Conspiracy theorists are already busy on the job weaving imaginary connections and, not twenty-four hours in, had begun forcing the facts into standard pre-existing narratives for mass-shootings. The most popular so far seem to be that the shooter was brainwashed, that there were actually multiple shooters, and that the whole event was planned as a pretext for a government gun-grab.

Again.

We have been flooded with a constant barrage of information about this tragedy since it began to unfold, and not all of that information has been true. Some has been spectacularly far from the mark. In order to formulate a thoughtful response to the horrors inflicted upon us by the shooter, no matter his intention or disposition, we need to be able to understand how information comes to us and understand that we can anticipate that it will change.

This will perhaps be a basic primer for many readers of the CSI website, and I may be restating something that skeptics do instinctively, but it’s worth repeating. New media, especially YouTube, has changed the public’s relationship to news and information in a way that has made conspiracy theories not only more prevalent but also a much more participatory pursuit. For this reason, it is vital that any student of conspiracy theory attain some degree of media literacy. A good place to start is with the information cycle.

The “information cycle” is a concept that comes out of media studies and posits that newsworthy information passes through a fairly consistent sequence of media outlets as it makes its way into the history books. Knowing the stage in the information cycle at which a particular source was produced can help researchers determine what a source is best used as evidence of. For example, let’s consider the story of the Challenger disaster. When television viewers watching the launch live saw the shuttle explode, the story began its course through the information cycle. The first news reports that people encountered were in broadcast media, both on television and radio as events unfolded live. The limited amount of information that was known was reported as it was received. That information was soon augmented by eyewitness accounts and backed by the speculation and commentary of experts and pundits.

The first complete accounts the events (cause still unknown) were the stories in the newspaper the next day. Over the next weeks and months, as the story developed and the investigation into the disaster focused on the mechanical and management failures that contributed to the disaster, the story passed into weekly magazines, where the topics were explored in more depth and at some length. Finally we saw the Challenger disaster work its way into journals and books, where the event was likely to be placed within an informed and more fully fleshed-out historical context.

The information cycle, which one thinks of as “the way in which newsworthy events are experienced and understood over time,” is changing, and a lot of this is due to the possibilities of new media. A defining aspect of new media is how it has changed audience members’ relationship to information from that of passive consumers to that of active participants in the creation of content. This has come about through the widespread availability of cheap video cameras and inexpensive video editing software. The type of media that used to take a large production studio, pressroom, and distribution network to disseminate now takes minutes for a single person with an Internet connection to get out there.

Despite the conspiracy theorists’ claims that media gatekeepers are constantly withholding vital information from the public, modern media makes it easier for inaccurate initial information to spread and endure. Take, for instance, what happened when an unnamed law enforcement source leaked a name that was reportedly that of the Sandy Hook shooter, “Ryan Lanza.” This was a misidentification, but the announcement set off a cascade of events that led to the wrong image being used to identify the shooter on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and innumerable other outlets within minutes. According to Jeff Jarvis, an experienced journalist and professor who prematurely shared his observations about a twitter account that later turned out to not be the Sandy Hook shooter’s:

One of the key skills of the journalist today is not to say what we know, but to say what we don’t know. That’s been the case since 24-hour cable news came along, where everybody becomes a witness to a story as it unfolds and those of us who were reporters back in the day of pay telephones and notebooks know that oftentimes by the time our deadline came around, we learned a lot more and we were saved from many ‘instant errors’ because of the time and the structure of the press. Well, that’s gone now, both because of 24-hour cable news and now because of the Internet, and further gone because anyone can do this. So it’s not just about training journalists when that photo gets retweeted, retweeted and retweeted, it’s the same difference—it doesn’t matter if a journalist did it.

Furthermore, news, no matter its quality or accuracy, has a longer lifespan on the Internet than it did two decades ago. Footage of erroneous reporting can be captured and distributed widely, and those images retain their immediacy as they get mixed and remixed into no-budget YouTube conspiracy videos alongside better information, often making it difficult to discern what is good information and what is bad information. What comes to mind immediately is the eyewitness testimony of people who had been near the Twin Towers when they collapsed. The sound bites and interviews of stunned people covered in gray dust have been archived and live on in cyberspace. This is not a bad thing in itself, of course, but without an awareness of where those clips entered the information cycle (and the subsequent possibility that that information will turn out to be if not completely inaccurate, at least incomplete) someone viewing those clips now might be led to some rather improbable conclusions.

Forgetting that reporters, as a rule, try not to report what is known to be inaccurate information, conspiracy theorists will point to the early, more tentative reporting as evidence that something is being swept under the rug. In reality, a week into the Sandy Hook story, parallel narratives had developed in the mainstream media and in the alternative (and proud of it) media. In the mainstream media, the story is that of an investigation into the motivation of Adam Lanza, the individual who was found dead at the scene with a gun taken from the house of a relative who had been shot the same day, and the individual who reportedly was too impatient to wait for a background check when he tried to legally secure his own weapon a few weeks ago. Some would call this converging evidence leading to an increasingly certain conclusion that Adam Lanza was in fact the one who pulled the trigger.

In the alternative media, the possibilities and uncertainties are blossoming unabated, leading to increasingly baroque explanations and imaginary linkages. Conspiracy theorists have predictably seized on the earliest, most confused and jumbled reporting that came out on the morning of the shooting. Veterans Today contributor Kevin Barrett wrote on Dec 17:

Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.

[...] So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to “catapult the counter-narrative” as quickly as possible.

This is especially horrifying for those of us who value conclusions drawn from evidence over conclusion-driven cherry picking. Barrett follows up with a widely-circulated list of “inconsistencies” that in part draws on confused reporting from the first day’s events, which, though discarded from the media’s narrative of events as more evidence has accumulated, endures as the “official story” in the minds of conspiracy theorists. These include early reports that the shooter was wearing body armor (he wasn’t), that the mother of the shooter was connected to the school (she wasn’t), and the misidentification of the shooter as Ryan Lanza (the shooter was his brother, Adam).

Confusion and contradicting reports are exactly what we should expect in the earliest hours of a news story. We should expect the false reports to travel far in the media and online. We should expect news reporters who are interested in the truth to adjust their stories to conform to the evidence as new evidence becomes available. What conspiracy theorists identify as “cover-up” is actually good journalism, and it is helping audiences understand this is something that the media should emphasize. Jeff Jarvis makes the point nicely:

I think that we have a larger job and a bigger challenge which is to make sure that everyone knows that you can’t trust what you learn immediately, and that if you do choose to spread it, that you have a responsibility to say how you know what you know.

Tavis Minnear, a writer for the Ashland Times-Gazette, reported that in November 2008, a year that saw the Supreme Court uphold handgun rights in Washington, D.C., and only a week after Obama’s election, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told members: “...that an ‘elite ruling class’ of anti-gun politicians has ‘declared war on our individual rights’ by trying to restrict Americans' ability to keep and bear arms.

“Seventy-five years ago in his first inauguration as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' he said. Today, I would argue almost the exact reverse is true. The greatest thing we have to fear in many ways is not enough Americans are afraid, because not enough realize what grave dangers are out there to our freedoms.” (http://bit.ly/KVWVvM)

This rhetoric, whether cynically uttered or not, is a major component of a widely held belief of the paranoid right that the federal government is going to disarm the populace and then sweep in an impose tyranny, or martial law, put the “true patriots” into FEMA-run concentration camps, or whatever. Crucial to this fantasy of oppression is that there will be a high profile false-flag attack on the American people, which will of course serve as a pretense for taking away all of the guns. The past month has sadly seen a number of high-profile mass shootings that quickly became fodder for conspiracy theorists.

