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- [00:00]
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- [01:09]
Don Wildman
Here at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. I'm buying a paper. I dig into my pocket and pull out a few crumpled singles. Funny how little I use cash these days. Feels almost antique. And yet holding a dollar bill, there's still something about it. The texture. 1/4 linen, 3/4 cotton. Soft and crisp at the same time. Well, till you put it through the laundry in a familiar sepia green. Washington's unwavering gaze. The serial numbers stamped in order. Then one Federal Reserve note. The United States of America, basically unchanged since 1963. Then the obverse. The weird side, the Great Seal. That unfinished pyramid on a barren landscape, its 13 steps rising to nowhere, topped by the ever watching eye of Providence. The design is unsettling as it is comforting and secure, as if it's whispering some truth. Right below it reads Novus Ordo Seclorum. New Order of the Ages. Yikes. It's eerie. It's cryptic. No wonder this thing keeps fueling theories spinning through closed door conspiracies, all whispered in the same breath as the one name that refuses to die. The Illuminati. And hello, it is. American history hit. I'm Don Wildman and we have a fascinating subject to discuss today. Once more, in the face of overwhelming desperation, helplessness and confusion, conspiracy theories are being bandied about that have no basis in fact, only in speculation rooted in fear of the unknown. Indeed, how unknown forces may be at work in our world, pulling the puppet strings to design our fate according to an agenda controlled by, well, unknown forces. Sound familiar? So where did this start? I mean, really, where did this notion of a star chamber of shadowy figures, a cabal of conspirators weaving their nefarious webs of intrigue at our expense to benefit only themselves, where did this come from? So this is an area where history is indispensable because there is a factual story behind this fiction, specifically to do with a group, more often than not cited as the force behind the mayhem, the method behind the madness. The ones called the Illuminati. Who were they? Where'd they come from? What was their grand plan? And is there any chance that somehow, somewhere, they're still meeting in secret and still playing as pawns in their grand chess game? Let us find out today, and quick, before they shut us off with author Michael Taylor, whose new work is entitled Impossible Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion, who is at present working on a full length history of the Illuminati in None Too Soon. Welcome, Michael Taylor, to American History Hit. Nice to meet you.
- [04:21]
Michael Taylor
Thanks very much, Don. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I've done some work with your colleagues on this side of the Atlantic. I'm in London at the minute, so it's a pleasure to make my way across to the States as well.
- [04:31]
Don Wildman
Fantastic, thanks. Okay, let's start by contrasting the rumor and reality. There's a long list of modern day events that lots of people automatically assume have to do with this select group of manipulators. Top of mind, the Kennedy assassination, moon landing, Vietnam War, 9 11, 2008, housing crisis, now even the fires of Los Angeles as they seek to create smart cities, whatever they are. What is the idea of how this group does its dastardly deeds at the most basic version?
- [05:04]
Michael Taylor
Well, it's important to state from the very outset that the Illuminati were real. This isn't fantasy, this isn't a conspiracy theory. Part of the book that I'm writing is going to be based in Bavaria in Germany in the 18th century, where a disgruntled liberal academic who was being frustrated by the Jesuits and the conservatives around him at university and within Bavaria. And he decided to form a secret society through which he could educate young men in the kind of philosophy and politics that he preferred and then send them off into various organs of government, into commerce, into the church, where they would shape the world in the way that Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, wanted. That's all true. And that basic mechanism has remained the same within the Illuminati conspiracy theory for the best part of 250 years now. The idea is that influential people are indoctrinated by the Illuminati, who thereby infiltrate the corridors of power, the councils of state, and who can shape government policy and international policy in the ways that they want.
- [06:10]
Don Wildman
What time frame are we talking about? The beginnings of this, when this man did what he did in Germany.
- [06:16]
Michael Taylor
So it was 1776, it was the foundation of the Illuminati. So in the spring of 1776, on both sides of the Atlantic, men filled with the ideas of the Enlightenment and willing to give democratic expression to those ideas, were meeting at great danger to themselves to move on their plans. Obviously, the Founding Fathers were in Philadelphia, but in Bavaria at the University of Ingolstadt in 1776. That's where Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati began. The problem with the Illuminati is that as much as they have all of these great ideas and really high minded ideas about how they want to shape society in the manner of the Enlightenment, they were completely incompetent. So although they have some success over the next 10 years in recruiting really quite significant figures within German society into their ranks, I think probably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe might be the most famous, maybe the most important figure in the history of German literature. By 1787, they are extinct. They have been hunted down. From 1784, they've been banned two or three times by the Bavarian state. And at every single turn they have made the wrong decision. So as much as they are gathering their forces to discuss how they're going to revolutionize the world, they're simultaneously finding that there isn't room for everybody. So some Illuminati are going to have to go and stay with Vice Hype's mother. They're having fights about who's going to pay for the postage, who wants what meals at what time. These are men who can't get a grip on their own lives, let alone run the rest of the world.
