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

by Kurt Andersen

In America during the First Great Delirium, the marvels of science and technology didn’t just reinforce supernatural belief by analogy or as omens—they inspired sham science and sham marvels.

Homeopathy, its fake medicines prescribed to cure every disease, is a product of magical thinking in the extreme. After it was exported from Germany to America during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, it swept the country and continued booming for the rest of the 1800s. In 1848 the Homeopathic Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, eventually becoming the Drexel University College of Medicine. Homeopathic M.D. degrees were issued by schools across the country to many thousands of homeopathic physicians.

Out of this cross-fertilization of pseudoscience and spirituality came new sects and eventually one whole new American religion. In the 1830s in Maine, a clockmaker and inventor with the irresistible name Phineas P. Quimby found out about mesmerism. He became a practitioner, hypnotizing sick and unhappy people and persuading them to feel better. Quimby’s work and philosophy were a wellspring of the New Thought movement, a nineteenth-century American precursor to both Scientology and the New Age movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

By 1848, Americans’ appetite for the amazing and the incredible had been whetted by two decades of transformative technologies and by the manic fabulism of dime museums and medicine shows and newly sensationalist newspapers. A credulity about E-Z self-improvement—swallowing pills or feeling the Holy Spirit to end one’s suffering magically—had been normalized during the First Great Delirium.

At the beginning of 1849, a year after the discovery, The New York Herald reckoned the prospect of free and easy gold in California had “set the public mind almost on the highway to insanity.”

The organizers of the Virginia Companies, which funded the first colonies in the 1600s, were early entrepreneurs. But when the word entered English in the 1800s, entrepreneur was a synonym for showman or impresario, a creator and promoter of spectacles.

Tocqueville observed. “Love of money is either the chief or secondary motive in everything Americans do.”

A generation later more of my ancestors arrived in Nebraska from Denmark, right before the Panic of 1893. That financial panic, which triggered a huge economic depression, was caused in part by the unsustainable over-building of the western railroads and the popping of that railroad bubble.

The Declaration of Independence consisted mainly of the colonials’ hyperbolic catalog of complaints about the king’s conspiracy to enslave his American subjects, his “design to reduce them under absolute despotism.”

For starters, consider Protestantism—an alternative system of truth-telling to replace the Vatican conspiracy’s false and corrupted version. The Puritans, oppressed by conniving elites, developed a self-identity focused on victimhood that sent them into American self-exile. When the Dissenters’ new American society promptly produced its own dissenters, the subversives and oppressors each saw the other as a conspiracy.

During their first century, Americans believed themselves beset by satanic conspiracies of witches and Indians. During their second century, there were panics about foreign conspiracies—despotically inclined leaders in league with European monarchs, other despotic leaders in league with European revolutionaries. Americans learned of the all-powerful master cabal controlling the European subversives from a 1797 book called Proofs of a Conspiracy, about the Freemasons and Illuminati.

In 1798 Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien Acts, giving him the power to imprison or deport any suspicious foreigner—especially French ones, whose recent revolution, people said, had been an Illuminati undertaking.

“There is no fouler stain upon the Morals of this nation,” declared John Quincy Adams, “than the Institution of Freemasonry.” No fouler stain, said the man crusading against slavery, who’d also famously said that the rational, peaceful United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

THE CIVIL WAR resulted from large and real disagreements between people in the South and the North—about two different political economies, two different cultures, and two irreconcilable moral understandings. The causes were not imaginary. But during the decades leading up to the war, those authentic causes became wrapped in self-serving fictions on both sides—moral and cultural and political fantasies.

THEN THERE WERE the powerful religious rationales for annihilating one’s fellow Americans. Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God’s orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and civilians believed and said again and again, “God is on our side.”

IN ADDITION TO fighting on behalf of a religious dream, the Confederacy fought to preserve an elaborate secular dream, maybe more powerful—the fantasy that the South was the last outpost of the old-fashioned virtues of chivalry, honor, grace, and charm. This myth too was extruded from a germ of historical reality.

