American History

Libertarianism

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img a="" almost="" alt="Libertarianism" border="0" conspirat="" government="" holds="" is="" libertarianism="" political="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4u9JIzy4KWPUzZyJY4mZiVy_GNU4FGnj0JvIQvUq6qRz37uVh0Ptd7RuY_pi2_P05Otmelf2Gc2CVnweQz6TXNgDJQm6m_Qs8hSDft27P3A7cijVv5y_A203jHVICEf-1Ku1RLT-CLxn6/s1600/Libertarianism.jpg" that="" the="" theory="" title="Libertarianism" width="250" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Libertarianism</td></tr> </tbody></table> Libertarianism is a political theory that holds that the government is almost a conspiratorial force, trying to enslave the people through its coercive power. Libertarians believe in individual freedom and individual choice. They reject the use of force or fraud to compel others, except in response to force or fraud. Libertarians want to take the government out of private decisions by reducing the size of the government to the most essential function of providing for a peaceful environment in which all persons can prosper. As a utopian ideal, libertarianism is based on the notion that society exists at its most free when people work together voluntarily without government intervention. The basic principles of modern libertarianism are attributed to the writings of Ayn Rand, especially her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). In this work, Rand describes a U.S. society weakened by many years of welfare. Contemporay U.S. society has made individualism and the work ethic into an evil. Instead of working for a living, the characters in the novel believe that the government owes them their livelihoods. In the novel Rand instead offers the maxim of libertarianism: individualism or selfishness is good. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476752842/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1476752842&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=K5KLPGBH37CX73AO"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1476752842&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" almost="" alt="Libertarianism" border="0" conspirat="" government="" height="1" holds="" is="" libertarianism="" political="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1476752842" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" theory="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019993391X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=019993391X&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=AMZ77AA52T2KDPVL"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=019993391X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" almost="" alt="Libertarianism" border="0" conspirat="" government="" height="1" holds="" is="" libertarianism="" political="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=019993391X" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" theory="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> The economist Murray Rothbard has built upon Rand to develop a more theoretical outline. He argues that government is inherently aggressive and exploitative. Instead of government, society should rely on the free market as the most efficient method of distributing resources. Libertarianism became the basis for a political party that emerged in the United States in the early 1970s. The Libertarian Party ran philosophy professor John Hospers as its presidential candidate in 1972. While the party reached the ballot in only two states, Hospers did receive one electoral vote. Roger MacBride, the Virginia elector who cast his vote for Hospers in 1972, was the party’s nominee in 1976, receiving over 200,000 votes in the November election. The party, and the libertarian movement in the United States, grew dramatically in the late 1970s, due primarily to the financial contributions of the Koch brothers, Charles and David, owners of Koch Industries. With their assistance, libertarians were able to establish a number of publications and an active think tank, the Cato Institute. In the election of 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nominee, primarily to take advantage of a loophole in federal campaign finance law allowing a candidate to spend unlimited campaign funds. Because of the financial assistance provided by the Kochs, the party’s nominees appeared on the ballot in all fifty states. The result of their influence in the movement was a battle over strategy, however. The party was split between a group of opportunists represented by the Kochs and the “missionaries,” following Murray Rothbard. Rothbard referred to the Koch brothers’ influence as the “Kochtopus.” The Libertarian Party ticket received 900,000 votes in 1980, a disappointment considering the millions of dollars spent by David Koch. In 1983, the Koch supporters, also known as the “Cato group,” left the party after their candidate was not nominated by the party convention. Without the Kochs’ financial support, the party did not receive as much attention for the rest of the century. Libertarianism, and the Libertarian Party, have had a difficult time finding acceptance in the United States, in part because the philosophy does not fit neatly on the liberal-conservative continuum with which most Americans are familiar. Libertarians emphasize free markets, making them similar to many conservatives. It is the libertarians’ belief that people should be free to choose their social activities, including, for example, the use of drugs, that puts the philosophy at odds with more cultural conservatives. In short, libertarians believe that national defense and law enforcement are the only areas in which governments should be involved. They oppose the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)</a> because it establishes an entangling alliance that might work to bring the United States into unnecessary conflict. The United Nations is also opposed because it undermines national sovereignty by placing power in the hands of international bureaucrats. Libertarians oppose restrictions on trade and immigration, believing that the free market more efficiently regulates these areas. Libertarianism has enjoyed some limited <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">success</a>. Many of its basic principles were voiced by the administration of President <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ronald Reagan</a> in the 1980s. Government services were privatized in the United States and in Europe, where a number of national airlines and railroads were sold by the government. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of thousands of libertarians around the world. Many participate as pro-freedom activists in traditional parties while others create their own political parties. All believe that government is the problem, not the solution.

Libertarianism

Libertarianism Libertarianism is a political theory that holds that the government is almost a conspiratorial force, trying to enslave t...

