CONTENTS

About the Book

You don’t have to be mad to live here, but it helps

If you want to understand Trump’s America, how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you have to go back to the very beginning and take a dizzying road trip across five centuries of crackpot delusion and make-believe from Salem to Scientology.

From the Pilgrim Fathers onward, America has been a place where renegades and freaks came in search of freedom to create their own realities with little objectively regulated truth standing in their way. To invent and believe what the hell you like is in some ways an unwritten constitutional right. Every citizen is more than ever gloriously free to construct and promote any vision of the world he or she devoutly believes to be true. That do-your-own-thing freedom – run amok since the individualism and relativism of the 1960s and later the unprecedented free-for-all world of the Internet, is the driving credo of America’s current transformation where the difference between opinion and fact is rapidly crumbling.

Fantasyland is a journey that joins the dots between the disparate crazed franchises of true believers – America’s endless homespun rebooting of Christianity from Mormons to charismatics, medicine shows to new age quacks, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, Creationists to climate change deniers, extra-terrestrial obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, anti-Government paranoia, pseudoscience, survivalists and satanic panic. Along the way Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. He co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and the New Yorker and contributes to Vanity Fair and the New York Times. Read more about him at his website: http://www.kurtandersen.com/

NOVELS

True Believers

Heyday

Turn of the Century

ESSAYS

Reset

The Real Thing

CO-AUTHOR

Tools of Power

Loose Lips

You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My First Fantastic Year as President Donald J. Trump

1

Now Entering Fantasyland

THIS BOOK HAS been germinating for a long time. In the late 1990s I wrote a few articles pointing toward it—about American politics morphing into show business and baby boomers trying to stay forever young, about untrue conspiracy theories being mainstreamed and the explosion of talk radio as it became more and more about the hosts’ wild opinions. In 1999 I published a novel about a TV producer who created two groundbreaking shows—a police drama in which the fictional characters interact with real police arresting real criminals, and a news program featuring scenes of the anchors’ private lives.

But the ideas and arguments really started crystallizing in 2004 and 2005. First President George W. Bush’s political mastermind Karl Rove introduced the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People “in the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He said it with a sense of humor, but he was also deadly serious. A year later The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of his first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing populist character, performed a feature called The Word in which he riffed on a phrase. “Truthiness,” he said.

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed in this particular, peculiar way, I realized. Until the 2000s, truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made much sense as jokes.

My understanding of how this change occurred became clearer a few years later, when I started work on a novel about a group of kids who in the early 1960s role-play James Bond stories, and then in 1968, as college students, undertake a real-life Bond-like antigovernment plot. During the 1960s, reality and fantasy blurred problematically, for my characters and for plenty of real Americans. In the course of researching and thinking through that story, I came to understand the era and its impacts in a new way. For all the fun, and all the various positive effects of the social and cultural upheavals, I saw that it was also the Big Bang moment for truthiness. And if the 1960s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are mistaken to consider ourselves over it, because what people say about recovery is true: you’re never really cured.

I realized too that this complicated American phenomenon I was trying to figure out had been not just decades but centuries in the making. In order to understand our weakness for fantasy of all kinds, I needed to follow the tendrils and branches and roots further back—all the way back, to America’s beginnings.

You’re not going to agree with me about all the various mental habits and beliefs and behaviors I classify here as imaginary or fantastical. You may find me too judgmental about matters of deep personal conviction. As I pass by fish in barrels, I will often shoot them. But I don’t consider all religion or all alternative belief systems or all conspiracy theories or all impossible dreams misguided. Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense.

What’s problematic is going overboard, letting the subjective entirely override the objective, people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will. In America those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts.

Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the last half-century, Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation, small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become. The cliché would be the frog in the gradually warming pot, oblivious to its doom until too late.fn1

Much more than the other billion or two people in the rich world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and miraculous, in Satan on Earth now, reports of recent trips to and from Heaven, and a several-thousand-year-old story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.

At the turn of the millennium, our financial industry fantasized that risky debt was no longer risky, so many tens of millions of Americans fantasized that they could live like rich people, given our fantasy that real estate would always and only increase in value.

We believe the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous truths from us—concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of AIDS, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.

