Free Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

which always has been considerable in a country built on imagination.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Templars in Town

    B etween 1798 and 1799, Mr. Madison spent much of his time wondering about the wheels within wheels. Both Great Britain and France had been playing cleverly behind the scenes, seeking to influence the new American republic. Conspiracy theories abounded, not all of them fanciful. President John Adams, distrustful of the revolution in France, beset at home by noisy political opponents and impertinent newspaper editors, and seeing hidden hands in every fresh outburst against him, had signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson referred to the period as the “reign of witches,” and he and Madison worked surreptitiously in Virginia and Kentucky to pass resolutions arguing that the states had the right to nullify acts of the federal government they deemed unconstitutional.
    (This theory of republican government would have unfortunate consequences when southern politicians revived it with a vengeance in 1861. Indeed, in his later years, Mr. Madison saw clearly where the doctrine was headed. Between 1828 and 1833, fearful of the civil war he knew was coming, he supported PresidentAndrew Jackson in the nullification crisis against South Carolina, and he spent years attempting to erase from history his involvement in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Even for him, there were wheels within wheels.)
    Madison saw the inherent value of inflamed public opinion as a spur to political action, but he was also wary of the demagogic threat to reason if public opinion was not kept in its proper place. He’d helped create channels in which public enthusiasms could be made to work for the common good, like a wild river run through a mill. He did that because he believed that the republican spirit was present in all human endeavors, from politics to popular culture to the fashions of the day. He saw that the dangers unreason presented to that spirit were as prevalent in the shops as they were in the Congress.
    In 1792, he had taken up the cause of some twenty thousand British buckle manufacturers thrown out of work because the fashion of the day had changed and shoes were now being made with laces, or as slippers, with no fasteners at all. “Can any despotism be more cruel than a situation in which the existence of thousands depends on one will,” Mr. Madison wrote, “and that will on the most slight and fickle of motives, a mere whim of the imagination?” Nothing, he believed, was as dangerous to reason as fashion was.

    IN 1887, Ignatius Donnelly attempted to demolish Shakespeare. Say what you will about him, he didn’t aim small.
    Donnelly was a Baconian, one of those people who assert that Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays attributed to that semiliterate hayseed from Stratford. It was a snob’s argument, and it ran counter to the populist principles that still animated Donnelly’s politics. But he adopted it with a ferocitythat surpassed even his enthusiasm for prehistoric comets. He published
The Great Cryptogram
, a massive doorstop in which he attempted to prove not only that Bacon had written the plays, but that he’d encoded clues to his authorship within them. Donnelly claimed to have discovered in the First Folio edition a “cipher” involving dots and dashes, and the spaces between words. He then applied this cipher to certain words that he called “constants,” and, mirabile dictu, he discovered exactly the messages he expected to find and those messages proved exactly the case he’d wanted to make.
    The book was as big a flop financially as
Ragnarok
had been, and as poorly reviewed, but it wasn’t ignored. Donnelly was shredded by the critics this time. A certain Joseph Gilpin Pyle wrote
The Little Cryptogram
, in which Pyle used Donnelly’s method to find in
Hamlet
the message “The Sage [of Nininger] is a daysie.”
    Undaunted, Donnelly went to England and defended his work at the