Hi everybody, this is Matthew Lasar. I'm back and here's a video that I made some about a year ago. It wasn't the video that I made for this online conspiracy course. It was a video that I made for my regular course here at UC Santa cruz on conspiracy theories. And it's a video that I made back when I wore thick glasses and it's about Richard Hofstadter. Who wrote what is arguably the most important book about conspiracy theories in the United States in the 20th century. And I think it will be helpful for you in terms of seeing how different historians think about conspiracy theories differently. So why don't you watch it and enjoy and thank you. >> Hello there. This is Matthew Lazar and I'm here to talk to you about conspiracy theory, history books. And in particular the most important conspiracy theory, history book in the history of well, conspiracy theory, history books and it's a lot of books. [MUSIC] A new one comes out like once a week and they all argue something or other that we as humans are cognitively structured to like conspiracy theories. Or that the mass media encourages us to favor conspiracy theories that the decline of our educational system has led to conspiracy theories. That conspiracy theories are bad that the conspiracy theories are not so bad that conspiracy theories are maybe even good. But there's one thing that they all almost all have in common and that's what they refer to one book. The grandmother of conspiracy theory books. Richard Hofstadter is the paranoid style in American politics. So let me talk about that book because it's like the book. [MUSIC] Richard Hofstadter was one of the most important US historians of the 20th century. And he was part of an intellectual school of thought called the Consensus School of History, which flourished after the Second World War. The consensus historians rejected the history writers of the early 20th century. Many of whom focused on the great conflicts of the American past battles over who would control the corporation, the civil war, the American revolution. The consensus historians thought that emphasis on those dramatic moments of conflict were important. But they often obscured the fact that over the course of two centuries Americans agreed about lots of stuff. They mostly liked their supposedly individualistic free enterprise system and they shared a passionate nationalism. Richard Hofstadter was probably the most elegant of the consensus historians. His 1948 masterpiece, the American political tradition and the men who made it explicitly argued the consensus philosophy he wrote above and beyond temporary and local conflicts. There has been a common ground, a unity of cultural and political tradition upon which American civilization has stood. That culture has been intensely nationalistic and fiercely individualistic and capitalistic. The book was a hit Hostetter won two Pulitzer Prizes. But then this guy came along and he kind of screwed up Hofstadter is consensus thesis. >> I don't care how much of a screwball or a crackpot any professor teacher might be as long as he or she is a free agent. But once, once you have this United States from the Atlantic to the pacific covered with a network. A network of professors and teachers who are getting their orders from Moscow from an organization that wants to destroy this nation that wants to corrupt the minds of youth. I'm talking about Senator Joe McCarthy who endlessly argued that the United States was on the verge of going totally kami. I mean Hofstadter looked at this and in a sense, he couldn't believe his historians eyes and ears. Here was this society that could not wait to build, buy and consume more and more capitalist goodies, cars, barbie dolls, custom air raid shelters. HiFi stereos, moving to the suburbs as fast as they could, buying $99 bedroom sets, as fast as they could. Having little capitalist consumer kitties as fast as they could. And here's Joe McCarthy yammering on about how Joe Stalin was going to show up next week take over the White House. And the next thing you knew we were all going to be singing the international and eating breakfast. And then there were all these weirdos, weird groups supporting McCarthy like the John Birch Society whose leader Robert, Welch called Dwight Eisenhower. President Dwight Eisenhower a traitor, here's a direct quote from Welch about Eisenhower, there's only one possible word to describe Eisenhower's purposes and actions, he warned that word is treason. People were like you're talking about Eisenhower here, you know the dude who led the allied forces to victory in Europe in World War II defeated Hitler. Hello, and Welsh responded, yeah, I'm talking about Eisenhower, he continued, he declared my first belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy. Is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence, so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt. So Hofstadter was like, how do I fit this remarkable phenomenon? The scary phenomenon into my consensus view of the United States history. And so we came up with a framework that argued that the McCarthy Ites were outsiders, but they were important outsiders. Hofstadter investigated the past in pursuit of this question