Crowned Heads Under the Beds: Satire, Sedition, and the Circulation of Fake News in the Reconstruction-era United States? Seminar

On a stormy evening in early 1869, three men met in a New York boardinghouse to plot the downfall of the United States. Declaring their eternal hatred for democracy, and their belief that only a monarchy could secure stable government, they proposed to establish a new ‘Empire of the West’ on the ruins of a war-ravaged republic. Over the following months, rumors of a coming coup - mostly emanating from the pages of a brazen advocate of hereditary government in Manhattan, The Imperialist - spread across the Union. Such monarchist scheming met a barrage of denunciation and pockets of praise.

The Imperialist conspiracy of 1869, I will show in my paper, was an elaborate hoax. But like more recent concocted conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, that hoax reveals much about the viral spread of information, the parlous state of a polarised political culture, and the ways in which frustrated producers of news could turn to forgery in order to turn a quick profit and expose the ‘humbuggeries’ of their employers. Part Bohemian prank undertaken by acquaintances of Whitman and Twain, and part conservative thought experiment that reflected real anxieties about the long term viability of republicanism, the Empire of the West is a joke worth taking seriously.