Liberty Lobby

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiJGiMxYlne2PB77miUNI6DVd0V4RqvoP-rxB3XMSJukQHxC7NKALJXkIJg1DkFIXdmqFh2B2dT_1hc5GHwhqA55_mMO9JE-YEE-mPtV-paXMwHHdKZbNrC3UnathElswGYimH3oswVKyJ/s1600/Liberty-Lobby.png" title="Liberty" was="" width="250" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Liberty Lobby</td></tr> </tbody></table> Established in 1957 by <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="0813031982" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="c93957d56f03f51109f67e6459b42383" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Willis Carto" href="http://www.amazon.com/Willis-Carto-American-Far-Right/dp/0813031982/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=c93957d56f03f51109f67e6459b42383&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_8799677" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Willis Carto</a><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_8799677" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=c93957d56f03f51109f67e6459b42383&_cb=1482069392959" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" was="" width="0" />, Liberty Lobby was initially described as a pressure group for patriotism. It published a detailed record of how members of Congress voted on key issues, testified before congressional committees, and, in the 1960s, supported the presidential candidacy first of the conservative Republican <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="1568584121" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="eca247510a4c229d41859b3993668716" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Barry Goldwater" href="http://www.amazon.com/Before-Storm-Goldwater-Unmaking-Consensus/dp/1568584121/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=eca247510a4c229d41859b3993668716&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_7957686" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Barry Goldwater</a><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_7957686" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=eca247510a4c229d41859b3993668716&_cb=1482069416060" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" was="" width="0" />, then the segregationist former governor of Alabama, George Wallace. In 1971, however, the country’s leading conservative magazine, National Review, published an article accusing Carto of creating the Lobby as a front behind which he concealed his real views. As early as the mid-1950s, it observed, he had been involved in a scheme to repatriate black Americans to Africa, while in 1960 he had visited the U.S. <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Liberty Lobby>neo-Nazi</a>, Francis Parker Yockey, who was being held in the San Francisco County Jail for passport offenses. Following Yockey’s suicide, Carto had published and written the introduction to a new edition of a book Yockey had written in the late 1940s, Imperium, in which he had praised “the German revolution of 1933.” Carto’s organization nonetheless continued to attract support and in 1975 was in a position to launch a weekly tabloid, the National Spotlight, later the Spotlight. The popularity of publications such as the National Enquirer, it declared in its first edition, was because of the American people’s thirst for <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Liberty Lobby>information</a> suppressed by the establishment media, and in the years that followed the paper’s antipathy to what it described as a Zionist plot mingled with and was sometimes masked by its propensity to publish a veritable smorgasbord of sensational allegations. Amidst claims of plans for UN occupation and “internationalist” weather manipulation, a central theme was the machinations of such bodies as the <a href=" " target="_blank">Trilateral Commission</a> and the <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="0979988624" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="e4dbc4238ede90e9e92d5dc2e5c4c642" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Bilderberg Group" href=" " target="_blank" title=Liberty Lobby>Rockefellers</a>’ and Rothschilds’ drive for a one-world government. This pamphlet, it declared, presented irrefutable proof of the truth of conspiracy theory. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MC27WUK/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=4800ded106f8b66f297f3a6a5057f8b9" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00MC27WUK&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" height="1" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=B00MC27WUK" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" was="" width="1" /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471679283/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=099eafb8b353c7961fff678bbffaf037" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0471679283&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" height="1" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0471679283" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" was="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> While the Spotlight and a weekly radio program, Radio Free America, were central to the Lobby’s activities, it also sold recommended publications through its Liberty Library, ranging from the early-twentieth-century British far-rightist Nesta Webster’s conspiratorial interpretation of the French Revolution to a pamphlet on the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Liberty Lobby>Oklahoma bombing</a>, Timothy McVeigh: Mastermind or Patsy? Amidst the different publications promoted by the Lobby, one of the most important was Carto’s own study, Profiles in Populism, in which he defined the organization’s beliefs. Where conservatives, he argued, defended free trade and involved the nation in foreign entanglements, populists recognized the need to protect the national economy and to pursue a noninterventionist foreign policy. As National Review had complained, Carto’s organization blended well with the conservative milieu, and it was not always easy to locate it with certainty. It had drawn attention to Carto’s private correspondence, in which he had lamented the Nazis’ defeat by “<a amzn-ps-bm-asin="1614271321" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="5e732471e2c84f6c1717888bcb3d77d2" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="the International Jews" href="http://www.amazon.com/International-Jew-Worlds-Foremost-Problem-Abridged/dp/1614271321/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=5e732471e2c84f6c1717888bcb3d77d2&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_3631609" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the International Jews</a><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_3631609" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=5e732471e2c84f6c1717888bcb3d77d2&_cb=1482069543249" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" was="" width="0" />.” In the early 1990s, the Spotlight was to publish a defense of the <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="1512331481" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="2ebda333e75143add4f633922385c927" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Waffen SS" href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Liberty Lobby>organization</a>, the Institute for Historical Review. In 1993, however, a bitter argument over a bequest left by the heir to the Edison fortune led to Carto being locked out of the Institute’s offices and a series of court cases that ultimately, in 2001, resulted in the closing down of both Liberty Lobby and the Spotlight. While both sides in the dispute continued to adhere to Holocaust revisionism, Carto declared that his erstwhile colleagues were working with the <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="0062123416" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="64fb3315c3bb88a4546bdffa384a0117" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Israeli Mossad" href="http://www.amazon.com/Mossad-Greatest-Missions-Israeli-Service/dp/0062123416/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=64fb3315c3bb88a4546bdffa384a0117&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_4922169" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Israeli Mossad</a><img a="" alt="Liberty" as="" border="0" described="" for="" group="" height="0" id="amznPsBmPixel_4922169" initially="" liberty="" lobby="" patriotism="" pressure="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=64fb3315c3bb88a4546bdffa384a0117&_cb=1482069375639" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" was="" width="0" />, the CIA, and the Church of Scientology in order to destroy his work.

