“There is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9
An attempt has been made on the President’s life, but the would-be assassin doesn’t complete his task. Soon after the incident, it is reported to the public that he’s just a crazy lone gunman. Murmurs. It is said that the gunman was in cahoots with the President’s political opponents, so an investigation is initiated. The President himself asserts that the shooter was probably hired by one or more members of the other party. The opposition counters by announcing that the shooting was staged to garner public sympathy for the President. Others blame the opposing party’s inflammatory comments made prior to the act for inciting it.
I’m not referring to the latest attempt on a (former) president. This recounting is a synopsis of the 1835 attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson while he was attending a congressman’s funeral, as recorded on page 1 of Jesse Walker’s book, The United States of Paranoia. Walker’s book was published in 2013, well before Qanon, the Trump and Biden presidencies, COVID-19, and all the rest we have endured in the last decade. It’s a lively way to start the book; it caught my attention because it shows we haven’t come far in all this time and that conspiracy theories are nothing new in American politics. Conspiracy theories are our modern-day horror stories and the fodder of water cooler gossip.
Walker organizes Part 1 of his book into five sections (he refers to them as primal myths): the Enemy Outside, the Enemy Within, Enemy Above, Enemy Below, and the Benevolent Conspiracy. The Enemy Outside are the “not us”– sometimes cast as the foreigners, sometimes the Elite; the Enemy Within are those in our midst, indistinguishable from “us” that turn against us, the us that we assumed they were a part of; the Enemy Above are the Elites; the Enemy Below are the marginalized groups at the fringes of “us”; and the Benevolent Conspiracy is the hidden work being done behind the scenes working to make things “better” (p.16).
Walker does a good job of providing examples, from colonial to present times (2013 being his present), of each type of myth, showing that many times there are more than one myth in play within a single conspiracy (e.g., the Enemy Below may get help from the Enemy Above—rioters getting money from a billionaire to bus others to an area to raise loot and commit arson). I won’t cover every example he offers up in each chapter (there is no way I can, he offers many), but I’ll mention a few to whet your appetite.
The Enemy Outside
According to Walker, Indians were the Enemy Outside to the colonists. An interesting take on the situation from the colonists, considering they were the people from the outside coming in. During WWI and WWII, the Enemy Outside were the Germans and Japanese, but this crossed over into the Enemy Inside. We are all aware of the interment camps Japanese families were forced into, but what about the people of German ancestry that lived in your neighborhood? During WWI, in the US, German Americans were barred from sensitive military areas (that included ports, boats, etc.), the District of Columbia, and German Americans had to get permission to travel or move (p.41). Some Germans were interred in concentration camps as well.
Here’s an anecdote from an older member, now deceased, in my family; she lived through WW I and II. Raised in Southwestern Illinois along the Mississippi River as a child of Germanic ancestry (her people had been in North America since before the Revolutionary War—Hessians—her last name was in fact Hess), she remembered when both school and church were held in German. During WWI, school was switched to English—no more German in the school. During WWII, English was adopted in her church. When I attended her funeral held in the church in which she grew up, the hymnals were in English, but beneath the English was the German translation in 8-point font.
In this section Walker gives more examples of the Enemy Outside from our past, with a most interesting tie-in with the assassination of Bin Laden and our country’s history with the Indians. Do you remember the code word to let the President know the assignment had been completed? (p.45).
The Enemy Within
Walker uses one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite short stories from this author to make his point about the Enemy Inside: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. For those of you unfamiliar with this story, please, go read it, it won’t take long and it’s absolutely haunting– and makes Walker’s point.
What happens when the Other looks, sounds and lives amongst you? You can usually spot the Other; perhaps they look different than you, they may speak a different language than you do, and most likely they hold different beliefs. But what if you can’t spot the difference; who can you trust? Walker writes that the most important aspect of the Enemy Within is that anyone could be, or become, a part of the conspiracy (p.54). It is in this section that the Salem (and other locations) Witch Trials are addressed. Walker covers the Second Great Awakening (a time of Protestant Christian religious revival), when ministers turned on one another. Shakers and Mormons are discussed in this section. Before Waco, there was the Utah War. Word got to the Feds that the Mormons were going to rebel. What to do? Send out troops to eliminate them. Didn’t work, but the Mormons ended up blaming Indians for the killing of about 120 unarmed folks passing through the area at the time.
