Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

But at the turn of the twentieth century, just three decades after the tragedy and the slaughter, an amazing slavery theme park was erected in Brooklyn. Its mastermind was William Cody’s producer, who installed the inaugural iteration of what he called Black America in a semirural park where he and Buffalo Bill had performed the Wild West the previous summer.

As a million and a half black people migrated from South to North during the 1910s and ’20s, four of the five states with the largest Klan memberships were Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

No, no, no, the war hadn’t really been about that; slavery was a detail. In fact, white Southerners had fought the war to defend their right as Americans to believe anything they wanted to believe, even an unsustainable fantasy, even if it meant treating a class of humanity as nonhuman.

Instead of squarely facing the uncomfortable facts—slavery was wrong, secession a calamitous mistake—they shifted into excuse-and-deny mode. For a great many white Southerners, defeat made them not contrite and peaceable (like, say, Germans and Japanese after World War II) but permanently pissed off. Which in turn led them to embrace a Christianity almost as medieval as the Puritans’.

Dwight Moody, a shoe salesman turned celebrity preacher, had opened his influential Moody Bible Institute, a college and correspondence school, as well as a publishing house. He insisted that every sentence in the Bible was literally true, no more metaphorical than the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and he helped revive a scriptural fetishism in American Christianity.

Four hundred years after Luther said that “we are all priests,” Americans took the notion a hysterical step further: every believer could now be a prophet as well, each equal to one of Jesus’s apostles, commissioned to perform and reveal miraculous wonders and signs, and not just temporarily.

In the early 1900s, the print-media substrate for celebrity and fandom grew wildly: in two decades the number of daily papers doubled, and the combined circulation of magazines tripled. More of them featured more and more photographs of famous people, which starting in the 1920s could be instantly transmitted everywhere over electric wires. In the 1910s a newspaper started the first Hollywood gossip column, and they multiplied, becoming nationally syndicated in the 1920s, when the fan magazine Photoplay took off. The grand new photo-centric weekly Life, amazingly, put no Hollywood star on the cover for its first six months, but resistance was futile: there were four in 1937, then ten in 1938. They’d begun to open the floodgates of modern celebrity culture.

In fact, the suburb was a twofer, fantasy-wise. Loathing cities had always been a defining American impulse, but as cities rapidly filled up with millions of black and Catholic and Jewish and otherwise not-quite-white immigrants, a lot of native-born people found cities even more loathsome. So in addition to nostalgia for the undefiled green republic, suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, preferably Protestant) people. Just as Americans in the 1600s and 1700s left towns where they found the dominant religious cast obnoxious and started new towns, Americans in the 1900s could leave cities where they found the ethnic and demographic cast obnoxious and move to new towns not very far down the road.

The central-city-dwelling fraction of Americans reached a third—and never rose above that again. Meanwhile the suburban population more than doubled in three decades and kept on doubling. As it turned out, most Americans (and industry and federal policy makers) shared the fantastic retro vision of a nation covered by brand-new old-timey homesteads and ranches and small towns, and themselves as pioneers redux.

For a century, Americans had a wide-ranging, well-established vocabulary for this, talking about suckers falling for hogwash. After the 1920s, however, we invented fewer and fewer such disparagements. Soon words like balderdash, humbug, and bunkum were shoved to the back of the language attic and semiretired or eliminated, along with hooey, claptrap, and malarkey. We also did a strange thing to a certain set of older words. For as long as they’d been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogatory or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling claims unlikely, imaginary, or untrue. But then they were all redefined to be terms of supreme praise, synonyms for wonderful, glorious, outstanding, superb.

But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California is America squared.

The new American dream home became a small private back lot for enacting one’s lifestyle fantasy of choice.

The 1950s, that stereotypically homogenous and conformist and regular American decade, generated extraordinary new alternate realities as well. To people then, they looked like bits of strangeness and pizzazz on the side, but they turned out to be prototypes for what would become mainstream American life.

Kerouac, the king of the Beats, nicely embodied a couple of recurrent themes in this history—mythologizing the good old days, living life as if it were a piece of fiction. “Nostalgia,” the Harvard cultural historian Louis Menand has written of On the Road, was “part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties,” the “dying…world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders.”

Like mesmerism and homeopathy in the nineteenth century, orgone therapy was an import from German Europe.

What made Scientology so perfectly American was its emphasis on practical self-improvement of an entirely subjective kind: If it makes you feel better, let alone omnipotent, it must be true.

Almost immediately after World War II, our most important ally, the Soviet Union, became our most serious adversary-cum-enemy. For Americans in 1950, it was not delusional to worry about international Communist aggression or Soviet espionage in the United States. But that’s the problem with a conspiracist mindset. After some kernel of reality triggers exaggerated fears and a possible explanation, it grows into an imaginary labyrinth of all-powerful evil, an elaborate based-on-a-true-story fiction that passes for nonfiction, such as the fantasy that thousands of committed Communists were covertly using movies and TV shows to propagandize on behalf of Communism and the Soviet Union.

