It was possible to reach the Klondike by boat, but the cost of tickets or vessels increased exponentially during the rush. The few who bought boats overloaded them until they sank. Those who bought passage were forced to leave much of their cargo behind. The ones who arrived at their destination soon realized the perils of less-traveled routes: they were often left in isolated camps along the river with no means to reach their destination.
By the time these first civilian prospectors reached the region, most of the valuable areas had already been claimed. Prospectors could still make day wages mining on behalf of others, but their earnings were far from the riches they’d imagined. Only thirty thousand of the initial one hundred thousand who set out reached the Klondike. The rest either turned back or died on the way.
Ultimately, only a few hundred prospectors became rich. Most were unable to claim stakes large enough to recoup the money they had invested in equipment and travel. But what really put an end to the Klondike gold fever was more hysteria. In 1898, the Klondike emptied out with the discovery of new gold veins elsewhere in the Yukon, and in Alaska.
As for the Long Depression? It ended with no help from any gold rushes or hysteria, and there are lessons for today. Unemployment began to ebb as immigration slowed due to the shrunken job market. New jobs were taken by unemployed citizens. Nations worldwide turned to protectionist policies. The United States spent money on infrastructure to expand the West. New technologies made manufacturing, transportation, and construction more economical. More new jobs were created than old jobs lost. In short, everything that Donald Trump proposed during the election of 2016 worked in the 1890s.
In fact, you know who really got rich in the Klondike Gold Rush stampede? Donald Trump’s grandfather Fred, and not from the precious metal. He opened restaurants and hotels in the region and walked away with half a million 1901 dollars. He wisely capitalized on the gold rush fever of others. By providing a service that was needed. That’s not a knock. That’s smart.
The takeaway from gold fever is what I was discussing earlier about racism. Hysteria creates tunnel vision and tunnel vision creates failed solutions. Head to the Klondike with nothing but a dream and you die. Fight racism with reverse racism and you motivate the original racists. Everyone jumps on an idea and careens toward the stated goal without objective thought. If a Powerball lottery is one million dollars, only regulars buy tickets. If it’s one billion dollars, everyone wants in. Is one million dollars not worth the price of a two-dollar ticket? The lines will certainly be shorter.
There is no rational reason for most hysteria, other than that people want to be a part of something big and current and important. They want the adrenaline rush of opportunity and risk. They happily push every other stress or distraction from their minds to follow a simple task, even if that task is burning witches or burning crosses on the lawns of freed slaves. Hysteria is appealing to the masses because it does not require thought; some lunatic college professor or mainstream media pundit does all the thinking for them, even if those thoughts are vacuous or destructive.
A double tragedy takes place when there is actually a good idea that gets co-opted by hysterics. Independence from England was a good idea and the process was directed by reasonable men. Reconstruction was a good idea that was poisoned by hate. The witch trials were hysteria fired up for the sake of political gain.
Unfortunately, there was more of the truly evil kind on the horizon, hysteria in which the news media were willing purveyors of fake news.
Fake news kills. That’s the lesson of out-of-control New York newspapers that revved up mass hysteria based on false tales of atrocities within Cuba and created the Spanish-American War. The war boosted newspaper readership—the equivalent of website “clicks” today—boosted the career of future president Teddy Roosevelt and resulted in more than three thousand Americans losing their lives. It also fed into the impulse to treat Hispanics and other immigrants, such as Germans, as second-class citizens. Once more, America is feeling the powerful forces of this hysteria more than one hundred years later.
9.
FROM REGIONAL WAR TO PROHIBITION
Hysteria Outside the Trenches
There’s a line in the movie Citizen Kane in which newspaper publisher Kane tells a colleague, “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”1
That fits neatly with Goebbels’s previously-stated philosophy that “a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”2 At the dawn of the twentieth century, both of those ideas converged to create hysteria that supported a war no one knew we needed.
The war involves people of Spanish descent. Before we get to that, however, it’s useful to ponder just how marketable hate is in order to generate mass hysteria. By that I mean it is relatively easy to target a historically mysterious or outsider group like witches or Jews. How do evil-minded leaders and agenda-driven media get us to focus on people who are off the radar? Can anyone be targeted? The answer to the last question is yes. After the Civil War, General George Armstrong Custer built his short-lived career on the public’s media-manipulated hatred of Indians. The answer to the first question, about concocting an enemy, is found in the kind of psychology I’ve been studying all my life, first as an anthropologist and then as a radio talk show host.
There are three primary ingredients necessary for whipping up mass hysteria. They are some combination of psychological stress, such as unemployment or debt or political strife within a family or group of friends; physical stress, as in illness caused by poor eating habits or drink or pot; and exhaustion from overwork, searching for work, commuting long hours, or lack of sleep due to the stress. These can occur naturally or they can be manufactured, especially today, when everyone is plugged in to some kind of device. You may not be thinking of a hurricane that probably won’t affect you, but the media will force you to worry. You might not be concerned about North Korean nukes until the fear-mongering press tells you to be. You could be unaware of Ebola or some other disease until two people who visited Africa come down with it in Europe and we are suddenly warned it could become a worldwide epidemic. Bedbugs are always good for a news cycle or two.
