The United States of Paranoia (13 page)

Murrell really was a criminal, even if he didn’t hold court like the King of the Elves in a hidden hollow in the woods; and he really did have an organization, even if Twain exaggerated the size and loyalty of its membership. In 1834, an independent investigator, Virgil Stewart, infiltrated Murrell’s gang and helped capture its chief, who was subsequently convicted of slave stealing and sentenced to ten years in prison. Someone called Augustus Q. Walton—probably a pseudonym for Stewart—then wrote a book laying out the secrets Stewart had supposedly uncovered as a member of the Mystic Clan. By Walton’s wild account, Murrell had agents everywhere from Maryland to Texas and they had been stirring discontent among the slaves. The grand plan, the bandit had allegedly told Stewart, was to strike the South with a great Christmas rebellion at the end of 1835:

We design having our companies so stationed over the country, in the vicinity of the banks and the large cities, that when the negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments to fire the towns, and rob the banks, while all is confusion and dismay. The rebellion taking place every where at the same time, every part of the country will be engaged in its own defence; and one part of the country can afford no relief to another, until many places will be entirely overrun by the negroes, and our pockets replenished from the banks, and the desks of rich merchants’ houses. . . .

We find the most vicious and wicked disposed ones, on large farms: and poison their minds by telling them how they are mistreated, and that they are entitled to their freedom as much as their masters, and that all the wealth of the country is the proceeds of the black people’s labor; we remind them of the pomp and splendor of their masters, and then refer them to their own degraded situation, and tell them that it is power and tyranny which rivets their chains of bondage, and not because they are an inferior race of people. We tell them that all Europe has abandoned slavery, and that the West Indies are all free; and that they got their freedom by rebelling a few times and slaughtering the whites, and convince them, that if they will follow the example of the West India negroes, that they will obtain their liberty, and become as much respected as if they were white, and that they can marry white women when they are all put on a level.
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It was the perfect story for nervous whites, particularly so soon after Nat Turner’s rebellion. It presented disgruntled slaves as the puppets of rapacious white people, abolitionism as a cynical tool for manipulating the field hands. And of course it included the traditional threat to white womanhood.

The book was a sensation. Even though Murrell was now in prison, fears of a coming uprising started to spread. They caught fire in June, when some slaves in Madison County, Mississippi, were overheard grumbling about their lot. Worried whites seized the suspects, and under torture the prisoners told their captors what they wanted to hear: On July 4, under cover of celebrating Independence Day, the slaves would gather together to attack the whites.

Vigilantes promptly lynched the captives, then went searching for the rest of the conspiracy. An alleged member of the Murrell gang was compelled to confess that the plot was real, explaining that it had been moved from Christmas to Independence Day because Walton’s book had blown their cover. He also laid out more details of the purported plan, which were then reported in the Clinton
Gazette
: After launching the rebellion in remote Madison County, the slaves and gangsters intended “to proceed thence, through the principal towns to Natchez, and then on to New Orleans—murdering all the white men and ugly women—sparing the handsome ones and making wives of them—and plundering and burning as they went.”
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To prevent this reenactment of the Manhattan plot, nervous whites reenacted the Manhattan crackdown, lynching dozens.
34
For years afterward, Americans along the Mississippi attributed all kinds of crimes to the Mystic Clan.

Long after slavery was abolished, the outside agitator stirring up rebellions would be a key villain in southern white demonology. During Reconstruction, conservatives claimed that northern carpetbaggers were conspiring to empower the newly freed slaves at the expense of ordinary whites. (Such fears fed the rise of a real conspiratorial secret society, the Ku Klux Klan.) A century later, southern leaders were telling the same stories about the civil rights movement.

Haiti made another contribution to the idea of the Enemy Below in the early twentieth century, when a distorted version of a voodoo legend started shambling into American pop culture. The
zombie
was a human body that no longer contained a human mind. A zombie was in the deepest trance possible, a creature completely subservient to its master’s will; it was also a violent subhuman threat.
35

Early zombie stories stressed the power of the monsters’ masters. There is a scene in Victor Halperin’s 1932 film
White Zombie
where a white man’s mill is run entirely by a black zombie workforce; the sequence was enough for a later critic to declare forthrightly that “Zombies are black slaves.”
36
Later zombie pictures, from George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
(1968) on, usually dropped the master from the equation. These movies’ monsters are appetites on autopilot, released from all control—cannibal corpses devouring everyone in sight. The idea of the Enemy Below rests on two great fears: that a subversive force could somehow step into the role of the mesmerizing master, and that the master might disappear altogether, transforming zombie slaves into an unrestrainable zombie rampage.
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D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
(1915), an enormously influential movie set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, exalts the Klan and denounces northern carpetbaggers. It climaxes with a mob of former slaves attacking whites who have holed up in a cabin. If you’ve seen Romero’s zombie movies, you’ve seen an afterimage of the cabin scene: In Griffith’s eyes, the black figures outside that little house are the Living Dead, their monstrous arms reaching through the doors and windows while our heroes try desperately to fend them off. (In
Night of the Living Dead
, Romero subverts that subtext: His hero is black; his zombies are white.)

