Anti-Catholicism

Anti-Catholicism

Anti-Catholicism constituted one of the nation’s earliest and most virulent conspiratorial fears. It continues to linger in the very heart of U.S. popular culture, appearing in radio, television, music, and now on the Internet. Based in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on Rome’s supposed political power, antipathy toward Roman Catholicism has since the 1960s insisted that Catholicism threatens the most basic tenet of U.S. identity: the personal freedom of the individual.

Roman Catholicism represents the perpetual “Other” whose very mysteriousness and difference maintains a certain distance from U.S. life. Over the centuries this distance has exhibited a rather protean nature to where “anti-Catholicism” serves as a canvas on which non-Catholic Americans paint their hostilities. During the colonial period, anti-Catholicism continued on U.S. soil religious and political conflicts that began in Europe.

During the antebellum period, anti-Catholicism represented the epitome of mental and physical slavery that social reform movements sought to undo, much like their crusades for temperance and slavery abolition. Catholicism’s ready identity with different ethnic groups—Irish and German at first, then Italians, Poles, and French-Canadians after the Civil War—underlined the Church’s inherent foreign character.


During World War I Catholicism appeared to many Americans as a traitorous community in their midst. Only with John Kennedy’s successful presidential campaign in 1960 did anti-Catholicism shift to more individual concerns. Now Catholicism is viewed as the last religious tradition capable of inhibiting the personal growth and self-awareness of many Americans.

According to this view, Catholics, despite whatever claims they might make about their Americanness, harbor a hidden agenda that they seek to impose on all other Americans. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., once remarked that anti-Catholicism was “the only remaining acceptable prejudice.”

Schlesinger pointed his comment toward the nation’s educated elite, but the point could be extended much further. The idea that Roman Catholicism represents a threat to U.S. culture has taken many forms, including a few by Catholics themselves. Mistrust and fear of Catholicism’s hierarchical structures and theological positions continue to animate U.S. life.

Roots in Protestantism and English Puritanism

Animosity toward Roman Catholicism is deeply rooted in the history of western Europe as well as that of Christian thought. The apocalyptic imagery of the “Whore of Babylon” in the Book of Revelation points toward the city of Rome itself.

While early Christianity read Revelation as a coded text against pagan Rome, the generations that followed often understood the Scriptures as leveling divine judgment against Christian Rome as well. Rome’s spiritual tyranny over Christians enjoyed demonic, not heavenly, support. English Puritanism took the argument even further.

Seeking to purify the Church of England of anything remotely Catholic, anti-Roman animosity became a measure of one’s faith. In other words, resistance to Roman Catholicism constituted a bedrock duty of all real English Christians. The martyrdom of English Protestants during the reign of Queen Mary (reigned 1553–1558) foretold the future if Catholics achieved power.

Elizabethan Puritanism held that Catholicism constituted a threat to English politics as well as the nation’s spiritual climate. The Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, and later the Jacobite uprisings indicated that Catholics seeking the throne also sought to return England, through force if necessary, to Rome.

Colonial Expressions

The English colonies in the New World reflected these conflicts with Catholic powers. Consequently, many colonies possessed legislation that limited worship opportunities and sometimes voting rights for Catholics.

Some, such as Massachusetts, threatened death by hanging to anyone revealed as a Catholic priest, and even though Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics, it quickly came under Anglican control, too. English Protestant colonists felt surrounded by Catholic colonial powers France and Spain. They therefore sought to ensure that their own spaces were utterly free of any Catholic contagion.

Fear of the Immigrant in the Nineteenth Century

The disease metaphor became quite popular during the nineteenth century, for Roman Catholicism appeared as metastasizing tumor. Waves of immigrants from Germany and Ireland beginning in the 1820s accelerated the growth of the Catholic Church.

While internally the Church faced growing ethnic conflicts (e.g., German parishes occasionally refused the English-speaking Irish priest assigned them by an Irish bishop), non-Catholic Americans perceived Roman Catholicism as a foreign monolith poised to overthrow the young nation’s democratic system.

It seemed that Catholicism was assuredly un-American. The Church lacked democratic procedures for acknowledging authority, its worship practices seemed clearly at odds with scriptural guidelines, it had attempted the forcible reconversion of Protestants, and its members in the United States were almost entirely nonnative immigrants.

Consequently, anti-Catholics acquired the label “nativists” for their insistence that the foreign-born could not claim to be Americans. Since the Catholic hierarchy often established parishes with specific national identities (e.g., naming parishes after a nation’s patron saint, such as St. Patrick), Catholicism seemed to prevent its members from “Americanizing” completely.

The Americanization issue continued to pester Catholic leaders through the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, immigration shifted from western Europe to southern and eastern Europe. Catholics from these regions— Italians, Portugese, Poles, Slavs, and French-Canadians from Quebec—appeared to be even more resistant to Americanization than the Germans and Irish.

Beyond the immigration issues, Catholicism posed a significant question to U.S. identity. If the nation became filled primarily with Christians belonging to a foreign faith (since the pope, ensconced at Rome, controlled Catholicism), what would become of U.S. institutions like democracy, free enterprise, and freedom of worship? The nativist response took two paths: political opposition and popular culture. Both paths took inspiration from the Puritan slogan “No Popery.”

The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, better known as the “Know-Nothing” Party because when asked about their political activities they claimed to “know nothing,” sought to elect candidates to local, state, and national offices who would ensure that the United States remained a Protestant and democratic country.

In 1852 Know-Nothings won election victories nationwide, especially in Massachusetts where the governor and all higher commonwealth officials were affiliated. Know-Nothings diluted some of their political power by joining larger national parties such as the Republicans.

Similarly, social reformers interested in abolishing southern slavery and the liquor trade often regarded Catholicism as the epitome of enslavement, suscribing to the view that being Catholic subjected one to physical as well as spiritual slavery. Many Catholics, it was felt, particularly the Irish, seemed unable to turn away from liquor’s appeal.

Reforming U.S. life began, therefore, with opposition to the further growth of Roman Catholicism. Another battleground was the public school system. In the early 1840s, following the complaints of Catholic parents, New York Protestants joined forces to ensure that public schools continued teaching with the King James Version of the Bible.

The mysteriousness of Catholic convent life fostered one of the strongest anti-Catholic messages. Tales of “escaped nuns,” young women claiming that they had been abducted into convent life, proved wildly popular throughout the nation.

Some were published, the most popular of which was The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a fictitious account of a young woman’s abduction into a Montreal convent. Many “escaped nun” tales featured the sexual depravity and rigid secrecy of the Catholic male clergy.

Not only did Catholicism threaten the nation’s political economy, individual Americans stood in danger of being the victim of Catholic “press-gangs” hell-bent on increasing the Church’s membership. In the 1840s a lecture circuit featuring Monk and other escaped nuns, as well as theatrical plays, developed the theme.

As a result, the arrival of Catholic immigrants occasionally resulted in violence. Lyman Beecher’s 1835 “Plea for the West,” a speech in which he claimed Catholics were settling western lands far faster than Protestants and thus threatened to cut off U.S. expansion, resulted in a mob burning an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

In 1844 Philadelphia nativists rioted following rumors that local Catholic parishes were stockpiling weapons for possible rebellious activity. Thirteen people died and over fifty were wounded in the violence. Violence threatened in St. Louis and New York, but did not materialize.

The Civil War offered a respite from anti-Catholic attitudes, as Catholics served in both armies (notably Union general Philip Sheridan) and religious sisters served in medical roles. Even then northern nativists questioned Catholic loyalty when, in 1863, large numbers of Irish immigrants participated in violent draft riots in New York City.

Political cartoonist Thomas Nash captured the anti-Catholic message in an 1871 Harper’s Weekly drawing. It depicted Catholic bishops as aggressive alligators coming ashore to attack Protestant America, suggesting that Tammany Hall was a new Vatican and that Irish immigrant politicians threatened to dismantle public schools.