- [07:46]
Don Wildman
Why here? I mean, why in Bavaria and why at this university? And who was this man, Adam Weishaupt, that he had this notion?
- [07:55]
Michael Taylor
So Weishaupt was a young, quite gifted academic. He was a professor of law. And the reason that Bavaria was such a fertile terrain for this conspiracy was that it was an incredibly conservative place in the 18th century. It's really tempting to look at Europe in the 18th century and think that it is a bastion of the Enlightenment, that all of these new ideas about philosophy and politics and commerce and literature are coursing everywhere from all of the great cities and universities. That's not necessarily the case. Bavaria had been a closed Catholic state, a very conservative state, since the 16th century. And more important to the story is the fact that the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, had controlled almost all of the important positions at the University of Ingolstadt for 200 years. So you have this young, maybe even this radical professor who's been appointed in 1773, and three years later, he realizes that he's getting nowhere. He can't teach what he wants, he can't say what he wants at the university. And so if he can't do that openly, he decides to do it secretly.
- [08:59]
Don Wildman
A lot of this story will have to do with pushing back against the Catholic Church at this point. They don't call themselves the Illuminati, do they?
- [09:07]
Michael Taylor
No, they don't call themselves the Illuminati until 1778. They begin with the slightly less catchy name of the Perfectabilists. Because Weishaupt's great idea is that given the time and the resources, he will achieve the perfection of man by teaching the right lessons. And then, if his own perfected men are sent out into society, they in turn can perfect everybody else. And there will be this inevitable progress towards the realization of perfection in society as a whole. Then change their name again to the Society of the Bee, which is an even worse name. But Weishaupt's idea there is that the bee is his perfect worker. They will go about their business placidly and silently, always under direction. But if anybody should cross them, there is yet a sting in the tail. Eventually, however, the Illuminati sticks as the name, meaning literally the enlightened ones.
- [09:59]
Don Wildman
At the core of this effort is a really important and charming aspect of life in these days. You have the emergence of individuals, this idea of this individual spirit. And people like Ben Franklin are writing things like the Poor Richard's Almanac. This perfectibility of the individual is a big theme in society in these days. And it makes sense. I mean, as human civilization is becoming more mercantile and people are learning they can make money, and there's more of sort of things are breaking up into little guilds and so forth. A little earlier on, this whole idea of perfecting the human, your own self, which is very much what we do today still, this is what's going on in the midst of the Enlightenment.
- [10:40]
Michael Taylor
It's an incredibly hopeful message that Weishaupt is trying to proselytize for he genuinely believes that he can improve people and that people can improve society if only they learn the right lessons, if they can be taken away from the strictures of government and the Church especially. It's not a coincidence. I think that at a lot of this time there's an idea of stadial theory governing societies. So the men of the Scottish Enlightenment, and I looked at quite a lot of this for the work that I've done in the history of slavery, thought that society progressed through very discrete stages, that everybody began as a hundred room gatherer and then you became farmers of animals, then you became farmers of crops. And then eventually the highest stage of civilization was living in towns and cities and trading with other men who lived in other towns and cities. So there was this unceasing sense of progress that lots of people who were conscious parts of the Enlightenment believed that they were participating in that very process.
- [11:36]
Don Wildman
Who are the members of this cabal and is it fair to call them a cabal? I mean, how were they advertising themselves?
- [11:43]
Michael Taylor
Well, they advertised themselves very discreetly because it's important to remember, not only that, the messages that they were promulgating. So these ideas about slightly more democratic, slightly more secular, much more liberal ideas about society were in themselves incredibly dangerous in a conservative religious state like Bavaria. But even by forming a secret society, and this was a danger which the Masons had to confront as well, they were creating a world in which the authority of the state of the Duke of the Church was not recognized. Whenever you joined a Masonic lodge, whenever you joined a chapter of the Illuminati, in theory, people were not supposed to pay any attention to your rank and to your status in the outside world. So you were creating a separate sphere of government and of separate social world. And that terrified authorities.
- [12:33]
Don Wildman
I don't understand why. What was so dangerous about this to them?
