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The Banality of Conspiracy Theories

Moral panics repeat, again and again.

By Colin Dickey

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: J. R. Osgood and Company / Library of Congress

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he riot, when it finally happened, was a leisurely one. In the weeks leading up to
August 11, 1834, the people of Boston had been openly discussing burning down the
T
Ursuline Convent that stood just outside the city, in what is now Somerville.
The convent, many had become convinced, was a den of sexual iniquity,
where priests used the confessional as a mixture of blackmail and mind control
to exert power over young women and force them into sexual depravity. Further,
many in the town had come to believe, infants born of these transgressions were being
murdered and buried in the convent’s basement. The only solution was to liberate the
women and, calmly, burn the whole place to the ground.

The Ursuline convent was targeted because of conspiracy theories that, in many ways,
were the 1830s version of the contemporary panic on the right regarding child sexual
abuse: Pizzagate—the conspiracy theory that, in a secret basement under a pizza
parlor in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton and her circle abused children, drank
their blood, and harvested their organs; Operation Underground Railroad—a dubious
nonprofit group that alleges a vast network of child sex traffickers; and QAnon—the
totalizing conspiracy theory that regularly incorporates accusations of child abuse.

Although it is tempting to see these moral panics as something new, they have been
part of American culture for nearly two centuries, and they recur at key moments in
history for specific, identifiable reasons. Combatting them requires first understanding
that they are not only not novel, but in fact rote—almost to the point of banality.

Conspiracy theories tend to emerge in times of rapid cultural or demographic change;

many of them reflect unease with that change, suggesting that it is not just the result
of evolving values or newly emergent communities—the messy progression of
democracy—but instead the work of a hidden network of nefarious actors whose
ultimate goal is the destruction of America itself. And they often portray the
American nuclear family, particularly its women and its children, as uniquely
vulnerable and in need of protection.

In the late 1820s and ’30s, a sharp increase in immigration, mainly from Ireland and
Germany, led to an explosion in anti-Catholic attitudes. Anti-Catholicism itself wasn’t
new—it had been fundamental to the founding of American democracy: a model of
political participation that wasn’t ruled by a divine authority. Catholics, Protestants
feared, could not be trusted to participate in representative democracy, because rather
than act as autonomous citizens making informed decisions, they’d vote as a bloc in
accordance with the wishes of the pope. (This “philosophical” aspect of anti-
Catholicism, which targeted not the individuals so much as the idea that people could
be controlled by a religious authority not bound by American sovereignty, helps
explain why it was so easily repackaged more recently against Muslim immigrants and
the specter of Sharia law.)

“We make war upon no sect,” Senator Sam Houston of Texas said in an 1855 speech
at a barbecue for the rabidly anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, while also asserting
the need to resist “the political influence of Pope or Priest.” More fundamentally, he
wondered, “Are not their doctrines opposed to republican institutions?” One only had
to look at Mexico, Houston continued, where “priestcraft rules, and civil liberty is
subordinate. There is no freedom where the Catholic Church predominates.” He
favored a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants before they could gain the
right to vote, which would, he argued, be enough time for them to shed their knee-
jerk subservience to foreign religious leaders.

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By the mid-19th century, the influx of Catholic immigrants had transformed a rather
philosophical question about Catholicism into something more urgent and paranoid.
Catholic was now becoming a rumor and a slur. Conspiracy theories proliferated,
many framed around the threat of white Protestants being “enslaved” at the hands of
the pope. These were a means of preserving a sense of white unity as the question of
actual slavery continued to drive apart the country in the decades before the Civil
War. Anti-Catholic conspiracists repeatedly used the fear of Catholic mind control to
shift the discussion away from America’s divisions. Although white people disagreed
on whether or not Black people should be enslaved, they could all agree that none of
them wanted that fate for themselves.

A new literary genre emerged. Many popular books—some purported to be memoirs,

some pure fiction—involved convents. Scipio de Ricci’s Female Convents: Secrets of
Nunneries Disclosed, Richard Baxter’s Jesuit Juggling: Forty Popish Frauds Detected and
Disclosed, and dozens of others detailed a nightmare world of women in bondage,
lecherous priests, and unwanted infants murdered and buried in cellars.

In these stories and the other sensationalist faux memoirs, the convent was revealed to
be not a place of piety and devotion but a secret den of illicit sex and infanticide.
George Bourne’s novel Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun,
described the convent as “the sepulchre of goodness, and the castle of misery. Within its
unsanctified domain, youth withers; knowledge is extinguished; usefulness is
entombed; and religion expires.”

