Who you calling paranoid?
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Some time ago, while researching a Retropolis post about the Anti-Masonic Party, I was drawn to Richard Hofstadter’s classic work on the “paranoid style” in American politics.
In a collection of essays written over a decade starting in the mid-1950s, Hofstadter traces the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the fear that sinister forces secretly control the American political system to the earliest days of the Republic.
His immediate concern was to find a way to explain the rise of McCarthyism and the Goldwater phenomenon of 1964, but it is his survey of U.S. political history that is of interest here.
“Paranoid” is a loaded word. Hofstadter goes to some lengths to explain that he does not use it in a clinical sense or even to imply that those who hold views he would characterize as paranoid suffer from mental illness. His primary focus is on the style of rhetoric that characterizes a political movement or party and what that tells us about the group’s beliefs.
But it is clearly an undesirable trait – and it got me wondering. How many of the third parties with which I have been preoccupied over the past decade were characterized not only by rhetoric that could be called paranoid but also by a set of beliefs or principles that could be so labeled?
It is not an insignificant question. From the 1820s through the 1890s, American politics was shaped and influenced by third parties in a way that seems unimaginable in our red-and-blue world.
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The Anti-Masonic movement is satirized (second from right) as one of the “hobby horses” of American politics in this cartoon from 1838. Library of Congress.
The Anti-Masonic Party, the first third party in American history, appeared as western New York was swept by fear of the secret society following the kidnapping and apparent murder in 1826 of the author of a book that purported to expose secret Masonic rites. The party was clearly animated not only by paranoid rhetoric — “at this very moment, its foot is on the neck of our liberties,” a Delaware newspaper warned in 1831 — but by a limited political program. Anti-Masons wanted to stamp out a fraternal order whose members included George Washington and 21 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The Anti-Masonic Party quickly faded from the scene, but it was followed by third parties opposed to slavery. Abolitionists, steeped in the Bible, borrowed heavily from Scripture to paint slaveholders in the darkest possible terms that could be seen as paranoid. When Sen. Daniel Webster, a Massachusetts Whig, appeared before a meeting of Virginia Whigs in 1840, a Vermont newspaper referenced a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice to describe his behavior. “Behold Daniel Webster at last prostrate before the Southern Moloch, with Senator [Samuel] Phelps [W-Vt.] behind him!”
Abolitionists invoked the threat of the “slave power” when they sought support for their anti-slavery stands. The phrase sounds like an example of the paranoid style except for this: There was a combination of political and financial forces at work that profited from and defended the institution of skavery.
Moreover, the profound evil of slavery demanded stark denunciation from its foes. It was fundamentally different than controversies over tariffs or government expenditures. Hofstadter’s analysis mentions abolitionists in passing but does not dwell on them — perhaps because opponents of slavery could not really be called paranoid, either rhetorically or programmatically.
A more serious case can be made against the silver champions of the second half of the nineteenth century. Silver coinage was one of the monetary policies considered essential by Agrarians as an antidote to the lingering effects of the Panic of 1873. Populists and other silver champions routinely referred to the “Crime of ’73,” legislation that took the silver dollar out of circulation.
“The [Coinage Act] of 1873 was simply an attempt to codify the fractional currency, which was in a chaotic state at the end of the Civil War,” Hofstadter writes. “The abandonment of the standard silver dollar, which meant the end of legal bitmetallism, was not objected to by any of the representatives of silver states in Congress in 1873 nor by anyone else.”
Populist theoreticians like William Hope “Coin” Harvey, whose free-silver tracts were wildly popular in the early 1890s, painted the The Coinage Act of 1873 — the measure that demonitized silver — in the darkest, most sinister light. “Demonitization,” Hofstadter writes, was seen as “the work of ‘men having a design to injure business by making money scarce.’ ” The measure, Harvey and his readers believed, “accomplished exactly what had been intended: it had created a depression and caused untold suffering.”
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Puck satirizes the Greenback-Labor Party and Benjamin Butler, its 1884 presidential nominee. Library of Congress.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding monetary policy in the late 19th century was indeed paranoid in style — and worse: it was often accompanied by anti-Semitic fulminations about the Rothschild banking house. But it would be a mistake to define the populist movement of the late 19th century by its paranoid or bigoted claims.
Throughout the 19th century, debate about monetary policy had long carried a significance that exceeded economics: it was the battleground for passionate debate about the nature of American democracy itself. When Andrew Jackson championed specie-based “hard money” and campaigned against the Bank of the United States, he exploited for political purposes the bank as a symbol of a privileged, moneyed elite. Opposition to the bank became a rallying cry for Democrats.
In the years after the Civil War, the same battle — the interests of average men and women versus the elite — was fought on different grounds. Small-d democrats and Agrarian radicals backed silver and paper greenback dollars, while financiers and their allies in Congress backed hard money and contracting the currency.
While economists can take issue with the arguments used by free-silver and soft-money advocates, aggrieved Agrarians and populists correctly diagnosed tight money as a serious economic problem for farmers and the communities that depended on them to prosper. As historian Richard White notes in The Republic for Which It Stands, deflation produced by the gold standard “transferred wealth from debtors to creditors and hurt producers, particularly in the South and West.”
Populists in the 19th century often employed dark language and spoke about sinister conspiracies, but their objective was not the persecution of a group — as it was for the anti-Masons — but economic justice for Americans crushed by tight money and deflation. Dismissing them as paranoid fanatics — which is what Hofstadter’s analysis of Coin Harvey invites — misses the mark and does them a disservice.
Nevertheless, we have come to learn in the years since Coin Harvey and the Anti-Masons that paranoid rhetoric has consequences. It cannot simply be laughed at or dismissed. Hofstadter’s work reminds us of its long presence in American history. We have to ask, when we encounter it, what lies behind it.
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My books on the Credit Mobilier scandal and 19th-century Iowa populist James B. Weaver are available at amazon.com.
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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver
