The United States of Paranoia (6 page)

Here the search for diabolical immigrants and other clearly foreign figures—for enemies easily identified as aliens—shifts into something else: a search for enemies who, on the surface at least, can’t be distinguished from “normal” Americans. In other words, the story of the Enemy Outside yields to the story of the Enemy Within. We’ll take a closer look at that second archetypal foe in the next chapter. But before we get there, let’s allow the tale of the Enemy Outside to reverberate one more time.

May 2, 2011. Navy SEALs storm a mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The compound is the home of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist at the top of the terror network known as Al Qaeda.

In the popular imagination, Al Qaeda is a tightly disciplined, globe-spanning hierarchy, with bin Laden serving, as
The Washington Post
put it, as a “terrorist CEO in an isolated compound.”
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In practice, the group has never managed to be both large and centralized at the same time. In the decade before the Abbottabad attack, it became an increasingly loose network, an organization with “no single center of gravity, but multiple ones,” according to George Michael, a professor at the Air War College. Al Qaeda cells, Michael has explained, “can act on their own initiative when the opportunity presents itself”; they don’t depend on a central authority for direction. Since 2002, nearly every Islamist terror attack around the world has been conducted either by one of those peripheral franchises or by a group whose only link to bin Laden is ideological.
55
By the time the raid was planned, Al Qaeda was urging independent “lone wolf” terrorists to carry out attacks on their own.

In other words, when the
Post
uses phrases such as “terrorist CEO,” it falls into the same sort of conspiracy thinking that attributed dispersed Indian raids to a single superchief. And the
Post
’s words weren’t an isolated lapse. Even when Osama’s group was more centralized, it was often conflated with the larger Islamist movement of which Al Qaeda was merely the most notorious part.
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All the same, bin Laden and his lieutenants have plenty of blood on their hands. They have been responsible for several lethal operations, most infamously the assaults on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that killed nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001. Because of those massacres, armed Americans have arrived in Abbottabad.

There is a firefight at the compound. Bin Laden is killed. The SEALs relay the news to Washington with a code word:
Geronimo
.

3

THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR

They’re here already! You’re next!

—Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1

H
ere’s the story:

Night falls in Salem Village. Leaving his wife at home, a Puritan called Goodman Brown walks into the wilderness, fretting that devilish Indians might be lurking behind the trees. Instead he encounters the actual Devil, a worldly, well-dressed man who bears a distinct resemblance to Brown himself.

As the two walk together, Brown suggests nervously that he should return home. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him,” he protests. “We have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs.”

Don’t worry, says Satan:

I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. . . .

I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too— But these are state secrets.
2

The pair encounter one of Salem’s respectable citizens, the woman who taught Brown his catechism; she reveals that she is a witch and that she is heading to a mysterious meeting. The deacon and the minister pass by, riding to the same night gathering. Then Brown thinks he hears his wife in the woods, and when he calls out her name her voice replies with a scream.

In a space in the forest, Brown finds a Black Mass in progress. Virtually all of Salem is present:

Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft.
3

Brown learns that he and his wife are to be initiated at the witches’ Sabbath that night. As the man and his bride stand before an altar, the Devil outlines his creed: “Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”
4

At the last moment, Brown calls out to his wife to look upward to heaven and resist the Devil. Suddenly everyone vanishes, and Brown is alone in the woods; he does not know whether his wife succumbed, or even whether he witnessed a ritual or merely dreamed it.

Either way, he is scarred for life. From that night till his death, he is a gloomy, distrustful man who sees wickedness in everyone around him.

Or that’s the story, anyway.

I’ve just laid out the bare bones of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” an enigmatic short story published in 1835. It imagines a conspiracy in colonial Massachusetts, but this is not the kind of cabal we encountered the last time we discussed the Puritans. The Indians have been reduced to a cameo role. The chief conspirators don’t live outside the village gates anymore, and they aren’t easily identified as aliens. Anyone might be a part of the plot. Even the investigator who discovers the secret circle is in danger of being absorbed by it. Goodman Brown has met the Enemy Within.

The story’s obvious inspiration is the witch fever of 1692 and 1693, in which a wave of witchcraft accusations swept through Salem and the surrounding area. One of the judges in those trials was
Hawthorne’s
great-great-grandfather John Hathorne. Judge Hathorne’s father, William Hathorne, was responsible for an act attributed to Goodman Brown’s ancestor: He ordered a Quaker woman whipped through the streets of town. Hawthorne felt considerable guilt for this family history, and it’s easy to read his story as a critique of a society that set out to destroy monsters but ended up becoming monstrous itself. Acts done in the name of fighting the Devil, from persecuting Quakers to slaughtering Indians, appear in the text as crimes committed with Satan’s blessing.

The critique applies not just to the woman-whipping, village-burning citizens of Salem but to Goodman Brown himself. Though he intended to resist the Devil, he ended up living his life as though he accepted the doctrine the Devil preached: “Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.” And it is Brown who adopts the mind-set of a witch finder, always suspecting that Satanists are everywhere. Indeed, one reading of the story suggests that Brown’s vision in the forest was itself the Devil’s work and that by accepting it as valid Brown fell into the Devil’s trap.
5

The trials that inspired Hawthorne’s story weren’t the first witch-finding expedition in New England, but they were both larger and more lethal than the others. If you set aside the Salem saga, ninety-three accusations of witchcraft are known to have hit the colonies’ courts in the whole seventeenth century, of which sixteen led to executions.
6
In the Salem episode, by contrast, at least 144 people went on trial in a little more than a year, and many others were accused without landing in court. Fourteen women and six men were executed, mostly by hanging; even a couple of dogs were sent to the gallows. Another man and three women died in jail, as did several babies.
7
The defendants came from a much wider spectrum of ages, occupations, and social ranks than the typical docket of witches. The trials cast an unusually wide geographic net, too: The accused hailed from more than twenty locations, not just Salem Village and the adjoining Salem Town.
8

By European standards, on the other hand, the trials were small potatoes. English America was less witch-obsessed than England, and England in turn was less witch-obsessed than Scotland or the Continent. From 1623 to 1631, the German bishopric of Würzburg burned an estimated nine hundred people for their ostensible dealings with demons. If that body count is accurate, one tiny principality killed more supposed Satanists in an eight-year period than were executed in all of New England in the entire seventeenth century.
9
That didn’t satisfy the authorities’ appetite for blood: European witch hunts continued to erupt for decades after the Würzburg carnage. The trials of 1692, by contrast, disgusted so many people that they effectively ended witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts.

The Salem saga began two and a half years into King William’s War, a bloody conflict that pitted the English colonies against the French and their Wabanaki Indian allies. In January 1692, a pastor’s daughter, age nine, and her cousin, age eleven or twelve, suddenly began to suffer wild and inexplicable fits. They “were bitten and pinched by invisible agents,” wrote Reverend John Hale, who witnessed the girls’ spasms; “their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented.”
10
As weeks went by and the children’s condition grew worse, the local experts suspected witchcraft.

Following a traditional (and rather witchy) ritual to discern the source of the sorcery, the girls accused Tituba, an Indian slave in their household, of being their tormenter.
11
Tituba denied the accusation. Then some older neighbors declared that they too had suffered fits and that Tituba and two other women were responsible. At that point Tituba confessed. She would later report that her confession had been extracted only after her owner had beaten her.

“Young Goodman Brown” begins with an excursion into the external wilderness, where there “may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,”
12
and then unexpectedly turns inward, imagining a plot at the heart of Salem society. The real-life Salem story followed the same pattern. When the witch hunt began, the first accusation was directed against an Indian woman, and the Indians never disappeared entirely as the episode unfolded. The purported witnesses to witchcraft frequently described Satan or his emissary as “a black man,” which in the local context was more likely to suggest an Indian than an African. One alleged witch, Reverend George Burroughs, was accused of “bewitch[ing] a great many soldiers to death” in the Indian wars.
13
Cotton Mather even suggested that the attacks “by the
spirits
of the
invisible world
” originated “among the Indians, whose chief sagamores are well known unto some of our captives to have been horrid
sorcerers
, and hellish
conjurers
, and such as conversed with
dæmons
.”
14
In one essay he announced that “at their Cheef Witch-meetings, there has been present some French canadians, and some Indian Sagamores, to concert the methods of ruining New England.”
15

But the movement that began with an accusation against an Indian quickly expanded to include the white townspeople, and when that happened a different set of fears and feuds came to the fore. In their 1974 book
Salem Possessed
, the social historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum made a strong case that the initial wave of accusations was closely correlated with long-standing local disputes over land, church politics, and the tensions between the agrarian Salem Village and the more mercantile Salem Town. Meanwhile, many accusations came wrapped in a long history of gossip, as old chatter about who might be a sorceress, a wife beater, or a whore made it easier for certain citizens to fall under suspicion.

From there the circle widened. More purported witches were accused, and many of them confessed, sparking still more accusations. The recriminations extended into areas far removed from the local dynamics discussed by Boyer and Nissenbaum, and the ranks of the purported Devil worshippers increasingly included people who defied the standard profile of a witch: ministers, wealthy merchants, the governor’s wife. When Hawthorne wrote that “the lady of the governor” had been at the Black Sabbath—or at least that “some affirm” that she had been there—he was reciting the historical record. “The afflicted,” one prosecutor wrote, “spare no person of what quality so ever.”
16

Along with the other forces fueling the inquisition, from small-town gossip to an especially nasty war, the accused had an incentive to admit or invent spiritual crimes: It soon became clear that a purported witch who confessed would not be executed. There is even the possibility, suggested by the historian Chadwick Hansen, that some of the defendants really were witches—not that they actually wielded supernatural powers, of course, but that they attempted to do so.
17

There was also, as the sociologist Richard Weisman has pointed out, a change in the role of the government. The typical New England witchcraft accusation involved townspeople blaming their neighbors for various mundane misfortunes. If you look past the fact that the charges involved the use of magical powers, you’ll find that the conflicts weren’t so different from the disputes that modern people have over rat-attracting junk piles, dogs that dig up gardens, or tree branches that extend into an adjoining yard. Even by the legal standards of the time, the use of malevolent magic was difficult to prove, so the New England courts were ordinarily reluctant to take on such cases.

But now the state was throwing itself into the conflict, creating a situation closer in spirit to Europe’s persecutions than to traditional tiffs between neighbors. An ordinary citizen of Salem might worry that the witches next door were poisoning his cow or making his children sick. The authorities had a grander fear: in Weisman’s words, that “an organized plot to subvert the Puritan mission had successfully infiltrated the core of the church.”
18
Tales of vast conspiracies began to appear in the confessions. In August, when one William Barker confessed to witchcraft, he reported that “Satans design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next upon Salem and soe goe through the countrey.” In the new Satanic society, he continued, “all persones should be equall . . . there should be no day of resurection or judgement, and neither punishment nor shame for sin.”
19

The accusers eventually overreached, and the furor abated. By May 1693, when the final hearings were held, several witch finders were having second thoughts about the process, not least when they found themselves or their loved ones in the crosshairs. (Reverend John Hale lost his enthusiasm for the trials when his wife was accused.) In 1697, Massachusetts recognized a day of repentance for the prosecution of innocent people. One magistrate announced that he accepted “the blame and shame” for his role in the affair, and a dozen Salem jurors signed a formal declaration of regret.
20