During the 1880s and 1890s, the American Protective Association (APA) resurrected the Know-Nothing cause. Predominantly located in the Midwest, the APA utilized the same rhetoric but failed to generate the same interest.

It did succeed in casting suspicion on emerging labor unions, often filled with and led by Catholics, and other radical political movements. In the 1880s and 1890s nativist politicians, particularly within the Republican Party, sought to curtail immigration to limit increasing Catholic power in urban areas.

Scientific racism informed these efforts, “proving” that Anglo-Saxons—who were overwhelmingly Protestant—enjoyed biological as well as cultural and religious superiority over the newer Catholic immigrants. Immigration restriction continued to be an issue until Congress established strict limits, aimed primarily at immigrants from Catholic and Jewish areas of eastern and southern Europe, in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.

The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

The Ku Klux Klan reemerged in 1915 as the primary vehicle for anti-Catholic nativism. By the early 1920s, the Klan had become popular across the nation. Committed to “100 percent Americanism,” the Klan sought to limit the powers of the now well-established Catholic community.

Klan recruiters pursued Protestant clergy, and the Klan moved to reinforce its view of traditional U.S. morality. This included supporting Prohibition, segregation, Protestant-oriented public schools, strikebusting, and boycotting Catholic (and Jewish) businesses.

Significantly, this incarnation of the Klan saw the largest membership numbers, and the 1920s Klan enjoyed national, not merely southern, popularity. Klan voters helped elect sympathetic politicians and passed anti-Catholic measures in Maine, Indiana, and Oregon, as well as other states. Klansmen fought with Catholic groups in workingclass urban neighborhoods in Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois.

The Klan resurrected stories of “captured nuns” like Maria Monk. It also circulated a fictitious oath—much like Protocols of the Elders of Zion—purportedly taken by the Knights of Columbus wherein they pledged to murder Protestant babies and undermine the Protestant political establishment.

However, the Klan’s popularity quickly shrank after scandals emerged concerning Klan leadership, especially Indiana’s grand dragon, David C. Stephenson. The Klan enjoyed a minirevival during the 1928 presidential election, stirring up opposition to the Democratic candidate, New York’s Catholic and anti-Prohibition governor, Alfred E. Smith.

Contemporary Expressions

With the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, evangelical Protestantism shrank away from public scrutiny, thus silencing an important source of anti-Catholic rhetoric. Evangelical opposition to Catholicism remains to this day, but never incites the same level of popular support.

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which inaugurated landmark changes in Catholic liturgy and theology (especially concerning non-Catholics), indicated the Church’s new willingness to converse with, instead of repressing, other religious perspectives. The Catholic Church also expressed its appreciation of democratic political processes.

In this new situation, those advocating antiCatholic views, ironically, have often spoken from liberal, not conservative, perspectives. Paul Blanshard’s wildly popular Catholic Power and American Democracy (published in 1948) expressed the point quite clearly: Catholics voted according to clerical direction, instead of individual decision, and this threatened U.S. democratic institutions.

Through utterly democratic processes, the Catholic Church could mobilize its members to limit the religious and political freedoms of other Americans. Although he had studied to be a Congregational minister, Blanshard affiliated himself more closely with secular humanist groups. He believed his argument was nonsectarian since it applied to the political freedoms of all Americans.

Blanshard’s work received praise from mainstream newspapers as well as from leading academics, such as John Dewey. This recalled the antebellum social reformers who feared Catholicism’s social and political influences, not its theological foundations.

Blanshard’s legacy resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s when Vatican authorities silenced American Catholic academics such as moral theologian Charles Curran. Catholic threats to personal freedom, especially concerning sexuality, have been explored in U.S. popular culture, ranging from the videos of the singer Madonna to television shows such as Ally McBeal. Much like Blanshard’s earlier work, these receive far less criticism from Protestants than from Catholics.

The latest expressions of anti-Catholicism use widely accessible language and assumptions to question the Church’s (and individual Catholics’) views on abortion, sexuality, and personal freedom. The hysterical fears of Maria Monk might have faded, but there remains a sense that Catholicism, much like Nash’s cartoon, threatens to overwhelm freedoms and values that non-Catholic Americans hold dear.

Anti-Federalists

Anti-Federalists

The United States was founded on conspiracy theories. Whiggish colonists started a revolution convinced that unscrupulous British ministers were deliberately undermining traditional English liberties. With independence secured, liberty was again threatened in 1787–1788, this time from within.

An urban, largely commercial group, known as the Federalists, were conspiring to further their own pecuniary interests and enforce domestic tranquility by creating a new constitution in secret session. The Anti-Federalists, their opponents, used a common U.S. idiom—the conspiracy theory—to articulate their defense of decentralized government.

The Anti-Federalists were a loose collection of usually small-scale farmers and paper-money advocates who were generally suspicious of financiers, lawyers, merchants, and powerful landowners.


They were strongest in rural areas and in the largest and most influential states: Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It was from those states that they drew their most able partisans: Sam Adams, James Warren, George Clinton, George Mason, Samuel Bryan, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee.

There was no organized AntiFederalism in the way that the Constitution was written in committee or that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay co-wrote the Federalist Papers. Instead, they represented a common American belief that what they called “consolidated government” (and modern Americans call “big government”) followed the interests of the elite at the expense of the common man.

Intellectual Context

Americans inherited several predominantly English intellectual traditions that made conspiracy theories an intrinsic part of the rhetoric of early American political discourse. The radical Whigs of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England suspected the crown and its advisers of perpetually scheming to undermine English liberties.

Moral philosophy, a product of the Enlightenment that sought to explain human interactions mechanistically, made humans directly responsible for all events, no matter how complex. Any unpopular act of Parliament or a provincial assembly, order of the king, or action of a provincial governor, regardless of how benignly or rationally conceived, could therefore be attributed to sinister motives. Religion also contributed to the matrix.

The dissenting Protestantism of most colonists inculcated in many a watchfulness of their religious liberties—liberties that had been denied their fathers and brethren in England and on the European continent. All these made the colonists, as they put it, “jealous of”— that is, protective of, suspiciously watchful for— their liberties. In the greatest sustained debate in U.S. history, Anti-Federalists drew heavily on this intellectual heritage.

They cited repeatedly the French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu, who insisted that republics could only be small. Anonymous Anti-Federalist essayists styled themselves “Cato,” “Algernon Sydney,” or “Brutus,” who slew the tyrannical Julius Caesar. Others wrote under names glorifying ordinary Americans: “A Federal Farmer,” “A Countryman,” or “An Officer of the Late Continental Army.”

Constitutional Conspiracy

The drafting and debating of the Constitution in 1787–1788 did little to convince the Anti-Federalists of the opposition’s virtues. Two New York delegates to the Constitutional Convention walked out, protesting that the Convention would not revise the Articles of Confederation as it was so summoned, but would create a new constitution.

The New York Anti-Federalist polemicist Cato complained that these now dubious proceedings had taken place behind closed doors. Prominent AntiFederalists complained of a suddenly dismal mail service. Newspaper editors, overwhelmingly Federalists, left Anti-Federalist editorials or rebuttals on press-room floors or grossly misrepresented opposition views.

The prominent Pennsylvania Gazette reported that Virginia Anti-Federalist and Revolutionary War statesman Patrick Henry was working for ratification. The Federalist New-Hampshire Spy told a heavily Anti-Federalist state that nary an opponent of the Constitution existed in all of New England.

The questionable manner in which the Constitution was born and the misrepresentation of its support inevitably led some Americans to doubt the beneficent motives of its authors. Anti-Federalists often concluded that the Constitution had been drafted to fashion a government run by the elite to enslave the common folk.

The “Federal Farmer” of Pennsylvania saw in the Constitution a monarchy waiting to happen because so many of the wealthy were believed to be secretly attached to the principles of monarchy and aristocracy. George Mason of Virginia, the most intelligent and respected of the Anti-Federalists, predicted in a widely circulated pamphlet that a government under the proposed Constitution would waver between aristocracy and monarchy, finally culminating in one or the other.