- [12:37]
Michael Taylor
Well, it was a world that they couldn't control. And if you're an absolutist monarch in 18th century Europe, the idea is that you get to control practically every facet of everybody's life. And so for this to be a separate world in which people could talk about their own ideas and respect different authorities, that was theoretically terrifying. Because if people could develop those ideas in secrecy, in safety, what was to prevent them then perfecting their own schemes and then spreading this society? And there would be a clash, they feared, eventually, between these enlightened ideals of the Illuminati and the much more conservative ideas of the Bavarian government.
- [13:16]
Don Wildman
But it did catch on. And over a large geographical area. Right? I mean, who are the more famous people that we know belong to this group?
- [13:24]
Michael Taylor
I mentioned Goethe, who is the literary rock star of 18th and early 19th century Germany. And he joins the Illuminati in weimar in the 1780s. Some of the bigger names of the time. So people like Friedrich Schiller, who is again, one of the more famous men of 18th century, late 18th century Germany, he rejects the Illuminati. They try really, really hard to recruit him because they think he would be an incredible catch. But Schiller, in the end says, no, you know what? I don't actually like the way that you're running this. Because Weishaupt, as much as he's trying to preach this relatively liberal politics, is a dictator within the society himself. And Schiller recognizes that. There are, again, some pieces of circumstantial evidence that Mozart knew about the Illuminati whenever he was in Salzburg and Vienna. But the evidence that he actually joined them is not particularly clear. We know that things like Masonic symbols and imagery play a big part in his music, especially in the Magic Flute, but I'm not sure we've got the documentary evidence to prove that he was a key member of the Illuminati. What we do have, however, are hundreds, if not thousands of educated, literary, wealthy Germans who occupy positions of influence within state governments all over the place. And this really matters because in small, absolutist states, where the monarch, as much as he would like to, can't really control everything, things are delegated directly to these kinds of people. So they are the men who are setting the syllabus for schools. They are the men who are distributing money throughout the state. They're the men who are censoring what books people can read. So if the Illuminati can have as many of them within their ranks as possible, this is the way they hope to transform Germany.
- [15:05]
Don Wildman
Did they view it as a seditious act? I mean, were they. So much of it sounds to be focused on the individual and the betterment of mankind. How do they feel about their place in the state?
- [15:15]
Michael Taylor
So later they will be accused of being revolutionaries. They will be accused of sedition and blasphemous sedition. They didn't really see themselves embarking on that kind of crusade. They wanted to change the world imperceptibly, very, very gradually. They knew that it was dangerous. But at the same time, they weren't atheists. They were liberal Christians, both Catholics And Protestants. But they didn't want to overturn the Church, nor did they want to destroy the state and set up something new. They just wanted to shape government in the way that they thought would be best for everybody.
- [15:50]
Don Wildman
It is very similar to what you learned. One learns about the guilds and how they were training their members in secret because the church did not like that, you know, especially the Low Countries and all these scary places up there. And also against the state. I mean, these. This time frame is really about this emergence, as I'm saying, and this is an important theme to hang our hat on, that this is a time the Enlightenment is about the individual emerging from what has always been a group mentality. And there's education, there's, as I say, people are making money. This is what is naturally happening in society that we are part of. And we are part of that continuum. Today they're joining in on this and sort of ramping things up. Is that a fair way of looking at it?
- [16:34]
Michael Taylor
They are certainly self consciously part of the Enlightenment. They didn't necessarily refer to it in those terms because, you know, Kant had only really asked the question, vas is auf Klrung, relatively recently. So it's a term that historians like to apply to this to make sense of these whole phenomena. But they are definitely reading books. And Weiszweim sets a very, very strict curriculum for all of the people that he wants to teach. What should you read? And all the stuff at the start is about stoic philosophy and 18th century philosophy, which is about knowing and understanding the self. So Alexander Pope's essay on man, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, all of these people are about being able to understand the passions that drive men, being able to control them. And this is where perhaps there is something a little bit more sinister. If you can understand those things about yourself, then perhaps you can control them in other people.
- [17:25]
Don Wildman
Right?
- [17:26]
Michael Taylor
They absolutely did foresee, or they certainly wanted to foresee, a world in which these changes take place. I'm not sure they ever really understood exactly how they were going to give effect to these things, because the relative success in recruitment rather overtook Weishaupt's ability to construct a secret society that was big enough and robust enough and could be directed with enough central authority in order to achieve these goals.
- [17:54]
Don Wildman
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
- [18:00]
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Michael Taylor
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- [18:23]
Don Wildman
A month with Boost Mobile Forever.
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- [19:58]
Don Wildman
We look at the enlightenment with such a, you know, from the perspective of history at the time. How much were they talking about these ideals as happening in everyday life? I mean, something they were trying to practice as they as they preached.
- [20:11]
Michael Taylor
There was certainly a domestic aspect to it. They focused in their recruitment. They were sent really quite extensive documents about all the things that they should look for in an ideal Illuminatis, and it would be how a man behaved. You know, were they polite? Could they command the respect of somebody in, you know, a coffee shop or in a lecture theater? How did they interact with one another? How did they deal with adversity? It was as much about perfecting the ability of the human being to withstand Whatever life in society could throw at him as much as it was about shaping society directly. So it was all about these indirect.
- [20:50]
Don Wildman
Processes, which is what basically the Freemasons were doing for. For a long time at that point. I'm using the metaphor of a builder, the compass, you know, all the techniques of architecture to rebuild a man from the inside out and create a better and stronger individual. How much did he use the ideas of Freemasonry in creating this group?
- [21:10]
Michael Taylor
So Weislej was very much aware of Freemasonry before he founded the Illuminati. And they were something of a model. He actually tried to join them. He tried to join a lodge in Nuremberg in 1775, but he find that he couldn't afford the fees and the travel expenses. So it wouldn't be until later that Weishaupt formally joined Freemasonry. It's important to say that the Illuminati are not Freemasons. Individual Illuminati, many individual Illuminati are Freemasons. And eventually what Weishaupt and one of his lieutenants, Adolf Freiherr von Knige, decide upon is that they would use disenchanted lodges of Freemasonry. Because there's a crisis in German Freemasonry in the early 1780s. There's an ideological schism and they look upon the lodges and the members of these lodges not only as viable recruits, but as vehicles for what they want to do. Because the Illuminati don't have bases, they don't necessarily have meeting houses, they don't have an institutional structure which will allow them to carry out their plans. So they try to infiltrate Freemasonic lodges and they do that really, really successfully. In most of the major cities in Germany. They convert leading Masons to Illuminism or to what some historians have called Illuminated Freemasonry. And therefore they use these Masonic lodges as headquarters for their campaigns.
- [22:28]
Don Wildman
Yeah, so let's underscore what we're talking about here. Just take a moment. The Illuminati is a name that refers not to some strange mystic glow or even weird lighting device from under the table. It refers to the Enlightenment. That is a direct case here, which for my money is that which made modern society certainly this American one that I live in, it makes it work, separating us from the binds of old feudalism and state religion. So. So every time we say the word Illuminati, one should not hear the woo woo sound effect in your head. It's. It has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the Enlightenment.
- [23:07]
Michael Taylor
Yeah. And in many cases, you can look on this original, real history of the Illuminati and think that, you know, maybe they were the good guys. They. They were trying to improve the world, or at least they were trying to improve the world in the way they thought was genuine here. And they were keen on the whole idea of a new world. Maybe not quite the New World order that comes from the woo woo in the 20th century, but they were looking. And bear in mind that the American Revolutionary War is happening at the same time here. They're on the side of the Americans. They want the colonists to triumph, and in fact, they want to send emissaries to speak to Jefferson and Adams whenever they're at Paris and Versailles negotiating the French intervention in the war. But they also look upon the upside to an American defeat because they understand that if the British win, they will need to rebuild their colonies in the Americas and they will need to repopulate them. So whenever the Illuminati are trying to recruit influential individuals, they are promising at the same time that if the British win, we're going over there, we're going to form illuminated colonies in Georgia and South Carolina. We're going to start out with maybe a few dozen men, the best kind of men from Germany, and we're going to take over our wives, and we're going to adopt orphaned children, and we are going to build our new illuminated society in the south of America.
- [24:25]
Don Wildman
So, Michael, this lasts, this period you're talking about, a little more than a decade. Is that fair to say?