Liberty Lobby

Liberty Lobby Established in 1957 by Willis Carto , Liberty Lobby was initially described as a pressure group for patriotism. It publish...

G. Gordon Liddy

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW6vL_frBWOEi29OJ6dezwtav7BNyikmv10vUvJ_v4X9Y4_OiF2W-n27a8Y1FvQhVSxnddbYuIDox_QpGJMO313T28CHodetk278n-OTlog2pvSiQpiYTwfhBG59kOkBeN-LkXdQATaunI/s1600/Gordon-Liddy.jpg" /></a></div> Of all the characters to be thrown up by <a href=" " target="_blank" title=G. Gordon Liddy>Watergate</a>, G. Gordon Liddy was one of the most colorful. Unlike the bookish lawyers, such as John Dean, caught up in the scandal, Liddy portrayed himself as a man of action and steel, refusing to answer questions and remaining loyal to <a href=" " target="_blank" title=G. Gordon Liddy>President Nixon</a>. A proud conservative, Liddy never apologized for or seemed ashamed by what he had done, which included planning the botched Watergate break-in itself. He was imprisoned for his part in the affair, but after his release he used his righteous hard-man persona and powerful articulacy to become a successful public speaker and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. Liddy became involved in Watergate through his role in the “Plumbers,” a small group within the White House charged with stopping damaging leaks following the release of the Pentagon Papers. Liddy was already working in the White House and he was chosen for the Plumbers because of his experience in law enforcement; he had spent five years in the FBI before becoming an assistant district attorney in upstate New York. He came to the attention of national Republican leaders in 1968 when he narrowly lost a New York congressional primary race against Hamilton Fish, Jr., a scion of a famous Republican family. After the defeat he took an active role in the Nixon campaign, for which he was rewarded with a job in the Treasury Department. However, he quickly fell out with his boss there and moved to the White House to work on “narcotics, bombings, and guns” under John Mitchell, the attorney general. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595383580/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=f716db7422454f8b1389c817609ffa7d" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0595383580&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img all="" alt="Of" be="" border="0" by="" characters="" g.="" gordon="" height="1" liddy="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0595383580" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" thrown="" to="" up="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895261065/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0895261065&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=P7MEERLIQVAAUVXZ"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0895261065&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img all="" alt="Of" be="" border="0" by="" characters="" g.="" gordon="" height="1" liddy="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0895261065" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" thrown="" to="" up="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> At the Plumbers, Liddy worked closely with E. Howard Hunt in organizing the September 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. However, their men botched the job, failing to find Ellsberg’s file and ransacking the office. Undeterred, Liddy and Hunt pushed for a second break-in at the psychiatrist’s home, but John Ehrlichman, who had been appalled by the damage done in the first operation, blocked it. The Plumbers continued to push other plans for attacking Nixon’s enemy, including drugging Ellsberg with LSD and firebombing the Brookings Institution, until Liddy moved to the Campaign to Re-elect the President (CRP) in December 1971. There he worked as the general counsel while planning “dirty tricks” for the forthcoming election. Throughout his career, Liddy unsettled many people who dealt with him because of his macho posturing, rampant conservatism, and gun advocacy. He also committed bizarre acts to show his strength and will, including holding his arm over a candle until it turned black. At the CRP he terrified his immediate superior, Jeb Magruder, which afforded him a free hand in planning GEMSTONE, a jadwal of espionage and sabotage for the 1972 presidential election. Liddy presented his plan to Mitchell, Magruder, and the president’s counsel, John Dean, in the attorney general’s office on 27 January 1972. It was a James Bond fantasy of wiretaps, prostitutes, and spy planes, and while Mitchell later told the Senate Watergate Committee that he “should have thrown him [Liddy] out of the window,” he merely turned the usulan down politely. Liddy believed that it was merely a question of costs so he presented a second, cheaper plan on 4 February. However, this was also rejected and as no one (especially not Magruder) was prepared to tell Liddy that the whole thing was too much, he cut back even further. Eventually a third plan, which consisted of a few wiretaps, prostitutes, and infiltrating opposition campaigns was finally approved. As a first step, Liddy’s men installed bugs in the Democrats’ offices in the Watergate building on 27 May. They failed to work properly, however, and when the team reentered the offices on 16 June to repair the bugs and photograph documents, they were arrested by the Washington police. Liddy watched the arrests from a hotel room opposite the Watergate building and it soon became clear that he had made a number of mistakes. The most important was using James McCord, the CRP’s security consultant, as one of the burglars. McCord was quickly linked back to the campaign, which indirectly implicated the White House in the affair. The day after the burglary Liddy started shredding papers, and even money, at the CRP and called Magruder in <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=G. Gordon Liddy>California</a>, who started the “damage control” along with Mitchell, which snowballed into the Watergate cover-up. The same day, Liddy was also sent to meet the new attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, and to ask him to get McCord released from jail. Kleindienst refused. After that, Liddy played little active role in the cover-up, as the White House kept him at arm’s length even before he was implicated. He told John Dean all that had happened on the Monday after the burglary (and even offered to be shot) but from then on he laid low. The FBI linked him to the crime in June through his White House phone number, which was in pocket books carried by the burglars. Liddy was questioned by agents but he refused to answer and was accordingly fired by the CRP. On 15 September he was indicted along with the burglars and Hunt on criminal bugging charges. He refused to testify at his trial and his obstinate manner caused the judge, John Sirica, to sentence him to twenty years. Liddy later received a further eighteen months for contempt when he refused to testify before the Watergate grand jury after being granted immunity. Liddy eventually spent fifty-two months in prison and after his release in 1977, he started a new career in the media. He wrote novels and also his autobiography, Will, giving his side of Watergate, but only after the statute of limitations had run out. The book was made into a TV movie, and Liddy also began a lucrative speaking career including debates with the LSD guru, Timothy Leary. (As an assistant district attorney, Liddy had twice arrested Leary.) In 1990, he found another forum for his conservative politics and gun advocacy, a radio talk-show on WJFK in Washington, D.C., which soon achieved national syndication. He has also branched out into acting, playing “baddies” in TV shows like Miami Vice, McGyver, and Perry Mason.

