Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/407

Rh Mob mind working in vast bodies of dispersed individuals gives us the craze or fad. This may be defined as that irrational unanimity of interest, feeling, opinion, or deed in a body of communicating individuals which results from suggestion and imitation. In the chorus of execration at a sensational crime, in the clamor for the blood of an assassin or dynamiter, in waves of national feeling, in war fevers, in political "landslides" and "tidal waves," in passionate "sympathetic" strikes, in cholera scares, in public frights, in popular delusions, in religious crazes, in "booms" and panics, in agitations, insurrections, and revolutions, we witness contagion on a gigantic scale, favored in some cases by popular hysteria. It is best to keep the term "craze" for an imitative unanimity arrived at under great excitement, while "fad" is that milder form of imitation which appears in sudden universal interest in some novelty.

As there must be in the typical mob a center which radiates impulses by fascination till they have subdued enough people to continue their course by sheer intimidation, so for the craze there must be an excitant, overcoming so many people that these can affect the rest by mere volume of suggestion. This first orientation is produced by some event or incident. The murder of a leader, an insult to an ambassador, the sermons of a crazy fanatic, the words of a "prophet" or "Messiah," a sensational proclamation, a scintillating phrase, the arrest of an agitator, a coup d'état, the advent of a new railroad, the collapse of a trusted banking house, a number of deaths by an epidemic, a series of mysterious murders, and an inexplicable occurrence such as a comet, an eclipse, a star shower, an earthquake, or a monstrous birth—each of these has been the starting point of some fever, mania, crusade, uprising, boom, panic, delusion, or fright. The more expectant, overwrought, or hysterical is the public mind, the easier it is to set up a great perturbation. Even clergymen noted a connection between the "great revival" of 1858 and the panic of 1857. After a series of public calamities, a train of startling events, a pestilence, earthquake, or war, the anchor of reason finds no "holding ground," and minds are blown about by every breath of passion or sentiment.

The fad originates in the surprise or interest excited by novelty. Roller-skating, blue glass, the planchette, a forty days' fast, the "new woman," tiddledy-winks, faith-healing, the "13–14–15" puzzle, baseball, telepathy, or the sexual novel attract those restless folk who are always running hither and thither after some new thing. This creates a swirl which rapidly sucks into its vortex the soft-headed and weak-minded, and at last, grown bigger, involves even the saner kind. As no department of life is safe from the invasion of novelty, we have all kinds of