'It Is Common to the Whole Country'

Like most middle-class Americans I have lived a sheltered life. My needs and many of my wants have been satisfied. I was in a few fist fights as a kid but was seldom a bully or bullied. I don’t know if I’m a physical coward. I don’t know how I would react in combat. Every boy imagines himself a hero but that’s fantasy and probably will remain untested.

The most frightened I have ever been came on May 4, 1971, the first anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. I was at the center of a crowd-cum-mob in Bowling Green, Ohio, a freshman at the university. Students were protesting the war, President Nixon, the National Guard killings at Kent State, Mommy and Daddy, and nothing in particular. I went along mostly out of curiosity and, I’m ashamed to say, because I didn’t want to be judged a reactionary party-pooper by some of my friends. I’ve never liked crowds.

Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power (trans. Carol Stewart, 1962): “In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own power. He has a sense of relief . . .” I have never felt that way. Rallies and rock concerts always left me feeling exhausted with anxiety. My vision of hell is an angry, single-minded crowd.

The mood of the mob as we marched downtown from campus was at first festive. It was a beautiful spring day. As the chanting grew louder and the bullhorns shrieked, the crowd turned surly. I remember two guys trying to tear down a stop sign. Girls were screaming and people started throwing bottles and anything else they could grab at the police, who seemed frightened and confused. I was witnessing for the first time the herd-mind in action. Individuals who on their own were polite and civilized surrendered their will and good judgment to the mob. It gave them license to behave badly. A writer in the nineteenth century describes the phenomenon like this:

“[T]here is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.”

Abraham Lincoln is speaking to the Young Man’s Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., on January 27, 1838. He is a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer. The Civil War is still twenty-three years away. Lincoln continues:

“They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana;--they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter;--they are not the creature of climate-- neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or the non-slave- holding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.--Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”