This 1848 painting has uncanny insight into American conspiracy thinking
- sciart0
- Aug 22
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Even thinking about conspiracy theories can feel, well, conspiratorial. One would be a fool to deny that bad actors sometimes work behind the scenes to do terrible things, and cover their tracks with denials, misinformation and lies. But then there’s the rabbit hole of obsession, paranoia and the shadow worlds of intrigue and manipulation offered up by Hollywood, constantly blurring the line between reality and illusion.
Welcome to democracy, in which belief and skepticism are dual obligations of good citizenship, dating at least back to the Roman Republic and the city-states of ancient Greece. Consider an 1848 painting by the American artist Richard Caton Woodville, whichsuddenly feels uncanny and of the moment.
In “Politics in an Oyster House,” owned by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the younger of two men sitting in a shabby restaurant is hectoring his elder with obnoxious vehemence. We don’t know what they are talking about, but based on body language we can make a guess: The loudmouth fellow in a rumpled hat, holding a newspaper and gesticulating aggressively, is expounding a theory of the world, tedious and detailed, based on a wild mix of reasonable and unfounded assumptions gleaned from haphazard reading, rumor and dubious research.
He is, perhaps, in the grips of conspiracy thinking, a special feature of American politics at least since the Rev. Samuel Parris found the devil lurking in the shadows of Salem, precipitating the witch trials that led to the deaths of at least 20 innocent people. (Woodville later suggested that the young man was a communist.)
A recent Washington Post poll shows that 84 percent of Americans believe there is incriminating information about billionaires in Justice Department files relevant to the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and 86 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat support releasing the information."