Walker includes, rather extensively, outer space “invader” science fiction books and movies (starting p. 67) under this myth. You might think this would fall under the Enemy Outside category, wouldn’t it? If the alien gets inside of you, your neighbors, or your family, the Enemy is literally Within—they appear safe; the same person you’ve always known, but they aren’t. Many of the films were made during the Cold War era and undercurrents of communism and McCarthyism can be detected in their narratives. Walker lists off film and book titles that might be interesting to investigate after reading this book.
The Enemy Below
In 1741, several fires occurred in New York. Coincidence? Maybe, but the government at the time didn’t believe so. Word was that white tavern owners were allowing Black men to congregate at their establishments in numbers and at times that were not allowed. Supposedly they, the customers, were planning to take over New York, being aided by these white business owners. Walker writes that at least thirty black and 4 white people were executed (13 burned at the stake) for their alleged roles in the setting of the fires; more were kicked out of New York and told never to return (p.86).
The idea of poor whites helping aid a slave revolt terrified the Elite. One of the fire incidents turned out to be a robbery gone wrong; they were going to set one shop on fire after robbing it, but the fire spread. Other fires were set, but there was no evidence that it was a coordinated sequence of arsons.
The Enemy Below is an Enemy Within, but distinguishable by their position at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; not exclusively racial, but economically defined. “Poor whites were, in their way, viewed as another beast below.” (p.95).
Why fear those you consider beneath you? Because you know what you are doing to them and how you would feel if you were in their position. The Enemy Below could: 1) take over, or 2) could rage uncontrollably against you (the Elites). The Enemy Below can be linked to the Enemy Above, where the Enemy Above is the puppeteer, controlling the behavior and funding the actions of the (often considered subhuman) Enemy Below. An example of this would be northern white abolitionists, directing slave revolts against their southern white owners. A century later, the same fears showed up during the Civil Rights movement, prompting actions to place fear and anger in poor whites with threats of “empowering” their Black compatriots, but not them. This is how distrust and anger amongst the Enemy Below keeps the fighting there and not directed at the proper target, those that fuel this distrust and anger.
Walker covers similar “scares” from the Enemy Below in the guise of the Tramp Scare, the Molly Maguires, and the Red Scare (pp.102-108). The poor unemployed, the poor working class trying to establish labor unions to protect themselves, and the poor looking to another political ideology to solve society’s ills were considered by some to be conspiring to ruin the status quo.
Enemy Above
Initially for the colonies, the Enemy Above was Great Britain and what it represented; monarchical power and a state-mandated church. Even though some colonists came to escape religious persecution, there were rumors that the Anglican Church was trying to root out other Christian sects out of the colonies and establish themselves as the only church, according to John Adams (p.110). The Stamp Act of 1765, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts of 1774 were rumored to have been created, knowing that they would provoke the colonists and to give the English an excuse to crack down militarily on the colonists, as if they couldn’t do that without provocation (p.110). Thomas Jefferson said America was suffering from “a series of oppressions…” and faced “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery,” the us being the white, male landowners in the colonies. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton both believed there was a systematic plan to reduce Americans to England’s slaves (p.111). Having power (and Great Britain was the most powerful), a plan of action (the conspiracies), and the ability to put that plan into play define what the Enemy Above is, and the founding fathers believed that revolution could be justified if the injustices of a government are specifically planned to create absolute power for one person or group (Great Britain “enslaving” the colonists) (p.111).
After defeating the Enemy Above, the conspiracy theories did not end. The Society of Cincinnati, an aristocratic military order, was said to want to become a “parallel government” in each state, eventually overtaking the legislatures elected by the people (well, those that were allowed to vote). Sounds like what we refer to in our times as a “shadow government.” This is back in the 1700s (p.111).
