Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 59

Culture of Contagion:
Germs, Aliens, and American Identity
Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.
— Albert Einstein, scrap of paper, undated (Robins 13)

The historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1966 essay “The Paranoid Style in
American Politics” names among the signal elements of the style a tendency to
ward “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” The tar
gets of this fevered gaze, as Hofstadter demonstrates, have been legion - Jesuits,
Jews, Freemasons, Mormons, the Illuminati - and, paradoxically, the enemy “seems
to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable
aspects of the self are attributed to him” (3, 32). Defining ourselves and our en
emies has been a constant, simultaneous project in America, and historian David
Brion Davis argues that our long history of obsession with conspiracy and subver
sion rises from Just this sort of confusion over identity:
Perhaps because American identity has usually been defined as a state of
mind rather than as a familial heritage, Americans have been susceptible
to the fear that their neighbors’ minds were being seduced by the devil ...
and that a hidden society.. .was growing within the very tissues of the
existing social order. (1)
As the twentieth century rose on the American horizon, changes in our politi
cal and cultural landscape prompted new ways of thinking about the self, both
individual and national. The rise - or fall, in another view - of the great cities, the
rise (or fall) of women, increasing racial and class tensions due to geographic and
economic shifts, the immigration explosion and its backlash, all