Predictably, as soon as word of the theater shooting in Aurora, CO broke on July 20, and as the human toll became clear (twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded), the conspiracy-theory-o-sphere was abuzz with speculation about what REALLY happened in that darkened movie theater. In the first few days after the shooting, the number of people who were “actually” responsible for the shooting swelled beyond reason; the FBI, CIA, the Illuminati, MK-Ultra, and the President all were named as being behind the shooting. It seemed that everyone except the person who pulled the trigger was responsible for the massacre. To many, the destruction of the Second Amendment seemed imminent.

To conspiracists, it was clear that the shooter was a patsy and that by definition this had been a false-flag event. As often happens, conspiracy theorists misjudged the relative usefulness of the first burst of eyewitness accounts, which suggested that there might have been an accomplice inside the theater to open the emergency exit for the shooter. In the fullness of time, the investigation found that the shooter acted alone. Of course, revelations that the suspect, James Holmes, had been a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado instantly led to the contention that he was some sort of mind-controlled hit man. Conspiracy theorists also latched onto word that the alleged gunman’s father had once worked for a company that had DARPA contracts. To them, the mind-control hypothesis seemed the natural conclusion from Holmes’s apparently disoriented and bizarre countenance at his first court appearance.

On August 5, word broke of another mass shooting, this time at the Sikh Temple outside of Milwaukee. Six people were killed and four were injured. The only suspect, Wade Michael Page, killed himself at the scene. Page had been a figure in the white supremacist “hate core” music scene and had been tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The conspiracy theories that surfaced following the Sikh shooting were of two types. The first was conventional and fit well within a rather worn conspiracy narrative. The other, not so much.

The first, an example of which I take from the execrable white supremacist site Stormfront.org, claims that a white veteran was set up/drugged and disposed of, or in the words of commenter Thor9019: “So this was likely a set up from the start and now they can go and blame it on 'white supremacists' like they always do.”¹

This is actually a long-standing self-pitying and persecutory narrative that goes back at least as far as the Oklahoma City bombing, which was of course carried out by former military, unapologetic white supremacists. And it closely parallels the plot of a peculiar and frustrating bit of what Tom Lolis (interviewed in my last article) has termed “militia fiction,” Matthew Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic (2003). I say frustrating because it represents a world where the paranoid are correct about the government’s conniving to take their guns away and impose tyranny. In the opening scene of the novel, a sniper opens fire into an arena at a sporting event, spurring a widely televised panic that results in hundreds of deaths. Killed at the scene is a disturbed but upstanding veteran who it is clear has been drugged and is being painted as a white supremacist.² This is the role that Page has been painted into by conspiracists.

A second line of conspiracy theories that has sprouted out of the Sikh killings was decidedly less expected. It began, I believe, when UFOlogist and Disclosure Project founder Steven Greer tweeted: “Sirius filmmaker Arm Kaleka's father shot at Sikh Temple. He is on scene now. Please pray for his family. Dr. Greer.”

Sirius is the title of a documentary project that Greer and filmmaker Amardeep Kaleka are working on and have been attempting to raise funds for. Kaleka’s father was the Temple President and was killed. Last year, Greer was a keynote speaker at the TruthCon in Atlanta, which I wrote about in my first CSI article. Greer was drumming up funds for his Orion Project, a scheme that would extract free energy from the expansion of the universe and deliver it to the people of the world, ending war and hunger for the bargain basement price of $5.7 million. The $5.7 million is earmarked for a secure facility where Greer can protect the scientists he’s recruited and their families from the Secret Government. It appears that the movie Sirius is intended to cover the Orion Project.

Within nanoseconds of Greer’s tweet, and even though I have seen neither Kaleka nor Greer claim that this was an attempt to silence them, UFO conspiracy theorists were raising the alarm. The blossoming of potential suspects in response to a single YouTube video about the shooting includes: JFK’s killers, Nazis, illegal black ops, private companies who put microchips in hit men’s heads, the CIA, Big Oil, bankers, and the Wall Street elite.³ Elements of the other line of conspiracy also appear in the comments, for instance, that the media are now actively pushing hate crimes laws (thought to unjustly punish whites), and that the media is being spun and distracted by the white supremacist angle. Unlike history, which jostles out untruths and favors facts to ultimately settle on a version of events that historians agree upon, conspiracy theory is ever more open and resists closure and consensus, ensuring that those who practice it will never be satisfied.

Notes

1. Another poster, the ironically named “Ballistic,” remarked:

“You know it's curious - every single one, without exception, of the racially-aware/White Nationalist-minded people I personally know are the most unremarkable, and least "extreme" people one could meet!! They are in no way distinguishable from any other White American - and in many cases, their own friends and family are probably totally unaware of their political/ideological outlook.”

Touché. From: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t905331/. ↩

2. While Bracken makes clear that the gun-owner veterans who are at being framed for hate crimes by the government are in no way racist, one of his main (and presumably meant to be sympathetic) characters says: “If they really wanted to stop terrorism, they’d go after the real threat, and they still won’t even say there’s a problem with Muslims. And now they’re trying to frame up white ‘militias’ as the next big terrorist threat.” Touché. ↩

3. One commenter disagrees: “it's the judeo masonic mafia.....it's not nazis. get real.” Touché. ↩

One of the most disturbing and popular books in white supremacist subculture is The Turner Diaries. Its author, William Pierce, who penned the thing under the name Andrew MacDonald, was a physics PhD who taught at the Oregon State University in the 1960s; Pierce became a leading American Nazi Party member (and editor of their journal) and eventually founded the National Alliance, which was for a while the most well-funded white nationalist group in the U.S. The Turner Diaries was published serially before it was released as novel in 1978. Pierce also authored Hunter, a book about a serial killer who stalks and executes mixed-race couples.

In the years since Barack Obama’s election, the number of anti-government militia groups (as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center) has exploded from 150 to over 1250. 2012 was also the first year that most of the babies born in the United States were not white. These demographic and social changes, augmented by an entrenched and politically active nativist movement that targets illegal immigrants, should encourage our awareness of the ideological fountain from which the racist subset of these militias draw, including The Turner Diaries.

To discuss The Turner Diaries, I sat down at a Mexican restaurant for a taco with Tom Lolis, my colleague and fellow Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech. Tom is a Renaissance scholar who has taught writing classes about the occult, but also takes a professional interest in conspiracy and conspiracy theories. As we sat down and ordered tacos, I pulled out my copy of The Turner Diaries and placed it on the table face down.

“You brought a copy?” Tom asked.

“When I first heard about it I downloaded pages as a PDF and printed them up on the department printer,” I said. “I ran down to the copy room to make sure that nobody intercepted it, because if someone did, it would be the end of me.”

“Yeah, it’s not the type of book that you read on the bus. If the other people on the bus knew what you were reading ...” he trailed off.

“… they’d rightly kick my ass,” I finished.

“Yeah, especially if they don’t assume that you are a college professor interested in this because it is a book of dangerous and terrible ideas.”

I showed him the promotional blurb by Timothy McVeigh on the back cover. “How did you get your copy?” I asked.

“I made the horrible mistake of ordering it online, which has probably put me on who knows how many watch lists? And it also started getting me inundated with pamphlets and catalogues from companies that I wish I didn’t know existed. I don’t recommend anyone does that.”

Tom gave a brief outline of the book’s premise. A resistance group known as “the Order” “is going to protect America from itself. The group has the aims of creating a white society, and in particular targets African-Americans and Jews. The novel suggests that Jews run the world, that Jews pull the strings, and that African-Americans are their unwitting flunkies, the unfortunate dupes who supposedly don’t know better (and of course a word like ‘African-American’ is nowhere to be found in the book).”