Twenty one of the fifty-five people participating in the convention to replace the Articles of Confederation were alleged members of the Society of Cincinnati. Instead of amending, they rewrote the Articles, concentrating more power in a national government. They wanted to abolish state governments. The Constitution was to have unanimous consent, but they only received nine states’ backing. It was claimed that this was an illegal coup d’etat. The nationalists appeased the Anti-Federalists by adding a Bill of Rights. There was talk of the President becoming King. The original Enemy Above returned in the form of Adams joining his family with the Royal House of Great Britain. Conspiracies galore, some true, some not.
Walker introduces the Illuminati on page 117. We are still talking Illuminati conspiracies in 2024. Begun by Adam Weishaupt on May 1, 1776, its members were a subset of the Freemasons. The Illuminati was supposed to have officially been “shut down” in 1786; anyone caught trying to recruit new members would be killed. But there were rumors that the elite within the Illuminati were conspiring to start another group under another name. In 1798, a minister, Jedidiah Morse, said there was a global conspiracy trying to “subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government” (p.118). “They” are always coming for our churches and town halls.
Do you want to insult a politician? Imply he is a member of the Illuminati. That is just what a Connecticut Federalist called Thomas Jefferson: “the very child of modern illumination” (p.118). The Federalists and the Jeffersonians concocted all sorts of conspiracy theories against one another, dragging Napoleon, the Louisiana Purchase, and a trade embargo with the British into some of them.
Along with the Illuminati, the Masons were found in conspiracy theories of the time (p.121). An Anti-Masonic Party was formed, with John Quincy Adams joining after his presidency.
Andrew Jackson pulled the Treasury’s deposits from the country’s central bank (Second Bank of the United States) in 1833, describing the bank as a shadow state, a term used for nefarious goings on to this day. Jackson said that the bank had “ruled the Senate as a showman does his puppets” (p.124). Even the railroads were not immune from being mentioned in conspiracy theories, as they were subsidized by the government. No large institution was safe from being considered part of a conspiracy. Walker covers topic this in much more detail on pages 123-132. What it boils down to is that the Enemy Above conspires to take people’s freedom, making them the Enemy’s slaves.
Benevolent Conspiracy
I had never heard of this kind of conspiracy. To me, a conspiracy is always something underhanded and sinister. Then again, a group of people could “conspire” to plan a surprise birthday party; underhanded, I suppose, but not a sinister act. Walker does include this type of conspiracy in his five myths. These are the kind of conspiracies that plot good for the world (what the plotters consider to be good for all), as in its name, benevolent but behind the scenes.
These are the self-described “experts;” those that know more than anyone else what is best for the world, and you should be grateful to them for taking care of you. Usually they are secret societies: Order of the Quest, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Illuminati, Society of the elect, Theosophical Society, Great White Brotherhood, Inner Government of the World, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, Elder Brothers of the Rosicrucian Order, Rosicrucian Fellowship, Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, Silver Shirts, Mankind United: Sponsors vs. World’s Hidden Rulers, International Legion of Vigilantes, to name more than a few. Pretty fancy names, much more impressive than just “the Elks” or something like that. The members of these clandestine groups work their way into powerful positions in society. In one elaborate conspiracy theory (or theories) involving the Order of the Quest, the story goes that “ambassadors of the Order visited the Americas during the golden age of Greece, and their successors had kept in contact with the secret societies that governed the Indians… the order guided Christopher Columbus… to rediscover the Americas. Francis Bacon directed the English settlement of America… the order’s agents unleashed the revolution against England. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were considered members of the Order…” Members of the order we said to be able to “drop in” and “drop out” to influence events, including one that gave such a rousing speech to the men considering the Declaration of Independence that, after listening to him, they rushed to sign the document when he finished (and was never seen again) (pp.134-135). It was rumored the Order got the US through the Civil War, WWII and is still working behind the scenes. An invisible government, the good guys; not the shadow government, the bad guys. Now THAT is a conspiracy!
In my next blog post, I will cover Part 2 of Walker’s book, where he brings the conspiracy theories into the current (2013) era, and I will see if I can find any post-2013 conspiracy theories that fit his categories.