The United States of Paranoia (46 page)

  9
. Nathaniel Saltonstall, “A Continuation of the State of New-England” (1676), in
Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699
, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 73.

10
. Horsmanden,
A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy
, 18.

11
. Ibid., 20.

12
. Ibid., 300.

13
. Ibid., 340.

14
. For an early example of a skeptical take, see the 1810 edition of Horsmanden’s own book, released just thirty-two years after the author’s death. Horsmanden had written his account to defend the prosecutions, but a new preface declared that the conspiracy’s “extent could never have been so great as the terror of those times depicted.”

15
. See, for example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s lively
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Beacon Press, 2000), 174–210.

16
. Horsmanden,
A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy
, vii.

17
. Ibid., 378.

18
. Quoted in Suzanne Lebsock,
The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860
(W. W. Norton, 1984), 91.

19
. See William Johnson, “Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement” (1822), in
Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822
, ed. Robert S. Starobin (Prentice-Hall, 1970), 68–70.

20
. Peter Charles Hoffer,
Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739
(Oxford University Press, 2010).

21
. George Baca,
Conjuring Crisis: Racism and Civil Rights in a Southern Military City
(Rutgers University Press, 2010), 48.

22
. Quoted in T. C. Parramore, “Conspiracy and Revivalism in 1802: A Direful Symbiosis,”
Negro History Bulletin
43, no. 2, April–June 1980. For more on the suppression of independent black churches, see Peter P. Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 60–62.

23
. Herself [Harriet Jacobs],
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(privately published, 1861), 98.

24
. Ibid., 99.

25
. Ibid., 102.

26
. Baca,
Conjuring Crisis
, 48. According to Jacobs, some whites protected slaves from the mob by putting them in jail for the duration of the riot.

27
. Peter Charles Hoffer,
The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law
(University Press of Kansas, 2003), 23–25.

28
. Quoted in “Monthly Record of Current Events,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
, January 1860.

29
. Mark Twain,
Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories
(University of California Press, 2011), 142–43.

30
. Mark Twain,
Life on the Mississippi
(Penguin, 1984 [1883]), 211. The Murrell gang is invoked in
Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy
too, though there it’s called “Burrell’s Gang.”

31
. Joseph S. Williams,
Old Times in West Tennessee: Reminiscences—Semi-Historic—of Pioneer Life and the Early Emigrant Settlers in the Big Hatchie Country
(W. G. Cheeney, 1873), 200–1.

32
. Augustus Q. Walton,
A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel, the Great Western Land Pirate
(George White, 1835), 26–27.

33
. Quoted in Edwin A. Miles, “The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835,”
The Journal of Negro History
42, no. 1 (January 1957).

34
. At about the same time, an Anti-Gambling Committee in Vicksburg, Mississippi, expelled the town’s gamblers from the city limits. The men who refused to go were hanged without a trial. It is unclear to what extent that outbreak of lynch law was connected to the Murrell lynchings, but the two events were linked afterward in public memory, and subsequent accounts sometimes treated the Mississippi gamblers as part of the conspiracy. In one historian’s words, “the terms ‘Murrell,’ ‘gambler,’ and ‘abolitionist’ became essentially interchangeable.” Thomas Ruys Smith, “Independence Day, 1835: The John A. Murrell Conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg Gamblers in Literature,”
Mississippi Quarterly
59, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2006).

35
. Compare: “The central idea of slavery, from the masters’ point of view, was the absolute submission of the slave to the master. Theoretically, the slave represented no more than an extension of the master’s will.” Eugene Genovese, “Class, Culture, and Historical Process,”
Dialectical Anthropology
1, no. 1 (November 1975).

36
. Annalee Newitz, “A History of Zombies in America,” November 18, 2010, io9.com/5692719/a-history-of-zombies-in-america.

37
. Zombies became extremely popular in the early twenty-first century. Some stories played with the notion of sympathizing with the zombies, an approach that dates back at least as far as Romero’s 1985 film
Day of the Dead
but became increasingly common in this period. Other storytellers stuck with the idea of the undead as feral subhumans who deserve to be dispatched. Some survivalists refer to postapocalyptic looters as “Mutant Zombie Bikers.” The term is tongue-in-cheek; the fear isn’t.

38
. “Outrages by Tramps,”
The World
, October 4, 1879.

39
.
The World
, October 24, 1879.

40
. Quoted in “The Vagrant Class,”
The New York Times
, September 7, 1877.

41
. Horatio Seymour, “Crime and Tramps,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
, December 1878.

42
.
Galveston Daily News
, August 25, 1877.

43
. Earlier in the century, one legal weapon the government had used against unions had been to prosecute them as criminal conspiracies. You didn’t have to be a slave to have something to fear from the broad application of conspiracy law.

44
. Kevin Kenny,
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires
(Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. Kenny credited Benjamin Bannan, the nativist editor of
The Miners’ Journal
, with introducing the term to the anthracite region, using it as what Kenny calls “a shorthand term for the various aspects of ‘the Irish character’ he found most objectionable and threatening.”

45
. Quoted in Allan Pinkerton,
The Molly Maguires and the Detectives
, 2nd ed. (G. W. Dillingham, 1905), 521.

