Over the course of the 2016 election, I and other commentators drew parallels between Trump’s conspiratorial ethno-nationalist politics and the brief 1850s emergence of the “Know-Nothings,” whose American Party briefly eclipsed the Republicans in rising from the ashes of the dying Whigs. Another less successful third party, the Anti-Masonic Party, emerged briefly a bit earlier than that, from 1828 to 1838. But the earliest example of this brand of paranoid politics actually appeared in the United States of America’s first full decade, the 1790s. It didn’t emerge from some populist third-party fringe, but from religious elite leaders close to the heart of the ruling Federalist Party.
The French Revolution had set much of Europe into a panic, and the writings of two authors, John Robison (“Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe“) and Abbé Barruel, promoted a continent-wide hysteria over the notion that the revolution had been fostered by a short-lived, extinct organization, the Bavarian Illuminati (1776-1785), allegedly through a French Masonic lodge. In 1798, President John Adams proclaimed May 9 a national “day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer” in response to this nebulous threat. Jedidiah Morse, a leading conservative Congregationalist minister, preached a scathing jeremiad against the Bavarian Illuminati in response. In doing so, Morse broke with the traditional jeremiad formula with his finger-pointing toward an outside source of evil. [...]
Third: The alleged conspirators do not actually exist. While other conspiracy-theory episodes have had at least some foothold in reality — exaggerating threats posed by people who actually existed — the Illuminati scare stands out for the fact that there literally was no such thing. The organization no longer existed in Europe: The Illuminati had been disbanded before the French Revolution, under penalty of death for recruiters — and banishment and confiscation of property for anyone attending a meeting. It certainly didn’t exist in America, where no known meetings had ever been held. As noted above, America did have Freemasons. It never had organized Illuminati.
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