dates in parentheses at the end of the citation refer to the dates I viewed the pages.
In the course of this research, I have incurred many institutional and intellectual debts. If they cannot be fully repaid, they can at least be gratefully acknowledged. My own institution, the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, provided a timely research leave, as well as support through the Appleby-Mosher Fund. A number of libraries and repositories generously provided access to their materials. I am particularly appreciative of the courtesies extended to me by the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University; the Alternative Press collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society; the American Religions collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Library; the Millennium Archive at the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania; the Anti-Defamation League; and the Library of Congress.
I had the opportunity of presenting preliminary versions of some of the ideas in this book before audiences of colleagues, which gave me the chance both to shape inchoate ideas and to modify them in light of the listeners’ comments. Much of the material on the Illuminati in chapter 3 was first presented at a conference titled “Millenarianism and Revolution,” organized by Richard H. Popkin at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA in 1998. The examination of “inner earth” ideas in chapter 7 was facilitated by an invitation from Mary N. MacDonald to participate in a 2000 lecture series called “Experiences of Place and the History of Religions,” at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. An opportunity to discuss the role of nativism in conspiracy theory was afforded when Richard Landes asked me to deliver the keynote address at the 1999 International Conference on Millennialism at Boston University. In similar fashion, I was able to develop ideas about the movement of fringe ideas into the mainstream at a conference, “American Apocalypse: Beyond the Fringe and Back to the Center,” held in 1999 at the University of Pennsylvania to mark the opening of the Millennium Archive collected by Ted Daniels.
Many individuals have graciously given their time to read manuscripts, provide materials, answer queries, and otherwise be of assistance. They have also saved me from numerous errors of omission and commission, and I am responsible for any that remain. Joscelyn Godwin, at neighboring Colgate University, shared his knowledge of esotericism, as Chip Berlet did his equally formidable command of American conspiracism. Vance Pollock responded patiently to numerous queries about William Dudley Pelley. Brad Whitsel, of Pennsylvania State University, Fayette, was an important source of “inner earth” material. Sue Lewis and Candy Brooks provided valuable assistance in manuscript preparation. I am also grateful to Matthew Kalman, Philip Lamy, Mark Pitcavage, Jeffrey Kaplan, and Charles Strozier. And, of course, my debt to Janet, my wife, for her unfailing love and support is beyond measure.
1
The Nature of Conspiracy Belief
On January 20, 2002, Richard McCaslin, thirty-seven, of Carson City, Nevada, was arrested sneaking into the Bohemian Grove in northern California. The Grove is the site of an exclusive annual men’s retreat attended by powerful business and political leaders. When McCaslin was discovered, he was carrying a combination shotgun–assault rifle, a .45-caliber pistol, a crossbow, a knife, a sword, and a bomb-launching device. He said he was acting alone.
McCaslin told police he had entered the Bohemian Grove in order to expose the satanic human sacrifices he believed occurred there. He fully expected to meet resistance and to kill people in the process. He had developed his belief in the Grove’s human sacrifices based on the claims of a radio personality, Alex Jones, whose broadcasts and Web site present alleged evidence of ritual killings there. Similar charges against the Bohemian Grove—along with allegations of blood drinking and sexual perversions—have been spread for several years on the Web and in fringe publications, some of which also suggest that the Grove’s guests include nonhuman species masquerading as human beings. These and similar tales would be cause for little more than amusement were it not for individuals like McCaslin, who take them seriously enough to risk killing and being killed.1
They also form part of a conspiracist subculture that has become more visible since September 11, 2001. Immediately after the terrorist attacks, strange reports burgeoned on the Internet, many of which never migrated to mainstream news outlets. Among them were that Nostradamus had foretold the attacks; that a UFO had appeared near one of the World Trade Center towers just as a plane crashed into it; that the attacks had been planned by a secret society called the Illuminati; that U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had advance knowledge of the attacks; and that the attacks signaled the coming of the millennial end-times prophesied in the Bible.
On one level, such ideas might be attributed simply to the anxieties of a deeply shaken people, desperate to make sense of the shocking events. On another level, however, these and similar beliefs alert us to the existence of significant subcultures far outside the mainstream. Surfacing in times of crisis and bound up with heterodox religion, occult and esoteric beliefs, radical politics, and fringe science, they have had a long-standing and sometimes potent influence in American life. It is with these beliefs—which in chapter 2 I refer to as stigmatized knowledge—that I am concerned. Binding these disparate subjects together is the common thread of conspiracism—the belief that powerful, hidden, evil forces control human destinies.
“Trust no one” was one of the mantras repeated on The X-Files, and it neatly encapsulates the conspiracist’s limitless suspicions. Its association with a popular end-of-the-millennium television program is a measure of how prevalent conspiracy thinking has become. Indeed, the period since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has seen the rise of a veritable cottage industry of conspiracism, with ever more complex plots and devious forces behind it.
Although much of this mushrooming can be traced to the traumatic effect of specific events, that seems an insufficient explanation on its own. Conspiracist preoccupations have grown too luxuriantly to be fully explained even by events as shocking as the Kennedy assassination or the rapid spread of AIDS. Rather, they suggest an obsessive concern with the magnitude of hidden evil powers, and it is perhaps no surprise that such a concern should manifest as a millennium was coming to a close and the culture was rife with apocalyptic anxiety.
Belief in conspiracies is central to millennialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. That is scarcely unexpected—millennialist worldviews have always predisposed their adherents to conspiracy beliefs. Such worldviews may be characterized as Manichaean, in the sense that they cast the world in terms of a struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, and hold that this polarization will persist until the end of history, when evil is finally, definitively defeated.
To be sure, one can believe in a struggle between good and evil without believing in conspiracies. In such a scenario, evil would operate openly—a picture often drawn by millenarian preachers when they point to widespread manifestations of greed, unbridled sexuality, or hostility to religion. But millennialists tend to gravitate toward conspiracism for two specific reasons. First, a millenarian movement without a mass following finds hidden evil an attractive way to explain its lack of popularity. Surely the masses would believe if only they knew what the concealed malefactors were up to. Second, the more elusive the end-times are, the more tempting it is to blame their delay on secret evil powers, whether in the form of a capitalist conspiracy or of the minions of Satan. Conspiracism explains failure, both for organizations and for the larger world. Yet significant though conspiracy is for millenarians, it is a slippery concept.
DEFINING CONSPIRACY
Despite the frequency with which conspiracy beliefs have been discussed at the end of the second millennium, the term conspiracy itself has often been left undefined, as though its meaning were self-evident. Courts and legislatures have devoted considerable attention to defining a crime of conspiracy, but the meaning of the broader concept has rarely been addressed.
The