- [24:30]
Michael Taylor
Yes. So by 1784, the Illuminati are strong, they're confident, but they're overconfident. And they begin bragging a little bit too loudly about what they're trying to do. And they make some very powerful enemies in Munich, at the Bavarian court. And from 1784, over the course of the next three years, they are hunted down, they are banned, they are thrown in prison, they lose their jobs, they lose their reputations. Adam Weishaupt has to flee, first from Ingolstadt to Regensburg, and then from Regensburg to Goethe. And it's a fairly pathetic existence that he leads for the rest of his life. He's crying in the wilderness, trying to protest his innocence, trying to prove that he was a good, loyal citizen and that he just wanted to change the world for the better. This is not, however, the end of the story, because come 1789, and especially come 1792 and 93, truly revolutionary things have happened in France. Truly extraordinary things that people are really struggling to understand. The French monarchy has been probably the most significant political institution in Europe, if not the world, for several centuries, and it disappears within the space of three years. It's abolished. And in desperation, people are trying to work out who could possibly have done this thing, because they don't have sophisticated means of analysis, they don't have access to all of the evidence. What they have are references to God, and they assume that God hasn't directed the French Revolution or human agency. So which group of men could have been willful and powerful enough to achieve these things? Who wanted to achieve these things? Well, on one reading of the history of the Illuminati, Weishaupt and his acolytes did so from 1797 and 1798. We have two really influential books that are published in Britain, first by the Abbe Barruwell, who is an emigrant, he's an exile, he's a former Jesuit priest, he's deeply conservative, and he despises everything about the French Revolution. So he blames the Illuminati. He thinks the Illuminati have survived somehow and have exported their message into Paris, into the Jacobin clubs, and that they are driving the French Revolution. The other author who writes his account of the conspiracy theory in isolation from Barrawell, but at the same time is John Robeson, who is one of the paradigmatic figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. He's a physics professor who has a fairly unblemished reputation until this point, but he's also a Mason, and he wants to defend Freemasonry from charges of corruption and infection by the Illuminati. So he simultaneously seeks to blame the Illuminati for the French Revolution in Britain. We have, in this late 1790s, these two books, which some people think are ridiculous, but lots of people, especially conservatives, who fear the ideology of the French Revolution and who would have opposed the Illuminati themselves if they had known about them at the time. They believe this conspiracy theory. They are terrified and they are looking for an enemy, and so they alight upon the Illuminati.
- [27:22]
Don Wildman
But this belies the fact that the Illuminae have sort of rotted from within, haven't they? There was so much infighting during that period of the breakdown.
- [27:29]
Michael Taylor
Oh, they collapse completely. So as much as they take over lots of Freemasonic lodges in Germany, they can't control these lodges. In fact, lots of people who are promised higher secret wisdom and the mystery of a secret society. Well, if they were already fairly literate progressive figures in Frankfurt, or Mainz or these fairly developed German cities. They'll have seen what these Bavarian professors are doing. They weren't very impressed, and so they fall away pretty quickly. But Weisweibt wants to control everything that's going on within the Illuminati, and that doesn't sit well with other ambitious people. So he begins falling out with his lieutenants. He also begins falling out with all of his colleagues at the university. Now he's established the Illuminati at Ingolstadt as a means of escaping from the conservatism of the Jesuits at Ingolstadt. But they still hate him. They're still after him. And so by 1785, with rumors swirling around about the founder of the Illuminati, they go for him again, and he flees. He quits, and he's in exile, really, for the rest of his life, as we've said. And so the Bavarian authorities, by this stage, are beginning to hunt down members of the suspected members of the Illuminati. People are turncoats. They go over to the authorities and they say, oh, these guys who are my enemies now, they were up to all sorts of terrible things, so you should definitely persecute them. And they accidentally yield up evidence of everything that they were doing as well. This is a completely.
- [28:55]
Don Wildman
We've learned the term from all those police procedurals they've rolled up on these guys. Everybody turns on each other, and houses are ransacked and documents are seized, and it all gets very condemned by the state and then gets painted with a brush, as you say, down the road.
- [29:14]
Michael Taylor
And so much of this is farce rather than high treason. So one of the senior Illuminati was called Franz Xaver von Zwack, and he's been expelled from his job, or at least from his office in Munich, and he's in a Bavarian town called Landshut, and he hears that further accusations are going to be made about him to the Bavarian authorities. So he rushes off from Landshut to Munich, but he leaves all of his documents unguarded. Well, he thinks he's done enough to protect him because he stored them in a drawer in his bedroom beneath his wife's underwear. But the authorities come in, they ransack the place, they find all the documents, and suddenly there's proof that the Illuminati were up to no good. This happens again with Count von Bassus and his documents that he's just carelessly stored in a drawer in his study in his castle at Sandersdorf, outside Ingolst. So now suddenly, by 1780, 6:87. There's evidence that the Illuminati were real, that they were a secret society who were promulgating all of these radical ideas. And that's enough to put pay to the secret society for good.
