NOTES

1. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1970). For treatments of conspiracy theory as pathology or propaganda, see Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,"Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (Sept. 1960): 205-224; David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, eds., Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); John H. Bunzel, Anti-Politics in America: Reflections on the Anti-Political Temper and Its Distortions of the Political Process (New York: Vintage, 1967); Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1977, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), the original version of which was published in 1970; Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1941; reprint, New York: Norton, 1973); John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (1936; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960). A recent return to the pathology approach is Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997). For critiques of the historiography of conspiracy theory, see Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,"William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 39 (1982): 401-406; and Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3-21.

2. On the recent prevalence and popularity of conspiracy theory, see (among many others), Fenster, Conspiracy Theories; Pipes, Conspiracy; Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Rampant "conspiracism" has also been a frequent topic of journalists in recent years. A few of the more useful examples (out of hundreds available) include: Michael Kelly, "The Road to Paranoia," The New Yorker, 19 June 1995, 60-75; Rick Marin, "Conspiracy Mania Feeds Our Growing National Paranoia,"Newsweek, 30 December 1996, 64-68; Eleanor Randolph, "Is U.S. Keeping Too Many Secrets? Government's Penchant of Classifying Information Has Helped Conspiracy Theories Flourish," Los Angeles Times, 17 May 1997, 1A; Rick Martz, "Conspiracy Theories: 'They' Don't Want You to Read This," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 30 April 2000, 1C.

3. Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Col. Philip J. Corso with William J. Birnes, The Day After Roswell (New York: Pocket Books, 1997); Bruce Handy, "Roswell or Bust: A Town Discovers Manna Crashing from Heaven and Becomes the Capital of America's Alien Nation," Time, 23 June 1997; Joel Achenbach, Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); Phil Patton, Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 (New York: Villard, 1998).

4. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1974); Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style"; James H. Hutson, "The Origins of 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics': Public Jealousy From the Age of Walpole to the Age of Jackson," in Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History, ed. David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate (New York: Norton, 1984), 332-372.

5. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution; Hofstadter, Paranoid Style; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures From Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Kenneth S. Stern, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

6. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 144-59; Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style"; Ira D. Gruber, "The American Revolution As a Conspiracy: The British View,"William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 26 (1969): 360-72.

7. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style," quotations on 429 and 411.

8. For examples of the literature on the Antimasons, see Ronald P. Formisano, "Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826-1827," American Quarterly 29 (1977): 139-165; Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, "Freemasonry and Community in the Early Republic: The Case for Antimasonic Anxieties," American Quarterly 34 (1982): 543-561; Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, "Antimasonry Reexamined: Social Bases of the Grass-Roots Party,"Journal of American History 71 (1984): 269-293; and Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For a similarly respectful take on a group far removed in time and place, modern African Americans, see Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Quotation from Lebbeus Armstrong, "Masonry Proved to be a Work of Darkness"(1830) in Davis, ed., Fear of Conspiracy, 83.

9. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 36-37.

10. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK, The Book of the Film: The Documented Screenplay (New York: Applause Books, 1992). The best introduction to the "field"of JFK conspiracy theorizing is probably Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, paperback ed. (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994). Even one does not accept all of Posner's refutations, one does get a very comprehensive education on the sheer variety of conspiracy charges that have been made.

11. Three highly negative surveys of exceptionalist historical literature are: Daniel T. Rodgers, "Exceptionalism," in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret Their Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21-40; Ian Tyrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,"American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031-1055, 1068-1071; and Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working Class History 26 (1984): 1-24. At least two of these authors (along with Gordon S. Wood) would probably object to the idea of conspiracy theory as an uniquely American political tradition, and that is not the thesis argued by the present essay. Instead, I want to delineate America's particular experience with a worldwide phenomenon.

Some historians have responded to these attacks on exceptionalism, though not to defend the popular version of American mission and virtue put forward by conservative politicians. See Michael Kammen, "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,"American Quarterly 45 (1993): 1-43; and Michael McGerr, "The Price of the 'New Transnational History',"American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1056-1067. Social science defenses of American distinctiveness include Byron E. Shafer, ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and nearly any book by Seymour Martin Lipset.

12. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

13. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style," 420-21; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 6, Bailyn presents the example of Boston shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr annotating his newspaper with the observation that the Earl of Bute, a popular American conspiracy theory villain, was "a tool of the devil." For numerous examples of the devil in American political cartoons, see Bernard F. Reilly, American Political Prints, 1766-1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991).

14. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 55-57.

15. I have used the version of Jefferson's draft reprinted in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 236-41. On black and Indian motivations in the Revolution, see Sylvia R. Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999).

16. Andrew Jackson, "Bank Veto," in Harry L. Watson, ed., Andrew Jackson Vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998), quotations on 186-88. The interpretation of the Bank veto message presented here is heavily influence by Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 143-49.

17. Jackson, "Bank Veto," 187; Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Carl E. Prince, "The Great 'Riot Year': Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834,"Journal of the Early Republic 5 (1985): 1-19; Richard C. Rohrs, "Partisan Politics and the Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson,"Journal of the Early Republic 1 (1981): 149-163.

18. Davis, ed., Fear of Conspiracy; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (1938; reprint, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964); David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970).

19. Marcus Raskin, "JFK and the Culture of Violence,"American Historical Review 97 (1992): 488, 498.

20. Oglesby, Yankee and Cowboy War, 15. For a version of some of the same ideas published by a respected university press, see Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

21. Oglesby, Yankee and Cowboy War, 14-15.

22. Stone and Sklar, JFK, The Book of the Film, 110-13, 183; Michael Rogin, "JFK: The Movie," American Historical Review 97 (1992): 502. The version of the film used is JFK, Special Edition: Director's Cut, dir. Oliver Stone, videocassette (Warner Home Video, stock no. 12614, 1993).

23. Stone and Sklar, JFK, The Book of the Film, 176-77. "The dying king" lines appear in the "director's cut" video, but not in the published script.

24. The version of the film used is Nixon, dir. Oliver Stone, videocassette (Hollywood Pictures Home Video, stock no. 6701,1995).

25. References to the script are drawn from the "Interactive Screenplay"available on Nixon: The CD-ROM (Irvine, Calif.: Graphix Zone, 1996).

26. "Interactive Screenplay," Nixon: The CD-ROM, Scene 71.

27. Ibid., Scene 68.

28. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More; James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, eds., The Satanism Scare (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991); Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: BasicBooks, 1995). For a critical account of Christian conspiracy theories from an explicitly Christian perspective, see Paul T. Coughlin, Secrets, Plots & Hidden Agendas: What You Don't Know About Conspiracy Theories (Downer's Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999).