Are there any people who could be justifiably labeled as conspiracy theorists from before the 1960’s ? Were they ever as vocal as they seem to be these days, and was there ever one who turned out to be at least partially correct?
I have no good source for this, but according to one of the JFK assasination documentaries, it only took weeks for the theories to start after his death.
But JFK was assasinated in the '60’s, not before them 
Technicallly true. Yet how friggin old do you have to be for something from the 60’s to be “a new phenomenom”?
Millions. Almost all religions involve at least one conspiracy theory. People have been using conspiracies demon inspired infidels to explain world events for thousands of years. Most of the great pogroms of Eastern Europe were inspired by beliefs in Jewish conspiracies, and the Hitler declared frequently that there was an international Jewish conspiracy designed to destory the Aryan race.
I think we can safely say that Nazi Jewish conspiracies were considerably more vocal than anything today.
Almost by definition if it turned out to be correct it wasn’t a conspiracy theory, it was brilliant deduction. What do you think would qualify? Communists believed that the Capitalist powers would never accept peaceful co-existence with socialist nations and would conspire to destroy them. Was that a conspiracy theory that came true?
Eleven.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which supposedly documents the plans of the Jews to control the world, originated in 1911 Cite. Although it was a hoax, I believe it was used to justify some of the pograms in Russia and the Holocaust in Germany. But I think the “Jews Control the World” theory goes back much farther. People were willing to believe, at least.
Well, here’s a short list of conspiracy theories over the last couple hundred years:
Theories about the fate of Anastasia have circulated for decades
http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/collections/disputes/anastasia.htm
http://home.att.net/~rjnorton/Lincoln74.html
Those who believed these theories would have to be called conspiracy theorists. The Anastasia mystery ended up in court, so someone at least was being vocal about it. Several of the listed theories are probably factually correct.
And of course any witch trials were at least as vocal and as nutty as any modern conspiracy theory.
Thanks, I had not included the anti-jewish propogandas, as these were theories that were I believe encouraged by those in power. Which to my mind disscounts them as ‘conspiracy theories’. I also think to be a conspiracy theory in the form I am considering in the OP there needs to be an element in the theory that the truth is being somehow hushed up by those in power. Maybe there is a better name for such a thing than ‘conspiracy theory’ if anyone has one.
Anastasia and Lincoln’s death sounds like good candidates for what I was thinking of.
Blake brilliant! that is the historical analog to modern nuttyness that I was looking for.
In a lot of cases they weren’t, it was just spontaneous paranoia turned on convenient victims.
In that case the greatest conspiracy theory is Christianity. The entire basis of the early Christian church was that the truth was being deliberately stifled by other churches and secular governments under Satanic guidance. Read Revelations with a non-literal interpretation to see how strongly this belief was held by early Christians.
It postdates the JFK assasination and it is surely a reflection upon certain reactions to it, but the famous analysis of the long tradition of conspiratorial thinking in US culture is Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax predates 1911. Careful rereading will show that the reference cited above refers to a revised 1911 edition of a book which reprinted the Protocols.
U. S. political parties hold public conventions in imitation of the Anti-Masons. This was a party in the early-to-mid 1800s which claimed that Freemasons were behind everything bad. This was already a well-established theme in paranoid literature by their time.
In the mid 1800s there were a series of books published in the U.S. about a vast Mafia-like organized crime conspiracy which supposedly dominated the American economy. Unfortunately, I can’t remember for the life of me the name of the supposed criminal underground (except that it was referred to as a “brotherhood”), or of the journalist who claimed to have exposed it. Although the books were best sellers at the time, the general opinion then and now is that the organization existed purely in the imagination of this one reporter.
Anti-Catholicism has generated ridiculous and frightening myths for centuries. In William Inge’s play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a fiercely pious Protstant woman in a small Oklahoma town in the 1920s tells anuyone and everyone about how her girlfriend peaked into the basement of the local Catholic church and saw the guns that are stockpiled there in anticipation of the Catholic overthrow of the country.
While entertainingly silly, this is an accurate reflection of exactly the sort of bilge the Ku Klux Klan was spouting during this era. My mother and father recalled hearing during their grade school days that if Al Smith were ever elected President, the Pope was going to send battleships (evidently Vatican City had quite a navy in those days) up the Mississippi.
