A Culture of Conspiracy. Michael Barkun
exists, composed of Illuminati animated by a purely destructive purpose it is conceivable that they might find support in those Germans who desire to disintegrate the countries of the Allies with a view to future conquest, and in those Jews who hope to establish their empire on the ruins of Christian civilization. . . . On the other hand it may be that the hidden center consists in a circle of Jews located in the background of the Grand Orient [Masonry] working in accord and using both Pan-Germans and Gentile Illuminati as their tools.
She ended up unsure which was the more likely, though she clearly leaned toward the second possibility. In any case, who was using whom scarcely mattered, since the three forces differed only marginally in their capacity for evil.18
Lady Queenborough’s view of the world was much the same: a complex of secret societies acted in concert to control the world and corrupt its values through their domination of the arts, political parties, the press, crime, and a host of other forces. But for her the ultimate lever was money, because money could buy control. “This power,” she concluded, “is wholly in the hands of international Jewish financiers.” She had less difficulty than Webster in figuring out the relation between the Illuminati and the Jews; as far as she was concerned, the Illuminati was simply one tentacle of the Jewish world conspiracy: “Illuminism rep-resented the efforts of the heads of the powerful Jewish Kahal [sic] which has ever striven for the attainment of political, financial, economic and moral world domination.”19
Webster’s and Queenborough’s ideas quickly crossed the Atlantic. Once again, the main channel for their dissemination in America appears to have been Gerald Winrod. His 1935 pamphlet Adam Weishaupt, a Human Devil drew explicitly on Webster and Queenborough, as well as on Barruel and Robison. Paraphrasing Queenborough, Winrod concluded, “The real conspirators behind the Illuminati were Jews.” As far as he was concerned, communism in the Soviet Union was merely Illuminism’s most recent manifestation. “Karl Marx . . . edited [sic] his teaching out of the writings of Adam Weishaupt.” As if that were not sufficient, Winrod proceeded to lay out a series of resemblances between the Illuminati and the Bolsheviks, ranging from alleged ideological parallels to their common penchant for changing their names. He concluded “that the Illuminati was Jewish. In like manner the Moscow dictatorship is Jewish.” Hence to fight Jews was simultaneously to fight both communism and the Illuminati, who now merged into a single entity.20
Anti-Illuminism thus became a staple of the American far right, particularly in that variant that linked the Illuminati to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. This tendency was doubtless reinforced by the wide circulation given in the 1920s to Victor Marsden’s English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose contents were disseminated in the United States through Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. The Protocols purports to be the transcripts of speeches given to an assembly of Jewish “Elders” who collectively conspire to rule the world. It takes the form of twenty-four brief addresses that explain the techniques Jews and their Masonic allies will employ to subvert governments and institutions. As journalists and scholars quickly discovered, it was plagiarized from two sources: Maurice Joly’s A Dialogue in Hell: Conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu about Power and Right, a polemic directed against Napoleon III and having nothing to do with Jews; and an anti-Semitic novel, Biarritz, by “Sir John Retcliffe” (aka Hermann Goedsche).21
After World War II, however, the situation had seemingly changed. The Protocols had long been discredited as a forgery, anti-Semitism had begun what was to be a long and steady decline, and the fixation on the origins of the Russian Revolution, so strong in the interwar period, gave way to the predictable mutual hostilities of the Cold War. Indeed, one may speculate that this combination of factors explains the manner in which Hofstadter treated the Illuminati literature. Writing in the depths of the Cold War and preoccupied with the Red Scare of the 1950s, he treated the Illuminati literature not as a living part of American mythology but as an artifact of the early nineteenth century, interesting largely as a precursor of the paranoid political style. If Hofstadter was aware of the links among Webster, Queenborough, and Winrod, he chose not to mention them.
In fact, Illuminism was of more than merely antiquarian interest, for the American right was on the threshold of an Illuminati explosion. Much of the stimulus for this renewed interest came from the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch in 1958. Welch himself picked up the strands of Robison’s argument even as Hofstadter was writing in 1964, and it remained a staple of the society’s view of history after Welch’s death.22
A recent systematic statement of Birch Society conspiracy theory blends traditional sources—Barruel and Robison—with modern scholarship on the Illuminati. It dismisses the supposed suppression of the order as meaningless, contending that it was soon transplanted to both the United States and other parts of Europe, where it gave rise to the Communist Manifesto and the revolts of 1848. The Birchite retelling attributes to the Illuminati the creation of movements as varied as “the Marxian and ‘utopian’ socialist movements; anarchism; syndicalism; Pan Slavism; Irish, Italian and German ‘Nationalism’; German Imperialism; the Paris Commune; British ‘New Imperialism’; Fabian Socialism; and Leninist Bolshevism.”23
Contemporary Illuminati Literature
The post-1965 Illuminati literature became so vast that only a sampling can be discussed here, drawn from both secular and religious sources. Larry Abraham’s Call It Conspiracy, first published in 1971, claims to expose a conspiracy of “Insiders” bent on world domination: “After the Insiders have established the United Socialist States of America (in fact if not in name), the next step is the Great Merger of all nations of the world into a dictatorial world government.” Although his roster of Insiders is drawn from the usual reservoir—the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission—their roots are claimed to be in the late-eighteenth century Illuminati: “The role of Weishaupt’s Illuminists in such horrors as the Reign of Terror is unquestioned, and the techniques of the Illuminati have long been recognized as models for Communist methodology.”24
While Abraham avoids the overt anti-Semitism of Webster and Queenborough, he treads perilously close to an anti-Semitic theory of history, in which Jews sit at the center of a conspiratorial web. “Anti-Semites,” he claims, “have played into the hands of the conspiracy by trying to portray the entire conspiracy as Jewish. Nothing could be farther from the truth.” Nonetheless, he places the Rothschilds at the conspiracy’s heart, and calls the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith an instrument created by “the Jewish members of the conspiracy” to “stifle . . . almost all honest scholarship on international bankers” through “highly professional smear jobs.” The Rothschild family established banks in Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, and London. Their prominence as international bankers peaked in the early nineteenth century and waned thereafter as national governments became increasingly adept at raising funds without recourse to private bankers. Nonetheless, the specter of Rothschild power continued to grow even as the family’s real influence declined. Although this type of speculation was widespread throughout anti-Semitic circles in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was notably strong in the United States, where radicals of every stripe seemed obsessed by financial conspiracies. The Rothschilds, who combined Jewishness, banking, and international ties, presented an attractive target.25
A more openly anti-Semitic version of Illuminati theory came in 1984 from the pen of Eustace Mullins, a protégé of Ezra Pound. Like his mentor, Mullins sees the world’s evil as a product of financial manipulation, in which Jews play a central role. But as an explanation of world, as opposed to modern, history, his conspiracist vision makes the Illuminati merely a link in a much longer chain that extends back to the ancient Near East and forward to the nascent communist movement of the early Marx. Weishaupt himself is portrayed as a mere figurehead. As Queenborough and Winrod had claimed half a century earlier, Mullins sees the Illuminati as really run by Jews, in this case a Jewish banker who worked for the Illuminati’s “corresponding branch in Italy.”26
A slightly different set of emphases informed William T. Still’s 1990 book, New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies. Here, too, the link between the Illuminati and the Rothschilds