Of course, at the turn of the seventeenth century, while Englishmen back in England promoting emigration gushed about the physical magnificence of the New World they’d never seen, the actual emigrants’ reactions tended more toward dread and misery, seeing the place as a horror to be suffered as part of their Christian adventure, a replay of the ancient Israelites’ humbling and testing for forty years in Exodus.

John Muir, the nature-worshipping American who actually walked the walk a generation later, mocked Thoreau as a poseur pretending to “see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush” a “mere saunter” from Concord. Indeed, when Thoreau left Walden Pond to spend a couple of weeks in the true wilderness of northern Maine, he was horrified—“grim and wild,” “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature.” After eight hundred days living deep and sucking out all the marrow of existence, he returned to town, helping run his father’s pencil-making business, living for the rest of his life at his parents’ big house on Main Street. Thoreau epitomized this particular have-your-cake-and-eat-it American fantasy, a life in harmony with nature as long as it’s not too uncomfortable or inconvenient.

The New York Sun was the great pioneer penny paper, and in 1835 it published an extraordinary six-part, sixteen-thousand-word series. Every day for a week, a battalion of newsboys—also an invention of the two-year-old Sun—shouted the extraordinary news on the streets of America’s largest city: famous astronomers at a new superpowerful telescope in South Africa had discovered life on the moon!

Three years later, long after the story had been exposed as an entirely fictional hoax, a New York writer remarked that “very many in our city [still] regard those revelations with more of reverence and confidence than any of the established truths in physics.”

Not long before, the editor of a Connecticut newspaper had received a letter from a local teenager warning about the larger, ongoing part of the Great Delirium—his “fears” of “the evils resulting from undue religious excitement” going on around him. After the newspaper declined to publish it, the boy started his own newspaper. As he recalled the fervor years later, “by means of systematized effort, large numbers of people of all ages, but especially the young, were converted” to born-again Christianity. “So great was the alarm awakened in the minds of some of these converts, that they became victims of religious frenzy.… Many thousands of our citizens were influenced by the religious enthusiasm which was sweeping like a tornado through our land.” That young man was Phineas Barnum, known as P.T., who by his early twenties was earning a living in Connecticut selling lottery tickets.

The fair’s organizers had turned down Buffalo Bill’s request to install his Wild West show on the fairgrounds, so he set up camp next door and made a fortune. Chicago was a world’s fair, so Cody used the opportunity to expand his narrative, renaming the show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. And five years later life imitated art: a U.S. Army cavalry regiment sent to wage the Spanish-American War in Cuba, commanded by the fair patron Teddy Roosevelt, named itself after Buffalo Bill’s fictional warriors, the Rough Riders. The U.S. population was 65 million at the time. In six months, the Chicago fair was visited by more than 27 million people, for whom there must have been one big takeaway: fantasy seems superior to reality—and, by the way, is there any important difference between the two?

What had been founded, in other words, was a synergistic and unstoppable fantasy-industrial complex.

THE UNITED STATES is a self-consciously modern country. During the first three decades of the first self-consciously modern century, the twentieth, rationality and reasonableness seemed to be winning the war against magical thinking and backwardness.

In the 1920s, Gilbert Seldes wrote The Stammering Century as a rationalist’s good-riddance epitaph for the last vestiges of America’s ridiculous magical-thinking 1800s. Psychics and séances had a revival—the young wife of a Boston socialite physician became an illustrious medium, in part because she often disrobed during séances—but spiritualism was definitively debunked during the 1920s by Houdini and other skeptics. Nearly all of the big spiritualist communities that had sprung up during the late 1800s disappeared. Theosophy, a hot turn-of-the-century American mishmash of occultism, mysticism, astrology, alchemy, and magic, splintered and declined into obscurity starting in the 1920s.