To Pierce, protecting America from itself means inciting a revolution, Tom said. “What seems to kick start this incendiary movement [in the novel] is an act called the ‘Cohen Act,’ which is a proposed bill to take our guns away, so it grafts that fear onto this race-hatred, and this becomes the realization for this group that they have to strike now, because once the guns are taken away, once the guns have been physically seized from your home, the Jews win.” ¹

The act that sets the revolution in motion is a truck bomb that destroys the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. “You always see in the lore of the militias that there is always going to be one act that triggers the revolution,” I said.. “All they have to do is strike against the Feds, for instance, and that’s going to spark the revolution. Even that Breivik guy, kinda thought that he was going to foment revolution. The Hutaree narrative: kill a cop, start a revolution. In The Turner Diaries, the act that is going to set things off is an attack on the FBI headquarters. This has some real world implications.”

Tom agreed. “What’s weird is what Breivik has been spouting off in Norway sounds very Turner Diary-esque, this claim that he is a part of this secret cell. [In the Turner Diaries] we have this network of terrorist cells that work together but don’t always know what the other is doing. And it’s also this quasi-theological order; there’s a lot of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism mixed in with this notion of a master race.” The major difference seems to be that Breivik substitutes the Muslims for the Jews in his conspiratorial hierarchy.

Tom suggested that the structure of the book, framing the story in the form of a revolutionary’s journals, gives the story a sense of authenticity. “It allows the reader to imagine a world where the Revolution has already happened. [...] The book sets the time of the action in the 1990s and we’re reading the journals [of martyr Earl Turner] a hundred years beyond that, when the world has completely changed (for the worse),” Tom said. “Asia has been made a desert via a nuclear strike, Africa has been ethnically cleansed—all of it. Puerto Rico has been colonized by whites, and there’s a whole list of other atrocities. In the final scene, our ‘hero,’ Mr. Turner, goes on a suicide run [in a small airplane] to nuke the Pentagon. New York is also hit with nuclear weapons because it’s seen as a sort of a Jewish capital.”

“It’s a sort a blueprint for the revolution that they are hoping will come,” I said, referring to a scene which describes in detail exactly how to prepare and bury weapons in the woods to keep them from being seized by authorities.

Tom nodded. “It’s very much, I think, a how-to manual, or at least it’s intended to be. What its efficacy could be, let’s hope we never find out, but it seems that the design is I’m going to tell an entertaining story (entertaining in huge quotes) because people are going to pass on the instructional manual. If you don’t have the wherewithal to sit through hundreds of pages of pure polemic, we’ll couch it in story.”

Tom paused. “I think one of the things that is so disturbing about the book is that the prose is actually not terrible, in the sense that had he been a gentler man, or a reasonable man, Pierce may have been able to have crafted a career as a bestselling novelist. It has that sort of page turner quality. The sentences are clean. It was one of the slowest books I ever read, though, because of the content and how hard it was to take, but I think if you looked at it purely as a prose stylist, you know, he can write. It’s not going to be high art, but there’s a story. It’s a terrible story. And I think that might account for this book’s success, that it has a sort of ‘thriller’ feel. I think that’s what makes it stand out from a lot of similarly themed fiction. And any other book I can think of that has achieved visibility, any vision of the world comparable to this, say, in science fiction, this is going to be presented as uniformly dystopian.”

“That’s the scary thing,” I chimed in. “Hitler was quite a utopian. A lot of these sorts of movements have this utopian vision and there’s no other way, you either go all the way toward the utopian world or the world is corrupt, and there’s nothing in between.”

Our tacos arrived. When we finished lunch, I mentioned that The Turner Diaries is part of a larger body of work, a collection of similarly themed novels. “I don’t think that most people would realize that there is an entire subgenre of what you have termed ‘militia fiction.’ What are some of the other books in that genre?”

“As far as books that have achieved heavy circulation,” Tom said, “you can take Unintended Consequences, which Tim McVeigh read in jail. It’s a long novel, 1,000-plus pages. It’s another one that [has] a bestseller prose style. That one is more about resistance against the ATF as opposed to killing ethnic groups. I think that’s become dominant in subsequent novels, taking the subversive tendencies of The Turner Diaries and turning them more toward political agencies than toward ethnic groups. Now in some of those works, we might find the underlying theme of ethnic groups controlling these agencies but the ATF will be front and center, or the FBI.

“I think that [The Turner Diaries] is the most prominent because it has been associated with specific crimes. Obviously you’ve got McVeigh. [A copy of the book was found in McVeigh’s car when he was arrested.] There was the case of the dragging of the African American man—I believe his name was James Byrd—in Texas. One of the assailants said that they were ‘starting The Turner Diaries early,’ so there’s clear association there. I’m not suggesting that reading a book drives you to commit violence, but those who are inclined toward that type of crime seem to gravitate toward it. [...] I don’t think that it works well as a conversion tool. I can’t see anyone picking it up and saying, ‘It changed my ideas.’

“You know, the Order, which was responsible for killing [Colorado radio host] Alan Berg [in 1984], the talk show host—the name of that group comes from The Turner Diaries. Berg was taken out because he was supposed to be a Jewish mouthpiece. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence either.”

“We end with nuclear strikes,” Tom concluded. “When this is written [in the late 1970s], nuclear terror is at the top of the list, in terms of our cultural anxiety, so it makes sense that we end with a nuclear attack. And it’s this utopian vision, this idea that all other races are wiped off the globe. Those few who remain we recolonize all over again to create a new workforce. This is seen as a sort of ultimate moral good, within the frame of the disturbed mind of the narrator and author.”

Notes

1. It should be noted that this is a type of argument from fear that we see in recent statements by the National Rifle Association, which floats conspiracy theories about people scheming to take their guns away. Tavis Minnear, a writer for the Ashland Times-Gazette, reported that in November 2008, a year that saw the Supreme Court uphold handgun rights in Washington, D.C., and only a week after Obama’s election, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told members:

...that an ‘elite ruling class’ of anti-gun politicians has ‘declared war on our individual rights’ by trying to restrict Americans' ability to keep and bear arms.

Seventy-five years ago in his first inauguration as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' he said. Today, I would argue almost the exact reverse is true. The greatest thing we have to fear in many ways is not enough Americans are afraid, because not enough realize what grave dangers are out there to our freedoms. (http://bit.ly/KVWVvM)

To fans of The Turner Diaries, those unnamed “elites” are Jews, but the structure of the narrative offered the NRA is the same. A powerful group is working below the radar to take away Americans’ guns. Not everyone knows the truth, but you do. You must resist this to preserve your way of life. In every way, this is a classic conspiracy theory operating as mainstream political rhetoric. You may remember that in the days after Obama’s election, ammunition sales spiked, and LaPierre is again warning constituents about “Obama’s secret plan to destroy the 2nd Amendment by 2016” (http://bit.ly/ue0GA0). ↩

I checked the lock, just in case, and went back to my paper, but the mumbling outside continued. Finally, I was creeped out enough by the feeling that people were watching me that I went upstairs to work on the computer up there. When I sat in front of that monitor, something strange happened. The mumbling that I had heard outside now came from downstairs, again, as if the mumbler were following me but remained just outside my field of vision. I freaked out, woke up my entire family, and stalked through the house with a tennis racket, fully intending to brain whoever had come into the house. That was when I was put to bed.

What I think happened that night is that one of the symptoms of my sleep deprivation was an audio hallucination of indistinct murmuring. But because what I was feeling—that people were talking—did not line up with what I was seeing, my brain interpreted the murmurers as being just outside of my range of visual perception: outside when I was downstairs, and downstairs when I was on the second floor.

I’ve often wondered if the conspiracy theorist doesn’t have a similar experience of the world. The source of the dread, foreboding, or control that conspiracy theorists sense is often outside the range of the normal experience of everyday life, which in no way diminishes the sense of a real threat. Therefore, they locate the locus of power just beyond the normal citizen’s perceptual range: the Oval Office, the board room, the annual Bilderberg meeting, the lunchroom at the CIA (surely they have one).

