Plots, Designs, and Schemes

Michael Butter

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110367942
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Literaturkritik Geschichte & Theorie

Plots, Designs, and Schemes is the first study that investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835) or Hermann Melville's Benito Cereno (1855).

The book offers three central insights:

1. The American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of republicanism, and the Puritan heritage.

2. Until far into the twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans, elites as well as "common" people, understood and reacted to historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories.

3. Although most extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960, and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.

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).¹⁶ 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).¹⁷ 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 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.¹⁸ 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, 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.

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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 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 co-presence 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.

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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.¹⁹ 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 circumstances 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 concatenations of events.”²⁰ 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” (...