G. Gordon Liddy

Of all the characters to be thrown up by Watergate , G. Gordon Liddy was one of the most colorful. Unlike the bookish lawyers, such as Joh...

Native Americans

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="Native" americans="" border="0" featured="" first="" in="" native="" non="" probably="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiqWHgz9R64wpb7vmRBfSxrrdh3a8KPoDVmskJVCG-wepgCAbnItbdYTSDmU7wnx0zhdw_niQdONNeB65TXqnkj6HaEN32YBLTMSG7k9gEhvT9EeP8d_1BxxSb15oCklE2_CLtprde49lX/s1600/Native-Americans.jpg" the="" title="Native" villains="" were="" what="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Native Americans</td></tr> </tbody></table> Native Americans were the featured villains in what were probably the first non-supernatural conspiracy fears experienced by European migrants to America. Fear and Loathing in the American Woods The early American frontier was in many ways a deeply fearful place, especially in the first decades of white settlement in any given region. Settlers knew little about their new home’s existing occupants, and possessed only the sketchiest notions of how many there were, where they lived, and what their intentions might be. Though as many as 7 million people lived above the Rio Grande at the time of first contact, Europeans thought of North America as, in Pilgrim leader William Bradford’s words, a “hideous and desolate wilderness”. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807057835/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=ab169ac0407d0b023de93a931dc48605" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0807057835&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="Native" americans="" border="0" featured="" first="" height="1" in="" native="" non="" probably="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0807057835" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" villains="" were="" what="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0448401681/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=79a7e1c639edec54b6acc6541b8fb0c6" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0448401681&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="Native" americans="" border="0" featured="" first="" height="1" in="" native="" non="" probably="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0448401681" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" villains="" were="" what="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> In traditional Judeo-Christian culture, wilderness was a place to be feared rather than cherished, a place where monsters and devils lived to test the faith of good, civilized people. Especially among the New England <a href=" " target="_blank">Puritans</a>, it was commonly believed that the Indians were devil worshippers out to do their master’s bidding, though not actual devils themselves. (However, it was considered quite likely that the Indians lived among real monsters, including dragons!) Thus the expectation of confronting ultimate evil was built into the Puritans’ sense of their “errand into the wilderness” Certainly not all the colonists shared the Puritans’ high level of theological dread, but some fear of the Indians was fairly constant and not without justification, since over the first three centuries of European settlement, there was always some part of North America where the natives were resisting their own conquest and displacement. This resistance often took the form of a raiding style of warfare that was intended to spread terror and usually preferred striking at weakly defended targets, like an outlying cabin or an isolated outpost. Always seeking ways of fighting that minimized their own casualties, Indian war leaders were not above using devious tactics such as ambushes, sneak attacks, and feigning peaceful intentions. One of the great Indian victories during Pontiac’s Rebellion (or War or Conspiracy, depending on your point of view) of 1763, the Ojibways’ triumph over the British at Ft. Michilimackinac was accomplished by lulling the soldiers into complacency with a friendly game of ball. The Indian players hit the ball into the open gates of the fort, chased after it, then suddenly attacked with weapons the Ojibway women had smuggled inside the post while the whites were watching the game. Though the European armies of the Early Modern Period were no slouches at wreaking death and destruction on the civilian population, Indian warfare was perceived as particularly and intimately awful. In some ways Indians were better at distinguishing their targets than whites were—the French were often spared in raids on European outposts— but their military customs made few allowances for noncombatants. Indian massacre stories invariably featured a scene in which a warrior tore an infant from her mother’s arms and dashed her head against a hearth or a tree; this became a cliché, but by no means one without a basis in reality. Numerous common practices of Indian warfare haunted the dreams of European settlers, soldiers, and officials, especially the scalping or other mutilation of victims’ bodies and the taking of captives to be assimilated into Indian society. (It should be noted that whites fighting Indians made few such allowances themselves, and showed far less interest than the Indians in taking captives. Nevertheless, white attacks on Indian villages were called “raids” or “battles,” while successful Indian attacks on white settlements or military posts were termed “massacres.”) This fear of assimilation by an alien, collectively minded society, a recurrent theme in the annals of American conspiracy theory, has one of its roots in tales of captivity among the Indians. Some of the stories even admitted what historians have found to be true, that many captives, especially women and children, were successfully assimiliated, and showed little desire to return to European ways. Ever more lurid Indian captivity narratives became a staple of American popular culture, and perhaps its first unique contribution to world literature. The earlier comment about Indians haunting settlers’ dreams should be taken quite literally. Recent interpretations of the 1692 Salem witchcraft crisis have emphasized the role of New England’s lateseventeenth-century Indian wars (1675–1678 and 1688–1691) in generating the psychological stress and supernatural fears that exploded in <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Massachusetts</a>. A large number of the accusers had some direct or immediate family experience with the Indian wars, and those who didn’t had probably read Mary Rowlandson’s popular, then recently published book on her experience as a captive during the earlier conflict, King Philip’s War. The witchcraft evil was thought to have first come from Indian powwows in the forest, and the devil appeared to several Massachusetts women as “a thing like an Indian,” or “a Tawny man”. Accuser Mary Toothaker of Billerica finally admitted under questioning that she had lashed out because she was “troubled w’h feare about the Indians, & used to dream of fighting with them.” Toothaker claimed to have signed up with the devil herself because he had “promised to keep her from the Indians”. At least these colonial New Englanders had some direct or nearly direct experience of the Indians they feared so much. In later centuries, far more white Americans eagerly consumed Indian atrocity stories around the family table and in popular literature and newspapers than ever interacted with Indians or witnessed an Indian raid. Given the emphasis placed on the depredations of “murderous savages” in their information about the Indians, it is perhaps not surprising that nineteenth-century migrants heading to the Pacific coast on the Overland Trail brought hair-trigger emotions to all their thoughts and actions concerning Indians. Many reported their scalps itching at the very thought of Indians. Most westering travelers suffered “far more,” according to historian Glenda Riley, “from their own anxieties what could happen to them than from what actually did happen”. Unfortunately, the Indians themselves did suffer, at the hands of settlers who were easily panicked into acts of violence and prejudice, and eager to support harsh government policies against Indians, having learned to deal with their anxieties by fearing and hating the natives. The Myth of the Superchief Although it would be stretching the definition of conspiracy theory to include all fears of Indian attack in this category, much of what settlers, soldiers, and government officials believed about the Indians certainly does qualify. Whites often became convinced that the Indians of different villages, tribes, and languages were leagued against them, and secretly plotting mayhem even when relations were peaceful and friendly. In some respects, a conspiracy model of Indian behavior came naturally to Europeans, who struggled to understand or even perceive the complex cultural, social, and political distinctions among the various Indian groups they encountered. As with many cross-cultural conspiracy theories, it was