American History

Hollywood Ten

Hollywood Ten

Hollywood Ten Among the first and most visible victims of the post–World War II wave of anticommunist paranoia, the Hollywood Ten were ...

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa His long disappearance has supplied endless jokes for late-night comedians and the theories about what happened to him have...

<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" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alger="" alt="In" anticommunist="" at="" beginning="" border="0" cold="" hiss="" of="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt-dqCWZJxiwfsJNl6xJ7nm_p8wu_zVEYPxse7PFDAyavRgkt1ElkfO6CjphrKNZR3OuaVRTUAy6KIcFupNZRFdQg0B2oipbdr_SDEkXktg9x1MJJOApkaLr_EreDWzEuonhqxvPD0FIM/s1600/alger-hiss.jpg" the="" title="Alger" trials="" war="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alger Hiss</td></tr> </tbody></table> In the anticommunist trials at the beginning of the cold war, Alger Hiss was accused of having infiltrated the government in the 1930s, and debate continues to this day about whether he was indeed part of a larger Communist conspiracy or whether there was a conspiracy to frame him. On 3 August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine, testified before the <a href=" " target="_blank">House Un-American Activities Committee</a> (HUAC) about his firsthand knowledge of Communist cells that he said had infiltrated the federal government in Washington, D.C. Chambers described the cells as Marxist study groups that were not involved in espionage and he testified that he ceased to have contact with them after he left the Communist Party in 1937. Chambers had already told his story to a number of government officials, going back to 1939, but only now in a year when the Republican Party had its first real chance to capture the White House since 1933 was it getting a public airing. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817912258/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=ecc088bfec1f7641122c2c70ffc63224" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0817912258&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alger="" alt="In" anticommunist="" at="" beginning="" border="0" cold="" height="1" hiss="" of="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0817912258" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" trials="" war="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/162157296X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=162157296X&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=3TG3H647UW4MINEK"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=162157296X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alger="" alt="In" anticommunist="" at="" beginning="" border="0" cold="" height="1" hiss="" of="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=162157296X" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" trials="" war="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Republicans on the committee were eager to use their hearings to paint the Democrats, specifically the current administration of President Harry S. Truman and the former administration of <a href=" " target="_blank">Franklin Delano Roosevelt</a>, as “soft” on communism and heavily influenced by Moscow. One of those Chambers named as a Communist was Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, who was then the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before he left the government in 1946, Hiss had served on President Roosevelt’s staff at the <a href=" " target="_blank">Yalta Conference</a> in February 1945. Later that year, he served as secretary-general of the San Francisco Conference, where <a href=" " target="_blank">the United Nations</a> was organized. He had joined the <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="0870032348" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="f143f6441e4466a994972821d82e925a" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Carnegie Endowment" href="http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Russia-Carnegie-Endowment-International/dp/0870032348/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=f143f6441e4466a994972821d82e925a&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_5671652" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carnegie Endowment</a><img alger="" alt="In" anticommunist="" at="" beginning="" border="0" cold="" height="0" hiss="" id="amznPsBmPixel_5671652" of="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=f143f6441e4466a994972821d82e925a&_cb=1483165323490" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" the="" trials="" war="" width="0" /> to help further U.S. work at the UN, which had come under harsh attack by powerful right-wing groups across the country. Two days after Chambers’s testimony, Hiss appeared before the HUAC. He denied any association with Communists and said that he had never met Chambers. He was such an impressive witness that several committee members wanted to drop the matter, but one member, first-term Congressman <a href=" " target="_blank">Richard M. Nixon</a>, had been fed a number of secret reports charging that Hiss had been a Communist (all of which could be traced to a single source—Chambers), and he convinced the committee to continue the investigation. On 7 August, Chambers met in secret session with the committee and testified to a great deal of information about Hiss’s private life. Much of this information was wrong—Chambers clearly was exaggerating his relationship with Hiss—yet it was also apparent from his testimony that he had known Hiss back in the 1930s, though not as Whittaker Chambers. During his 7 August testimony, Chambers revealed that Hiss only knew him as “Carl.” Once Hiss realized who Chambers was, he testified on 16 August