Often it seems to me that the more outrageous the claim, the harder it becomes to disprove. Let’s say that during the Cold War an alien spacecraft managed to crash in New Mexico. In that case, it is not inconceivable that the government would want to assess the national security implications of the crash, including its origins and technology. They might very well decide to house the wreckage at a secure military base. (Whether or not they would be able to keep it a secret—and for how long—is another story.) Regardless, a relatively inaccessible hangar on a military base is in any case a tempting target of speculation when left unchecked by disconfirming evidence.

A less plausible conspiracy theory, in my mind, is that the aliens and humans have not only encountered each other by means of a crash, but have established diplomatic relations and have even engaged in armed conflict. An elaborate X-Files-like plot has been built up on this premise. As the story goes, the great Alien/Human war broke out underground in an installation underneath Dulce, NM, in 1979. In the version I’m familiar with, the aliens—in this case the “grays”—had entered into an agreement with the American government, which provided the aliens with the biological material that they needed for research in exchange for alien technology. The grays reneged on their deal, however, and a battle broke out on the underground military base between human security forces and the aliens. More than sixty brave Earthican patriots died protecting us from the extraterrestrial menace. The underworld has long been a popular place for locating the source of elusive, otherworldly evils. In a way, I think it makes a certain sense that someone whose innate “threat detection equipment” detected malevolent agency everywhere would locate that evil underground, which is in a sense also everywhere, only inaccessible.

The apotheosis of extraordinary conspiratorial claims is David Icke’s claims about the reptilian, shape-shifting, inter-dimensional space-alien bloodlines who control our minds from the moon, which is not only hollow but also a spaceship. Each elaboration on the story addss another layer designed to make it even more un-falsifiable (not unlike the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage). Again, it seems to make a weird sort of sense that one would need to be a deity to see through veil upon veil of lies posited by Icke—a role that Icke gladly accepted [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiyrHZCksDM].

At this point, I expect that the essayistic form demands that I summarize everything that I’ve said, but it’s hard to do. Conspiracy theories are as variable as the people who endorse them. I’ve never met two conspiracy theorists who believed precisely the same thing, even if they agreed on the broader themes of conspiracy. The problem for the conspiracy theorist, even if he doesn’t recognize this fact, is that by locating the sources of conspiracy in inaccessible places he has made his own story harder to prove and no easier for the skeptic to believe.

Oh, and for the record, I have not heard voices since that night in graduate school. None worth listening to, at least.

If you are at all familiar with modern American conspiracy theories, you will know something about the Denver International Airport (DIA). The main terminal, designed by Fentress Bradburn Architects and completed in 1995, is striking, cutting a serrated line in the sky, a visual echo of the surrounding mountains on the horizon.

Somehow, the conspiratorial world has convinced itself that, to use Richard Dreyfus’s phrase as he sculpts his mashed potatoes into a replica of the Devil’s Tower, the Denver International Airport “means something.” What exactly it means is unclear, but conspiracy theorists know its meaning is sinister. Numerous hypotheses about the facility’s real purpose have been proposed, most of them rooted in the assertion that the truth is to be found underground in the bowels of the airport. This element of the conspiracy seems to stem from a misinterpretation of events surrounding DIA’s construction. First is the extensive excavation, construction, and inexplicable (to conspiracy theorists) reburial of tunnels on the site, which now house the airport’s rail system. Second, cost overruns on the order of $2 billion raised eyebrows and left conspiracy theorists wondering where all that extra money was going.

The explanations that conspiracy theorists have offered range from the absurd to the even more absurd: DIA is the home of the global shadow government of Illuminati/Masons/New World Order; DIA is the site of a future FEMA concentration camp; it sits atop an underground city that is in turn connected to a network of other underground cities populated by aliens. One idea that seems be on the ascendance is an assertion made by governor-wrestler Jesse Ventura that DIA will be a refuge for global elites during a world-wide catastrophe, not unlike the “arks” seen in the almost unwatchable movie 2012.

According to conspiracy theorists, the key to discerning the conspiracy and understanding the real purpose of the airport is the artwork found throughout the building.¹ Two of the richest sources of clues are a pair of murals by Leo Tanguma, “The Children of World Dream of Peace” and “In Peace and Harmony with Nature,” both of which are found near the baggage claim area. These two pieces are diptychs, each consisting of a small panel and a much longer panel. While each smaller panel portrays a truly dystopian world of destruction and decay, the much larger panels display celebratory and vibrant symbolism suggestive of a utopian vision of the future.

On a recent long layover at DIA, I made a point of studying the Tanguma murals. I first came upon “The Children of the World Dream of Peace” and found it utterly enormous.

Details from “The Children of the World Dream of Peace”. Photos by Susan Gerbic

I stood back to see how people reacted to the mural. Most did not look up, but about one in 200 travelers would pause, shake his head, and move on. I approached one, a slim African American man who looked like he was in his late twenties. He agreed to an interview on the condition that I did not record his voice or give his real name. I will call him Jim.

“This is like a concentration camp,” he said, pointing to the smaller of the two panels in the diptych. And it’s true: the smaller panel looks a little like a poster for a Holocaust movie. A ghastly military figure in a gas mask dominates the scene, striking down a dove of peace with a vicious-looking scimitar. Behind him, a line of dispossessed people shuffles off endlessly into the distance. Jim pointed to the children lying on the ground near the feet of the faceless soldier. “I mean, who puts dead children in a painting? That’s sick.”

“I don’t think that they are dead, actually,” I said. “I think they are asleep.” I pointed out a little note painted into one corner of the mural, near the sleeping children. The note reads:

I was once a little child who longed for other worlds. But I am no more a child for I have known fear. I have learned to hate.... How tragic, then, is youth which lives with enemies, with gallows ropes. Yet, I still believe I only sleep today, that I’ll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play.

The quote is attributed to a fourteen-year old who died in December of 1943 at Auschwitz. “Look,” I began. “You see these sleeping kids? They are literally dreaming of a peaceful world.” All of the important themes of the piece, the contrast of war and peace and the dream motif, are introduced in the quote, serving as a key for interpreting the mural. “It’s all about yearning for peace,” I said.

Jim was doubtful. We drifted over to the other panel, and he pointed to all the children and noted that many carry weapons. “That makes them soldiers, right?”

“But they are taking the swords and beating them into ploughshares. That’s a biblical reference. It’s not subtle!” I laughed.

Jim shook his head. “That’s what they want you to think.” He pointed to the smiling, happy children. “See that? That’s the antichrist. The antichrist is going to promise us a world of peace, but he is going to give us that,” he said, gesturing toward the gray panel.

“How do you know this?” I asked, and he gave me some quotes from Revelation. But he finished with a curious statement: “Also, nobody who works here, if you ask them, will talk about the conspiracy.”

Finally, something that we can put to the test, I thought. “Do you want to go ask someone?”

He stepped back and crossed his arms, as if it had never occurred to him that someone might actually go ask. In a moment he shook his head. “No. No.” His unease was clear, and I told him I wouldn’t delay him any longer. I went to talk to the people at the information booth.

When I reached the booth, I asked the woman behind the desk if she could tell me about the conspiracy theories, and I’ll be damned if she wouldn’t talk to me about it! Was Jim right?

Not exactly. They gave me the contact information for the media office. It was clear by the way she rolled her eyes when I mentioned the conspiracy theories that I was not the first person to ask about them.

I headed over to see the other mural, “In Peace and Harmony with Nature.”

Details from “In Peace and Harmony with Nature”. Photos by Susan Gerbic

There I met traveller Matt Brown, a new resident of Denver who was encountering the murals of DIA for the first time. I asked him why he was interested in the murals.

“I was just interested because my dad just sent me an e-mail about some of these different murals, and I said that I didn’t even notice. So on my way back I’m going check [them] out and see what the deal is.”

“So, what’s your first impression?” I asked.

“I don’t see anything wrong with this one. I mean, peace and harmony with nature. There [are a] whole bunch of different nationalities and creatures. I don’t know what that is in the middle,” he said, pointing to a psychedelic-looking plant that dominates the middle of the mural. ”But it looks like that they are all having a good time.

“This [panel] over here,” he went on, “[is] a little different. There are flames up here, there’s a dead cheetah, and then a bunch of dead people. And so I don’t really know what to make this one is trying to say, to tell you the truth, but it’s pretty harsh!” he said, laughing.

“Is there some sort of Egyptian god of death somewhere also?” Matt asked me.

“Anubis?”

“That’s what I was told.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been told all sorts of things.” It turns out that the figure of Anubis was actually not part of the art collection at DIA. The figure was only a temporary exterior marketing display promoting “The Treasures of the Pharaohs” exhibit, which was at the Denver Art Museum from July 2010 to January 2011. It was not evidence that ancient mystery cults associated with the Masons were unabashedly announcing their resurgence.

Matt asked about the other mural’s location, and I showed him where it was at the other end of the terminal. When we reached it, I introduced myself to a young couple, Lauren and Tom. I asked Lauren what she thought.

“I’ve heard about these [murals],” she said, “but ... they have never caught my eye ’cause I was always on a mission to get to a plane. But today because we were here and just casually doing a pick-up without any time constraint, [so] I wanted to take notice. They’re very strange; they are kind of confusing. They’re...odd. Mass destruction and children and weapons...It makes no sense to me.”

“This statue guy over here,” Tom jumped in, “I mean, over here he’s in charge, and over here he’s dead.”

“I’ve seen little excerpts online about this thing,” Lauren said, “and it’s very strange and I’ve just never really been able to understand it. So this is really the first time I’ve looked at it in any kind of detail.”

“What do you think of the conspiracy theories that surround these?” I asked Lauren.

“I’ve heard a lot of different conspiracies, you know, preparing for mass destruction, that kind of thing, going underground. I’ve heard about those, especially about this airport.”

“So, what do you think about those?”

She paused. “Sure, why not? We’ve got NORAD not far from here. It makes sense that...”

Tom chimed in. “We’re at a high elevation here. So there is more room to dig, if you want. What better place to come to hide someone?”

“Wouldn’t NORAD’s presence make the area a potential target or at least a little more dangerous?” I asked.

“If you go down far enough, it doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Plus this is an airport, so if you have to fly Air Force One here for protection....”

“Well,” Lauren cut in, “I’m sure that there are plenty of locations which have underground cities and things in them.”

“Do you think of it as being a refuge for the President?” I asked.

Tom: “It could be. I mean, why not?”

Lauren: “I know they shut NORAD down a few years ago from having visitors, so....There’s probably places all over the world that have underground cities.

Tom: “If you can afford it, you can come up here and live. If you can’t, you’re screwed.”

I asked them why the conspirators had put so many hints around the airport if they wanted the secret city to remain secret.

“You just stand around here and look, and people don’t even stop and notice this,” Tom replied. “It’s blatant. It’s in your face. You walk right by it.”

Lauren nodded in grim agreement. “It’s denial, I guess.”

My layover in Denver was not long enough for me to hunt down all of the art associated with the conspiracy theories, so when I returned to Atlanta I contacted Matt Chasansky, the Art Program Manager at the Denver International Airport. I interviewed Matt and Jenny Schiavone, a representative from the DIA media office, in a conference call.

In recent years, I have seen lots of large art installations in airports like San Francisco’s and Atlanta’s. Is it a trend, and if so how does DIA fit into that trend?

Matt: Well, the way we fit into that trend is that we started the trend. When they began planning for the airport in the early 1990s, they very quickly gravitated to artists in the process in a very profound way, I think. There had been public art integrated into buildings before, but the Denver Airport was the first one to do it on such a massive scale. I think we had twelve artists in the room with the design team at the very early stages of the design of the airport, and the idea was to have these projects that are equally a part of the architecture and the experience made there. And that was in the early ’90s. It was one of the last fully built out airports before 9/11, and since then there’s been [an] interesting discussion about civic spaces and what that means, and art ... has been a big part of that [discussion]. But a lot of the airports, including Denver, are city buildings, municipal buildings, so in Denver that triggers a percent for art work. On the one hand, like I said, there is a push towards art in civic spaces, and on the other hand it’s a mandatory thing to put art in airports because of how we have designed our public art program.²

How were artists or works selected for the airport?

Matt: It’s never one person selecting artwork. We form selection panels in order to have community representation and transparency and democracy in deciding how these things go. It’s really a community-wide effort and never an individual deciding what art should be, how public money should be spent on art. So, when the airport was built, a series of these community panels were assembled project by project in order to decide who are the best to work with and then once identified the airport contracted with the individual artists and began the design process.³

Are those records public?

Matt: Yeah.... All of the public records are open to scrutiny.

Jenny: I don’t know where those public records live, but since we are a government agency we are part of the [Colorado] Open Records [Act]. So it’s certainly something we could help you find.⁴

Why has Leo Tanguma’s work attracted the attention of so many conspiracy theorists?

Matt: They are striking, and Leo Tanguma is known for social and political subject matter [which he portrays] in a very up-front manner. Not the least of which [are] his choices of color and his format and the way he brings the style, the approach of the WPA murals, and the Mexican visual realists to contemporary narrative. So all that comes together. As far as not being subtle in any way, I think that’s quite intentional just because what Leo chose to do, what he proposed to be in ... his two pieces. In one mural the subject matter was overcoming war, violence, and aggression. In the other [it was] was overcoming the challenges of the environment. In both cases, he felt that you can’t pull your punches on subjects like that. You don’t talk about war with images that are anything less than powerful and emotional and striking. In order for him to complete his narrative, what he gave us was a mural, in the case of “The Children of the World Dream of Peace,” a smaller panel on one side that is that metaphor for war and is very direct because its subject matter is dealt with in a very passionate way and the solution equally so. [In] the larger panel we see the children of the world gathering ... the swords of war and destroy[ing] them in the symbolic end of violence, [which comes from] a biblical verse, beating the swords into plowshares.... On the one hand I get it; when people say that they are very unsubtle works to have in an airport, that’s very true. The reason is not because of the airport or the way they were selected. The reason is because you’re dealing with serious subject matter here. You can’t do anything short of being very serious about his approach.

What conspiracy theories have you heard about the airport?

Matt: I think it’s more “what conspiracy theories haven’t we heard about the airport?” Basically, you name it. You name a conspiracy theory and somehow we seem to be connected to it.

It’s one of the exciting parts about the story, the culture, that has built up around these; … we can fit into pretty much any story you want to tell because the assumptions and the misinterpretations have gotten wilder and wilder.... It’s a very plastic narrative that’s been created. But probably the most common is that there’s an underground city and that it is a part of a network of underground cities that the government or some sort of shadow international government or aliens are building, depending on your perspective...or Masons.... DIA just seemed to fit that story.

I met a passenger who said that if you ask an employee about the conspiracy theory, they won’t tell you anything. I asked, and she didn’t.

Matt [laughing]: I know there’s no airport policy about not talking about the conspiracy theory. I think that some people are so flabbergasted by the attention that people are paying to that that they don’t know what to say and choose not to say anything.

What are the positive and negative aspects of having conspiracy theories associated with your collection?