Anti-Federalist Objections

The source of Anti-Federal apprehension was the fear of centralized authority. The new Constitution seemed to many Anti-Federalists a throwback to its colonial past with an unresponsive king, locally irresponsible provincial governors, and an unrepresentative Parliament that taxed at will. The Federalists proposed a national constitution that would supersede the individual state constitutions, which hitherto had been the equals of the Articles of Confederation.

The implications of ending a truly federal system seemed ominous. “Brutus” of New York, the ablest of the Anti-Federalist theorists, worried that under the “necessary and proper” clause of Section 8, article 1 of the proposed Constitution, congress would possess absolute power and consolidate all state governments into one executive, legislature, and judiciary.

Nothing could prevent an aggrandizing national government from destroying civil liberties. The three branches of the proposed government would invariably function as a de facto aristocracy and monopolize power. Where Federalists saw checks and balances, Anti-Federalists foresaw juntas destroying public liberties.

The executive, without term limits, with appointment, pardon, and veto powers, and in control of the military, would become an unrestrained “President-General” in league with the long-tenured Senate. Together, they would make war and peace as they saw fit, usurping national and state laws with international treaties.

The House of Representatives, the most democratic feature of the new Constitution, was hardly representative enough for most Anti-Federalists, as only the elite would serve here. And the Supreme Court, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, would be composed of judges beholden to their benefactors, interpreting laws and treaties accordingly.

As the Constitution said nothing about preserving English common law, the courts would no longer check legislative and executive excesses, the “Federal Farmer” warned, but would now be part of them. A small coterie of like-minded men would make, interpret, and enforce the laws. Several Anti-Federalists remarked that so much power had been granted to the rulers in the proposed Constitution that there was no need for the ambitious to seize more.

The Anti-Federalists also assumed that republics could only exist on a small scale. It was a lesson of history that republics must be near the people, where local interests were closely guarded and local justice properly administered. Partly this was a sectional issue.

How could a Virginian determine the interests of a New Yorker? Would not the more populous, urban, commercial North dominate the new government and enact policies to the detriment of the agrarian, slave holding South? The problem of a consolidated national government making uniform immigration laws was obvious, even among northern states.

James Winthrop of Massachusetts, writing under the pseudonym Agrippa, found his state moral, pious, manly, and prosperous because of its long-standing restrictions on immigration. Impious and immoral Pennsylvania, conversely, had traded piety for prosperity by allowing anyone to emigrate. A distant, unrepresentative government was hardly preferred over provincialism.

Bill of Rights

Despite these serious protestations against the proposed Constitution, some Anti-Federalist fears could be assuaged with a bill of rights guaranteeing civil liberties and states’ rights. Here was the great contribution of Anti-Federalist conspiracy concerns.

Ever jealous to protect their rights and the rights of state governments, they made it clear in numerous essays, letters, and speeches that some basic protection of the natural rights of citizens had to be included in any constitution for it to be accepted. Nothing in the proposed constitution guaranteed, among other things, freedom of religion, the press, and arms; trial by jury; and the reservation to the states of all unenumerated powers.

Failure to include such provisions convinced most Anti-Federalists that their counterparts were conspiring to wreck democracy. In the end, the Constitution was ratified because Federalists promised that the first Congress under the new plan would take up the business of adding a bill of rights to the new Constitution.

Enough Anti-Federalists— barely enough in key states like New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia—took them at their word. The new Constitution was ratified by the necessary nine of the thirteen state legislatures by July 1788. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments, the product of conspiratorial warnings—was added four years later.

Anti-Masonic Party

Anti-Masonic almanac

Following the American Revolution, some critics began to voice their suspicions of Freemasonry as a secret society, and these concerns eventually led to the formation of the Anti-Masonic Party in the late 1820s.

Modern Freemasonry began in 1717 in England as a social organization built on the ancient traditions of the medieval masons’ guild. It developed its own social hierarchy, with a complex system of lodges, titles, and rituals, and within a few years it began to spread abroad, coming to America by 1730.

Over the next century, its aims of social camaraderie and moral education attracted a largely middle-class membership in America that eventually numbered in the tens of thousands, including such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and other political and military leaders of the day.


However, in the later eighteenth century critics voiced concerns about its overtly English origins, and its use of grandiose titles (which was said to smack of discredited European aristocracy). Especially suspect was its strict code of secrecy, which was claimed to be enforced by the threat of a brutal death and to be nothing less than a cover for a foreign plot and moral debauchery.

After the French Revolution, many Americans became alarmed over the excesses of the new French government and its seeming rejection of the religious establishment, and paranoia over supposed ties between Freemasonry and France superseded earlier doubts about the society’s English origins.

In 1798, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, a conservative Massachusetts pastor opposed to French ideas, delivered a sermon that linked Freemasonry to the evils of the French Revolution by way of a conspiracy theory that a secret society of Illuminated Masons, or Illuminati, had been formed in Germany to overthrow the institutions of government and church, and that Freemasonry was a secret society working to spread that subversion to the United States.

Since some members of his own congregation were Masons, Morse was careful to distinguish between good and bad Masons, as did later anti-Masons, but the idea that their fellow citizens were part of a foreign plot proved hard to swallow for most Americans. Although the clamor over the Illuminati conspiracy did not last long, it did serve as a precursor to the more pronounced outbreak of anti-Masonry yet to come.

The event that led directly to the creation of the Anti-Masonic Party was the abduction and apparent murder in 1826 of Captain William Morgan of Batavia, New York. Having announced his plans to publish a book that would expose the secrets of Freemasonry, Morgan was seized by parties unknown and taken to Fort Niagara.

From there he disappeared forever, and the later discovery of a body fed speculation that he had been murdered, although the body could not be positively identified as his. When those suspected of foul play went on trial, they were exonerated or given light sentences, inspiring a number of anti-Masonic groups to conduct their own private inquiries.

A conspiracy theory about Morgan’s demise was formulated and widely distributed, including claims that prominent Masons had abducted and murdered him and, through their social and political influence, allowed the guilty parties to avoid punishment for the crime and induced the press to remain silent about the true facts of the case.

An anti-Masonic social movement quickly sprang up, first in New York and then in other northeastern states, and attracted members especially from the agricultural classes, who mistrusted the largely middle-class Masons, and among church members who saw Freemasonry as a rival to organized religion.

The anti-Masons especially objected to the secrecy practiced by Freemasonry, arguing that it was incompatible with democratic principles and served as a shield for the various illegal acts and outrageous plots of which Masons were suspected. Thus was born the first of a succession of nativist movements that spread through the United States in the nineteenth century, each with its own brand of prejudice.

Having emerged as the first widespread social movement in the history of the United States, anti-Masonry transformed itself into the first of America’s third parties as it attracted support from those who were politically opposed to President Andrew Jackson, a Mason.

Among the leading anti-Masons in New York were Thurlow Weed, a journalist who took over the editorship of the Anti-Masonic Enquirer in 1829, and William Seward, who would later become Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state.

Anti-Masons started their own newspapers, organized local and state societies, and in 1832 ran their own candidate, William Wirt, for president of the United States against Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, also a prominent Mason. A former U.S. attorney general, Wirt doubted that Clay could win, and hoped that his own candidacy would unite the opponents of Jackson, but in the Electoral College he succeeded in carrying only the state of Vermont, where the anti-Masons established themselves as the largest political party.

A quarter of New Englanders voted anti-Masonic, but the poor national showing of the anti-Masons in the election of 1832 led to their rapid deterioration as a movement. Some of their younger leaders, Weed and Seward among them, joined the new Whig Party and eventually went on to become prominent members of the Republican Party, where a moral fervor against slavery substituted for their earlier antipathy to Freemasonry.