Henry Ford, America’s most esteemed and successful industrialist, became a superfan of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the Russian book originally published as fiction, now purporting to be a nonfiction account of a secret meeting of the leaders of a global Jewish conspiracy plotting world domination. In the 1920s he underwrote the U.S. publication of a half-million copies.

Nostalgia had been turned back into a pathology. In 1915 the director D. W. Griffith released a motion picture that was more cinematically ambitious, sophisticated, and compelling than any so far—the movie of the year, of the decade, hugely profitable. It was The Birth of a Nation, a shameless three-hour-long piece of propaganda for the mythical Old South and its Ku Klux Klan redeemers. It was the first movie to be shown at the White House, and it played in New York City for almost a year. And then life proceeded to imitate art. During the next decade, the popularity of the revived Klan exploded.

Fighting to keep the big Protestant denominations from drifting toward the rational was hard work. But in twentieth-century America, celebrity was totally fungible, entrepreneurialism the winning way, and show business exploding.

A large fraction of American Christians, however, refused to move beyond the picture of human creation they’d had as children. “I don’t believe your own bastard theory of evolution,” Billy Sunday snarled. “I believe it’s pure jackass nonsense.” In the winter of 1925, he preached for two weeks in Memphis, where 250,000 people (in a city of 200,000) turned out to hear him rail against Darwin and godless biology.

A BIG, STARK American inflection point had arrived. Modern science or ancient myth? Reason or magic? Reality or fiction? The argument over evolution had finally come to a head, each side coalescing and arming for battle during the same decade. A ferocious sector of Christians arose and named itself, and anti-evolution-education laws were enacted.

The next day, after deliberating for nine minutes, the jury found Scopes guilty. The judge fined him $100. And as if the whole episode were not already theatrical enough, a few days later in Dayton—on the following Sunday—Bryan dropped dead.

Tongues. Mencken had witnessed the defining voodoo artifact of the newest species of fantastical Christianity. It had occasionally bubbled up here and there in America for a century or two before finally becoming a sustained geyser in the early 1900s.

And an international joke. “In the 1920s,” the Notre Dame historian George Marsden writes in Fundamentalism and American Culture, “when the American fundamentalists were fighting their spiritual battles, few in England rallied to the battle cry.” And not just England: “Almost nowhere outside of America did this particular Protestant response to modernity play such a conspicuous and pervasive role in the culture.”

Newspapers and most magazines had always sold advertising space, but the ads had been pretty strictly informational, small and printed in small type, and not the main revenue source for most publications—until the 1900s.

Harper’s Weekly, the first American newsmagazine, refused to take ads when it started in 1857. Then it sold a half page per issue, which grew to three pages in the 1870s—and then, the more the merrier, at least ninety pages in each issue during the early 1900s. Between 1900 and the late 1920s, annual spending by American advertisers increased from the contemporary equivalent of $6 billion a year to $48 billion.

In 1850 Barnum whipped up so much advance newspaper publicity for Jenny Lind, a young Swedish singer whose first American tour he was promoting, that a tenth of New York’s population gathered on piers simply to watch her arrive. That was the moment when celebrity came to mean a famous individual, and after that Americans coined the slang word fan for people besotted by particular celebrities.

But Frank Lloyd Wright has not barged into this book only as an exemplar of the new celebrity culture that exploded in the early twentieth century. He’s here because he was a principal author of another all-American fantasy coming to full fruition—the suburb.

Wright learned to despise big cities as a young architect working in Chicago for a decade. L. Frank Baum was living there at the same time when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the world’s fair’s White City clearly inspired his Emerald City.

Now, however, there was a new means for middle-class Americans to have it both ways, to work downtown in the real world but otherwise live the old dream: the suburb. As Leo Marx writes, “The psychic root of all pastoralism—genuine and spurious” is one that “our experience as a nation unquestionably has invested … with peculiar intensity.

“The creation of the mental domain of phantasy,” he wrote in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, published in 1916, “has a complete counterpart in the establishment of ‘reservations’ and ‘nature parks’ in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threatened to change the Earth rapidly into something unrecognizable.… The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality principle.”

