| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. By Robert Alan Goldberg. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xiv, 354 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-300-09000-5.)

Shit happens—but why? Conspiracism, the topic of Enemies Within by Robert Alan Gold-berg, is a concern of publics and of historians. Like Dorothy facing the Wizard of Oz, we long to know what is really transpiring behind that curtain. We can only imagine! Private spaces may—or may not—conceal cabals of great moment.

Goldberg, in exploring what Richard Hofstadter famously referred to as the "paranoid style in American politics," analyzes beliefs in conspiracy and countersubversion in five domains of recent American culture: beliefs in conspiracies (mostly shared among the far Right) to establish a leftist dictatorship, the so-called "master conspiracy" of the John Birch Society; beliefs about the readiness of the Antichrist to return and the immanence of born-again rapture; dark explanations of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; conspiratorial Jewish threats to black America, embedded in the beliefs of the Nation of Islam; and conviction of visits from publicity-shy extraterrestrials. Notably absent among those leaden dogmas are those of academics, ready with bags packed to emigrate to Canada should some Republican president reveal his true colors. The conspiracies arise from the usual suspects.

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