The basic McCarthyist vision—a conviction that a powerful conspiracy of Americans in government, media, and academia, in alliance with foreign Communists, was hell-bent on the ruin of their own country—had several generations, from 1940s into the 1990s, to become an entrenched American habit of mind.

God had always tipped the scales for America economically and militarily, but now in the 1950s He was also looking out for you, the individual middle-class American busy bee. Peale mass-marketed two strains of thought that had wormed their way into American Christianity since 1900: magical thinking about wealth and success (“God’s ability is mine,” a prominent turn-of-the-century pastor had preached. “His success is mine. I am a winner”) and see no evil–hear no evil–speak no evil as practical means of getting there. Lots of prominent Protestant theologians hated The Power of Positive Thinking—it was egocentric, materialist, and escapist, a cult. Billy Graham loved it.

All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, and more. Anything goes meant anything went.

“Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees.

The idea that finally eclipsed all competing ideas was a notion of individualism that was as old as America itself, liberty and the pursuit of happiness unbound: Believe the dream, mistrust authority, do your own thing, find your own truth. In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

These influential early critiques by the left-wing Laing, the libertarian Szasz, and the left-wing libertarians at Esalen had some bad consequences. Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now

once granted complete freedom of thought, Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the paths of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so.

In a nutshell: all beliefs and approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised by people to serve their own needs or interests. Reality itself is a social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent. Superstitions, magical thinking, and delusions—any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because it’s pretty much all equally true and false.

The rulers of any tribe or society do not merely dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science.

When evangelicalism and fundamentalism started blowing up bigger than ever in the 1980s, becoming synonymous with the political and cultural right, nobody remembered that Christianity had been revivified and crazified in the same 1960s that produced Esalen and Woodstock. The ascendant Christians mostly didn’t look or talk very 1960s, but they shared the sense of unbound freedom to abandon reason and believe whatever they wished, some of them more fearful than hopeful, others radiating enchantment more than paranoia, some in the thrall of ecstatic experience and others, extreme doctrine.

but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings, and in 1968 the court finally ruled—unanimously—that states could not ban the teaching of evolution.

Back in 1960, the largest Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, had 508,000 American members; by the end of the 1970s, its total U.S. members and “adherents” had grown to 2.6 million. The great pioneers in freakishly innovative Christianity, the Latter-day Saints, had grown slowly during the twentieth century. But the Mormons had a great 1960s and ’70s, with U.S. membership almost tripling. In fact, their strenuous outward normality as individuals—so cheerfully hardworking, sober, and square, so un-1960s—was another way outré beliefs became normalized.

In America, “the odd spectacle of politicians using ecstatic, nonrational, holy-rolling religion in presidential campaigning was to appear first…in 1976,”

“The Vietnam war,” Reich wrote in The Greening of America, “represents a form of madness in which logic is carried to fantastic extremes.” He had a point. In addition to the fact that moral calculus isn’t reducible to actual calculus, the empiricism these best and brightest practiced was often faulty and fake.

Even before the Weathermen convinced themselves they were American Vietcong, officials at the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence agencies, as well as in urban police departments, convinced themselves that antiwar protesters and campus lefties in general were dangerous militants, and they expanded secret programs to spy on, infiltrate, and besmirch their organizations. Which thereby validated preexisting paranoia on the New Left and encouraged their wingnuts’ revolutionary delusions. It was a symbiotic vicious circle, alarmed and overreaching government fantasists versus alarmed and overreaching antigovernment fantasists.

As a result, more Americans than ever would become reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and hashish, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award. In the early ’60s, Hollywood released the Washington conspiracy thrillers Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate, and by the 1970s conspiracy became the smart Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life at the time conspired to make such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left groups had just been revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy masterminded in the White House.

In fact, this left-right tag-teaming became a motif in the 1960s and ’70s. The modern homeschooling movement, for instance, got going then in both fundamentalist Christian and Woodstockian iterations. The former sought to reduce children’s exposure to ideas from outside the Bible-based bubbles of family and church. In left-bohemian milieux, parents decided that their children are not in this world to live up to expectations; that they must only and always do their own thing; and that tests and grades would turn them into drones of the corporate state.

Gun nut became a phrase in the 1960s because gun nuts really didn’t exist until then—and they emerged on the far right and left simultaneously. The John Birch Society, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers were our first modern gun rights absolutists. The Panthers’ self-conception, as a heavily armed and well-regulated militia ready to defend Oakland’s black community against the police, led quickly to a California law, sponsored by a Republican and signed by Governor Reagan, that made it illegal to carry loaded guns in public. Huey Newton, twenty-five-year-old cofounder of the Panthers, condemned it as part of “the plot to disarm” Americans.