easy to move from lumping all Indians together culturally to believing that all Indians were working together against the colonists. This pattern emerged even before the beginning of permanent settlement. The leaders of the 1585 lost colony of Roanoke abandoned their island off the coast of present North Carolina out of a belief that Pemisapan, the weroance of the local Indian village, had organized a region-wide conspiracy, involving many tribes, to starve and then wipe out the colony. According to historian Michael Oberg, Pemisapan had probably done nothing more than “grown weary of an intolerant, violent, contagious, and dependent people”, and, quite understandably, moved his village off Roanoke Island to a more congenial neighborhood. Even so, colony commander Ralph Lane led a force that brought back the weroance’s head, the culmination of a pattern of precipitous, threatening actions by Lane. “No conspiracy is needed,” writes Oberg, to explain the growing hostility of the region’s Indians to the Roanoke colony. The English settlement abruptly shifted locations after Pemisapan’s death, and disappeared completely a few years after that. Pemisapan represents the original version of two ideas that became standard parts of conspiracy theories about the Indians: the Indian mastermind or monarch in control of tens of thousands of warriors, and the unfaithful Indian ally or convert. From “Pemisapan’s Conspiracy” on, serious or widespread Indian resistance was usually attributed by Europeans and later chroniclers to the machinations of some preternaturally brilliant, all-powerful “superchief” (Bourne, 202). This analysis may have been somewhat accurate for the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Powhatan</a> Indian rebellions against Virginia in 1622 and 1644, which almost destroyed the colony and are generally thought to be the work of the war chief turned paramount chief Opechanacanough, Pocahontas’s uncle, and the reputed power behind her father Powhatan’s throne. The reputations of most other putative Indian masterminds were built on much shakier foundations. In many cases, a widespread conflict was blamed on someone who was really only a major figure in some critical early encounter, or promoted himself as the primary conspirator in a later treaty with the white authorities. For instance, New England propagandists depicted their apocalyptic, region-wide Indian war of 1675–1678 as the work of Philip, sachem of Pokanoket, whom they dubbed “King Philip” to reemphasize their claim that the conflict was, as Russell Bourne puts it, “not a series of separate raids by provoked people but a brilliantly orchestrated war, conducted by a devilish military genius”. Besides personalizing the conflict as conspiracy theories so often do, this conspiratorial view of the New England Indians’ resistance was a political and ethical convenience for whites, who were authorized by their belief in this evil plot to ignore the role of their own behavior in the Indians’ unrest, take extreme measures against tribes whose land rights conflicted with their ambitions, and to declare the masalah solved when the designated villain was eliminated. Philip (who changed his name from Metacom when he became sachem) was the son of Massassoit, the Indian chief who had befriended the Pilgrims and allowed their Plymouth Colony to survive. Relations had deteriorated after Massassoit’s death as the local fur trade dried up and agricultural settlement expanded, bringing livestock that consumed the Indians’ open-field crops and forcing them into economic dependence upon whites. Philip and his people also chafed under Plymouth’s unequal laws, which had recently been used to try to hang three of Philip’s followers. Plymouth leaders coveted the Pokanokets’ land, and eagerly accepted rumors circulated against Philip by the sachem’s Indian political rivals, to the effect the sachem planned a major war, possibly in concert with the French. When Philip was recorded at a meeting with Rhode Island officials complaining about his people’s mistreatment by Plymouth, and vowing that he was “determined not to live until I have no country”, the mantle of conspiratorial mastermind was fitted and ready to be forced on him. Philip was thought to be seeking the extermination of New England’s white population. The Pokanokets did begin hostilities with a much exaggerated raid on the nearby town of Swansea, but Philip himself spent the war running while the Narragansetts, Abenakis, and other tribes around New England did most of the fighting. He nevertheless always remained New England’s primary target, and by the end of the war, his village had vanished, his wife and son had been sold into slavery, and his dismembered body was on display in the town of Plymouth. Pontiac played a similarly inflated role in accounts of the 1763 “conspiracy” that bears his name. An obscure Odawa war leader (not a chief), Pontiac touched off a frontier-wide uprising but actually led only one phase of it, the failed siege of Ft. Detroit. Both he and the British tried to advance their interests in the aftermath of the war, concluding a peace treaty that bolstered British claims to the Trans-Appalachian West and acknowledged Pontiac an Indian potentate, but probably got the former rebel assassinated as a traitor to the Indian cause. As they had long done with the alleged “conquests” of the Iroquois “Empire,” the British authorities and the Anglo-American colonists exaggerated Pontiac’s power and status in ways that magnified both the military threat he posed and the glory and power that accrued to those who had pacified him. The operative theory regarding Pontiac and many other superchiefs was well expressed in “Ponteach, or the Savages of America,” a drama published in 1766 by French and Indian War pendekar Robert Rogers. Rogers’s Ponteach is a haughty forest emperor laid tragically low by his pride. “This Country’s mine, and here I reign as King,” a king whose “Empire’s measured only by the Sun,” the character asserts in explaining his disdain for British authority. In fact, it is unlikely that general Indian uprisings could ever have been the work of a single conspiratorial mastermind, or even a knot of them. The primitive nature of the available means of communication alone—symbolic war belts of clamshell beads (“wampum”) were used to coordinate the 1763 risings—precluded any sort of command and control. Conspiracies were unlikely for more fundamental cultural reasons as well. Most North American Indian tribes lacked any sort of true chief executive who could impose his will on his followers. A chief, unlike a European general, governor, or king, drew his power not from law or force, but only from the respect and love that his prowess, wisdom, and generosity had garnered among his people, who could obey him or not as they chose. The superchief mythology, from the exaggerations of the leader’s influence and the depth of his scheming to the popular dramas (and often place names) that celebrated his nobility in defeat, was applied successively to every significant Indian resistance leader after Pontiac, from John Logan of the 1774 Lord Dunmore’s War (immortalized in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia for his oratorical prowess) to Tecumseh, Black Hawk, and Osceola in the early nineteenth century and, in a somewhat less conspiratorial vein, to such far western Indian rebels as Cochise, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse. It was applied retroactively to Philip in one of the antebellum era’s most popular plays, “Metamora.” The celebrity that the superchief myth brought all of these men should not obscure how damaging it was to Indian people when they were still struggling to stay in their homelands. In their time, the names of all of these leaders were capable of plunging whole frontiers into panic, and such panics usually brought on white military campaigns that would be followed by the expropriation of Indian lands. “Our Most Dangerous Enemies”: Indian Converts and Allies as Victims of Conspiracy Fears Far more harmful than the “superchief” myth, in terms of the brutality it inspired in whites, was the related conspiracy theory that all Indians alike were actual or potential enemies, no matter what attitude they professed to hold toward whites. Even Indians who had become Christians, pursued white occupations, and lived peaceably near white towns for decades were treated as likely traitors, spies, and saboteurs. Since the beginning of European contact, the colonizers had been urging the natives to lay down their weapons, adopt European ways of life, and convert to the Christian religion. Most Indians resisted this pressure when they could, but for many resistance became impossible once European settlement had engulfed their homelands. Some responded to the urgings of Christian missionaries and adopted the faith, while others sought to simply live as quietly as they could, at peace with the settlers or even joining in the whites’ battles with other Indians. In most of the colonies, then, there were at least small communities of peaceful and