How One Republican Senator Got the Idea the Great Depression Was an Inside Job

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“The Great Depression was pretty well planned.” —Sen. Ron Johnson, when asked about the national debt on a conservative radio show in early September

At this point, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s assertion that Joe Biden got dementia from the COVID vaccine, and Donald Trump’s careless promotion of QAnon, it’s tempting to think that many of our government officials have had their brains completely addled by internet conspiracy theories. But every once in a while, a politician comes along to remind us that our representatives don’t always need the internet’s help—they are totally capable of latching on to nonsensical beliefs the old-fashioned way.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, did just that in an appearance on a radio show that surfaced last week.

On Tuesday, Johnson appeared on the Vicki McKenna Show, a conservative radio show out of Wisconsin, and spoke about his “investigations” into the “corruption of federal agencies.” He also spoke of his motivation to run for reelection to advocate “for the vaccine-injured.” But it was his answer to a question about debt that got the most wide-eyed attention on social media, after it was posted by a progressive radio station. Asked by the host whether it was “possible to stave off a debt crisis” until Trump could step in and fix the problem, Johnson gave a strange answer:

Well, we’ve been doing it for years by just printing more money. Now, one of the interesting revelations of Creature From Jekyll Island is the fact that the Great Depression was pretty well planned. You know, all the big money men were pretty well warned that they were going to finally collapse the system. 

So, again, I know this. I know it really sounds like a conspiracy theory. I don’t completely understand it. But it sure seems—it just, in my bones, I just feel there’s a great deal of corruption and control there that the vast majority of people do not understand.

If that answer makes no sense to you, that’s because it’s incomprehensible even to people who study conspiracy theories. It seems that Johnson is implying that a sinister cabal of “big money men” planned the Great Depression for their own personal gain, but it’s not entirely clear.

As a conspiracy theory, “The Great Depression was an inside job” doesn’t seem to be a particularly common one; one researcher Slate reached out to said he had “never seen it put exactly that way.” But he agreed that the general tone of what Johnson said did appear to fit with a more well-known body of conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, and of supposed communist infiltration of the banking system more generally.

Also, the book Johnson cited as a source—The Creature From Jekyll Island, published in 1994—relates a Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. The eponymous “creature” is the Fed; Jekyll Island, in Georgia, was the setting of a 1910 meeting in which wealthy men drafted legislation to create a central banking system. (The meeting did happen, but it did not create the Fed, as the book implies; ideas from what was discussed at the meeting were instead later incorporated into a separate Federal Reserve Act.)

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, said he had been surprised to hear Johnson reference the title, calling it an “infamous far-right conspiracy-theory book” and “not a remotely reputable source.”

And yet, the tradition of anti-Fed conspiracy theories is a robust one. According to Pitcavage, the far right has, for decades, been opposed to the country’s central banking system and invented conspiracy theories to support its feelings of distrust. These conspiracy theories typically fall into two camps, he said: the ones that posit that a group of extremely wealthy bankers created the Fed to manipulate the nation’s finances for their own gain, and the overtly antisemitic ones, which follow the same narrative, except the powerful bankers are all, emphatically, Jewish.

Luckily for Johnson, his mangled reference to a Great Depression inside job was still specific enough to place him in the former camp: The Creature From Jekyll Island is not openly antisemitic, Pitcavage said. It’s still primarily promoted by and intended for an audience of the far right, he noted, but Jewish bankers aren’t a focus. The book is big enough on the libertarian right that Ron Paul has blurbed it, pronouncing it “a superb analysis deserving serious attention by all Americans.” Glenn Beck once called it “a fascinating book” in a recommendation on Fox News. There’s even a children’s-book version from the libertarian franchise the Tuttle Twins, with a Goosebumps-style cover. (“Join Ethan and Emily as they uncover the curious mystery of how a powerful creature is stealing their grandparents’ hard-earned savings.”) Pitcavage says that the book has gone through a number of different printings and is “by far the most popular” book out there on the Federal Reserve conspiracy theory.

It’s extreme. The book imagines the Fed as a totalitarian instrument through “which the world’s money cabal deliberately encourages war as a means of stimulating the profitable production of armaments and of keeping nations perpetually in debt.” The book’s author, G. Edward Griffin, is, among other things, an HIV denier; a chemtrails believer; a JFK assassination skeptic; and a 9/11 truther. More recently, he has pushed “plandemic” conspiracy theories.

But there is one particularly odd thing about Johnson’s citation of the book. According to Pitcavage, for all his conspiracy theorizing, the book’s author seems not to make the case for a preplanned Great Depression. Instead, the work mentions the Great Depression only as an example of the Federal Reserve’s failures—a product of its incompetence, not malicious intent. That means that Johnson, if we are correctly understanding his assertion, is misremembering something or misread the book. He’s obviously a fan of right-wing conspiracy-theory literature, and he clearly believes he’s pulling from established scholarship. But this particular theory appears to be, at least accidentally, a Johnson original.