You get the picture. Leaders distract us, and media sell ads based on our base instincts, whether fear or greed. So how does this translate to a particular group? How many people really have anything to fear from neo-Nazis who are few in number and essentially powerless? Why is the media obsessed with them, yet equally devoted to promoting love for Muslims who pose an immediate twofold threat: swiftly increasing numbers and well-hidden terrorists?
The answer is demographics. Neo-Nazis and their boosters represent a small voting bloc. Muslims and their bleeding-heart boosters represent a much larger bloc. In a free America, which this once was—with an unbiased press—these groups would have been reported upon only when they did something newsworthy. When the National Socialist Party of America marched in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, in 1978, that was news. The march was intentionally provocative but, more important, it was constitutionally protected. It was reported upon and then it was gone. There was no social media to keep it alive, pro or con. Indignation and fear were not headlined as if they were commodities to be sold. There was not a spike in membership for the NSPA.
When you have the bedrock causes of mass hysteria, the subtler effects take hold. In the short term, they are largely physical. Fear and excitation cause us to have panic attacks and to hyperventilate. Depleted of carbon dioxide, we experience symptoms from spasms to benign fasciculation (twitching) to temporary numbness. If these issues continue, hysterical psychology takes over and triggers hypochondria: It’s a heart attack, it’s colon cancer, it’s a brain tumor. Others in our family become concerned. We feed off their fear and our symptoms amplify, whether they are imagined or real. We go online, playing amateur doctor, and zero in not on the voices of calm and reason but on the few fellow hysterics who say it really could be a heart attack, colon cancer, or a brain
tumor. We actually make ourselves ill.
That same progression applies to the psychology of hate. We are annoyed by someone at work or on the bus. We find that other voices are aligned with our frustration—not at that individual necessarily but at that individual’s race or religion. If the government or media decides there is a group we should hate (more on that in a moment), we fixate on that. If you are inherently stable, you won’t bite. But how many of us possess that consistent level of benevolence? If the media feeds us someone to hate, anyone, we are likely to transfer our disgust and climb aboard. This is an insidious but very real, very human process. If you are a male attorney, normally rational, and a fellow female attorney takes maternity leave giving you her workload on top of your own, you may find yourself resentful of her… and as the weeks and months pass, of feminism in general. You may be triggered into expressing your displeasure by all the hype around a movie like Wonder Woman. You may circle the wagons around all things male. And if the assault continues, if you read about (as I did) plans to make an all-girl film based on the all-boy novel Lord of the Flies, your resentment starts to set, like concrete. You find yourself on Election Day refusing to vote for any female candidates.
Psychological weakness of any kind, in any capacity, makes us yearn for a steadying hand, even if that hand is an agent of Goebbels or a once-reliable brand like CNN or the New York Times. Or Facebook, which offers you a rainbow gay flag for your profile but not a Confederate one. When all of these outlets and individuals have the same progressive agenda, you will either hate who they hate or love who they hate. The more these entities push an agenda, the more rabid your views become. As Goebbels said it would.
Which brings us to a perfect confluence of controlling factors to generate mass hysteria and hate near the turn of the century.
THE BIRTH OF A WAR
Shortly before the turn of the century, Americans needed new outlets for their energy. The frontier had been tamed, and the country’s reach extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. What was left? One of the last strongholds of the old colonial powers, and it was right at our doorstep. What to do about it? The answer was obvious.
The history of the Spanish colony of Cuba was four centuries of abuse, exploitation, and genocide. By 1896, Cubans had fought three wars over thirty years in their quest for independence. That year, occupying Spanish troops viciously cracked down on the rebels, relocating hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their rural homes into prison camps. What housing there was, offered scant protection from the elements. The Spanish provided little food for their prisoners and almost no medical services. Tens of thousands of Cubans died there or were shot for refusing to move to them. 3
His eyes turned toward the Caribbean, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt said, “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”4 President William McKinley preferred diplomatic and economic pressure, but William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, realized that a war with a substantial human interest angle would sell newspapers. Starting in 1895, the New York Journal and its rival the New York World competed for readership by publishing ever-increasingly lurid tales of torture, horrible living conditions, rapes, and murders within the Cuban camps. As Hearst had predicted, the camps were just the sort of outrage Americans could latch on to. The hysteria building continued, with help from members of the American government and Cuban rebels who sought an armed conflict. It had been more than thirty years since the end of the Civil War. A new generation felt the stirring of war fever.
