of “gullible liberals” occasionally occurred in anti-Communist texts from the early or mid-1940s (Chamber 15), the decisive moment in forging the link between ideological and social perversion was the Alger Hiss case. Testifying before HUAC in 1948, renegade Whittaker Chambers accused Hiss, a former State Department official who had later served as Secretary General at the United Nations’ inaugural meeting, of being a member of the Communist Party.14

degree be considered the predecessors of the Communists, the link that the John Birch Society later forged between these two conspiracies is not quite as absurd as it might seem at first sight. I will have more to say about this in the conclusion. 14 The Hiss case also marks the origin of countersubversive concerns about the United Nations. During the 1950s the UN figured in accounts of the Communist conspiracy either as an easy way for Soviet spies to enter the country or, as in the case of Hiss, as the place were treasonous liberals continued their work after they had misdirected U.S. government agencies for a while. Since the

244

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

Largely due to the insistence of a young Congressman from California named Richard Nixon, who sensed that he could capitalize on this issue in an upcoming Senate race, Hiss, who always denied the charges, was put on trial and eventually, after two hung juries, convicted of perjury in 1950. What is important about the Hiss case is not so much the question of guilt or innocence, but the way the trial and discussions about the case played out. As David Oshinsky has written, “In Alger Hiss, conservatives from both parties found the perfect symbol for all that they distrusted and despised.” To them, Hiss appeared as “the quintessential New Dealer – young, intelligent, sophisticated, Ivy League.” His treason finally offered proof of what they had known for a long time: something was fundamentally wrong with the “liberal-internationalist philosophy that had guided the Democratic Party for a decade and a half.” The liberals were traitors, their New Deal had been one step in their subversion of America, and nobody should be surprised if others were already underway (99; cf. also Horowitz 255). It is therefore no coincidence that Joseph McCarthy returned to the Hiss case in his 1950 Lincoln Day speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, with which he burst onto the national scene. Whenever Conservatives wanted to suggest a connection between liberals and Communism, they reminded their audiences of Alger Hiss. However, the Hiss case rendered not only liberals suspicious. As K. A. Cuordileone has shown, “the case’s sexual subplot” more narrowly focused anti-Communist attention for the years to come on (alleged) homosexuals (44). Charges of homosexuality circulated on both sides during the two years between Chambers’s first accusation and Hiss’s conviction and were well known to the public. In the end, Chambers, who told the FBI in much detail about his homosexual encounters after joining the Communist Party, managed to project himself as somebody who had overcome both his political and sexual perversion, whereas Hiss, who never confessed anything similar, was seen by many in the end as a weak homosexual, as somebody under whose respectable exterior sexual and ideological deviance went hand in hand (cf. 40–45).15 Because of Hiss, the link between homosexuality and Communism proved particularly strong throughout the 1950s, but homosexuality was not the only sexual or social “perversion” that became associated with Communism during those years. During the 1950s, American society became increasingly open to the

1960s, then, the UN has no longer primarily been associated with Communism but has been turned into a conspiracy in itself or imagined as an instrument of the New World Order. 15 Johnson, too, deals extensively with the connections between the hunt for Communists and that for homosexuals, but he underestimates the degree to which these issues became intertwined in the public’s mind.

Communism and Other Deviancies

245

public discussion of sexuality, as is evidenced by the establishment of Playboy magazine in 1953, the emerging market for marriage and sex manuals, and the arrival of novels such as Lolita (1955) or Peyton Place (1956) that represented sex scenes in a fashion unimaginable even a decade earlier (cf. Cuordileone 87). Middle-class women were no longer completely confined to the domestic sphere, as Betty Friedan suggested in her feminist classic The Feminine Mystique (1963). In fact, many of those who had entered the workforce during the war successfully refused to give up their jobs after the war had ended, and a considerable part of the media supported their stance. Life, for example, ran a highly successful photo essay on a working wife in 1953 (cf. Weiss 53–55).16 Gender roles available to men, to give one final example, changed as well. There was doubtlessly still a hegemonic form of masculinity, but its dominance was increasingly challenged. As James Gilbert has shown, with a spectrum ranging from John Wayne to Cary Grant, men had more than one male role model to choose from, something that many found liberating and that they welcomed as much as the general changes in gender relations these years brought (cf. 32–33, 218–19). Many others, however, men as well as women, and especially conservatives, worried immensely about these transformations. Struggling to achieve hegemony for the model of society, family, and gender relations they preferred, they linked these, in their eyes, fatal developments to a variety of social ills and eventually to Communism. As discussed earlier, conservatives worried about the conformity of “organization men” and the harmful effects of social change on individuals, families, and the nation. They pointed to the supposedly rising number of divorces (cf. Coontz 35–36), and they complained about the increased visibility of gays and lesbians, which for them indicated that homosexuality as such was on the rise – an impression they saw vindicated by Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 and 1953 reports on male and female sexuality (E. May 88). They regarded working mothers “as a primary cause of juvenile delinquency” and even projected them as a threat to the “stability of the nation’s social institutions” (Chafe 176). Paradoxically, though, stay-at-home moms did not fare better in many of their accounts. They were charged with what Philip Wylie had labeled “momism” in Generation of Vipers as early as 1942, with being overprotective and overbearing. This was construed as particularly dangerous for boys, who lacked a male role model since middle-class fathers commuted between the suburbs and the cities. Observers worried not only that boys were spoilt by their mothers, they also feared that “Sexually frustrated mothers whose husbands were not in command might turn

16 Cf. also Meyerowitz on the roles available to women and part of the media’s role in encouraging them to pursue professional careers.

246

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

their perverted desires toward their sons, thwarting the boys’ natural masculine development” and thus turning them into “passive, weak, and effeminate ‘perverts’”: in other words, into homosexuals (E. May 84).17 In short, conservatives worried about what Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a famous 1958 Esquire article, called “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” and the related crisis of femininity, and the disastrous social and political effects of both. As Elaine Tyler May puts it, “moral weakness was associated with sexual degeneracy, which allegedly led to communism” (86), but what she does not say is that this was not a one-way street. In the eyes of many conservatives, social and sexual deviancy were not only the roots and indicators of, at the very least, a propensity toward Communism, they also saw them as the effect of a Communist lifestyle. Deviancy was both what drew people to Communism and what Communism produced in those who had gotten entangled in its web. If, as May writes, “Behind every subversive […] lurked a woman’s misplaced sexuality,” it was also the other way round: subversion misplaced both female and male sexuality (96). As a consequence, from the time of the Hiss trial onward, the anxieties about weak men and strong women that informed concerns about working mums and homosexuals as much as worries about extramarital sex and the disintegration of families became virtually one with concerns about the Communist threat. Texts that focused on social and sexual deviance always also talked about Communism, and the texts about Communism that I focus on here always also talked about social and sexual deviance. Addressing “Communism in Our Schools” in 1946, that is, before the link between Communism and these other issues had been forged, Congressman George A. Dondero rallied only against conspirators who were indoctrinating American children with “left-wing theories and philosophies” (A3516). Three years later, as the Hiss trial was making headlines, Dondero spoke out against “Modern Art Shackled to Communism” in quite a different fashion. He now not only complained about the “effeminate effect” of modernist art, but, in sexually charged language, accused the liberal patrons of such art – “pink busybodies,” as he called them – of “an orgy of spending to hasten the destruction of the art of our great inheritance” (11586). Within three years, then, Dondero’s concerns had considerably broadened. He was no longer worried about the political dangers of Communism alone but also about the social and sexual evils by which it was fueled and that it fueled in turn. A couple of years later, J. B. Matthews staged an even more comprehensive attack on liberal values. Matthews argued that the ground for the, in his eyes, far

17 Cf. also Gilbert 65–69; Mintz and Kellog 184, 189.

Communism and Other Deviancies

247

advanced Communist infiltration of colleges had been paved by teachers’ fatal belief in Darwinism and Pragmatism. In fact, Matthews even made the source of his anxieties explicit when, in an aside, he complained about “Alger Hiss and the rest of the traitors [who had been and were still] at work right in the heart of the federal government” and suggested that “John Dewey [had been] the ideal philosopher for the period of the New Deal” (114). In similar fashion, but focusing on more specific problems, Louis Budenz described the disastrous effects of party requirements and discipline on family life (cf. Men 113–20), while Angela Calomiris reported from her undercover work that Communists “were more promiscuous than other groups of men and women working together” (128). Other antiCommunists worried about various forms of bad parenting (cf. Schrecker 147–48) or homosexuals in government, legitimating their concerns with the “fact” that homosexuals could be far more easily blackmailed than others (cf. Cuordileone 67–69). Apart from “depoliticiz[ing] politics by blaming subversion on personal influences” (Rogin qtd. in Jacobson and González 131), the linkage between ideological “aberration,” on the one hand, and social and sexual ones, on the other, had two related effects: it defined the circle of those who might be Communists, and it fueled the crisis. If traitors could be recognized by their sexual preferences, the way they treated their children, or even their liberal political views, some were more suspicious than others. At the same time, the unholy alliance between Communism and these various social and sexual issues was the second major factor besides the course of the Cold War that fueled the Great Red Scare. As Richard M. Fried has suggested, anti-Communism became firmly rooted in U.S. national consciousness in 1949 when the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb, and the State Department’s White Paper on China revealed that there was nothing the United States could do to prevent the country from becoming Communist (87; cf. also Oshinsky 100–02). But to this we have to add what Cuordileone has aptly called “the ideological fallout” of the Hiss case, which was being tried at exactly the same time (44). The hunt for Communists reached its peak during the mid-1950s, but it continued as long as the Cold War appeared to be going badly, and as long as American culture saw a link between social and sexual deviancy and the alien ideology it feared so much, that is, until the end of the 1950s. Real Communists were hard to find, but as long as the link existed, there was never a shortage of people who could be suspected and accused of being Communists since they displayed behavior that, because it was seen as closely tied to the external threat, needed to be contained just as much as the Soviet Union itself. In the terminology I have employed throughout, then, the Communist conspiracy theory of the 1950s is characterized not only by distortion but also by

248

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

deflection. We have encountered such a blend of distortion and deflection during the Salem witchcraft crisis already, but whereas with regard to 1692 one can identify those who distorted the issues and those who deflected from them, these modes merged completely during the 1950s. Accordingly, distortion and deflection can only be kept apart heuristically when discussing the Communist conspiracy theory. Heuristically, there are two distinct groups: those who worried about Communism and for whom the conspiracy theory offered an explanation for the disastrous course of the Cold War, and those who worried about changes in social and sexual mores and for whom the Communist conspiracy theory offered a way to vent their anger. For the latter, targeting Communists deflected from the actual problems and directed their attention to the alleged Communists, a group that could fairly safely be attacked even in a society officially dedicated to pluralism. In practice, however, as I hope to have shown, these two motivations are impossible to keep apart. Deflection and distortion constantly collapsed into each other as social and sexual deviancy came to be regarded as the root, the result, and the outward manifestation of Communism. In the end, just as in Salem, it was the interplay of distortion and deflection that fueled the Great Red Scare by making the conspiracy theory at its heart both broad and powerful.

Preachers in a Moral Struggle: J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy The two previous sections have discussed the nature of the Communist conspiracy and the association of the ideological enemy with social and sexual deviance in general terms. In this section I discuss in detail texts and speeches by two of the most prominent countersubversives of the 1950s. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972, and Joseph R. McCarthy, the Junior Senator from Wisconsin between 1946 and his death in 1957, are figures that still come to mind immediately when we think of the Great Red Scare.18 Their prominence, or, if you will, notoriety, however, is not the only

18 Both Hoover and McCarthy have been the subject of a number of biographical studies, often of questionable quality. Especially early works tend to either glorify or demonize them. See, for example, Rovere and Caute on McCarthy, and Whitehead on Hoover. For a more nuanced account of Hoover that nevertheless makes some questionable claims, see Summers; on McCarthy, see the comprehensive biography by Oshinsky. For a revisionist take on McCarthy, see Herman, who contends at the outset that in retrospect McCarthy’s cause “has proved to be more valid and durable than the basic assumptions of his anti-anti-Communist critics” (6).

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

249

reason why I focus on them here. Their writings bring to the fore both the republican jeremiadic structure of the Communist conspiracy theory and its populist element particularly well. As typical anti-Communist texts of their time, they cast the fight against Communism as a struggle between good and evil, as a contest between religion and heathenism in which America, so they insist, can only prevail if the people open their eyes to the danger so imminent and return to the values that their forefathers held dearly. In different ways, the texts by Hoover and McCarthy show just how much the fight against Communism was also a moral struggle, an attempt to stop and turn around the perceived “moral decline” of America (Cuordileone 66). Unsurprisingly, therefore, both Hoover and McCarthy graft their arguments onto the template of the republican jeremiad. Blaming a decline in religious as well as republican values for the alleged progress of the Communist conspiracy, they paint a bleak picture of the spiritual and political state of the nation, but they also envision that the fight against Communism will bring about a national regeneration. In his 1958 book Masters of Deceit, J. Edgar Hoover focuses on the history of Communism and the Communist Party in the United States and Communist techniques of infiltration. However, as the structure of his argument, his examples, and, in fact, his language reveal, this concern is inextricably tied to worries about the state of the American family, sexual mores, women outside the domestic sphere, and liberals. By contrast, in his famous Wheeling speech in February 1950, the Senate debate that it triggered, and in America’s Retreat from Victory, his 1951 indictment of George Catlett Marshall, Joe McCarthy focuses far more narrowly on the Communist infiltration of government and attempts the exposure of individual traitors. But as they link Communism to effeminate liberalism, intellectuals, and homosexuality, these texts also express larger concerns about the state of American masculinity, thus corroborating the link between political and sexual perversion.19 Unlike McCarthy a couple of years earlier, Hoover avoids explicit indictments of liberals in general in Masters of Deceit. This is probably due to the fact that Hoover was the more careful tactician of the two. He was aware that the liberals might win back the presidency at some point and surely wanted to keep his job even then. A few times, however, Hoover insinuates nevertheless that the New Dealers, who are generally identified with liberalism, share central convictions with those who openly call themselves Communists.

19 Although McCarthy’s speeches predate Hoover’s book by a couple of years, I will discuss first Hoover and then McCarthy because The Manchurian Candidate, which I focus on in the next section, parodies McCarthy and not Hoover.

250

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

Hoover achieves this by claiming explicitly that “Communists are not liberals.” This may be surprising at first sight, but what Hoover does here is that he revives an older, pre-New Deal notion of liberalism according to which it is characterized by “a curb on the powers of the central government.” Hoover then contrasts this definition of liberalism with Communism, where “The state becomes all-powerful” – a charge often raised by conservatives against the New Deal. Thus, without ever mentioning the movement’s name or any individual in particular, Hoover suggests that New Dealers are not real liberals but Communists, adherents to an ideology that constitutes the “absolute reversal of American tradition” (97). The link between liberalism and Communism is also forged in the first chapter where Hoover discusses the lives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Echoing descriptions of Alger Hiss as a rich, soft, and potentially homosexual East Coast liberal, Hoover characterizes Engels as “gay, mannerly, from a wealthy family, and interested in having a good time.” Since hints at Engels’s immorality are only implicit in this description, Hoover continues: “He lived for years with one girl without marriage and then, upon her death, with her sister.” This suggestion of deviant heterosexual behavior is complemented by a hint at homosexuality, something otherwise completely absent from the book. Hoover insinuates this a few lines earlier by stating that “Marx and Engels were close friends for forty years. Engels, most appropriately, can be called the ‘collaborator’ of Marx.” To readers convinced that political and sexual deviance were connected, Hoover’s emphasis on the closeness between Marx and Engels and his ambiguous use of the term “appropriately” probably suggested that Engels may have been more than Marx’s collaborator. This insinuation is repeated a few lines further down when Hoover casts Marx and Engels as “the parents of ‘scientific socialism’”– an ideology, he thus implies, as perverse as their personal relationship (15). If this sexualization of Communism works very subtly and was probably missed by readers who did not harbor such suspicions anyway, related concerns that figure far more prominently in the text, namely about the destruction of American families and marriages through Communism, are more explicitly introduced in the description of Marx’s family life that follows the remarks on Engels. Hoover stresses that “Marx did not have a regular job” and that therefore “Money was always short.” He quotes extensively from an article by Gustav Meyer according to which “Washing himself, combing his hair, changing his underwear and shirts [were] a rarity with him” and “In the entire apartment there [was] not a single piece of clean and good furniture. […] Everything [was] dirty” (16, 17). But Marx did not only fail to keep his home in order and feed his family, he also followed a disorderly, and as Hoover implies with Meyer, unnatural schedule in his work: “He [was] often lazy for days,” but when he had work to do, “he stay[ed]

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

251

up the entire night and then [laid] down on the couch fully dressed at noon and sle[pt] through until evening” (16). What is more, Hoover tries to show that Marx was a bad father and husband. When his daughter died, “There was no money for the funeral,” and when his wife was sick, “There was no money for medicine” (17). The reason why Hoover mentions all this is that, for him, Marx’s family life is not only an indicator of his character, which “helped shape the whole philosophy of communism” (23), but also what Communism leads to. In short, then, Communism figures in Masters of Deceit as an ideology that both was born out of domestic disorder and leads to domestic disorder. This double movement – Communism as cause and consequence – structures his whole argument. Hoover’s book obsessively revolves around the harmful effects of Communism on marriages, families, the well-being of children, and morality in general. He stresses that, like Marx, many Communists are most active “late at night,” “sleep late,” and “eat away from home a great deal” (149). As a consequence, the concept of home is radically redefined: “‘Home,’ to the communist organizer, is more a place to sleep than to enjoy restful relaxation” (150). The Communists, Hoover points out repeatedly, are not first and foremost husbands, wives, and parents, as they should be, but comrades. They are loyal to the party and not to the family. This unnatural prioritization has devastating consequences for the individuals involved. “Children [who] have been born in the communist underground,” that is, to parents who live under a name that is not their own, are often robbed of their true identity because they are “not even given their true family name.” While “such a family situation” constitutes “hypocrisy” for Hoover (287), it pales in comparison to the families that are destroyed because the party commands it. To dramatize the cruelty of the Communist Party and the degree to which members have internalized its disregard for human relations, Hoover relates the story of a family where the father was told to leave forever on a party assignment. He obeyed, and when the children started to ask about him, the mother told them: “He is dead. You don’t have a daddy!” This, Hoover dryly comments, “is the fanaticism of the trained member”: it destroys the natural bond between husband and wife and parents and their children (84). Due to such twisted values, family members frequently turn against each other, as several of Hoover’s small case studies show. He relates how a young woman, for very selfish reasons, “charged her parents with chauvinism” and had them expelled from the party (182). If this anecdote proves that party discipline undermines and replaces parental authority, other examples demonstrate how Communism violates the sanctity of marriage. Hoover tells the story of a husband who when his wife “was expelled […] was instructed to leave her and the children” (186), and that of a wife who tells her expelled husband “Get out of this house, […] I don’t want you around!” (181). According to Hoover, marriage is for

252

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

the Communists merely a tactical instrument that can be employed to “enabl[e] the [bride or the groom] to stay in the United States” (153). But Hoover is equally worried by the “[s]exual immorality” (288) that life as a member of the Communists Party, to his mind, inevitably leads to. The passage below is merely one among several in which Hoover projects the Communists as frequently disregarding marital obligations and entering into sexual relationships with whoever is available: In one instance an organizer, leaving wife and children, lived in Chicago with another woman. In an Eastern city, a woman whose husband was underground carried on an affair with another man. In still another instance a wife kept company with a man while her husband was forbidden by the Party’s underground leaders to see her. (288)

What passages like this one indicate is that Communism brings out the worst in human beings, as it prevents both men and women from channeling their sexual desire, whose destructive potential conservatives never tired to stress at the time, into marriage “where it would provide a positive force to enhance family life” and thus contribute to the stability of the nation (E. May 99). What is more, even if Communist couples stay together, raise their children, and sleep only with each other, their lives nevertheless do not resemble those of normal families, Hoover suggests. Since the party expects its female members to leave their homes to perform the tasks assigned to them, Communism threatens the gendered division of labor – with disturbing consequences for everybody involved but especially for the children, as Hoover tries to bring to the fore with a small anecdote about party members Eleanor and Henry: Eleanor probably won’t get home in time to fix supper. If she doesn’t, Henry and the kids can make some cold meat sandwiches. Besides, Henry is scheduled to meet with the state education secretary tonight and won’t have time to eat anyway. (148)

While the father’s absence might be acceptable – after all, non-Communist daddies, too, meet business partners in the evening –, that of the mother appears irresponsible and unacceptable, because it endangers the institution which, for anti-Communists just as much as for anti-Catholics a century earlier, was at the heart of the American republic: the family. It is also no coincidence that Hoover chooses the name Eleanor for the woman who neglects her duties as a wife and mother. As Cuordileone explains, “In the 1940s and 1950s, Hoover’s preferred target was Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he seemed to revile with an intensity that bordered on obsession” (73). By alluding to Eleanor Roosevelt, Hoover of course also evokes her husband and New Deal liberalism. Thus, once again fairly subtly, he forges a connection between Communism and American liberalism, implying that both have devastating effects on morality and family.

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

253

Accordingly, Hoover does not only claim that Communism destroys everything that should be dear to Americans, he also stresses that independently of the subversive work of the Communists, Americans’ moral standards have considerably decreased in recent years. Hence, in a passage where he discusses the attraction of Communism for Americans he casts its spread as the fruit and not as the origin of moral decline: “In an era when moral standards have been lowered, when family life has been disrupted, when crime and juvenile delinquency rates are high, communists have set forth a goal […] that would captivate the longings and hopes of men” (116). In other words, all the problems that Hoover projects as the consequence of the Communist subversion of the family at other moments are depicted here as its cause. He suggests that Communism could only take root in American society because there were more and more divorces, because women worked outside the home, and because children were left unattended after school and in the evening. In this sense, Communism merely intensifies and accelerates what is happening anyway. What this circular argument points to is that concerns about Communist infiltration are, for Hoover, truly indistinguishable from concerns about social change. His apprehension about the Communist conspiracy is of course not simply a symptom of his anxieties about unruly teenagers, women in the workplace, and a rise in the divorce rate. Rather, associating them with Communism allows him to voice and rationalize his concern about social developments that are bothering him – and that, as the attentive reader can infer, he ultimately sees caused by New Deal liberalism. Hoover’s preoccupation with decency and domestic order also surfaces in the language he employs to describe aspects of Communism that have nothing to do with its impact on marriage and family. For instance, he describes half-hearted Communists who are not completely loyal to the cause as “single-nighters” (82), likening them to people who are sexually attracted to others but unwilling to make a full commitment. In similar fashion, he claims that an appeal he considers Communist propaganda “prostitutes the reputation” of the university that issued it (237). At other moments, he describes the workings of the Communist Party as a travesty of homemaking: “With the effectiveness of a vacuum cleaner,” he writes, “the Party pulls money from everywhere” (154). When discussing the limited influence of ordinary members to shape the course of the Communist Party, he compares the party to “a house full of furniture. A comrade is permitted to discuss how the furniture can be arranged […]. But as soon as he questions the size of the house […] well, that’s just too much” (180). Finally, he also discusses at length the household metaphors like “deep freezes,” for remote hideouts (281), or “drycleaning,” for getting rid of pursuers (285), that the Communists themselves use, because they reinforce one of his major points: Communism perverts the home and makes a farce of family life.

