Among the Truthers (5 page)

The second major influence on American conspiracism is the country's unique political culture. From early on in the nation's history (before it even became a nation, in fact), Americans viewed the United States as a land of economic and political freedom—a place where sturdy, independent yeomen could make their way in the world without much help from government or entanglement with their neighbors. This muscular, independent attitude extended into the realm of philosophy: Born amid the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on individual reason unfettered by authority, America produced a lively culture of homegrown inventors and scientists. As time would tell, it was also more hospitable than the nations of Europe to intellectual outsiders—oddballs, dissidents, heretics, fussy autodidacts, and skeptics—the sort of men who we would now call “cranks.”

But this worldview sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Unfettered American capitalism in the nineteenth century permitted a concentration of economic power in a small handful of banks and conglomerates, whose abuses summoned into being a populist backlash, which in turn spurred the creation of an intrusive regulatory state. Meanwhile, on the international stage, America became liberty's defender of last resort in the face of the Soviet threat—a campaign that ultimately was successful, but only through the empowerment of what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” The combined result was a country where the ideals of liberty conflicted with a reality in which power became concentrated in the hands of large, faceless corporate and governmental organizations whose very existence seemed a malign affront to the open character of America's early years.

The third major influence on the development of American conspiracism was technology. In the early and mid-twentieth century, in particular, Americans were confronted with a range of powerful new machines—from mass communications, to invasive medical imaging, to space travel, to nuclear energy—that were controlled by a new class of menacing technocrats. Thanks to America's massive wealth in the postwar years, the pace of progress was much faster than in other developed nations. While the new technologies improved the material lives of most Americans, they also increased their dependence on the government and large corporations, thereby increasing the scope for mass paranoia.

It is out of this three-part mix—religious apocalypticism, political populism, and rapid technological advancement—that America's unique brand of conspiracism emerged. I call the resulting pastiche “flowchart conspiracism”—because its trademark feature is the imagining of a complex organizational chart linking all of America's power centers, from media companies to drug makers to the CIA, to one central, all-controlling secular Antichrist.

Populism and Paranoia: How Politics Shaped American Conspiracism

From the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, to the KKK, to the backlash against FDR's New Deal, to McCarthyism, the militia movement, Ross Perot, the films of Michael Moore, and the red-state rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, American conspiracism has reflected a consistent political theme: Some cabal of coastal political elites, Ivy league intellectuals, “bankers” (sometimes, but not always, a code word for Jews), and corporate oligopolists are conspiring to sell out the nation's ordinary, hardscrabble working people. As I was reminded by a sixteen-year-old Minnesotan Truther whom I heard fulminating in New York City against “a tyrannical government and their oppressive regime of bankers, front men, and puppets” and “thieves who take our hard-earned money and ship it off to foreigners,” much of the modern conspiracist mindset, and even its terminology, remains frozen in place from the Jacksonian movement of the early nineteenth century.

If conspiracism may be seen as a collective ailment, then the United States was infected at birth: British colonial rule under King George III truly was designed to keep Americans in a state of perpetual subservience, and to steal the fruits of their industry. Over time, resentment of this fact grew into a deep suspicion of government power more generally. “Society in every state is a blessing,” Thomas Paine wrote in
Common Sense
. “But government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . . Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

The violent boom-and-bust cycles of America's young, rapidly industrializing, hypercapitalist economy provided conspiracists with plenty of growth opportunities—but with an important New World twist. The authors of the
Protocols
and the conspiracist tracts that followed in the wake of the French Revolution were reactionaries who urged a return to a preindustrial, precapitalist Christian utopia ruled by benign, hereditary kings. In the United States, it was the opposite: American conspiracy theorists cast themselves as
defenders
of the revolution, on guard to protect their noble values from a backsliding into monarchist tyranny.

“A great part of both the strength and weakness of our national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life,” wrote historian Richard Hofstadter in 1955. “We are forever restlessly pitting ourselves against them . . . whether it be the force represented by the ‘gold bugs,' the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked and controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment.”

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning classic,
The Age of Reform
, and again in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter traced the roots of the McCarthyite conspiracism he witnessed in his own era to eighteenth-century Jeffersonians and Federalists, who accused one another of seeking to reestablish a monarchy or subvert America's Christian character. The latter theme would endure throughout the nineteenth century—particularly in regard to Catholics, whose imagined role as Vatican-directed fifth columnists fueled the creation of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (the Know-Nothings), as well as several short-lived anti-immigrant political parties. The Ku Klux Klan, though remembered by historians primarily for its violent campaigns against blacks, also trafficked in anti-Catholic propaganda—including the theory that Washington, D.C.'s Catholic churches were secret military bases from which papist hordes would emerge to install the pope as America's president. Even as late as the mid-twentieth century, it was not uncommon to hear claims that—in one Protestant propagandist's words—“Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to . . . disseminate Popery.”