We stockpile guns because we fantasize about our pioneer past, or in anticipation of imaginary shootouts with thugs and terrorists. We acquire military costumes and props in order to pretend we’re soldiers—or elves or zombies—fighting battles in which nobody dies, and enter fabulously realistic virtual worlds to do the same.

And that was all before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, what’s true and what’s false, the nature of reality.

We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. America has mutated into Fantasyland.

HOW WIDESPREAD IS this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of people’s beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think, but from reams of research, drilling down and cross-checking and distilling data from the last twenty years, a rough, useful census of American belief, credulity, and delusion does emerge.

By my reckoning, the more or less solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, believe with some certainty that CO₂ emissions from cars and factories are the main cause of Earth’s warming. Only a third are sure the tale of creation in Genesis isn’t a literal, factual account. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts.

Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” At least half are absolutely certain Heaven exists, ruled over by a personal God—not some vague force or universal spirit but a guy. More than a third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists, government, and journalists.

A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like humans today; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of “natural” cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have recently visited (or now reside on) Earth.

A quarter believe vaccines cause autism and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 general election. A quarter believe that our previous president was (or is?) the Antichrist. A quarter believe in witches. Remarkably, no more than one in five Americans believe the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—around the same number who believe that “the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals” and that U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.fn2

When I say that a third believe X or a quarter believe Y, it’s important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the U.S. population. Various fantasy constituencies overlap and feed each other—for instance, belief in extraterrestrial visitation and abduction can lead to belief in vast government cover-ups, which can lead to belief in still more wide-ranging plots and cabals, which can jibe with a belief in an impending Armageddon involving Jesus. Fantasyland operates like the European Union, a collection of disparate domains of various sizes overlaid with a Schengen Area that allows citizens of any of the dozens of lands to travel freely among the others, the way Hungarians and Maltese can visit France or Iceland at will.

And like intra-European antipathies, the mutual contempt among Fantasyland regions can be as intense as their contempt for the reality-based. To many evangelicals, Pentecostals are heretics, and to evangelicals and Pentecostals, Mormons are heretics; Pat Robertson has called Scientology satanic; the Vatican considers Oprah’s apostles misguided fools; different kinds of truthers regard each other as deluded. A lot of the people certain that GMOs are unsafe to eat, despite overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary, deride deniers of climate science. Indeed, the history of Fantasyland could be rendered bracketologically, like college basketball, centuries of continuous playoffs, with particular teams losing (Puritans) and winning (Mormons) along the way and continuing to fight it out today.

Why are we like this?

That’s what this book will explore. The short answer is because we’re Americans, because being American means we can believe any damn thing we want, that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet that hated Establishment, the institutions and forces that once kept us from overdoing the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, politics, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—has enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the last few decades.

A senior physician at one of America’s most prestigious university hospitals promotes miracle cures on his daily TV show. Major cable channels air documentaries treating mermaids, monsters, ghosts, and angels as real. A CNN anchor speculated on the air that the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner was a supernatural event. State legislatures and one of our two big political parties pass resolutions to resist the imaginary impositions of a New World Order and Islamic law. When a political scientist attacks the idea that “there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged,” colleagues just nod and grant tenure. A white woman felt black, pretended to be, and under those fantasy auspices became an NAACP official—and then, busted, said, “It’s not a costume … not something that I can put on and take off anymore. I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black.” Bill Gates’s foundation has funded an institute devoted to creationist pseudoscience. Despite his nonstop lies and obvious fantasies—rather, because of them—Donald Trump was elected president. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable. As particular fantasies get traction and become contagious, other fantasists are encouraged by a cascade of out-of-control tolerance. It’s a kind of twisted Golden Rule unconsciously followed: If those people believe that, then certainly we can believe this.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the last several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks with no easy exit. Voilà: Fantasyland.

THE SCOPE OF this book extends way beyond the contagion of clear-cut, fact-checkable untruths. America’s transformation finally clicked into focus for me when I stepped back and broadened my field of vision. I saw that the proliferation of delusions and illusions concerning the large subjects that people have always debated—politics, religion, even science—is connected to the proliferation and glut of the fictional and quasi-fictional coursing through everyday American life.

What I’m calling Fantasyland isn’t only a matter of falsehoods fervently believed but of people assembling make-believe lifestyles as well. Both kinds of fantasy—conspiracy theories and belief in magic on one hand and fantasy football and virtual reality on the other—make everyday existence more exciting and dramatic. And the modern tipping points for both kinds were the result of the same two momentous changes.