254

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

However, Hoover does not merely describe the Communist “infection” (319) but also suggests a remedy. In the best tradition of the republican jeremiad, he calls for political and moral renewal. Echoing politicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he demands a revival of citizenship that acknowledges that “citizenship carries with it not only rights but obligations” (310). Americans, he admonishes, “need to be working members of our republic and citizens on duty at all times” (336). But since Western civilization and democracy, for him, are rooted in Christian values, echoing religious leaders from the Puritans onward, he also calls for a return to religion in order to counter the “bigoted faith” of Communism that appeals to those who have lost the right way (107). These two dimensions converge in the “democratic faith” that he envisions and tries to bring about (320). Despite the bleak picture that he paints over the course of his book, Hoover, as the genre of the jeremiad requires, remains optimistic that America will pass the Communist test. He does not believe that the enemy “can ever win” because Communism is “anti-God and anti-man” (330, 331). This is why he is also confident that “lost souls,” a term that recalls Ernst and Loth’s “damaged souls” as much as Puritan rhetoric, can still break with Communism and can be reintegrated into the community of Christian citizens if they show “sincere repentance” (128). He is convinced that if “Americans spent a little time each day […] in studying the Bible and the basic documents of American history, government, and culture” it would lead to “a new America, vigilant, strong, but ever humble in the service of God” (334). “With God’s help,” his last sentence declares, “America will remain a land where people still know how to be free and brave” (337). It would be easy to dismiss all this as mere rhetoric employed by one of the country’s most controversial figures to justify actions that an increasing number of Americans had begun to question by the time Masters of Deceit was published. From that angle, Hoover’s call for a renewal of citizenship would appear as an attempt to turn all Americans into conservative countersubversives watching over the behavior of their neighbors. His apparent faith in the redemption of former Communists would then be nothing more than a cynical attempt to motivate potential informers to step forward. I do not want to deny that this dimension also informs Hoover’s writing, but it is certainly not the whole story. More than most anti-Communists, Hoover knew that accusations of subversion were a weapon that could be strategically deployed, but there is little reason to doubt his genuine concern about Communism and social change. Just as the devil’s plot against Massachusetts confirmed the Puritans’ election for Cotton Mather a quarter of a millennium earlier, the fact that “America [was] now the prime target of international communism” was for Hoover a wake-up call meant to return the chosen people to the true path (vi).

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

255

Exactly the same attitude is palpable in Joe McCarthy’s Lincoln Day speech with which he catapulted himself to the forefront of the anti-Communist crusade on February 11, 1950. In fact, the notion that the fight against Communism was a moral struggle is even more pronounced in this speech than in Hoover’s book or, for that matter, any of McCarthy’s other speeches.20 “The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world,” McCarthy argues right at the beginning, “is not political […] it is moral.” He continues in apocalyptic language: “Today we are engaged in a final all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.” He feels that America is losing this battle and takes the observation that “the one hundred and forty-first birthday of one of the greatest men in American history” does not offer cause for celebration as his starting point for a narrative of moral decline since the days of Lincoln, and especially since victory in World War II. Consciously harking back to Puritan language, McCarthy regrets that America is no longer “a beacon in the desert of destruction” (1954). The obvious reason he offers for why America has been losing ground over the past five years is, of course, the influence that Communist infiltrators wield within the federal government. But “the corruption, the dishonesty, the disloyalty, the treason in high Government positions” has only been possible, he claims, because of “a lack of moral uprising” on behalf of the American people (1957).21 In his study of McCarthy’s rhetoric, James Darsey has observed the tendency toward the apocalyptic. Darsey argues that McCarthy offered no positive vision of what America should look like in the future and concludes: “There is no affirma20 No original manuscript of the speech, delivered to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, has survived, and McCarthy always claimed that a written version never existed. I therefore quote from the speech that McCarthy presented as his Wheeling speech in a Senate debate on “Communists in Government Service” on February 20 and that, together with the discussion it triggered, is available in the Congressional Record. While the speech is probably largely identical with the one delivered in Wheeling, some changes have almost certainly been made. Most notably, McCarthy cut the number of 205 alleged Communists in the State Department, which, according to most sources, he gave at Wheeling, to 57 (1956). On the context of the Wheeling speech and the question of what was actually said, see Oshinsky 103– 11. 21 In light of what I have argued about Abraham Lincoln in the previous chapter, the fact that McCarthy first voiced his conspiracy theory in a Lincoln Day speech appears strangely fitting. Lincoln and McCarthy both named names in their most famous conspiracy speeches, and they combined a true belief in the existence of the conspiracy with the ability to deploy accusations of conspiracy strategically. Hence, while I do not mean to liken the two, it is not that ludicrous that McCarthy self-consciously tried to fashion himself as a new Lincoln in McCarthyism: The Fight for America by reproducing in the book a “quotation of Abraham Lincoln, which hangs over my desk” (195).

256

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

tion in McCarthy’s discourse” (157). This, however, is not the whole story. After his bleak evaluation of the state of America, McCarthy ends his Wheeling speech on an optimistic note. Having discussed the infiltration of the State Department and named a couple of names, McCarthy suggests that the Alger Hiss case had a positive effect on the American people in the final analysis because in Hiss’s “high treason and betrayal of a sacred trust” the “blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” In true jeremiadic fashion, then, McCarthy casts the alleged Communist traitor as an agent of evil whose actions in the end contribute to the cause of good. Since “the morals of our people have not been destroyed,” since Americans were only suffering from a “temporary moral lapse” and had not fallen from grace altogether, the Hiss case, and here McCarthy returns to the beacon imagery, “has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising.” Accordingly, the situation might still be grave at the moment, but, just like Hoover, McCarthy also understands it as the beginning of a thorough renewal, and he ends on the vision of “a new birth of national honesty and decency in government” (1957). Significantly, the larger social concerns that merge with McCarthy’s anxieties about the Communist infiltration surface at key moments in the speech. At the end of the introductory part, right before he turns to the situation in the State Department, McCarthy bemoans America’s current “position of impotency” (1954). His distress contrasts markedly with George Kennan’s faith, expressed in his “Long Telegram,” that America could muster the “firmness and vigor” needed to contain the Communist enemy. The reason for these diametrically opposed perspectives is not merely the course the Cold War had taken in the meantime, but a fundamentally different understanding of the state of American society. Whereas Kennan was confident that the U.S. had the will and the strength to prevail in the conflict with communism, McCarthy worries that America has become too soft, that weak liberals are steering the country in the wrong direction or are even willingly betraying it. As the sexualized term “impotency” also reveals, McCarthy is concerned about the state of American masculinity. In the speech itself he never explicitly links his concerns about the strength of America’s defenses to the alleged increase in homosexuality, but he hints at this nexus at the very end. Casting Hiss as “this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent” and as one of the “twisted, warped thinkers” that are ruining the country (1957), McCarthy projects the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, and phony East Coast liberal, thereby also fostering the strong anti-intellectualist strain deeply ingrained in American culture since the Jacksonian period. Moreover, by using the term “twisted,” a term that back then not only designated false ideology but also functioned as a code word for sexual deviance, he evokes notions of homo-

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

257

sexuality as well. Throughout his career, this stereotype of the soft and perverse liberal served McCarthy as the foil against which he projected himself as one of the “sturdy, self-made, patriotic men – real men – from the heartland of America” (Cuordileone 46). More than any other element of his rhetoric, this brings to the fore the populist dimension of his stance. McCarthy fashioned himself as the voice of the people in the struggle with Ivy League elites who had lost touch with the common man and his concerns (cf. Horowitz 268–69). The conflation of elitism, intellectualism, liberalism, homosexuality, and Communism is even more apparent in McCarthy’s utterances following the speech. Soon after giving the speech he sent a telegram to President Truman in which he depicted the Democratic Party in a revealing sexual metaphor as “the bedfellow of international communism” (1953). During the debate about Communists in government in the Senate on February 20, then, he attacked homosexuals directly. A particular homosexual, number 14 of the 81 cases McCarthy presented to the Senate that day, was “a bad security risk,” he contended, because he could be easily blackmailed by the enemy. However, McCarthy also used this case to make a larger point: He [number 14] had extremely close connections with other individuals with the same tendencies, and who were active members of Communist-front organizations, including the Young Communist league. I think this is interesting, Mr. President. I asked one of our top intelligence men in Washington, one day, “Why do you find men who are fanatically Communist? Is there something about the Communist philosophy that attracts them?” He said: “Senator McCarthy, if you had been in this work as long as we have been, you would realize that there is something wrong with each of these individuals. You will find that practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way.” (1961)

In a reassuring move, McCarthy confirmed that there were outward and behavioral characteristics that explained why people became Communists and that allowed for the identification of Communists, even when they hid their political convictions. While the agent’s comment could be read as indicting the physically handicapped as well, it is safe to assume that what resonated most with McCarthy’s audience was, once again, his association of a variety of unrelated issues that he and other conservatives found threatening with Communism. McCarthy not only insinuated that all homosexuals were promiscuous, an allegation entailed in the emphasis he put on the “extremely close relations” between suspect number 14 and a number of other homosexuals. More importantly, playing on all notions of “twisted” – a merging strengthened by repeated references to “twisted intellectuals” or “twisted-thinking intellectuals” throughout the debate (cf., for example, 1953, 1959, 1968) –, McCarthy linked liberalism and intellectuals

258

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

to homosexuality and cast them as indicators of, at least, an inclination toward Communism.22 McCarthy’s remarks, however, are not only significant because they bring to the fore that concerns about masculinity and sexuality were inextricably connected with ideological threats in his mind. In the debate, McCarthy presented 81 cases, but, unlike in the Wheeling speech, he refused to identify a single of these alleged conspirators by name, arguing that such exposure would be inappropriate. “I think, however, it would be improper to make the names public until the appropriate Senate committee can meet in executive session and get them. […] If we should label one man a Communist when he is not a Communist, I think it would be too bad,” he told a Senator who asked for them (1959). While his concerns about Communists, liberals, and homosexuals were surely genuine, this was purely a tactical move that aimed at claiming the high moral ground for his endeavor. After all, he had no problems naming names at most other times, least of all during his second big moment in the Senate, on June 14, 1951, when he delivered the 72,000-word speech in which he accused General George Catlett Marshall, the architect of the Marshall Plan and “the most respected patriot and public servant of his time” (Doherty 171) of being the “evil genius” behind a conspiracy responsible for the disastrous course of the Cold War (74).23 Maybe because McCarthy considered the exposure of Marshall as merely a step in the larger struggle that he had described in his Wheeling speech, or maybe because he was originally addressing his colleagues in the Senate and not the “people,” the populist and jeremiadic elements are less pronounced in this speech than in the earlier one. However, what the speech wonderfully brings to the fore is McCarthy’s obsession with all sorts of evidence. Next to Robert Welch’s “exposure” of President Eisenhower’s Communist conviction in The Politician (1963), McCarthy’s indictment of Marshall is probably the most detailed conspiracy narrative that ever focused on a single individual. Already palpable in the Senate debate after the Wheeling speech where he insisted on presenting all cases he had collected, McCarthy’s desire to paint as complete a picture as possible truly peaks in his biased portrayal of Marshall’s career between 1941 and 1951. He quotes extensively from a broad variety of documents, and, to signal the great

22 Drawing on the “Report of the Senate Special Investigating Committee,” McCarthy made a similar point about homosexuals’ propensity to be blackmailed and their moral deficits in McCarthyism (cf. 31–32). 23 McCarthy did not read out the whole speech in front of the Senate but entered the manuscript in the Congressional Record. Immediately afterward, he published the speech as a book entitled America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall.

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

259

care with which he works, he invariably provides page references for his sources in the written version, for example, on each page of chapter 2 (15–21). This obsession with details is quite characteristic of the modern conspiracy theorist, and we have encountered it already in the writings of Samuel Morse and Lyman Beecher as well as in the conspiracist visions revolving around slavery. It distinguishes secular conspiracy theories, as they arose with the Enlightenment, from metaphysical ones. For the Puritan conspiracy theorists Cotton Mather and Samuel Parris, spectral evidence and a close reading of the bible was enough to prove the plot. For the modern conspiracy theorist, additional sources are of importance as well. However, for both metaphysical and secular conspiracy theorists, the evidence they present only ever confirms what they knew before: that there really is a conspiracy. As Mark Fenster puts it, “Interpretation may be endless, but it is contained within the explication of the conspiracy” (78). Accordingly, the way McCarthy handles his evidence, and especially quotations, is anything but neutral. Like conspiracy theorists, he pulls them out of contexts that he completely ignores, twists them until they fit his argument, and thus only ever finds confirmations of what he has known all along. His way of arguing is particularly evident in chapter 6 where he discusses “The Marshall Policy for China” (64). A couple of pages into the chapter, he quotes Dean Acheson, who was Secretary of State at this time. Immediately afterward, McCarthy argues as follows: I think it is clear what Acheson was signaling to Moscow. He was saying: “You have seen that we delivered Manchuria and Northern Korea to you. […] Only give us time and you will have a friendly Asia and then we can have world peace.” It could not have been spelled out more explicitly. (69–70)

What McCarthy performs here is a manipulative but rhetorically effective move. Based on the assumption that Acheson is a Communist agent, a claim he has not explicitly made, let alone proven, McCarthy postulates, again without making this explicit, that Acheson was employing Aesopian language to pass on a coded message to Moscow. He then “decodes” this piece of communication so that it fits best into his own argument. Last, but by no means least, he ascribes his own transcription to Acheson again and takes it as the basis for the next step in his argument, thus suggesting to the casual reader, and even more so to his original listeners in the Senate, that he is presenting a perfectly stringent argument, based on the careful interpretation of sources. While the specious logic by which he arrives at the final sentence in the quotation is extreme even for him, this sentence is nevertheless quite typical of what he does throughout. His text is full of phrases such as “It became evident” (20), “[t]he evidence is overwhelming” (31), or “I

260

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

think it is now transparently clear” (74) that suggest that a conclusion has been arrived at by rigorous inference.24 The rhetorical questions that McCarthy uses at key moments throughout the speech add to this effect. They create the impression of a precise argument in which different explanations are carefully weighted against each other, but in the end they invite the reader to confirm the worst that McCarthy insinuates about Marshall: Is that the answer? Or was Marshall’s insistence that Russia should be allowed to serve her own interest – not ours – in eastern Asia a part of a baffling pattern which has been emerging with ever greater clarity as we trace his career: a pattern which finds decisions, maintained with great stubbornness and skill, always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin? (50)

Over the first half of the speech, the strategic deployment of passages like this one also works to suggest that McCarthy is not rushing to premature conclusions as far as the greater picture is concerned. He does not accuse Marshall outright of being a conspirator but rather speaks of a “pattern” (37) or a “baffling pattern” (43). But McCarthy’s accusations get more explicit over the course of the speech, creating the impression that his evidence is convincing himself as much as it is supposed to convince his listeners and readers. Then, at the very end of the speech, he finally answers the most important rhetorical questions himself in apocalyptic fashion: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man” (136). This passage is not only the “logical” climax of his whole argument, it also shows the hyperbole typical of conspiracy theory and the theorists’ preferred line of reasoning. Asking who benefited from a development or decision, the conspiracy theorist interprets events from hindsight, postulating that history is shaped according to the will of the conspirators. McCarthy “proves” once again that Marshall really is a conspirator at the very end of his speech when he says: “If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would have dictated that at least some of his decisions would have served this country’s interests” (138). This is a telling moment because it marks a return to what in McCarthy’s autobiographical narrative of his fight against Communism clearly figures as the major narrative pivot, the moment when he

24 For a careful analysis of how McCarthy “interpreted” sources for his Senate speeches, see Oshinsky 113–14.

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

261

became aware of the existence of a conspiracy. Originally, he writes at the beginning of McCarthyism: The Fight for America, he saw the reason for the wrong decisions taken in the State Department in “incompetence and stupidity.” In December 1946, however, another Senator, Jim Forrestal, opened his eyes: “He said, ‘McCarthy, consistency has never been the mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.’ This phrase stuck me so forcefully that I have often used it since” (7) – most prominently, arguably, at the end of his indictment of General Marshall. McCarthy’s accusation of Marshall marked the height of his power and the peak of the Great Red Scare. McCarthy could accuse one of the nation’s most revered figures as a liberal-homosexual-Communist conspirator because he was either admired as America’s defender or feared. Even though scholars who have examined the 1950 and 1952 elections have argued that he was less influential in shaping public opinion than was generally thought, the fact remains that both friends and enemies ascribed enormous influence to him and acted accordingly (cf. Rogin, Intellectuals; Schrecker). Moreover, McCarthy was crucial in making the contest between allegedly “real” and “soft” masculinities center stage. As Cuordileone has shown, one reason why Dwight D. Eisenhower took the White House in a landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952 was that he could project the kind of masculinity that was considered sufficiently “tough” to contain Communism while his opponent appeared as just another weak, effeminate liberal – an impression consciously created by, among others, McCarthy (88–93). Thus, as long as the Republicans were in the opposition, McCarthy was extremely useful for them. After Eisenhower’s election, however, McCarthy quickly became a nuisance to the new administration and to those Republicans for whom accusations of Communism had primarily been a convenient way of hurting the political enemy. A true believer in the Communist conspiracy, McCarthy simply did not stop with his accusations about Communists in government. As he began to implicate the Republican administration, he “became a problem the GOP could no longer ignore” (Schrecker 255). But the tide was slowly turning. Eisenhower’s security program drew heavy criticism from its initiation in 1953, as more and more Americans worried that in fighting the totalitarian enemy their country was abolishing more and more civil and personal rights and was beginning to resemble the enemy that theses measures were meant to keep under control (cf. Fried 178). The surest indicator, though, that the hunt for Communists – and especially McCarthy’s popularity – was at least past its peak was that, late in 1953, television journalist Edward R. Murrow, one of America’s most highly regarded journalists since his reports from wartime London, began to openly attack McCarthy and his methods. Thomas Doherty, who has studied this “duel” in detail, readily concedes that “Murrow was neither the first nor did he risk the most in challenging

262

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

McCarthyism.” But he rightly points out that Murrow was the first journalist who dared to take on McCarthy on television. As Doherty puts it, “when television, the medium so leery of controversial personalities, so devoted to ‘100 percent acceptability,’ provided a forum for anti-McCarthyism, the gesture marked a seismic shift in the zeitgeist” (162). Murrow’s severest among a number of blows delivered through his show See It Now was the episode “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” aired on March 9, 1954. The episode consisted mainly of footage of McCarthy during speeches and hearings, “edited to inflict maximum damage” on McCarthy (173), who emerged from this montage as an even greater bully than he actually was.25 But despite the impact of Murrow’s shows, it was ultimately McCarthy himself who brought about his own downfall. McCarthy turned against the U.S. Army, because the Army, or so he felt, had turned against him. In summer 1953 G. David Shine, a consultant to Roy M. Cohn, Chief Counsel to McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee, had been drafted into the Army. Cohn began to pressure the Army to extend special privileges to his close friend, and these attempts were exposed by the Army on March 11, 1954, two days after Murrow’s show. McCarthy retaliated by “claiming the Army was holding Shine ‘hostage’ to deter the committee from exposing communists within the military’s ranks” (Doherty 190). The public Army-McCarthy hearings where this contest was played out marked the end of McCarthy’s influence. Broadcast live everyday, the hearings “exposed his uglier traits on TV” in a fashion that far surpassed the effect created by Murrow (Fried 138). The media, which had helped produce McCarthy, thus also played a role in eventually breaking his power. As important as exposing McCarthy’s techniques, however, was that the hearings made it impossible for McCarthy to claim the high moral ground any longer. What the American public remembered was the accusation leveled at him by the Army’s attorney, Joseph Welch, during one of their exchanges: “Have you left no sense of decency?” (qtd. in Doherty 207). McCarthy had always insisted that politics contained a moral dimension, envisioned a new decency in his Wheeling speech, and declined to expose Communists by name in the debate that followed the speech because he considered it improper. Now he appeared as the one who had violated the moral code of the republic. As Doherty explains, “The obligation to perform military service was an article of faith in the democratic catechism that crossed class lines […] a democratic chore that affirmed the citizen’s compliance with the egalitarian ethos” (230). Cohn had violated this

25 For a general discussion of TV reporting on the Cold War, Communism, and anti-Communism, see MacDonald 13–100.

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy

263

ethos by trying to get Shine out of his military service. Since McCarthy sided with Cohn, he became associated with the charge so that he could no longer fashion himself as somebody who upheld the ethos of republicanism and defended the rights of the people against the elites.26 A couple of weeks later, McCarthy was censured for his conduct by the Senate. However, the Great Red Scare was far from over: “McCarthyism outlasted McCarthy, just as it predated him” (Schrecker 265). As I already mentioned above, Congress made membership in the Communist Party virtually illegal in August 1954, and the hunt for Communists in government continued for another couple of years. Yet, as Richard Fried has convincingly argued, “1953–54 marked a multiple turning point as the underpinnings of the Second Red Scare slowly eroded” (178). Eisenhower’s security program increasingly drew criticism, as journalists “exposed injustices committed in its name” (181). When the Democrats won back the Senate in 1955, they launched an investigation into the program which enjoyed considerable support among the population (cf. 182). The testimony of many renegade Communists began to be doubted when it became more and more obvious “that, whether resulting from error or malice, fallacious identifications of accused persons as Communists had been going on for some time” (183). Moreover, the Supreme Court under Earl Warren steered a firmly liberal course and brought down several laws that had facilitated the dismissal and discrimination of alleged Communists as unconstitutional (cf. 184–86). As Fried metaphorically puts it, “if anti-Communist extremism was the Dracula prowling the mid-century darkness of American politics, it was the Supreme Court that drove the fatal stake through its heart” (184). Thus, just as the witchcraft scare in Salem in 1692 ended when Governor Phips disallowed the use of spectral evidence, the “witch-hunt” for Communists ended when the judiciary and legislative branches of government took decisive actions.27 Another factor that Fried, who is not interested in conspiracy theories, does not mention surely also contributed to the end of the Great Red Scare. The Communist conspiracy theory, I would suggest, lost in influence as the 1950s progressed not only because of the measures just described but also because conspiracy theorizing as such lost in acceptance. Conspiracy theories began to lose their status as legitimate knowledge and were increasingly considered illegitimate knowledge. This shift in status, which I address in more detail in the conclusion, however, occurred only gradually. While its repercussions are surely palpable during the late 1950s already, it truly gained momentum during the

26 For the most detailed analysis of the hearings, see Oshinsky 400–71. 27 See Fried 178–88 for a thorough discussion of the factors that I summarize here.

