The Enemy Within Page 28
So the trail of witch-hunting peters out. Or does it? In fact, the term—the metaphor—has survived to the present day. All sorts of human imbroglios may now be characterized as witch-hunts. Political “Red Scares” come quickly to mind. But other more localized, even private, events are also described thus. Police investigations, corporate restructurings, projects to reconstitute schools, churches, and civic organizations, family struggles: the list goes on and on. The metaphor comes easily—perhaps too easily—as a mode (most often) of moral reproach. Wherever appears some allegation of subversive intent, of conspiratorial menace, of concealed betrayal—just there the “witch-hunt” label may be directly affixed.
Is there a genuine continuity between the witch-hunts of the pre-modern era and their supposed equivalents in more recent times? Are some parts of the metaphor, as it is commonly used nowadays, more apt than others? And does this usage help us to understand— perhaps even to combat—certain darker tendencies in our own social and political system? Such questions can serve to frame a highly compressed and selective tour d’horison of American history since the mid-18th century. Along the way, six separate episodes will be spotlighted for particular attention. Each will be summarized and measured against the profile of traditional witch-hunting. Our spotlight will also touch broader themes and tendencies that, while lacking any sharp episodic focus, appear to reflect the same basic mentality.
If the beginnings of modern science helped erode the conceptual basis of witchcraft, they also ironically produced a rise in what might be called “paranoid thinking.” As one historian has written, “the century or so following the Restoration [of the British monarchy, in 1660] was the great era of conspiratorial fears.” In all parts of the Anglo-American world, public affairs were increasingly understood in terms of “plots” and “designs,” “cabals” and “schemes,” intrigue and hidden intent. This tendency cannot be explained as individual pathology, for its prevalence was virtually society-wide. The best historical accounts attribute it to a convergence of social change (the early growth of the market economy, a rapid process of political mobilization) and the cultural impact of the Enlightenment. As the natural sciences began to assume their modern importance, life in many sectors became progressively demystified—with increasing emphasis on chains of very specific cause-and-effect linkage. Some of these belonged to the realm of nature, but many others embraced human purpose and action. In effect, a space had opened up on the landscape of experience, to be filled (at least in part) by the agency of particular men and women: he/she/they have planned, and caused, these particular events, not “Providence,” or fate, or other cosmic forces. This relatively novel concept was especially conducive to a focus on conspiracy; the difficulties we face have been craftily, secretly, wickedly plotted by our enemies.
Such was the case, for example, with the political movement leading up to the American Revolution. Patriot leaders stressed a darkening “scheme” against their traditional liberties—even, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” Still, there would be no witch-hunt, actual or metaphorical, as a result. A considerable number of Loyalists—people who rejected the move toward independence—were forced to flee their homes in the colonies, and some were subjected to cruel persecution. Yet many others hung on where they were and managed well enough. Loyalists were cast as individual opponents, no more and no less; they were not demonized as a group. Fears of dire conspiracy pointed overseas toward the British parliament and king. With real, massively consequential, combat under way—with soldiers in the field, including such “demonic” foes as regiments of foreign Hessians—there was little motive to focus on enemies within the patriot community itself. Both now and later on, countersubversive activity would follow—not coincide with—direct experience of warfare.
The Bavarian Illuminati (1798-99)
Revolutionary-era anxiety did help open a way for the first of the many political and social “scares” that would dot the later course of American history: the so-called Bavarian Illuminati crisis of the late 1790s. As with other such events to come, its alleged source lay far from American shores. Some two decades earlier in Bavaria, at the University of Ingolstadt, a small group of “enlightened” reformers had organized themselves as a “society” to counter religious (mostly Jesuit) influence in educational life. Because they maintained a protective shield of secrecy, little is known of their actual doings. But their adversaries would soon identify them as a deeply threatening element—opposed to all religious and governmental authority, espousing “Epicurean” values and the pursuit of “sensual pleasures,” and aiming for a wholesale transformation of conventional social arrangements. Though quickly suppressed at its German points of origin, the Society of Illuminati was thought to have spread its malignant cells through other parts of Europe, and to have directly inspired the most shocking excesses of the French Revolution.
Inevitably, its reputation crossed the ocean to America in a series of published exposés. An initial cry of alarm was raised in May 1798, on a national fast day, when a prominent Massachusetts minister, Reverend Jedediah Morse, preached against the imminent threat of “Illuminism.” According to Morse, “We have in truth secret enemies . . . scattered through our country whose professed design is to subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government.” Indeed, he claimed to have identified one specific group of Illuminati in Virginia (through “an official, authenticated list” of members) and another in New York; from these, he declared, “have sprung fourteen others scattered we know not where over the United States.” Morse’s sermon was published and widely distributed, and then inspired additional sermons, commencement addresses, holiday orations, and newspaper editorials. These, in turn, would disseminate a virtual catalogue of (alleged) Illuminist horrors: espionage, plots against civic order, incitement to class hatred, an “end justifies the means” philosophy, and personal “vices of the most gross, savage, and monstrous complexion”—all shrouded behind elaborate efforts of concealment.