- [30:11]
Don Wildman
So over the course of about 10 to 20, 30 years, really, you end up with this very hopeful idea run by a guy who was a fair, becomes a dictator. I mean, it's really sounds like the story of any. I mean, cult, frankly, but any group like this that has sort of this internal agenda, trying to inflict itself upon the world, has problems within itself, and then ends up breaking down with the pressures that come upon it. I want to explore what you've just touched on before about the. About the way that this group was blamed for the French Revolution, which becomes so much of the crucible of what we still live with with this idea. Does it begin with these books that come out of Great Britain?
- [30:52]
Michael Taylor
There are rumors and there are accusations in the early 1790s in Germany, in France, some in Britain, but it really does begin with these books in 1797. They are literary and commercial sensations. Even if you don't believe them, everybody's reading them. All of the newspapers, all of the review journals are addressing them, are critiquing them, and they command quite serious audiences. The problem, if you're trying to debunk the conspiracy theory, is that things begin to happen which might be attributable to a secret society doing terrible things. So you have mutinies in the British Navy, in the Royal Navy in 1797, and you then have in Ireland in 1798, a massive rebellion of the United Irish who had been in contact with the French Jacobins. So if you are minded to believe in the conspiracy theory, you can easily fit everything that is happening in the 1790s into that continued story of the conspiracy.
- [31:47]
Don Wildman
Because it seems so unlikely that the great state of France, with this tremendous aristocracy, with all of the history that was behind this, would suddenly collapse. How could that possibly happen? There are lots of reasons why that happened, and there's lots of history behind that that's provable. This is so much the case of conspiracy theories that they become a comfortable place for people to go to, to undo what seems like such a tangled mystery. This happens over and over and over again. It's just very interesting to find out that the Illuminati were blamed for the French Revolution. I don't think a lot of people walking around today understand that that's really where it begins.
- [32:28]
Michael Taylor
And lots of really, really serious people believe this. So British booksellers ship these books across the Atlantic as well, and they land in the United States and especially in New England at a time of intense political activity and sensitivity. So the United States is torn between perhaps allying itself with Britain against France or perhaps allying itself with France against Britain. It's fighting the French in a quasi war at sea over piracy. In 1798, the Adams government passes the Alien and Sedition act because they believe that immigrants to the United States, especially from Europe, are Trojan horses for this kind of republican ideology that they think would be fatal to their own republican project or this extreme republican ideology that they fear. And there are important, influential people, especially in Connecticut. So you have Timothy Dwight, who's the president of Yale, you have Jedediah Morse, who's a really respected preacher in New England, who's the father of Samuel Morse, who invents Morse cod. And they are publishing books and pamphlets and sermons saying, you know, hold on here. If we look at Jeffersonian Republicanism, if we look at Jefferson's well known pro French biases in foreign policy and the time that he spent in Paris, well, isn't it obvious that the Illuminati are beginning to infiltrate American society too?
- [33:48]
Don Wildman
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
- [33:56]
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- [34:52]
Don Wildman
So the idea was, if I'm getting this, that this German phenomenon, the Illuminati, had somehow infiltrated the French society, tipped the revolution, which of course at first we were very in favor of, but went too far because of all their nefarious doings, they want to take things over. That same problem could happen to the American Revolution, to our ideals that if we let these people infiltrate here, that's going to happen. And they see this so obviously because the French had such a big role in our revolution. Right?
- [35:26]
Michael Taylor
Yeah. The world is a much more connected place. These ideas about freedom and liberty and republicanism are being swapped across the Atlantic in between cities and so it's not necessarily a stretch of the imagination to believe that now a small number of French people at the French court in the 1770s and 1780s had done so much to accelerate and to solidify and to guarantee the American Revolution. Why would the Illuminati, these geniuses of the Enlightenment, not have been capable of doing the same in Paris? And if they've done that, then what would be to prevent them doing something similar in the United States?
- [36:02]
Don Wildman
Sure.
- [36:03]
Michael Taylor
And it's important that we recognize this is not completely far fetched for people at the time. It's obviously insane. It never happens. And we would probably be laughed out of any kind of court if we tried to prove it today. But serious people did believe this. So, you know, John Adams and his wife Abigail are reading about these things. They've been alerted to them by their sons who are in Europe at the time, and they are very, very deeply concerned. George Washington is informed of the Illuminati by a German immigrant to Virginia, and again, he seems to take it relatively seriously. Jefferson himself ends up reading the books, and he actually seems quite sympathetic to lots of Weishaupt's ideals, as you might expect. But he regards Barrawell as a crackpot. So in these years 1798, 99, 1800, which culminates in the Revolution of 1800, when Jefferson's Republicans cast out the Federalists from the federal governments. Jefferson beats Adams in the presidential election. The Illuminati are a specter looming over all of this in the political discourse.