The first was that profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the 1960s, whereby Americans ever since have had a new rule set in their mental operating systems, even if they’re certain they possess the real truth: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. The paradigm can be explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, but it’s the way we are now.

The second big enabling change was the new era of information and communications. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of both types, the lifestyle and entertainment kinds as well as the ideological and religious and pseudoscientific kinds, in subtypes bright and dark. Among the one billion websites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists who share their beliefs, with collages of facts and “facts” to back them up. Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.

Computers make fantasies that we (mostly) understand to be fantasies seem much more authentic as well. We can pretend we’re anybody or anything from any time or galaxy. But online fantasy doesn’t end when we exit the CGI realms of Dr. Ludvig Maxis and Lady Jaina Proudmoore. There’s an immense gray zone outside the obvious fictions of games. Because we are anonymous online, we can become fictionalized versions of ourselves in real life, real people interacting with other real people in ways that not long ago we’d never dream or dare to do.

Each of the small fantasies and simulations we insert into our lives is harmless enough, replacing a small piece of the authentic but mundane here, another over there. The world looks a little more like a movie set and seems a little more exciting and glamorous, like Hitchcock’s definition of drama—life with the dull bits cut out. Each of us can feel like a sexier hero in a cooler story, younger than we actually are if we’re old or older if we’re young. Over time the patches of unreality take up more and more space in our lives. Eventually the whole lawn becomes AstroTurf. We stop registering the differences between simulated and authentic, real and unreal.

In the old days, if you wanted a shot at becoming instantly rich, you had to travel to Las Vegas. In order to spend time walking around a razzle-dazzling fictional realm, if you weren’t psychotic, you had to go to Disneyland. Theme was not a verb. Pornography was not ubiquitous. Cosmetic surgery was rare; breasts were not preternaturally large and firm, faces artificially smooth and tight. We didn’t reenact military battles with realistic props for days on end. We hadn’t yet fabricated the mongrel of melodrama and pseudodocumentary called reality TV.

Of course, having fake boobs or playing League of Legends probably doesn’t make any individual more inclined to believe that she needs a dozen semiautomatic rifles for self-protection or that vaccines cause autism or that the Earth is six thousand years old. But we are freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever or to pretend to be whomever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, a matter of personal preference. There is a functioning synergy among our multiplying fantasies, the large and small ones, the toxic and the individually entertaining ones, the ones we know to be fiction, the ones we kinda sorta believe, and the religious and political and scientific ones we’re convinced aren’t fantasies at all. Scientists warn about the “cocktail effect” concerning chemicals in the environment and drugs in the brain, where various substances “potentiate” other substances. I think it’s like that. We’ve been drinking bottomless American cocktails mixed from all the different fantasy ingredients, and those various fantasies, conscious and semiconscious and unconscious, intensify the effects of the others.

We like this new ultrafreedom to binge, we insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrong-headed fellow Americans abuse it. When John Adams said in the 1700s that “facts are stubborn things,” the overriding American principle of personal freedom was not yet enshrined in the Declaration or the Constitution, and the United States of America was itself still a dream. Two and a half centuries later the nation Adams cofounded has become a majority-rule de facto refutation of his truism: “our wishes, our inclinations” and “the dictates of our passions” now apparently do “alter the state of facts and evidence,” because extreme cognitive liberty and the pursuit of happiness rule.

THIS IS NOT unique to America, people treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously. We’re just uniquely immersed. In the developed world, our predilection is extreme, distinctly different in the breadth and depth of our embrace of fantasies of many different kinds. Sure, the physician whose fraudulent research launched the antivaccine movement was a Brit, and young Japanese otaku invented cosplay, dressing up as fantasy characters. And while there are believers in flamboyant supernaturalism and prophecy and religious pseudoscience in other developed countries, nowhere else in the rich world are such beliefs central to the self-identities of so many people. We are Fantasyland’s global crucible and epicenter.

This is American exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. America has always been a one-of-a-kind place. Our singularity is different now. We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But at the same time, our drift toward credulity, doing our own thing, and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less-developed country as well.