often Christian Indians living near white towns and farms. In times of general Indian conspiracy scares, these communities became deeply suspicious to whites, and often suffered as much or more than the tribes actually engaged in hostilities. The residents of Puritan missionary John Eliot’s “praying towns” discovered this during King Philip’s War. Stories circulated of “Praying Indians” joining in raids on Christian towns and spying for the rebels. According to historian Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “The English were quick to believe tales of Christian Indian perfidy,” and the burning of English barns or haystacks “became pretexts for English violence against the praying towns”. The Christian Indians at Wamesit had to abandon their village and food supplies in late 1675 after furious English militiamen fired on them without warning on two separate occasions, in one incident wounding a number of women and children, a twelve-year-old fatally. Various Puritan commentators questioned the sincerity of Indian religious conversions and depicted the “Praying Indians” as contemptible mockeries of Christianity. Sometimes with and sometimes without official approval, New England troops sacked the villages of Indian Christians and Indian allies. Meanwhile, the authorities shut down many praying towns and interned numerous friendly natives on barren Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Some praying Indians even shared the fate of Philip’s family, enslavement in the Caribbean. Other groups of peaceful Christian Indians were visited by some of the worst atrocities in the annals of European-Indian relations in North America. The infamous Paxton Boys massacre, for instance, was part of the fallout from the conspiracy theories surrounding Pontiac. The Pennsylvania frontier had been wracked by Indian raids both during the 1763 rebellion and the French and Indian War that preceded it. There were a number of Christian Indian villages in the colony, including Conestoga, where a handful of people eked out a meager living selling bowls and baskets. Looking for payback and charging that some of the Conestoga men had fought with Pontiac, a number of men from the town of Paxton, on the Susquehanna River in east-central Pennsylvania, concluded that these supposedly friendly Indians amounted to a “Basket & Broom-making Bandittey” who were “in Reality our most dangerous enemies”. A week and a half before Christmas, 1763, fiftyfour Scots-Irish men from Paxton rode to Conestoga, and shot and hacked to death six Indians they found there, allegedly in revenge for Pontiac’s Rebellion. Local authorities gathered the surviving Conestogas (who had been lucky enough to be out) and placed them in a workhouse for protection. The men from Paxton soon rode in and killed the rest. Far from horrifying their fellow Pennsylvanians, the “Paxton Boys” found themselves at the head of a popular cause. Their numbers swelled with new recruits, the Paxton Boys rode down to Philadelphia, in arms, to take some Christian Delaware Indians being protected there and topple the government itself if necessary. A manifesto was issued in which the supposedly Quaker-dominated government of Pennsylvania was charged with being insensitive to frontier needs because it was too soft on the Indians. A poem called “The Cloven Foot Discovered” expressed the settlers’ view that whites who gave sympathy or aid to any Indians were traitors to their fellow colonists and fellow travelers of the Indians’ secret plots against the frontier settlements: <blockquote> Go, good Christians, never spare To give your Indians Clothes to wear Send ’em good Beef, and Pork, and Bread, Guns, Powders, Flints, and Stores of Lead, To Shoot Your Neighbours Through the Head;... Encourage every friendly Savage To murder, burn, destroy, and ravage.</blockquote> Only some fast talking by leading Pennsylvania politician Benjamin Franklin finally defused the Paxton Boys situation, but not before more than fifty of the “protected” Christian Delawares died of diseases in the city. Time and again in early America, peaceful Christian Indians found that the most dangerous place to be was anywhere near their supposed allies and coreligionists, the Anglo-American settlers. No matter how devout a Christian and firmly committed to peace and friendship with whites a group of Indians might be, many settlers assumed all Indians were secretly conspiring against them, and in the right circumstances might slaughter whatever Indians they happened to run across. The biggest masalah that the young United States had in recruiting Indian allies during the Revolutionary War was the fact that pro-American chiefs kept getting killed by American soldiers. By far the most heinous example of intentional “friendly fire” on Indians during the Revolution can be found in a 1782 incident that came to be known as the Gnadenhutten massacre, in present east-central Ohio. The “Ohio Country” was a bitter battleground between the British and Indians on the one hand, and the settlers just south of the Ohio River in Kentucky on the other. German American missionaries from a sect called the Moravians had converted large numbers of Delaware Indians who lived in this area to Christianity and kept them on the American side. The Moravians were pacifists, so once converted these Indians did not even believe in fighting. The Christian Indians of Gnadenhutten happened to be harvesting their corn one day in 1782 when a war party of American settlers appeared. They were pursuing some hostile Indians who had been seen in the area. The settlers charged the friendly villagers of Gnadenhutten with being warriors, pointing to the existence of European implements, such as axes, spoons, and tea kettles, in this village of Indians who had adopted white lifestyles, as evidence they had killed and stolen from whites. On the strength of this flimsy evidence, the Gnadenhutten Indians were sentenced to death. They spent the night praying to the European God, and in the morning the settlers dragged the Indians out of their cabins in groups of two or three and executed them with a mallet so as not to waste ammunition. These sorts of incidents often turned white suspicions about Christian and friendly Indians into self-fulfilling prophecies. With friends like the American settlers, many Indians reasoned, who needed enemies? During wars and war scares with neighboring colonial powers like Great Britain, France, and Spain, most Indians with any access to the “foreign” power were quite willing to work with them against the settlers and/or the United States if they possibly could, though the Indians’ fondest desire was always to be left relatively independent of any European power. Colonial and U.S. officials frequently turned this rational pattern of Indian behavior into the basis of another sort of conspiracy theory, of the Indians as cat’s-paws of foreigners out to split off pieces of their territory or curb American expansion. Andrew Jackson first made a name for himself by brutally precluding the possibility that the southeastern Indians might collaborate with the Spanish or British to block the United States from accessing the Gulf Coast and its ports. This was the basic aim of his campaigns against the Creeks, the British, and the Seminoles between 1813 and 1818, which began with a settler panic about a “massacre” at Ft. Mims in Alabama, and ended with the summary execution of two British citizens and an Indian religious leader and the forcible U.S. annexation of Spanish Florida. But at least Jackson’s enemies were genuinely hostile to the United States. Unfortunately, the mistreatment of friendly and Christian Indians continued long after the point had passed when Indians posed any real threat to the United States and even in cases where they could hardly have done more to demonstrate their loyalty. Perhaps the most egregious example of many occurred in Civil War kurun Minnesota. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><img alt="Native" americans="" border="0" featured="" first="" in="" native="" non="" probably="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1svFe0OyrBjE4dctBFr4INsUMtsUq_TIiqbED5G9VddMN5BzZMObW8nAPYtjiuW6xphL5bZaXQlmnfDkWahVRiHX71M1hsezhek7ZgzRR-l3jI2tUzz-GyXbhKdWZiAUg_yrcrzSNknb2/s1600/native.jpg" the="" title="Native" villains="" were="" what="" /></a></div> A group of Winnebago Indians, previously removed by the government from their Wisconsin homeland, were living peacefully in the manner of white farmers in the area around Blue Earth. When a Sioux uprising broke out in 1862, the Winnebago were forced out of their homes as a security threat, and sent to a new reservation in a barren section of present Nebraska. The Winnebago had no connection to the Sioux outbreak, and could not have made much of a military contribution to it in any case, since most of the fighting-age Winnebago men were serving in the Union army at the time. The Winnebago veterans would find no homes to return to after the war. At that point, many of them doubtless wished they had been conspiring against the United States.

