Panic is Timeless.
J.P. Chaplin's Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds was a paperback original published in 1959. It was part of a weird little Ballantine series which included Daniel P. Mannix's Those About to Die (about the Roman Coliseum) and The Hell Fire Club (about the Hell Fire Club). So far as I'm aware, unlike those others, Chaplin's book was never republished. That's too bad, because like the greatest historical works, it has an awful lot to say about the times we're living in.
Chaplin, as it happens, wasn't a historian, but rather a psychologist at the University of Vermont. He was also one heck of a researcher. The book is separated into about a dozen chronologically arranged chapters, each giving an account of an instance of American mass hysteria. Some were limited to the borders of a small town, while others spread across the entire nation.
So you have the Great Airship of 1897, a dirigible of unknown origin that was seen by thousands of people as it floated between California and the Midwest (though after it vanished for good, no one was able to provide any solid evidence that it existed at all). There was the Red Scare that followed World War I, fueled by a few mail bombs and a maniacal, paranoid attorney general by the name of A. Mitchell Palmer. Valentino's death in 1926 led an estimated 70,000 mourners to converge on Midtown in the hopes of getting into the funeral home where the dead actor was lying in state.
Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio stunt in 1938 was an obvious example, but I'd never heard of "The Mad Gasser of Mattoon." In 1944, in the small town of Mattoon, IL, supposedly a deranged anesthesiologist?or perhaps a disgruntled former military scientist?was sneaking around town, pumping gas into the bedrooms of lonely women (sort of like in The Prisoner's opening credits). The gas would nauseate them, paralyze them briefly and leave them with a burning sensation in the mouth and throat. Nobody died, but man, did the townsfolk lose their nut. The FBI was even called in at one point to help in the investigation.
In the end, the Mad Gasser, like the airship, seemed to have little basis in reality. One woman smelled something weird one night, then felt sick. She took her story to the police and the press, and everyone else took it from there. Within two weeks after that first "victim" came out, there had been hundreds of reported attacks.
Then there was the big flying saucer craze (1947-1952), and McCarthy's second Red Scare and? Well, you get the idea.
Each night as we sat at the bar, I would regale Morgan with anecdotes I'd encountered as I crawled my way through each chapter. Chaplin's accounts were each punctuated with newspaper and magazine reports from the day?many of which were funny as hell. (During Welles' broadcast, one elderly woman in Chicago called a local police precinct to find out what was happening. When she was informed that it was just a radio show and wasn't real, she replied, "That's fine?but what are we going to do with those poor Martians?") Some were clearly fictionalized, others just as snide and cynical as anything you'd find today.
On what I think was the second night of drunkenly entertaining Morgan with delightful tales like that, she suggested that it was about time someone updated the book.
That it was a great idea goes without saying. At the end of each chapter, Chaplin analyzes the various forces that (he believed, anyway) could lead thousands of people to believe in (and panic over) something absolutely ridiculous. Most of the time it boils down to the reigning zeitgeist combined with the increasing speed with which the news was disseminated. The Salem witch trials never spread to other towns, he points out, because without telephones or radios, the news traveled much too slowly. One of the reasons (again, Chaplin says) the Welles broadcast was so effective was because people were hearing so much about Hitler, and were clearly anxious that something very ugly was about to explode in Europe.
Now take a look at the world since 1958. Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK, Watergate, Reagan, the arms race, a little war here, a little war there, terrorist attacks in New York, increasing suspicions, increasing paranoias, wackier and wackier conspiracy theories. Nothing has changed, really. We're certainly no smarter than we were in the previous century, and in many ways less sophisticated despite all the fancy machines. And we have many more things to be anxious about. Those old stories about airships and mad gassers seem quaint, but the same damn things keep happening, and Alphonse Karr is proven right again and again. If anything, cases of American mass hysteria are cropping up even more frequently than ever before, and for the same reasons that Chaplin pointed out.
On a relatively small scale there was Jonestown. On a global scale (though it seemed most acute here in the states) there was the Y2K bug. To a certain degree, the Unabomber raised a nationwide ruckus. There were a variety of diseases that were supposed to wipe us all out (HIV, SARS, West Nile). If you wanted to go international, you could throw in India's persistent Monkey Man. But few things offered a more beautiful example of mass hysteria than the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The kind of shenanigans Attorney General Palmer pulled in his effort to protect the American public from Bolsheviks mirrors to an almost comical degree our current attorney general's shenanigans in his effort to protect us all from "terrorists." (And why more hasn't been made of that, I guess, can simply be put down to the fact that people no longer care about history.) Back then, everyone who wasn't part of the status quo was a Bolshevik; today, they're a terrorist. With those fancy color-coded alerts, the government can even switch mass hysteria on and off like a light switch.
The anthrax hoopla was one of my favorites. Five people who avoided their doctors for too long died, but thousands upon thousands of people who received a mildly hinky piece of mail insisted that large men in space suits come and rescue them. (As of this writing, the first reports of ricin in a Senate office building are just breaking?I can't wait to see what that turns into.) There are dozens, maybe hundreds of other examples from recent years that just aren't coming to mind right now. Hardly a month goes by that some part of the country doesn't go all nuts over some stupid thing or another.
There was, of course, something more lighthearted about those earlier examples of mass hysteria?most of them anyway. Few people were actually hurt. These new ones have a nastier edge to them (of course, what doesn't these days?), and more people are being killed.
Still, it's a book that needs doing, especially if it could be done in the same style and format as Chaplin's original, which captured just the proper slightly tongue-in-cheek tone. Thing is, it's not a book I have any interest in writing myself. I'm too lazy.