that he knew Chambers as a freelance writer named “<a amzn-ps-bm-asin="1628997818" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="ea4c32a7b2b3236b5732e31fa804c524" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="George Crosley" href="http://www.amazon.com/Clasp-Sloane-Crosley/dp/1628997818/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=ea4c32a7b2b3236b5732e31fa804c524&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_6763428" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">George Crosley</a><img alger="" alt="In" anticommunist="" at="" beginning="" border="0" cold="" height="0" hiss="" id="amznPsBmPixel_6763428" of="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=ea4c32a7b2b3236b5732e31fa804c524&_cb=1483165350462" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" the="" trials="" war="" width="0" />” who had come to him to get some information for a story. He said he had gotten to know Crosley for a while, but when Crosley failed to pay back several small loans, Hiss cut off their relationship. In subsequent hearings, Chambers denied ever using the name Crosley, but months later, after Hiss located a publisher who also knew Chambers as Crosley, Chambers conceded that he probably had used the pseudonym. Furious at what he saw as malicious slander, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. Chambers responded by escalating the charges. During pretrial depositions in Baltimore, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Maryland</a>, that November, Chambers offered into evidence four slips of paper in Hiss’s handwriting as well and a sheaf of typewritten pages (later called the Baltimore Documents) that he said were copies of State Department documents that had been typed by the Hisses at their home and then handed to Chambers for transmission to the <a href=" " target="_blank">Soviet Union</a>. Two weeks later, Chambers dropped a public bombshell when he led HUAC investigators to his Maryland farm, and from a hollowed-out pumpkin pulled five rolls of 35mm film, which he said contained photographs of documents implicating Hiss and others in an espionage conspiracy. These new charges were at odds with Chambers’s previous testimony, not only before the HUAC, but also before a grand jury, that he was not involved with espionage. Because the documents were dated into April 1938, they presented another problem: Chambers had insisted in nearly all his statements as far back as 1939 that he had left the party in 1938. The public uproar over these so-called Pumpkin Papers increased pressure to indict Hiss, but that, too, presented roadblocks. Hiss could not be indicted on espionage charges because the statute of limitations protected him from being charged with a crime that had allegedly taken place more than ten years before. The solution was to ask Hiss before the grand jury whether he committed espionage. He denied it, and on 15 December 1948 he was charged with perjury. But Chambers still presented a problem. He had admitted perjuring himself before the grand jury when he denied any firsthand knowledge of espionage. If he were to be indicted as well, a jury at Hiss’s trial might not believe the testimony of an admitted liar. At the urging of <a href=" " target="_blank">Richard Nixon</a>, who testified before the grand jury on 14 December, the jury decided against indicting Chambers. As for his previous testimony that he had left the party in 1937, Chambers simply amended his testimony, saying he was merely preparing to leave in 1937 and didn’t make his break after April 1938. Hiss’s trial opened in May 1949 and ended in July with a hung jury, voting 8–4 for conviction. Hiss was retried that November and this time was convicted. He went to jail in March 1951 and served forty-four months in a maximum security penitentiary before his release in November 1954. At his sentencing on 25 January 1951, Hiss told the judge, “I am confident that in the future the full facts of how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.” The campaign to prove that he had been framed began at that moment and Hiss directed his attorneys to search for any evidence that would prove his innocence. After his appeals had been exhausted, he hired a new lawyer who filed a motion for a new trial in 1952. In the motion, Hiss for the first time presented evidence that his conviction was obtained from fraudulent evidence. The questions it raised included the following: <ul> <li>Was the Woodstock typewriter #230099 that was presented in evidence at the trial by the defense (claiming the Hisses gave it away long before the documents were allegedly typed) a clever fake planted on the defense by the FBI?</li> <li>Was forgery by typewriter possible and specifically, were the copies of State Department documents placed in evidence by the prosecution forged by Whittaker Chambers or a confederate?</li> <li>Did Whittaker Chambers leave the Communist Party long before the April 1938 dates of the last document and therefore could not have received those documents from Hiss? </li> </ul> The defense offered a great deal of evidence to support its brief. It stated that according to Woodstock company records, a typewriter with serial number #230099 would have been manufactured too late to have been the machine given to Hiss’s wife by her father when his company went out of business in 1932. Another expert examined the type bars on the machine and found that they had been altered. The assumption was they had been altered so that typing from the machine would match the typing on the Baltimore documents. Experts also looked at the documents themselves and concluded that contrary to Chambers’s testimony that Hiss’s wife Priscilla had typed them, they had been typed by several people. Another expert made a careful examination of the paper