264

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

1960s only. Yet, by the end of the 1950s, the Communist conspiracy theory could be satirized, albeit only to a degree, as we will see in the next section.

McCarthy’s Mommies: The Manchurian Candidate Published in 1959, Robert Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate was both a commercial and critical success. The story of an American G.I. who is captured during the Korean War and, through brainwashing, turned into an unwitting assassin for America’s Communist enemies made Condon for a while an author to watch. In 1963, for example, Time magazine included Condon in its list of the ten important new novelists, the other nine being, among others, “Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, […] Philip Roth, […] and John Updike” (Smith 221). Yet, Condon did not become a canonized author, and even the novel on which contemporary reviewers based their high expectations for the author’s future has received surprisingly little critical attention. By contrast, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film adaptation, also called The Manchurian Candidate, has generated a large number of interpretations, with most critics more or less explicitly subscribing to the view that The Manchurian Candidate “is one of those cases where the film seems to eliminate the need for the text from which it comes” (Jackson).28 In this section I want to dispute this hierarchization. Reading the novel alongside the film, I argue that both texts are equally complex and function in very similar ways. The novel as much as the film is best considered “both comment on and expression of common American ideas and ideologies at the height of the Cold War,” as Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González suggest in one of the few studies that does not ignore Condon’s book (49). Like the narratives by Lippard and Melville with regard to the countersubversive visions of their own times, then, the novel and the film are highly ambivalent in their stance toward the Communist conspiracy theory. They simultaneously confirm and critique the vision of Communist subversion and its perceived connection to forms of social and sexual deviancy. In fact, as my interpretation shows, if any of the two texts deserves to be labeled more critical than affirmative, it is the novel and not the film. Both the novel and film are generic hybrids. What Matt Bell observes about the movie – “It is a war film, a coming-home film, a satire of American politics, an 28 Among the critics who devalue the novel and exclusively focus on the film are Canino, Carruthers, Gardner, Henriksen, Rogin, Ronald Reagan, and Whitfield. Jonathan Demme’s remake, which was released in 2004, replaces the Communist enemy with a transnational, albeit U.S.-based, corporation.

The Manchurian Candidate

265

oedipal melodrama, a ‘problem film’ centered on a social misfit, a detective film, a romantic comedy, an espionage thriller, and a revenge tragedy” (88) – applies equally to the novel. Most obviously maybe, The Manchurian Candidate, in both versions, is a satirical critique of Joseph McCarthy. The figure of Senator Johnny Iselin, the stepfather of Raymond Shaw, the brainwashed G.I., is, on the one hand, modeled so closely after McCarthy that the “resemblance […] cannot even be termed thinly veiled” (Carruthers 82). Like McCarthy, Iselin is a former lawyer and judge who changed party affiliations when seeking political office. He falsely claims to be a war hero and makes a name for himself by exposing the alleged Communist infiltration of the government. Just like McCarthy, Iselin is a loudmouthed and often unshaven alcoholic. On the other hand, Iselin is not merely a copy of McCarthy, but a larger-than-life version of the Wisconsin senator who does everything McCarthy did, albeit in a more extreme fashion. The most famous example of this is arguably what the novel refers to as “the numbers game” (147). While McCarthy changed the numbers of alleged subversives in the State Department once from 205 to 57, Iselin, in the novel’s corresponding scene, speaks first of “two hundred and seven persons” (141), then of “fifty-eight” (144), for a short time of “one Communist” (146), and finally of “fifty-seven” Communists in the Defense Department (148). In the film, Iselin changes the numbers within a couple of seconds from “207” to “104” and then to “275.” While such exaggerations work to ridicule Iselin and through him McCarthy in both novel and film, the film’s mise-en-scène additionally tries to alert viewers to the dangers that figures like Iselin, or, for that matter, McCarthy, pose to the country. For a costume party, Iselin dresses as Abraham Lincoln, and throughout the film he is placed next to portraits or busts of Lincoln. Combined with Iselin’s behavior, these visual arrangements work to challenge McCarthy’s self-fashioning as Lincoln’s heir, suggesting that McCarthy was, and Iselin is, a threat to the republic that Lincoln fought to preserve. The contrast with Lincoln is largely absent from the novel, but Condon’s text pokes fun at Iselin/McCarthy by making Iselin refer to himself in the third person, as McCarthy frequently did in his speeches and writings, when he fabricates a heroic wartime past for himself in an autobiographical account: “Iselin was on thirty-one combat missions in the arctic” (94). Moreover, the omniscient narrator explicitly describes Iselin’s way of conducting politics, tellingly labeling it “‘Iselinism’,” as “a modern miracle of dishonesty” (172, 173), and repeatedly mocks Iselin’s hunt for Communists and the public hysteria that allows him to proceed by way of little asides that bring to the fore the absurdity of the charges. Relating something completely different, for example, the narrator tells us at one point that Iselin is at the same time conducting a “formal investigation of atheism in the Department of Agriculture” (248).

266

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

Due to the specificities of filmic narration such remarks do not occur in the movie version of The Manchurian Candidate, but novel and film share the most effective means of satire: the contrast between Iselin’s public persona and his true self. While Iselin is a bully in the political arena, a number of scenes devoted to private conversations with his wife Eleanor expose him to be a childish and not very intelligent man whose successful career is the result of his faithful execution of whatever his wife tells him to do. In fact, in both novel and film Iselin does not simply confuse the numbers, but his wife orders him to use a different number each time. In the novel, we learn about this right after he has used different numbers; in the film, we see it even earlier, at least if we watch very carefully. When reporters ask him to verify his first number, his wife silently mouths him two different numbers which he obediently passes on. Iselin does not like the numbers game because he finds the various figures hard to remember and feels that his contradictions make him look like “a goddam fool” in the novel (148), and “some kind of a nut” in the film. The novel only hints at Mrs. Iselin’s motives, but the film spells them out. Exasperated she tells her complaining husband in a later scene: “Are they saying are there any Communists in the Defense Department? Of course not. They are saying how many Communists are there in the Defense Department?” Constantly changing the numbers thus emerges as a clever ploy to keep Iselin in the news and to deflect from the question if there is any substance to his accusation. For the film’s viewers, her explanation once again reveals that Iselin’s accusations are only a means to further his career, and it underlines what film as well as novel stress throughout: Iselin is a ridiculous figure whose success completely depends on his wife pulling the strings and virtually scripting his every utterance. On the whole, the critique of Iselin is even harsher in Frankenheimer’s film than in Condon’s novel. In the novel, Iselin may be a “low clown,” as his opponent, Senator Jordan, puts it (305), but he enjoys at least some independence and knows how to deliver his lines for maximum impact. For instance, when he first confronts the Secretary of Defense at a press conference, he makes sure “to shout very slowly so that, before he had finished, every newspaperman in the room had located him and was staring at him” (140). In the film, he merely starts shouting and creates chaos. Moreover, in the film, all this happens in the presence of his wife, who not only feeds him the numbers but supervises how he will come across to the American public by checking one of the TV cameras that captures Iselin’s performance. Her behavior thus invites a comparison with the work of a director, further reinforcing the notion that Iselin is merely an actor in a script that she writes and stages. Closely connected to the critique of Iselin is a critique of the media that disseminate and thus popularize his charges. However, as my short comparison

The Manchurian Candidate

267

of the accusation scenes in novel and film already hints at, there are differences in the kind and degree of media critique that both novel and film undertake through the representation of Iselin and the reception of his charges. The novel focuses on the print media. When Iselin first attacks the Secretary of Defense, for example, the journalists present are described as “staring at him with the expectant lust for sensation which was their common emotion” (140). They are more interested, it seems, in what sells than in what is true. Accordingly, the novel criticizes them for reporting the accusations without checking them, attacking a journalistic convention of the time that immensely helped McCarthy, as I discussed in the introduction to this chapter. Their lack in carefulness comes explicitly to the fore at the very end of the novel when supporters of Iselin submit a petition to make him the Republican Party’s presidential candidate to the nomination convention. While there are only “four thousand signatures,” of which a considerable number has been forged, “Many of the newspaper reports got the figure wrong,” the omniscient narrator informs us in his typical deadpan fashion, “reporting as many as 1,064,219 signatures, although at no time did any representative of any newspaper attempt to make a count” (337, 338). However, the novel does not perform a wholesale condemnation of the press. The reporters do not check the sources properly, but they are also subtly manipulated, as in Iselin’s performances, or being lied to, as is implicit in the phrase “got the figure wrong.” What is more, the novel does not accuse all reporters of neglect and sensationalism, devoting ample space to Raymond Shaw’s fight against his hated stepfather first as the aid to and then as a newspaper columnist himself. By contrast, the film performs a “recurring attack on television and on the passivity of television viewers” (Carruthers 78), largely blaming the medium itself for Iselin’s rise. The Iselin of the film is mostly a televised Iselin, his public persona depending completely on how he comes across on screen. In fact, at times the film seems to suggest that television creates its own reality, doing with its audience what the Communist brainwashers do with their victims. Historically, of course, the film’s media critique misses the point, since television, as we have seen, contributed more to Joseph McCarthy’s downfall than to his rise. Thus, one might conclude that the targeting of television has primarily to do with “Hollywood’s own anxious relationship to television at the time,” the widespread worry among filmmakers that television would ruin the film industry (Gardner 27). What is important to notice, however, is that The Manchurian Candidate is not only a critique of McCarthyism. As Jacobson and González convincingly suggest, it also vindicates McCarthy’s suspicions, as the film and novel replicate the epistemology on which McCarthy’s and others’ anti-Communism relied:

268

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

The bifurcation of public and private that operates in the depiction of Iselin is precisely the bifurcation that McCarthyism had thrived upon and that Cold War [culture] reveled in: a shocking hidden identity lies behind the placid public mask […]. The Manchurian Candidate may parody McCarthy gleefully, but it nonetheless adopts his modus operandi, and in doing so the film endorses his vision and authenticates his thesis. (95–96)

Jacobson and González may only have the film in mind here, but I would contend that their claims apply to the novel as well. Just as McCarthy and other antiCommunists claimed about subversives, the face that Iselin wears to the world radically differs from his private one in both film and novel. As film and as novel, then, The Manchurian Candidate works to critique the strategies of McCarthy, while, unwittingly maybe, it confirms the basic premise that made McCarthy’s methods generally accepted for a while. A similar ambivalence is palpable in the representation of the conspiracy in both the novel and the film. On one level, the conspiracy that film and novel revolve around can be read as the confirmation of an anti-Communist’s worst nightmare. In 1951 Soviet and Chinese agents abduct an American patrol in a concerted mission across the Korean border to Manchuria and brainwash them thoroughly. After their return, all soldiers, including Major Ben Marco (played by Frank Sinatra), testify that they were attacked by the enemy and that only the heroic behavior of Sergeant Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey) saved them, except for two men whom even the brave Shaw could not help. After his return from Korea, Shaw is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, “the highest tribute for valor” the American nation can bestow (63). In reality, however, the Communist conspirators have turned Shaw into a sleeper assassin who can be activated by his American handler or, in fact, by anybody else, with the correct words. He will execute any order given to him and forget what he did afterward. The Communists want to use Shaw to assassinate the Republican presidential candidate for the 1960 election during his acceptance speech at the convention in order to win the nomination for the candidate for the vice presidency, Senator Johnny Iselin, whose wife Eleanor, Raymond’s mother (played by Angela Lansbury), is working together with the Communists, while pretending to be staunchly anti-Communist. As we eventually learn, she is also Shaw’s handler. The image of conspiracy that emerges from novel and film, then, is that of an insidious plot. America’s foreign and domestic enemies as well as the unwitting dupe Johnny Iselin, who has no idea what his wife’s true agenda is, are collaborating in order to win the most important political office available. The hostile take-over of the country is imminent and only foiled at the last minute because Major Marco has not been brainwashed thoroughly enough and thus eventually manages to find out what really happened and why. The programming of Shaw and the various tests that the Communists put him through after his return to the

The Manchurian Candidate

269

United States are perfectly synchronized with the rise of Iselin, and Shaw’s mother skillfully exploits her son’s fame as a Medal of Honor man against his will to promote her husband’s political career. What happens within the fictional world is what conspiracy theorists always claim about the conspiracies they are concerned with, namely that history unfolds according to the will of the conspirators. The basic parameters of the plot, we learn early in the novel, were “planned in 1936” (20), that is, long before the emergence of the Cold War or before China became Communist, and in both novel and film the speech that is to secure Iselin the presidential nomination after the assassination has been worked on “for over eight years” (352). What is more, The Manchurian Candidate dramatizes one of American culture’s most deeply-held fears of the 1950s. As David Seed and Timothy Melley have shown, both the general public and political and academic elites were concerned about the enemy’s ability to brainwash Americans so completely that they would either from now on work for the enemy without knowing it or openly turn against their country. These concerns originated in society’s bewilderment about American prisoners of war who either decided to stay in North Korea or defended the Communist cause after their return, but they very quickly got detached from these concrete cases. For journalists like Edward Hunter, in BrainWashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Mind (1951) and Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It (1956), and psychologists like Joost A. Meerloo, in Rape of the Mind (1956), or William Sargant, in Battle for the Mind (1957), brainwashing became a powerful trope to address larger social issues that worried them and that, as we have seen in the previous sections, were seen as inseparable from the Communist threat.29 For example, in In Every War But One (1959) journalist Eugene Kinkead constructed a connection between brainwashing and “momism,” arguing that POWs in the Korean War could only be brainwashed because their overbearing mothers had raised them as soft, fragile, and emasculated men (cf. Seed, Brainwashing 46–47). The Manchurian Candidate, too, links the Communist threat to “momism,” as I will discuss in more detail below. By contrast, for Meerloo and Sargant, brainwashing provided a means to talk about indoctrination in more general terms. This connection is made in the novel as well where what is done to Shaw is described as “concentrat[ing] the purpose of all propaganda upon the mind of one man” (46). As Melley explains, brainwashing was a welcome tool to discuss propaganda and its effects because “the theory of brainwashing studiously avoids structuralism; it preserves the intentionality at the heart of indivi-

29 For a detailed discussion of these works, see Melley, “Brainwashed”; and Seed, Brainwashing.

270

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

dualism by understanding social control as the work of an exceptionally powerful, willful, rational, and malevolent human agent – the brainwasher” (“Brainwashed” 149). In other words, translating systemic social influence into conspiracy, brainwashing allowed researchers to uphold the belief in the power of the individual – a belief that the novel challenges far more than the film, as will see. Finally, brainwashing became a favorite trope of countersubversive discourse because it allowed conceptualizing the Communist attack as both invasion and infection. “You are a host body and they are feeding on you,” Marco tells Shaw at one point, thus likening brainwashing to parasitic infection, while a few lines further down the narrator talks of “the invasion of [Shaw’s] body” (264).30 However, if The Manchurian Candidate appears on one level as the confirmation of anti-Communist anxiety, both novel and film, albeit to different degrees, also contain and critique the fear about conspiracy, complicating the picture through the way in which they represent the Communist plot. For the generic hybrid that is the novel, the conspiracy is not at all central; the focus rather lies on Shaw’s psychology and that of the other characters involved, on the one hand, and on political satire, on the other. The assassination plot comprises chapters 20 to 30, and thus one third of the chapters, but in terms of space it makes for less than one fifth of the novel, and even in these chapters the novel is concerned with a variety of topics. Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, then, is not a classical conspiracy narrative as described by Mark Fenster. The reader does not perceive the events through the eyes of a central character that slowly uncovers the conspiracy and eventually foils it. Furthermore, while in classical conspiracy narratives the revelation about the size and goals of the conspiracy arrives only at the end of the story, Condon’s omniscient narrator relates everything that happens to the abducted soldiers as well as the conspirators’ larger rationale in the second chapter already. Hence, the scope of the conspiracy is known to the reader almost from the outset of the story. A dangerous conspiracy by America’s foreign enemies to capture the presidency is underway, but the number of American conspirators, of traitors at home, is very limited. There is only Mrs. Iselin, who, as it turns out in the end, is not blindly following orders from Moscow but has been using the Communists as much as they have used her, and there is the unsuspecting dupe Johnny Iselin. But as far as the novel is concerned, there are no traitors in the Defense Department or in any other important organization or agency. The

30 On yet a different level, Marco’s image likens Communism to cannibalism. The Manchurian Candidate is not the only text that associates the hostile ideology with the ultimate Other of civilization. In Masters of Deceit, J. Edgar Hoover, too, casts communism as “cannibalistic” (187).

The Manchurian Candidate

271

only element of the conspiracy that the narrator does not immediately disclose is the identity of Shaw’s American handler. But there are various conclusive hints throughout that his mother performs this role. Accordingly, the novel “does not subscribe to a logic of paranoia,” as Dallmann correctly observes. The readers are never invited to suspect everybody Shaw interacts with, as is usually the case in classical conspiracy narratives. Equipped with the information provided by the narrator, the reader is from the outset “able to distinguish between real conspiracies and ungrounded paranoid suspicions” (90). It is this position that renders the satire of Iselin/McCarthy particularly effective, as the reader can be sure that Iselin’s accusations are indeed ludicrous and not even accidentally true. The novel takes the threat of a Communist conspiracy seriously, but it also dismisses the idea that there is large-scale infiltration and subversion going on. Frankenheimer’s film functions in very similar fashion, also containing the threat that it simultaneously evokes. However, the conspiracy plot is far more central for the film whose second half is almost entirely devoted to the assassination attempt. More importantly even, what happened to the patrol in Manchuria is revealed more gradually in the film than in the novel. Since the narrative employs the device of character-centered flashbacks to disclose the Communist plot, it remains for a long time unclear if what Marco and another soldier remember in their dreams is real or not. Thus, although the film is not a classical conspiracy narrative either, it nevertheless is more prone to evoke what Dallmann calls “ungrounded paranoid suspicions” than the novel, where the reader knows for sure that the dreams adequately reflect reality. In fact, as Jacobson and González relate in their comprehensive study of the film, there were movie critics, like Greil Marcus or Roger Ebert, who believed that Rosie (played by Vivien Leigh), the woman Marco meets on the train, is part of the conspiracy because they could not account otherwise for her mysterious behavior and immediate interest in Marco, who is almost broken at this point. What seems to have rendered Rosie particularly suspicious is that the way she talks to Marco quite obviously recalls the film’s previous brainwashing scenes.31 Thus, these critics’ reading of Rosie might be wrong on the literal level, but it captures the link the film, and to a slightly lesser degree also the novel, forges between the Communist conspiracy and the harmful influence of women, and especially of

31 What contemporary reviewers, somewhat curiously, did never mention was that one could also suspect Rosie because she identifies herself, in the film as well as in the novel, as “a teaprivileges member” of “the Museum of Modern Art” (191). As I discussed in section 2, antiCommunists like George A. Dondero considered modern art a Communist attack on American values.

272

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

mothers, over men. As Jacobson and González put it, “Leigh may be Sinatra’s ‘controller,’ but not in the way Marcus implies or Ebert believes” (151). Rather, in The Manchurian Candidate “the Cold War ‘problem’ of the feminine stands out in unsual power” (Jackson). Rosie is one of three potentially controlling women in The Manchurian Candidate, the others being Mrs. Iselin and Jocie (played by Leslie Parrish), Senator Jordan’s daughter, Shaw’s love interest, and, apart from Marco, the only person he can meaningfully relate to and feels for. Of the three, Mrs. Iselin is quite obviously the most important, and most dangerous, figure. In the film as well as in the novel, she seems to have stepped right out of Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, enjoying absolute power over her husband and her son. The film dramatizes how completely she infantilizes Iselin at the very end of the scene in which she explains to him why she keeps changing the number of alleged Communists. Accepting her explanation, Iselin devotes himself to his breakfast, pouring ketchup on his eggs in a quantity and a fashion that is reminiscent of a three-year-old. The novel, by contrast, uses a sexual trope to indicate that the Iselins’ relationship is not one between adults. In Condon, Iselin is impotent with his wife: “although throughout his life quite capable of getting and giving full satisfaction with other women, [Iselin] found himself as impotent as a male butterfly atop a female pterodactyl when he tried commerce with Raymond’s mother” (78–79). In both novel and film, though, it appears only logical that Mrs. Iselin functions as Raymond’s “American operator” for the conspiracy (155), as this merely continues and intensifies what she has been doing his whole life: making decisions for him and directing him. Significantly, The Manchurian Candidate goes beyond what even the staunchest critics of “momism” imagined. While anti-Communists claimed that there was a direct link between overbearing mothers and Communism, between what Jacobson and González in an apt metaphor call “the marriage of perversion and subversion” (142), The Manchurian Candidate conflates these two dimensions entirely. Whereas anti-Communists warned that mothers might spoil and pervert their sons and thus anchor a propensity for the subversive ideology of Communism in them, The Manchurian Candidate turns the mother itself into a Communist agent, who turns her son, against his will and without his knowledge, into a Communist agent himself just as she has prevented him from enjoying normal relationships with other people, especially with women. What is more, if the figure of Iselin already confirms anti-Communist fears that the private self might differ completely from the person presented to the world, Mrs. Iselin validates such suspicions even more. Beneath her respectable, and in the film even matronly, outward appearance lurks a Communist pervert who betrays her country and harbors an incestuous desire for her son.