Still, not everyone was convinced. Legend has it that in 1897, New York Journal illustrator Frederic Remington—the famed western artist who was stationed in Cuba to provide drawings of Spanish cruelty—sent a cable to Hearst reading, “Everything quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. Wish to return.” Hearst allegedly replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”5
Ultimately, a deadly incident in Havana Harbor removed the need for newspapers to peddle atrocities. The cruiser Maine had been stationed in the harbor—not, as President McKinley claimed, as a goodwill gesture, but to remind both the Spanish government and Cuban rebels that any activities that endangered American interests in Cuba would not be tolerated. On February 15, 1898, the Maine exploded and sank, killing 266 men.
Roosevelt and Hearst had their flash point. Here was destruction of American property. Here was a seeming attack on the American military. Never mind that the exact nature of the explosion was never determined. Two days after the incident, the World ran a piece debating whether the Maine explosion was caused by a bomb or a torpedo6—and further, whether Spain had even been involved. Recent investigations of the wreckage have led to speculation that it was an accident, an explosion caused by onboard ammunition and coal being stored too near each other.
No matter. The Journal took a firm stand, declaring “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy” and posting a “$50,000 REWARD! For the Detection of the Perpetrator of the Maine Outrage!” Since the perpetrator was never uncovered, the reward went uncollected. The next day, the Journal announced “The Whole Country Thrills with War Fever.” That much, at least, was true. Around the country, newspapers embraced the tone set by the New York media. In tone and content and even in terms of monetary gain, this was no different than the billion-dollar Powerball.
The only person who was not ablaze with war fever, it seemed, was McKinley, who was not prepared to go to war based on the goading of newspapers and an explosion of inconclusive origin. For two months, he pursued a diplomatic end to hostilities. It wasn’t until an April U.S. Navy blockade of Cuba resulted in Spain declaring war on America that newspapers got their war.
The newspapers weren’t the only entities ready for war. As soon as the United States reciprocated Spain’s declaration of war, Teddy Roosevelt resigned his post and formed the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. To complete the reality TV-style selling of the war, he gave his regiment a nickname bestowed in honor of the spectacular, live western attraction “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Partly because of the fervor, partly because of Roosevelt’s go-get-’em reputation, and partly because the whole matter seemed like a warm-weather vacation, volunteers swamped to join Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. This, too, is mass hysteria: wanting to be a part of something that is big and trendy. In the absence of Facebook and Instagram, young men wanted to be able to send letters and photographs and trinkets to their wives, girlfriends, and mothers. Those were automatic “likes.”
While the Spanish-American War was hardly a vacation, it did last only three and a half months. Mosquitos proved to be more fearsome than the Spanish: of the 3,289 American dead, nine times as many U.S. servicemen were felled by typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever than were killed in battle.7 The brevity of the campaign had to be a relief to Hearst, not because he was a humanitarian but because he was a businessman. He knew then what we have since learned in Afghanistan—that over time even a necessary or at least publicly sanctioned war becomes tiresome… especially as the coffins and the maimed begin returning home.
The result of the mass hysteria caused by the American press was unprecedented and far-reaching. It didn’t matter that it was based on a fabrication, just like the Associated Press and its lying use of the term “undocumented citizens.” Spain left Cuba and gave Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States. For an additional $20 million we received sovereignty over the Philippines. Spain was no longer a global power while, for the price of ten weeks of war, the United States was. Cuba effectively remained an American colony and playground until Castro tossed us out in 1959. Roosevelt returned a hero (also helped by the press) and went from governor to vice president to president in just two years.
But there was a less obvious result, one that also resonates to this day. That was the treatment of all Hispanics as second-class citizens. We’ve seen a lot of racial hate in just the events
we’ve talked about, and though the result isn’t always obvious mass hysteria—rioting, burning, lynching—it is slow-burn hysteria nonetheless. It’s a form of fight-or-flight. If you are of any ethnicity, with familiar practices, languages, traditions in your town, and someone with a different look and lifestyle shows up, you will go into self-preservation mode. Protect the herd. You needn’t even express that to others of the town or neighborhood or jungle village. Fear and suspicion are palpable. Your people and your way of life are about to end. I am perplexed that the illegal immigration of drug dealers and killers that causes the death of citizens is okay with progressives, yet these same voices want to tear down statues of Columbus. That defies logic. Columbus made a difficult journey to go somewhere new. He sought a better life, too. He sent money home. He established a community within an existing community. He did not bother to learn the ways of the indigenous people but made them accept his ways, his nation’s religion. Once a foothold had been gained, his numbers swelled. And by the way: he was sailing under the flag of the very people who are now demonized: Hispanics. They were conquerors then but victims now. Progressives are lucky to have logic that works like a pendulum, swinging wherever they want it to go.
Racism and bigotry have two defining parts, immorality and illegality. The problem for progressives is that the first is subjective and often clashes with the latter—for example, the bakery that refuses to make a cake for a gay couple. When any entrenched group feels threatened by a newly formed identity—be they married gays, freed blacks, or transplanted Hispanics who don’t necessarily speak the language—hysteria on the local or national level is invariably the result. How that is manifest, whether by the formation of the KKK or massive deportations, depends entirely on the wisdom and broad-based compassion of our leaders.
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 16