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On July 4, 1798, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University and one
of the most powerful men in New England, delivered a sermon at his
college titled, The Duty of Americans at the Present Crisis. The
present crisis, he explained, was a new and terrifying threat to the
young democracy: the Illuminati. Fears of the secret society had been
growing for the past year, and Dwight now warned the “ultimate objects”
of this group were nothing less than “the overthrow of religion,
government, and human society civil and domestic. These they pronounce
to be so good, that murder, butchery and war, however extended and
dreadful, are declared by them to be completely justifiable, if
necessary for these great purposes.”
Dwight, a Federalist, was hardly alone. Among the others sounding the alarm on the Illuminati were other well-known Federalists, including his brother, Theodore, a prominent lawyer, and pastor and geographer Jedidiah Morse (known as the “father of American geography,” as well as the father of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse), who authored a sermon in 1798 warning that the Illuminati sought to “root out and abolish Christianity, and overthrow all civil government.” Jedidiah Morse’s text, in turn, received supportive letters from both George Washington and former chief justice and governor of New York John Jay for his efforts in bringing light to the subject.
Morse, the Dwight brothers, and their allies were soon mobilizing opposition against Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson, calling him the candidate of none other than the Illuminati. But they couldn’t have anticipated what came next: Their conspiracy theory, once unleashed in the world, was turned back on them, upending the 1800 election and demonstrating the unique vulnerability of American democracy to conspiracy theories—especially during times of pitched cultural and ideological warfare.
Dwight, a Federalist, was hardly alone. Among the others sounding the alarm on the Illuminati were other well-known Federalists, including his brother, Theodore, a prominent lawyer, and pastor and geographer Jedidiah Morse (known as the “father of American geography,” as well as the father of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse), who authored a sermon in 1798 warning that the Illuminati sought to “root out and abolish Christianity, and overthrow all civil government.” Jedidiah Morse’s text, in turn, received supportive letters from both George Washington and former chief justice and governor of New York John Jay for his efforts in bringing light to the subject.
Morse, the Dwight brothers, and their allies were soon mobilizing opposition against Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson, calling him the candidate of none other than the Illuminati. But they couldn’t have anticipated what came next: Their conspiracy theory, once unleashed in the world, was turned back on them, upending the 1800 election and demonstrating the unique vulnerability of American democracy to conspiracy theories—especially during times of pitched cultural and ideological warfare.
Conspiracy
theories will almost surely play a role in the 2020 presidential
election—look no further than those that thrived in the immediate
aftermath of the bungled Iowa caucuses and those that are now either
causing panic or threatening to undo a coordinated public response to
the novel coronavirus pandemic. One recent text message convinced untold
numbers of people across the country that the president was just hours
away from shutting down all businesses, including grocery stores—a story
that spread like wildfire without support from any mainstream news or
government source.
The promulgation
of conspiracy theories can feel new—a by-product of social media,
Russian disinformation campaigns and a demagogic president who built a
political identity on birtherism. But from almost the beginning of
American democracy, wild, unproven theories have flourished, often even
coming to be embraced by influential leaders. And the 1800 election
shows just how those theories thrive and can even shift elections, long
before Twitter, fake news and viral text messages.
Where did Dwight and his contemporaries get their ideas about the Illuminati? The real Illuminati
was founded by a disgruntled Bavarian Jesuit named Adam Weishaupt. A
professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, Weishaupt had
become disillusioned with the Catholic Church by 1776. Believing that
only a secret society could spread secular, rationalist ideas in a
repressive, religious environment, he founded a small group modeled on
the Freemasons, with which he hoped to someday found a new society
altogether, based on a rational government free from religious
influence.
Weishaupt
recruited young noblemen for his new group, seeking acolytes both rich
and impressionable; gradually, the group expanded from a few dozen to
several thousands. In 1784, Charles Theodore, the Duke of Bavaria,
banned all secret societies, hoping to suppress the Illuminati
specifically. Two years after that, his police conducted raids on the
houses of several high-profile members, confiscating essays deemed
heretical that defended atheism and suicide, promoted counterfeiting and
abortion, sketched out plans to include women and claimed the
Illuminati had power over life and death. Sunlight proved a powerful
disinfectant, and, once illuminated, the Illuminati dissolved.
Weishaupt’s
organization might have been entirely lost to history as a minor
footnote if not for a French priest named Augustin Barruel, who in 1797
tried to make sense of how his country had gone from a seemingly stable
Catholic monarchy to a violent, atheist regime in such a short time. How
had the ideas of philosophers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who had long railed against the excesses of the monarchy and the church,
so successfully undermined the old order? Barruel concluded that they’d
relied on a secret network of the Illuminati, who used unwitting
Freemasons to spread its unholy message.
Barruel’s
conspiracy theory posited that the entire French Revolution was not a
story of exuberant democracy descending into unpredictable chaos but
rather a carefully orchestrated plan by philosophers who’d long seeded
the French landscape with subversive agents, a function of what Barruel
termed “the Illuminization of Freemasonry”: the union of Masonic secrecy
and secular revolution.
Though the
Bavarian Illuminati may have been dead by the mid-1780s, Barruel’s
insinuation gave it new life. Whispers of these dangerous atheists found
their way first to England with the publication of John Robison’s 1797
pamphlet, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and
Governments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of the
Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. A Freemason
himself, Robison worried the irreligious Illuminati had gained control
of the Masonic organization and perverted it and was now working to root
“out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing
governments of Europe.”
Robison’s
warnings of the Illuminati reached the United States at a vulnerable
time. Still forming their more perfect union, Americans felt acutely
vulnerable to foreign interference. But by the late 1790s, this anxiety
had broken along partisan lines. Federalists feared that France’s
revolutionaries were bent on turning Americans against their nascent
government, whereas Jeffersonian Republicans worried instead that Great
Britain was scheming to reclaim its former colonies.
The
New England of Federalists like Dwight was in particular primed to
receive news of a godless network of spies and invaders. Calvinist
remnants of the original Puritans (including Congregationalists and
Presbyterians) still dominated New England politics, and they were wary
of any attempt to separate church and state. They supported their man
John Adams for reelection against the Republican Thomas Jefferson, a
Deist who at times seemed to verge into atheism. (While Jefferson
believed Jesus Christ to be an enlightened prophet, he famously
dismissed both the Resurrection and the miracles of the Gospels as
mythology.) This, combined with his generally positive attitude toward
post-Revolution France, made him a likely candidate for Illuminati
subversion. That July Fourth, Dwight’s brother, Theodore, proclaimed, “I
know not who belonged to that Society in this country, but if I were
about to make proselytes to illumatism in the United States, I should in
the first place apply to Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin [a U.S.
House Representative from Pennsylvania and future Treasury secretary
under Jefferson], and their political associates.”
But having
worked to stoke the public’s fear of the Illuminati’s infiltration of
the United States, the Federalists were perhaps not prepared for how
quickly this paranoia would be turned against them. Had they known, they
would have perhaps been kinder to a man named John C. Ogden. A
little-known and long-forgotten preacher, Ogden, had tried for years to
establish himself in New England but repeatedly spoke out against what
he saw as the entrenched power structure of the Congregationalist
clergy, and in 1793, he left New England for New York and Philadelphia.
Embittered, he began publishing a series of anonymous articles in the
anti-Federalist Philadelphia paper, the Aurora, published by
William Duane, who would go on to become a powerful lawmaker in
Pennsylvania and secretary of the Treasury under President Andrew
Jackson.
Ogden’s series was about a
conspiracy he claimed to have uncovered. The New England of Morse and
the Dwight brothers may have been publicly against Illumatism, Ogden
argued, but this was all a front: They were in fact secret Illuminati, and it was they—not Thomas Jefferson—who were bent on destroying America’s young democracy.