The anti-Masons provided a model, flawed as it was, for those who would cast suspicion on secret societies, and in the mysterious fate of William Morgan they found inspiration for a complex conspiracy theory that could bear comparison with those surrounding U.S. political assassinations of the late twentieth century; but for all their efforts, they did little to endanger the existence of Freemasonry.

Anti-Rent War

An attack in anti-rent war

Did the National Reform Association (NRA) and the Whig Party conspire against wealthy landowners in the 1840s to win votes from farmers along the Hudson River, or did the tenants use these groups to achieve their own goal of acquiring land? More likely, the relationship was mutually beneficial.

The farmers had been protesting years before the NRA and the Whigs began to help them. Economic conditions following the panic of 1837, and the death of the “Good Patroon” Stephen Van Rensselaer III in 1839, led his sons, Stephen IV and William, to try to collect $200,000 in overdue rents from the tenants on their father’s New York estates in eleven counties, including Albany, Columbia, Delaware, Greene, Rensselaer, and Schoharie.

The farmers refused to pay. They claimed that the land was not as productive as it used to be and that the landlord privileges were excessive. Since the price of wheat had increased over the years, the requirement to pay ten to fourteen bushels in addition to $40 to $65 per farm was too much.


They wanted to renegotiate the leases or to purchase the land for $2.00 to $2.50 per acre, to revoke the landlord’s water, mill, and mineral rights, and to have the landlord forgive back rents for all tenants unable to borrow money.

Stephen agreed to surrender his quarter sales for $30.00 per farm or for $2.00 per year, to give up his mineral rights, and to sell his poorer quality land for $5.00 per acre, if a tenant paid all back rent. This angered the farmers, and on 4 July 1839, they drafted a declaration of independence.

During the ensuing months, farmers intimidated those who attempted to evict them. When Albany County Under Sheriff Amos Adams failed to heed a warning not to serve a writ on Isaac Hungerford, someone destroyed the sheriff’s wagon and harness and clipped his horses’ tails and manes. Crowds forced other law officers to throw their writs of eviction into barrels of blazing tar, armed themselves with sticks, and chased deputies away from their farms.

On 2 December, Sheriff Michael Artcher gathered a citizen posse of 500, including former New York Governor William Marcy and John Van Buren, son of former President Martin Van Buren. When they reached a hamlet at the foot of the Helderberg Mountains, 1,600 men armed with clubs threatened them and they retreated.

The tenants deployed two Revolutionary War field pieces to defend themselves. Governor William H. Seward dispatched three uniformed companies of the state militia, appealed to the tenants to put down their arms, and pledged to take their grievances to the state legislature.

But the legislature took no action other than suggesting that, perhaps, the state use its power of eminent domain to force the landlords to sell at a fair price. Further negotiations failed and sheriffs continued their attempts to evict tenants.

In 1842 the NRA sent Thomas Devyr to help the tenants form an Anti-Rent Association with the goal of persuading the state to assist them. Organization flourished and on 18 January 1844, 25,000 tenants petitioned the legislature.

A select committee of Whig representatives from the affected counties reported that the leases were onerous and repugnant, that the system stifled agricultural incentive, and the titles of the Patroons’ heirs were questionable. But the Judiciary Committee concluded that the tenants should purchase the land at the asking price.

The tenants intensified efforts to organize, this time with an auxiliary secret army. Ten thousand disguised themselves as “Indians,” donning sheepskin masks and calico skirts and calling themselves to arms with the sound of a tin horn.

They tarred and feathered deputies, intimidated tenants willing to pay their rent, frightened the Patroon’s heirs, and shot to death two persons who favored the rents. The legislature passed an act to prevent persons from appearing in public disguised and armed.

On 12 March 1844, Delaware County Under Sheriff Osman N. Steele with 50 men defeated 100 “Indians” and arrested several who were convicted and sent to prison. Agitation increased and on 7 August, when Steele attempted to sell the property of Moses Earle to pay his back rent of $64, someone in the crowd fired shots, killing the sheriff.

This triggered a violent backlash against the antirenters and led Governor Silas Wright to proclaim the county in a state of insurrection. Authorities arrested 242 men, convicted 2 of murder and sentenced them to death, sentenced 4 to life in prison and 13 to lesser terms, and fined 51.

On 22 November, the governor commuted the death sentences to life in prison and asked the legislature to tax incomes from rent and to limit the duration of all future leases. The legislature passed the tax. Then, in February 1847, newly elected Whig Governor John Young pardoned 18 anti-rent prisoners and Stephen Van Rensselaer offered to sell some of his land for $2 per acre.

When voters elected more anti-rent candidates in 1848, the legislature directed Attorney General Ambrose Jordon to test the Patroon’s title in court. He filed eleven cases against Stephen, who lost in lower court but won on appeal. Then, in 1852, the court of appeals unanimously upheld a new case declaring quarter sales illegal and void. Finally, Stephen sold his west Albany lands in 1853 and his East Manor in 1857.

Some incidents occurred even later. In 1860 William Witbeck shot and killed Deputy Sheriff William Griggs when the latter attempted to evict him for back rent. In 1865 “Indians” abused a man who purchased a farm from a person who had been evicted. And as late as 1866 a sheriff had to call for reinforcements when seventy-five armed men accosted him for attempting to evict a farmer.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism

The concept of antisemitism refers to two distinct kinds of prejudice and hostility against Jews. It denotes both an essentially premodern hatred against Judaism as a religion and a cultural community, and a more modern, racist and economic aversion to practically all of Jewish ethnicity or heritage.

Both types of antisemitism regard Jews as a uniform group with inherent characteristics and predilections, whether they are derived from religion, from historical-cultural development, or from the supposed racial essence of a people.

The older type of antisemitism formed a part of the worldview of several Western and Middle Eastern religions since before the Common Era and was perpetuated through patristic, medieval Catholic, and early Protestant church doctrine. The latter type has proliferated with the elaboration of those modern industrial, economic, and democratic structures with which disproportionate numbers of Jewish people have been associated.


In the United States both generic forms of antisemitism have existed throughout the country’s history, marginal in numbers but pervasive in the ethos of several extremist groups and fluidly imbedded in mass popular culture. Both forms of antisemitism have also yielded to various conspiracy theories throughout U.S. history. This has been the case especially in the period after the 1870s when several overarching conspiracist syntheses have been constructed and broadcast by antisemitic ideologues and publicists.

Christian Antisemitism in Colonial and Antebellum America

In the colonial period of American history and in the early Republic antisemitic prejudice rarely resulted in full-blown conspiracy theory. Much of those periods’ public doctrine was, however, underlain by a traditional Christian public theology that incorporated a deeply ambivalent and frequently adversarial attitude toward Jews and Judaism.

These attitudes abided, were reformulated, and significantly contributed to the content of later, more modern forms of antisemitic conspiracism. Among Christian motifs with powerful conspiracist resonance were the concepts of original sin, of the Fall of Man, and the supposedly continual temporal struggle between forces of good and evil, of Christ and of Antichrist.

These motifs tended to envisage this worldly existence as a space characterized by human rebellion and hubris, rooted in the Fall, and in a free will wrongly employed, which amounted to a conspiracy against a divinely set and ultimately triumphant order.

Given its supersessionary outlook (i.e., a belief that the Christian religion had now rightfully replaced or “superseded” Judaism), such a worldview not surprisingly supported and became enmeshed with antisemitism. Supersessionary beliefs were grounded in antisemitism by early Christian writings, and later by Catholic canon law and early Protestant texts, much of which tended to associate postbiblical Jews and Judaism with satanic forces and to imagine a Jewish desire to destroy Christians and Christianity.

Such underlying, cosmic conspiracy beliefs were particularly strong in the Puritan Protestant forms of Christianity that were prevalent in the United States of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These tended to predict a future apocalypse in which Christianity came to take over the world from its supposed infidel or Judaic grasp.

Given that for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of U.S. citizens identified with some form of Christian religion, the nation was particularly predisposed for varied syntheses of religion, conspiracism, and antisemitism.

