I see more shredding trucks in New York than I used to. They park around the city for “community shredding” events, where neighbors, friends, and loved ones convene to watch their old bank statements and medical records become curly, illegible ribbons. One such truck I’ve seen was emblazoned with a slogan: secure destruction you can trust. But I’d never thought to give destruction anything less than my total trust. The truck belonged to Iron Mountain, a corporation in the business of both destroying information and preserving it, named for a former mine in the Hudson Valley. Its first storage facility, which contained a massive bombproof vault, opened there in 1951, allowing banks, oil companies, and insurance firms to assuage their atomic-age paranoia by maintaining bunkers for their most sensitive documents and, should the need arise, prized personnel. (Shell Oil apparently adorned its bunkers with fake shrubs and chintz curtains, despite the lack of windows.) It was all tucked away behind a twenty-eight-ton steel door that was, in retrospect, bound to attract attention.

Phil Tinline’s Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today (Scribner, $29.99) is a book about another book, Leonard C. Lewin’s 1967 Report from Iron Mountain. In it, Lewin claimed that a concerned citizen had passed on to him an incendiary assessment from the “Special Study Group”—a secret commission, one might say a cabal, formed by members of the Kennedy Administration, including defense secretary Robert McNamara. Once a month for nearly three years, he wrote, the group had met in the sacrosanct hush of the Iron Mountain vault “to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive.” Being coolheaded technocrats, they concluded that the nation needed war to prevent economic collapse and “social disintegration.” In the absence of armed conflict, only an alternative threat, such as environmental pollution or an alien invasion, could ensure the government’s continued control. Without mass death to keep the population in check, the herd would have to be culled by way of sterilization, slavery, or blood sport.

Lewin included the unredacted report, and the Dial Press published it as non-fiction. But it was a hoax, a wry satire of the amoral rationalizing that had overtaken the Cold War think-tank set—what C. Wright Mills had described as “crackpot realism.” Maybe in another era it would’ve been seen as patently absurd and easily ignored, but the military-industrial complex had lately given itself to ceaseless bombing in North Vietnam, napalming children, and concealing the true depth of the quagmire. Lewin’s Iron Mountain lodged itself rather nicely into the Johnson Administration’s credibility gap. It soon became a bestseller. Tinline reports that the president’s deputies scrambled for a full five days to confirm that the report was, in fact, a fake, and even after the government disavowed it, many in the media wondered if it was the genuine article. When pressed about its provenance, Lewin responded much as an official might have, neither confirming nor denying. “It is authentic in what it represents,” he told a radio host, elliptically. Readers agreed. It could’ve been true, and that was a kind of truth.

In a 1972 article in the New York Times, Lewin finally admitted it was a ruse. Victor Navasky—the editor of Monocle, a satirical magazine, and later the editor and publisher of The Nation—had come up with the idea for the report after reading of a “peace scare” that had spooked the stock market. E. L. Doctorow, then the editor in chief of the Dial Press, had been in on it, too. But Lewin had decided that the Pentagon Papers—recently leaked, chock-full of ruthless and indisputably unfabricated talk of hegemony—had outclassed him. His hoax had served its purpose. More than a decade had passed since Philip Roth’s famous pronouncement that “American reality” constituted “a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Regarding the staginess of the first televised presidential debate, Roth had begun “to wish that someone had invented it, and that it was not real and with us.” In the case of Report from Iron Mountain, which soon slipped out of print, something like the opposite desire took hold. A swath of conspiratorial Americans kept reviving it, wishing it were real and not invented.

By 1990, bootleg versions of the book had washed up for sale in the pages of far-right magazines, peddled alongside sulfurous predictions of American concentration camps and a helpful who’s who of global elitists. Its pirate distributor, Liberty Lobby, had merely photocopied an earlier printing and slapped some new copy on the back. The document was not, they suggested, “just another move in the deception game being played with exceptional cunning.” No: it was an actual blueprint for a top-down restructuring of society by the Establishment. Liberty Lobby’s founder, Willis Carto, was a reactionary zealot rumored to have four bronze busts of Hitler in his office. Lewin sued to get him to halt the printing and, once he prevailed, received the remainder of the stockpile. Hundreds of unauthorized copies soon cluttered his house.