Both were expressions and enablers of our American appetites for immersive make-believe. After suburbia and TV became so pervasive so fast—Currier & Ives on the outside, private electric cinemas inside—we lost any sense of the radical peculiarity of our new fantasy-drenched postwar way of life.

At the time, America’s total embrace of TV and suburbia during the 1950s didn’t seem like symptoms of a national immersion in fantasy. To the contrary, all serious observers saw reason and rationality cruising to victory on most fronts, led by America. The United Nations was established. Colleges and universities were growing fast. Science was unchallenged, the genetic code was broken, computers and transistors were invented, government and big business and even the big churches were run by technocrats, and ideology seemed passé. “Our culture is unique,” a historian and sociologist of the period declared, “in its … outlawing of the irrational.”

On Main Street USA, there were no giant twirling teacups or mechanical crocodiles: it was imaginary—always bright and clean, charming and happy—but it seemed uncannily real, life with the dull and charmless bits cut out. One’s disbelief approached complete suspension.

DISNEYLAND AND MODERN Las Vegas were born simultaneously. Disneyland had been inspired by disapproval of “questionable characters” and “honky-tonk” atmosphere. In the badlands three hundred miles across the Mojave Desert, Vegas was created by questionable characters to be honky-tonk, the Pottersville to Disneyland’s Bedford Falls.

YOU COULD HAVE your fill of naughty fantasies in Las Vegas in the 1950s, but southern Nevada was a long way from anywhere. A copy of Playboy, however, was available on newsstands everywhere and cost only fifty cents. At the moment when Vegas was becoming the branded hub of American bacchanalianism and construction was about to begin on Disneyland, Playboy was created by an American, Chicago born, the twenty-seven-year-old advertising copywriter Hugh Hefner.

James Bond was a new model of manhood in the 1950s. The first Bond novel was published the same year Hefner published the first Playboy, and a new book appeared every year. “I’m sure James Bond, if he were an actual person,” Hefner said, “would be a registered reader of Playboy.”

He donated to John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he said, because he figured he would be “a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe president.” Plus, Kennedy was the ultimate Playboy man—urbane, Ivy League, great-looking, oversexed, a real-life fantasy figure. JFK, Hefner said, “was one of us.” (And as soon as he became president, Kennedy confirmed that, announcing that one of his favorite books was the Bond novel From Russia with Love.)

We think of the Beats as un-American creatures, the anti-1950s exceptions who proved the rule. But they were highly American. For one thing, the founders became enduring pop celebrities.

This is what made the Beats such an American phenomenon. They were all about their mystical, individualist beliefs, and all in. They rejected bland rules to live lives of antimaterialist and quasi-religious purity. They were like some freaky renegade Protestant sect who didn’t focus on Jesus but otherwise took the original priesthood-of-all-believers idea to the max. The Beats’ self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world. The hippie dream that followed drew as well from a parallel lineage—Cane Ridge, the communes of the 1830s and ’40s, Transcendentalism, pastoralism, Thoreau. Both were enactments of classic American fantasies.

Drug use would become part of the Fantasyland transformation, and the Beats started making drugs cool during the 1950s. Burroughs loved his junk, Kerouac his speed, Ginsberg his weed. Regular Americans also discovered and embraced new, legal psychotropic drugs in the 1950s. The synthetic amphetamine Benzedrine was available over the counter in the United States until 1959, and its more powerful sibling Dexedrine had just been introduced. By 1960, amazingly, Americans’ legal-speed dosage averaged one hit per person per week. People also started taking tranquilizers by the barrel. In 1957, two years after the miracle “nerve pill” Miltown appeared in pharmacies, it accounted for a third of all U.S. drug prescriptions. Like so many of their American predecessors and successors, the Beats cobbled together a patchwork doctrine that included exotic religious belief. Cassady, Kerouac, and especially Ginsberg considered themselves Buddhists, and Burroughs became a devotee of Scientology, proselytizing his pals.