The United States of Paranoia (45 page)

23
. Valentine Rathburn, quoted in Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, “ ‘A Very Deep Design at the Bottom’: The Shaker Threat, 1780–1860,” in
Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture
, ed. Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Purdue University Press, 1999), 107.

24
. A Protestant [Calvin Colton],
Protestant Jesuitism
(Harper & Brothers, 1836), 13–14.

25
. Ibid., 35.

26
. Ibid., 30.

27
. Ibid., 16.

28
. Ibid., 107.

29
. Ibid., 111.

30
. Ibid., 132.

31
. Robert S. Levine,
Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville
(Cambridge University Press, 1989), 128. Levine also suggested that “Young Goodman Brown” was partly inspired by the Anti-Masonic movement and its “attack on aristocratic plotters,” noting that the story features “a typically Antimasonic image of the community’s religious, judicial, and political leaders leagued in secretive fraternity.” I’ll have more to say about the movement against Masonry in chapter 5. Here I’ll just note that though it’s certainly possible that Anti-Masonic imagery influenced elements of Hawthorne’s tale, the alleged conspiracy in “Young Goodman Brown” extends beyond the respectable classes; the witches’ camp meeting also includes “men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes.” The Anti-Masons of the 1820s and ’30s feared the Enemy Above. Goodman Brown’s fears were not limited to any single social class.

32
. Calvin Colton,
Thoughts on the Religious State of the Country; with Reasons for Preferring Episcopy
(Harper & Brothers, 1836), 177–78.

33
. La Roy Sunderland,
Pathetism; with Practical Instructions
(P. P. Good, 1843), 210.

34
. Pleasant Hill Ministry, quoted in Stephen J. Stein,
The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers
(Yale University Press, 1994), 98.

35
. The Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 3:9, Helaman 6:26–29.

36
. For a discussion of the Gadianton robbers in Mormon folklore, see W. Paul Revere, “ ‘As Ugly as Evil,’ and ‘As Wicked as Hell’: Gadianton Robbers and the Legend Process Among the Mormons,” in
Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore
, ed. W. Paul Revere and Michael Scott Van Wagenen (Utah State University Press, 2011), 40–65.

37
. David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
, September 1960.

38
.
Female Life Among the Mormons; A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience
(J. C. Derby, 1855), 47. The title page attributes the book to “The Wife of a Mormon Elder, Recently from Utah,” but the narrator identifies herself as Maria Ward in the text. Some scholars have suggested that Ward was a pseudonym for Cornelia Ferris, whose (non-Mormon) husband worked for Utah’s territorial government. Whether or not that’s true, the book is clearly fiction.

39
. John C. Bennett,
The History of the Saints; or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism
(Leland & Whiting, 1842), 223.

40
. Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion.”

41
. Harrington O’Reilly [and John Young Nelson],
Fifty Years on the Trail: A True Story of Western Life
(Chatto & Windus, 1889), 180.

42
. Mark Twain,
Roughing It
(American Publishing Company, 1873), 106.

43
. The most telling attack on the Mormons’ economic enterprises came from New England, not Idaho. Writing in the 1880s, Samuel Porter Putnam complained that the “Mormons are money-getters, like the Jews.” Quoted in Dyer D. Lum, “Mormon Co-Operation,”
Liberty
, July 3, 1886.

44
. Recall that Wovoka studied both the Mormons and the Shakers before he revived the Ghost Dance. Outsiders observed the two sects’ influence on him, and conspiratorial speculation predictably followed. Catherine Weldon, an Indian rights advocate who didn’t approve of the Ghost Dance, claimed that “the Mormons are at the bottom of it all & misuse the credulity of the Indians for their own purposes.” Quoted in Rex Alan Smith,
Moon at Popping Trees
(University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 110.

45
. Zane Grey,
Riders of the Purple Sage
(Grosset & Dunlap, 1912), 310.

46
. Ibid., 26.

47
. Ibid., 160–62.

48
. Ibid., 172.

49
. Ibid., 174.

50
. Don Siegel,
A Siegel Film: An Autobiography
(Faber and Faber, 1993), 178.

51
.
It Came from Outer Space
, directed by Jack Arnold, screenplay by Harry Essex, from a story by Ray Bradbury, Universal Studios, 1953. Sources differ as to how much of a role Ray Bradbury played in writing the movie. The film was produced by William Alland, who earlier had acted in Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds.”

52
. Harl Vincent, “Parasite,”
Amazing Stories
, July 1935.

53
. Campbell’s novella was the basis of Howard Hawks’s 1951 film
The Thing from Another World
, which removed the body-snatching element of the plot but maintained the atmosphere of paranoia. The theme of imposture was restored in the second movie to be based on the story, John Carpenter’s
The Thing
(1982). For a clever reimagining of the scenario from the alien’s point of view, see Peter Watts, “The Things,” January 2010, clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10.

54
.
The Puppet Masters
, in keeping with its Enemy Outside leanings, does end with the hero preparing to battle the invaders at their home base on Titan. In Britain, meanwhile, the sequel to
Quatermass II
—the six-part serial
Quatermass and the Pit
(1958–59)—features a mind-controlling Satanic alien that has been lying dormant beneath the earth.

55
.
Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Third Congress, Second Session, Pursuant to S. 190
(United States Government Printing Office, 1954), 93.

56
. Vance Packard,
The Hidden Persuaders
(Ig Publishing, 2007 [1957]), 32. Packard was a former staffer at
Collier’s
, the same magazine that serialized Jack Finney’s
The Body Snatchers
.

57
. Ibid., 33.

58
. Ibid., 219–20.