and he identified important and Solaris to McCarthy. Ancillary is a $10 word for precedent, most notably the anti-Masonic and the anti-Catholic movements of the 19th century. The masons were a secret society or really not so secret that emerged out of the renaissance stone makers, gilds. The Masonic orders became a kind of a popular social club kind of thing. And anti masonry became subsumed in American party politics in the 1930s because Andrew Jackson who drew very partisan passions as President of the United States was a mason. Lots of Americans saw, Jackson is a kind of a disruptor of the old genteel system by which mostly rich guys from Virginia, New England became president. But his opponents drew upon his masonry to suggest that the United States was now in the clutches of a secret order. That had consumed the lives of local sheriffs, city council members, state assemblyman, mayor, senators, representatives and now an American president, all of whom had been converted to this evil cult. Thus, popular books on the Masons declared that freemasonry was an engine of Satan dark, unfruitful, selfish, demoralizing, blasphemous, murderous, anti-republican and anti Christian. In 18 32 the anti mason political party, yes way the anti mason political party one, almost 8% of the presidential vote of that election year, it won all of Vermont's electoral votes. This was followed by the great anti-pulp ARY hysteria of the late 19th century, in which protestant demagogues assured their audiences. That all these Irish Catholic immigrants and German Catholic immigrants and Italian Catholic immigrants were agents of the pope. And being coordinated by the Jesuits for the great papal takeover of America, in which innocent young ladies would be led to the confession chamber, not to save their souls. But well for other purposes of, shall we say less pious nature, Hofstadter found in these movements what he called the paranoid style. Paranoia in its clinical sense is the belief that someone or something out there is out to get you personally, this would be called the clinical paranoiac. But the paranoid politician took matters to a whole new level Hofstetter argued and I quote from him quote the clinical paranoid sees the hostel. And conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him. Whereas the spokesman for the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone, but millions of others. But Hofstadter thought that the right-wing conspiracy, paranoia kicks of his time in the 1950s different from the anti masons and the anti-Catholics in one fundamental way. He wrote, the spokesman of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country. That they were offending off threats to a still well established way of life in which they played an important part. But now, he argued, America had been largely taken away from them and they're kind and they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. Now, in peering at Senator Joseph McCarthy and Robert Welch, Hofstetter had to grapple with a problem. They McCarthy and Welch warned of communist subversion in the United States government and they were right. The Soviet Union through the 1940s and 50s have deployed agents in the United States government who told the USSR about the Manhattan Project. Which built the first atomic bomb and the CIA's plans to fight communism in Europe and other top secret information. But Hofstadter pointed out that Welsh and McCarthy took this problem and extrapolated it into a vast conspiracy to take over the United States, which it wasn't, Hofstadter wrote. The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here are there in history. But that they regard a vast or gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is conspiracy set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendental power and what is felt to be needed to defeat. It is not the usual methods of political give and take, but an all out crusade. So it's one thing to see a conspiracy of which there are always many and we will explore a lot of real conspiracies in this class. It's another thing to extrapolate it into the only thing that matters about what's going on, that's what the conspiracy theorist or the politician does, Hasta warned. [MUSIC] Hofstadter also thought that the reason why these groups embraced conspiracy theories was because they had embraced what he called status politics. A sense that in a changing society, they whoever they were, we're suffering from a sense of status loss either because of the onrush of new immigrants or in the 1950s. Because of the sudden new prominence of the university, the scientist and the liberal corporate leader in American life. Thus, in the McCarthy era, Hofstadter saw conspiracy mongering going hand in hand with the anti intellectualism of the McCarthy Ites. Who are constantly talking about the egg headed professors and administrators who are giving America over to the communists. McCarthy a Catholic, ironically appealed to a white working class that has experienced itself as being left in the dust by the elites. Sound familiar the status politics and a pension for conspiracy theories went hand in hand in Richard Hofstadter is view. This is the way