- [37:04]
Don Wildman
Because where did Jefferson come down on this?
- [37:07]
Michael Taylor
He was sympathetic to the ideals that the Illuminati were propagating, but he didn't necessarily believe that there had been any kind of conspiracy that could have caused the French Revolution.
- [37:16]
Don Wildman
But he could have been painted with that brush right by his. By his adversaries.
- [37:20]
Michael Taylor
Oh, and he was. Jeffersonian Republicans were damned as American Illuminati.
- [37:25]
Don Wildman
There you go.
- [37:25]
Michael Taylor
You know, if you weren't a Federalist, if you weren't pro British, if you were sympathetic to the European immigrants who were arriving on the shores and likely to vote Republican, then you were probably one of the Illuminati, at least in their adult imagination.
- [37:38]
Don Wildman
Boy, you can see how useful this is to, you know, not just to the 1700s, but all the way through to all the world events that happen or the domestic events that happen here in the States that, that seem to shake the very foundation of where we live. How does this happen? You know, you look back on it. How did we get here? Well, it must be this group that's in charge. And it's incredible to me how applied this becomes throughout time. I mean, we move from this into the 1930s and 50s for that matter. It's incredible.
- [38:09]
Michael Taylor
Yeah. So the Illuminati are there in the background in quite a lot of events in the 19th century. They do have an eruption of relevance in the 1820s and 1830s in American politics with the rise of the anti Masonic Party party who send quite a few congressmen to Washington. They've got the governorships of Delaware and Pennsylvania. They have people like William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore and John Quincy Adams among their ranks at the time. And if you go back and read the transcripts from the early anti Masonic Party conventions, they are passing motions about Barwell and Robison and condemning Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati. The conspiracy theory is alive and well in the 1830s. What really gives it a new lease of life in the 20th century is the Russian Revolution. So if we can compare it to the French Revolution, you have the Russian Empire, the czars of St. Petersburg who've been there for hundreds of years. You have a deeply autocratic, religious, conservative, Orthodox state which disappears within the course of a year and is replaced by a militant form of Communism. And again, people will look at this and just not understand it. So they are more inclined, I think, to blame individuals or to at least attempt to understand the processes underlying the Russian Revolution with reference to individuals who could possibly have achieved such a thing, who were the plotters? And thanks primarily to a very well off British socialite and author called Nesta Webster, the myth of the Illuminati conspiracy theory is revived again. And she begins to paint Communism and Leninism and Marxism as merely a continuation of Adam Weishaupt's project from the 1770s. She now looks back into the history of the 19th century and sees the hand of the Illuminati in almost everything that has happened. And a continuity between Bavaria and St. Petersburg.
- [40:04]
Don Wildman
Wow. Literally, I always thought that, you know, when people bandy about the term Illuminati, it's more of a general idea rather than specifically referring to a continuation of the organization. But you're saying that was actually written about.
- [40:16]
Michael Taylor
Oh, yeah. And it's picked up in lots of the British press. The books sell a hell of a lot of copies. Someone like Winston Churchill is reading one of her books in the early 1920s, reviewing it in the London press, and he says, well, yeah, clearly this has been going on for the last 150 years. What seems to prove it is that Adam Weishaupt's code name was Spartacus within the Illuminati and who had just launched a communist revolution in Germany, the Spartacists. So in this conspiratorial mindset, everything is proof.
- [40:47]
Don Wildman
Yeah, it goes right into the 50s and John Birch Society takes this up. But I really want to emphasize the fact, I've never trusted the fact that there was a literal reference being made that this had sort of shifted over time to a more of a metaphor, that people, we don't understand who they are, but they're at work here. But this is really important to make note of that there is a lot of people who literally think that this is the same organization.