The Manchurian Candidate

273

No scene in Condon’s novel captures the connection between the façade of respectable motherhood and the Communist conspiracy as effectively as the brainwashing scene that Marco relives early on in a nightmare in Frankenheimer’s film. In the novel, we merely learn that soldiers, who are sitting in a lecture theater in Manchuria where the chief brainwasher Yen Lo explains to an audience of Soviet dignitaries what he has done to them, have been made to believe that they have “been forced by a storm to wait in a small hotel in New Jersey where space restrictions made it necessary […] to watch and listen to a meeting of a ladies’ garden club” (43). However, this pretense fades to the background, as the scene unfolds, and whenever Shaw, who is of course at the center of attention, or any other soldier answers Yen Lo, he addresses him as “Sir” (56, 57). The film, by contrast, merges these contexts – the hotel lobby and the lecture theater – and the different sets of people – respectable middle-class women and Communist conspirators – by way of editing. Scenes set in the auditorium are intercut with scenes set in the hotel. In some shots Yen Lo lectures about flowers and in others about brainwashing, and so does the ladies’ club’s president. Whenever Shaw answers Yen Lo here, he addresses him as “Ma’am.” Thus, the constant oscillation between garden club and auditorium literally implicates the figure of the mother in the Manchurian conspiracy.32 In addition, the montage also works to establish brainwashing not only as “a distinctly ‘Oriental’ practice” (Jacobson and González 119), but also as a feminine weapon and means of control. Both of these effects hinge on the fact that the Communists’ chief brainwasher is not a Russian scientist but the Chinese Yen Lo. As an “oriental” he belongs to a group of people that the Western imagination has traditionally othered by, among others means, casting them as effeminate (cf. Jacobson and González 114).33 What the film performs here, then, is a double movement: it feminizes the “Oriental” Communists, and it orientalizes American women – a reading further corroborated by the fact that Mrs. Iselin likes to wear Chinese robes. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that in the film – but also in the novel which does this in less condensed form – the female characters perform a number of acts that bear an uncanny resemblance to brainwashing. Again, this is most obviously the case with Mrs. Iselin, who controls her husband,

32 As Dallmann points out, the notion of the ladies’ garden club also recalls the audience of McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, and thus aligns McCarthy with brainwashing as well. 33 For a detailed discussion of the Orientalist traditions that the film draws upon in order to either other or domesticate the East and Easterners, see Jacobson and González 100–29. For a reading of film and novel that holds that Westerners and Easterners are represented in much the same fashion, see Szalay 376n15.

274

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

directs her son, and, via the media, seems to brainwash the American people as such, but it is observable in Jocie and Rosie as well.34 Before I can explore these characters in detail, though, it is necessary to distinguish far more strictly between the novel and the film than I have done so far. The film powerfully connects conspiracy, brainwashing, and “momism” in the scene I have discussed at length, but, on the whole, sexual and social deviance is a far bigger topic in the novel than in the film. As Jacobson and González put it, “The novel is shot through with sexualized references that link communism and subversion to unorthodox familial and gender arrangements, or perversion” (141). Raymond’s mother’s incestuous desire for her son is dramatized in two scenes in which the reader sees Raymond from her point of view and is privy to her thoughts about him. What these scenes make clear is that she truly loves him, albeit in a perverse way (295, 332). Moreover, her love for him, and, in fact, her behavior more generally, are explained in the novel through the incestuous relationship she had with her father when she was a teenage girl: “Raymond, her own Raymond, looked exactly like her darling, darling Poppa!” (295). This explanation, which further enforces the link between perversion and subversion but also adds complexity to Mrs. Iselin’s character, is completely absent from the film. In different fashion, the novel also negotiates cultural concerns about homosexuality, laying bare how accusations of homosexuality could function as a weapon during the 1950s. When Mrs. Iselin, whom the narrator, except for one or two cases, invariably calls “Raymond’s mother” (e.g., 69, 70, 73, 74, and passim), decides to drive a wedge between Shaw and Jocie after they have fallen in love during the summer before Shaw leaves for Korea, she informs Jocie’s father, Senator Jordan, that “Raymond was a homosexual and in other ways degenerate” (115). For three related reasons the film cannot be that explicit with regard to either incest or homosexuality. First, there is simply not enough time to include all scenes from the novel in the film so that the film necessarily has to be selective. Second, many of the relevant scenes in the novel occur in what is the backstory of the movie. Since the film uses flashbacks already to dramatize the conspiracy and to show how Shaw and Jocie met, it cannot return to Mrs. Iselin’s childhood for reasons of narrative economy. Third, and most importantly, any explicit representation of incestuous or other kinds of sexual encounters as they abound in the

34 Moreover, as Jackson stresses, the murders that Shaw commits at the orders of his mother all occur in spaces marked as female. He strangles his boss, Mr. Gaines, in the bedroom, and shoots Senator Jordan and Jocie, who is by then his wife, in the kitchen.

The Manchurian Candidate

275

novel would have been impossible because the Production Code, which banned all such scenes from the screen, was still in effect in 1962. The film finds a way out of this conundrum by heavily relying on allusion and condensation.35 Thus, the film, as Matt Bell explains, “ostensibly ignores the subject of homosexuality altogether” (88) but features several lines of dialogue that a “knowing” audience can see as hints that a couple of characters in the film indeed wrongly suspect that Shaw is homosexual. As, among others, Jacobson and González argue, in the film, “most of these sexualized strands [of the novel] are boiled down to one, telling, incestuous kiss between Eleanor [his mother] and Raymond” (143).36 The different rendering of the issues of sexual and social deviance has two effects. The connection between deviance and conspiracy is present in the film as much as in the novel, but, due to its condensed treatment, it can be more easily missed. Moreover, the novel’s treatment of these issues is not only more extensive but also more nuanced. While both film and novel insist on the link between feminine power and conspiracy, the novel does not project all female influence over men as potentially destructive, thus offering a more balanced and complex picture. This difference is already palpable in the representation of Mrs. Iselin. In the film she is nothing but a power-hungry schemer who presents a façade of matronly decency to the world. Her regrets that her Communist allies chose her son to be the assassin, which she voices in a conversation with Shaw toward the end of the film, do not come across as believable and appear more as a tactical ploy to keep him under control and prepare him for his final task, the assassination of the presidential nominee. In the novel, Mrs. Iselin is a far more ambivalent figure. At first sight, she is as treacherous and ruthless as in the film, and maybe even more so, since in Condon’s text she is also a seductress who uses her sexuality to promote her husband’s career (90) and a “narcotics addict” who cannot function properly without regular doses of heroin (168). From this vantage point, she is, as Senator Jordan puts it, “a smiler who wraps a dagger in the flag”

35 For an account of how the Production Code Administration doctored the script of the film, see Jacobson and González 19–20. 36 While their treatment of the film, and, to a slightly lesser degree, also the novel, is overall excellent, Jacobson and González create a misleading impression by referring to Mrs. Iselin as “Eleanor.” While the credits identify the character as “Eleanor Iselin,” her first name is never used in the film, and it seems only to have been included in the credits because the character is named Eleanor in Condon’s novel. The questions why Condon used this particular name, if it is a reference to Eleanor Roosevelt, and, if so, if it works to suggest that Eleanor Roosevelt controlled her husband as much as Eleanor Iselin controls her husband or, on the contrary, parodies such Hooverian implications, would merit a paper of its own.

276

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

(305). But this is not the whole story, and critics like Seed are, in my opinion, mistaken when they claim that “Condon is so eager to confirm [her] role [as the incarnation of Wylie’s momism] that he overloads her with negative significance” (Brainwashing 115). Contrary to the film, she seems to genuinely care for her son, albeit not in the fashion one would usually describe as motherly. Her regrets that he has been turned into the assassin come across as more convincing in the novel because the relevant passage is focalized through her (331–32) and because there are, on second reading, hints that she is severely shaken when she learns that Shaw was chosen (157). Most importantly, though, the novel complicates the theory of “momism” by relating how the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager affected her development. Condon’s text thus remains within the Freudian framework at the center of Wylie’s and later anti-Communists’ indictments of mothers, but it suggests that when mothers exert harmful influence on their children there might be deeper reasons to it than a flawed female character. The differences between film and novel are even more pronounced with regard to the character of the other two potentially manipulating women, Jocie and Rosie. In the novel, Jocie embodies innocence and romantic attachment. Although she gets married after Mrs. Iselin has driven her and Shaw apart, she never gets over their separation and rushes back to him, when he contacts her after her husband’s death. In fact, Jocie figures as the one who can potentially break the spell cast over Shaw by the Communists and his mother alike, as is powerfully dramatized in their reunion scene. At the costume party Mrs. Iselin puts Shaw into the state he needs to be in to receive his orders by showing him the queen of diamonds from a deck of cards, the trigger Yen Lo settled on because it represents his “dearly loved and hated mother” (54). Then, however, she has to leave the room, ordering Shaw to wait for her. At this moment, Jocie enters, dressed as the queen of diamonds for the party. Her costume overrides Mrs. Iselin’s orders, and she and Shaw leave, get married, and spent a happy honeymoon in the Caribbean. When they return to New York, circumstances prevent Marco, whose team of investigators has detected the mechanism by which Shaw is controlled in the meantime, from talking to Shaw before his mother can gain control over him again. Thus, the events that follow – the murders of Senator Jordan and Jocie – cannot be blamed on Jocie, but result from unhappy coincidences. By contrast, in the film, Jocie is a far more ambivalent figure. Here, too, she exerts good influence on Shaw, as a scene set on the morning after their spontaneous wedding shows. Talking to Marco, Shaw makes the first joke of his life, and self-consciously comments how good Jocie is for him. Yet, in Frankenheimer’s film, Jocie does not represent innocence but rather figures as a seductress who poses as innocent. When she first meets Shaw, who, as in the novel, has just been

The Manchurian Candidate

277

bitten by a snake, she dresses down to her bra while attending to his wound. The film suggests that it is this sexualized act, notably absent from the novel, that casts a spell over Shaw. More significantly yet, in the film, Marco meets Jocie and Shaw before they leave for their honeymoon. He wants to run some tests with Shaw in order to break the conditioning of the Communists, but Jocie talks Marco into postponing this until after their honeymoon – in a fashion that, as various critics have observed, echoes Shaw’s brainwashing and the way Rosie talks to Marco on the train, a scene to which I turn in a moment. Thus, in the film, Jocie is at least partly responsible for the tragic events that follow.37 Novel and film differ even more in their representation of Rosie. In one of the strangest scenes of the film, she appears virtually out of nowhere and “brainwashes” Marco into memorizing her address and phone number.38 For the rest of the film she retains this control over Marco, playing with him and repeatedly postponing the marriage he desires. As Jacobson and González put it, “Marco, at the film’s end, remains an impotent figure, as susceptible as ever […] to the ‘threat’ posed by Rosie, or, more accurately, what she represents – the continued influence of the strong-willed woman and the symbolic castration of the male” (166–67). In the novel, Rosie also takes control on the train, and even more so at the police station where she picks Marco up that night because he has been arrested after getting into a fight and had nobody to call but her: She signed out for him at the desk as though he was a ripped purse some cannon had torn off her arm. […] She shook hands like a fight manager with the desk lieutenant […]. Eugénie Rose called a taxi as if it were her own hound dog: it came to heel with a hand signal. (199– 200)

In this passage Rosie acts like a man and thus further emasculates Marco. However, she continues to do so only until Marco, who is much more of a nervous wreck in the novel than in the film, has regained his strength and sanity through her help, and thus can start his work to foil the Communist plot. Unlike in the film, the novel depicts their relationship from then on as one between equals and suggests that they will get married soon. In sum, then, the film represents all female influence on men as dangerous and potentially destructive. As Gardner writes, “as great a danger as is posed by Communism in [the] film, that posed by Mother is stronger still,” and this evalua-

37 See Melley, “Brainwashed” 157; and Wildermuth 124 for similar observations. Ohi has pointed out that the dialogue between Jocie and Marco implies that she considers Shaw a homosexual but is confident that she can cure him (158). 38 For a detailed analysis of the cultural resonances and Hitchcockian pretexts of the encounter on the train, see the chapter “Strangers on a Train” in Jacobson and González (150–67).

278

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

tion can be extended to include all female characters, the actual as well as the potential mothers (25). Melley makes exactly the same point when he concludes: “The film’s deepest worry, then, is […] that American society has allowed women, and especially mothers, far too much influence over men” (“Brainwashed” 158). The novel, too, recognizes the enormous influence that women can exert over men, yet in contrast to the film, it firmly maintains that this influence can also be benevolent. In fact, this influence is bound to be benevolent, as long as the woman is “a good woman,” as the narrator explicitly characterizes Rosie in an uncharacteristically non-ironic passage (227). The same characterization could be applied to Jocie, whose powers are simply no match for the destructive influence that Communist brainwashing and a bad mother have on Shaw. This positive representation of female influence can be seen as echoing the ideology of republican motherhood. After all, American culture has since the times of the Early Republic acknowledged that women influence “their” men, and the culture has usually seen this influence as a positive, at times even civilizing, force. As long as it is not corrupted, as in the case of Mrs. Iselin whose sexual abuse recalls the attack on republican motherhood nineteenth-century antiCatholics worried about, it works for the maintenance of the republic, as in the case of Rosie and Marco where she gives him the strength to defeat the conspiracy against democracy. Thus, the novel presents a far more balanced picture of and is much less concerned about female power than the film. Closely related to the diverging representation of the women, novel and film also depict the two male protagonists, Shaw and Marco, in different fashion. The novel projects Shaw as a deeply disturbed person who, sexually and emotionally inhibited, is virtually unable to enjoy “normal” relationships with other people. It may complicate the origins of “momism,” but it uses Shaw as an example of the effects of bad parenting. He can be turned into an assassin because he has always been, like his mother, what Ernst and Loth called a “damaged soul.” As David Seed has pointed out, the novel expresses Shaw’s “other-directedness” and emotional distance from the events around him through a variety of stylistic means (Brainwashing 114). Except for scenes that involve Jocie, we hardly ever perceive events from his point of view, and when we do, the sentences usually feature passive constructions and are devoid of adjectives. This creates the impression that Shaw does not possess any autonomous self, and this effect is strengthened by the fact that, in the novel, Marco and his colleagues cannot break Shaw’s conditioning. Although they learn that he has been brainwashed quite early and eventually even find out about the trigger, they cannot deprogram him. All that Marco can do is to reprogram Shaw so that he does not shoot the presidential nominee but instead Iselin and his mother, and eventually also himself, during the convention. Leaving the scene of the crime, the novel’s final sentence has

The Manchurian Candidate

279

Marco “listening intently for a memory of Raymond, for the faintest rustle of his ever having lived, but there was none” (358). There is none, for Shaw has, because of what first his mother and then the Communists have done to him, never “exist [ed] as a full individual” (Dallmann 98–99). Marco, however, is clearly an autonomous individual for most of the novel. A womanizer whose libido is eventually channeled toward monogamy by the “good woman” that is Rosie, Marco overcomes his temporary loss of independence, caused by the Communist brainwashing, with the help of his future wife. Significantly, it is he who orchestrates events in the final chapters. Realizing that he cannot deprogram Shaw, “He decided for both of them what they would have to do” (347) and orders Shaw to kill the conspirators. That he fails to break Shaw’s mechanism does not indicate his weakness but underlines the degree to which Shaw is other-directed. Yet, the fact that Marco has to use the brainwashed Shaw to foil the conspiracy is nevertheless significant, as it stresses that there are limits to what the individual can do and that not everybody is to the same degree an individual. In Frankenheimer’s film, by contrast, Marco is a much weaker figure, the embodiment of the “organization man,” who is directed by the Army, by the conspirators, and, as discussed above, eventually by Rosie. In fact, in the film Shaw appears as far more individualistic than Marco. He may be “not loveable,” as he puts it himself once, but overall he comes across as far less disturbed than in the novel and, indeed, as relatively normal and capable of genuine feelings. The film offers no deeper explanation for Mrs. Iselin’s “momism,” as the novel does, but her power over Shaw is far more limited here – unless she activates his brainwashed self – whereas in the novel, he does whatever she wants without her resorting to this technique. Thus, in the novel she talks him into having his picture taken together with Johnny Iselin, whereas in the film, she has to take him by surprise to get the photo opportunity. Accordingly, it does not come as a complete surprise that Shaw emerges as a self-determined individual at the end of the film. One of the few things that Marco actually achieves in the film is to, remarkably easily, break Shaw’s control mechanism. From that moment on, Shaw is a free agent who decides and acts for himself. He pretends to be still under his mother’s control to deceive her, listens to her plans, and determines that he has to shoot her and Iselin. As he tells Marco, who tried to stop him because he thought he was still other-directed, after the deed has been done and before he kills himself, “You couldn’t have stopped them. The army couldn’t have stopped them. So I had to stop them.” Far more than the novel, then, the film can be read as an affirmation of individualism, especially since Marco’s weakness, represented only symbolically in a couple of short scenes, can far more easily be overlooked here than Shaw’s

280

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

lack of individuality in the novel. If one misses the crisis of masculinity dramatized in Marco, the character can be seen as “a ravaged, lonely Kennedy hero” and the film therefore as the “Kennedy administration film” as which Michael Rogin has famously classified it (Ronald Reagan 253). With its focus on conspirators located outside the country and its release coinciding with the Cuban Missile Crisis (cf. Jacobson and González 171), The Manchurian Candidate appears from this vantage point as a confirmation of the worldview – Communism as a real but largely external danger – that Kennedy shared.39 However, while it is well possible that it functioned like this for at least parts of its cinema audience, Frankenheimer’s movie, when watched carefully, assumes as ambiguous a stance toward the Communist conspiracy and all the larger social issues connected to it, as Condon’s novel does. Like the narratives by Lippard and Melville discussed in previous chapters, The Manchurian Candidate as novel as well as film both unsettles and confirms the conspiracy theory it is concerned with. It clearly ridicules Joe McCarthy through the figure of Johnny Iselin and strongly suggests that his vision of subversion was ludicrous. In fact, both novel and film work to marginalize McCarthy, implying that his conspiracist worldview was never shared by a majority of Americans, but that he and his allies simply cleverly exploited or even manipulated the media.40 What complicates this satire is not so much that, historically, many Americans did in fact share McCarthy’s anxieties about Communist infiltration, but that novel and film share McCarthy’s epistemological premise – appearances constantly deceive in The Manchurian Candidate – and that both revolve around and confirm the anxieties about social and sexual deviance that nourished McCarthy’s anti-Communism and made it, for a while, so central to Cold-War American culture. The novel, as I have argued, may be more critical of the theory of “momism” than the film, but it also puts this and related issues center stage. As ambivalent as The Monks of Monk-Hall and “Benito Cereno” in its stance on conspiracy theory, The Manchurian Candidate differs from these two texts in that it captures a moment of transition in the history of American conspiracy theorizing. By mainly locating the enemy outside, it recalls the mode of conspira-

39 Frankenheimer’s film, it is worth pointing out, provoked a number of reductive readings by its initial audience, drawing criticism from both poles of the political spectrum, the American Legion as well as the Communist Party (cf. Kirshner 41). 40 In fact, one of Frankenheimer’s objectives when making the film was to show “how ludicrous the whole McCarthy far Right syndrome is” (qtd. in Carruthers 82). In the novel, the costume party strongly suggests that “Iselinism” is nothing but a fringe fantasy. Senator Jordan describes the guests as belonging to the “lunatic fringe” (302) – an evaluation corroborated by the fact that many guests are dressed in “quaint American Legion uniforms” (294).

The Manchurian Candidate

281

cist thinking that dominated throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, this externalization foreshadows the concerns that have dominated “official” conspiracy theories since the 1960s. The worldviews of government representatives like Ronald Reagan and Oliver North or George W. Bush and Richard Cheney were not less conspiracist than those of McCarthy. But, as I discuss in the conclusion, the visions of these countersubversives differ in several aspects from McCarthy’s which is why they have largely escaped the increasingly derogative label “conspiracy theory.” In similar fashion, the trope of brainwashing also anticipates later conspiracy theories. After all, brainwashing in The Manchurian Candidate is not only what the Communists do with Shaw and the other soldiers. It is also associated with the influence of women over men and the power of the media and the advertisement industry to determine the way people think and perceive the world. Mrs. Iselin’s decision to settle on the number of 57 Communists in the Defense Department is based on the idea that “it could be linked so easily with the fifty-seven varieties of canned food that had been advertised so well and so steadily for so many years” (148–49). Projecting her to “brainwash” Americans by way of the media, the novel as well as the film (which forges the connection to the 57 Heinz Varieties through the shot of Iselin pouring ketchup on his eggs) appear as predecessors of contemporary conspiracy theories which often hold that those in power control, indoctrinate, and pacify “the people” through messages hidden in media broadcasts and commercials working on the audience’s unconscious. Moreover, in many of these accounts, the media and society at large are gendered as female and contrasted with the male conspiracy theorist who, by either exposing or destroying the conspiracy, reasserts his masculinity. However, most contemporary conspiracy theories, no matter whether they are concerned with brainwashing or not, assume a highly critical attitude toward the federal government and the state in general, frequently holding that this is exactly where the conspirators are located. This is not yet the case in The Manchurian Candidate, which, much like earlier conspiracy narratives, projects the government as what the conspirators target but have not captured yet. In The Manchurian Candidate there are no traitors within the government, and the Communist conspiracy is foiled largely because of the work of a joint intelligence commission of Army, F.B.I., and C.I.A., headed by Marco. In expressing firm confidence in the state and its institutions, film and novel thus differ markedly from the anti-statism, shared by McCarthy (cf. Horowitz 217), that has dominated American conspiracy theories since the 1960s. As many scholars have argued (cf. Knight, Kennedy; Olmsted), this skepticism toward the state was very much fueled by the Kennedy assassination and the, in the eyes of many, dubious role that government agencies seem to have played in it. With a plot revolving around the

282

Chapter 5: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s

attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and an assassin who is played in the movie by Laurence Harvey, The Manchurian Candidate almost seems to anticipate Kennedy’s murder by Lee Harvey Oswald as well (cf. Rogin, Ronald Reagan 254). Like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the text with which I concluded my first case study, then, The Manchurian Candidate looks both back and ahead.