Native Americans

Native Americans Native Americans were the featured villains in what were probably the first non-supernatural conspiracy fears experien...

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="blank"><img abraham="" alt="The" assassination="" border="0" friday="" good="" lincoln="" of="" on="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg-6dUQl5G2zLoRQmeP5LCzLQiZKeaZd_2Ew0GSiIoUAjAIc7tAX5qVr4ZwhsKBOERUqyf6N3xohWsq_GboDWaYROwdgXGHt0m1b2NxHWHdJCK664DSnQu1KjJCNgPbu8BUFmNfIWW37XE/s1600/Assassination-Lincoln.jpg" title="Assassination" width="470" /></a></div> The assassination of Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday (14 April), 1865, by actor John Wilkes Booth unleashed a flood of rumors regarding larger conspiracies afoot. Hardly had the president breathed his last early Saturday morning, when officials and public alike began accusing Confederate leaders and secret organizations in the North of master-minding the murder. A New York Times editorial on 26 April vowed that when the time came for revelations, “[i]t will be seen that all the talk of ‘Knights of the Golden Circle,’ ‘Sons of Liberty,’ ‘American Knights,’ &c., was not without foundation.” President Andrew Johnson’s proclamation of 2 May 1865 ordering the arrest of Jefferson Davis and several others explicitly accused the Confederate leadership of complicity in Lincoln’s death. While the very tangible political and emotional stresses that gave rise to these accusations abated in the years following the murder, the effort to tie the deed to a larger, hidden plan did not. Theories implicating a surprising range of persons and causes—from the Confederacy, to Andrew Johnson, the Catholic Church, Wall Street financiers, and even Lincoln’s stalwart secretary of war, Edwin Stanton—surfaced over the next century. Some remain in vogue to this day. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813191513/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0813191513&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=3Z2DCLHWS5FUFHZH"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0813191513&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img abraham="" alt="The" assassination="" border="0" friday="" good="" height="1" lincoln="" of="" on="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0813191513" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0439903548/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0439903548&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=U6RXS3ZS5YTCTISC"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0439903548&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img abraham="" alt="The" assassination="" border="0" friday="" good="" height="1" lincoln="" of="" on="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0439903548" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> If the Kennedy assassination has been the greatest single source for conspiratorial expression in recent U.S. culture, Lincoln’s certainly deserves credit as the longest running. And like their contemporary cousins, conspiracy theories linked to the first presidential assassination were forged in the context of surrounding political, social, and cultural forces. The Basis in Events In the days following the shooting, there were legitimate reasons for fearing a larger plot. Booth accomplice Lewis Powell’s simultaneous knife-attack on Secretary of State William Seward made the possibility of an organized assault on the Union leadership very real. It was reported that officers sent to inform Stanton of the shooting accosted a man “muffled in a cloak” on the secretary’s doorstep. Booth’s calling card left for Vice-President Andrew Johnson at the latter’s hotel raised hackles further. And the discovery of a letter in the actor’s trunk at the National Hotel, in which Booth’s correspondent advised a halt in plans until “Richmond could be heard from,” (U.S. Government, 46:3, 781) seemed to confirm the authorities’ worst suspicions. The capture of Powell at Mary Surratt’s boarding house on 17 April, and the arrest within a few days of most of Booth’s other accomplices, provided firm evidence that the attacks had sprung from an organized center. In the minds of many, including Edwin Stanton and the officers charged with bringing the conspirators to trial, there was little doubt this center originated with the Confederacy. The larger political and military situation preceding Lincoln’s death contributed to the climate of conspiracy. On 9 April, a mere five days before the assassination, the rebel Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. This signaled the effective end of the Civil War and the North erupted in celebration. But in reality Lee’s surrender marked the beginning, not the end, of the cessation of hostilities between North and South. Confederate forces remained in the field. In Virginia, some units, including Mosby’s Rangers, refused to surrender. In mid-April, there were reports that forces under his command were launching raids into <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Assassination of Abraham Lincoln>Maryland</a> from across the Potomac. In addition to active military forces, eastern Maryland and northern Virginia were full of disbanded soldiers and displaced civilians. Refugees crowded Richmond and Petersburg, seeking food and shelter from federal commissaries. Some ex-rebels formed marauding bands, adding to the uncertain security in the countryside. Others headed toward Washington and Baltimore, believing the federal government would provide free transportation to their homes in the South (U.S. Government, 46:3, 868–869). Thus, in addition to sustaining the loss of its chief of state, the area in and around Washington experienced a period of turmoil as hostilities gradually ended. In the North the euphoria following Lee’s surrender quickly turned to bewilderment and a desire for vengeance as news of Lincoln’s death made its way across the country. It did not ease matters that the surrender and murder coincided with two of the most important dates, Palm Sunday and Good Friday respectively, on the Christian calendar. The religious symbolism attached to the tragedy culminated as the funeral cortege bearing Lincoln’s embalmed body wound its way through northern cities on its 1,600-mile journey back to the president’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. More important, however, to understanding the basis for the initial conspiracy theories, is recognizing that at the time of his death Abraham Lincoln was a controversial figure in the North. Many held him in high esteem, but others reviled him for the war’s slaughter and for his actions in favor of black Americans. Northern political dissent was centered in the Democratic Party, and in particular among anti-war Democrats, termed “Copperheads.” It ran especially strong in the larger cities outside New England and in the old Northwest, ironically, the very region Lincoln hailed from. In the aftermath of 14 April, newspapers reported individuals and communities celebrating his death by burning effigies and firing explosives. Irate mobs tarred and feathered some of these celebrants and others were rescued by policemen. In Westminster, Maryland, a Democratic newspaper editor was murdered for publishing anti-Lincoln comments following the assassination. The presence of this political dissent in the North helped feed popular rumors concerning the operations of so-called dark lantern societies, secret organizations including the previously mentioned Knights of the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Assassination of Abraham Lincoln>Golden</a> Circle, devoted to political and military treason. Historians generally agree the real extent of the groups’ activities was greatly exaggerated at the time. The exaggerated accounts were often produced by Republican newspaper editors seeking to discredit the Democrats before election time. Regardless of the reality, the evidence indicates that a good percentage of the northern public paid attention to the rumors implicating the groups in Lincoln’s death. In the months that followed popular literary works, including Dion Haco’s pseudonymous John Wilkes Booth, the Assassinator of Abraham Lincoln, and Ned Buntline’s pseudonymous John Wilkes Booth, provided fictionalized accounts of a conspiracy involving secret northern societies. Culture and Politics Despite the circumstantial evidence and testimony given by government witnesses, investigating authorities never established a hard link between Booth and the Confederate government, or between Booth and northern secret societies. Following the conviction of eight of his accomplices by a military tribunal in June 1865, belief in a grand conspiracy involving the rebel chieftains slowly faded from view. The execution of Mary Surratt (along with George Atzerodt, Davey Herold, and Lewis Powell) on 7 July 1865 dampened the public’s enthusiasm for extreme justice. Much of the testimony proving the involvement of Confederate leaders unraveled when it was revealed that the government’s chief witness, an adventurer named Charles Dunham, had fabricated most of it. Jefferson Davis was released from prison in May 1867 without ever being indicted. The disclosure of Booth’s “missing” diary by former Secret Service chief Lafayette C. Baker during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in early 1867 further discredited the government’s case. The diary had been taken from Booth’s body after he was shot on the Virginia farmstead on the morning of 26 April 1865. Turned over to the War Department, it was never introduced in evidence at the conspirators’ trial. Its pages confirmed the testimony of most of the accomplices: the plan had been to kidnap Lincoln and escort him safely to Confederate lines. Booth acted largely on his own initiative in deciding to assassinate the president. However, the diary did help launch the next round of conspiracy-making. It is at this point that historian William Hanchett’s thesis on the relationship between national politics and Lincoln assassination theories provides a useful perspective for understanding their subsequent development. Baker not only revealed the diary’s existence, but when shown the book following its subpoena from the War Department, he claimed on the witness stand that pages had been removed since it had been turned over to Stanton in April 1865. Despite the testimony of federal officials that the pages had been torn out by Booth and used as notes, suspicions were immediately raised over what might have been written on the “missing” pages. Leading the charge was former political general and recently elected Republican congressman Benjamin Butler. In March 1867, Butler accused the government prosecutors of purposefully withholding the diary during the conspirators’ trial, resulting, among other things, in the judicial murder of Mary Surratt. Drawing from Baker’s allegation of missing pages, and Booth’s own statement in the diary that he proposed to return to Washington “and clear myself from this great crime,” Butler went on to insinuate the involvement of high government officials in the conspiracy to murder Lincoln wanting to know who had tampered with the diary after the government had got hold of it. In July, he introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives establishing a five-member committee to investigate the assassination. The resolution’s preamble reaffirmed that the crime had been abetted by many people holding high positions of power. Butler’s target was President Andrew Johnson and his aim was shared by other Radical Republicans who, as Hanchett notes, were intent on finding evidence that could be used to impeach the president. Johnson, so the reasoning went, was the only person to gain materially from Lincoln’s death. But the evidence against him was