by the wide circulation given in the 1920s to Victor Marsden’s English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose contents were disseminated in the United States through Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. The Protocols purports to be the transcripts of speeches given to an assembly of Jewish “Elders” who collectively conspire to rule the world. It takes the form of twenty-four brief addresses that explain the techniques Jews and their Masonic allies will employ to subvert governments and institutions. As journalists and scholars quickly discovered, it was plagiarized from two sources: Maurice Joly’s A Dialogue in Hell: Conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu about Power and Right, a polemic directed against Napoleon III and having nothing to do with Jews; and an anti-Semitic novel, Biarritz, by “Sir John Retcliffe” (aka Hermann Goedsche).21
After World War II, however, the situation had seemingly changed. The Protocols had long been discredited as a forgery, anti-Semitism had begun what was to be a long and steady decline, and the fixation on the origins of the Russian Revolution, so strong in the interwar period, gave way to the predictable mutual hostilities of the Cold War. Indeed, one may speculate that this combination of factors explains the manner in which Hofstadter treated the Illuminati literature. Writing in the depths of the Cold War and preoccupied with the Red Scare of the 1950s, he treated the Illuminati literature not as a living part of American mythology but as an artifact of the early nineteenth century, interesting largely as a precursor of the paranoid political style. If Hofstadter was aware of the links among Webster, Queenborough, and Winrod, he chose not to mention them.
In fact, Illuminism was of more than merely antiquarian interest, for the American right was on the threshold of an Illuminati explosion. Much of the stimulus for this renewed interest came from the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch in 1958. Welch himself picked up the strands of Robison’s argument even as Hofstadter was writing in 1964, and it remained a staple of the society’s view of history after Welch’s death.22
A recent systematic statement of Birch Society conspiracy theory blends traditional sources—Barruel and Robison—with modern scholarship on the Illuminati. It dismisses the supposed suppression of the order as meaningless, contending that it was soon transplanted to both the United States and other parts of Europe, where it gave rise to the Communist Manifesto and the revolts of 1848. The Birchite retelling attributes to the Illuminati the creation of movements as varied as “the Marxian and ‘utopian’ socialist movements; anarchism; syndicalism; Pan Slavism; Irish, Italian and German ‘Nationalism’; German Imperialism; the Paris Commune; British ‘New Imperialism’; Fabian Socialism; and Leninist Bolshevism.”23
Contemporary Illuminati Literature
The post-1965 Illuminati literature became so vast that only a sampling can be discussed here, drawn from both secular and religious sources. Larry Abraham’s Call It Conspiracy, first published in 1971, claims to expose a conspiracy of “Insiders” bent on world domination: “After the Insiders have established the United Socialist States of America (in fact if not in name), the next step is the Great Merger of all nations of the world into a dictatorial world government.” Although his roster of Insiders is drawn from the usual reservoir—the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission—their roots are claimed to be in the late-eighteenth century Illuminati: “The role of Weishaupt’s Illuminists in such horrors as the Reign of Terror is unquestioned, and the techniques of the Illuminati have long been recognized as models for Communist methodology.”24
While Abraham avoids the overt anti-Semitism of Webster and Queenborough, he treads perilously close to an anti-Semitic theory of history, in which Jews sit at the center of a conspiratorial web. “Anti-Semites,” he claims, “have played into the hands of the conspiracy by trying to portray the entire conspiracy as Jewish. Nothing could be farther from the truth.” Nonetheless, he places the Rothschilds at the conspiracy’s heart, and calls the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith an instrument created by “the Jewish members of the conspiracy” to “stifle . . . almost all honest scholarship on international bankers” through “highly professional smear jobs.” The Rothschild family established banks in Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, and London. Their prominence as international bankers peaked in the early nineteenth century and waned thereafter as national governments became increasingly adept at raising funds without recourse to private bankers. Nonetheless, the specter of Rothschild power continued to grow even as the family’s real influence declined. Although this type of speculation was widespread throughout anti-Semitic circles in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was notably strong in the United States, where radicals of every stripe seemed obsessed by financial conspiracies. The Rothschilds, who combined Jewishness, banking, and international ties, presented an attractive target.25
A more openly anti-Semitic version of Illuminati theory came in 1984 from the pen of Eustace Mullins, a protégé of Ezra Pound. Like his mentor, Mullins sees the world’s evil as a product of financial manipulation, in which Jews play a central role. But as an explanation of world, as opposed to modern, history, his conspiracist vision makes the Illuminati merely a link in a much longer chain that extends back to the ancient Near East and forward to the nascent communist movement of the early Marx. Weishaupt himself is portrayed as a mere figurehead. As Queenborough and Winrod had claimed half a century earlier, Mullins sees the Illuminati as really run by Jews, in this case a Jewish banker who worked for the Illuminati’s “corresponding branch in Italy.”26
A slightly different set of emphases informed William T. Still’s 1990 book, New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies. Here, too, the link between the Illuminati and the Rothschilds is of prime importance. By the time Weishaupt and his key followers were forced to flee Bavaria, “the Illuminati had taken root among the rich and powerful of Europe, including, possibly, the wealthiest of all, the first international bankers and railway kings, the German brothers Rothschild.” Weishaupt’s infiltration of the Masonic movement, together with the Rothschilds’ money, made possible the manipulation of the French Revolution. But Still parts company with many earlier writers in concentrating on Masonry as the key to understanding the conspiracy’s reach. Jewish bankers may supply the conspiracy’s capital, but its camouflage comes from its control of the Masonic movement. Nevertheless, Still is willing to concede that in the twentieth century, the plotters have found alternative homes in such organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations.27
Religious concerns hover in the background of much recent Illuminati literature; the Illuminatists’ deism tends to be regarded as anti-Christian agitation if not outright satanism. In the majority of the literature, the alleged Illuminatist attack on revealed religion is a secondary motif, but in the works of Texe Marrs and Pat Robertson, it emerges as the central theme.
Unlike almost all others who have written about the Illuminati, Texe Marrs detaches the idea from any historic roots. While deeply suspicious and fearful of Masonry, Marrs, a Texas-based evangelist, has no particular interest in Weishaupt, whom he barely mentions, or in the actual Illuminati order. Instead, the Illuminati becomes an umbrella category under which he can subsume everything from the Knights of Malta and Skull and Bones to the Aspen Institute and the Trilateral Commission: “All of these groups—and many more which we will expose—are part of one gigantic, unified, global network known collectively as the Secret Brotherhood. In the past they have also been identified as the Illuminati.” Although its members are anti-Christian, their demonic religion is itself part of God’s plan, a sign of the nearness of the millennial end-times. “The unseen men who rule the world are determined to bring in their New World Order by the magical year 2000—the advent of a New Millennium.” The chaos this portends “will fulfill Bible prophecy, for our Lord warned us the time would come when the very denizens of hell would lash out and attempt to destroy God’s people.” The Illuminati, by whatever name, are none other than the beast of the Book of Revelation.28
No work on the Illuminati published in recent decades—whether secular or religious—has matched the influence of Pat Robertson’s The New