People tend to regard the Trump moment—this post-truth, alternative facts moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history—and really, from its prehistory. What I’m trying to do with this book is define and pin down our condition, to portray its scale and scope, to offer some fresh explanations of how our national journey deposited us here.

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

I hope we’re only on a long temporary detour, that we’ll manage somehow to get back on track. If we’re on a bender, suffering the effects of guzzling too much fantasy cocktail for too long, if that’s why we’re stumbling, manic and hysterical, mightn’t we somehow sober up and recover? You would think. But first you need to understand how deeply this tendency has been encoded in our national DNA.

2

I Believe, Therefore I Am Right: The Protestants

IN THE BEGINNING, it didn’t even have a real name: the New World was a placeholder, like the generic proxy NewCo that corporate lawyers nowadays temporarily assign to businesses their clients are creating. To its prospective white residents, the New World was practically an imaginary place. For them, America began as a fever dream, a myth, a happy delusion, a fantasy. In fact, it began as multiple fantasies, each embraced around 1600 by people so convinced of their thrilling, wishful fictions that most of them abandoned everything—friends, families, jobs, good sense, England, the known world—to enact their dreams or die trying. A lot of them died trying.

Ours was the first country ever designed and created from nothing, the first country authored, like an epic tale—at the very moment, as it happened, that Shakespeare and Cervantes were inventing modern fiction. The first English people in the New World imagined themselves as heroic can-do characters in exciting adventures. They were self-fictionalizing extremists who abandoned everything familiar because of their blazing beliefs, their long-shot hopes and dreams, their please-be-true fantasies.

But to extend Tocqueville’s metaphor, if the first English undertakings in the New World constituted newborn America, the cradle of the nation, then let’s go back a bit further and try to see how this singular infant came to be conceived.

A DEVOUT, KNOW-IT-ALL young theology professor at a new provincial university south of Berlin disagrees with Christian doctrine and practice in some important ways. He’s especially upset that the regional archbishop, in order to cover the costs of celebrating his elevation to cardinal, has encouraged local Christians to pay money to be forgiven their sins (and the sins of deceased loved ones), thereby reducing or eliminating the posthumous wait in purgatory. In addition to paying, the buyers of forgiveness were required to troop through the local church on All Saints’ Day to admire its thousands of holy relics, most if not all of them fake. These included a piece of straw from baby Jesus’s manger, threads from His swaddling clothes, a bit of Mary’s breast milk, a hair from adult Jesus’s beard, a piece of bread from the Last Supper, and a thorn from His crucifixion crown. The young theologian, appalled by the church’s merchandising, writes an impassioned three-thousand-word critique in proto-PowerPoint form, nails it to the door of the church on All Saints’ Eve, Halloween, and for good measure sends a copy of his screed to the archbishop himself.

If all this had happened in 1447, say, the episode might now be an obscure historical footnote. But because this young preacher, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, went public in 1517, a good half-century into the age of mechanical printing, his manifesto changed everything. The Ninety-five Theses were immediately printed, translated from Latin into local languages, distributed throughout Europe, and reprinted ad infinitum. Protestantism had been launched, an organized alternative to the Christian religious monopoly, Roman Catholicism.

After the launch of this new Christianity, the new printing enabled its spread. Luther’s main complaint had been about the church’s sale of phony VIP passes to Heaven. “There is no divine authority,” one of his theses pointed out, “for preaching that the soul flies out of the purgatory immediately [when] the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.” Within a few decades that was moot anyhow, because the Vatican ended the practice of selling salvation. However, Luther had two bigger ideas, revolutionary ideas, that became foundational both to his religion and to America.

He insisted that clergymen have no special access to God or Jesus or truth. Everything a Christian needed to know was in the Bible. So every individual Christian believer could and should read and interpret Scripture for him-or herself. Every believer, Protestants said, was now a priest.

This would have been a doomed, quixotic dream any earlier. According to the Vatican’s long-standing regulation, only priests were permitted to own Bibles, particularly Bibles translated from Latin into modern languages. It was a rule easy to enforce, because Bibles were extremely rare and expensive. In the 1450s, when Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book—a Latin Bible—there were only thirty thousand books of any kind in all of Europe, about one for every twenty-five hundred people. But by the time Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, sixty years later, twenty million books had been printed—and more of them were Bibles than anything else.