Raid, by Patrik Sevcik © The artist. Courtesy Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain

But an afterlife never ends. In the Nineties, the report became a staple in the bilious feedstock of right-wing militias, part of a slurry of propaganda that turned legitimate grievances into the conviction that FEMA agents in unmarked black helicopters were soon to enact a new world order. If you accepted it as fact, the Iron Mountain report could explain everything: the Waco siege, the Oklahoma City bombing, the standoff at Ruby Ridge. The hoax was greeted credulously by people who should’ve known better, including Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force officer whose high post had given him privileged access to the intelligence apparatus. He was so troubled by the real activities of the CIA that he believed Lewin’s book must have issued from it: the report was “too true to life to be created.” Prouty became an ally of Carto’s and a mentor to the director Oliver Stone, who worked some of his feverish theories of power into the screenplay for JFK—Prouty is the sage, fast-talking spook played by Donald Sutherland. Iron Mountain’s seamy second wind left Lewin “really bummed out,” one of his contacts recalled. He died in 1999, but his report trudges on as a zombie alongside crisis actors, deep-state moles, and the lizard people.

Tinline’s book is an astute study of a fiction warped under its own weight. But he lacks patience for the paranoid style in American politics. Immersing himself in the looniest conspiracy theories, the ones that go all the way to the top, where two-faced men pull levers in the dark, leads him to dismiss conspiratorial thought altogether, including the notions of JFK assassination buffs, who, though they “sincerely seek the truth,” have lost sight of the line between “what feels-as-if” and “what is.” This line is clear, he suggests, to anyone sane or scrupulous enough to follow the facts. I’m not so sure. It’s true that suppositions about the “omnipotent power elite” and the “malign omnipotence of the military-industrial complex” are too prominent in the national imagination. But it’s possible to believe in cover-ups, even fairly vast ones, that follow not from omnipotence but from blundering, hubris, neglect, revenge; it’s possible to accept that the Iron Mountain report is a hoax, and JFK a Hollywood fantasia, while still reading into the Warren Commission’s mistakes. Possible—and fun! Tinline, who is British, doesn’t quite know what to do about the softer side of America’s conspiracy dabbling—the way these theories express our collective frustration, our yearning for the unknowable, our bumptious camaraderie. I think of a one-liner by John Swartzwelder, who wrote for The Simpsons in the Nineties: “They can kill the Kennedys. Why can’t they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?”

They can kill the Kennedys. Why can’t they reduce carbon emissions? What if I told you that the real answer goes back all the way to the Founding Fathers? In The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $32), the historian Joyce E. Chaplin argues that Benjamin Franklin’s most ingenious invention—a fireplace designed to conserve wood, and later coal—had lasting ramifications for America’s approach to energy and the environment. Franklin experimented with his stove for more than half his life, designing five iterations between 1738 and 1784. It was both “the violent capitalist machine in an Edenic garden and far-out, new age, redeeming alt-tech,” Chaplin writes, as well as the result of an era of “techno-optimism” not unlike our own.

An entire book built around old-timey fireplaces—it’s a suffocation risk. There were longueurs, I confess, in which I could almost feel the weight of geological time compressing dead plants into anthracite. But Chaplin lets in enough fresh air to make the reader care about things like flue innovations and the proliferation of affordable thermometers. She conveys what an inestimable gift it was, in the eighteenth century, to feel consistently comfortable indoors, “a once-impossible bodily state.” In America and Europe alike, the Little Ice Age had made winters wintrier. But fires were inefficient, firewood was frequently stolen, and homes were easily burned down. More than smoky, rooms were smoaky (the extra vowel gets across something of the foulness), and this was widely accepted as a fact of life. Franklin described London in the 1750s as “one great smoaky House, and every Street a Chimney, the Air full of floating Sea Coal Soot.” A Massachusetts almanac from 1777 quipped that the only certain way to “hinder a House from smoaking” was to “KEEP no fire in it; if a fire is already made, throw a sufficient quantity of water on to quench it, and the smoak will soon depart.”

View of Antwerp with Frozen Schelde, 1593, by Lucas van Valckenborch. Courtesy Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany.