Matt: The positive is that everyone talks about it. It’s a culture of itself now, and there’s always more discussion, people all around the world paying attention to this art collection. And once you get past the irreconcilable conversation of “Is there or is there not going to be an end of the world in 2012 and will DIA be the capital of the new world order” ... you can actually talk about what art means and how the artist conveys the information and how artists when they create and put their whole abilities into telling a story, they hand it over to the people looking at the art. And they really do sacrifice a lot of their own personal endeavor to what people bring to these sculptures, to these pieces of artwork. So that super valuable conversation about what public art is and how we should properly spend this money and how things are selected is really good to have. And that’s the big positive.

I think the negative is [the difficulty of knowing] how to educate people because the power of a single person with a blog taking a picture of a corner of one of our murals and interpreting that—that has so much more resonance than anything official that we could do, that telling the other side of the story is a big challenge.

How have you tried to tell that story?

Jenny: ...We have tried to use social media to our benefit in that area. We have a very popular Facebook page and we do get a lot of commenters who are conspiracy theorists and people who are clearly only following us because … they want to see what the Illuminati is up to, what the aliens are up to underneath the airport, that sort of thing. It’s been fun for us to open up that dialogue between the public and the airport, where we’ll go and post a photo and a short story about a new art work, and it’s fun to see the comments roll in. You may see a few comments that are accusing us of starting another conspiracy or playing into a conspiracy theory, but then immediately following that you’ll see a conversation starting with other fans who are trying to explain what the artwork is. That really goes even beyond our art program.

Would you host a piece of artwork that addressed the conspiracy theory?

Matt: We don’t really dictate what artists should do. The artists come to our selection panels proposals based on the nature of the site.... We want things to be very site specific and serious....The approach on how to spend the public money on the art is ... a serious undertaking.

Who runs the airport operation on a daily basis? Have you been to the areas singled out by conspiracy theorists?

Jenny: We definitely have, and I would say Matt has more so than me. [W]e’re a city agency, we’re part of the city and county of Denver. And the employees who run the airport are all City and County of Denver employees. We have about 1,100 employees here who make up our operations team, our maintenance team. Matt and I, our marketing, PR, and finance divisions, those are all City employees. [There are] another 30,000+ people who work out here for the airlines, concessionaires, and other vendors who do business with the airport. But in terms of who runs the airport, it’s essentially the City and County of Denver Department of Aviation. I have been in many if not all of the places that the conspiracy theorists are fond of “calling out,” and I’ve never seen anything that was even remotely suspicious looking. There have been [people] who have asked me that [question], and I have given them that same answer. [T]hey of course think that I am brainwashed and I’m supposed to say that, but I can 100 percent honestly say that.

Matt: It’s interesting, I can’t give a tour in the airport without at least one person attaching themselves to the tour and starting to ask questions about that. [R]eally it’s fascinating that there’s nothing that you can say. There’s not [any] evidence you can provide, there are no assurances you can give that the conspiracy theory is wrong, because ... obviously it’s going to be a cover up or brainwashing or chips installed in brains.

Where do you folks plan to be in December, oh, around the 21st?

Matt: I’m going to have a stock of food in my office, but not for any particular reason.

Jenny: I think I will be on Christmas vacation, but who knows?

Notes

1. For a typical taste of DIA conspiracy theories, see the Vigilant Citizen website, which specializes in misinterpreting artwork. ↩

2. According to the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, since 1988, Denver’s Public Art Program directs that “1% of any capital improvement project over $1 million undertaken by the City be set aside for the inclusion of art in the design and construction of these projects”. ↩

3. The complete process of selecting artwork for capital improvement projects is outlined in exquisite detail in a brochure produced by the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, which can be downloaded in PDF format. For a full account of the process by which Tanguma’s murals and all the other works in the airport were selected, see pages 10–16. ↩

4. If you are in Denver and would like to examine the records relating to any of the art in the Denver International Airport, visit the Airport Public Record FAQ page. ↩

In the early days of the Republic, there was no guarantee that the American experiment would succeed, and many thought that the ballot box was especially vulnerable to undue influence. Even in the fairly egalitarian period following the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers thought that the American system of democracy was especially vulnerable to manipulation by outside interests, and Catholicism, with its hierarchical institutional structure, seemed to be a special threat. In 1816, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits,” maintaining that they are

more numerous [in the United States] than everybody knows. Shall we not have more of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of the gypsies … assumed? In the shape of printers, editors, writers, schoolmasters, &c? … If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth and in hell, it is the Company of Loyola. Our system, however, of religious liberty must afford them an asylum. But if they do not put the purity of our elections to a severe trial it will be a wonder. (Adams 219)

Jefferson agreed that the restoration of the Jesuits from one of their many suppressions was a “retrograde step from light” but insisted, “We shall have our follies without doubt. … But ours will be follies of enthusiasm, not bigotry, not of Jesuitism” (Jefferson 223).¹

By the 1830s, the warm, fuzzy afterglow of the American Revolution—which had brought many colonists together to fight with a common purpose—had faded, and nativist factionalism emerged as more Catholic immigrants came into the country. One of the most curious salvos in these early culture wars arrived in 1836, when an anti-Catholic New York periodical, the Protestant Vindicator, announced the upcoming publication of Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, purportedly written by an escapee from a Montreal convent. The supposed author, Maria Monk, related a story of deception, torture, idolatry, rape, priest worship, and murder. Awful Disclosures was perhaps America’s most widely distributed book before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was popularly republished throughout the nineteenth century. Awful Disclosures was part of a spate of similarly themed books in the period, including Rosamond (about the wife of a Cuban priest), and Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent.² Forty years later, Awful Disclosures was still being published, with the publishers’ hope that it would “inspire a wholesome and practical hatred of Popery and all that means to-day in our very midst” (iv).

In Awful Disclosures, young Maria finds herself commended into the care of the Catholics for her education due to the indifference of her widowed Protestant mother. She learns little at her convent school because the nuns are coarse and ignorant, though the nunneries manage to maintain an outwardly pious and holy appearance. Despite the neglect of the girls’ education (Maria says her studies never progressed beyond grade school), Maria decides to take vows and join the convent, believing that she will “retire from the temptations and trouble of this world into a state of holy seclusion, where, by prayer, self-mortification, and good deeds, [she will prepare] herself for heaven” (18). It’s hard to imagine how she comes to this conclusion, given the stories of abuse she hears while at Catholic school. For example, take the tale of a young squaw, La Belle Marie, who

had been seen going to confession at the house of the priest, who lived a little out of the village. La Belle Marie was afterwards missed, and her murdered body was found in the river. A knife was also found bearing the priest’s name. Great indignation was excited among the Indians, and the priest immediately absconded, and was never heard from. A note was found on his table addressed to him, telling him to fly, if he was guilty. (16)

A trope introduced early in the book that bodes poorly for every female character is “what happens in the confessional.” Of course, because the book was written in the 1830s, we don’t get descriptions of exactly what goes on there, which, of course, makes the goings-on all the more sinister because the mischief is limited only by the reader’s filthy imagination. For instance, Maria relates the testimony of a thirteen-year-old acquaintance: “She told me one day of the conduct of a priest with her at confession, at which I was astonished. It was of so criminal and shameful a nature I could hardly believe it. … She was partly persuaded by the priest to believe that he could not sin, because he was a priest, and that anything he did to her would sanctify her… ” (15). When this girl tells her mother what has happened, the mother “expressed no anger nor disapprobation; but only enjoined it upon her not to speak of it; and remarked to her, as priests were not like men, but holy, and sent to instruct and save us, whatever they did was right” (16). The corruption of the Church, Maria suggests, is known to every Catholic daughter and embraced by the faithful.

While in the convent, Maria becomes a witness to extravagant and perpetual horrors. Following her initiation ceremony, which involves a coffin and only the occasional novice’s death, she immediately becomes privy to the secrets of the Black Nunnery, including the women imprisoned in the basement and the fate of babies born in the convent (presumably conceived in the confessional): “Infants were sometimes born in the convent, but they were always baptized and immediately strangled…. ‘How happy,’ [the Superior] exclaimed, ‘are those who secure immortality to such little beings! Their souls would thank those who kill their bodies if they had it in their power’” (40). As a result, a surprisingly large number of corpses are tossed into an apparently bottomless pit in the convent’s basement.

