Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, by Colin Dickey

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Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, by Colin Dickey

According to millions of Americans, conspiracies are everywhere, and conspirators lurk inside every pizzeria (remember Pizzagate?), every corporate boardroom and government bureau. Cultural historian Colin Dickey reminds us that this is nothing new. The American Revolution was fomented by conspirators, many of them Freemasons, a society whose emblem, the eye in the pyramid, adorns the dollar bill and the flip side of the Great Seal of the United States. And it goes back further. The Salem witch trial exemplifies a paranoid conspiracy theory with tenuous grounding in reality but deadly results. Perceptions can kill.

In Under the Eye of Power, Dickey sets out to show that conspiracy theories (and occasionally, actual conspiracies) have been less marginal in American history than academic historians have been willing to admit. “At key moments when we have undergone major cultural or political shifts, fears of secret groups with hidden agendas are stoked to stymie and blunt the effects of those shifts,” he writes. In the 19th century, nativist groups warned of a sinister conspiracy behind the migration of Irish Catholics to the U.S. In reality, there was no conspiracy, just starvation and oppression in Ireland. On the other hand, there have been conspiracies of hope, including the loose network of activists, the Underground Railroad, who helped enslaved people escape bondage.

Dickey ranges widely across American history to find conspiracies real and mostly imagined. He investigates the little-known mass execution of Blacks indicted in a 1741 plot to burn down New York City; fears of subliminal advertising whose baleful influences are unproven; dangerous CIA mind control experiments with LSD in the 1950s; and the Red Scare. According to him, anti-Catholic and anti-Communist campaigns “essentially, were the same fear: a foreign group of subversives who took orders from abroad and sought to undermine American democracy.”

Conspiracy theories provide their proponents with an easy answer to the questions of a complicated world. Those theories sometimes overlap with real conspiracies (yes, the Iraq invasion was a conspiracy at the highest level) “but their function,” Dickey maintains, “is not about understanding the mechanisms of actual conspiracies, but instead working as explanatory narratives for the unpredictable nature of modern life.”

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