Richard Hofstadter store conspiracy theorists, but subsequent historians have substantially different from Hofstadter. Professor Kathryn Olmstead of the University of California Davis has written a book called Real Enemies, which is the most important text of this class and you should give it your top priority. Olmstead agrees with Hofstadter that around the First World War, something changed in terms of the popular conspiracy theories of the day. Now conspiracy people were no longer arguing that the forces of darkness were standing at the gates of America pushing to get in. Now they were arguing with the government had been taken over that now it was the Enemy. This is more or less the same framework time framework that Hofstadter outlined. But Homestead makes three additional points that stand in stark contrast to Hofstadter First, she contended in the 20th century Americans were right to be suspicious of their government. The government had a history of conspiring against its citizens from CIA projects like MK ultra. Which experimented with LSD on an unsuspecting Americans to the Tuskegee project. In which public officials denied potentially life saving treatments to African American men in medical experiments. The US government was often an outright conspirator against its own citizens. Second, the United States government had a long history of promulgating its own conspiracy theories. It made up conspiracy is committed by the Germans during World War I, all the way to the early 2000's when the bush administration cooked up the fable. The hoax really that Saddam Hussein had helped Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Third, the US government had a long history of spying on Americans and worse from the huge crackdown on dissenters during World War I. To the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II to cointelpro during the 1950s and 60s, Americans have been right to be suspicious of their government's activities and motivations. Yes many conspiracy theorists have been crazy or out for personal gain, but Armstead find sincerity and even patriotism in much conspiracy theorizing, even when she disagrees with some of its more outlandish conclusions. Next, you have in this class, Jesse walker is very entertaining book. The United States of paranoia, a conspiracy theory and Jesse walker, he just sees the conspiracy theorist everywhere. For walker, the paranoid style is the American style in America, he writes, it is always a paranoid time, there is no fringe. This book effectively argues there used to be an old vaudeville entertainer. I recall named Jimmy Durante he sang and he danced and he played the piano and he had a huge knows that cartoonists made lots of fun of. And one of his most famous lines was everybody wants to get into the act. Well, walker argues that when it comes to conspiracy theories, everybody indeed wants to get into the act. From university liberals, to government officials, to leftists, to conservatives, to civil rights advocates, to alt right activists. Everybody subscribes to a conspiracy theory at some point in their lives, Jesse walker sees conspiracy theorists seeing conspiracies coming from five different directions, he calls them the five primal myths. One is the enemy outside who plots outside the community's gates, next is the enemy within, comprising villainous neighbors who can be easily distinguished from friends. Then comes the enemy above hiding at the top of the social pyramid heap. After that the enemy below lurking at the bottom and ready to strike and then last but not least, is the benevolent conspiracy, some kind of secret force working to improve people's lives. These myths are with us everywhere Walker contends every kind of America says, comes to them at some point in their lives. Finally, I have assigned to you David Arana Vic's book, voodoo histories and Iran of it just doesn't like conspiracy theories. He doesn't have a clearly identifiable framework for them like Hofstetter and almost dead in walker, he just doesn't like him, that's all. And he tends to write about too many things that aren't really conspiracies, I think. But his book has a very good summaries of conspiracy theories that the other authors neglect, most notably the protocols of the elders of Zion. And he makes a very important point, which is that many people who subscribe to conspiracy theories tend to come from the most educated sectors of our culture. The idea that conspiracy theorists appeal just to the ignorant, forget it. We are the people who are most likely to subscribe to some conspiracy theory, us supposedly educated types, that's a big takeaway from his book. So as you think about these things and you take my class and you study these conspiracy theories, consider this. How would Richard Hofstadter, Kathryn Olmstead, Jesse walker and David, Arana Vic think about this or that theory that's around today. I'm hoping that thinking about their frameworks will help you come up with yours. >> So now that you learned all about these interesting and great historians of conspiracy theories. Let's take on the story of the first really big conspiracy theory of the 20th century, The Protocols of The Elders of Zion. [MUSIC]