unsubstantiated and relied almost entirely on the innuendoes of Baker and others. The real motivations for the charges against the president lay in the bitter conflict then raging between Johnson and the Radical-controlled Congress over Reconstruction. By early 1867 the executive and legislative branches of the government were at loggerheads, with Johnson vetoing most of the congressional legislation bearing on Reconstruction policy, and Congress overriding his vetoes to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, and more. In February 1867, at the same time the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Baker, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the South into five military districts and established more stringent conditions, including black suffrage, for readmitting the southern states. Thus, the theory implicating Johnson sprang from tangible political conflicts, and Butler’s accusations may be read as a form of political theater overlaying more serious issues. As it turned out, the theory outlived its immediate political usefulness and lived on into the next century when most of the details explaining Johnson’s involvement would be worked out. At the time, however, it represented a significant stage in the development of Lincoln theories for alleging the malefactor was inside the government, and that the government was involved in a cover-up. It also displayed the unique characteristic of all early theories: they were encouraged and oftentimes fabricated from inside the government, by officials and political actors like Butler and Baker. It also inspired a number of popular literary works over the next several decades, the most famous probably being Tennessee attorney Finis L. Bates’s Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth (1907) in which he combined Johnson’s involvement with the legend of Booth’s escape. In the 1880s, a fourth theory emerged, arguing that the conspiracy originated with the Catholic Church. Charles Chiniquy’s Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (1886) was the first of several works alleging a Catholic plot. A French-Canadian priest who had emigrated to Illinois, Chiniquy met Lincoln when the latter defended him in a civil trial against his Catholic superiors. The case was settled before going to a jury, but the priest believed Lincoln had earned the bitter enmity of the Catholic Church and its Jesuit henchmen in defending him. Worse, Lincoln stood for everything the Catholic Church hated, so Chiniquy argued. The clinching evidence in his presentation was statements reportedly made before witnesses by priests at a monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota, on the day of the assassination, but hours before events unfolded in Washington. A Protestant clergyman swore an affidavit stating that he had been told the priests said Lincoln and Seward were dead before the fact. How did they gain this foreknowledge? Chiniquy asserted it came through the dissemination of the plot through the church’s network: “[t]hey are members of the same body, the branches of the same tree.” For Chiniquy and several others, the Catholic Church not only plotted Lincoln’s murder, it also planned to destroy America’s free institutions in its quest for world domination. These accusations were frequently voiced by native-born Protestants in the nineteenth century and were part of the rise in nativist sentiment in the 1890s. Historian John Higham argues this rise reflected a larger national crisis—the class cleavages then investing U.S. society. The anti-Catholic theories may be read as belonging to this larger phenomenon. But they also appear to have served more mundane political purposes. Burke McCarty’s The Suppressed Truth about the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln appeared in 1922, in the midst of the debate over Prohibition and six years before Catholic governor Al Smith’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency. Reprints of an earlier anti-Catholic work appeared in 1960, in time for John F. Kennedy’s successful candidacy to become the nation’s first (and only) Catholic president. Commemoration and Revisionism According to historian Merrill Peterson, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed the peak period of Abraham Lincoln’s commemoration in U.S. culture. Historical studies and popular texts, including Carl Sandburg’s massive two-part biography, were supplemented by works in stone. The dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 and the completion of Lincoln’s head in the Mount Rushmore group in 1937 marked the high points of this monumental commemoration. Lincoln studies also reached an important watershed with James G. Randall’s 1934 essay “Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?” in which he decried the lack of professional historical studies of the sixteenth president (Peterson, 256). Into this mix of popular commemoration and historical dedication appeared the most radical conspiracy theory ever associated with the assassination. Austrian-born Otto Eisenschiml’s Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (1937) presented a mass of circumstantial evidence that implied Lincoln’s own secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, was the mastermind behind the murder. The Eisenschiml Thesis, as it is termed, quickly overshadowed all previous theories by virtue of its outlandish assault on Stanton’s historical reputation, and the implication that the perpetrator of America’s greatest tragedy was Lincoln’s own trusted advisor. Eisenschiml based his argument on a series of anomalous events that occurred just before, during, and after the assassination. These included General Grant’s sudden decision not to accept the Lincolns’ invitation to the theater, Stanton’s alleged refusal to detail the husky Major Eckert to escort the president at his request, the assignment of a derelict patrolman as the president’s bodyguard, the breakdown in the telegraph system for two hours immediately following the shooting, and more. Behind these apparently isolated instances, Eisenchiml argued, there lay a broad plot on the part of the Radical Republicans under Stanton to seize control of the government and punish the South. The Radicals had deliberately prolonged the war in order to ensure the abolition of slavery and the South’s destruction. At the war’s conclusion, they were dismayed at Lincoln’s tawaran to “let them up easy.” The Radicals decided to remove Lincoln and the leading moderate of his cabinet, William Seward. With these two men out of the way, so the argument went, the way would be clear for Stanton to dominate the government and for the Radicals to exact vengeance on the South. Booth’s death, and the quick trial by military tribunal of his accomplices (who were then either executed or imprisoned in the Dry Tortugas), were parts of the cover-up. This theory and its political rationale were extreme expressions of the then-current revisionist interpretation of Civil War history. Revisionism held that the war could have been avoided, but that it was forced on the United States by the extremism of northern abolitionists. The war’s principal cause had not been slavery but the constitutional issue of states’ rights. Lincoln had been a moderate, both on matters of race and in his plans to restore the South. The Radicals bore responsibility for turning Reconstruction into a nightmare by insisting on black suffrage and imposing harsh conditions on the former rebel states. An earlier extreme expression of these views was Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Clansman (1905), which served as the basis for D. W. Griffith’s silent film Birth of a Nation (1915). The revisionist interpretation gained mainstream acceptance in U.S. society during the first decades of the twentieth century and is seen as the intellectual corollary to the growing racial intolerance of white society during the same period. The politics in Eisenschiml’s work does not appear to have raised much of a storm at the time. While several scholars noted the political implications in their reviews, the popular press praised the book for its “refreshing directness” and “just and impartial” treatment. Modern Refrains In the post–World War II kala Lincoln conspiracy theories have, for the most part, given way to other topics. Their periodic resurgence indicates, however, that Lincoln’s death still holds power in U.S. culture. With one notable exception, the recent accounts borrow from previous material. Theodore Roscoe’s Web of Conspiracy (1959) restated the Eisenschiml Thesis, adding little that was new. Whether his use of the thesis carries the same revisionist intentions is another matter. Emmett McLoughlin’s An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1963) again raised the specter of a Catholic plot. Like his predecessor Joseph Chiniquy, McLoughlin was a former priest. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 has probably laid to rest theories of this type. The most prolonged eruption of assassination theorizing occurred in the mid-1970s with the production of a movie and companion book titled simply The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977). This intentionally commercial production again resuscitated the Eisenschiml Thesis and for good measure threw in the legend of Booth’s escape, northern speculators, Confederate leaders, and Andrew Johnson. Authors David Balsiger and Charles Sellier’s most original contribution to conspiracy literature was their alleged use of scientific testing, including special-light photography and chemical analysis, of physical evidence related to the assassination. Once again the famous diary took center stage when unwary officials at the Ford’s Theater museum allowed the movie producers to examine the book. Even more shocking was their claim to have obtained transcripts of the diary’s “missing” pages through a collector of Americana who found them among papers in the possession of Stanton’s heirs. The missing pages proved, they claimed, the secretary’s involvement, and listed “the names of 70 prominent people directly and indirectly involved in Booth’s plan to kidnap Lincoln” (Balsiger and Sellier, 11). Contrary to past episodes, assassination experts and professional historians quickly mobilized to attack the work’s credibility. The level of professional concern can be gauged by documents viewable (as of December 2001) at the FBI Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) online reading room. Correspondence between historians and government officials, and between federal agencies, reveals the preoccupation in the post-Watergate kala with protecting mainstream historical accounts against malicious fabrications. Concern reached the level of Vice-President Mondale’s office and the FBI was requested by the Department of the Interior (parent organization of the National Park Service, the curator of Ford’s Theater) to analyze the famous diary for evidence of tampering, invisible ink, or other “hidden” messages. After subjecting the diary to its own special-light techniques, the FBI crime lab returned a clean bill of health: no evidence of hidden messages was found. Assassination experts including William C. Davis, editor of Civil War Times, also subjected the work’s many claims to rigid scrutiny and succeeded in debunking most of them. Despite its failure to sustain a credible case for conspiracy, The Lincoln Conspiracy once again proved the allure of theories alleging governmental malfeasance and cover-up. As several commentators noted at the time, the movie’s release was clearly tied to the popular distrust of government in the wake of <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Assassination of Abraham Lincoln>Vietnam</a> and <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Assassination of Abraham Lincoln>Watergate</a>.