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?) By way of a systematic overview and four cases studies, the preceding chapters have traced the long history of American conspiracy theorizing from the seventeenth century into the 1950s. They have shown that conspiracy theories have been an integral element of American culture throughout this period, one that repeatedly and decisively shaped the course of the nation. The emergence and proliferation of these conspiracy theories, we have seen, was closely tied to media conditions. While the journalistic ethos of “straight reporting” facilitated the spread of anti-Communist suspicions during the 1950s, technological innovations such as the steam press intensified fears of Catholics and helped generate the abolitionist conspiracy theory during the 1830s. These and the other conspiracy theories discussed in this study articulated conflicts between classes and religious denominations, concerns about proper political representation and the undue influence of certain groups, or anxieties about race and gender relations and “proper” sexual behavior as fears of subversion and infiltration. Distorting or deflecting from these issues altogether, conspiracy theories reaffirmed existing identities or created entirely new ones on the individual as well as on the collective level. They elevated those individuals who were aware of the alleged conspiracies above the unknowing masses to a position of privileged knowledge and allowed them to fashion themselves as those who fight the evil plot with words and/or deeds. Likewise, conspiracy theories imbued the community they (re)constructed with a sense of mission by imagining it as targeted by the conspiracy: it was attacked because it embodied good, or because it was the last stronghold of liberty. Habitually casting the alleged conspirators as “un-American,” conspiracy theories created a sense of national identity, even if the suspicions they voiced led to the actual disintegration of the nation, as in the case of conspiracy theories about slavery. Most importantly, conspiracy theories were not voiced and believed by “paranoids” on the fringes of society. An official form of producing and representing knowledge, they were firmly anchored in the center of society and voiced and believed by some of the nation’s most revered figures: presidents, senators, congressmen, religious leaders, and intellectuals. In fact, as we have seen, not even the most sophisticated literary writers of the time questioned the foundations of this specific body of knowledge. They and others occasionally dismissed specific claims of conspiracy and laid bare the motivations of such accusations, but they never challenged the validity of the worldview that regarded large-scale conspiracies a major historical force. Today, this has changed completely. Since the 1960s, conspiracy theories have been met with en-

284

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

ormous skepticism, as the fate of the Communist conspiracy theory after the Great Red Scare shows. During the 1950s, as we have seen, conspiracy thinking was firmly anchored in American culture. Fears of a Communist conspiracy were voiced and believed both by the “common people” and by elites; the executive branch of the federal government proposed countersubversive laws, the legislative passed them, and the judiciary, at least initially, upheld them. During the 1960s, Americans continued to consider the Soviet Union a menace, but they now feared open conflict and nuclear war, instead of subversion and infiltration. There were, however, some who still warned about a Communist conspiracy. Yet these were no longer senators and congressmen, or experts heard during official inquiries, but people like Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, who founded the John Birch Society in 1958 in order to fight the Communist conspiracy. The John Birch Society, named after an army captain killed by Chinese Communists, was not exactly a minority movement – by 1967 it had 80,000 members (cf. Bennett 319) – but compared to the mass appeal that warnings of Communist subversion had had a few years earlier, it was marginal. Whereas the anti-Communists of the 1950s voiced their suspicions in official government publications, through the national media, or in books that, like Masters of Deceit, became bestsellers, Welch’s publications, such as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society or The Politician (in which he accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist conspirator), were privately printed and distributed. What is more, as David Bennett convincingly suggests, the John Birch Society appealed initially to at least some people not because of but despite Welch’s accusations of conspiracy, “provid[ing] a vehicle for [the] anger and fears” of people scared and harmed by the “rapid growth and social disorganization” of the post-war era. However, “Welch’s conspiratorial fantasies turned away many of these people by the late 1960s” (323). The Society survived until the mid-1980s, but from the early 1970s onward its numbers were restricted to a few “true believers” who had no political influence and were largely ignored, if not forgotten, by the mainstream of society (315). The marginal position of Welch and his followers is the one typical of conspiracy theorists over the past five decades, and it is diametrically opposed to that of the conspiracy theorists this study has focused on. Cotton Mather and Lyman Beecher, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Morse and Joseph McCarthy were all well-regarded and influential members of their societies, not despite but, partly, at least, because of their accusations of conspiracy, which were believed by many people. By contrast, conspiracy theorists since the 1960s have usually been excluded from mainstream discourse, and when their claims are reported on by national newspapers and television, they are invariably

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

285

dismissed.1 However, today’s conspiracy theorists, it must be stressed, are not always already marginalized and then begin to voice conspiracy theories (although this holds true for many of them). Often they are marginalized because they have become conspiracy theorists. The case of Steven Jones illustrates that voicing something that can be considered a conspiracy theory is nowadays one of the quickest ways to be excluded from mainstream discourse. In 2006, Jones, a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University, published a paper that argued that the plane crashes alone could not have caused the collapse of the Twin Towers. His work was well received by the countercultural 9/11 Truth Movement, but he lost all credentials with the scientific community and was forced to accept early retirement by his university (cf. Fenster 248–49, 349n72). The two examples of Robert Welch and Steven Jones are quite typical, and many more could be added to show that conspiracy theorists have in recent decades exerted only a very limited influence on politics, and that academic and political elites as well as journalists have usually been quick to dismiss both their specific claims and their more general assumptions about agency and intentionality.2 The reason for this attitude toward conspiracy theory is that during the 1960s and 1970s conspiracy theory’s status as knowledge changed completely. Until then, conspiracy theories were considered a legitimate form of producing and representing knowledge; since then, they have come to be considered what Michael Barkun calls “stigmatized knowledge” (Culture 5) or what Jack Bratich, drawing on Michel Foucault, calls “subjugated knowledges [sic]” (7). Addressing this transformation and its causes in detail would require a book of its own. One would have to examine, for example, how the social sciences, which during the 1950s still confirmed the belief in individual agency and thus, implicitly, the possibility of large-scale conspiracies (cf. Melley, Empire 48–49), arrived at models that put more emphasis on structural factors, and how these ideas increasingly influenced public discourse. One would also have to examine corresponding developments in psychology and psychoanalysis that unsettled notions of intentionality and conscious decision-making. Obviously, such an investigation is so far beyond the scope of this conclusion that I will not even consider these developments in passing. The reason why I extend the scope of my analysis at all to the present here is that my diachronic take on conspiracy theory will require scholarship to rethink the period from 1960 to the present. My thesis

1 For a recent example, see the New York Times article by Kate Zernike who wonders about the persistence of conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and firmly places them outside of rational discourse. 2 Bratich even suggests that “proving that conspiracy theories [are] disparaged by mainstream sources” amounts to “belaboring the obvious” (7).

286

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

that conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant in terms of their social, cultural, and political impact as during the past five decades runs counter to all extant research on that period. Whereas the cultural studies scholars and historians who have previously studied this period hold that it is characterized by the mainstreaming and proliferation of conspiracy theorizing, I argue exactly the opposite, and I want to use this conclusion to corroborate my claims. I first discuss how conspiracy theories’ shift from legitimate to illegitimate knowledge manifests itself in the emergence of a critical discourse on the subject, which contributes to its marginalization, and argue that many of the phenomena that have usually been presented as evidence for conspiracy theories’ increased centrality to American culture, such as their apparent ubiquity in public discourse, are, from a larger historical perspective, in fact, indicators of their increased marginality as far as their actual influence is concerned. I then consider the reciprocal relationship between conspiracy theories’ marginality and changes in the internal make-up of conspiracy theories – the shift to conspiracies by the government and the blending of previously isolated conspiracy scenarios to visions of superconspiracies. Finally, though, I quickly explore indicators that suggest that during the last few years, conspiracy theories may have become more central and influential again. *** The first indicators that the status of conspiracy theories in American culture was about to change can be traced back to the 1950s. Whereas nineteenth-century authors were unable to escape the logic and appeal of the conspiracy theories surrounding them, Arthur Miller could step outside conspiracy discourse and analyze it from a distance and without condoning the validity of conspiracist claims in his 1952 play The Crucible. Accordingly, for the student of conspiracy theory, the action of Miller’s play is not half as interesting as the extensive comments provided by an “authorial narrator” who clearly expresses the views of the playwright himself throughout Act 1.3 This narrator provides background information on the characters and on Puritan society, and discusses the reasons for the witchcraft scare of 1692. He also stresses the continuity from the Puritans to the 1950s. Phrases like “We have inherited this belief” (15) or “It is another trait

3 I use the term “narrator” here with reserve and for want of a better concept. The dramatis personae does not list a Brechtian narrator figure who addresses the audience, but the comments are not part of the stage directions either, which are printed in italics.

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

287

we inherited from them” (27) suggest that the same mechanisms that fueled the hunt for witches are now fueling the hunt for Communists. Miller’s narrator identifies psychological and strategic reasons for the accusations of witchcraft. He refers to the witch-hunt as an entirely irrational event, calling it “madness” (14) and a “perverse manifestation of panic” (16). He puts much blame on Puritan society’s suppression of sexuality and, suggesting that the crisis was “a long overdue opportunity for everybody so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims” (17), sees projection at work. Moreover, he also psychoanalyzes Samuel Parris and diagnoses him as suffering from a persecution complex: “He believed he was being persecuted wherever he went” (13). But if the narrator thus puts great emphasis on factors working on the historical actors without them being aware of it, he also claims that some members of the community were well aware of what they were doing and deployed accusations tactically. “Long-held hatreds of neighbors could now be openly expressed, and vengeance taken,” he argues, contending that many of the accusers were motivated by “Land-lust” (17). He particularly focuses on Thomas Putnam, who, at least as the motives for accusations of witchcraft are concerned, functions as the mirror figure of Parris. While Parris unconsciously fuels the crisis, Putnam does so intentionally. When he enters Betty Parris’s bedroom a few minutes into Act 1, the narrator freezes the action in order to characterize him as “a deeply embittered man” who felt that “his own name and that of his family had been smirched by the village” and who “meant to right matters however he could.” A few lines later he makes the selfish motives of revenge that he ascribes to Putnam even more explicit when he concludes his assessment of Putnam’s character by saying that “it is not surprising to find so many accusations against people in the handwriting of Thomas Putnam, or that his name is so often found as witness corroborating the supernatural testimony, or that his daughter led the crying-out at the most opportune junctures of the trials” (23). Interestingly, by stressing both strategic and psychological reasons, Miller anticipated both branches of conspiracy theory research as they emerged a decade later: the realist and the symbolist school. As Michael Rogin explains in his review of the history of scholarship in the field, “Realists addressed interests and conscious political manipulation; symbolists addressed anxiety and unconscious grievances” (Ronald Reagan 273). While he tried to synthesize both branches in his later work, Rogin was a proponent of the realist approach during the 1960s. As I explained in my discussion of research on the Great Red Scare in chapter 5, he argued in The Intellectuals and McCarthy that the hunt for Communists was orchestrated by Republican elites in order to promote their political goals. He thus challenged the argument made by “symbolists” who saw the

288

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

Communist conspiracy theory as an irrational response to the changes brought about by modernity. The most influential proponent of this approach was of course Richard Hofstadter whose notion of the “paranoid style” pathologized conspiracy theorizing as a form of mental illness – just as Miller had done a decade earlier. Like Miller, Hofstadter suggested that “the feeling of persecution is central” to the conspiracy theorist’s mindset (4) and saw projection at work in accusations of subversion. The enemy imagined by conspiracy theorists, he wrote, “seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him” (32).4 Apart from these differences, though, the realist and the symbolist approach to conspiracy theory shared a crucial assumption. They were both based on the conviction (shared by virtually all later scholarship, this study included) that the conspiracist worldview is wrong. But the emerging conspiracy theory research was more than another indicator of conspiracy theory’s ongoing transformation from legitimate into illegitimate knowledge. Casting it as pathology or propaganda, scholarly discourse contributed to the marginalization of conspiracy theorizing underway at that time. In this sense, Hofstadter’s famous claim that in the United States conspiracy theorizing has always been restricted to the fringes of society was bad history but good prophecy. In fact, it was partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Hofstadter’s text participated in a discourse that placed conspiracist thinking outside and even as the Other of rational political discourse.5 Produced by academics, political elites, and what conspiracy theorists often derogatorily refer to as the “mainstream media,” this delegitimizing discourse has been highly effective in recent decades. Today, it is usually enough to label something a “conspiracy theory” in order to disqualify it as absurd and based on faulty premises. The term “conspiracy theory” itself, however, was not yet used by Miller, Hofstadter (who speaks, though, of “grandiose theories of conspiracy” [4]), or the early Rogin, even if what they described and critiqued were conspiracy theories as I defined them in the introduction and traced them through American history. In fact, while conspiracy theorizing is a long-standing practice in both the United States and Europe, the term “conspiracy theory” came into use fairly late. As Andrew McKenzie-McHarg has recently shown, it dates back to the 1880s where it was used in newspaper articles in the context of reporting on unsolved

4 What is also interesting to note is that by drawing on tropes of mental illness to characterize conspiracy theorists, Miller and Hofstadter replicated the discourse that, as we saw in the last chapter, conspiracy theorists themselves employed during the 1950s in order to explain why “real” Americans had joined the Communist cause. 5 For more extensive accounts of this process from quite different perspectives, see the first chapters in Bratich’s and Fenster’s monographs.

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

289

murders. In these cases, “conspiracy theory” designated one possible explanation, just as “suicide theory” designated another (cf. “How”). The first to use the concept “conspiracy theory” in the sense familiar to us today was probably Karl Popper whose 1947 indictment of the “conspiracy theory of society” I discussed in chapter 1. Significantly, in Popper, the deployment of the term already goes hand in hand with a problematization of the worldview it denotes. For Popper, “conspiracy theory” is a threat to the open society that he has set out to defend. The concept as such, though, only became popular, according to McKenzie-McHarg, during the 1960s and 1970s, that is, at exactly the time when conspiracy theorizing was delegitimized as official discourse. Since then, the term has developed into a powerful instrument of dismissal. As Peter Knight puts it, “Calling something a conspiracy theory is not infrequently enough to end discussion” (Conspiracy 11). Jack Bratich is therefore right when he argues that the concept of “conspiracy theory,” on the one hand, designates “a type of narrative” (with a specific structure, rhetoric, and tropes) that expresses a particular understanding of agency and causality – this is what I have focused on and how I have used the term – and, on the other, functions as “a sign of narrative disqualification” (4). Bratich’s own study focuses on this second dimension, and he approaches it from such a clear-cut (I am tempted to say, extreme) Foucauldian position that he quickly revises the preliminary position just quoted and argues that conspiracy theories do not exist until they are derogatorily labeled as such. As he puts it, “conspiracy theory [is] a symptom of the discourse that positions it” (16; his emphasis). Mainstream discourse, he suggests, produces what he calls “[c]onspiracy panics,” that is, concerns about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, to “help to define the normal modes of dissent” (11). As my take on conspiracy theory throughout this study will have made clear, I do not share Bratich’s position. As I hope to have shown, conspiracy theories exist independently of the designation “conspiracy theory” and they can be identified, described, and meaningfully read as symptoms of the conflicts and anxieties they articulate. In fact, Bratich’s exclusive focus on the contemporary, his neglect of earlier discourse (among others, McCarthy, Sumner, Beecher, Morse) that employed the term “conspiracy” but that was not yet labeled by contemporaries “conspiracy theory,” is the severest limitation of his otherwise important book. One great merit of Bratich’s study is that he demonstrates convincingly that by now almost every deployment of the term “conspiracy theory” in U.S. public discourse performs a disqualifying function. Another is that he stresses, almost in passing, that the knowledge produced by conspiracy theorizing remains valid or at least tempting to many people, although it is disqualified by official discourse. He writes: “I will begin with the assumption that commonsense

290

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

constructions (not necessarily the commonly held beliefs of a population, but the hegemonic meanings) positioned conspiracy theories as illegitimate knowledge” (7). This observation confirms the argument that I have made in my discussion of the fate of the epistemological paradigm that made conspiracy theorizing commonsense for so long in chapter 1: although by now officially discarded, it remains attractive. Bratich’s observations allow for a re-evaluation of the high visibility and seemingly new ubiquity of conspiracy theory that has led scholars like Peter Knight, Mark Fenster, and Michael Barkun to the conclusion that conspiracy theorizing is now more popular, mainstream, and influential than ever before. I want to suggest that the opposite is true. Conspiracy theories have become increasingly visible since the 1960s because they are no longer unquestioningly accepted but considered a problem. When Bennett Kravitz argues that “Since the 1960s, every generation of Americans has grown up on conspiracy theories” (23), he is right, but not in the sense that his essay’s subtitle – “Conspiracy as a Mindset” – suggests. I would contend that until 1960 conspiracy was indeed a mindset in American culture. The culture was concerned with conspiracies, because the premises of conspiracy theory were unchallenged and appeared both logical and natural. Since the 1960s, however, these premises have been problematized with the result that the culture has been increasingly concerned with conspiracy theory, while those who are still seriously concerned with conspiracy are now both marginalized and in the minority. To a certain degree, then, what has happened to conspiracy theorizing is what has happened to racism, homophobia, sexism, or xenophobia, which is not to say that conspiracy theories bear a necessary relation to any of these problematic stances.6 But like conspiracy theories, they are these days reported on in the United States more than ever before – not because they are more prominent and influential now, but because the worldviews that fuel them are no longer accepted but considered problematic. Racism and homophobia have not disappeared, but those who voice them are now sanctioned and excluded from mainstream discourse. However, just as racism or sexism may continue to appeal to people who know better than to voice them publicly, so do conspiracy theories. Bratich captures this when he points out that the knowledge that conspiracy theories produce and represent may now be considered illegitimate, but that it still holds commonsensical appeal. This, I would like to suggest, is another reason why the mainstream media report on conspiracy theories so obsessively. Their reports do

6 As I have stressed in the introduction, conspiracy theories can have positive or negative effects. My comparison here is structural and not anchored in any similarity of content.

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

291

not only work to maintain the limits of accepted discourse, as Bratich suggests, but they also appeal to people who actually “know better” or know that they should know better. To my mind, this explains why opinion polls regularly indicate that a high percentage of Americans believes in at least one conspiracy theory (cf. Goertzel; Abalakina-Paap et al.). These numbers, to be sure, are still much lower than polls in 1950 or 1850 would have yielded had they been conducted back then. But the anonymity of the polling seems to move some to voice beliefs they would not express publicly. And so, it seems, does the confidentiality of private conversation, which explains a phenomenon probably familiar to all scholars of conspiracy theory: the sudden confessions of people one would never have suspected to harbor such beliefs that they think that 9/11 was an inside job or that the moon landing was faked (as I was told on New Year’s Eve 2010 by an acquaintance who runs a successful medium-sized business). Contemporary conspiracy theory’s ambivalent status as illegitimate but attractive knowledge also accounts for the often playful, ironic, and self-conscious engagement with it that both Fenster and Knight observe and that they regard as another indicator of conspiracy theory’s mainstreaming. Reporting on a convention of conspiracy theorists that he attended, Fenster suggests that “many (but certainly not all) were as much fascinated by and removed from the ‘paranoia’ that they practiced as they were part of it” and suggests that “they could feel the excitement of playing paranoia while keeping the disaster it assumes in abeyance outside the convention hotel” (156, 157). Likewise, Knight convincingly argues that “Conspiracy theory [has become] something that people buy into – often quite literally – on a non-committed basis” (Conspiracy 45), and he points out that many popular conspiracy narratives are now “surprisingly self-conscious,” anticipating, integrating, and often pre-empting the criticisms that are usually raised against conspiracist visions. This tendency is epitomized by the 1997 feature film Conspiracy Theory, which expresses skepticism toward the suspicions harbored by its protagonist Fletcher (played by Mel Gibson) both through its title and its plot. The movie’s final minutes, though, playfully suggest that Fletcher might be on to something after all. Unlike Fenster and Knight, however, I would contend that both the playful engagement with and the self-reflexive form of this and many other narratives should be understood as indicators that conspiracy theory is no longer as influential as it used to be. As long as conspiracy theories produced official knowledge, it was impossible to engage playfully with them, because suspicions of conspiracy were a very serious matter. Only conspiracy theory’s shift in status has made it possible to consider its claims entertainment. Now that they have been delegitimized, an ironic attitude is the only mode of reception left to many people. Like Conspiracy Theory, conspiracy narratives geared at mainstream audiences often

292

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

acknowledge this by taking a self-reflexive stance on the conspiracy scenarios they dramatize, but such a stance is notably absent from accounts of conspiracy that circulate only among “true believers.”7 In fact, it might be argued that virtually all contemporary fictional representations of conspiracy at least implicitly operate in and capitalize on such an “as if”-mode. They do of course articulate real anxieties and concerns, but due to the nature of articulation these concerns need to have nothing to do with conspiracy. Thus, as far as conspiracy is concerned, audiences in the movie theater assume such an “as if”-mode as well, entering for two hours a world where conspiracies are really the driving forces in history. Another phenomenon that scholars like Knight or Melley consider indicative of the proliferation of conspiracist worldviews in American culture is the frequency with which works of high literature have drawn on conspiracy theory over the past decades. They are correct in so far as the novels of acclaimed postmodernist authors, such as William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, or Ishmael Reed, regularly suggest conspiratorial scenarios by featuring characters that are either part of a conspiracy, as in DeLillo’s Libra (1988), or suspect that they are the victim of a conspiracy, as in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). However, I would suggest that the complex and ambivalent stance that these novels assume vis-à-vis conspiracy theory once again shows that conspiracy theorizing is no longer an accepted practice; it is nothing that can be “simply” represented. The ambivalence of these novels thus differs from that which I have detected in Lippard and Melville. The nineteenth-century writers explored the motives behind specific conspiracy theories and the mechanisms by which they worked, but they ultimately confirmed the validity of the conspiracist worldview, because they could not detach themselves entirely from what their culture regarded as rational. By contrast, the attractiveness that the suggestion of conspiracy holds for postmodernist authors, I would suggest, is that it evokes a model of causality and agency that appears increasingly dated and that is tied to a notion of the self that these novels deconstruct but whose passing they bemoan at the same time. Importantly, the conspiracies in these postmodernist novels are seldom real. This distinguishes them both from the texts by Lippard and Melville and from more popular contemporary forms, such as the thrillers of Robert Ludlum or Michael Crichton, or Hollywood films. When conspiracies are real in postmoder7 The commodification of conspiracy theory has, albeit from a different angle, also been explored by Birchall. She, too, observes that there are conspiracy narratives that are devoid of irony and meant for serious consumption and others that speak to those who engage ironically with it (cf. 39–42).