Print it, and they will come. During the century after printed English Bibles appeared, the literacy rate among English people tripled. Now millions of Christians were able to make good on Luther’s DIY Christianity. The Catholic Church and its priestly elite were disintermediated. Disruptive innovation? No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon.

Apart from devolving religious power to ordinary people—that is, critically expanding individual liberty—Luther’s other big idea was that belief in the Bible’s supernatural stories, especially those concerning Jesus, was the only prerequisite for being a good Christian. You couldn’t earn your way into Heaven by performing virtuous deeds. Having a particular set of beliefs was all that mattered. (And in strict early Protestantism, even those didn’t guarantee you entry.)

The original Protestant grievance seems like a strike on behalf of reason—that paying money or staring at (fake) relics couldn’t expedite souls into Heaven. But it’s only more fair and logical, not really more rational. It’s like arguing whether the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, if she had mispronounced the dwarf’s name, would have been set free. The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

However, out of the new Protestant religion, a new proto-American attitude emerged during the 1500s. Millions of ordinary people decided that they, each of them, had the right to decide what was true or untrue, regardless of what fancy experts said. And furthermore, they believed, passionate fantastical belief was the key to everything. The footings for Fantasyland had been cast.

3

All That Glitters: The Gold-Seekers

DURING THE 1500S too, European fantasies of worldly splendors had just acquired a thrilling new inspiration and focus. In 1492 Columbus had sailed west in search of a shorter route by sea from Europe to Asia that might replace the overland Silk Road trip—an impossible dream then and for four hundred years afterward. Instead of Japan, he got the Bahamas. But he had discovered a New World. It was a blank slate on which fantastic wealth and glory could be imagined from three thousand miles away.

More European explorers quickly followed and would keep coming, many of them pursuing the dream of a Northwest Passage. That was the dream of Captain John Smith at the beginning of the 1600s when he sailed to the New World, funded by English investors. Imagining that the Potomac River led all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Smith got only as far as Bethesda, Maryland. Passage to Asia was also the dream in 1609 of the Englishman Henry Hudson, who got only as far as Albany. A year later English investors who wanted to believe the Arctic-trade-route dream financed Hudson to try again. This time instead of China, he made it to Ontario; when Hudson wanted to keep going west, his crew, not as enraptured by the fantasy, mutinied; Captain Hudson was never seen again.

But the Spaniards who followed Columbus, instead of searching in vain for a Northwest Passage to Asia, headed southwest. There they discovered advanced civilizations with cities, the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in South America. And there too they found the Aztecs’ and Incas’ gold—which they stole and mined for more than a century, thereby establishing a transatlantic empire.

The English envied the suddenly powerful Spanish—and their New World gold in particular.

If there was so much treasure for the taking in the southern reaches, why not thousands of miles closer, in the north, in the lands closest to England? Thus the quest for gold became a fetish for would-be English colonists as the 1500s turned into the 1600s. It also established a theme we’ll encounter again and again: around some plausible bit of reality, Americans leap to concoct wishful (or terrified) fictions they ardently believe to be true.

A young Oxford graduate and royal factotum named Richard Hakluyt was among the most excited and influential of England’s America enthusiasts during the 1580s and ’90s. He cherry-picked the reports of earlier explorers, many of them second-and thirdhand, to depict a perfectly ripe paradise. All those probes into eastern North America, he wrote in a forty-thousand-word manuscript, “prove infallibly unto us that gold, silver … precious stones, and turquoises, and emeralds … have been by them found” up and down the coast. The southern part “had in the land gold and silver”; a bit to the north there was also sure to be gold because “the colour of the land doth altogether argue it”; and farther north too “there is mention of silver and gold.” At the time, England’s population was growing faster than its economy, so Hakluyt proposed shipping off “idle men” to America and “setting them to work in mines of gold.”

It was inconvenient that humans already inhabited the northern New World. However, Hakluyt reported that the natives were “people good and of a gentle and amiable nature, which willingly will obey.” And North America’s population density was less than 5 percent of Britain’s, so to the newcomers it appeared essentially empty, a tabula rasa ready to be transformed into some brand of English utopia.