Even in newspapers, such attitudes were reported as straightforward fact. “Convents,”

The Harrisburg Herald reported in November 1854, “are the very hot-beds of lust and
debauchery.”

Conspiracy theories always breed strange architectural imaginings. They start with
something like the rumors of illicit sex between priests and nuns, and from there the
allegations of unwanted pregnancies. But no children are around, so the infants must
have been murdered. Where are the bodies buried? You start to envision deep
catacombs, hidden structures, sub-basements and labyrinths. You must, because how
otherwise to account for the lack of evidence? The idea of the subterranean, the house
with secrets—all of this becomes an architectural necessity to explain where the dead
are hidden.

These books were popular because they were both titillating and moralizing. They
promised a world of illicit sex and fantasy while at the same time decrying such a
world. For all their lurid detail, there was a heavy hand to the moral worldview here.
Scipio de Ricci told his readers that the “sole object of all monastic institutions in
America is merely to proselyte youth of the influential classes of society, and especially
females; as the Roman priests are conscious that by this means they shall silently but
effectually attain the control of public affairs.”

The convent was a space distinct from the home, and thus an affront to the role of the
Protestant woman as a mother and wife. Women in the early days of the republic
could not vote, and yet were envisioned as the keepers of democracy, because it was
their job to raise sons and inject values into them. This is what the scholar Linda
Kerber has called “Republican motherhood”: the complicated way in which women
were held up as the vessels of American ideals even as they were denied access to
political power. As such, men worried about secret subversion often fretted about the
susceptibility of women to moral decay and degeneration, and assumed that foreign
conspirators would target them as the key to bringing down America itself.

It was only a matter of time until these salacious rumors and simmering xenophobia
burst forth into violence.

B
oston’s ursuline convent had opened in 1820, and quickly established
itself as a leading school for the young women—both Catholic and Protestant
—of the city’s elite. But it was far from the city center, looming up on Mount
Benedict over its neighbors, mostly brickmakers and other working-class laborers.
Relations between them and the nuns, particularly the mother superior, Sister Mary
Edmond St. George, were tense. As one John Buzzell would later say of St. George,
“She was the sauciest woman I ever heard talk.”

These local tensions were fueled by the rise of national anti-Catholic sentiment, and
by the flood of lurid best sellers. So when, on the night of July 28, 1834, a young
woman named Elizabeth Harrison fled the convent, the community was quick to see
confirmation of their deepest suspicions. The woman, who had taught music there for
12 years, sought refuge with a local neighbor before being taken to her brother in
Cambridge. There, distraught, she said that she didn’t want to return to Mount
Benedict—for reasons that were never fully made clear. But within a few hours, the
Bishop had arrived and was able to comfort the young woman, persuading her to
return.

Years of anti-Catholic fearmongering now had a narrative to cling to. On August 8, a

local newspaper ran an article headlined “mysterious,” relating the story in brief
and ending on a suspicious note: “After some time spent in the Nunnery, she became
dissatisfied, and made her escape from the institution—but was afterward persuaded
to return, being told that if she would continue but three weeks longer, she would be
dismissed with honor. At the end of that time, a few days since, her friends called for
her, she was not to be found, and much alarm is excited in consequence.”

That same weekend, Lyman Beecher (the father of Harriett Beecher Stowe and the
abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher) delivered a series of anti-Catholic sermons in
Boston, and though he would later claim that he had no influence on the events that
followed, something was clearly in the air.

The decision to riot seems to have developed rather leisurely. Genuine concern about
Harrison’s status was mingled with a long-simmering resentment toward these women
who seemed to look down on their laboring neighbors. Local men began to talk
openly of securing Harrison’s rescue and burning down the convent. Placards and
posters appeared throughout the city that read: go ahead. to arms!! to arms!! ye
brave and free the avenging sword unshield! leave not one stone
upon another of that cursed nunnery that prostitutes female virtue
and liberty under the garb of holy religion.

A week before the riot, a farmer named Alvah Kelley was holding court at a local bar,
complaining about the Catholics; another patron asked if there was a plan to attack
the convent, and “in a cool deliberate manner,” Kelley replied that if Harrison was not
“liberated” within a few days, the nunnery would come down.
E
arly in the evening on August 11, St. George allowed a fact-finding
mission: Prominent men toured the convent and found nothing amiss and
Harrison apparently happy and fine. Satisfied, the group prepared a report to
this effect to be published in the papers the following morning. But it was too late—
by the time the report was published, the Ursuline convent was a smoking ruin.