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

293

nist fiction, as is the case in Libra, they have nothing in common with the conspiracies that countersubversives usually imagine. The conspirators in Libra are not a powerful secret order, but a small group of disaffected secret agents. Moreover, they fail to impose their will on history. What they want is to stage an attempt on Kennedy’s life that fails in order to make the president reconsider his stance on Cuba, but Kennedy ends up dead. Far more frequently, though, in these novels, the characters suspect that a conspiracy is going on because they cannot accept chaos, coincidence, and structural explanations. The novels often do not dismiss these suspicions, but leave it open whether they are justified or not, as happens in prototypical fashion at the end of The Crying of Lot 49, which concludes just before the event that gives the novel its title promises to finally resolve the question if Oedipa Mass is paranoid or if there really is an all-encompassing conspiracy going on. The postmodernist novels thus demonstrate the contingency of the models of agency they evoke and self-consciously reflect on the appeal that conspiracy theory still holds. If postmodernist novels thus often oscillate between affirming and dismissing suspicions of conspiracy, they just as frequently oscillate, Peter Knight argues, between a literal and a metaphorical conceptualization of conspiracy. With regard to Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), for instance, Knight observes that “Reed inhabits the territory between the literal and the figural” (Conspiracy 161). In that, Reed’s novel has much in common with much of African-American as well as feminist discourse of the past decades. As Knight’s careful close readings show, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978), Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990), Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991), Stokeley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power (1968), and Jawanza Kunjufu’s Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys (1983) all alternate between suggesting that there is literally a patriarchal or white conspiracy at work that suppresses women and blacks and explicitly denying such allegations and claiming that talk of conspiracy is just a figure of speech.8 While Knight suggests that the frequency with which tropes of conspiracy occur in these texts is another sign of the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory, I would contend, once again, that it is the other way round. Whereas indictments of the Slave Power, as we have seen in chapter 4, at times proposed a structural explanation of the slaveholders’ influence but invariably shied away from this thought and settled on a conspiracist account, the black and feminist activists perform exactly the opposite move. Since conspiracy theory is no longer legitimate knowledge, they eventually settle on structural explanations such as institutionalized racism. But since conspiracy

8 For the detailed argument, cf. Knight, Conspiracy 117–44.

294

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

theorizing remains attractive, they frequently present their analysis in a language that evokes this mode of thinking about causality and social relations, although it is no longer really available for any analysis of gender inequality or racism that wants to be taken seriously. Thus, these texts, too, show in the final analysis that since the 1960s conspiracy theorizing has moved not toward but away from the mainstream. *** I have argued in chapter 1 that the 1960s witnessed not only the delegitimization of conspiracy theorizing but also changes in the internal structure of conspiracy theories. Until then, conspiracy theories were almost exclusively concerned with plots against the government. The conspiracies these accounts exposed were often imagined to have been long underway and already far progressed, but they were usually not thought to have subverted the most important American institutions yet. Over the past five decades, though, conspiracy theories have been predominantly concerned with plots that have allegedly already subverted the government entirely. Moreover, whereas earlier conspiracy theories usually exposed plots by either the Illuminati, the Masons, or the Communists, post-1960 conspiracy theories frequently merge previously isolated scenarios, creating what Michael Barkun calls “superconspiracies” (Culture 6) and Michael Kelly “fusion paranoia.” Again, the development of the Communist conspiracy theory during the early 1960s is quite typical in both regards. For Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, the “government of the United States [was] under operational control of the Communist Party” (qtd. in Bennett 319), an organization that allegedly continued the plotting began by the Illuminati almost 200 years earlier (cf. 317). Other conspiracy theorists have developed a plethora of similar visions of subversion with accounts frequently revolving around mysterious transnational organizations like the New World Order (often linked to the Illuminati) or the Zionist Occupied Government (often linked to the Masons) that are said to have largely or even entirely infiltrated the federal government. This is not to say, however, that the other type of conspiracy theorizing – targeting conspiracies against the government – has disappeared completely. Some conspiracy narratives about the NWO or ZOG stress that the final takeover is imminent but has not yet occurred.9 What is more, over the past decades govern-

9 In fact, many contemporary conspiracy narratives, for instance Alex Jones’s The Obama Deception, oscillate between claiming that the takeover is imminent and that it has already occurred.

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

295

ment officials and even presidents have continued to occasionally “expose” conspiracies against the United States and its government. In 1986, for example, in an attempt to justify his administration’s support for the Nicaraguan contras, Ronald Reagan implied that the Sandinistas were part of a conspiracy that included Cuba and the Soviet Union and that threatened not only Middle and South America but also the United States (cf. Rogin, Ronald Reagan xiv-xv). In similar fashion, the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by alleging that there were conspiratorial connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, and that both were plotting to deploy weapons of mass destruction against the United States. Significantly, such accusations of conspiracy voiced by government officials have often escaped the label “conspiracy theory” – at least initially and in mainstream discourse. Jack Bratich would surely take this as a case in point for his argument that “Conspiracy theories come to exist as objects when they come to exist as objects of concern” (160). For him, a specific account is cast as a conspiracy theory only when it threatens those in a position of power. In fact, Bratich begins his study by pointing out that the official account of what happened on September 11, 2001 escaped the label “conspiracy theory” in mainstream discourse, even though it has a lot in common with conspiracy theories as those define them who focus on their internal characteristics. Only “underground ‘conspiracy theorist[s]’” like David Ray Griffin, in an effort to gain legitimacy for their version of what happened, Bratich observes, claimed that “there are two competing explanatory accounts for 9/11, both conspiracy theories – official (Bin Laden) and alternative (the U.S. government did it)” (1).10 Bratich surely has a point here: power has a lot to do with which accounts get cast as conspiracy theories and which escape this disqualifying designation. But power is not the only factor at work here. As Mark Fenster has pointed out, Bratich ignores that there are differences between conspiracy theories, for example, that some are more plausible or more problematic than others (cf. Fenster and Bratich 285). Moreover, Bratich misses a crucial structural difference between conspiracy theories that get labeled as such in mainstream discourse and those that do not. Not only have visions of conspiracy projected by government officials over the past decades usually been concerned with plots against the government, they are also usually about small-scale conspiracies, and they have almost invariably been what Michael Barkun calls “event conspiracies” (Culture 6). The official

10 Peter Knight has also stressed the many structural and functional similarities of the official and the alternative conspiracy theory (cf. “Outrageous” 175–82). See also Butter, “Verschwörung” 145–46.

296

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

conspiracy theory about 9/11, for instance, deals with a conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and 19 Arab men and only seeks to explain how the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carried out. In fact, the only conspiracy theory formulated in recent years by members of any U.S. administration that does not quite fit this pattern concerns the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. However, the nature of the supposed connection and the goals of the secret alliance were never specified; it was left open whether the goal of the conspiracy was just one attack or a series of such events. Even more importantly, as with official accounts of 9/11 as well as other event conspiracy theories projected by government officials, the goal ascribed to this alleged conspiracy was not infiltration but destruction, not the subversion of state institutions but their destruction. Moreover, like Reagan’s indictment of the Sandinistas and the official account of 9/11, this conspiracy theory targeted a purely external enemy and did not accuse Americans of knowingly supporting the plot. Finally, unlike the official account of 9/11, claims that bin Laden and Hussein were secretly collaborating were disbelieved by many from the outset. While the American media were initially reluctant to dispute the connection (which allowed the Bush administration to garner the public support they needed), and in some cases even helped forge it, European media challenged the allegations as they were formulated, casting them as lies uttered to provide a pretext for a desired war.11 By contrast, conspiracy theories that attempt to expose plots by the government are of a different kind, and this I would like to suggest facilitates their being labeled “conspiracy theories.” Like those theories discussed in previous chapters, conspiracy theories that target the NWO, the ZOG, or the military-industrial complex “expose” what Michael Barkun calls “systemic conspiracies.” They may focus on one particular event, but they are invariably concerned with a longer history of subversion, as they presuppose that the conspirators want to secure or maintain “control over a country, […] or even the entire world” (Culture 6). Like most of the earlier theories, these accounts of conspiracy frequently implicate Americans in the plots they reveal. But unlike most of the earlier theories, they claim that the sinister groups they are concerned with have already managed to

11 For a discussion of the alleged ties between bin Laden and Hussein, see Olmsted 207–11. While reporters of the New York Times tended to be sceptical of the alleged link from the outset (cf., for example, Benjamin), other American newspapers and journals helped to anchor the connection in the public’s mind (cf., for example, J. Goldberg). This explains why as late as 2005 41 percent of Americans still believed “that Saddam Hussein had ‘strong links to Al Qaeda’” (“Sizeable Minorities”). Among the European journalists who challenged the Bush administration’s claims from the outset are Münch; Tisdall; and Whitaker.

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

297

subvert the government entirely and turned it into an instrument to further the conspiracy’s goals. All of these characteristics can be observed in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Even those accounts that do not talk about a longer history of infiltration but focus solely on demonstrating that the Bush administration conducted the attacks or allowed them to happen rest on the assumption that the government has already been taken over by conspirators, and that the attacks are part of a larger plan to promote the conspiracy’s ends. Whereas this notion was only implicit in earlier 9/11 conspiracy narratives, it has in the last five years been increasingly foregrounded. Whereas, for example, the first two versions of the Loose Change films (2005, 2006) are exclusively concerned with the attacks themselves, the latter two versions (2007, 2009) explicitly expose a systemic conspiracy and relate a story of government betrayal that goes back to World War II (cf. Butter and Retterath). Moreover, by now, 9/11 has also been integrated into existing superconspiracy theories. For instance, in The Obama Deception, Alex Jones contends that, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the election of Barack Obama, 9/11 was merely another move by the sinister New World Order that he traces back to the Illuminati. Most scholars – both those who, like Kathryn Olmsted, have observed the shift from conspiracies against the government to those by the government, and those who, like Peter Knight, only deal with the period in which the latter type has been dominant – have argued that a major reason why contemporary conspiracy theories target those in power is to be found in the federal government’s actions. As Olmsted puts it, “government officials provided fodder for conspiracism by using their powers to plot – and to conceal – real conspiracies” (234). Knight writes that “During the twentieth century, and since the foundation of the CIA in particular, American politics has increasingly relied on clandestine means to pursue its goals, and a bureaucratic culture of secrecy [the ‘invisible government’] has been taken for granted” (Conspiracy 28). Finally, Clare Birchall, quoting an article from The Guardian, contends that “Conspiracy theorising is fast becoming a legitimate means of reporting on a government so secretive” (59). These analyses are certainly correct. The experience of government conspiracies (the leak of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, etc.) and government secrecy (the locking away of files related to the Kennedy assassination, and especially the Bush administration’s obsession with concealment) have undoubtedly been of crucial importance in transforming American conspiracy theories. But, again, this is hardly the whole story. What I would like to suggest is that the changes in conspiracy theory’s internal set-up are also connected to the shift in status of conspiracy theorizing as such, and that these two aspects fuel each other. The increasing marginalization of conspiracy theory discourse

298

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

due to conspiracy theory’s new status as illegitimate knowledge engenders visions of systemic conspiracy that see the conspirators as already controlling virtually everything and visions of superconspiracies – more and more prominent in recent years (cf. Barkun, Culture 6) – that explain why the conspirators have been in power for such a long time. But such comprehensive visions of subversion are invariably met with disbelief. As they seem especially outlandish and paranoid, the voicing of such conspiracy theories leads to the further marginalization of conspiracy theory discourse as such, and hence of conspiracy theorists. Thus, the fact that, in recent decades, the conspiracy scenarios envisioned by conspiracy theorists have, in the eyes of the mainstream, become more and more outlandish and “paranoid” has led to the further marginalization of conspiracy theorizing. From the Revolution to the 1950s, conspiracy theorists were taken seriously. Specific claims could be dismissed but not this mode of generating knowledge as such. Since the 1960s, though, conspiracy theories have increasingly been met with derision, and most mainstream discourse has not even bothered to scrutinize their specific claims but challenged the premises on which they are based. The media still frequently draw on the notion of the paranoid style when reporting on conspiracist visions (cf. Zernike), academic studies, like this one, propose symptomatic readings of these accusations, and both label them “conspiracy theories,” thus employing a label that the conspiracy theorists regard as insulting, even when it is used in a neutral fashion as in much scholarly writing of the past decade. For the convinced conspiracy theorist, this state of affairs is apt to reinforce the idea that the conspiracy he or she is concerned with is truly “allencompassing” and “always already (almost) everywhere” (Fenster 134). The conspirators, the countersubversives are bound to conclude, already control both the media and academia, and they are using the prestige of these institutions to dismiss challenges to their power. For instance, when I said during an interview on national radio that conspiracy theories blaming the Bush administration for the attacks of 9/11 are wrong, I received a couple of emails from German conspiracy theorists that accused me of being part of the conspiracy. One of them called me an “enemy of truth,” and he later featured the conference that I was promoting in this interview prominently on his website, casting it as part of the conspiracy’s efforts to cover its deception and dismiss the claims of the Truthers.12 Thus, the way conspiracy theories are usually commented on in mainstream

12 In the German original the email called me “Feind der Wahrheit.” For the online report on the ominous goals of the conference on “Conspiracy Theories in the Middle East and the United States” that I co-organized with Maurus Reinkowski, see Gerhardt, “Imperium.”

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

299

discourse strengthens conspiracy theorists in their conviction that the conspirators already control this discourse, and thus most if not all of society. Accordingly, conspiracy theories have increasingly come to function as explanations for why one is marginalized and why one’s demands are dismissed by the rest of society. In earlier times, when conspiracy theories still produced legitimate knowledge, they were most loudly voiced, as we have seen, by wellsituated people who had something to lose and thus tended to detect plots that had threatened but not yet subverted their societies. Such conspiracy theorists still exist, but in recent decades the serious, non-ironic practice of conspiracy theorizing has moved to the margins of society and become the domain of those who feel that they are disenfranchised and disregarded, and who therefore articulate visions of conspiracy in which the conspirators have already assumed power. It is hardly surprising that in the United States today, conspiracy theories are particularly prominent among African Americans, who have been on the losing side of history for a long time, and on the extreme right, that is, among white men of the working class who feel that they have suffered most from the social and economic transformations since World War II. For these groups, conspiracy theories do not only account for why they are marginalized but also work as a means to make themselves heard and relevant, as Aaron Winter has recently shown with regard to the extreme right. This is certainly true, since charges of conspiracy (revolving, for example, around 9/11 or the election of Barack Obama) are reported on by the mainstream media and institutions such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. But since these reports habitually cast conspiracy theories as causes of concern, if not indicators of the paranoia of the extreme right, such conspiracy theories increase the marginalization of those who voice them and remove them even further from the mainstream, thus likely generating new visions of conspiracy in turn. Contemporary conspiracy theories, then, both marginalize people and appeal to those on the margins already. *** There are, however, indicators that conspiracy theorizing as a serious, non-ironic practice has become more central and influential again in American culture over the past couple of years. 9/11 conspiracy theories are believed not only on the margins of society but, as the previously mentioned case of Steven Jones shows, also at the center. And so have the various conspiracy theories about Barack Obama that claim that he was ineligible for the office of President of the United States because he was not born in the country and cannot be considered a “natural born Citizen” under article II of the Constitution, because he renounced his citizenship at some point, or because he is a Muslim. These groundless

300

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

allegations have gained so much currency in the United States since 2008, particularly in the South and among the Republican base, especially the Tea Party, that there is by now a considerable number of Republican politicians who may not believe these claims themselves, but do not reject them explicitly. Asked about Obama’s birth certificate whose release the “Birthers” were still demanding at the time, Sarah Palin, for instance, said late in 2009 that “the public rightfully is still making it an issue” and added that “The McCain-Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area” (qtd. in Ruta-Franke). By the same token, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt from Ohio told a woman who complained about Obama’s ineligibility, “I agree but the courts don’t” (“Jean Schmidt”). However, Palin, Schmidt, and other Republican politicians are well aware that it is still only a minority of the electorate, albeit a substantial one, that believes these conspiracy theories, and that open support for the “Birthers” would impact negatively on their poll numbers. Accordingly, these politicians often acknowledge and even support the conspiracy theorists’ concerns and then deny that this is what they have done, claiming that they have been misunderstood. Thus, Schmidt’s office quickly issued a statement according to which her comment was “taken out of context” (cf. “Jean Schmidt”), and Sarah Palin wrote as quickly on her Facebook page that she had merely meant to say that voters had the right to ask any question (cf. Ruta-Franke). In fact, Palin and others seem to feel most comfortable supporting the “Birthers’” claims when they are off the record. Hence, Ken Buck, the Republican Candidate for Kansas’s U.S. Senate seat in 2010, told one of his staffers to “tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on camera,” implying that he was willing to discuss the issue when there was no camera present (cf. Amira). That such comments invariably become public sooner or later might just be what Republican politicians count on, as it allows them to pick up the issue and deny that they did at the same time.13 As of this writing, it is still impossible to say whether the current vogue of Obama conspiracy theories and their reception really indicates that the status of conspiracy theories, and hence their influence, is changing again. But if this is the case, there are two different ways, which are not mutually exclusive, to account for it. The first one would be to point out that the borders between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge have become more and more fuzzy over the past decade, that the hegemony of officially produced knowledge – in the universities, the mainstream media, and political discourse – has been increasingly challenged,

13 For a more extended discussion of conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and their relation to the mainstream, see Butter, “Birthers.”

Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)

301

and that illegitimate knowledge enjoys now more importance and wider circulation than ever before. As Clare Birchall, who has traced these shifts in the economy of knowledge, suggests, illegitimate knowledge’s new role is largely due to the influence of the Internet: “Locally, of course, ‘illegitimate’ knowledges have always been exchanged. Yet, the velocity and scale of knowledge exchange in the Internet age is unique. Those local, ‘illegitimate’ knowledges now enjoy mass participation” (5). Not only have collaborative projects like Wikipedia successfully challenged the prerogative of elite institutions to represent official knowledge, the Internet is also a largely unregulated space, where legitimate knowledge (a mainstream media source reporting on the Obama conspiracy theory) and illegitimate knowledge (a conspiracy theorist exposing the Obama conspiracy) are often only one click or Google search request apart. In this context, conspiracy theorizing, a way of viewing the world that, as Jack Bratich correctly observes, has never lost its commonsensical appeal, may have gained new credence and thus become more widespread and influential again. Once again, then, a change in media conditions would impact on conspiracy theory, and this time not only on the proliferation of a specific version but on the status of this mode of thinking in general. The other explanation that comes to mind is that conspiracy theories are not so much moving back to the mainstream of American culture, but that the mainstream is becoming thinner and the margins are becoming broader. In the climate of heated partisanship that, partly fueled by the media, has characterized the United States over the last decade, the center of society seems to be disintegrating and consensus to be eroding. In a situation where two camps are more and more heatedly accusing each other of acting against the good of the country – in a fashion sometimes reminiscent of the conflicts between Federalists and Democratic Republicans during the 1790s and 1800s –, accusations of conspiracy may increasingly appear attractive and believable, as they offer an explanation for why the other side does not listen to reason. Like my hypothesis concerning the Internet’s impact on conspiracy theory’s status as knowledge, this hypothesis, too, needs more investigation and, indeed, a study of its own. What this study, however, should have made clear is that any proper evaluation of what is happening to American conspiracy theories at the moment needs to take into account the shift in status that conspiracy theories have undergone during the 1960s. Whatever the proliferation of conspiracy theories through the Internet and the growing acceptance of suspicions about Barack Obama’s eligibility mean, they are definitely not signs that conspiracy theorizing is becoming ever more central and influential. Rather, they might indicate that conspiracy theories are currently returning toward that position of importance that they occupied throughout most of American history, but that they, thankfully, still have a long way to go.

Works Cited Aaronovitch, David. Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. Print. Abalakina-Paap, Marina et al. “Beliefs in Conspiracies.” Political Psychology 20.3 (1999): 637–47. Print. Adams, Gretchen A. The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago, IL: The U of Chicago P, 2008. Print. Alexander, David. “White House Garden Lead Scare a Bit Overblown.” Reuters.com. Reuters, 2 July 2009. Web. 16 Jan. 2012. Allen, John. “The American Alarm.” 1773. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ed. David Brion Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971. 29–30. Print. Allhoff, Fred. Lightning in the Night. 1940. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979. Print. Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1979. Print. Amira, Dan. “Kansas Congressional Candidate Just Can’t Stop Accidentally Being a Birther.” Nymag.com. New York Magazine, 23 July 2010. Web. 11 July 2011. Anton, Andreas. Unwirkliche Wirklichkeiten: Zur Wissenssoziologie von Verschwörungstheorien. Berlin: Logos, 2011. Print. Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print. Ashwill, Gary. “The Mysteries of Capitalism in George Lippard’s City Novels.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40.4 (1994): 293–317. Print. Ashworth, John. “Free Labor, Wage Labor, and Slave Power: Republicanism and the Republican Party in the 1850s.” The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880. Ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 1996. 128–46. Print. Babcock, Barbara. “‘A Tolerated Margin of the Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered.” Critical Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. Boston, MA: Hall, 1985. 153–85. Print. Bailyn, Bernard. Foreword. Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750–1776. Ed. Bailyn. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1965. vii-xii. Print. ———. “General Introduction.” Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750–1776. Ed. Bailyn. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1965. 1–202. Print. ———. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1967. Print. ———, ed. Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750–1776. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1965. Print. Baker, Jean H. Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983. Print. Bale, Jeffrey M. “Political Paranoia v. Political Realism: On Distinguishing Between Bogus Conspiracy Theories and Genuine Conspiratorial Politics.” Patterns of Prejudice 41.1 (2007): 45–60. Print. Bancroft, George. History of the United States: From the Discovery of the American Continent. 8 vols. Boston, MA: Little & Brown, 1854–78. Print.

