Suspecting Clandestine Plots Behind Every Door

UNDER THE EYE OF POWER: ​How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, by Colin Dickey

The Memorial Day pancake breakfast in Blue Hill, Maine, is hosted by the Oddfellows, an 18th-century craftsmen’s guild turned community service organization, related to the Freemasons. While there this spring, I pondered the elderly members pouring coffee and selling raffle tickets to fund college scholarships. How bizarre, even funny, that this group was once perceived as a threat to America. Right?

Wrong. In his new book, “Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy,” Colin Dickey draws an unbroken line from violence against the Freemasons — whose secret rituals and devotion to social uplift attracted Ben Franklin and many of our young democracy’s early luminaries — to the 2021 Capitol insurrection, demonstrating that our current obsession with conspiracies is not new.

America’s DNA is etched with the belief that we are an exceptional yet vulnerable nation, under threat by powerful secret groups “conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law,” Dickey writes. History bristles with examples of citizens and their elected leaders hijacking public discourse by tarring — sometimes literally — perceived enemies of the American project. Unfortunately, we have willfully forgotten most of this warped history, rendering us constantly surprised by the next imagined peril.

Americans often point to the 1692 Salem witch trials and their 20th-century analogue, the McCarthy hearings, as singular moral panics — one driven by religious zealotry and terrified children, the other by the Red Scare and a sociopathic senator. We characterize these twin witch hunts as aberrations, their lessons learned.

Dickey demolishes this misconception with a three-century tour of the concocted plots and panics that flared in America amid social upheaval, economic downturn and cultural turmoil. Protestants, Catholics and Jews, enslaved people, immigrants and gay people, trade unionists and corporate elites, the conservative right, activist left and many others have been demonized by deluded Americans and the leaders who stir moral outrage for political gain.

“Conspiracy theories, after all, feed on historical amnesia,” Dickey writes. “They depend on your belief that what is happening now has never happened before.”

Dickey is a cultural historian whose previous book, “Ghostland,” considers the deeper meanings behind the nation’s haunted places. In this newest exploration of the scary stories Americans tell themselves, he reminds us that as recently as the 1980s, innocent people were jailed and many lives ruined when children tapped “recovered memories” of ritual abuse inside suburban day care centers, sensational allegations later proved false. Janet Reno, Bill Clinton’s future attorney general, prosecuted the alleged perpetrators. Oprah hosted the accusers on her show.

That most Americans forgot all about this does not help us understand or counter the politically fueled scares about “groomers” and “indoctrination” now plaguing American educators and librarians. Dickey, a meticulous researcher, unearths fresh detail about our best-known ruptures with reality, and shocks with tales of paranoia-fueled violence long forgotten.

He documents a surge in antebellum attacks on Catholics, including a savage assault on a Massachusetts convent ignited by Protestant leaders’ lies about sexual depravity and infanticide behind its walls. Dickey does not note the later, true revelations of abuse that occurred in Catholic schools and churches. Including that would have served as a useful reminder that sometimes, delegitimizing one’s critics is itself a means of social control, deployed in this case for decades by the Catholic Church.

The book examines the dueling falsehoods that abolitionists and enslavers spread about each other as the nation descended into civil war, each group minimizing heroic instances of insurrection and escape by enslaved people to serve their own ideological ends.

The C.I.A.’s clandestine filming of encounters between sex workers and Americans unaware that the agency had dosed them with LSD, part of a project known as MKUltra, is described in chilling detail. This horrific and fruitless search for “mind control” drugs, which the agency was convinced our Cold War adversaries already possessed, began in the early 1950s and lasted for two decades.

Other chapters document the eye-popping success of the tracts and books that fueled mass delusions well before we had social media, Fox News or Alex Jones’s Infowars. From the best-selling anti-Catholic tome “Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal” to “The International Jew,” the rawly antisemitic series authored by the industrialist Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, fearmongering has always been profitable, financially, politically or both.

And Donald Trump was not the only president to leverage populist paranoia, Dickey makes clear. George Washington in his farewell speech warned Americans to be on guard against foreign forces working “insidiously” against liberty. Of course the stark distinction here is that, unlike Trump, Washington spoke with the new nation’s survival in mind.

As Dickey explains, ordinary people weave conspiracy webs because they long for simple, soothing explanations for troubling events with complicated causes and no clear solutions. While researching the theories that sprang up after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I learned that young moms were among the first to entertain — if only briefly — the falsehood that the shooting was a hoax aimed at gun control.

They were not drawn by the gun policy implications of the tragedy. They simply struggled with the fact that parents like them had put their first graders on the school bus that morning, and lost them two hours later.

I wish this book allowed more Americans drawn to such false theories to speak. “While factual debunking is vital, it remains less important than first understanding the psychological need that drives the conspiracist to seek out alternative stories,” Dickey writes. But he does not interview any conspiracists, to show us how trauma, disappointment and personality traits drive some people’s search for scapegoats, as does the sense of belonging conspiracists derive from reinventing themselves as “researchers.”

Like the man I met at a Trump rally who believed walling off the southern border might have prevented his son’s death from opioid addiction, people are lured down the conspiracy trail by other factors besides bigotry, making their exploitation all the more abhorrent.

Dickey presents a thoroughgoing record of panics and violence all but erased by history. But his accounting, particularly of the colonial period and early 19th century, is so dense that it is hard to track who did what to whom and when — always a challenge when hacking our way through these weedy webs. (One shocking colonial-era episode left undiscussed here, though amply covered in Brendan McConville’s “The Brethren,” found a network of North Carolina farmers plotting to assassinate the governor and other officials, convinced the Revolution was a stalking horse for religious oppression.)

And his broad condemnation of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. as unique exemplars of conspiracists’ worst nightmares — “two networks that worked in secret to violate civil liberties, commit blatantly illegal actions and suppress American democracy” — is so reductive that some may wonder whether these agencies ever served a lawful purpose. (Dickey also erroneously refers to C.I.A. “agents.” The agency’s employees are called officers and the informants they recruit are agents; F.B.I. employees are called agents.)

“Under the Eye of Power” ends with a question: Is it reassuring or disheartening to learn that we’re living through a rupture all too common in our history? Efforts to regulate the spread of social media disinformation don’t solve the core problem, Dickey argues. While the internet enables and propels widespread deception, “the behavior is ours to begin with.”

The good news: The nation survives. The bad: Until we recognize that conspiracy-driven uproars are not anomalies, but central to how power is amassed and maintained in this country, we’re doomed to careen from panic to panic, failing to recognize that the real enemy of the people is us.

UNDER THE EYE OF POWER: ​How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy | By Colin Dickey | 368 pp. | Viking | $30