Hakluyt’s breathless chronicle of America had been commissioned by the thirty-year-old aristocrat, poet, rake, adventurer, zealous Protestant, and gold-mad New World enthusiast Walter Raleigh. He was a charming, larger-than-life up-and-comer—a stereotypical go-go American before English America even existed. As soon as he’d had Hakluyt write his report on the New World, meant to convince Queen Elizabeth to colonize, Raleigh over the course of just three years became Sir Walter Raleigh; got the royal franchise to exploit and govern the eastern coast of North America; and sent three separate expeditions of Englishmen to get the gold. They found none.

Although Raleigh never visited North America himself, he believed that in addition to its gold deposits, his realm might somehow be the biblical Garden of Eden. English clergymen had calculated from the Bible that Eden was at a latitude of thirty-five degrees north—just like Roanoke Island, they said. And there was still more fresh (hearsay) evidence of divine magic in Virginia: a botanist’s book, Joyful News of the New Found World, reported that various plants unique to America cured all diseases. A famous English poet published his “Ode to the Virginian Voyage,” calling Virginia “Earth’s only Paradise” where Britons would “get the pearl and gold”—and plenty of English people imagined that it was literally a new Eden.fn1 Alas, no. A large fraction of the first settlers dispatched by Raleigh became sick and died. He dispatched a second expedition of gold-hunters. It also failed, and all those colonists died.

But Sir Walter continued believing the dream of gold. He failed to find the legendary golden city of El Dorado when he sailed to South America in 1595, but that didn’t stop him from propagating the fantasy in England. He published a book about it that consisted of secondhand historical anecdotes meant to make the dream seem real. Raleigh helped invent the kind of elaborate pseudoempiricism that in the centuries to come would become a permanent feature of Fantasyland testimonials—about religion, about quack science, about conspiracy, about whatever was being urgently sold.

In 1606 the new English king, James, despite Raleigh’s colonization disasters, gave a franchise to two new private enterprises, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, to start colonies. The southern one, under the auspices of London, they named Jamestown after the monarch. Their royal charter was clear about the main mission: “to dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold … And to HAVE and enjoy the Gold.” As Tocqueville wrote in his history two centuries later, “It was … gold-seekers who were sent to Virginia. No noble thought or conception above gain presided over the foundation of the new settlements.” Two-thirds of those first hundred gold-seekers promptly died. But the captain of the expedition returned to England claiming to have found “gold showing mountains.”

Hakluyt, a director of the London Company, never managed to get to America but never stopped believing in the gold. Sure, none had been found yet, he admitted in a presentation to fellow executives in 1609, but an Englishman who spoke Indian languages and had been on earlier expeditions said that “to the southwest of our old fort in Virginia, the Indians often informed him … there was a great melting of red metall. Beside, our own Indians have lately revealed either this or another rich mine … near certain mountains lying” just a bit west of the failed settlement.

No gold was found. Captain John Smith, looking for a navigable westward route to the Pacific rather than gold, was not completely exempt from gullibility—he reported as fact a native’s claim that people on Chesapeake Bay hunt “apes in the mountains.” But he famously did not believe in the dream of instant, easy mineral wealth. “There was no talk, no hope, no work, but dig gold, work gold, refine gold, and load gold,” Smith wrote of his fellow Jamestown colonists, “golden promises [that] made all men their slaves in hope of recompense.” In fact, Jamestown ore they dug and refined and shipped to England turned out to be iron pyrite, fool’s gold.

Anxious investors in London demanded the colonists produce at least one chunk of real gold. In 1610, three years into the operation, they dispatched a new man to set things right, who arrived just as the surviving colonists finally abandoned the dream and set sail home for England. Lord De La Warr persuaded them to disembark and buck up; he led a team inland to search for another rumored Indian gold mine, where De La Warr’s men killed some Indians, and finally … found no gold.

The gold fantasy wasn’t limited to colonists in the South. Those dispatched at the same time by the Plymouth Company, 120 of them, landed up on the Maine coast, also looking for gold and a faster route to Asia. They found signs of neither. But their desperation to believe the impossible is funny and sad. No gold so far, the colony president wrote home, but “the natives constantly affirm that in these parts there are nutmegs, mace and cinnamon.” Tropical spices growing in New England? “They [also] positively assure me that … distant not more than seven days’ journey from our fort [is] a sea large and wide and deep … which cannot be any other than the Southern Sea, reaching to the regions of China.” Unlike their Virginia compatriots, however, the English colonists in Maine quickly accommodated reality and admitted defeat. Half left a few months after arriving, the rest six months later. They were not credulous or imaginative enough to become Americans.

