The long, strange influence of conspiracy theories on U.S. politics
On an oppressive summer day in July 1822, a group of mostly enslaved men prepared themselves for death in South Carolina.
“Do not open your lips,” two of the men, Denmark Vesey and Peter Poyas, are both said to have commanded their comrades. “Die silent as you shall see me do.”
Vesey, Poyas and at least four other men were then executed, part of a brutal response to an attempted insurrection. It was led by Vesey, a formerly enslaved man and carpenter who was said to be inspired by the successful 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti; the plan was to free people being held in Charleston, kill their captors and then sail to safety. The plot was broken up when two men involved confessed before it could be carried out, but the details are still somewhat unclear. The condemned men apparently followed the command and took their secrets to the grave. But the records of their trial and punishment were, of course, written by their murderers — and the idea that they had secrets to keep would grow to be part of an anxious fable.
The execution of Vesey and his comrades — as well as the stories that White people would tell about it — makes up one of the most intriguing episodes in Colin Dickey’s “Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.” Enslavers throughout the South refused to accept that enslaved people weren’t happy with their lot, and came up with an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain why they kept rebelling, running away and struggling for their freedom. Slaveholders decided that the uprisings had to be led by a secret, sinister cabal, a shadowy group fomenting discontent throughout the ranks of the people they owned. Vesey’s attempted insurrection and others like it fed their wildest fears, intolerably complicating their simplistic narrative: that slavery was the natural order of things, accepted by all. And Vesey and his men’s refusal to fully disclose their plot, confess or atone for the sin of staging a rebellion frustrated enslavers’ desire to shape their deaths into usable propaganda — leaving only the fear of a formless secret society that could, at any moment, strike again.
World history is full of real secret societies: the short-lived Illuminati, for instance, whose infamy has outlasted its existence by centuries. Some actual secret plots by the government — the CIA’s bizarre quest to discover the secrets of mind control, for example, or the FBI’s brutal COINTELPRO campaign against civil rights leaders — have been particularly destructive. But then there are the wilder conspiracy theories and florid tales that dominate our cultural imagination and leak into our political discourse, ranging from the partially true to the farcically fantastical: the reveling world leaders at Bohemian Grove, cults, communist infiltrators, lizard people, tunnels full of satanic ritual abusers conducting their unholy rites beneath our feet. The conviction that these secret societies control the levers of power works in several ways: It marshals populist anger against a common enemy; it provides a simple — too simple, of course — way to understand the dynamics at work in the country and the world; and it conveniently launders older forms of hatred, such as antisemitism, into contemporary forms.
Dickey vividly retells the histories of many of these conspiratorial fables and offers complex, well-informed analyses. Occasionally, he makes memorable pilgrimages to find the remnants of what he’s chasing, gazing at Masonic symbols at Valley Forge or visiting the site of a 2020 bombing perpetrated by a man who believed that an AT&T building in Nashville housed reptilians (the aforementioned lizard people) “using 5G technology as a mass mind control device.”
Throughout, Dickey follows a straightforward if occasionally sluggish chronology, from the earliest days of the American colonies to the present, from the feverish stories enslavers told themselves to the very real group of secret plotters — highly placed financiers and politicians — who met at a place called Jekyll Island to plan what would become the Federal Reserve. (This is a major historical event for many conspiracy theorists who hold unusual beliefs about the financial system; for more on that, if you really feel the need, you can consult “The Creature From Jekyll Island,” an absolutely unreadable conspiracy classic by pseudohistorian and still-enthusiastic 91-year-old conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin.)
Dickey is at his most effective when drawing clear lines between the secret societies of yore and the conspiratorial moment we’re living in today. He vividly describes the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, for instance, which came to prominence in the 1920s. “It harbored, encouraged, and covered for real violence, hatred, and bigotry,” he writes of the organization, “while also allowing for disinterested nonpartisans seeking community. Its strengths depended on its perceived reach as much as its actual reach, and it both exploited those violent individuals that acted in its name while simultaneously, as needed, distancing itself from them.” He finds revealing parallels between the Klan and QAnon, particularly in how the more polite sectors of each movement provided a rhetorical incitement to violence.
But Dickey’s focus on the United States also means an occasional, and understandable, tendency to make American history slightly too large in the overall history of conspiratorial thinking. He writes, for instance, that U.S.-based anti-Catholic attacks and conspiracy theories of the 1830s were the template for the trans panic and “groomer” slurs thrown at LGBTQ Americans today. But this framing does not adequately encompass much older, durable, transnational conspiracy theories — especially the “blood libel” myth of the Middle Ages and the later “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — that form the unconscious backbone for so many kinds of conspiratorial thought, particularly those involving paranoia about sexual abuse.
But if he doesn’t quite close that loop at first (and he does ably discuss the “Protocols” later), it’s because he’s busy examining much more obscure and fascinating incidents. He describes, for instance, a jaw-dropping 1834 attack by an enraged mob on a convent near Boston, during the height of anti-Catholic fervor, after its members suspected that a young woman was held there against her will. A crowd stormed the convent, ransacked it, and searched high and low for “hidden crypts,” as Dickey writes, where they assumed the young woman would be found, along with the bodies of infants who, urban legends claimed, were tortured and killed inside the convent walls. Finding only the coffins of deceased nuns in a clearly marked tomb, the mob burned the convent to the ground, then proclaimed to the stunned surviving sisters that they had been freed.
It’s these kinds of lesser-known incidents that make “Under the Eye of Power” an important and sobering read. The book comes more fully to life, and shows moments of welcome humor, in its second half, with discussions of the satanic Panic and reptilians — places where a fear of secret societies merges with our half-frightened, half-titillated interest in the occult. A particularly gripping chapter outlines the formation and rise of the John Birch Society, of which Dickey’s grandfather was a member. (He also has a very good time writing about the Denver airport, which has generated decades of conspiracy theories with its bizarre art.)
Throughout, Dickey’s writing is elegantly thoughtful, sure-footed and occasionally luminous, reminiscent of his soulful 2016 classic “Ghostland,” which surveyed U.S. history and our modern landscape for specters of an entirely different kind. He deftly brings new life to the by-now-familiar discussion about how historical fears and paranoias affect the present day. If one occasionally wishes that Dickey had had more fun with his subject matter, it’s easy to see, given the times we’re living in, why he found precious little to laugh about.
Anna Merlan is a journalist and the author of “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.”
Under the Eye of Power
How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
By Colin Dickey
Viking. 353 pp. $30
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Washington Post can be found here.
