The Adder’s Den

PETER: This week marked the 50th anniversary of another presidential assassination, that of President John F. Kennedy. In the years since 1963, Americans have struggled to understand what happened in Dallas that November day. The Warren Commission offered some answers the following year, but its official report hardly put the questions to rest. For decades, alternative accounts have been bandied about, suggesting that there may be more to the story. This year’s anniversary triggered a new wave of books about the assassination, and recent polls report that something like 2/3 of Americans don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

BRIAN: Why do these conspiracy theories continue to hold so much power 50 years later, and what do they tell us about our own time? It’s easy enough to dismiss these theories. But might there be something about conspiracy thinking that is deeply and fundamentally American?

But first, let’s return to that book by John Smith Dye we heard about a few minutes ago. The theories in that book– they strike me as incredibly wacky, and I want to know why a book that was built around so many crackpot theories was so popular in the 1860s.

ED: Brian, great question. I look forward to digging into the slave power conspiracy. But I’m curious about why the great concern about the presidency and about federal power. Peter, do you have any ideas?

BRIAN: Oh, passing the buck again.

ED: Yeah.

PETER: Well, it begins with the American Revolution itself. You know, Americans thought that they had destroyed the whole idea of monarchy. They were free people. They established republican governments. But it was the return of the repressed, and the president became a kind of king figure.

And you know what’s important about this is that conspiracy thinking makes sense where you have one person exercising tremendous power, and that person is surrounded by ministers and advisers, and maybe with an agenda, a conspiratorial agenda. Maybe they want to kill the king. Maybe they just want to turn him toward their own ends. And that’s what Americans thought had happened with George III.

Why would we have these taxation policies? Why would we have this systematic campaign to destroy American liberty? What’s the explanation? We had been good and loyal subjects. There are things happening that are not transparent. We don’t see them happen, but we can see the results.

So we begin with this great revolution against a conspiracy to destroy our liberties, and then we discover that we have emerging in our own midst a power center that’s vulnerable to capture by the slave power.

ED: And the slave power comes up in several different episodes, each of which lends greater credibility to its power. The first one is the war with Mexico in the 1840s, when it seems that Southern slaveholders, in a lust for new land, are driving the United States, despite the will of the white Northern majority, into a international war. And then right on the heels of that, in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, which is telling white Northerners that they have to be the deputies, the allies, of slave catchers, who are fanning into the North to bring back people who are putatively former slaves.

BRIAN: A lot of boundaries are being crossed, Ed, in the name of slavery.

PETER: Oh, absolutely.

ED: Exactly. And I think the pivotal moment is the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court, hidden away in chambers, like the English government, comes up with a ruling that tells white Northerners that it’s the federal government that’s going to determine who is and who is not a citizen, not the states, the way that it had been.

PETER: And the important thing, Ed, is white Northerners are not concerned primarily and immediately about the slavery of the South.

ED: Right.

PETER: They’re concerned now that the slave power reaches into the North, and they will be the ultimate slaves. They will be in the control of the South. And that’s precisely the kind of concern that drove the revolutionaries to break with the British empire.

BRIAN: And we spent so much time in the 20th century worrying about Northern intervention into the South on civil rights and breaking up Jim Crow, it’s just amazing for me to hear all these concerns about a slave power poking its nose where it shouldn’t be, well beyond slavery in the South into literally defining citizenship in Northern states, declaring war on Mexico because of this cabal in the South.

ED: And you know what makes it so maddening to white Northerners is that their preponderance in the electoral numbers keep growing. The North is getting bigger and bigger, and the South still seems to be holding on to this undue power. It seems to me that a conspiracy might be at the heart of that, Brian.

BRIAN: Yeah. And I do think that gets to the essence of conspiracy. I’ll go 20th century again, but those people who believed in Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, they were asking, how could a nation so powerful as the United States– who just developed the atomic bomb, who had the only standing industrial base in the world after World War II– how could we be tied down to a third-rate country in Korea? How could we lose China? How could this be? Well, there’s only one explanation. It must be a conspiracy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: It’s time for a quick break. When we return, a shadowy trust that threatened to steal young women away in the early 1900s.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a minute.