But … maybe they just hadn’t talked to the right natives! Or looked in the right places! In 1614 yet another Plymouth Company expedition sailed to New England, this one exclusively in pursuit of gold. They had an inside man aboard, a native who’d been captured and enslaved by an earlier Plymouth Company ship off Cape Cod. The Indian had spent his time in captivity in London learning English and the nature of his captors’ shiny-metal fixation, so he concocted a story just for them: There’s a gold mine on my own island, he lied, and I’ll take you back there to claim it. When the English anchored off Martha’s Vineyard, he jumped ship, and his tribal brothers covered his escape with bow-and-arrow fire from canoes. The Englishmen realized they’d been played and sailed home.

Down in Virginia, meanwhile, more than six thousand people had emigrated to Jamestown by 1620, the equivalent of a midsize English city at the time. At least three-quarters had died but not the abiding dream. People kept coming and believing, hopefulness becoming delusion. It was a gold rush with no gold. Fifteen years after Jamestown’s founding, a colonist wrote a friend to request a shipment of nails, cutlery, vinegar, cheese—and also to make excuses for why he hadn’t quite yet managed to get rich: “By reason of my sickness & weakness I was not able to travel up and down the hills and dales of these countries but doo now intend every day to walk up and down the hills for good Minerals here is both gold [and] silver.”

The sickness and weakness and death continued. Gold remained a chimera. Two decades into the seventeenth century, English America was a failing start-up, a vaporware tragedy and farce. But back in England the investors and their promotional agents continued printing posters, hyperbolic testimonials, and dozens of books and pamphlets, organizing lotteries, and fanning out hucksterish blue smoke. Thus the first English-speaking Americans tended to be the more wide-eyed and desperately wishful. “Most of the 120,000 indentured servants and adventurers who sailed to the [South] in the seventeenth century,” according to the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall’s history of America, Freedom Just Around the Corner, “did not know what lay ahead but were taken in by the propaganda of the sponsors.” The historian Daniel Boorstin went even further, suggesting that “American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.” Western civilization’s first great advertising campaign was created in order to inspire enough dreamers and suckers to create America.

As a get-rich-quick enterprise, Virginia was a bust. The colonists who stayed resorted to the familiar drudgery of agriculture, although the cash crop that saved them was a harbinger of a certain future America—it was indigenous, novel, glamorous, inessential, psychoactive, and addictive: tobacco.

Another leader of the colonization enthusiasts was Francis Bacon, the English government official and philosopher, who at the time was also laying foundations for science and the Enlightenment. He was bracingly clear-eyed about the New World project, and he seemed to understand better than any of his proto-American contemporaries the distorting power of wishful belief, how fantasy can trump fact. “The human understanding,” he wrote in 1620,

In his London circles, Bacon said, it was all “gold, silver, and temporal profit” driving the colonization project, not “the propagation of the Christian faith.” For the imminent next wave of English would-be Americans, however, propagating a particular set of Christian superstitions, omens and divine judgments were more than just lip-service cover for dreams of easy wealth. For them, the prospect of colonization was all about the export of their supernatural fantasies to the New World.

4

Building Our Own Private Heaven on Earth: The Puritans

THE FIRST ENGLISH colonizers’ visions of gold and a Northwest Passage were not totally mad. Two hundred years later gold was discovered and mined in Virginia. Three hundred years later a tiny ship did reach the Pacific by means of a Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic. But in the 1620s, after four decades of English failure in the New World, reasonable people wouldn’t have continued risking their lives and fortunes pursuing impossible dreams. The original hypotheses, gold for the plucking and a maritime route to Asia, were “falsifiable,” as logicians say—and were finally falsified by the evidence. No gold. No shortcut to China and India. European emigrants might be able to make livings in the New World, occasionally even get rich, but only in ways they’d done in the Old World, by raising and making and selling stuff. So in seventeenth-century Virginia, as they gave up gold-hunting for tobacco-growing, empiricism and pragmatism beat back wishfulness and fantasy.

On the other hand, most supernatural religious beliefs aren’t falsifiable. The existence of a God who created and manages the world according to a fixed eternal plan, Jesus’s miracles and resurrection, Heaven, Hell, Satan’s presence on Earth—these can never be disproved.