and the envelope that Chambers said they had been stored in for ten years and concluded that their condition precluded Chambers’s story from being true. Chambers had testified that he ceased getting documents from Hiss after he left the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Communist Party</a>. He also said he had gotten work as a translator after he left the party. The brief used letters from the publishing company to show that Chambers had been assigned the translation in 1937. In its response, the government ridiculed Hiss’s brief, saying forgery by typewriter was an impossibility. It also contradicted the defense’s typing experts, saying the information was irrelevant anyway to the charges against Hiss. As for the date when Chambers left the party, it said he was only preparing for a break when he got the translation work. The judge agreed with the prosecution, and Hiss’s motion was turned down. Many years later, it was revealed that not only was forgery by typewriter possible, but that it had already been employed by the government. In 1940, the FBI had worked with Canadian agents to forge a typewritten letter to convince the president of Brazil that an Italian airline had connections with Nazi Germany. The ruse worked, and the president cut off the airline’s landing rights in Brazil. Hiss appealed the motion’s denial, but his efforts were unsuccessful, and the case appeared to be dead until the mid-1970s when Hiss, working with new attorneys, successfully sued the government under the <a amzn-ps-bm-asin="1624171346" class="amzn_ps_bm_tl" data-amzn-link-id="24e4d7f55abcf8cbe720707e5a023134" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword="Freedom of Information Act" href="http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Information-Act-Government-Procedures/dp/1624171346/ref=as_li_bk_tl/?tag=epichistory-20&linkId=24e4d7f55abcf8cbe720707e5a023134&linkCode=ktl" id="amznPsBmLink_9108502" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Freedom of Information Act</a><img alger="" alt="In" anticommunist="" at="" beginning="" border="0" cold="" height="0" hiss="" id="amznPsBmPixel_9108502" of="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?source=bk&t=epichistory-20&bm-id=default&l=ktl&linkId=24e4d7f55abcf8cbe720707e5a023134&_cb=1483165534274" style="border: none !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;" the="" trials="" war="" width="0" /> and received some 45,000 investigative documents on the case from the FBI. The documents confirmed some of the suspicions aired in Hiss’s 1952 motion and, worse, indicated that the government knew about or helped hide information that would have benefited Hiss at trial. Among other things, the documents showed that: <ul> <li>The FBI knew that a typewriter with the serial number #230099 was manufactured too late to have been the Hiss machine.</li> <li>Previous statements by Chambers that had been inconsistent with his testimony at both trials were concealed from the defense by the government. Among the statements was one revealing his homosexuality, which could have provided a motive for his charges.</li> <li>The FBI had gotten statements from other witnesses indicating that key portions of Chambers’s testimony were false.</li> <li>An investigator working for the defense turned out to be a mole for the FBI, who turned over a great deal of what he found for the defense to the prosecution.</li> </ul> Armed with this evidence, Hiss’s new attorneys went to court in 1978 filing a motion of coram nobis to overturn the verdict based on what they said was prosecutorial misconduct. Again, the government opposed the motion for, saying the information, even if true, would not have been enough to overturn the original verdict. The judge sided with the government and subsequent appeals again were unsuccessful. Legally, the Hiss case was dead. But not quite. In 1992, Hiss wrote a letter to one of Russia’s preeminent historians, General Dimitry Volkogonov, requesting that he examine the files of the KGB for any evidence of Hiss’s guilt. Volkogonov did examine the files and announced that while Hiss clearly had contacts with the Soviets during the course of his official duties, they contained no evidence that Hiss had ever been a Soviet spy. His statement was greeted harshly by U.S. conservatives. In response, Volkogonov admitted that he hadn’t looked through all the files, but he still said that if Hiss had been a spy, he would have seen some indication of it in the files he had examined, and he had seen none. Then, in 1995, the National Security Agency (NSA) released several hundred telegrams between Moscow and its U.S. agents that it had decrypted during the cold war. Two of the telegrams discuss an agent code-named “Ales.” According to the NSA, Ales was Hiss. Others disagreed, pointing out that the NSA was merely guessing and that there was no such proof that Ales was Hiss. This view received some support with the 1996 publication of a book in Russia called Operation Snow, by a former KGB official named Vitaly Pavlov. In the book, Pavlov, who joined the KGB in 1939, insisted that Hiss was never a Soviet spy. By then, the information was too late for Hiss, who died four days after his ninety-second birthday on 15 November 1996, still proclaiming his innocence. As for Chambers, he died long before, under mysterious circumstances on 1 June 1961. Like Hiss, he went to his grave insisting that his testimony was truthful. With more than a dozen books written on the case representing both sides, what actually happened between the two men back in the 1930s remains a topic of deep disagreement.

Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss In the anticommunist trials at the beginning of the cold war, Alger Hiss was accused of having infiltrated the government in...