Although a strong pro-semitic strand also existed from the beginning of the Christian experience in the United States, many leading Protestant clergymen of the colonial and early republican periods did proffer a public theology along antisemitic lines conducive of conspiracism.

Some of these clergy, such as the colonial New England divines John Winthrop and Cotton and Increase Mather, denounced Jews as “the synagogue of the Antichrist,” and accused them of supposedly using magic and witchcraft in an anti-Christian, satanically inspired campaign. Others accused Jews, Roman Catholics, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians of a joint conspiracy to foist an established, apostate church on the United States.

Also, popular myths dating back to the medieval age continued to circulate well into the nineteenth century about Jewish anti-Christian practices such as the poisoning of wells, the drinking of Christian blood, and the desecration of the Holy Communion wafers, as well as about Talmudic prayers for the annihilation of all Christians.

On occasion these myths found expression through the idiom of conspiracy, but more often this so-called chimerical antisemitism restrained itself to a more general and unsystematic, politically unorganized prejudice. For the most part, the conspiracies pointed out were taken to be local and contextual on the one hand, and universal but transcendental on the other hand.

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, this kind of a religion-based conspiracist attitude did not, however, tend to lend itself to political conspiracy theory. As far as such theory existed, it was more likely still to be directed against the British, the French, and the Roman Catholics, or against such secret societies as the Freemasons, than against observant Jews.

This was the case especially with the conspiracist polemic that briefly followed the French Revolution in 1789 and in which some leading Protestant clergy for the first time broached the so-called Illuminati conspiracy theory, later to be suffused with antisemitism.

In what were the first theories ever constructed about a universal, systematically led political conspiracy, the Illuminati were taken to be the world conspiracist hub of Enlightenment philosophers, Freemasons, and of several occult anti-Christian secret societies, and as such the organization primarily responsible for the French Revolution and for all subsequent subversionary and anti-Christian agitation.

The major European theorists who constructed that all-inclusive theory sometimes claimed that Jews were to be found at the core of its subversive apparatus and that Jews in particular were the ones ultimately directing it.

Some U.S. conspiracy theorists alluded to such accusations, first made in 1806, and they sometimes formed part of the mostly anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic agitation of the early- and mid-nineteenth-century mass political movements, the Anti-Masonic Party and the Know-Nothing (American) Party.

However, such claims were not generally accepted at the time, and also the French Revolution’s contemporary U.S. critics tended to regard its conspiratorial aspects as largely unconnected with Judaism or Jewishness.

All in all, in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there rarely resulted antisemitic action comparable to that which was endemic in contemporary European societies.

Although residual discrimination in office holding and sometimes in voting and landowning rights continued in some states into the nineteenth century, on the whole antisemitic prejudice in the United States remained weak. Its conspiracist aspects were weaker still, residing mostly in general and diffuse suppositions about a cosmic conspiracy by those refusing to accept Christianity.

Modern Political and Economic Antisemitism

It was only with the arrival in the late nineteenth century of two additional sets of influences—modern finance capitalism and modern racist theory— that the materials were all in place for the emergence of a fully developed antisemitic conspiracy theory.

In its consistent, generic form this theory came to accuse all Jews, as a group, of having colluded to take unfair advantage of the economic and political power that, after late-nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation, was for the first time formally available to them. Given that this generic theory issued from secular, economic, and racist speculations, the prescriptiveness for antisemitic conspiracy theory of Christian attitudes would seem to be open to question.

Yet it remains equally true that antecedent Christian prejudices had already predisposed many in the Gentile world so to configure all subsequent threats to traditional religio-political valuations and structures that Jews were accorded a central role.

In the United States and in Western Europe this modern, economic, and racist form of antisemitism emerged after about 1870. It was by that time that most Western European Jews had achieved full political emancipation and civil rights and had suddenly become socially and politically more prominent than ever.

Jewish representation in the financial and commercial sectors was by that time already disproportionate. According to so-called interactionist models of antisemitism, this multiple new conspicuousness of Jews called forth intensified European animosity toward them.

The same process was at work in the United States, even though political emancipation had taken place much earlier. For the late-nineteenth-century rise of the Jews was patent in the United States as well, partially because of the arrival of great numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and partially because of Jewish prominence in the new class of finance capitalists that emerged after the Civil War.

The unprecedentedly swift and pervasive period of industrialization, urbanization, and economic centralization that also followed the Civil War generated new economic dislocations and anxieties just as Jews became more prominent and seemed more than others to benefit from the changes. For those so minded, it proved irresistible not to trace that conjunction to a secret financial cabal that was malevolent, foreign, international, and Jewish.

From the early Republic onward some U.S. antisemites had voiced concerns over what they perceived as Jewish power in international finance and commerce far in excess of what their numbers should have indicated. Late-eighteenth-century plans for the construction of an American Bank had been denounced as a secular Jewish conspiracy, and similar charges had reemerged at regular intervals throughout the nineteenth century.

During the Civil War they had enjoyed a particular revival, and the commander of the Union armies, General Ulysses S. Grant, had at one point tried to evict all Jews from areas under his control because of their purportedly disloyal commercial activities.

On the Confederate side similar, inverted charges had been made against the Jewish secretary of state Judah Benjamin and against others said to conspire against the Confederacy and on behalf of international financiers and moneylenders. With the palpable rise of American-Jewish banking interests that took place from the late nineteenth century onward, these kinds of charges multiplied and intensified manifold.

Most conspicuous in the discourse of various left-wing populist and agricultural protest movements, such as the Populist Party, this new economic antisemitism issued in a variety of full-blown conspiracy theories in the 1870s through the 1890s.

In these conspiracy theories all the perceived evils of modern capitalism and industrialism were ascribed to Jews, because of their supposed racial/ religious bent for exploitation and, on a more precise level, because of the purported machinations of identifiable Jewish financiers.

The latter type of theories tended to center around the supposed power of the Rothschild banking family and those of its U.S. agents that were central in various reconstruction and public debt refinancing schemes after the Civil War, as well as in an essentially imperialist defense of their investments abroad.

The economic dislocations attendant on these schemes were highly disruptive of traditional agrarian communities, and in the western and southern areas most affected they tended to be blamed on a cabal of Jewish financiers acting in collusion with corrupted Gentile politicians.

This strand of left-wing antisemitism reached something of a culmination in the 1890s campaigns for the free coinage of silver (and against imperialism) by the Democratic presidential candidate William J. Bryan. Affiliated motifs could still be detected after World War I in various anti-internationalist, isolationist, and social reformatory forms of discourse.

On the political right, as well as elsewhere, these conspiracist speculations were further focused by the new racist, eugenicist, and social Darwinist theories, which made their appearance at about the same time. No major race theorist emerged in the United States, but a more generally orienting racist paradigm came to characterize much of the intellectual discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Both right-wing and left-wing intellectuals traversed racist arguments, claiming that some inherent, genetically acquired racial imperative drove Jews toward a quest for world domination and generally to reprehensible financial and commercial activities.

Elitist literary antisemites further accused Jews of having a baneful, corrupting influence on the aesthetic and moral standards of U.S. life through their financial dealings and through the control that they allegedly acquired in early-twentieth-century print media and in the Hollywood film industry. These elitist antisemites tended to regard both of these kinds of supposedly Jewish influence as somehow racially grounded and possibly conspiracist in nature; certainly international and pervasive.

A fusion of these right- and left-wing tracks of racist antisemitism was never effected, but in the United States no less than in Europe they separately continued to color much of public discussion throughout the twentieth century. On the whole, the Left’s racist conspiracism tended to remain altogether more implied and unsystematic, directed against international bankers in general, while the right-wing version moved ever closer to structured and highly ossified universal conspiracy theories.

Antisemitism and Twentieth-Century Illuminati Theory

In the wake of World War I right-wing conspiracy theorists revived and brought up to date the older theories on the Illuminati. It was then that antisemitism was, for the first time, placed into the very center of the Illuminati theory.