By 11 p.m., a crowd had lit several barrels of tar on fire in a neighboring field to
provide ready incendiaries and torches. St. George, sensing what was in the offing,
threatened the rabble, telling them, according to one account, “The Bishop has
20,000 Irishmen at his command in Boston who will whip you all into the sea,” but
this only infuriated them. Around midnight, men stormed the convent; after making
sure that the nuns and their pupils had all been evacuated, they ransacked the place in
search of the hidden crypts where the bodies of infants were buried, and in search of
what they assumed would be Harrison’s corpse. They found nothing, but razed the
building anyway.

Once it became clear that law enforcement would make no effort to put down the
mob, the scene turned carnivalesque. John Buzzell broke into the bishop’s retreat
inside the convent and draped himself with the bishop’s vestments. Rioters,
disappointed in their search for dead babies, overturned coffins in the crypt and
desecrated the remains. One of the students, Louisa Whitney, later described the
mob’s cheery violence as the work of “amiable ruffians”; the Christian Examiner
described the scene as “a sort of diabolical frolic, as if such an atrocity were no more
than the kindling of a great bonfire.”

Having destroyed the nuns’ homes, the rioters seemed to think they had acted
philanthropically. The morning after, some of the men told Whitney (according to her
later court testimony), “We’ve spoiled your prison for you. You won’t never have to go
back no more.” Whitney, who’d just seen her home burned to the ground, was
incredulous: “The general sentiment of the mob seemed to be that they had done us a
great favor in destroying the convent, for which we ought to be grateful to them.”

Following the riot, multiple men were arrested, but they would face no serious
punishment. This marked the beginning of a major turn in America’s paranoid
history. Anti-Catholicism became mainstream, a successful political posture. After
1854, newly elected lawmakers forced the Church to divest its real-estate holdings,
transferring property to boards of trustees instead. “Nunnery committees” in
Massachusetts and Maryland were founded to investigate convents over rumors of
sexual abuse. (The Massachusetts committee ran into scandal, predictably, when the
chairman himself was revealed to be engaging in sexual impropriety, using taxpayer
money to pay for his mistress’s lodging.)

A book supposedly by an ex-nun, Maria Monk (but actually written by a group of

Protestant preachers), Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, yet
another pornographic morality tale, appeared soon after and sold 300,000 copies,
becoming one of the most popular books in antebellum America, second only to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1835, two more enormously successful books were published: A
Plea for the West and Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Both
warned that Protestant America was on the verge of being caught unawares by a new
George III: the pope in Rome.

The panic abated only as concern began to shift away from the Vatican toward the
more pressing crisis of slavery. In the South, those who enslaved others were riven
with paranoia of uprisings and abolitionist saboteurs. In the North, fears focused
instead on the slavocracy and its brutal political power. In 1854, the journalist Charles
A. Dana wrote that “neither the Pope nor the foreigners ever can govern the country
or endanger its liberties, but the slavebreeders and slavetraders do govern it, and
threaten to put an end to all government but theirs.”

As for the convent itself, not much remains today, not even the hill on which it was
built. The site where it once stood is now Broadway, a thoroughfare that runs through
Somerville and connects Cambridge and Boston. A small public library sits there
today, with only a small stone marker noting that the Ursuline convent “burned” in
1834. The hill itself, the text explains, was dug down in the late 19th century, which
gave rise to the place’s current name: Ploughed Hill.

A hill that’s been ploughed, a name that testifies to its erasure.  In a city known for
meticulously preserving its history, it’s disorienting to see how little is said about what
happened here.

Part of the reason these moral panics resurface so frequently is that they’re so easily
forgotten. The same script gets recycled again and again, only to be memory-holed as
soon as the fervor subsides. What happened in Boston in 1834 would resurface in
1920s, with the Ku Klux Klan’s willingness to use violence to defend against fictitious
assaults on Protestant women’s “purity” by Catholics and Jews, and again in the ’80s
during the Satanic panic, when children were coerced into accusing day-care
employees and even their own parents of ritualistic abuse and murder. Contemporary
conspiracy theories about Clinton’s murderous sex cabal may sound outlandish, but
it’s only the latest page in a playbook that is more than 200 years old. If we remember
this, perhaps we can rob the next panic of its heat and fury.

This essay is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, Under the Eye of Power: How
Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.

Under The Eye Of Power - How Fear Of Secret Societies

Shapes American Democracy
By Colin Dickey

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