Works Cited

303

Barkun, Michael. “Conspiracy Theories in America: A Historical Overview.” Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Peter Knight. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003. 1–13. Print. ———. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003. Print. Barthes, Roland. “L’Effet de Reel.” Communications 11 (1968): 84–89. Print. Bartley, William. “‘The Creature of His Own Tasteful Hands’: Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and the ‘Empire of Might’.” Modern Philology 93.4 (1996): 445–67. Print. Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. Print. Beecher, Edward. The Papal Conspiracy Exposed and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture. Boston, MA: Stearns & Co., 1855. Print. Beecher, Jonathan. “Echoes of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 9.2 (2007): 43–58. Print. Beecher, Lyman. A Plea for the West. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835. Print. Bell, Matt. “‘Your Worst Fears Made Flesh’: The Manchurian Candidate’s Paranoid Delusion and Gay Liberation.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1 (2006): 85–116. Print. Benjamin, Daniel. “Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies.” NY Times.com. New York Times, 30 Sep. 2002. Web. 10 Jan. 2012. Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From the Nativist Movement to the New Right in American History. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1988. Print. Bennett, John Cook. History of the Saints; or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism. Boston, MA: Leland & Whiting, 1842. Print. Bentley, Elizabeth. Out of Bondage. London: Hart-Davis, 1952. Print. Benton, Thomas Hart. Thirty Years’ View: or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850. Chiefly Taken from the Congress Debates, the Private Papers of General Jackson, and the Speeches of Ex-Senator Benton, with his Actual View of Men and Affairs; with Historical Notes and Illustrations, and Some Notices of Eminent Deceased Contemporaries. 1854–56. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1858. Print. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Print. ———. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1975. Print. ———, ed. Typology and Early American Literature. Amherst, MA: The U of Massachusetts P, 1972. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Big Jim McLain. Dir. Edward Ludwig. Warner Bros., 1952. Film. Billington, Ray A. “Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Home Missionary Movement, 1800–1860.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22.3 (1935): 361–84. Print. ———. The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of the American Nativism. 1938. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1964. Print. Birchall, Clare. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Print. The Birth of a Nation. Dir. D. W. Griffith. Epoch Film, 1915. Film. Blair, Jennifer. “The Knowledge of ‘Sex’ and the Lattice of the Confessional: The Nun’s Tales and Early North American Popular Discourse.” ReCalling Early Canada. Ed. Blair, Daniel Coleman, Kate Higginson and Lorraine York. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2005. 173–210. Print. Bodo, John R. Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1954. Print.

304

Works Cited

Booker, M. Keith. Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Print. Borutta, Manuel. Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2010. Print. Bourne, George. Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents. 3rd ed. New York: Small, 1834. Print. Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974. Print. Bradshaw, Charles C. “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The New England Quarterly 76.3 (2003): 356–77. Print. Brandt, Bruce E. “Reflections on the ‘Paranoid Style’ in the Current Suspense Novel.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 3.1 (1982): 62–69. Print. Bratich, Jack Z. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2008. Print. Brogan, Hugh. The Pelican History of the United States of America. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Print. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Print. Bruce, Dickson D. “Lorette: Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom in Antebellum America.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 22 (2006): 97–115. Print. Brunner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21. Print. Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. New York: Norton, 1981. Print. Budenz, Louis. Men without Faces: The Communist Conspiracy in the USA. New York: Harper, 1950. Print. ———. The Techniques of Communism. Chicago, IL: Regnery, 1954. Print. Buenting, Joel, and Jason Taylor. “Conspiracy Theories and Fortuitous Data.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40.4 (2010): 567–78. Print. Bullard, Rebecca. The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. Print. Bülow, Andreas von. Die CIA und der 11. September: Internationaler Terror und die Rolle der Geheimdienste. München: Piper, 2003. Print. Burnham, James. The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the U.S. Government. Boston, MA: Western Islands, 1965. Print. Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Print. Butter, Michael. “The Birthers’ New World Order: Conspiracy Theories about Barack Obama.” Obama and the Paradigm Shift – Measuring Change. Ed. Birte Christ and Greta Olson. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 227–48. Print. ———. “Caught between Cultural and Literary Studies: Popular Fiction’s Double Otherness.” Journal of Literary Theory 4.2 (2010): 199–216. Print. ———. The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. ———. “Verschwörung.” 9/11: Kein Tag, der die Welt veränderte. Ed. Butter, Birte Christ and Patrick Keller. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011. 136–49. Print. Butter, Michael, and Lisa Retterath. “From Alerting the World to Stabilizing Its Own Community: The Shifting Cultural Work of the Loose Change Films.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40.1 (2010): 25–44. Print.

Works Cited

305

Cairnes, John. E. The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs. Being an Attempt to Explain the Real Issues Involved in the American Contest. New York: Carleton, 1862. Print. Calef, Robert. More Wonders of the Invisible World, or the Wonders of the Invisible World Displayed in Five Parts. London: n.p., 1700. Print. Calomiris, Angela. Red Masquerade: Undercover for the FBI. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1950. Print. Campbell, Peter Robert, Thomas E. Kaiser, and Marisa Linton, eds. Conspiracy in the French Revolution. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. Print. Canino, Catherine Grace. “‘Ben, It’s a Terrible Thing to Hate Your Mother’: Mind Control in Hamlet and The Manchurian Candidate.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production 61 (2008): 134–46. Print. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Print. Carmichael, Stokeley, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage, 1968. Print. Carruthers, Susan L. “The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18.1 (1998): 75–94. Print. Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower. London: Secker Warburg, 1978. Print. Chafe, William H. The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970. New York: Oxford UP, 1972. Print. Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America. Communists within the Government: The Facts and a Program. Report of Committee on Socialism and Communism. Washington, DC: GPO, 1947. Print. Channing, William H. The Civil War in America; or, The Slaveholders’ Conspiracy. Liverpool: Vaughan, 1861. Print. Chase, Salmon. “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” 1854. The Library of Original Sources: 1833–1865. Repr. ed. Vol. 9. Honolulu, HI: UP of the Pacific, 2004. 144–52. Print. ———. “Speech of the Hon S. P. Chase.” 1854. The Nebraska Question: Comprising Speeches in the United States Senate. New York: Redfield, 1854. 47–61. Print. Churchill, Robert. “Liberty, Conscription and a Party Divided.” Prologue 30 (1998): 294–303. Print. Coady, David, ed. Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Print. Coale, Samuel Chase. Paradigms of Paranoia: The Culture of Conspiracy in Contemporary American Fiction. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2005. Print. Cogliano, Francis D. No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1995. Print. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1997. Print. Colacurcio, Michael J. The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Print. The Complaint of Mexico, and Conspiracy against Liberty. Boston, MA: Alden, 1843. Print. Condon, Richard. The Manchurian Candidate. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Print. Conspiracy Disclosed! Kansas Affairs. Read! Read! Read! Washington, DC: Granite State Club, 1856. Print. Conspiracy Theory. Dir. Richard Donner. Warner Bros., 1997. Film.

306

Works Cited

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print. Cooper, James F., and Kenneth J. Minkema. Introduction. The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694. Boston, MA: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1993. 1–36. Print. Coward, Barry, and Julian Swann, eds. Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Print. Craven, Roberta J. “Melville’s Signifyin(g) Shadows: The Mutiny of Form in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.” Short Story 9.2 (2001): 81–93. Print. Critchlow, Donald T., John Korasick, and Matthew C. Sherman. Introduction. Political Conspiracies in America: A Reader. Ed. Critchlow, Korasick and Sherman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2008. vii–xii. Print. Cross, Andrew B. Priest’s Prison for Women: or, A Consideration of the Question, Whether Unmarried Foreign Priests Ought to Be Permitted to Erect Prisons. Baltimore, MD: Sherwood, 1854. Print. Cubitt, Geoffrey. “Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 20 (1989): 12–26. Print. ———. The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993. Print. Cuenca, Carme M. “An Angel in the Plantation: The Economics of Slavery and the Politics of Literary Domesticity in Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 51.1 (1997): 87–104. Print. Culbertson, Rosamond. Rosamond; or, A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests. Intro. Samuel B. Smith. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1836. Print. Cuordileone, Kyle A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Curtis, Julia. “Philadelphia in an Uproar: The Monks of Monk Hall.” Theater History Studies 5 (1985): 41–47. Print. Dallmann, Antje. “Manchurian Candidates: Conspiracy Fiction, Visual Representation, and Masculinity in Crisis. Three Variations on a Popular Theme.” Picturing America: Trauma, Realism, Politics and Identity in American Visual Culture. Ed. Dallmann, Reinhard Isensee and Philipp Kneis. Frankfurt: Lang, 2007. 81–112. Print. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology. London: Women’s P, 1984. Print. Darsey, James F. The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America. New York: New York UP, 1997. Print. Davis, David Brion, ed. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971. Print. ———. The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1970. Print. ———. “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 205–24. Print. Davis, Mary K. Nat Turner before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1999. Print. Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998. Print. ———. “Declarations of Independence.” Cultural Studies & Political Theory. Ed. Dean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000. 285–304. Print.

Works Cited

307

“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” The Charters of Freedom. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. Print. Demos, John. The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World. New York: Viking, 2008. Print. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London: Verso, 1987. Print. Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, and James Arthur Levernier. The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900. New York: Twayne, 1993. Print. Dies, Martin. The Trojan Horse in America. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1940. Print. Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg P, 1967. Print. ———. Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909. Print. Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print. Dondero, George A. “Communism in Our Schools.” 1946. Appendix to the Cong. Rec. US 79th Cong., 2nd sess. vol. 92, part 11. Washington, DC: GPO, 1946. A3516–18. Print. ———. “Modern Art Shackled to Communism.” 1949. Appendix to the Cong. Rec. US 81st Cong., 1st sess. vol. 95, part 9. Washington, DC: GPO, 1949. 11584–86. Print. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977. Print. Douglass, Frederick. The Heroic Slave: A Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty. N.p.: n.p., 1863. Print. ———. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. London: Kershaw, 1852. Print. Drayton, William. The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists. Philadelphia, PA: Manly, 1836. Print. Dye, John Smith. History of the Plots and Crimes of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America. New York: n.p., 1866. Print. Earle, Jonathan Halperin. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2004. Print. Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Farewell Address.” Transcript of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961). Our Documents, n.d. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” 1841. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Joseph Slater. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1979. 25–51. Print. Ernst, Morris L., and David Loth. Report on the American Communist. New York: Holt, 1952. Print. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991. Print. Fathi, Schirin, ed. Komplotte, Ketzer und Konspirationen: Zur Logik des Verschwörungsdenkens. Beispiele aus dem Nahen Osten. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. Print. Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Rev. ed. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print. Fenster, Mark, and Jack Z. Bratich. “Dialogues in Communications Research.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 33 (2009): 278–86. Print. Fenton, Elizabeth. Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in U.S. Literature and Culture, 1744–1889. Diss. U of Texas, 2006. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2006. Print.

308

Works Cited

Fessenden, Tracy, Nicholas F. Radel, and Magdalena J. Zaborowska, eds. The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality and National Identity in American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Finke, Rodger, and Rodney Stark. The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. Five Years Progress of the Slave Power: A Series of Papers. Boston, MA: Mussey & Co., 1852. Print. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Formisano, Ronald P. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s– 1840s. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print. Forret, Jeff. Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 2006. Print. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1994. Print. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print. Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Print. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Print. Frothingham, Charles W. Six Hours in a Convent: or, The Stolen Nuns! A Tale of Charlestown in 1834. 8th ed. Boston, MA: Graves & Weston, 1855. Print. Frothingham, Frederick W. Significance of the Struggle between Liberty and Slavery in America: A Discourse. New York: Mercian Anti-Slavery Society, 1857. Print. Fulcher, James. “American Conspiracy: Formula in Popular Fiction.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 24.2 (1983): 152–64. Print. Fuller, Metta Victoria. Mormon Wives: A Narrative of Facts Stranger Than Fiction. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856. Print. Gara, Larry. “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction.” Civil War History 15.1 (1969): 5–18. Print. Gardner, Jared. “Bringing the Cold War Home: Reprogramming American Culture in The Manchurian Candidate.” Proceedings of the Conference on Film and American Culture. Williamsburg: Roy R. Charles Center, College of William and Mary, 1994. 23–29. Print. Garrison, William Lloyd. Selections from the Writing and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison: With an Appendix. Boston, MA: Wallcut, 1852. Print. Gerhardt, Dirk. “Das Imperium schlägt zurück: Neue Interviews und Videos der Rebellenallianz.” 9/11-archiv.net. N.p., 14. Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Jan. 2012. Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party: 1852–1856. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Gilbert, James B. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Gillis, Chester. Roman Catholicism in America. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Goertzel, Ted. “Belief in Conspiracy Theories.” Political Psychology 15.4 (1994): 731–42. Print. Goldberg, Jeffrey. “The Great Terror.” New Yorker.com. The New Yorker, 25 Mar. 2002. Web. 10 Jan. 2012.

Works Cited

309

Goldberg, Robert A. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Goodell, William. Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Struggle in Both Hemispheres; with a View of the Slavery Question in the United States. New York: Harned, 1852. Print. Goodman, Paul. Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Goodnight, G. Thomas, and John Poulakos. “Conspiracy Rhetoric: From Pragmatism to Fantasy in Public Discourse.” Western Journal of Communication 45.4 (1981): 299–316. Print. Gragg, Larry. A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel Parris, 1653–1720. New York: Greenwood, 1990. Print. Grant, Susan Mary. North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 2000. Print. Gray, Matthew C. Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World: Sources and Politics. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Griffin, Charles J.G. “Jedediah Morse and the Bavarian Illuminati: An Essay in the Rhetoric of Conspiracy.” Central States Speech Journal 39.3/4 (1988): 293–303. Print. Griffin, Susan M. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. ———. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 111.1 (1996): 93–107. Print. Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. 2nd ed., with new intro. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1987. Print. Groh, Dieter. “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Part I: Preliminary Draft of a Theory of Conspiracy Theory.” Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Ed. Serge Moscovici and Carl F. Graumann. New York: Springer, 1987. 1–13. Print. ———. “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Part II: Case Studies.” Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Ed. Serge Moscovici and Carl F. Graumann. New York: Springer, 1987. 15–37. Print. Groh, Ruth. “Verschwörungstheorien und Weltdeutungsmuster: Eine anthropologische Perspektive.” Verschwörungstheorien: Anthropologische Konstanten – Historische Varianten. Ed. Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf. Osnabrück: fibre, 2001. 37–45. Print. Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Gustafson, Thomas. Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso, 1988. Print. Halpern, Faye. “In Defense of Reading Badly: The Politics of Identification in ‘Benito Cereno,’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Our Classrooms.” College English 70.6 (2008): 551–77. Print. Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1982. Print. Hannemann, Dennis. Klassische Antike und amerikanische Identitätskonstruktion: Untersuchungen zu Festreden der Revolutionszeit und der frühen Republik 1770–1815. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008. Print. Harding, Nick. Urban Legends. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005. Print. Hart, David K., and Artell Smith. “Fame, Fame-Worthiness, and the Public Service.” Administration and Society 20 (1988): 131–51. Print.

310

Works Cited

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution. New York: Hartcourt, 1955. Print. Hasian. Marouf, Jr. “Understanding the Power of Conspiratorial Rhetoric: A Case Study of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Communication Studies 48 (1997): 195–214. Print. Hatch, Nathan O. Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001. Print. Hawkin, Martin. When Adolf Came. London: Jarrold, 1943. Print. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. 1850. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce and Claude M. Simpson. Vol. 1. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1962. Print. ———. “Young Goodman Brown.” 1835. Mosses from an Old Manse. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce and Claude M. Simpson. Vol. 10. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1974. 74–90. Print. Haynes, John Earl. Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era. Chicago, IL: Dee, 1996. Print. Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fiction from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1997. Print. Hazel, Harry. The Nun of St. Ursula, or, The Burning of the Convent: A Romance of Mt. Benedict. Boston, MA: F. Gleason, 1845. Print. Heale, Michael J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within 1830–1970. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1990. Print. ———. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation 1935–1965. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Print. Heins, Volker. “Nachdenken über Verschwörungstheorien.” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2.2 (2005): 135–44. Print. Helbig, Jörg. Der parahistorische Roman: Ein literarhistorischer und gattungstypologischer Beitrag zur Allotopieforschung. Frankfurt: Lang, 1988. Print. Helminski, Joseph John. Rome in America: Anti-Catholicism and American Identity in Antebellum Literature. Diss. Wayne State U, 2001. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2001. Print. Henriksen, Margot. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1997. Print. Hentz, Caroline Lee. The Planter’s Northern Bride. 2 vols. Philadelphia, PA: Hart, 1854. Print. Herbert, Christopher. “The Society of Death and Anglo-American Fears of Conspiracy in Gold Rush California, 1849–1858.” Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East: A Comparative Approach. Ed. Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. 121–38. Print. Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator. New York: Free P, 2000. Print. Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts 1690–1750. New York: Norton, 1984. Print. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2008. Print. Hochbruck, Wolfgang. Die Geschöpfe des Epimetheus: Veteranen, Erinnerung und die Reproduktion des amerikanischen Bürgerkriegs. Trier: WVT, 2011. Print. ———. ‘I Have Spoken’: Die Darstellung und ideologische Funktion indianischer Mündlichkeit in der nordamerikanischen Literatur. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. Print.

Works Cited

311

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 1997. Print. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963. Print. ———. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” 1964. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. 3–40. Print. Hogan, William. A Synopsis of Popery; As It Was and As It Is. Hartford, CT: Andrus & Son, 1847. Print. Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Wiley, 1978. Print. Honig, Bonnie. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. Hoover, J. Edgar. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. New York: Holt, 1958. Print. Horn, Eva, and Anson Rabinbach. Introduction. New German Critique 35.1 [103] (2008): 1–8. Print. Horowitz, David. Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1997. Print. Howard, H. R. The History of Virgil A. Stewart, and His Adventure in Capturing and Exposing the Great “Western Land Pirate” and His Gang in Connexion with the Evidence. New York: Harper, 1835. Print. Howe, Daniel Walker. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1979. Print. Hünemörder, Markus. The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy and Distrust in Early America. New York: Berghahn, 2006. Print. Hunnicutt, James W. The Conspiracy Unveiled: The South Sacrificed; or, The Horrors of Secession. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott & Co., 1863. Print. Hunter, Edward. Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Mind. New York: Vanguard P, 1951. Print. ———. Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956. Print. Hunter, Robert Mercer. “A Northern Party Is Seeking to Convert the Government into an Instrument of Warfare upon Slavery.” 1850. Appendix to the Congressional Globe, for the 1st Sess., 31st Cong. Washington, DC: n.p., 1850. 375–76. Print. Interior Causes of the War: The Nation Demonized, and Its President a Spirit-Rapper: A Citizen of Ohio. New York: Doolady, 1863. Print. Invaders from Mars. Dir. William Cameron Menzies. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 1953. Film. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists Pictures, 1956. Film. Jackson, Tony. “The Manchurian Candidate and the Gender of the Cold War.” Literature Film Quarterly 28.1 (2000): n. pag. Web. 15 Feb. 2013. Jacobs, Harriet. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” 1861. I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Yuval Taylor. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: Payback P, 1999. 533–681. Print. Jacobson, Matthew Frye, and Gaspar González. What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 1981. 347–60. Print. Jaworski, Rudolf. “Verschwörungstheorien aus psychologischer und aus historischer Sicht.” Verschwörungstheorien: Anthropologische Konstanten – Historische Varianten. Ed. Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf. Osnabrück: fibre, 2001. 11–30. Print.

312

Works Cited

“Jean Schmidt at the Voice of America Tea Party on Birth Certificate Issue.” YouTube. YouTube, 5 Sep. 2009. Web. 11 July 2011. Jenkins, Philip. The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. J.F.K. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991. Film. Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago, IL: The U of Chicago P, 2004. Print. Jordan-Lake, Joy. Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2005. Print. Julian, George W. “The Slavery Question.” 1850. Speeches on Political Questions. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1872. 1–33. Print. ———. “The Strength and Weakness of the Slave Power.” 1852. Speeches on Political Questions. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1872. 70–82. Print. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Print. Kelly, Michael. “The Road to Paranoia.” Newyorker.com. The New Yorker, 19 June 1995. Web. 14 Jan. 2014. Kennan, George. “Long Telegram.” gwu.edu. National Security Archive, 27 Sep. 1998. Web. 9 Dec. 2011. Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. 5th ed. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print. Kibbey, Ann. The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print. Kinkead, Eugene. In Every War But One. New York: Norton, 1959. Print. Kirshner, Jonathan. “Subverting the Cold War in the 1960s: Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Planet of the Apes.” Film and History 31.2 (2001): 40–44. Print. Klausnitzer, Ralf. Poesie und Konspiration: Beziehungssinn und Zeichenökonomie von Verschwörungsszenarien in Publizistik, Literatur und Wissenschaft 1750–1850. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. Print. Klement, Frank L. Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1984. Print. Knight, Peter. Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. ———. “Introduction: A Nation of Conspiracy Theorists.” Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of American Paranoia. Ed. Knight. New York: New York UP, 2002. 1–17. Print. ———. The Kennedy Assassination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print. ———. “Outrageous Conspiracy Theories: Popular and Official Responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United States.” New German Critique 35.1 [103] (2008): 165–93. Print. ———. “Plotting Future Directions in Conspiracy Theory Research.” Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East: A Comparative Approach. Ed. Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. 345–69. Print. Knox, J. Wendell. Conspiracy in American Politics 1787–1815. New York: Arbo P, 1972. Print. Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. New York: Basic Books, 1964. Print. Kravitz, Bennett. “The Truth Is Out There: Conspiracy as a Mindset in American High and Popular Culture.” Journal of American Culture 22.4 (1999): 23–29. Print. Kunjufu, Jawanza. Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys. N.p.: African American Images, 1985. Print.