As wild as these stories could get, there were two kernels of truth to them. Angry African Americans did resist white supremacy, and they did have Caucasian allies in the North, both in the battle against slavery and in the battle against segregation. The myth of the Enemy Below distorted their dissent into something feral and demonic, and the myth of the Enemy Outside gave whites credit for a movement launched and led by blacks. But the threat to the racial power structure was real, even if the tales told about the threat were drenched in fantasy.

You didn’t have to be black to be cast as the Enemy Below. In the 1870s, while a six-year depression ravaged the country, a Tramp Scare swept the press, as papers filled their columns with accounts of crimes by unemployed wanderers. Some of the stories strained the reader’s credulity, and even the plausible ones were often soaked in fearmongering rhetoric. A typical report, published in the New York
World
, listed a series of unconnected “outrages by tramps”—a burglary in one town, a stickup in another—culminating with the comment that a “number of fires have occurred within the past two weeks, presumably set by tramps.”
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(Presumably!) Later that month, after some hoboes were shot while resisting arrest, the same paper called the killings a “partial solution of the tramp question”; “some more shooting,” it suggested, “might be wholesome for the community.”
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In the academic world, Yale Law School dean Francis Wayland wrote a paper describing the tramp as “a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.”
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Several states passed antitramp statutes, which allowed the authorities to arrest and imprison vagabonds essentially at will.

As is often the case with moral panics, conspiracy theories followed. In 1878 Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York and former Democratic presidential nominee, argued in
Harper’s
that vagabonds were “rapidly gaining a kind of organization” that was “growing into a system of brigandage” with “systems of communication and intercourse, which are made more perfect each year.”
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A Texas paper informed its readers that undercover Massachusetts detectives had discovered a “perfectly organized brotherhood” in which “each tramp has a special duty assigned to him. Some of them beg and some of them steal, and they are even instructed what to steal and whom to steal it from.”
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While the army of tramps crisscrossed the country, a more settled Enemy Below was haunting the Pennsylvania coal country. When mine owners, foremen, and superintendents started turning up dead in the 1860s and ’70s, word spread that they’d been killed by a secret society of Irish-American workers called the Molly Maguires. Back in Ireland, the story went, the Molly men would dress as women, blacken their faces, and assassinate the landlords’ agents and other enemies. In the United States the Irish continued to conspire against the social order, applying blackface and murdering men in the night. There were thousands of Molly terrorists, with lodges that held their conclaves in Irish saloons. Or so said the local authorities, who convicted twenty miners of murder after James McParlan of the Pinkerton Detective Agency testified that he had infiltrated the Mollies and learned their secrets.

No one doubts that the area’s Irish laborers sometimes beat and even killed people perceived as enemies of their communities. There is considerable doubt, on the other hand, about the tale of a far-reaching Molly conspiracy, a story that relies heavily on the word of a detective who was never a neutral party. There has also been a reaction against any history of the coal industry that stresses workers’ violence while playing down the considerable violence brought down on the miners, including vigilante killings of suspected Molly Maguires.

The war between the Mollies and the Pinkertons is usually framed as a battle between workers and employers: The Pinkertons were brought in by the president of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company, and one of the crackdown’s goals was to prevent
any
sort of labor organizing, not just the kind that ended with a foreman dead.
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But the tale of Molly terrorism reflected ethnic enmity as well as class conflict. As early as the 1850s, the historian Kevin Kenny noted, “the term
Molly Maguires
was being used in the anthracite region as a synonym for Irish social depravity.”
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The authorities attempted to link the Mollies not just to the budding union movement but to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish fraternal association that McParlan believed was a Molly front.

That didn’t make the Mollies an Enemy Outside. Just as slave conspiracies were not believed to be based in Africa, the Mollies were not, by and large, accused of being manipulated from abroad. While other Irish immigrants were denounced as pawns of the pope, prosecutor Franklin B. Gowen, an Irish Protestant, struck a different note during the Molly trial, pointing out that the Vatican had condemned the Maguires and calling on his ethnic brethren to reject the Maguires as “not true Irishmen.”
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Think of it as the paranoid underside of assimilation: As the Irish became American, alleged Irish conspiracies evolved from a foreign to a domestic threat, from an Enemy Outside to an Enemy Below.