- [41:15]
Michael Taylor
Yeah. And there are three or four people in the post war period who do quite a lot to keep propagating this myth. One of them is a retired British naval officer called William Guy Carr, who after the First World War, spends the 1920s hunting down communist spies in the merchant marine around the world. Emanuel Mann Josephson is an American Columbia educated doctor and he writes an influential first pamphlet called Roosevelt's Communist Manifesto. He wasn't a fan of the, of the New Deal. And with, as you mentioned, the John Birch Society, these people begin to reimagine the Illuminati as nefarious international conspiratorial government forces. If Weishop's plan eventually had been to transform the world, well, wouldn't he have wanted a world government? And so they point to things like the IMF and the United nations and even to NATO. Never mind that NATO is formed as a defensive alliance against communism and against Russia. They nonetheless believe that NATO is a Trojan horse for communism and for the illuminous conspiracy to foist communism upon the United States.
- [42:21]
Don Wildman
But how much do you think that these people were using this idea, you know, consciously understanding that it wasn't correct, but they were using it, that it becomes this ploy that they can win mass audience with because they know that the myth is still alive.
- [42:35]
Michael Taylor
So the question of where the metal ends and the rust begins with these people is always really, really difficult. I think from what I've read of them so far, that certainly at first they genuinely believe this. They truly think that there is a network of men sitting in smoky rooms deciding the fate of the world in service of an illuminous project. It doesn't necessarily take in the same way that it did in the 1920s or in the 1790s for a number of reasons. One is, as I've just mentioned, it was really obvious that these government associations were fighting communism. They were not propagating it. The fact that there is really explicit antisemitism in a lot of these people's views as well, discredits them completely. Because this is a world which is coming to grips with the horrors of the 1940s in Central Europe. And so I think serious political figures are really unwilling to align themselves with any of these anti Semitic conspiracy theories. I also began to wonder whether or not the boom in political satire in the 1960s had something to do with it. It was just easier for people to laugh at these ideas now. Previously, you might have disagreed with them, you might have thought they were nonsense, but you may have accorded them a modicum of respect. But now you can just take. Take the mickey out of them. You know that, you know, you know that it's answer, so you can just laugh.
- [43:58]
Don Wildman
But along comes the Internet, which now gives, you know, free wheel to everything that is, you know, everything and anything comes at you every day. You're writing a book on this subject. Do you see a hopeful end to this or is it just gonna get worse?
- [44:14]
Michael Taylor
Well, I think it's certainly different. The Illuminati conspiracy theory in the time of the Internet has changed. You mentioned a few minutes ago whether, you know, the idea that Illuminati was simply a catchword that people would try to attribute to anything they didn't like. Now, that hadn't been true for a very long time, but I think it is true now. I don't think anybody is tracing a lineage all the way back to Bavaria in the 1770s anymore. In fact, if you go onto a website like Infowars and, you know, you may or may not want to do that, and you read all of their articles which allege that the Illuminati are behind the assassination plot on Trump or the Oscars or the forest fires or whatever it may be, it's not really about the Illuminati at all. It's a word to grab people's attention. It's now become a conspiracy theory where you say somebody is a member of the Illuminati to discredit them, or you want to blame shadowy figures that you can't identify and you call them Illuminati or members of the Bohemian Grove or members of the Bilderberg Group or attendees of Davos in the World Economic Forum. It all melds into one, right?
- [45:21]
Don Wildman
Exactly. It's become the great, you know, unseen hand that's working among us.
- [45:27]
Michael Taylor
Yeah, there are a few things I think people should really remember whenever they're considering the validity of conspiracy theories first. And this is not the most sophisticated thing that you'll ever hear an historian say, but sometimes stuff just happens.
- [45:41]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [45:42]
Michael Taylor
The second thing is people are really, really bad at keeping a secret. Now, if you were a member of the Illuminati, if you were an all powerful member of this enlightened secret society which was directing world events, I'd want to tell people, yes, from the documented history that we do have about the illuminati in the 1770s, they did tell people. That's why they got caught. They were so excited and caught up in what they were doing that they let their guard down and they were exposed really, really quickly. The third thing is that people are incompetent. There is no way that people who couldn't arrange accommodation for members of their congress or who arranged a convent of leading Freemasons that was supposed to be held in super secrecy in the summer of 1782 at a really popular spa resort at the height of the summer season. These people didn't necessarily know what they were doing. And I think that's true of all of these conspiracy theories. Do you really think that everybody could pull off these incredible tricks and feats and hoaxes? No.
- [46:39]
Don Wildman
Well, they've won in that we're even bothering to talk about it. But it's the case of human nature really is what's at the heart of it all. Michael Taylor's new book is called Impossible Monsters, Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion. But I'm really looking forward to the new book that you're working on, which is the History of the Illuminati. Good luck with that, Michael. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [47:02]
Michael Taylor
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
- [47:05]
Don Wildman
Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American history hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.
- [47:40]
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