46
. As capitalists worried about labor conspiracies, union activists sometimes fretted about conspiracies bubbling among the immigrants who competed with them for jobs. Denis Kearney, the Irish-American leader of the Workingmen’s Party, saw the “debauched, offal-eating, devil-worshipping, leprous Chinese” as the pawns of a capitalist plot to undercut white wages and undermine the republic. Quoted in “John Chinaman in America,”
All the Year Round
, December 10, 1881.

47
. “The Communists of New York—Their Secret Meetings and Movements,”
New York Herald
, January 18, 1874.

48
. Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner,
Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America
(University of California Press, 2001), 48.

49
. “Race Riots,”
The New York Times
, July 28, 1919. The editorial’s gallery of villains also includes Germany and the Industrial Workers of the World.

50
. Quoted in Howard W. Odum,
Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1943]), 133, 135. Odum also collected rumors in which the secret power behind a black conspiracy was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who supposedly lent her name to subversive “Eleanor Clubs.” The clubs’ purported motto: “A white woman in every kitchen by 1943.” Ibid., 73–80.

51
. Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots,
Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?
December 2, 1965, usc.edu/libraries/archives/cityinstress/mccone.

52
. Gary Allen, “The Plan to Burn Los Angeles,”
American Opinion
, May 1967. All subsequent Allen quotes in this chapter come from this
article
.

53
. There is more than a faint parallel between Allen’s fear of what white retaliation might bring and the antebellum planters’ fear of a black insurrection setting off white lawlessness. Allen, like the planters, preferred that the suppression of the Enemy Below be channeled through the state. On a related note: In the 1960s, the John Birch Society believed that the international conspiracy was manipulating not just the civil rights movement but the various Klan and neo-Nazi groups as well, with the aim of using both sides to incite a race war. In later years, Bircher accounts of the civil rights era would assign their most heroic role to the FBI infiltrators who targeted the Klan.

54
. John Schmidhauser, quoted in Rick Perlstein,
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
(Scribner’s, 2008), 142.

55
. Terry Ann Knopf,
Rumors, Race, and Riots
(Transaction Books, 1975), 131.

56
.
Subversive Influences in Riots, Looting, and Burning, Part 1: Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, First Session, October 25, 26, 31, and November 28, 1967
(U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 835.

57
. Quoted in Gerald Horne,
Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s
(University Press of Virginia, 1995), 267.

58
. Quoted in “Hard-Core Leftists Exploit L.A. Negroes, Says Graham,”
The Spartanburg Herald
, August 18, 1965.

59
. Quoted in “Outside Agitators Took Part in Riots, Says Frisco Mayor,”
St. Joseph News-Press
, October 1, 1966.

60
. Quoted in Perlstein,
Nixonland
, 199. On Johnson’s push for the FBI to find a Communist conspiracy behind the riots, see Kenneth O’Reilly,
“Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972
(Free Press, 1989), 229ff.

Chapter 5: Puppeteers

  1
. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Harvard University Press, 1967), 94.

  2
. Oliver Noble,
Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story Recorded in the Book of Esther, Shewing the Power and Oppression of STATE MINISTERS Tending to the Ruin and Destruction of GOD’s People:—And the Remarkable Interpositions of Divine Providence, in Favour of the Oppressed
(E. Lunt
and H. W. Tinges, 1775), 6.

  3
. Edmund Burke,
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
(J. Dodsley, 1770), 15–16.

  4
. Noble,
Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story
, 26.

  5
. John Adams, letter to Henry Niles, February 18, 1818, in
The Works of John Adams
, vol. 10, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 288.

  6
. Quoted in Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, 101.

  7
. Quoted ibid., 119–20.

  8
. George Washington, letter to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774, gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/revolution/letters/bfairfax3.html.

  9
. Quoted in Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, 119.

10
. First Continental Congress, “Address to the People of Great Britain,” September 5, 1774.

11
. It’s the Declaration of Independence. Do I really need to footnote the Declaration of Independence?

12
. Alexander Hamilton, letter to George Washington, February 7, 1783, in
Hamilton: Writings
, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (Library of America, 2001), 122.

13
. Cassius [Ædanus Burke],
Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati; Lately Instituted by the Major-Generals, Brigadiers, and Other Officers of the American Army
(A. Timothy, 1783), 8, 28–29.

14
. Abraham Yates, quoted in Bill Kauffman,
Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin
(ISI Books, 2008), 27.

15
. Luther Martin, “The Genuine Information, Delivered to the Legislature of the State of Maryland, Relative to the Proceedings of the General Convention, Held at Philadelphia, in 1787” (1787), oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1787&chapter=96564&layout=html&Itemid=27.

16
. Quoted in Kauffman,
Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet
, 75.

17
. Quoted in Donald Henderson Stewart,
The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period
(State University of New York Press, 1969), 490.

18
. Quoted in Louise Burnham Dunbar, “A Study of ‘Monarchical’ Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801,”
University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences
10, no. 1 (March 1922).

19
. Quoted ibid.

20
. Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, 56.

21
. George H. Smith, “ ‘That Audacious Document’: Notes on the Declaration of Independence,” November 8, 2011, libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/audacious-document-notes-declaration-independence.