Its full-blown twentieth-century forms tended to be adaptations from the writings of Nesta Webster, a British pioneer of the study of the Illuminati whose many publications were widely circulated in the Englishspeaking world from 1918 onward. It was she, more than any other, who framed the twentiethcentury interpretive matrix that made secular and revolutionary Jews the controlling and directing power behind the Illuminati.

Claiming that the originally Masonic organization had been taken over at some point by an inner cabal of influential Jewish financiers, philosophers, and Reform rabbis, Webster and her conspiracist followers portrayed all, apparently unrelated forms of subversion as deliberately chosen, complementary tracks of a core Jewish conspiracy.

This reformulation of the Illuminati theory found favor primarily because of the need to explain Russian Bolshevism, the apparent overrepresentation of Jews in it, and the purported interest of international financiers to trade with the Bolsheviks and to have them recognized by the Western powers.

The concurrent radicalization of Western labor movements and of colonial nationalists provided further causes for concern for many on the right, as did the creation of the League of Nations as a new supranational authority invested with a radical social program.

This multiple coincidence could not readily be explained in traditional, nonconspiracist ways, least of all by those already steeped in Christian conspiracist thought-forms and interested in continued adherence to traditional religio-political authorities. In the tumultuous aftermath of World War I, all of these developments were instead increasingly interpreted from the Illuminati theory and pronounced different tracks in the campaign for world control of the Illuminati’s core of Jewish financiers.

The 1920 republication of the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion provided crucial added documentation for this new version of the Illuminati theory. Protocols contained a relatively precise program of action that fitted in with earlier predictions and could be presented by conspiracy theorists as the exposed twentieth-century plan of Illuminati action.

Although the document was actually a forgery created by czarist secret police, the authenticity of the Protocols as a secret Jewish document was vouched for by a wide range of apparently respectable commentators. Various abridgements and commentaries of the Protocols quickly spread in the United States. Especially influential among them were those broadcast in the Dearborn Independent and the book The International Jew (1921) by the industrialist Henry Ford.

He became the primary popular disseminator of Illuminati conspiracism in the United States and, more than anyone else, was responsible for the unprecedented spread and popular acceptance of the Jew-Bolshevik equation, which coincided with his period of greatest antisemitic activity, the years 1920–1927. A range of lesser known and less influential U.S. antisemites further popularized the Jew-Bolshevik collusion before and after Ford’s public recanting in 1927.

From the Catholic radio priest Father Coughlin to the Silver Shirts of William D. Pelley and from the Defenders of the Christian Faith of Gerald D. Winrod to Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade, these populist antisemites benefited from and used the anxieties of the Great Depression to incorporate in 1920s generic conspiracy theory such subsequent developments as the New Deal, or “Jew Deal,” and the United Nations. More than a hundred new antisemitic organizations were created in the 1930s, most of them rooted in this kind of conspiracism.

In the 1930s and 1940s, speculations on the Illuminati also found their way to the exegesis of many prominent Christian fundamentalist leaders. Especially important in this regard was William B. Riley, the Baptist founder and head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, who commanded an important position in Christian print and radio media and in various fundamentalist organizations, and could thus powerfully exert himself in the spreading and popularizing of antisemitic attitudes.

Riley primed the early cold-war generation of fundamentalist leaders and made sure that Christian fundamentalist theology accommodated secular Illuminati conspiracism within the older framework of Christian prophecy thought. He, his disciples, and others like him endorsed the Illuminati theory, accepted Protocols as largely authentic, and accentuated the purported Jewishness of international communism.

Believing in the imminence of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and in a preceding antiChristian world empire, these fundamentalists tended also to portray the League of Nations and the UN as prefigurations of the coming anti-Christian world power and to oppose them as such. They further assumed that secular Jews, in particular, played a central role in this anti-Christian world power and that it operated along the lines sketched out in the Protocols.

Renditions of Illuminati theory thus shaped by fundamentalism were used by many religious and secular antisemites throughout the interwar and cold-war periods. To them, it cohered the apparently unrelated, subversionary, and anti-Christian movements of religious and cultural modernism, international communism, liberal internationalism, colonial nationalism, and, originally, Zionism.

Each was presented as but one track in the world conspiracy of secular Jews and their allies, each designed in its different way to weaken the temporal power of Christianity, and each directed by an immensely powerful inner cabal of conspirators. Because of its malleable and inclusive nature, such a compound conspiracy theory proved appealing to many on the political and religious right, usable in a range of anticommunist and antimodernist campaigns from the 1940s to the early 1990s.

By any gauge, antisemitism precipitously declined in the United States during the cold war. The antisemitic aspects of anticommunist conspiracy theory tended to become ever more rarely voiced and explicit, more and more silent and implied. Yet behind much of the anticommunist clamor of the cold war the old antisemitic prejudices still operated.

Post–Cold War Trends

No marked weakening of the various antisemitic conspiracy theories was noticeable immediately after the cold war, even though one of their main rationales was removed by the implosion of the Soviet Union and of international communism.

Also, the increasingly consensual aversion felt toward antisemitism that the crimes of the Holocaust had generated in Western societies made it increasingly difficult for conspiracists to maintain the overtly antisemitic complexion of their theory. Yet its essence remained unchanged. Conspiracy theorists’ concerns were hardly alleviated by the ending of the cold war, for they saw in it the collapse of only one overt aspect of a still ongoing conspiracy.

After the cold war conspiracist discourse centered increasingly on international organizations, such as the UN, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, which were now portrayed as the residual aspects of the one single conspiracy of which international communism had been another aspect. The supposedly Jewish character of that conspiracy’s inner cabal was now referenced more through general allusions to international finance than through direct naming, but the antisemitic element remained at the core of the theory, as did, frequently, the Illuminati.

One new constituency for antisemitic conspiracism received much public attention from the 1980s onward, but its theories did not contain anything new. This was the antisemitism apparent in the African American community, most glaringly in the Nation of Islam movement.

Its leaders, and other prominent African American antisemites, revisited all the customary religious, economic, and racist conspiracy theories, but it was manifest that the core motifs of antisemitic conspiracy theory had remained remarkably uniform and unchanged from their first appearance.

Throughout its long history in the United States, antisemitism has yielded itself to conspiracism, whether premised on antecedent religious prejudices or more interactionist prompters. Its religious and secular forms alike have tended to coalesce around a number of slightly different but essentially homogeneous permutations of the socalled Illuminati conspiracy theory.

This theory has proved to be one of the most persistent containers of antisemitism ever, not least because its malleable and all-inclusive nature can be used to accommodate widely dissimilar forms of economic, religious, racist, or political anxiety.

For most Americans, a general predisposition toward conspiracist explanations came from originally Christian forms of anti-Jewish prejudice, and the Illuminati theory was situated into this context as a secularized form of millennialist speculation. Gradually, its appearance became emphatically anticommunist and anti-internationalist and its antisemitic roots increasingly obscured.

However, there was no doubt but that secular conspiracy belief, especially when allied with prophecy belief, was a mainstay of much of U.S. popular and extremist thought well into the post–cold war era. Nor was there much doubt that such conspiracism was predicated on presuppositions and paradigms originally derived from religious and racist antisemitic speculation.

Apocalypticism

God orders the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to spread wars,
diseases, civil strife, and natural disasters

Conspiracy theories are sometimes generated through an apocalyptic worldview. An apocalypse is an approaching significant transformation that will mark a new phase of human experience. Those anticipating the apocalypse can passively wait for the event or actively promote its arrival. They can dream of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius or fear the nightmare of a terminal nuclear wasteland.

The terms “apocalypse,” “revelation,” and “prophecy” share common root words related to the uncovering of hidden truths—a core claim of conspiracy theories. Apocalypticism is a major feature of Christianity, but the tradition has deep roots in Zoroastrianism and Judaism and can be found in Islam, Hinduism, and other religions. Today the influence of the apocalyptic mindset has emerged from these religious traditions and transmuted into a dizzying array of secular beliefs.