But violent crime had tripled in a decade, and in the late 1970s hysterics managed to take over the NRA, replacing its motto “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” with the second half of the Second Amendment—“The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” Within a decade, the official Republican position shifted almost 180 degrees to oppose any federal registration of firearms.

As the decade began, tellingly, American TV invented a curious new form of fiction-passing-as-reality: comedies were now mostly filmed without audiences, but recordings of laughing crowds were layered into almost every sitcom soundtrack. And what we watched suddenly changed as well. For its first dozen years, prime-time network TV was more or less committed to realism—Topper, a sitcom about ghosts, was the memorable exception. But that unwritten law was repealed at the beginning of the 1960s—The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Flintstones, The Jetsons—followed by an immediate glut of the supernatural and otherwise fantastic.

Dedicated to blurring the lines between the fictional and the real, people in the living history world became focused on what they called the authenticity of their simulations. Living history boomed and acquired academic legitimacy, no longer just tourist traps but centers for “experimental archaeology” and “imitative experiments.”

Before that moment, there had not been hordes of people living in their own private Disneylands or inserting themselves into familiar fiction and sharing their stories with the world. There were no Comic-Cons, the first of which took place in 1970 in southern California, when a few hundred people in love with comics and sci-fi met in the basement of a 1910 San Diego hotel that reeked of nostalgia—but that had also reeked of nostalgic make-believe when it opened, because it was built in a faux-old classical style popularized by the Chicago world’s fair.

What happened in Disneyland did not stay in Disneyland, didn’t even stay in museums and theme parks. Main Street USA’s imitation of old-time small-town America was followed in 1966 by the three-acre simulation of a sexier, more cosmopolitan nineteenth-century urban downtown, New Orleans Square. They become the de facto models for large-scale builders and designers of shopping malls and much of the rest of real-life America.

The sexually explicit movie that began making porn respectable was hardly porn at all but a sweet, arty, black and white Swedish film called I Am Curious (Yellow), extensively covered in the news media when it was released in America in 1969.

Relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else, became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say. But it was by no means limited to the ivory tower. The intellectuals’ new outlook was as much a symptom as a cause of the smog of subjectivity that now hung thick over the whole American mindscape. After the 1960s, truth was relative, and criticizing became equal to victimizing, and individual liberty absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

As I’ve described, America’s suburbanization after World War II amounted to the first step in the absorption of real estate development into the fantasy-industrial complex. Then came the theming of suburban chain restaurants and the rest of retail, followed by nostalgically reinvented downtowns. After that, canny executives in other sectors came to understand that in America their businesses could also be understood as show businesses.

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared, followed at the end of Clinton’s first term by Fox News.

In any case, when the Washington gatekeepers decided to get rid of that regulatory gate, it was a pivotal moment, practically and symbolically. For most of the twentieth century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Like Christians certain both that evolution is a phony theory and that God created people a few thousand years ago, conspiracists are simultaneously credulous (about impossible plots) and incredulous (about the confusing, dull gray truth). Conspiracists often deride arguments against their theories as disinformation cooked up by the conspirators—the way some Christians consider evolutionary explanations to be the work of the devil.

the total of agnostics and atheists has gone from extremely tiny (4 percent in 2007) to very tiny (7 percent in 2014). Those are percentages one otherwise finds in less-developed countries. If that is evidence for U.S. secularization, we are now just about as secular as, oh, Turkey.

In any case, creationism, in flavors and consistencies from nutty to extra-nutty, has been completely normalized and institutionalized in America. The nuttiest have invented an elaborate new pseudoscience. There are creationist research papers that look and read like real academic papers, written by scientists with advanced degrees, such as “Radioisotope Dating of Meteorites,” which purports to explain why 4.5-billion-year-old rocks aren’t actually old—“their 4.55–4.57 Ga ‘ages’ obtained by Pb-Pb, U-Pb, and Pb-Pb–calibrated isochron age dating are likely not their true real-time ages, which according to the biblical paradigm is only about 6000 real-time years.”

The institute’s Harvard-educated founder and director has explained why so many Americans, unlike people in the rest of the developed world, deny biology. Our “high percentage of doubters of Darwinism” is because “this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field.”

The Puritans regarded financial success as a possible signal from God—if He had made you wealthy, maybe you were a “visible saint,” already elected to everlasting life. But in contemporary America, cause and effect have been switched. It is no longer just some dull Protestant work ethic that leads to success. As America’s I’m-a-winner individualism extinguished belief in predestination, hopeful Christians decided that prayer could directly result in a high net worth. It was a way of reconciling two irreconcilable pieces of the American character—the extreme religiosity and the refusal to believe that success isn’t up to each person individually. The solution: you can persuade God to make you rich.