William Randolph Hearst

<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" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="The" border="0" hearst="" of="" power="" randolph="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirpo5VNuR6uk7BmrNBP8B7Ndd5bdpDs_o8gUirKy9uCOl0e-sJrUCHBp0_23zV9ort80KBpYxRmJKqSyOgMjslMbj4ltFGxNkttEwdHeLdcSxlqCbGT8DHK1EBOyP8T5k0CXe76Wn55sI/s1600/William-Randolph-Hearst.jpg" title="William" unprecedented="" william="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Randolph Hearst</td></tr> </tbody></table> The unprecedented power of William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) opened the media magnate to charges of conspiratorial behavior throughout his entire career. With his hands firmly wrapped around the levers of public opinion, Hearst happily applied pressure to his enemies (such as <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Theodore Roosevelt</a> and Orson Welles) and an almost suffocating embrace to his own enthusiasms (the eight-hour workday, the annexation of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mexico</a>, or Marion Davies’s acting career, for example). Many aspects of Hearst’s professional career have been viewed through a conspiracy-tinged lens, although perhaps the most often invoked is his alleged “engineering” of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spanish-American War</a>. There were other public moments when charges of Hearst-generated conspiracies were alleged. Among the most interesting are those associated with the McKinley assassination, the death of Hollywood producer Thomas Ince, and the campaign to expunge Welles’s classic film Citizen Kane. In the history of modern media, perhaps no individual was more skillful in marshaling the tools of communication to promote his own jadwal than William Randolph Hearst. His early twentieth-century media empire—which he built through the inherited wealth of his father’s mining enterprises—was influential in a way not easily appreciated today. At the peak of his power he owned twenty-eight newspapers, with most of them in the largest U.S. cities, as well as eighteen widely circulated magazines, influential film studios, several radio stations, and for a time a political constituency of national consequence. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618154469/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0618154469&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=6VSMNH3X4SIL6APE"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0618154469&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" hearst="" height="1" of="" power="" randolph="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0618154469" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" unprecedented="" width="1" william="" /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/034532739X/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=2fc5363255d4b29315e4c0244323b6bf" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=034532739X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" hearst="" height="1" of="" power="" randolph="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=034532739X" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" unprecedented="" width="1" william="" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Hearst was more than a media figure. He was outsized in his influence, and his ego. His grasp of the media matrix in its infancy was as thorough as his commitment to push his jadwal on the U.S. public, and his use of the tools of technology to advance his own causes—from the global (Spanish-American War) to the ephemeral (the film career of chorusgirl-turned-actress Marion Davies)—earned him the requisite fear, awe, and contempt of his media brethren. Financially wounded by the Great Depression and undermined by the backlash against his pro-German sympathies in the 1930s, his massive empire and influence declined throughout the last decade of his life. Although he died 14 August 1951, the Hearst Corporation remains a formidable publishing conglomerate, employing nearly 20,000 people and producing dozens of magazines and newspapers, as well as maintaining an active presence in business publishing, cable television, radio, even real estate. The McKinley Assassination Establishing a pattern that would become familiar to readers of his newspapers for half a century, Hearst mercilessly attacked the sitting president during his reelection campaign in 1900. Hearst’s papers assailed President William McKinley in their news stories and front-page editorials, and savagely delineated him and his Republican cronies in cartoons. Hearst attacked McKinley for his support of wealthy industrialists, his pro-trust business policies, and his anti-working-class hubris. When a crazed assassin named Leon Czolgosz murdered McKinley at the Buffalo World’s Fair in September 1901, some Republican politicians and many Republican newspapers accused Hearst of inflaming the murderous hatred of Czolgosz through editorials such as the one published in Hearst’s papers the previous April: “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then killing must be done.” Competing newspapers and a handful of powerful politicians were quick to denounce this Hearst-generated pattern of stirring up the masses through his papers’ consistent, coordinated attacks on McKinley. According to biographer David Nasaw, no less a figure than Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt fingered Hearst as bearing some responsibility for the assassin’s act: “Every scoundrel like Hearst and his satellites who for whatever purposes appeals to and inflames evil human passion has made himself accessory before the fact to every crime of this nature.” Death on the Water Another death—and a more enduring suspicion about Hearst’s direct involvement—enmeshed the publisher in November 1924. Movie producer Thomas Ince, who was celebrating his forty-third birthday at a star-studded private party aboard Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, died shortly after being taken off the boat early the following morning. Although