Works Cited

313

Laclau, Ernesto. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: NLB, 1977. Print. ———. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2002. Print. Lang, Hans-Joachim. “The Strategic Unity of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World.” Studies in New England Puritanism. Ed. Winfried Herget. Frankfurt: Lang, 1983. 71–97. Print. Larned, Lucinda Martin. The American Nun; or, The Effects of Romance. Boston, MA: Otis, Broaders & Company, 1836. Print. Lasser, Carol. “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric.” Journal of the Early Republic 28.1 (2008): 83–114. Print. Lavine, Harold. Fifth Column in America. New York: Doubleday, 1940. Print. Levin, David. Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer, 1663–1703. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978. Print. ———. “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’.” American Literature 34.3 (1962): 344–52. Print. Levine, Robert S. Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Lincoln, Abraham. “A House Divided.” 1858. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 2. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1953. 461–69. Print. Lippard, George. New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million. Cincinnati, OH: Rulison, 1854. Print. ———. The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. Philadelphia, PA: n.p., 1845. Print. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Print. Loose Change. Dir. Dylan Avery. N.P., April 2005. YouTube. Web. Loose Change: 2nd Edition Recut. Dir. Dylan Avery. N.P., June 2006. YouTube. Web. Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup. Dir. Dylan Avery. Microcinema International, 2009. DVD. Loose Change Final Cut. Dir. Dylan Avery. Louder Than Words, 2007. DVD. Luce, Dianne C. “John A. Murrell and the Imaginations of Simms and Faulkner.” William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier. Ed. John Caldwell Guilds and Caroline Collins. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1997. 237–57. Print. Luciano, Dana. “Melville’s Untimely History: ‘Benito Cereno’ as Counter-Monumental Narrative.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 60.3 (2004): 33–60. Print. Ludlum, Robert. The Bourne Identity. New York: Marek, 1980. Print. Lunt, George. The Origin of the Late War: Traced from the Beginning of the Constitution to the Revolt of the Southern States. New York: Appleton, 1866. Print. Maaz, Hans-Joachim. “Zur Psychodynamik von Verschwörungstheorien: Das Beispiel der deutschen Vereinigung.” Verschwörungstheorien: Anthropologische Konstanten – Historische Varianten. Ed. Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf. Osnabrück: fibre, 2001. 31–36. Print. MacDonald, J. Fred. Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1985. Print. The Manchurian Candidate. Dir. John Frankenheimer. United Artists, 1962. Film. Marcus, George E. Introduction to the Volume. Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation. Ed. Marcus. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1999. 1–11. Print. ———, ed. Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.

314

Works Cited

Massa, Mark S. Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005. Print. Mather, Cotton. “The Life of Sir William Phips.” 1697. Selections from Cotton Mather. Ed. and introd. Kenneth B. Murdock. New York: Hafner, 1926. 149–283. Print. ———. “The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England.” 1692. The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England. By Cotton Mather, D. D. To Which Is Added a Farther Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches by Increase Mather, D. D. London: John Russell Smith, 1862. 1–191. Print. Matthews, Joseph B. “Communism and the Colleges.” The New American Mercury May 1953: 111–14. Print. Mattingly, Carol. “Uncovering Forgotten Habits: Anti-Catholic Rhetoric and Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 58.2 (2006): 160–81. Print. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Print. May, Lary. “Movie Star Politics: The Screen Actors’ Guild, Cultural Conversion, and the Hollywood Red Scare.” Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1989. 125–53. Print. McCarthy, Joseph. America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall. New York: Devin-Adair, 1951. Print. ———. McCarthyism: The Fight for America. Documented Answers to Questions Asked by Friend and Foe. New York: Devin-Adair, 1952. Print. ———. “Speech at Wheeling, West Virginia.” 9 Feb. 1950. Repr. in “Communists in Government Service.” Cong. Rec., 81st Cong., 2nd sess., vol. 96, part 2. Washington, DC: GPO, 1950. 1954–57. Print. McCarthy, Maureen A. The Rescue of True Womanhood: Convents and Anti-Catholicism in 1830s America. Diss. State U of New Jersey, 1996. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1996. Print. McKenna, George. The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007. Print. McKenzie-McHarg, Andrew. “How Did Conspiracy Theories Come To Be Seen As Theories?” 8 Sept. 2011. Conspiracies Real and Imagined. 11th York Cultural History Conference, U of York, Sept. 2011. Unpublished conference paper. Print. ———. “The Transfer of Anti-Illuminati Conspiracy Theories to the United States in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East: A Comparative Approach. Ed. Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. 231–50. Print. McWilliams, John. New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Meerloo, Joost A. The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. Cleveland, OH: World, 1956. Print. Melanson, Terry. “Illuminati Conspiracy Part One: A Precise Exegesis on the Available Evidence.” Conspiracyarchive.com. N.p, 5 Aug. 2005. Web. 19. Jan. 2012. Melley, Timothy. “Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Postwar United States.” New German Critique 35.1 [103] (2008): 145–64. Print. ———. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000. Print.

Works Cited

315

Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” 1855. The Piazza Tales. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. 66–170. Print. ———. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. 1857. Ed. John Seelye. San Francisco, CA: Chandler, 1968. Print. Meyer, Joseph Matthew. “A Good Natured Warning: Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 13.3 (2003): 230–45. Print. Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Beyond the Feminine Mystique.” Journal of American History 79 (1993): 1455–82. Print. Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York: Bantam Books, 1952. Print. Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956. Print. Miller, Shane. “Conspiracy Theories: Public Arguments as Coded Social Critiques. A Rhetorical Analysis of the TWA Flight 800 Conspiracy Theories.” Argumentation and Advocacy: The Journal of the American Forensic Association 39.1 (2002): 40–56. Print. Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Life. New York: Free P, 1989. Print. Monk, Maria. Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. 1836. 2nd and rev. ed. London: Hodson, 1837. Print. Moore, Andrew S. The South’s Tolerable Alien: Roman Catholics in Alabama and Georgia, 1945–1970. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 2007. Print. Moore, Sydenham. “Admission of Kansas.” 1858. Speech of the Hon. Sydenham Moore of Alabama. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 3–16. Print. Morse, Samuel F.B. Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberty of the United States. 1835. 7th ed. New York: American and Foreign Christian Union, 1855. Print. ———. The Present Attempt to Dissolve the American Union: A British Aristocratic Plot. New York: John F. Trow, 1862. Print. Moscovici, Serge. “The Conspiracy Mentality.” Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Ed. Moscovici and Carl F. Graumann. New York: Springer, 1987. 151–69. Print. Moscovici, Serge, and Carl F. Graumann, eds. Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. New York: Springer, 1987. Print. Münch, Peter. “Quittung für die Häme.” Süddeutsche.de. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 Sep. 2001. Web. 13 Jan. 2012. My Son John. Dir. Leo McCarey. Rainbow Productions, 1952. Film. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Print. “Nonfiction Review: Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture by Mark Fenster.” Publishers Weekly.com. Publishers Weekly, 29 Mar. 1999. Web. 9 Jan. 2012. Nordstrom, Justin. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2006. Print. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Knopf, 2002. Print. ———. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. 6th ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print. The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off. Dir. Alex Jones. Alex Jones Productions, 2009. Web. O’Donnell, Patrick. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Print.

316

Works Cited

Ohi, Kevin. “Of Red Queens and Garden Clubs: The Manchurian Candidate, Cold War Paranoia, and the Historicity of the Homosexual.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 20.1 (2005): 149–83. Print. Olmsted, Kathryn S. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Oshinsky, David. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Ostendorf, Berndt. “Conspiracy Nation: Verschwörungstheorien und evangelikaler Fundamentalismus: Marion G. (Pat) Robertsons Neue Weltordnung.” Politisierte Religion: Ursachen und Erscheinungsformen des modernen Fundamentalismus. Ed. Heiner Bielefeld and Wilhelm Heitmeyer. Frankfurt/Main, 1998. 157–87. Print. Ostler, Jeffrey. “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism.” Agricultural History 69.1 (1995): 1–27. Print. Ostrowski, Carl. “Inside the Temple of Ravoni: George Lippard’s Anti-Exposé.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55.1 (2009): 1–26. Print. Otter, Samuel. “The Mysteries of the City: George Lippard and Edgar Allan Poe.” Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom. Ed. Otter. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. 165–82. Print. Pagán, Victoria Emma. Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2012. Print. Palmer, James W., and Michael M. Riley. “America’s Conspiracy Syndrome: From Capra to Pakula.” Studies in the Humanities 8.2 (1981): 21–27. Print. Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Arnold, 1978. Print. Parchesky, Jennifer. “‘You Make Us Articulate.’ Reading, Education, and Community in Dorothy Canfield’s Middlebrow America.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, 2002. 229–58. Print. Parker, Theodore. “The Nebraska Question: Some Thoughts on the New Assault Upon Freedom in America.” 1854. Additional Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons. Vol. 1. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1855. 295–380. Print. ———. “The Present Crisis in American Affairs.” 1856. The Rights of Man in America. Ed. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1911. 430–90. Print. Parris, Samuel. The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694. Ed. James F. Cooper and Kenneth J. Minkema. Boston, MA: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1993. Print. Parson, Tyler. Mormon Fanaticism Exposed: A Compendium of the Book of Mormon, or Joseph Smith’s Golden Bible. Boston, MA: n.p., 1841. Print. Paulding, James Kirk. Slavery in the United States. New York: Harper, 1836. Print. Penick, James L. The Great Western Land Pirate: John A. Murrell in Legend and History. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1981. Print. Perman, Michael. Coming of the Civil War. 3rd ed. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1993. Print. Person, Leland S. The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Pfahl-Traughber, Armin. “‘Bausteine’ zu einer Theorie über ‘Verschwörungstheorien’: Definitionen, Erscheinungsformen, Funktionen und Ursachen.” Verschwörungstheorien: Theorie – Geschichte – Wirkung. Ed. Helmut Reinalter. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2002. 30–44. Print. Pfau, Michael. The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2005. Print.

Works Cited

317

Pidgen, Charles. “Popper Revisited, or What Is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 25.1 (1995): 3–34. Print. Pionke, Albert D. Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2004. Print. Pipes, Daniel. Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From. New York: Free P, 1997. Print. ———. The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Print. Pocock, J.G.A. “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought.” Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. By Pocock. London: Methuen, 1971. 80–103. Print. ———. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975. Print. Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1956. Print. Porterfield, Amanda. Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Powers, Richard G. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New York: Free P, 1995. Print. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1920. Print. Prouty, L. Fletcher. JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Introd. Oliver Stone. New York: Citadel P, 1996. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1966. Print. Räikkä, Juha. “On Political Conspiracy Theories.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 17.2 (2009): 185–201. Print. Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. Print. Reed, Rebecca. Six Months in a Convent, or, The Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed. Boston, MA: Russell Odiorne & Metcalf, 1835. Print. Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997. Print. Report of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1939. Print. Rexheuser, Rex. “Einführung in die Schlussdiskussion.” Verschwörungstheorien: Anthropologische Konstanten – Historische Varianten. Ed. Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf. Osnabrück: fibre, 2001. 183–86. Print. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988. Print. ———. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Print. ———. George Lippard. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Print. Richards, Jason. “Melville’s (Inter)national Burlesque: Whiteface, Blackface, and ‘Benito Cereno’.” ATQ 21.2 (2007): 73–94. Print. Richards, Leonard L. “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Riots in Jacksonian America. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Print. ———. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 2000. Print. Ridgely, Joseph V. “George Lippard’s The Quaker City: The World of the American Porno-Gothic.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7.1 (1974): 77–94. Print. Robertson, Pat. The New World Order. Dallas, TX: Word, 1991. Print.

318

Works Cited

Rodgers, Daniel T. “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” The Journal of American History 79.1 (1992): 11–38. Print. Rogalla von Bieberstein, Johannes. Die These von der Verschwörung, 1776–1945: Philosophen, Freimaurer, Juden, Liberale und Sozialisten als Verschwörer gegen die Sozialordnung. Frankfurt, West Germany: Lang, 1976. Print. Rogin, Michael P. The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1967. Print. ———. Ronald Reagan: The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1987. Print. Roisman, Joseph. The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2006. Print. Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print. Rovere, Richard. Senator Joe McCarthy. London: Methuen, 1960. Print. Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. 1682. Sandwich, MA: Chapman Billies, 1953. Print. Roy, Jody M. Rhetorical Campaigns of the 19th Century Anti-Catholics and Catholics in America. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen P, 2000. Print. Ruta-Franke, Garance. “Palin Flirts with Obama Birth Certificate Questions.” Washington Post. com. The Washington Post, 4 Dec. 2009. Web. 11 July 2011. Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Ed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. Boston, MA: Northeastern UP, 1993. Print. Salt. Dir. Phillip Noyce. Columbia Pictures, 2010. Film. Sanders, Steven M. “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film. Ed. Sanders. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 2008. 55–72. Print. Sargant, William. Battle for the Mind. London: Heinemann, 1957. Print. Sayre, Nora. Running Time: Films of the Cold War. New York: Dial P, 1982. Print. Schetsche, Michael, and Ina Schmied-Knittel. “Verschwörungstheorien und die Angst vor überund unterirdischen Mächten.” Kuckuck: Notizen zur Alltagskultur 1 (2004): 19–24. Print. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. “The Crisis of American Masculinity.” Esquire 51 (1958): 64–66. Print. Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998. Print. Schultz, Nancy Lusignan. Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834. New York: Free P, 2000. Print. ———. Introduction. Veil of Fear: Nineteenth-Century Convent Tales. Ed. Schultz. 5th ed. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2003. vii-xxxiii. Print. Schurz, Carl. “The Irrepressible Conflict.” 1860. Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz. Ed. Frederic Bancroft. Vol. 1. New York: Negro UP, 1913. 130–34. Print. Scott, Kevin Michael. “‘Likewise Masked’: Blackface and Whitewash in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation 39–40 (2006): 126–35. Print. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley, CA and London: U of California P, 1993. Print. Seed, David. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Print.

Works Cited

319

———. Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control. A Study of Novels and Films since World War II. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2004. Print. Shalhope, Robert E. “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography.” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 49–80. Print. Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. New York: Dell, 1975. Print. Sielke, Sabine. “Theorizing American Studies: German Contributions to an Ongoing Debate.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 50.1/2 (2005): 53–98. Print. Silverman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Print. “Sizeable Minorities Still Believe Saddam Hussein Had Strong Links to Al Qaeda, Helped Plan 9/11 and Had Weapons of Mass Destruction.” PRNewswire.com. PR Newswire, 29 Dec. 2005. Web. 10 Jan. 2012. Sleigh, William W. Abolitionism Exposed! Philadelphia, PA: Schneck, 1838. Print. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1973. Print. Smith, Julian. “The Infernal Comedy of Richard Condon.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 14.4 (1969): 221–29. Print. Smith, Thomas R. “Independence Day, 1835: The John A. Murrell Conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg Gamblers in Literature.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 59 (2005/06): 129–61. Print. Stauffer, Vernon. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. Diss. Columbia U. New York: Columbia UP, 1918. Print. Stewart, Kathleen, and Susan Harding. “Bad Endings: American Apocalypses.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285–310. Print. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 5th ed. Harlow: Pearson, 2009. Print. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Boston, MA: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1856. Print. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Boston, MA: Jewett & Co., 1852. Print. Strada, Michael, and Harold Troper. Friend or Foe? Russians in American Film and Foreign Policy, 1933–1991. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow P, 1997. Print. Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2002. Print. ———. “Haunted Houses: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Middle-Class America.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 38.3 (1996): 443–72. Print. Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993. Print. Sumner, Charles. “The Crime against Kansas.” 1856. Recent Speeches and Addresses by Charles Sumner. Boston, MA: Higgins & Bradley, 1856. 586–697. Print. ———. The Rebellion: Its Origin and Main-Spring. An Oration Delivered by Hon. Charles Sumner. New York: Young Men’s Republican Union, 1861. Print. ———. “The Slave Oligarchy and Its Usurpations.” 1855. Recent Speeches and Addresses by Charles Sumner. Boston, MA: Higgins & Bradley, 1856. 522–62. Print. ———. “Speech for Union.” Orations and Speeches. By Sumner. Vol. 2. Boston, MA: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850. 250–64. Print. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1993. Print.

320

Works Cited

Swami, Viren, and Rebecca Coles. “The Truth Is Out There: Belief in Conspiracy Theories.” The Psychologist 23 (2010): 560–63. Print. Swartzell, William. Mormonism Exposed: Being a Journal of a Residence in Missouri from the 28th of May to the 20th of August, 1838. 1840. Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1992. Print. Szalay, Michael. “The White Oriental.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 67.3 (2006): 363–96. Print. Tannenhaus, Sam. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997. Print. Tawil, Ezra F. “Captain Babo’s Cabin: Stowe, Race and Misreading in ‘Benito Cereno’.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 8.2 (2006): 37–51. Print. Tisdall, Simon. “Disconnected from Reality.” Guardian.co.uk. Guardian, 11 July 2002. Web. 13 Jan. 2012. Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Print. Trapp, Jonna Smitherman. “‘Strange Costumes, Gestures, and Faces’: Non-Verbal Signs in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.” Conference of College Teachers of English Studies 62 (1997): 37–46. Print. Tschacher, Werner. “Vom Feindbild zur Verschwörungstheorie: Das Hexenstereotyp.” Verschwörungstheorien: Anthropologische Konstanten – Historische Varianten. Ed. Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf. Osnabrück: fibre, 2001. 49–74. Print. Tuck, Jim. McCarthyism and New York’s Hearst Press: A Study of Roles in the Witch Hunt. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1995. Print. Tucker, Beverley. The Partisan Leader: A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy. Rev. ed. Richmond, VA: West & Johnson, 1862. Print. Tyler, John. “From the Sinks of Europe a Plotter Has Come.” 1835. Letters and Times of the Tylers. Ed. Tyler Gardiner. Richmond, VA: n.p., 1894. 575–78. Print. “United Steelworkers of America et al. v. National Labor Relations Board.” Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States. October Term, 1949. Ed. Ernest H. Schopler. Rochester, NY: Lawyers Co-Operative Publishing, 1950. 925–77. Print. Utley, Freda. China Story. Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1951. Print. Vacha, J. E. “It Could Happen Here: The Rise of the Political Scenario Novel.” American Quarterly 29.2 (1977): 194–206. Print. Valkeakari, Tuire. “The Politics of Perception in Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” Studies in American Fiction 33.2 (2005): 229–50. Print. Vidi. Mr. Frank: The Underground Mail-Agent. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853. Print. Vollaro, Daniel R. “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30.1 (2009): n. pag. Web. 14 Feb. 2013. Walton, Augustus Q. A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel, the Great Western Land Pirate. Athens, TN: George White, 1835. Print. Ward, Maria. Disclosures: Female Life among the Mormons. Philadelphia, PA: J.E. Potter & Co., 1856. Print. The Washington Despotism Dissected. 5th ed. New York: Metropolitan Record, 1864. Print. Washington, George. “Farewell Address.” 1796. George Washington: Uniting a Nation. By Don Higginbotham. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. 137–55. Print.

Works Cited

321

———. “There Has Been a Regular, Systematic Plan.” 1774. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of UnAmerican Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ed. David Brion Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971. 33–34. Print. Watkins, Floyd C. “James Kirke Paulding and the South.” American Quarterly 5.3 (1953): 219–30. Print. Watson, Harry L. “Conflict and Collaboration: Yeomen, Slaveholders, and Politics in the Antebellum South.” Social History 10.3 (1985): 273–98. Print. Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era. New York: Random House, 1999. Print. Weiss, Jessica. To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print. Weizman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts. Amherst, MA: The U of Massachusetts P, 1984. Print. Welch, Robert. The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. Belmont, MA: Welch, 1961. Print. ———. The Politician. Belmont, MA: Welch, 1963. Print. Welter, Barbara. “From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard: A Century of Protestant Anti-Catholicism.” Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America. Ed. Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn. New York: Crossroad, 1987. 43–71. Print. West, Harry G., and Todd Sanders. “Introduction: Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order.” Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Ed. West and Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. 1–37. Print. ———, eds. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1859: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Weston, George M. The Progress of Slavery in the United States. Washington, DC: Weston, 1857. Print. Whitaker, Brian. “An Engineered Crisis.” Guardian.co.uk. Guardian, 27 Jan. 2003. Web. 13 Jan. 2012. White, Ed. “The Value of Conspiracy Theory.” American Literary History 14.1 (2002): 1–31. Print. Whitehead, Don. The FBI Story. 6th ed. New York: Random House, 1956. Print. Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins P, 1996. Print. Wiebe, Robert H. The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print. Wildermuth, Mark E. “Electronic Media and the Feminine in the National Security Regime: The Manchurian Candidate before and after 9/11.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35.3 (2007): 120–26. Print. Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. Print. Williams, John. The Redeemed Captive: A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Return of the Rev. John Williams, Minister of Deerfield, Massachusetts, Who Was Taken Prisoner by the Indians on the Destruction of the Town, A.D. 1704. Ed. Joshua Leavitt. Boston: S.W. Benedict & Co., 1833. Print. Williams, Skip. “Spinning Paranoia: The Ideologies of Conspiracy and Contingency in Postmodern Culture.” Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of American Paranoia. Ed. Peter Knight. New York: New York UP, 2002. 21–39. Print.

322

Works Cited

Wilson, Henry. The Death of Slavery is the Life of the Nation: Speech of Hon. Henry Wilson (of Massachusetts) in the Senate, March 28, 1864. Washington, DC: Polmiehorn, 1864. Print. ———. The History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. 3 vols. Boston: Osgood & Co., 1872–1877. Print. Winter, Aaron. “My Enemies Must Be Friends: The American Extreme-Right, Conspiracy Theory, Islam, and the Middle East.” Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East: A Comparative Approach. Ed. Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. 35–58. Print. Wippermann, Wolfgang. Agenten des Bösen: Verschwörungstheorien von Luther bis heute. Berlin: be.bra, 2007. Print. Wisnicki, Adrian S. Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: Morrow, 1991. Print. Wood, Gordon S. “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 39.3 (1982): 402–41. Print. ———. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. New York: Norton, 1972. Print. ———. Representation in the American Revolution. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 1969. Print. Wulff, Erich. “Paranoic Conspiratory Delusion.” Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Ed. Serge Moscovici and Carl F. Graumann. New York: Springer, 1987. 171–90. Print. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of 1835.” The Journal of Negro History 50.4 (1965): 227–38. Print. Wylie, Philipp. Generation of Vipers. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942. Print. Zacher, Elissa Michele. “Urban Legends: Modern Morality Tales.” TheEpochTimes.com. Epoch Times, 18 July 2010. Web. 18 Dec. 2011. Zakai, Avihu. Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Zarefsky, David. Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1990. Print. Zernike, Kate. “The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories.” NYTimes.com. New York Times, 30 Apr. 2011. Web. 12 Jan. 2012. Zuckert, Catharine H. “Leadership – Natural and Conventional – in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 26.2 (1998): 239–55. Print.