ABSTRACT

This chapter synecdochically traces the changing status and form of conspiracy theory at large by focusing on the figure of Herbert Philbrick. A high-profile informant for the FBI, Philbrick became a TV star and cultural icon in the early 1950s by helping to uncover an alleged communist conspiracy before drifting off into the radical fringe in the early 1960s. Philbrick’s career as a celebrity informant was only possible because conspiracy theories still produced legitimate knowledge until the mid-1950s, when the anti-communist consensus began to vane. The chapter shows, first, how texts, above all Philbrick’s autobiography and the television series based on it, created the image of a vast communist conspiracy, while pointing at a struggle for discursive authority between private citizens and institutions like the FBI which anticipates the struggle between conspiracy theories and official accounts in later years. To underline that the problematization of conspiracy theory contributed to the decline of the anti-communist consensus and affected the form of conspiracy theories, the chapter then compares different conspiracist accounts produced by anti-communists in the early 1960s. Conspiracy theorists either embraced their marginalized subject position and developed large-scale conspiracy scenarios or modified the conspiracist rhetoric and targeted mainstream audiences.