Hearst claimed that Ince had suffered a heart attack on board, there was rampant speculation in the gossip columns and throughout Hollywood that Hearst had murdered Ince. Murmured motives included everything from an untenable clash of egos to, more salaciously, a theory that Hearst shot Ince while he was firing at Charlie Chaplin, who was allegedly having an affair with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies. The “Hearst-shot-Ince-while-gunning-for-Chaplin” theory was the premise of a 2001 film, The Cat’s Meow, directed by Peter Bogdonovich and adapted from Steven Peros’s play about the incident. No evidence has ever been produced linking Hearst to the crime, although his yacht full of media-connected guests (a regular group of revelers who usually partied at Davies’s Los Angeles mansion, according to Chaplin) remained uncharacteristically silent about the incident. The conspiracy theorists claim Hearst swore them all to silence and that none of the witnesses would have risked incurring the wrath of the media giant by revealing the truth. Razing Kane Hearst’s attempt to squelch distribution of Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane, led to what several biographers have called a “clash of titans.” Hearst—informed by columnist Hedda Hopper after she screened the movie that the portrayal of Kane/Hearst was a “vicious and irresponsible attack”—pulled out all the stops to keep the movie from being shown (Carringer). In one of the earliest examples of the power of vertical media integration, Hearst allegedly threatened Kane’s producers, RKO, with an advertising blackout of all future RKO movies in Hearst magazines, newspapers, and newsreels. Hearst supposedly promised unflattering, magazine-length profiles of RKO executives in his publications and reportedly even threatened to initiate FBI investigation of members of the RKO board of directors and of executives associated with the film. Hearst’s newspapers labeled Welles a Communist sympathizer and attacked his association with a group of radio writers and directors called “The Free Company,” whom Hearst labeled as anti-American leftists. The film did eventually open, though in limited release around the country. Despite its widespread celebration by reviewers (Time magazine called it “Hollywood’s greatest creation”), the film—battered by Hearst’s preemptive publicity strikes—was a commercial failure. Only after RKO sold its film library to television in 1956 did the movie find its audience. In 1962, the film magazine Sight and Sound voted it the greatest film ever made. Hearst didn’t kill Citizen Kane, but he wounded it, and it wouldn’t be until well after “the Chief” (as his employees called him) was dead that his quasibiographical counterpart Charles Foster Kane became, for a new generation of media consumers, the enduring icon of a once-mighty publishing empire.

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst The unprecedented power of William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) opened the media magnate to charges of conspirato...

Health Scares

<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" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img allegations="" alt="and" been="" border="0" conspiratorial="" have="" health="" long="" of="" public="" scares="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEWqCbgyfWBrib6OVVfHDG7gIy8zjmb44VziJYvGDDnEHrTiUimPg6ZKzV2ge-hDD4KcMNpQeQR1j5uy8S3AI_i9rr6KwQaBC85OyXxpmfFz93GbbBsJfVT5DVpAwktd_7PLFBt5C5OiI/s1600/Health-Scares.jpg" subjects="" title="Health" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Health Scares</td></tr> </tbody></table> Disease, medical practice, and public health have long been subjects of conspiratorial allegations. Historians of earlier centuries typically link such suspicions to the vulnerability of a social order threatened by instability or war, and to the mysteriousness of illness prior to the age of “scientific medicine.” At the turn of the twenty-first century, key discoveries and treatments have transformed medicine, and the public is bombarded with a constant stream of health-related information carried by the media. But despite these advances in knowledge and access to information, health-related conspiracy theories proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century. It may be that, in a culture saturated with medical information, the body’s uncertainties and vulnerabilities are pervasive and prominent. Medical conspiracy theories also reflect rising suspicion toward and resentment of the medical establishment, which, since the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly prestigious, powerful, and rich. <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0984235841/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0984235841&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=QPVOQI2GENFEMBDI"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0984235841&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img allegations="" alt="and" been="" border="0" conspiratorial="" have="" health="" height="1" long="" of="" public="" scares="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0984235841" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" subjects="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060580461/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060580461&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=MZRD4HMHIAN4NQKO"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0060580461&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img allegations="" alt="and" been="" border="0" conspiratorial="" have="" health="" height="1" long="" of="" public="" scares="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060580461" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" subjects="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Historical Precedents Contagion was recognized long before microbes were identified. Notable conspiracy theories of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries blamed disease on infection by foreign enemies or domestic aliens. During the Salem witchcraft scare that culminated in the trials of 1692–1693, routine forms of disease and death were said to be the work of witches, but far more fearsome than familiar diseases were the special “afflictions” caused by demonic possession— screaming fits, visions, pains—which were considered highly contagious. Historians stress that the witch-hunt was preceded by a series of disrupting calamities, including drought, floods, smallpox, and Indian wars, and that it took place during a hiatus in governmental and legal authority. The Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793 occurred during the vulnerable early republican period, which was characterized by fear of a French invasion. Faced with the epidemic, Philadelphia doctors speculated that the recent flood of Caribbean immigrants into the city had brought a French contagion with them, possibly as part of a deliberate French plot. A foreign enemy also figured in a prominent conspiracy theory about the Great Flu pandemic that coincided with <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">World War I</a>. Spurred by media stories revealing a German conspiracy to spread contagion through Bayer aspirin tablets, public health authorities formally investigated the imported medicine. The Growth of the Medical-Industrial-Governmental Complex A decisive step in the formation of the modern medical establishment was the founding of the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1847, which capped decades of struggle to transform a diverse, unregulated array of practices and practitioners into an exclusive, credentialed profession. Resistance to professionalizatin, which was widespread in the nineteenth century, was collectively known as the Popular Health Movement (PHM). Like its post-1970 descendant, the Alternative Health Movement, the PHM comprised a diverse array of supporters who shared distrust or outright paranoia toward legitimate medical authority. Today, the split between the profession and the public is more pronounced than ever: the AMA is reputedly the strongest and richest lobby in Washington, while the Alternative Health Movement has grown into an institution in its own right. The growth of “scientific medicine” in the early twentieth century decisively divided the layperson from the expert. Scientific medicine based medical practice on laboratory research and credentialed expertise acquired through long, costly years of training at a shrinking number of medical schools that were selectively endowed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Trusts. In the mid-twentieth century, the growth of related chemical, pharmaceutical, technological, and service industries brought an everincreasing involvement of private interests and funding into academic, research, and clinical medicine. Beginning with the Pure Food Act of 1906, the U.S. government has formally intertwined itself with healthcare and health policy. Since 1970, Washington has spun out a vast web of healthrelated agencies and centers, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the agencies that operate within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which include the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health. Through these organizations, the government has become involved in all aspects of healthrelated delivery, licensing, regulation, funding, policy, research, education, and publicity. The healthcare sector absorbs a vast amount of the national economy, having accounted for 14 percent of the gross domestic product in 2001. Although more money goes into healthcare, the systems that deliver it are breaking down. Doctors blame unregulated, price-fixing insurance companies; insurance companies blame price-fixing by consolidating hospitals and the steep rises in drug and technology costs. The healthcare consumer, meanwhile, faces enormous cost spikes and decreasing access to quality care. At the turn of the twenty-first century, government, business, and universities share funding, research projects, clinical facilities, and oversight personnel; industry and giant philanthropic trusts support education and research; and public relations firms work with industry-supported scientific experts to feed information to the media. Although medicine has always been political in the broad sense—a source and use of power—by the end of the twentieth century medicine was a major facet of the power structure. Faced with this conglomerate of intersecting interests, many healthcare consumers voice the perception that individual and collective bodily wellbeing calls for a power struggle against fraud, exploitation, manipulation, and coercion. Big Medicine and Overarching Conspiracy Theories Some conspiracy theories posit seamless collusion among the intersecting interests involved in medicine. The <a href=" " target="_blank">Rockefeller</a> conspiracy theory, which was promulgated in the mid-twentieth century (Bealle), alleges that in the 1930s Rockefeller petroleum and financial interests merged with the infamous Nazitainted German chemical company I. G. Farben to form an international drug trust, which went on to control many banks and industries and to direct education, policy, and research through gifts to agencies and universities. This theory, because of its emphasis on Rothschild funding and media monopoly, is usually considered antisemitic. A later elaboration asserts that Rockefeller interests financed the “green revolution” to develop super-profitable “superwheat” hybrids that require large amounts of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides (commodities controlled by Rockefeller), enabling Rockefeller drug and medical interests to profit from resulting increases in environmental and diet-related illness (Ruesch). The “hidden cure” genre of overarching conspiracy theories alleges that the public is denied effective cures and treatments that the medical-pharmaceutical complex does not consider sufficiently profitable. A prominent example is the belief that, although the cure for cancer has been discovered, doctors, researchers, drug companies, the media, and the FDA have conspired to suppress the cure in order to