I don’t like crowds.
Maybe it’s just some sort of neuroses like agoraphobia or maybe it’s just having developed a sense of uneasiness from seeing how individual people could react differently after becoming part of a group. It always confounded me from an early age how the dynamics of a group could change the behavior of a person, bringing out characteristics that might be undetected in one-to-one interactions. It’s as though the protection of the group brings out extreme attitudes that would otherwise be stifled. The whole moral compass is pushed further from the center and the sense of conscience that is present becomes diluted.
I was reminded of this feeling when I saw a short film about the actor Henry Fonda that talked of the parallels of his character’s experience in the movie The Oxbow Incident , where he was the lone voice of reason against a mob that lynches three men without evidence of their guilt, with his own as a young boy in Omaha, Nebraska. He was 14 years old in 1919 when he witnessed a mob storm the courthouse that was located across the street from his father’s printing business. They were inflamed by allegations made by a white woman that she had been assaulted by a black man. A suspect had been taken into custody and was in the courthouse. The mob, whose size was estimated to be between 5000 and 15000 people, exchanged gunfire with police in which two of the mob were killed. The mayor of Omaha tried to intervene and was beaten and himself lynched before being saved. The suspect was not so lucky.
The accounts of this mob rule are horrific. Fonda carried this memory with him for the rest of his life and it informed many of the roles he had over his career. In The Oxbow Incident his character confronts the mob afterward in a bar and reads them a letter written by one of the hanged men to his wife. I could go on and on but I think the clip says it all…
Redtree Times 