59
. That worldview was widespread not just among the critics of advertising but also among the admen themselves, many of whom “contemplated the rise of the modern mass man with fear and contempt,” according to the historian Roland Marchand. Advertisers were aware that this fear and this contempt were also becoming prevalent in the larger society, and they found ways to exploit both. As early as the 1930s, as pitchmen recognized “a rising public fear of submergence in mass conformity,” ads “frequently appealed to this concern by advertising products on the strength of their capacity to lift the individual out of the crowd.” Roland Marchand,
Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940
(University of California Press, 1985), 268–69.

60
.
The Whip Hand
, directed by William Cameron Menzies, screenplay by George Bricker and Frank L. Moss, from a story by Roy Hamilton, RKO, 1951. Menzies’s next credit would be the aforementioned
Invaders from Mars
.

61
. Thomas Doherty,
Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture
(Columbia University Press, 2003), 146–47. Philbrick was played by Richard Carlson, who was also the lead in
It Came from Outer Space
.

62
. Ibid., 146.

63
. On the 1950s fear of brainwashing and its influence on Condon’s book, see Louis Menand, “Brainwashed,”
The New Yorker
, September 15, 2003. As Menand pointed out, American observers exaggerated the brainwashers’ power: “the former prisoners who had come home praising the good life to be had in North Korea soon reverted to American views.”

64
. Richard Condon,
The Manchurian Candidate
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004 [1959]), 32. This edition of Condon’s book reprints Menand’s essay as an introduction.

65
. Ibid., 41.

66
. Richard H. Rovere,
Senator Joe McCarthy
(University of California Press, 1996 [1959]), 51.

67
. Kerouac’s views on McCarthy are discussed, with different degrees of sympathy, in Dennis McNally,
Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America
(Da Capo Press, 2003 [1979]), 185–86; Bill Kauffman,
America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics
(Prometheus Books, 1995), 172; and Barry Miles,
Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats
(
Virgin
Books, 2010 [1998]), 239. To see Burroughs praising Pegler, read William S. Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg, December 24, 1949, in
The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959
, ed. Oliver
Harris
(Penguin Books, 1993), 57.

68
. See Leo Ribuffo,
The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War
(Temple University Press, 1983). The term
Brown Scare
is also sometimes used to describe fears of Mexican subversion. The historian Ricardo Romo attached the phrase to an anti-Chicano crusade of the 1910s that “developed peculiar dimensions on the West Coast,” including fear of “a revolution which would claim the entire American Southwest for Mexico.” Ricardo Romo,
East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio
(University of Texas Press, 1983), 90.

69
. Erich Fromm,
Escape from Freedom
(Avon Books, 1969 [1941]), 266–67.

70
. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,”
The Twilight Zone
, CBS, March 4, 1960.

71
. Even as the fear of the herd mind was riding high in the 1950s and early ’60s, social scientists were doing research that undercut the idea that mass panic was a common response to disaster. Much of their work was funded by the Pentagon, which was worried about how the public would act in a nuclear war and was surprised by the conclusions that E. L. Quarantelli, Charles Fritz, and other sociologists reached.

72
. Erich Neumann,
Depth Psychology and a New Ethic
, trans. Eugene Rolfe (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 52. (First published in German in 1949.)

73
. Gore Vidal,
The City and the Pillar
, 2nd ed. (New American Library, 1965), 158. Vidal was not the first writer to compare homosexuality to freemasonry: Richard Burton and Marcel Proust, among others, had used the same metaphor.

74
. R. G. Waldeck, “Homosexual International,”
Human Events
, April 16, 1952.

75
.
Congressional Record
, May 1, 1952.

76
. Quoted in David K. Johnson,
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
(University of Chicago Press, 2004), 112.

77
. Ibid., 76. The Lavender Scare rebounded on some of the McCarthyists as well, eventually grazing against Joseph McCarthy himself. See
Andrea
Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,”
American Quarterly
57, no. 4 (December 2005).

78
. Johnson,
The Lavender Scare
, 183–84.

79
. Quoted ibid., 187.

80
. Ibid., 188.

81
. Harry R. Jackson, Jr., quoted in Van Smith, “Holy War,”
City Paper
(Baltimore), October 3, 2012.

82
. Quoted ibid.

Chapter 4: The Beast Below

  1
. Bertram Wyatt-Brown,
Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South
, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2007), 413.

  2
. The North River is now known as the Hudson River.

  3
. Quoted in Daniel Horsmanden,
A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America and Murdering the Inhabitants
(John Clarke, 1747), 100. The first printing of Horsmanden’s book appeared in 1744.

  4
. Quoted ibid., 26.

  5
. Quoted ibid., 14. In the text, “goddamn” is rendered as “–damn.”

  6
. Quoted ibid., 16.

  7
. For a detailed accounting of the accused and their fates, see Jill Lepore,
New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 248–59.

  8
. “Great Newes from the Barbadoes” (1676), in
Versions of Blackness: ‘Oroonoko,’ Race, and Slavery
, ed. Derek Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 341. Jill Lepore has argued that the Barbados conspiracy charges were an early example of what the English thought “a slave plot looked like,” with elements of the story reappearing in subsequent crackdowns through the years. “In Barbados in 1676,” she wrote, “slave rebels sent signals using trumpets made of elephant tusks; in Antigua in 1736, dancing plotters swished an elephant tail. The New York confessions seem so formulaic that, if pachyderm tusks and tails were plausibly to be had on the banks of the Hudson, they might have made an appearance in John Hughson’s tavern,” if not in fact then at least in the accusers’ imagination. Lepore,
New York Burning
, 10–11.