Apocalyptic movements often anticipate the betrayal of an idealized community by secret malevolent forces conspiring against the common good. Those persons sounding the warning urge immediate and drastic measures to stop the secret conspiracy from achieving its sinister goals.


Episodes of this type of apocalyptic conspiracism appear periodically throughout U.S. history: witchhunts in Salem in the 1600s; fears of “alien” sedition in the late 1700s; claims of plots by Freemasons or Catholics in the 1800s; allegations of a Jewish banking cabal behind the Federal Reserve in the early 1900s; and the anticommunist witch-hunts of the cold-war 1950s. Historian Richard Hofstadter studied U.S. anti-Masonic movements of the 1800s and wrote of the “apocalyptic and absolutist framework” of those warning of the claimed conspiracy (Hofstadter, 17).

He developed the theory that conspiracy thinking in U.S. right-wing movements represented a “paranoid style” in U.S. politics. According to Hofstadter, “the central preconception of the paranoid style [is the belief in the] existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character” (Hofstadter, 14).

He argued that grandiose conspiracy theories were constructed when a conspiracist channeled a sense of persecution and hostility into apocalyptic claims that were overheated, overly suspicious, and overaggressive.

Damian Thompson looked at Hofstadter’s thesis and concluded he was right to emphasize the “startling affinities between the paranoid style and apocalyptic belief,” especially the demonization of opponents and “the sense of time running out.” But Thompson felt Hofstadter “stopped short of making a more direct connection between the two.

He did not consider the possibility that the paranoia he identified actually derived from apocalyptic belief; that the people who spread scare stories about Catholics, Masons, Illuminati and Communists” had been primed by the dramatic conspiracist narrative of the End Times popular among Protestants in the United States. Thompson argued that the persistence of such belief in the United States rather than Europe surely explains why the paranoid style seems so quintessentially American.

In the 1950s academics postulated that those who join dissident social movements (and sometimes circulate conspiracy theories) are psychologically unbalanced. Phrases such as “lunatic fringe,” “extremists of the left and right,” and “wing nuts” gained popular usage—especially to dismiss the activism of the 1960s.

This view is sometimes called the classical or pluralist school, represented by authors such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. Critics of the classical school call it the “centrist/extremist theory” because it glorifies an idealized center and implicitly defends the status quo, shielding the powerful from popular complaints.

Hofstadter actually drew a distinction between the psychological and the sociological in his work, but for years the idea that paranoidsounding conspiracy theories were a sign of mental illness reigned supreme as an influential concept, especially in mainstream media.

Since the 1980s academic theories about social movements have stressed their rational and strategic nature, portraying dissidents as people seeking the redress of grievances by collectively mobilizing resources and exploiting political opportunities.

All dissident movements involve some form of apocalypticism with their narrative of speaking truth to power and demands for a transformation of existing relationships that enforce dominance and oppression. Investigative reporters are practicing a form of apocalypticism when they uncover criminal conspiracies and malfeasance by political and business leaders.

Some analysts argue that when dissidents develop the more spectacular and dubious conspiracy theories, it is a misdirected attempt to understand and challenge the actual power and privilege of dominant groups (Fenster).

This type of conspiracism is a narrative form of scapegoating where the apocalyptic style is used to demonize targeted groups as wholly evil, and to valorize as a hero the person sounding the warning about the malevolent plot (Berlet and Lyons, 9). There is increasing attention to the apocalyptic style in the study of history, sociology, and political science; and it has a long pedigree in studies of religion and literature. As an applied way of seeing the world, however, it is as old as the Bible.

Revelation

In Western culture, apocalypticism traces back to the Book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament in the Bible. Revelation contains a prophetic story of God’s wrath caused by the rising tide of greed, sloth, lust, and sin in general. As a warning, God orders the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to spread wars, diseases, civil strife, and natural disasters.

Satan seizes this time of chaos to send in the Antichrist, who appears in human form as a popular world leader, promising peace through the building of one worldwide government. His accomplice, the False Prophet, urges all world religions to unite. A rumor is spread that the popular world leader is actually the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Some Christians are fooled.

The real aim, however, is the total destruction of Christianity. Once the evil Antichrist gains control of the world through a conspiracy involving betrayal by popular political and religious leaders, the storm troopers of Satan start to track down true Christians.

When caught, the Christians not fooled by the Antichrist are told they must accept the mark of the beast—666—as proof they have renounced their earlier beliefs. If they refuse, they are rounded up, tortured, and murdered. God eventually intervenes, and there is a huge battle on the plains of Armageddon in the Middle East. Good triumphs over evil, ushering in a millennium of Christian rule.

Many Christians see the Book of Revelation in metaphoric terms, but others read it as a God-given script in which they must play a role when the time comes. While apocalyptic millennialism based on the Book of Revelation is more prevalent in Protestantism, it exists in Catholic subcultures as well.

Christian Apocalyptic Millennialism

Most contemporary Protestant Christian fundamentalists are premillennialists, believing the Second Coming of Christ starts a thousand-year period of Christian rule. Some Protestant fundamentalists are postmillennialists who believe that godly Christian men must seize control of society and rule for one thousand years before Christ returns.

The most militant of these are the Christian Reconstructionists. The terms “millennialist” and “millenarian” are often used interchangeably to describe social and political movements that are apocalyptic and seek the ideal society. The concept is used regularly in anthropology, where an early and influential study looked at millenarian “Cargo Cults” that emerged in the Pacific Islands in the 1940s and 1950s.

It is the demonizing version of apocalyptic Christian millennialism that has played a major role in establishing conspiracism as a key frame of reference in European cultures—and later in the new colonies of the Americas. The problem starts when apocalyptic Christians in Europe started viewing current world events as “signs of the End Times,” and then scapegoated those with whom they disagreed as agents of the Antichrist.

This dynamic drew on the ancient tradition of dualism or Manicheanism, in which the world is seen as a stage for a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. The cast of players is composed of “Us” versus “Them.” This divisive process is sometimes called the creation of the apocalyptic “Other.”

For Christians, Jews were often cast in the role of the “Other.” As early as the second century, Christians portrayed Jews as in league with the Antichrist. Twelfth-century Christians blamed Jews for the ritual murder of children, poisoning of wells, desecration of communion bread and wine, and other heinous acts.

Apocalypse by digital artist

During the Inquisitions that followed in later centuries, the apocalyptic scapegoating of Jews was often tied to a claim that they were engaged in a vast evil conspiracy. This process was repeated during the sixteenth century, and can be found in the anti-Jewish writings of Martin Luther, for whom the Reformation was a necessary purifying prelude to what he saw as the approaching End Times.

The conspiracist reading of Revelation became a central apocalyptic narrative in the political discourse of Christians. The image that reverberated down through the centuries was of a vast global conspiracy involving high government officials betraying the decent productive citizens, while subversive parasitic agents gnawed away at society from below.

Freemasons, Jews, and Communists

When the theories of the Enlightenment began to popularize the notion of the separation of church and state and the inherent rights of the individual, those intellectuals who defended the unrestrained prerogatives of church-state oligarchies were quick to cast their critics in the role of subversive conspirators.

In the 1790s John Robison and Abbé Augustin Barruel claimed that the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment—and the French Revolution—were part of a plot networked through lodges of Freemasons.

The alleged culprits were the Illuminati, members of a philosophical study group started by a Bavarian free-thinker named Adam Weishaupt. Both Robison’s and Barruel’s books are apocalyptic in a generic sense, but excited readers quickly wove their themes into vividly apocalyptic scenarios.

In the early 1900s, charges that the Freemasons controlled the banks, the press, politics, and the government were rewritten into an antisemitic hoax document claiming a Jewish world conspiracy.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first appeared in Russia as a creation of the czarist secret police, and its most popular early version specifically linked Jews to the conspiratorial machinations of the Antichrist. The Protocols argues that behind the Freemason conspiracy is an even more secret conspiracy run by rabbis.