Conspiracy theories based on secret societies also gained adherents in nineteenth-century America. Following the mysterious 1826 disappearance of a disgruntled Freemason from Batavia, New York, anti-Masonry activists spawned a single-issue political party that managed to capture two state governorships before withering. Thanks to the stateside penetration of two influential (and poisonously anti-Semitic) English paranoiacs, Nesta Webster and Edith Starr Miller, anti-Illuminati conspiracism, too, enjoyed episodic popularity. Some Federalists even accused the Democratic-Republicans of being in the Illuminati's grip—quite an amazing claim given that not a single Illuminati leader is known to have ever traversed the Atlantic.

The most profound manifestation of conspiracism in nineteenth-century America came through the Populist movement that reached its zenith following the collapse of food, commodity, and land prices in the 1890s. As farmers' profits dwindled, many country dwellers (not entirely without basis) blamed their troubles on industrialization, immigration, financial speculation, corporate conglomerates, and the rise of urban machine politics. Their vision of America was famously captured by the sketch of an octopus with tentacles encircling all of the nation's workers and industries—an image that would go on to become an enduring staple of anti-Semitic paranoia (albeit with zoological variations: while many editions of the
Protocols
retained the octopine image, the Jew appeared in a British edition as a snake, and in a French edition as a spider).

Such notions eventually led to the broad notion that America's rural yeomen were locked in an existential war with bankers, railroad owners, mining magnates, and other conniving urban sophisticates. As one manifesto circulated by the Populist Party put it: “There are but two sides in the conflict that is being waged in this country today. On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroad corporations, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and impoverish the people. On the other side are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all others who produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation. The one represents the wealthy and powerful classes who want the control of the Government to plunder the people. The other represents the people, contending for equality before the law, and the rights of man. Between these two there is no middle ground.”

A similarly dark vision of society's divide came in
Caesar's Column
, a best-selling 1890 novel by Ignatius Donnelly, a lifelong crank and conspiracy theorist who later would go on to draft the preamble to the Populist Party platform. Foreshadowing more influential classics of the sci-fi genre, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We
(discussed in more detail later in this chapter),
Brave New World
, and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Donnelly's lurid work portrays a dystopic America in the grip of a tyrannical syndicate known simply as the Oligarchy.

The work is stunning to read in the post-9/11 era: Though 120 years old, it closely tracks the modern-day Truther obsession with secret plots and weapons, apocalyptic state terrorism, mass civilian slaughter, unalloyed evil, and death from the air:

The Oligarchy have a large force of several thousands of [dirigible air-ships], sheathed with that light but strong metal, aluminum; in popular speech they are known as
The Demons
. Sailing over a hostile force, they drop into its midst great bombs, loaded with the most deadly explosives, mixed with bullets; and, where one of these strikes the ground, it looks like the crater of an extinct volcano; while leveled rows of dead are strewed in every direction around it. But this is not all. Some years since a French chemist discovered a dreadful preparation, a subtle poison, which, falling upon the ground, being heavier than the air and yet expansive, rolls, “like a slow blot that spreads,” steadily over the earth in all directions, bringing sudden death to those that breathe it. The Frenchman sold the secret of its preparation to the Oligarchy for a large sum; but he did not long enjoy his ill-gotten wealth. He was found dead in his bed the next day, poisoned by the air from a few drops of his own invention; killed, it is supposed, by the governments, so that they would possess forever the exclusive monopoly of this terrible instrument of slaughter.

In a climate overheated by these paranoid reveries, it was inevitable that anti-Semitism, a European pathology that formerly had been comparatively mild in America, would become embedded in the populist creed. (Russian Jews, who were alleged to be agents of bolshevism, were seen as doubly suspect.) Full-blown Jew-hatred would remain a fixture of American political life until the 1940s, finding especially prominent expression in fascist street-marching groups, such as the German-American Bund and the Silver Legion of America; and the national radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a Nazi sympathizer who blamed Jews for both the Depression and the Russian Revolution. Like the scattered anti-Semites who still pop up in today's conspiracist movements, Coughlin would sometimes couch his hatred in more particular attacks on the Rothschilds, whom he accused of having “re-established in modern capitalistic life the pagan principle of charging interest . . . The horrible, hated word spelled ‘W-A-R' was the secret of their success.” In 1941, no less an American hero than Charles Lindbergh publicly blamed American war fever on “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” and fretted about the Jews' “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” (When the United States
did
enter the war, many conspiracy theorists switched their focus to FDR himself, who, it was believed, had deliberately engineered or facilitated the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor. As described later in this book, this belief has become embedded in Truther mythology as a false-flag precursor to the 9/11 attacks.)

To Americans' great credit, wartime anti-Semitic propaganda never led their country to the same barbarism that afflicted Europeans following the publication of the
Protocols
. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American populists groused noisily about the Jews and their imagined machinations, but for the most part, grousing is all they did: The United States has never once witnessed an anti-Semitic pogrom.
¹

Following World War II, anti-Semitism was fatally discredited as a mainstream middle-class creed in the United States. And it was the communist, not the Jew, who became the primary target of American conspiracists. “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” thundered Senator Joseph McCarthy to the U.S. Senate in a famous June 14, 1951, speech. “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. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”