continue generating profits from cancer patients. There is no plausible evidence for the Rockefeller and hidden cure theories, which imagine an improbable degree of collusion across a vast array of institutions and professions. But it is not surprising that such theories are popular, given the very real and profitable collusion of government, industry, and research institutions at the expense of consumers. For example, in a pharmaceuticals market controlled by the FDA, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry enjoys monopoly-like power; and in 2001, U.S. prescription drug costs—already much higher than in other countries—spiked 16 percent in a single year. Fact-Based Theories Many conspiracy theories grow by citing a legitimate disclosure, linking it to a troubling public health situation, and explaining it all as a large conspiracy—sometimes very plausibly. Patient safety studies released in the 1990s cited data indicating that 1 in 500 hospital patients is gravely injured or killed by mistake. Since a professional code of secrecy is traditional in medicine, the safety researchers conducted their own direct studies, finding that the vast majority of iatrogenic (doctor-caused) disabilities and deaths are never reported, even within secret internal hospital reviews. They concluded that the true percentage of hospital patients killed by a “medical mistake” is 1 in 50 (Institute of Medicine). Disclosures of damage caused by prescription drugs often give rise to theories about prior knowledge and cover-ups, or even about deliberate plots to induce illness in order to profit by its treatment. There are parallels in the area of surgery: for example, responses to well-publicized questions about heart bypass surgery’s efficacy and dangers have included allegations of unnecessary surgery as well as an overarching theory that the production and treatment of heart disease is a large industry in which agribusiness and fast-food chains profitably induce the obesity and heart blockage from which medical and drug interests, cardiac surgeons, hospitals, and device makers profit. Some conspiracy theories respond to striking trends in new diagnoses; examples include behavioral disorders such as attention deficit disorder, mood disorders such as depression and anxiety states, and so-called hormone deficiencies. Profit is generally the ascribed motive for the conspiracy to diagnose and medicate, but some theorists posit more sinister aims, describing plots to debilitate the population with mind-numbing drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin; to pacify women through “addicting” hormone replacement; to reduce the population by impairing fertility; and, in a period of economic instability, to keep the lower classes in their place by making them fat with fast food. Fraud and Addiction Tobacco is a compelling context and paradigm for the perception of disease-related conspiracies involving profit, public relations, government collusion, and scientific fraud. Broadly publicized exposés have shown not only that industry and government leaders knew tobacco was both addictive and deadly, but that tobacco companies, guided by their public relations consultants, influenced research and even directly paid scientists to sign their names to favorable reports in prestigious medical journals (Rampton and Stauber). A number of conspiracy theories accuse industry and marketing interests, in collusion with government, of addicting the population to, in addition to tobacco: street drugs, alcohol, hormones, Ritalin, Prozac, fatty food, starchy food, television, the Internet, violent films, sugar, shopping, pornography, and gambling. Some theories describe significant collusion, for example, that the meat, dairy, and grain industries work hand in hand with chains like McDonald’s, whose “supersize” meals help increase rates of diabetes so that Eli Lilly can reap greater profits from insulin. The “food disparagement” laws passed by many states in the 1990s, which attempt to suppress speculative criticism of food safety, have helped fuel the perception that agribusiness intimidates the media and buys off politicians. Transgressive Science New laboratory techniques and inventions have given rise to a number of conspiracy-tinged scenarios, including the charge that the human genome project is being used to develop pathogens that target racially specific populations. There is fearful speculation about novel pathogens created in the laboratory, including animal pathogens that cross over to humans and superpathogens produced through gene-splicing. Outbreaks of Hanta virus, Legionnaire’s disease, and some of the rarer hepatitis strains have been followed by speculations that dangerous new agents bred in the laboratory have been accidentally or deliberately released. These fears grow from an anxiety about the breaching of boundaries between species, between nature and science, and between genetically distinct individuals. Some large-scale disease conspiracy theories often harmonize this boundary anxiety with an anxiety over geographic and demographic boundaries. In an age of globalization, boundaries no longer separate populations and nations, nor do they sequester diseases. Popular press books published in the 1990s describe impending epidemics facilitated by laboratory experimentation, jet-setting doctors, negligently unchecked urban overcrowding, mass migration, and international travel (Garrett). Immunization One of the richest popular veins of conspiratorial theorizing focuses, not surprisingly, on vaccination programs. Although parents are free to refuse to immunize their children, state, federal, and school authorities exert considerable pressure. Immunization programs developed by the government in league with vaccine manufacturers (who profit greatly), and aiming to include every child, represent in an immediate form the combined powers of government, education, and commerce expressed through medical intervention. The fact that serious adverse outcomes and even death occur from a small percentage of vaccinations is widely publicized and fuels complaints about medicalized coercion and