The women are kept largely in the dark about the horrific goings-on elsewhere in the convent, but Maria learns a lot through the intervention of a nun who may or may not be crazy, Jane Ray. She is a defiant character who is largely unaffected by the discipline inflicted upon her and who seems to know a lot more than most of the other nuns. Much of the rest of the narrative is filled with stories of the bizarre abuses and punishments inflicted upon the nuns, including kissing the floor, kissing other nuns’ feet, kneeling on hard peas or walking with them in their shoes, eating meals with a rope around their necks, being fed only food that the nuns detest (like eel), drinking the water in which the Superior’s feet had been washed, brandings, whippings, mass gaggings, standing or sleeping in uncomfortable conditions for hours, and “the cap,” a leather hat that causes convulsive pain by unknown means.

Eventually, Maria learns that she is pregnant. To avoid the inevitable infanticide, she leaves this elaborate chamber of horrors by walking out quickly and fleeing to New York, where her book was presumably ultimately written. As her due date approaches, Maria fears that she may not survive the labor and feels compelled to share what she has witnessed. She openly acknowledges that the reader only has her word that any of this has happened:

If the interior of the Black Nunnery, whenever it shall be examined, is materially different from the following description, then I shall claim no confidence of my readers. If it resemble it, they will, I presume, place confidence in some of these declarations, on which I may never be corroborated by true and living witnesses.

I am sensitive that great changes may be made in the furniture of apartments; that new walls may be constructed, or old ones removed; and I have been credibly informed that masons have been employed in the nunnery since I left it. (53)

She nonetheless maintains that “ … there are some facts for which I can appeal to the knowledge of others” (130). For instance, when priests take “Holy Retreats” and disappear from the public eye for a while, they are actually recovering from venereal diseases at the Black Nunnery (131).³ This is as good as her evidence gets, unfortunately.

The publication of Monk’s memoirs was a sensation, but the account seems to have been entirely fabricated. An exchange of charges and counter-charges ensued in the press between those involved with the publication of Awful Disclosures, those familiar with Maria Monk’s personal history, representatives of the Catholic Church, and investigators who conducted inquiries into the matter. The Protestant Vindicator attempted to validate the story that Maria told by vouching for her character. It turned out, however, that the editors, especially minister J.J. Slocum, had either helped her fabricate or were otherwise intimately involved in the writing of Awful Disclosures.⁴

Six affidavits were published in the Montreal press in November 1835 that seemed to illuminate some of the background to the publication of Awful Disclosures, though in every single aspect they cast doubt on Monk’s reliability. Nonetheless, these were republished in the 1936 edition of Awful Disclosures as evidence of the veracity of Maria Monk’s testimony by virtue of “discrepancies” in the testimony. In this edition, Monk answers what she calls the three lines of attack by her critics: “1st, That I had never been in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery; 2d, That my character entitled me to no confidence; 3d that my book was copied, ‘word for word, and letter for letter,’ from an old European work, called ‘The Gates of Hell Opened’” (204). Monk’s publishers offered a $100 reward for any book resembling hers (206). Any resemblance in content, they maintained, between her account and any other exposé was due to both being factually true.⁵

In the first affidavit, justice of the peace and physician William Robertson of Montreal swore in an affidavit that three men had encountered Maria Monk by the Canal on 9 November 1834, and saw her acting in such a way that caused them to fear she was contemplating suicide. She claimed to be Robertson’s daughter, but as Mrs. Robertson turned them away when they came to his door, they took her to a watch-house, where she remained in custody. When Robertson himself went to assess the situation, “[A]s she could not give a satisfactory account of herself, I, as a Justice of the Peace, sent her to jail as a vagrant” (in Monk 213). After she was identified by her pastor and released, he heard no more about Monk for many months until he was approached to take her deposition about her experiences in the convent, but, he says, “I declined doing so, giving as reason, that, from my knowledge of her character, I considered her assertions upon oath were not entitled to more credit than her bare assertion, and that I did not believe either… ” (214). He does say that if she wants to level specific criminal charges, he would be willing to participate in the investigation. Given the seriousness of accusations, Robertson did try to ascertain where she had been during the years she claimed to be at the convent: “During the summer of 1832 she was at service in William Henry’s; the winters of 1832-3, she passed in this neighborhood, at St. Ours and St. Denis” (215).

Maria Monk’s mother, Isabella Mills, also gave sworn testimony about her daughter. In the testimony, taken down and prefaced by Robertson, she claimed that “designing men… have taken advantage of her daughter, to make scandalous accusations against the Priests and the Nuns in Montreal, and afterward to make her pass herself for a nun, who had left the Convent” (215). These men, including W.H. Hoyte of New York, with whom Maria and her child had been lodging at a local hotel, told Mills that Monk had escaped from the hotel, leaving the child behind. They claimed she had been found sick and destitute in New York and had wanted to make a confession about the Montreal Convent. Mills’s warning that they really should not trust her daughter is one for the ages:

I expected to get rid of their importunities, in relating the melancholy circumstances by which my daughter was frequently deranged in the head, and then told them, that when at the age of about seven years, she broke a slate pencil in her head; that since that time her mental faculties were deranged, and by times much more than at other times, but that she was far from being an idiot; that she could make the most ridiculous, but most plausible stories; and that as to the history that she had been in a nunnery, it was a fabrication, for she was never in a nunnery…. (217)

But Hoyte was not willing to accept that his informant was anything but absolutely trustworthy:

Next morning Mr. Hoyte returned, and was more pressing than in his former solicitations, and requested me to say that my daughter had been in the nunnery: that should I say so, it would be better than one hundred pounds to me; that I would be protected for life, and that I should leave Montreal[;] I answered, that thousands of pounds would not induce me to perjure myself; then he got saucy and abusive to the utmost; he said he came to Montreal to detect the infamy of the Priests and the Nuns; that he could not leave my daughter destitute in the wide world as I had done; afterward said, No! she is not your daughter, she is too sensible for that, and went away. (218–9)

Most of the action in Awful Disclosures happens without reference to external, historically verifiable events, with the exception of Montreal’s 1832 election riots and the arrival of cholera in the city. In every respect, her account of the convent’s behavior during the cholera epidemic fails to jibe with Montreal citizens’ accounts of the nuns’ actions. Many published accounts of the epidemic concur that the residents of the convent made their reputations as valuable members of the larger community for highly visible selfless acts during those terrible times, and it is because of this reputation that the community, including Protestants who openly reviled popery, rejected Monk’s claims.

Of course, little could be settled by vouching for the character of the nuns or author. Luckily, Monk made specific statements about the interior of the nunnery, and in the 1836 edition even provided a diagram of the interior of the convent.⁶ The Church opened the building for inspection. The most impressive investigation was carried out by Colonel W. L. Stone, the Presbyterian editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser. He visited Montreal with the most recent edition of Awful Disclosures, which included the diagram of the convent interior. The full narrative of his investigation was republished in the U.S. Gazette. He inspected every room, and the nuns opened every door and cabinet he asked to peek into. He inspected the walls and floors for evidence of recent construction. In every specific, Monk’s descriptions of the convent—some of which were very detailed, such as her escape through a gate that did not exist—were inaccurate. Based on his inspection Stone concluded, “[I]t may well be said that the girl must be an incorrigible blockhead, not to be able to remember somewhat of the interior of a house in which she pretends to have been a resident” (qtd. in Englund, 395). Most interesting, however, is what else Stone uncovered while in Montreal, hitting on the likely source of the story:

[I]t is a little remarkable that the only internal resemblance to the diagram she has given are said to be found in the recent Catholic Magdalen Asylum of Mrs. McDonnell, which was dissolved about a week before our visit, and in which the celebrated Jane Ray remained until the last. (qtd. in Englund 395)

In a deposition taken in July 1836, the matron of that institution—a reformatory for prostitutes—verified that Monk had been a resident between November 1834 and March 1835 and testified that Maria Monk had “for many years led the life of a stroller and a prostitute.”⁷ Monk seems to have been pregnant while at the asylum. I believe that it is a reasonable conclusion that during her confinement at a religious charity in New York, Monk came into contact with a group of anti-Catholics, told them what they wanted to hear, and collaborated with them on the book, inventing details from her own past experiences in Montreal.