Franklin so doggedly pursued smoke abatement that a friend called him a “universal Smoke Doctor.” His first stove, marketed in 1741, was in essence a pair of iron boxes sold as eight flat-packed plates. It promised to warm the home evenly while saving fuel, reducing smoke, and improving health. (A pamphlet promoting Franklin’s stove neglected to mention that his labor-saving device was produced at several ironworks using slave labor.) The second stove’s “Air-Box” had baffles to absorb more heat. It took advantage of the fact that hot air expands: “warmed air enters the room through vents at the firebox’s side plates,” Chaplin writes, “requiring no additional energy to force it out, just pressure from the air’s expansion.” But what matters more to Chaplin than the stove’s engineering is that Franklin got people “to think of themselves as living in nested sets of atmospheres, natural and artificial,” a revolutionary idea at the time. Franklin’s pamphlet boasted that the stove was “ANOTHER Sun! . . . More obliging than his elder Brother,” because it would never set—or sear your flesh. This was “powerful assurance that humans could correct for nature’s flaws,” Chaplin writes, leaving the reader to hear the echoes in today’s solar geoengineering startups.

The colonial appetite for firewood was decimating Pennsylvania’s forests—many of them ill-gotten from the Lenape, as Franklin knew but never acknowledged. He publicized his stove as a way to conserve resources, sounding a rare and early note of environmentalism; many of his contemporaries believed that denuding the landscape would warm the climate, something they desperately wanted to do. And though he kept refining his stove in the name of efficiency, at some point he seems to have thrown his hands up and decided to burn it all down. In “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc.,” an essay from 1751, he wrote that “White People” should multiply and continue “Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus.” Bracketing his interest in interplanetary communication, this impasse means everything to Chaplin; her expansive claims for the Franklin stove’s importance click into place. The man who invented a fireplace to save trees now advocated for their wholesale destruction:

Franklin never reconciled the contradiction between conservation of natural resources and economic growth—no one really has. The tension lingers; the ghost of a homespun Poor Richard haunts the shiny machinery of the modern global economy, questioning any assumption that economic progress must be linear. . . . Maybe it took an American colonist to see this tension between growth and dearth—quite possibly the most powerful force in American history.

Writing to a friend, Franklin warned that America’s indigenous people had “few but natural wants,” whereas the colonists had “infinite Artificial wants.” In a turn worthy of a shadowy Iron Mountain technocrat, his point was that the artificial wants were superior—their infinitude meant that white people would go on breeding and consuming in perpetuity. “What an Accession of Power to the British Empire!”

Franklin Stove, 1938, by J. Howard Iams. Courtesy the Index of American Design

“Oil is the most precious thing we have here,” a supervisor says in Claire Baglin’s first novel, On the Clock (New Directions, $14.95): “We get all we can out of it and we don’t waste a bit.” The conservationist Franklin would have been proud. So, too, would the Franklin of “infinite Artificial wants,” because On the Clock is set in a fast-food restaurant, a cornucopia of artificiality, a place whose logo, Baglin writes, “says we’ll never let you down, we’ll always be here for you, everywhere.”

And they mean everywhere: even in France. On some level I’d always known that the French eat fast food, but in my provincial way I’d assumed that even the working classes were tooting around with Michelin guides in their glove boxes, the fruits of nouvelle cuisine spilling onto every roadside. Mais non. Baglin’s novel, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, is narrated by a university student working a summer job. By her own admission, she is “the crew member who never participates in anything, never joins anything, and never eats with anyone.” She walks around disinfecting things, wading through the regular floods caused by a malfunctioning soda fountain that is always “buzzing softly, like a giant insect,” and observing cars as they queue testily in the drive-through lane. In fastidiously clipped prose, she thinks about her family, their centime-pinching vacations, and especially her dad, an electrician who used to repair robots for a living. Is she not a robot in need of repair? Someone else will have to do the job: her dad accidentally electrocuted himself.

There’s a message here about labor, precarity, and alienation: a muted, distant longing, as when you remember a Christmas present you really wanted as a kid but never got. But it feels sketched in. Reading the novel, I remembered one of David Foster Wallace’s gripes about John Updike: “When his characters go out to eat fast food they go to Burger Bliss instead of Burger King.” Realist fiction should use real brand names, Wallace believed. Similarly, and Americanly, I was irked by Baglin’s refusal to identify the restaurant, its flagship product, etc. It felt critically important to know whether I was under the Golden Arches or not. The novel’s semihallucinatory tone called for the monotonous, demoralizing exactitude of a trademark. Without one, I couldn’t be sure if the heroine was really losing her will to live. Like a ravenous woodstove or a shredding truck bearing the name of an old hoax, McDonald’s offers secure destruction I can trust.