Ogden
achieved this reversal by turning his sights on Timothy Dwight, whom he
began calling the “Pope of New England,” insinuating that he was using
his position at the head of Yale to infiltrate America’s higher
education system and indoctrinate the youth. Long before the modern,
right-wing attack on “liberal college professors,” Ogden was accusing
Dwight of “pervert[ing] a public literary institution to the purposes of
party; and wish[ing] to extend the effect and oppression of
ecclesiastical establishment through this nation,” slyly insinuating
that colleges were subversive breeding grounds where impressionable
young people were being led astray.
By
November of 1799, Ogden had stepped up his attacks and shifted from
anti-Catholic to anti-Illuminati rhetoric. Behind this structure of
anti-democratic indoctrination, he alleged, was a sinister cabal bent on
suppressing the freedom of religion in favor of an overt hierarchy,
with New England Federalists in charge. He played off of Americans’
inherent distrust of anything that looked like a pope and then blurred
it with the conspiracy theories Dwight and Morse had already set in
motion. New England’s Congregationalist clergy, Ogden argued, “bear too
near an affinity to the Illuminati Societies of Europe, not [to] be
viewed part of the same: at least if Professor Robeson and Abbé Barruel are to be believed, they must be sister societies.”
What mattered, he understood, was simply the insinuation that there was
a power structure behind the scenes pulling the strings.
The
bugbear of the Illuminati worked to unite a series of interlinked
partisan attacks: The Federalists advocated a top-down hierarchy, they
opposed religious and civic freedom and their love of democracy was
insincere. And by alleging that these motives were deliberately obscured
by this secret society, Ogden and the Aurora defused any
potential defenses. Of course Dwight would speak out against the
Illuminati, they argued; the more fervently he and other Federalists
spoke out against them, the clearer it was that they were secretly
members, trying to throw everyone off the scent.
Ogden understood that the Illuminati could represent something far
more primal than simply atheism. Secret societies were terrifying
because they presupposed a group of foreign invaders whose motives could
never be fully known.
It was easy to paint the tight-knit structure of New England politics as a mostly secret enterprise controlled by a few wealthy, well-connected individuals. Ogden’s conspiratorial accusations were carried not just by the Aurora but spread in sympathetic newspapers from New York to Baltimore. Even some who did not repeat his specific Illuminati insinuations adopted his overall contempt of New England’s political class—the Richmond, Virginia, Examiner called Connecticut “Priest Ridden” and “muzzled by its prejudices.” At Republican gatherings throughout the country, members toasted not just Jefferson but Aurora editor Duane (for “his endeavors to unveil the secret plots of a crafty aristocracy”) and to the “Clerical Illuminati of New-England”: “May their ambitious views in forming a union between church and state, never be realized.”
While Dwight had first seized on the Illuminati as a threat to religion, Ogden and the Aurora had recast it as the unholy union of a secret state religion and the levers of government.
Ogden had helped manufacture a paranoia around organized religion in the early republic that helped doom Adams’ reelection. In the early days of the republic, each state determined its own election day, so voting for the 1800 presidential election lasted from April until October. By the time voting was over, Jefferson had won, though Ogden was not alive to see it—he died in late September. But his work had been done.
Did Ogden’s conspiratorial whisper campaign tip the scales? A bitter, close-fought election, there were too many factors at play to say how crucial the Aurora’s part was in all of this. But the Aurora’s Illuminati attacks were successful in part because they worked in tandem with mainstream assaults against Adams’ ham-handed attempt to wed government with religion. After he called for a national day of fasting and prayer in 1799, opponents accused him of trying to instill Presbyterianism as a single, dominant religion, stoking fears of a government-mandated faith.