An interesting stylistic note about Awful Disclosures is that the story shares numerous conventions with popular gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer.⁸ One can go through a checklist of the conventions of the gothic novel and find most of them in Awful Disclosures: Large isolated building with secret passageways and terror around every corner? Check. Imprisoned heroine? Check. Tyrannical or abusive male characters? Check. Overwrought emotion? Oh god, yes. Atmosphere of suspense? Check. Supernatural occurrences? Sort of—the nuns believe they live with a “true saint,” a holy daughter of a wealthy citizen who is restricted to one part of the convent and is said to bodily occupy heaven from time to time. Violent or macabre events? Even better—hilarious nun murder.

Let me explain.

In her fifth month as a nun, Maria witnesses the death of a young woman, who has taken the name Saint Frances, at the hands of her sisters. Maria helps carry the poor woman to the place of her “trial” though, she reports, “I had not a moment’s doubt that she considered her fate as sealed, and was already beyond the fear of death” (85). While the interrogation and evidence is being presented against the nun, the bishop seems impatient to see the sentence passed. When Saint Frances plainly states that she refuses to kill a baby, even if it means her own death, Maria reports:

“That is enough; finish her!” said the bishop.

Two nuns instantly fell upon the woman, and in obedience to directions given by the Superior, prepared to execute her sentence.

“She still maintained all the calmness and submission of a lamb. Some of those who took part in this transaction, I believe, were as unwilling as myself; but of other I can safely say, I believe they delighted in it. Their conduct certainly exhibited a most blood-thirsty spirit. But above all others present, and above all human fiends I ever saw, I think Saint Hypolite was the most diabolical; she engaged in the horrid task with all alacrity, and assumed from choice the most revolting parts to be performed. She seized a gag, forced it into the mouth of the poor nun, and when it was fixed between her extended jaws, so as to keep them open at their greatest possible distance, took hold of the straps fastened at each end of the stick, crossed them behind the helpless head of the victim, and drew them tight through the loop prepared as a fastening.

They then tie Saint Frances to a bed. “In an instant,” Maria reports

another bed [later referred to as a feather-bed] was thrown upon her. One of the priests, named Bonin, sprang like a fury first upon it, with all his force. He was speedily followed by the nuns, until there were as many upon the bed as could find room, and all did what they could, not only to smother, but to bruise her.

After about fifteen or twenty minutes of jumping on the bed, the nuns stop and have a good laugh. Later, she reports that St. Frances’ body

was taken down into the cellar and thrown unceremoniously into the hole which I have already described, covered with a great quantity of lime, and afterwards sprinkled with a liquid, of the properties and name of which I am ignorant. This liquid I have seen poured into the hoe from large bottles, after the necks were broken off; and have heard that it is used in France to prevent the effluvia rising from cemeteries. (87–90)

I bring up these gothic elements in this historical discussion of the conspiracy theory because a frequent feature of conspiracy theorists is an apparent inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and this seems to have always been true. Awful Disclosures was marketed as a non-fictional account, but a cursory glance at the conventions reveals it to be strongly influenced by fiction. The mind-bending improbability of the story is surpassed perhaps only by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Michael Barkun identifies the tendency of conspiracy theorists to commit such fact-fiction reversals in his A Culture of Conspiracy; one should note that many modern conspiracy theories are built around transparently fictitious plots and stories. For instance, you can look to Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame), who wrote of subterranean beings who made use of limitless Vril energy in his 1871 The Coming Race.⁹ This story jumped into the occult literature and found its way into modern conspiracy literature in the form of free energy narratives and underground civilizations.

It is telling that Maria Monk escaped from Catholic French Canada. Nativists were quick to see Catholics menacing the United States from across both the northern and southern borders. Coordination and cooperation between the Catholics in these countries was thought to be inimical to the well-being of the nation. This strikes me as especially important to an understanding of nativist conspiracy theory—transnational entities, like international Judaism, Catholicism, Freemasonry, big oil, or Google, which do not have strictly defined geographical borders, have historically been the objects of suspicion because their members may have alternative loyalties that do not entirely or exclusively coincide with that of the nation. And the wicked Catholics were thought to especially prize Americans: “The priests and nuns used often to declare that all of all the heretics the children from the United States were the most difficult to be converted; it was thought a great triumph when one of them was brought over to the ‘true faith’” (182–3).

Monk’s story does not have a happy ending. In September 1837, a report appeared that Maria Monk had tried to enter another Catholic institution, this time an asylum in Philadelphia, under an assumed name as the basis of another abduction scheme (qtd. in Englund 418). She was discovered under the name Jane Howard. In 1849, she was arrested in New York for theft; she died, insane, in Blackwell’s Island Prison two months later.

Notes

1. It should be noted that in 1816 “enthusiasm” did not have the entirely positive connotation that it has today. ↩

2. Susan M. Griffin finds that 300,000 copies of Monk’s memoirs had been sold by 1860. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111.1 (1996): 93–107. 93. ↩

3. A fascinating discussion of how anti-Catholic authors grounded the devious character of the priest in his celibacy and rejection of “family” can be found in Marie Anne Pagliarini’s “The Pure Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture 9.1 (1999): 97–128. See also Sandra Frink’s “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830–1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2 (2009), 237–264. ↩

4. On Slocum’s admission of his involvement, see Frink, 238. ↩

5. A book by this title does exist, but it appears to be a satire in verse of two rival British political publications early in the previous century. ↩

6. A great deal of collected published matter related to the Monk affair appeared in an edition of the complete works of the first bishop of Charleston, SC, John Englund, titled The Works of the Right Rev. John Englund, vol 5. 5 vols. Ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1849. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations about the investigations into the convent and Monk’s “catchpenny libel” (347) come from this. ↩

7. A copy of this deposition may be found at: http://www.canadiana.org/view/50665/0002. ↩

8. It also shares a number of conventions with the escaped slave narrative, a popular form of abolitionist literature at the time. It is interesting to note that often the same people who are crusading against slavery during this period are the ones who are crusading against popery. See Griffin. ↩

9. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 31–32. ↩

References

Adams, John. 1856. “To Thomas Jefferson, 6 May 1816.” The Works of John Adams, volume 10. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 216–219.

“Maria Monk; Affidavit of Madame D.C. McDonnell, Matron of the Montreal Magdalen Asylum, Ste. Genevieve Street.” 1836. Republished on Early Canadiana Online. <http://www.canadiana.org/view/50665/0002>. 5 Feb 2012.

Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Englund, John. 1849. The Works of the Right Rev. John Englund, volume 5. Ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co.

Frink, Sandra. 2009. “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830–1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2, 237–264.

Griffin, Susan M. 1996. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111.1: 93–107. 93.

Jefferson, Thomas. “To John Adams, 1 Aug 1816.” In Adams. 222–223.

Monk, Maria. 1836. Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. New York: Francis F. Ripley.

---. 1878. Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings. New York: D. M. Bennett.

Pagliarini, Marie Anne. 1999. “The Pure Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture 9.1: 97–128.