The wider context was a growing sense of peril in American relations with France and a deep revulsion against the “radical” course of the ongoing Revolution there. Conflict between American and French vessels at sea had become endemic; full-scale warfare seemed more and more likely. If it came to that, an internal conspiracy linked to the enemy would be insupportable. Even without war, Illuminism posed a grave threat; having already poisoned one republic, it might easily do the same to another.
To be sure, there was more shadow than substance in these dangers. No actual conspirators were ever accused, Reverend Morse’s “authenticated list” notwithstanding. But the Illuminist scare did serve, in conjunction with other forces, to create at least a small group of victims. In 1798, Congress passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which (among other things) criminalized certain forms of writing and speech about the government or its officers. These laws led to 15 indictments and 10 convictions of offending editors and publishers, at least some of whom would serve time in jail. Fears of the Illuminati helped create the atmosphere in which such actions could be organized and sustained.
Was it a witch-hunt? In many ways it does carry that flavor. Consider: Illuminism was, first and last, imagined as a conspiracy: dark and dire, and hidden behind a veil of secrecy; vast in scope, encompassing both Europe and America; with a fundamental aim to undermine—or even to reverse, in direct counterpoint—all that right-thinking folk would regard as good and true; proceeding through nefarious, covert methods, and thus liable to become a kind of unwitting contagion; creating high stakes around the outcome, if not a threat of apocalypse. All these elements evoke the paradigm of traditional witch-hunting. And even if Satan was not directly implicated (not much anyway), the aspect of moral inversion goes strongly in that direction; religious orthodoxy was heavily mobilized, with clergy playing a leading role. Also pointing in the same direction was the underlying emotional charge: deep anxiet
y, recurrent distress, horrified outrage.
Yet the fit is not a perfect one. If most witch-hunts served, in one way or another, to entrench or defend the position of elite groups, that does not much appear in anti-Illuminism. Moreover, there was little in the way of specific investigation of supposed perpetrators; there were no confessions (forced or otherwise); and there were only a few actual victims (whose suffering was of limited scope). Very much in contrast to traditional witch-hunts, this was something of a shadow affair. Finally, one element almost everywhere apparent in campaigns against witchcraft was entirely missing: a marked preponderance of female targets. On balance, then, the verdict here has to be mixed: something of a witch-hunt, yes, but not entirely so.
As with many similar episodes, the end of the Illuminati scare came very fast. The election of 1800, bringing defeat for the Federalists and the start of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, left American politics in a radically different place. “Jacobinism” and Revolutionary France no longer gripped the public imagination; the Illuminati were scarcely spoken of anymore. For the next quarter century, the nation moved into, and through, a new set of preoccupations: trade embargoes (in which Britain, much more than France, played the role of villain); the War of 1812; the so-called Era of Good Feelings.
Anti-Masonry (1826-40)
The mid-1820s saw the start of another rampant “scare.” The target this time was the Order of Freemasons. In fact, the Society of Illuminati had itself been associated with Masonry, since both seemed tainted with a dangerously modern spirit. But now a huge wave of antipathy toward Masons began to run entirely of its own accord. Its source point was the abduction, disappearance, and apparent murder in upstate New York of ex-Mason William Morgan, who had authored an exposé of the order’s “secrets.” The resultant anxiety and outrage spread rapidly across the entire northern half of the country. (The South remained largely unaffected.) Individual Masons were thrown heavily on the defensive. Masonry as a whole was vilified as anti-American, anti-republican, anti-Christian, antifamily. Unlike the case of Illuminism a generation before, a political movement was born—with conventions held, candidates nominated, and public officials (including 25 congressmen and 1 state governor) elected. There was an anti-Masonic ticket in the presidential election of 1832. Both judicial and legislative committees, formed for the express purpose of investigating Masonry, unearthed dire evidence of a conspiracy against established institutions and principles. (Or so the investigators believed.) Eventually this movement, too, would run its course, as anxiety about the Masons diminished and public attention shifted elsewhere. But it did take its toll—if not in lives lost, then certainly in careers altered, reputations damaged, friendships broken, communities rent asunder.
Was it a witch-hunt? In many respects, anti-Masonry wears a look quite similar to that of anti-Illuminism: conspiracy; secrecy; huge scope; fundamentally subversive ends; hidden, silently contaminating means; apocalyptic danger; the driving force of strong negative affect—key markers all, in both cases (and in witch-hunting). However: religion seems to have played an inconspicuous part in anti-Masonry. Ministers were found on both sides; for the most part, secular leadership prevailed. But, as with traditional witch-hunts, there was strong incentive to investigate; there were also “trials” (if not in the legal sense, then certainly in the court of public opinion). Indeed, there was much overt reality to galvanize and focus the movement: Masonic lodges were well-established, highly visible institutions, and individual Masons were readily identifiable (as Illuminists, and supposed witches, were not). Many Masons were victimized; at the least, they lost status. And Freemasonry, as a whole, was a victim. But gender—the whole underlying aspect of misogyny—was (again) absent. All in all, then, anti-Masonry makes another partial, but not total, match with witch-hunting.