Implicit in both the anti-Masonic and antisemitic conspiracist narratives, as they were first modified for U.S. consumption, is the theme that the United States is essentially a Christian nation threatened with subversion by anti-Christian secret elites with allies in high places.

The secular version of U.S. conspiracism omits the overtly religious references and simply looks for betrayal by political and religious leaders. Conspiracist movements in the United States derived their specific narratives from these historic roots, ranging from mildly generic to harshly antisemitic.

Godless communism was the central conspiracy scapegoat for many conservative Christians in the twentieth century. The rise of U.S. Protestant Fundamentalism in the early 1900s coincided with a secular political attack on bolshevism and anarchism as un-American. Defense of democracy and capitalism became interwoven.

This buttressed support for the Palmer Raids in late 1919 and 1920, during which socialist and anarchist labor organizers were accused of plotting an apocalyptic campaign of bombing and insurrection. Projecting their apocalyptic fears into action, the government launched a countersubversive campaign that deported thousands of immigrants from Italy and Russia based on the false perception that they were all part of a conspiracy of criminal sedition.

Events such as the establishment of the Federal Reserve System and the income tax were woven into Christian apocalyptic conspiracism, and flourished during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were sometimes portrayed as part of the efforts of the Antichrist to socialize and collectivize all societies under a oneworld government as prophesied in Revelation.

Christian evangelical tracts discussing the relationship between communism and the apocalyptic End Times were popular from the 1920s through the 1960s. Different subcultures could easily weave in claims that behind the evil of the “red menace” were Freemasons, Jews, or both. Later it was the UN, the Trilateral Commission, or other scapegoats.

Apocalypticism and Fundamentalism

Hal Lindsey reignited Protestant apocalyptic speculation in 1970 with his book The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold 19 million copies. U.S. Protestant fundamentalists were the main audience for this and the many apocalyptic books that followed.

The original use of the term “fundamentalism” referred to a populist theological protest movement that arose within U.S. Protestantism in the early twentieth century. Fundamentalism was a reaction against mainline Protestant denominations in the United States such as Presbyterians and Baptists and, to a lesser extent, Methodists, Episcopalians, and others.

Leaders of these major denominations were accused of selling out the Protestant faith by forging a compromise with the ideas of the Enlightenment and modernism. In the early 1900s conservative critics of this denominational leadership developed voluminous lists of what they considered the fundamental beliefs required for people to consider themselves Christian—thus the term “fundamentalism.”

The term is now used to describe similar but not identical religious renewal movements in other religious traditions, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Fundamentalism is often confused with orthodoxy and traditionalism.

Fundamentalists claim to be restoring the “true” religion by returning to “traditional” beliefs and enforcing orthodoxy—the set of theological doctrines approved of as sound and correct by a faith’s religious leaders. In fact, while fundamentalist movements claim to be restoring tradition and orthodoxy, they actually create a new version of an existing religion based on a mythic and romanticized past.

There is a basic apocalyptic framework common across religious fundamentalist movements—the idea that a struggle between good and evil is reaching a crucial moment in history. One way to mobilize people to join a religious fundamentalist movement is to claim that the idealized Godly society is being subverted by an evil conspiracy. This raises the stakes in the anticipated apocalyptic confrontation.

Fuller ties the Christian millennialist viewpoint to the larger issues of demonization and scapegoating when he argues that many efforts to name the Antichrist appear to be rooted in the psychological need to project one’s ‘unacceptable’ tendencies onto a demonic enemy.

It is the Antichrist, not oneself, who must be held responsible for wayward desires. And with so many aspects of modern American life potentially luring individuals into nonbiblical thoughts or desires, it is no wonder that many people believe that the Antichrist has camouflaged himself to better work his conspiracies against the faithful.

While many dissident movements (religious or secular) are in some sense apocalyptic, not all such movements utilize demonization and scapegoating to construct conspiracy theories. Even those Christians who think the End Times are imminent do not automatically succumb to conspiracism.

There is a deep division within modern Christianity between those Christians who identify evil with specific persons and groups such as Muslims, feminists, or homosexuals and those Christians who see evil as the will to dominate and oppress. The distinction cuts across theological and political lines. Some of the most vocal critics of apocalyptic demonization and conspiracist scapegoating come from within Christianity, such as Gregory S. Camp or Dale Aukerman.

Apocalyptic New World Order

When European communism began to collapse in the late 1980s, many Christian conspiracists simply shifted their attention to another godless philosophy—secular humanism. The attack on liberal secular humanism gave new life to fundamentalist conspiracy theory. On the one hand, the secular humanist conspiracy could be tied to the outward manifestations of the Satanic End Times, while on the other, a conservative critique of liberalism and moral relativism that omitted overt references to prophetic passages in Revelation could be crafted.

Apocalypticism remained central in both versions as a call for a return to “traditional” values as the only way to stave off the impending collapse of society. This came to be known as the Culture Wars.

As the calendar year 2000 approached, scores of books aimed at Christian evangelicals warned of the coming apocalypse and many contained elaborate conspiracy scenarios involving the Antichrist, the Freemasons, the UN, computers, universal price codes, and corporate globalization. Jeremiah Films produces videos with conservative Christian apocalyptic theology emerging in the form of conspiracist claims.

The 1993 video The Crash—The Coming Financial Collapse of America comes in two versions: one with a secular doomsday scenario and a Christian version featuring Biblical prophesy. Jeremiah Films distributed several videos claiming vast conspiracies by the Clinton administration, including allegations that the president had his aide Vince Foster assassinated.

Preparing to survive the coming apocalypse is the basis of the survivalist subculture that stores food and conducts self-defense training. Conspiracism, apocalypticism, and survivalism are a potent stew. The tragic shootout between federal agents and the Weaver family in Idaho in 1992 involved government misconduct and a failure to understand the power of apocalyptic belief.

The Weavers were survivalists because they were followers of Christian Identity, a theology rejected by all mainstream Christians that claims the United States is the Promised Land and white Christians are God’s chosen people.

The neo-Nazi version of Identity claims Jews are Satanic agents, and sometimes followers arm themselves for what they believe is an imminent apocalyptic race war. The Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, was a survivalist center, and leader David Koresh was decoding Revelation as an End Times script. The failure of government officials to understand this dynamic resulted in many needless deaths in 1993.

Spurred by anger over these events, the Patriot movement developed an armed wing, known as citizen militias, which briefly flourished in the mid1990s. Patriot social movements involve as many as 5 million Americans who believe that the government is manipulated by subversive secret elites and is planning to use law enforcement or military force to repress political rights.

The militias circulated an elaborate conspiracy theory about betrayal by secret internationalist elites that is a standard narrative of right-wing populist movements in the United States. A popular speaker in these circles is Robert K. Spear, author of Surviving Global Slavery: Living under the New World Order. Spear believed the formation of armed Christian communities was necessary to avoid the mark of the beast in the coming End Times.

The approach of the year 2000 seemed to stimulate apocalyptic excitement in a variety of groups. The Aum Shinrikyo sect turned its apocalypticism outward with a deadly 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in 1997 merged millennial apocalyptic visions from the Bible, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the literary genre of science fiction.

Also turning its apocalypticism inward, between 1994 and 1997 the Order of the Solar Temple staged group suicides in Canada, France, and Switzerland. Other self-fulfilling apocalyptic events include the People’s Temple suicide/murders engineered in 1978 by Jim Jones in Guyana; and the Ugandan doomsday sect Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, where in the year 2000 some 1,000 devotees were murdered by the sects’ leaders.

Apocalypticism as a style can also be detected in doomsday scenarios circulated by some sectors of the environmental and antinuclear movements, although they point out that nuclear devastation or our atmosphere turning into toxic soup would effectively mean the end of time for the species that are aware of it. That would truly be apocalyptic, but no one would be left to appreciate the irony.