Years later, he would complain bitterly to Benjamin Rush of a general suspicion “that the Presbyterian Church was ambitious and aimed at an establishment as a national church. I was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical project. The secret whisper ran through all the sects, ‘Let us have Jefferson, Madison, Burr, anybody, whether they be philosophers, Deists, or even atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.’ Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion.” And in doing so, Ogden revealed a crucial lesson about democracy: paranoia, once unleashed, is impossible to control, and remarkably easy to turn back upon its source.
In his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter posited that American democracy was uniquely prone to conspiracy theories. But what Hofstadter got wrong more than anything was his belief that such conspiracy theories are a fringe part of American democracy. He believed, ultimately, that a “responsible elite with political and moral autonomy” could curtail these excesses of belief, quarantining them at the fringes of culture. But Dwight, Morse and their colleagues were never fringe actors, nor was the Philadelphia Aurora a minor publication.
Over two centuries later, conspiracy theories once again come not from the fringes but from media juggernauts like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting—and from the president of the United States and his allies. American citizens need facts and for media and social media companies to act responsibly, to be sure. But we might also need to accept that democracy makes us all a touch paranoid and to be on guard for how it affects not just our fellow citizens but ourselves, too.
It was easy to paint the tight-knit structure of New England politics as a mostly secret enterprise controlled by a few wealthy, well-connected individuals. Ogden’s conspiratorial accusations were carried not just by the Aurora but spread in sympathetic newspapers from New York to Baltimore. Even some who did not repeat his specific Illuminati insinuations adopted his overall contempt of New England’s political class—the Richmond, Virginia, Examiner called Connecticut “Priest Ridden” and “muzzled by its prejudices.” At Republican gatherings throughout the country, members toasted not just Jefferson but Aurora editor Duane (for “his endeavors to unveil the secret plots of a crafty aristocracy”) and to the “Clerical Illuminati of New-England”: “May their ambitious views in forming a union between church and state, never be realized.”
While Dwight had first seized on the Illuminati as a threat to religion, Ogden and the Aurora had recast it as the unholy union of a secret state religion and the levers of government.
Ogden had helped manufacture a paranoia around organized religion in the early republic that helped doom Adams’ reelection. In the early days of the republic, each state determined its own election day, so voting for the 1800 presidential election lasted from April until October. By the time voting was over, Jefferson had won, though Ogden was not alive to see it—he died in late September. But his work had been done.
Did Ogden’s conspiratorial whisper campaign tip the scales? A bitter, close-fought election, there were too many factors at play to say how crucial the Aurora’s part was in all of this. But the Aurora’s Illuminati attacks were successful in part because they worked in tandem with mainstream assaults against Adams’ ham-handed attempt to wed government with religion. After he called for a national day of fasting and prayer in 1799, opponents accused him of trying to instill Presbyterianism as a single, dominant religion, stoking fears of a government-mandated faith.
Years later, he would complain bitterly to Benjamin Rush of a general suspicion “that the Presbyterian Church was ambitious and aimed at an establishment as a national church. I was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical project. The secret whisper ran through all the sects, ‘Let us have Jefferson, Madison, Burr, anybody, whether they be philosophers, Deists, or even atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.’ Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion.” And in doing so, Ogden revealed a crucial lesson about democracy: paranoia, once unleashed, is impossible to control, and remarkably easy to turn back upon its source.
In his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter posited that American democracy was uniquely prone to conspiracy theories. But what Hofstadter got wrong more than anything was his belief that such conspiracy theories are a fringe part of American democracy. He believed, ultimately, that a “responsible elite with political and moral autonomy” could curtail these excesses of belief, quarantining them at the fringes of culture. But Dwight, Morse and their colleagues were never fringe actors, nor was the Philadelphia Aurora a minor publication.
Over two centuries later, conspiracy theories once again come not from the fringes but from media juggernauts like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting—and from the president of the United States and his allies. American citizens need facts and for media and social media companies to act responsibly, to be sure. But we might also need to accept that democracy makes us all a touch paranoid and to be on guard for how it affects not just our fellow citizens but ourselves, too.
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