UNDER THE EYE OF POWER: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracyby Colin Dickey
The Memorial Day pancake breakfast in Blue Hill, Maine, is hosted by the Oddfellows, an 18th-century craft guild turned community service organization related to the Freemasons. When I was there this spring, I thought about the older members who served coffee and sold raffle tickets to fund college scholarships. How bizarre, even funny, that this group was once seen as a threat to America. Right?
Wrong. In his new book, “Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy,” Colin Dickey draws an unbroken line of violence against the Freemasons — whose secret rituals and devotion to social upliftment Ben Franklin and many of our young the early risers of democracy – to the 2021 Capitol uprising, showing that our current obsession with conspiracies is not new.
America’s DNA is etched with the belief that we are an exceptional yet fragile nation, threatened by powerful secret groups “who conspire to disrupt the will of the people and the rule of law,” writes Dickey. History is replete with examples of citizens and their elected leaders hijacking public discourse by bullying – sometimes literally – perceived enemies of the American project. Unfortunately, most of this twisted history has been willfully forgotten, leaving us constantly surprised by the next imagined danger.
Americans often point to the 1692 Salem witch trials and their 20th-century analogue, the McCarthy hearings, as particular moral panics—one driven by religious zeal and terrified children, the other by the Red Scare and a sociopathic senator. We characterize these double witch hunts as aberrations, their lessons learned.
Dickey shatters this misconception with a three-century tour of the fabricated plots and panic that flared in America amid social unrest, economic decline, and cultural upheaval. Protestants, Catholics and Jews, enslaved people, immigrants and gays, labor unionists and business elites, the conservative right, activist left and many others have been demonized by deluded Americans and the leaders who foment moral outrage for political gain.
“Conspiracy theories, after all, feed on historical amnesia,” writes Dickey. “They depend on your belief that what is happening now has never happened before.”
Dickey is a cultural historian whose previous book, “Ghostland”, deals with the deeper meanings behind the country’s haunted places. In this latest exploration of the scary stories Americans tell themselves, he reminds us that as late as the 1980s, innocent people were imprisoned and many lives ruined as children tapped “rediscovered memories” of ritual abuse in suburban daycares, later evidenced by sensational accusations. false. Janet Reno, Bill Clinton’s future Attorney General, prosecuted the alleged perpetrators. Oprah featured the accusers on her show.
That most Americans have forgotten all this doesn’t help us understand or counter the politically fueled fears about “groomers” and “indoctrination” that now plague American educators and librarians. Dickey, a meticulous investigator, discovers new details about our most famous fractures from reality and shocks with tales of long-forgotten paranoia-fueled violence.
He documents a spate of antebellum attacks on Catholics, including a savage attack on a Massachusetts convent, fueled by lies from Protestant leaders about sexual depravity and infanticide behind its walls. Dickey takes no note of the later, true revelations of abuse that took place in Catholic schools and churches. That inclusion would have served as a helpful reminder that delegitimizing one’s critics is sometimes itself a means of social control, in this case practiced for decades by the Catholic Church.
The book explores the dueling falsehoods that abolitionists and slavers spread about each other as the nation descended into civil war, with each group minimizing heroic revolt and escape by enslaved people to serve their own ideological ends.
The CIA’s clandestine tapes of encounters between sex workers and Americans unaware that the agency had injected them with LSD, part of a project known as MKUltra, is described in chilling detail. This gruesome and fruitless search for “mind control” drugs, which the agency was convinced our Cold War adversaries already possessed began in the early 1950s and lasted for two decades.
Other chapters document the dazzling success of the tracts and books that fueled mass delusion long before there was social media, Fox News, or Alex Jones’ Infowars. From the best-selling anti-Catholic book “Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal” to “The International Jew,” the raucously anti-Semitic series written by industrialist Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, fear-mongering has always paid off. financial, political or both.
And Donald Trump wasn’t the only president to exploit populist paranoia, Dickey points out. George Washington, in his farewell speech, warned Americans to be wary of foreign troops working “treacherously” against freedom. The big difference here, of course, is that unlike Trump, Washington spoke with the survival of the new nation in mind.
As Dickey explains, ordinary people weave conspiracy webs because they crave simple, comforting explanations for troubling events with complicated causes and no obvious solutions. While researching the theories that arose after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I found that young mothers were among the first to entertain — if only briefly — the lie that the shooting was a gun control hoax.
They were not drawn to the gun policy implications of the tragedy. They just struggled with the fact that parents like them had put their first graders on the school bus that morning and lost them two hours later.
I wish this book would speak to more Americans who are drawn to such false theories. “While factual exposure is vital, it remains less important than first understanding the psychological need that drives the conspirator to search for alternative narratives,” Dickey writes. But he doesn’t interview conspirators, to show us how trauma, disappointment, and personality traits drive some people to look for scapegoats, as does the sense of belonging that conspirators reinvent themselves as “investigators.”
Like the man I met at a Trump rally who believed that walling up the southern border could have prevented his son’s death from opioid addiction, other factors besides bigotry are lured onto the conspiracy track, making their exploitation all the more becomes more disgusting.
Dickey presents a thorough account of panic and violence that has been all but erased by history. But his accounts, particularly of the colonial period and early 1800s, are so extensive that it’s hard to keep track of who did what to whom and when – always a challenge as we weed our way through these weedy webs . (A shocking colonial-era episode left unaddressed here, though amply discussed in Brendan McConville’s “The Brethren,” found a network of North Carolina farmers plotting to assassinate the governor and other officials, convinced that the Revolution was a hunter for religious oppression.)
And his broad condemnation of the FBI and CIA as unique examples of conspirators’ worst nightmares — “two networks that secretly worked to violate civil liberties, blatantly commit illegal acts, and suppress American democracy” — is so limiting that some wonder if these agencies ever served a legitimate purpose. (Dickey also incorrectly refers to CIA “agents.” The agency’s employees are called officers, and the informants they recruit are agents; FBI employees are called agents.)
“Under the Eye of Power” ends with a question: Is it comforting or disheartening to hear that we are going through a rift that is all too common in our history? Attempts to regulate the spread of disinformation on social media do not solve the core problem, Dickey argues. While the internet facilitates and propels widespread deception, “the behavior is ours to begin with”.
The good news: the nation survives. The bad: Until we recognize that conspiracy-induced riots are not anomalies, but are central to how power is gained and maintained in this country, we are doomed to move from panic to panic, failing to recognize that the real enemy of the people are us.
UNDER THE EYE OF POWER: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy | By Colin Dickey | 368 pp. | viking | $30
