The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. By Jesse Walker. New York: Harper Collins, 2013. ISBN: 978-0062135551. 448 pp. Hardcover, $25.99; paperback, $15.99.
Peter Huston
The United States, like most nations, has a long history of paranoia that permeates its culture and politics. In Jesse Walker’s entertaining and informative book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, he surveys and discusses this paranoia in an evenhanded and entertaining way.
The book begins by describing how on January 30, 1835, a madman attempted to assassinate President Andrew Jackson with a pair of single-shot pistols. The assassination failed when both pistols misfired and the president, a war hero and duelist, beat him severely with a walking stick. The would-be assassin was reported to be mentally ill and motivated by a complex cluster of irrational beliefs, including that the assassin thought himself to be King Richard the Third of England, that Jackson had murdered the assassin’s father (untrue), and that the public would have nearly unlimited wealth with the president dead. This is strange enough.
However, what Walker focuses on is the beliefs that arose among the media and the general public surrounding the event. These beliefs, perhaps, were equally strange, particularly as they were coming from citizens who presumably did not suffer from mental illness.
Some argued the attempt had been orchestrated by Jackson’s enemies in Congress. These enemies responded that, no, in fact, the attack had been orchestrated by Jackson himself to gain sympathy and make them look bad. And twenty-nine years later, a writer argued that the assassination attempt was organized by “slave power,” essentially the political lobby of slave owners who disliked Jackson.
And so it goes. Events occur, explanations and hypotheses unfold, and often these show a bizarre paranoid style. Walker surveys such beliefs, past and present, in America and divides them into categories. There’s the enemy outside, the enemy above, the enemy inside, and the enemy below. Outside were the Native American Indians and hordes of evil foreigners, all of questionable morals and strange, perhaps demonic, religious practices. Above, were the Illuminati and other secretive organizations, both real and imagined, as well as the government or sections of the government, some of which may have actually been controlled by secretive organizations or groups behind the scenes Below were disgruntled slaves and the lower classes, again conspiring to undermine society and the American way of life. Inside society, or even next door to one’s house, were witches, Satan worshippers, members of strange religious sects (Shakers and Mormons are named as examples), secret Communists (“the Red Scare”), hidden homosexuals (according to Walker, soon after World War II, the U.S. congress did investigate and hold a series of rather clueless hearings on the security threat homosexuals—the so-called “Lavender Scare”—might pose to America), as well as others who might pose a hidden threat to people’s safety and the stability of society.
In the first section Walker surveys these ideas in an entertaining and informative manner using proper accreditation and footnotes. Although I found this section at times frustratingly superficial, other reviewers have felt it was too long and detailed. Therefore, it’s probably just right for the average reader. In any case, those who wish for more depth can easily use this work as a jumping off point for more research.
In the second section of this two-part work, Walker brings these ideas into the post-World War II era, through McCarthyism, the sixties, and the Watergate era and then brings them up through the age of Rambo (who rescued hidden POWMIAs that our government denied existed) and into The X-Files television show, past September 11, 2001, and on to contemporary times. This section, too, will interest skeptics and anyone else seeking to understand American society. For years, Walker has been a monitor and connoisseur of fringe literature, and he knows of what he speaks.
Walker’s survey history is balanced and does not seem to favor one political group or view over another. For instance, he makes it quite clear that there is a pattern in American history of one political faction putting in place institutions, laws, and procedures to monitor or control a perceived threat, but then after losing power the faction objects when those institutions, laws, and procedures are targeted against them. Walker also makes it clear that when many government institutes feel themselves under threat from secretive forces, they tend to respond by becoming secretive themselves, tightening their security, and hiding things from journalists, the public, and the outside world. Of course, this only increases conspiracy thinking. Such mirroring—one organization taking on the trappings of another organization, real or imagined, that it fears—is another recurring theme in Walker’s work.
In an earlier section, for instance, Walker draws parallels between the trappings and ritual and hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, favored by many immigrants of the early twentieth century, and the Ku Klux Klan of the time which was often motivated to assemble out of fear of this church and these immigrants. And so it goes.
The paperback edition includes seven extra pages that cover Edward Snowden and Wikileaks and also elaborate, clarify, and update the themes of the work. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in conspiracy theories, American government, United States history, or even current events. In other words, almost everyone would benefit from reading this book. n
Peter Huston is an author, journalist, and teacher of English as a second language in the northeastern United States but with much overseas experience teaching in Asia. An avid historian, he holds a master’s degree in East Asian Studies with a focus on the history of western science in China. He’s written two books on skepticism and a self-published novel involving conspiracy theories.