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9/11 Truth Movement: Why America Turns to Conspiracy Theories
Jan 21, 2010 Marilyn Michaud

Conspiracy theories have a long history in American culture.This article provides a brief historical overview and an explanation for why they are rational and necessary.

The tendency to view events through the lens of deception and conspiracy has been part of American culture since the founding. Suspicion was particularly acute in the writing of the American revolutionaries; whether loyalist sympathizers, suspicious Whigs or radical democrats, Americans often adopted conspiratorial and duplicitous modes of interpretation to explain the threat to republican liberty.

While it is popular to dismiss conspiracy theories as delusional and paranoid, history is full of reasonable and sophisticated people who naturally believed in plots and schemes. Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, a conspiratorial mode of thought was one way that human behaviour could be understood in a rapidly changing world. Charges of hypocrisy and conspiracy also worked to hold individuals personally and morally responsible for their actions.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, commonly resorted to conspiratorial explanations when describing the motives of King George III: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinions of a day; but a series of oppressions…too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery” (Summary View, 1774). While he was accusing the British king of plotting, George III was equally attributing colonial resistance to “turbulent and seditious persons, who, under false pretenses, have but too successfully deluded numbers of my subjects in America” ("Address", 1775).

In this personal and individualistic interpretation, the eighteenth-century belief in conspiracy stems from a desire to decipher the contradiction between an individual’s words and deeds, motives and actions. Individuals were expected to know with whom they were dealing and what their true intentions were. This was particularly important for a country engaged in rebellion. It was the disparity between what individuals said and what they did that often led to charges of hypocrisy and conspiracy.

However, when an occurrence caused widespread upheaval, the individualistic explanation no longer worked and instead events became linked to large scale organizations involving thousands of individuals. Conspiracy theories surrounding the start of the French Revolution, for instance, become understandable and acceptable because they removed the irrationality, incomprehensibility, and unpredictability from complex events. In the eighteenth-century mind, only the machinations of secret societies or organizations could be behind such chaos and turmoil.

The fear of subversive organizations working to bring down a nation or system of government was entrenched by George Washington who, in 1794, suggested a causal link between the Whisky rebellion and democratic societies or what he called “self-created societies” and “associations of men” ("Annual Message", 1794). In the press, these associations quickly became linked with the Jacobin clubs in France, and with the Freemasons and Illuminati in America. Everywhere was the fear of the artifice of individuals, but also the malevolent design of large organizations who were working to undermine the new republic.

Conspiracy Theories in the Twentieth Century

In Cold War America, the spectre of hidden malevolent design still functioned as a potent explanation in the public imagination. Individuals such as J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy argued that communism was an “arm of revolution” and a powerful system organized by a “dedicated conspiratorial group”; and like the Illuminati before them, the ultimate aim of the communist conspiracy was the complete destruction of America’s religious, political and social institutions (Hoover, 1958).

In the 1960s, the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King confirmed the continuing propensity to view unexplainable events as a form of deliberate design. The widespread belief that Oswald did not act alone, for example, reveals that behaviour that is spontaneous and situational is seen as having been planned in advance as part of a complex conspiratorial plot involving hundreds of individuals.

9/11 and the twenty-first century interpretation

The 9/11 Truth Movement takes the position that the conspiracy originates from within while the official narrative looks to enemies from without. Whether the evidence on either side is compelling, the turn to conspiracy follows an American tradition of questioning motives and intensions, and of ferreting out deception and hypocrisy. Conspiracy theories surrounding what happenend on September 11, 2001 are not simply paranoid and unpatriotic, but represent an attempt to locate moral responsibility for incomprehensible actions and to seek rationality in the midst of fear and unpredictability.

Sources

Hoover, Edgar. J, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America (London: Dent, 1958), pp. vi-viii, 81, 82.

Jefferson, Thomas, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774); Washington, George, "Sixth Annual message", 19 November 1775 The Avalon Project at Yale Law School

King George III, "Address to Parliament", 27 October, 1775, Library of Congress

Michaud, Marilyn, Republicanism and the American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp.107-126.

Marilyn Michaud earned her Ph.D in Gothic Literature in 2007 and is now teaching English and conducting research. She is the author of Republicanism and the American Gothic as well as numerous articles on British and American literature and culture.