Anti-Masonry, like the Illuminati scare, was intensely focused and time limited—analogous, in medical terms, to a fast-moving epidemic. Other currents of public alarm, in roughly the same period, are better described as endemic; they waxed and waned, diffused and sharpened—but never disappeared entirely. And they helped to shape the cultural matrix in which new scares might emerge.
For example, anti-Catholicism was a long-established tradition among the largely Protestant population of early America. And starting in the 1830s, it gained new force in response to the arrival of large numbers of Catholic immigrants, especially the Irish fleeing famine. Occasionally this antagonism flared into open violence, as, for example, in the burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834. A variety of specifically anti-Catholic organizations formed at midcentury, one of which, the American Protective Association, would eventually claim over two million supporters.
Meanwhile, Mormonism—a new and wholly indigenous religious movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the 1820s and growing rapidly thereafter—evoked a similar kind of alarm. Public pressure, up to and including mob violence, soon forced the Mormons to leave their original home ground in upstate New York and New England for the wilderness territory of Utah. En route, Smith was seized and murdered by a lynching party and his followers subjected to repeated harassment.
Both Catholics and Mormons were suspect in the eyes of the Protestant majority for owing their primary allegiance to an external, and highly centralized, system of authority—the papacy in one case, the “prophet” Smith and his church councillors in the other. “The papal hierarchy declares its complete sovereignty over the state, and . . . decrees that the papal fiat is superior to the voice of the people”: thus the official view of the American Protective Association. “What, then, is the real strength of Mormonism?” asked a foremost critic of that group. “It is an ecclesiastical despotism ruled by a man who is prophet, priest, king, and pope, all in one.” (With the Mormons, to be sure, there were additional issues of “secret rites” and of practices abhorrent to conventional morality, like polygamous marriage.) Such authoritarian structures were thought virtually to require the hatching of conspiracies, of “plots,” against the national mainstream.
These anxieties reflected a broader sense that republican governance was fragile and easily subverted. The same theme appeared also in politics; each of the leading parties of the day, Whigs and Democrats, accused the other of threatening core principles and institutions. No less was true of the ripening sectional conflict between North and South. Northerners denounced a “Slave Power conspiracy,” while Southerners voiced a similar feeling of threat by abolitionists. In all these different venues, then, the language of conspiratorial menace was pervasive. And so, too, was its emotional substrate—fear, distress, and hatred.
But of public “scares,” in the epidemic sense, there was nothing during the long and tumultuous middle decades of the 19th century. In the pre-modern period, warfare and witch-hunting had proceeded largely in alternating sequence—one or the other, not both at the same time. Perhaps something of the same dynamic can be attributed to this later era as well. Sectional conflict, followed by grinding, unimaginably bloody Civil War, consumed energies that might otherwise have gone toward hunting for enemies within.
The Civil War was such a watershed moment that antebellum and postbellum seem, in retrospect, different worlds. Part of the difference was a vast increase in labor organizing—and labor conflict—with the coming of a fully industrial age. To be sure, unions had been formed, and strikes staged, as far back as the 1820s. But none of the previous agitation remotely approached what developed in the century’s closing years. This, in turn, set the stage for a new round of reactive (and reactionary) response, some of which invites direct comparison with old-style witch-hunting.
There was, to begin with, an international context here: the rapid growth of trade unionism in Britain and France, the spread of Marxian socialism, anarchism, and other such radical ideologies, the dramatic saga of the Paris Commune (a workers’ uprising in the French capital) in the spring of 1871. Together, such events helped raise a specter of foreign-born “Red Revo
lution”—a modern-day equivalent of Satanism—that would haunt American public life for over a century to come. Moreover, anxiety about overseas developments would mesh very tightly with a range of concerns rooted much closer to home. The as-yet unfamiliar system of factory production, the seemingly chaotic environment of modern cities, immigration on a massive scale, the “tramp menace” (thousands of unmoored men set loose to roam around the country), and a rising homicide rate all played into the mix. “There never was a time in the history of the world when an enemy of society could work such mighty mischief as today,” declared clergyman and author Josiah Strong in his immensely popular book Our Country (1885). “The more highly developed a civilization is, the more vulnerable does it become.”
Such feelings of vulnerability were not altogether illusory; indeed, they incorporated real events and actual dangers. The actions of the French Communards cast an especially long shadow. That workers could seize control of government, execute bishops and other conservative opponents, requisition property, and abolish debt seemed, in the words of a New York newspaper editorialist, “to uproot society and organize Hell.” Perhaps other countries, too—including the United States—might soon be engulfed in “a sudden storm of communistic revolutions,” reflecting “the deep, explosive forces which underlie all modern society.” The Paris Commune would, in years to come, remain a touchstone for all manner of anti-radical opinion.