speculations about more far-reaching damage. Elaborate theories about intent and damage related to vaccination are widely discussed, especially on the Internet. New vaccines are constantly being tested, and covert experimentation is sometimes alleged: for example, there is a theory that a health maintenance organization (HMO) in California secretly tested a new measles vaccine on 700 minority children (the use of minorities as guinea pigs resonates with the infamous Tuskeegee medical experiment of the 1930s). Officially reported “adverse events” tend to be immediately apparent, but questioners of immunization programs speculate about long-term harm, including developmental problems, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune and neurological problems, and behavioral and learning disorders. Since vaccines are modified pathogens, some antiimmunization protesters use a rhetoric of purity, complaining that the “pure” bodies of children are invaded, polluted, and disordered by this literalized form of governmental intrusion. The public revelation that at least one common, mandated vaccine serum contained a mercury-based preservative called thimerosol was followed by charges of outright poisoning and cover-ups. Acting on the theory that autism is caused by unsafe vaccines in general, and thimerosol in particular, organizations of parents of autistic children were successful in getting the thimerosol-containing vaccine pulled and the issue brought before a congressional hearing, where a representative called for criminal penalties for any government agency that had covered up the thimerosol danger. Immunization packs together several paranoiainducing aspects of medicine: coercion by power, population-wide inclusion, the invasion of the body and the family system, and novel tinkerings that forever change the body’s functioning. Immunization sometimes serves as the warp into which other conspiracy theories are woven. For example, a theory about biochip implants for tracking and controlling the populace converges with smallpox vaccination phobia in a theory that smallpox vaccinations will be used to implant tiny ID microchips useful for detecting foes during periods of social unrest. Another theory uses immunization to link chemtrails and West Nile virus. Chemtrails, or contrails, are the visible condensation streaks left by aircraft exhaust; conspiracy theorists suspect they are toxic and represent secret mind-control or weapons testing programs. Citing outbreaks of West Nile virus and Legionnaire’s disease, and noting that authorities responded to West Nile by spraying New York with questionable pesticides, one theorist posits that the outbreaks resulted from pathogens and toxins released as chemtrails in a covert experiment in mass immunization. Environmental Dangers Conspiracy theories constantly emerge in response to ever-recurring alarms about environmental contamination. The dangers discussed include exposure to nuclear, microwave, and electromagnetic radiation; poisoning by toxins, pathogens, and pollutants in the environment; and contaminants in food and water. A number of well-publicized incidents since 1970 have fueled suspicions of widespread industrial fraud and negligence. These include several nuclear plant neardisasters in the 1970s and the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant mystery, which involved the 1974 death in a one-car crash of whistle-blower Karen Silkwood (the subject of a 1984 movie). Discoveries of disease clusters in sites contaminated by industry gave rise, in the 1990s, to the mass media book and film dramas A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich, in which poisoned families with sick or dying children are pitted against corporate bullies propped up by governmental and legal authority. Many cancer fears revolve around suspicions of covered-up exposure and suppressed knowledge of toxicity. Some environmental alarmists have set out to emulate Rachel Carson, whose 1962 exposé of pesticide dangers turned public awareness toward environmental pollution. One self-proclaimed follow-up is the 1996 book Our Stolen Future, whose authors look beyond cancer to the reproductive and developmental damages threatening future generations caused, they write, by hormonally active pollutants, particularly organochlorines. A red flag, according to the endocrine disrupter thesis, is the alleged drop in human sperm levels—a broadly publicized finding that led to much speculation about the future of humanity, but which follow-up studies have repeatedly shown to be unsubstantiated. Governmental responses to the endocrine disrupter scare illustrate the ineffectual oversight that helps nurture conspiracy-tinged suspicions. Although Congress, spurred by scientific testimony about emasculated wildlife, has undertaken a vast Environmental Protection Agency kegiatan to test 80,000 chemicals for estrogenic agency, the United States is one of the few developed nations in which chlorine pollution by the paper and chemical industries continues unchecked. The 1990s saw the publication of plausible, detailed reports and books exposing chemical industry malfeasance pulled off with the collusion of the government and media. Behind Closed Doors and Toxic Deception trace machinations to prevent the regulation of dangerous pollutants including dioxin (a potent organochlorine and a known carcinogen). PBS aired “Trade Secrets,” exposing how chemical companies concealed the toxic by-products of vinyl chloride, particularly dioxin pollution. Food Scares The corporate push for genetically modified food arouses great suspicion. Critics charge that GM food (“Frankenfood”) is profitable to industry not only because it can be patented, but because crop uniformity will eventually drive up pesticide demand. The charge that big food interests take advantage of poverty to open new markets for GM food is restated by conspiracy theorists, who describe a deliberate macroeconomic creation of food shortages in impoverished nations in order to open the door to GM food. The food industry’s opposition to GM food labeling and precautionary measures fuels such suspicions.