This stuff has not gone entirely out of style since. A Baptist friend recalls being told in church as a girl that if John Kennedy were elected President plans were already in place to chain Protestants up in caves, where food would be kept just out of their reach. Back in the 1990s a friend of mine in St. Louis was told by a fiercely pious Divinity student of her acquaintance that Catholics are forbidden to read the Bible, and that during church services men with whips strike any parishioners who slouch while kneeling in prayer.
Catholics have, of course, been prone to this same sort of thing. In addition to promoting a good deal of anti-Masonic paranoia over the centuries, many Catholics in Europe in the late 19th Century fell for a series of books and articles about a worldwide Satanic conspiracy. It was said to operate out of a secret base inside the Rock of Gibralter, and its head was the half-human daughter of Satan himself. I believe there is a brief discussion of this in Curtis MacDougall’s book Hoaxes.
During the anti-homosexual campaign spearheaded by Anita Bryant in the late 70s and early 80s, there was a good deal of sniggering by homophobes about how it is “well known” that gays can’t reproduce, and therefore have to rely on “recruiting”. This had long been a popular theme in gay-bashing, with the odd result that U. S. military intelligence agencies acted for years on the assumption that homosexuality actually amounts to some kind of organized movement. (Incidentally, Bryant later recanted her claims about homosexuals, something the mass media largely ignored.)
In the 50s and 60s some gay men in the Chicago area developed a slang with which to identify one another; upon meeting someone he thought might be gay, a gay man might introduce himself by saying he was “a friend of Dorothy’s”. The reference was to Dorothy Gail, the charactrer Judy Garland (long associated with male impersonators) played in The Wizard of Oz. Getting wind of this, the U. S. Navy expended enormous resources trying to track down this “Dorothy” who, they were sure, was in charge of the vast homosexual conspiracy. This is detailed in the book Conduct Unbecoming.
During Operation Desert Storm it was reported that the U. S. government was required to hire a great many civilian intelligence analysts as purges of gay servicemen had depleted the ranks of its own military intelligence agencies. Often, it was said, the civilian contractors were the very servicemen which had been ousted. It is interesting to speculate how much of the military’s search for a nonexistent gay conspiracy was conducted by gay soldiers and sailors who knew the conspiracy they were searching for did not exist.
A final observation: campaigns against fictitious conpiracies are commonly refered to as “witch hunts”, and the sporadic real-life witch hunts throughout Europe–which lasted until the late 1700s in Scandinavia–are an excellent example of the popularity and the endurance of conspiracy paranoia prior to the 1960s.
The observations above about how the early Christians can be viewed as conspiracy theorists are quite interesting. In the same way, the early Chirstians were themselves the victims of conspiracy propaganda. In particular, they were accused of cannibalism, a claim Christians later made against the supposed witch conspiracies and against Jews.
As the plague passed through Europe (during the fifteenth century, IIR), in various areas it was blamed on witches or Jews. In other areas I haven’t heard of anyone being blamed.
The notion that Nero was responsible for the burning of Rome (which is believed by many to this very day) was a rumor that started in the immediate aftermath of the Great Fire. I think this qualifies as a conspiracy theory.
Well, there’s the granddaddy of the current “one world government” conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, which Cecil has discussed. He even points out that:
The Knights Templar were the subject of a sort of conspiracy theory around 1307. Around that time they were a very powerful and wealthy order whose primary business was banking. They had extrodinary resources and landholdings, even lending money to kings. King Philip IV (the Fair), who was coincidentally hurting for cash, instituted charges of heresy and immorality (denying Christ, spitting on crosses, sodomy, idol worship, that sort of thing) against the supposedly now Satanic Templars, and extracted confessions by torture. Soon England and Spain were doing the same. Pope Clement V balked at first, but eventally got on board and suspended the order by papal bull. When the Grand Master and other Templar leaders theatrically retracted their coerced confessions just as they were about publicly do penance and reconcile with the church, they were burned at the stake. Their holdings were split up among the Knights Hospitalers and secular rulers, although Philip didn’t get any. The guilt of the Templars has been debated for centuries, but most historians now believe they were the victims of a conspiracy theory.
My epidemiologist wife recently brought home a medical geography article detailing how 19th-century San Francisco was wracked by rumors that various outbreaks — cholera, I think, though it might have been something else — were being caused by the increasing population in the Chinatown ghetto.
It’s always something.