Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 125

Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the aggregate which const.i.tutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an average struck between its elements. What really takes place is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact--bases and acids, for example--combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.

It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference. To obtain, at any rate, a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle a.n.a.lyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct.

The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other, while it is princ.i.p.ally in respect to the conscious elements of their character--the fruit of education, and yet more of exceptional hereditary conditions--that they differ from each other. Men most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts, pa.s.sions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of everything that belongs to the realm of sentiment--religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies, etc.--the most eminent men seldom surpa.s.s the standard of the most ordinary individuals. From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his bootmaker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or nonexistent.

It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal individuals of a race in much the same degree, it is precisely these qualities that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind the intellectual apt.i.tudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the h.o.m.ogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an a.s.sembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles. The truth is, they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is acc.u.mulated. It is not all the world, as is so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but a.s.suredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by "all the world"

crowds are to be understood.

If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.

Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.

The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but which it is not easy to explain. It must be cla.s.sed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order.

In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an apt.i.tude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable except when he makes part of a crowd.

A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.

The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself--either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant--in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.

Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotized subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity. The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.

We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the princ.i.p.al characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian--that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.

An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary a.s.semblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interest, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circ.u.mstances, be better or worse than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honor, that are led on--almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the Crusades--to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93, to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.

3. The Crowd Defined[304]

A crowd in the ordinary sense of that term is any chance collection of individuals. Such a collectivity becomes a crowd in the sociological sense only when a condition of _rapport_ has been established among the individuals who compose it.

_Rapport_ implies the existence of a mutual responsiveness, such that every member of the group reacts immediately, spontaneously, and sympathetically to the sentiments and att.i.tudes of every other member.

The fact that A responds sympathetically toward B and C implies the existence in A of an att.i.tude of receptivity and suggestibility toward the sentiments and att.i.tudes of B and C. Where A, B, and C are mutually sympathetic, the inhibitions which, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, serve to preserve the isolation and self-consciousness of individuals are relaxed or completely broken down. Under these circ.u.mstances each individual, in so far as he may be said to reflect, in his own consciousness and in his emotional reactions, the sentiments and emotions of all the others, tends at the same time to modify the sentiments and att.i.tudes of those others. The effect is to produce a heightened, intensified, and relatively impersonal state of consciousness in which all seem to share, but which is, at the same time, relatively independent of each.

The development of this so-called "group-consciousness" represents a certain amount of loss of self-control on the part of the individual.

Such control as the individual loses over himself is thus automatically transferred to the group as a whole or to the leader.

What is meant by _rapport_ in the group may be ill.u.s.trated by a somewhat similar phenomenon which occurs in hypnosis. In this case a relation is established between the experimenter and his subject such that the subject responds automatically to every suggestion of the experimenter but is apparently oblivious of suggestions coming from other persons whose existence he does not perceive or ignores. This is the condition called "isolated rapport."[305]

In the case of the crowd this mutual and exclusive responsiveness of each member of the crowd to the suggestions emanating from the other members produces here also a kind of mental isolation which is accompanied by an inhibition of the stimuli and suggestions that control the behavior of individuals under the conditions of ordinary life. Under these conditions impulses long repressed in the individual may find an expression in the crowd. It is this, no doubt, which accounts for those so-called criminal and atavistic tendencies of crowds, of which Le Bon and Sighele speak.[306]

The organization of the crowd is only finally effected when the attention of the individuals who compose it becomes focused upon some particular object or some particular objective. This object thus fixed in the focus of the attention of the group tends to a.s.sume the character of a _collective representation_.[307] It becomes this because it is the focus of the collectively enhanced emotion and sentiment of the group.

It becomes the representation and the symbol of what the crowd feels and wills at the moment when all members are suffused with a common collective excitement and dominated by a common and collective idea.

This excitement and this idea with the meanings that attach to it are called collective because they are a product of the interactions of the members of the crowd. They are not individual but corporate products.

Le Bon describes the organization thus effected in a chance-met collection of individuals as a "collective mind," and refers to the group, transitory and ephemeral though it be, as a "single being."

The positive factors in determining the organization of the crowd are then:

(1) A condition of _rapport_ among the members of the group with a certain amount of contagious excitement and heightened suggestibility incident to it.

(2) A certain degree of mental isolation of the group following as a consequence of the _rapport_ and sympathetic responsiveness of members of the group.

(3) Focus of attention; and finally the consequent.

(4) Collective representation.

C. TYPES OF Ma.s.s MOVEMENTS

1. Crowd Excitements and Ma.s.s Movements: The Klondike Rush[308]

It was near the middle of July when the steamer _Excelsior_ arrived in San Francisco from St. Michael's, on the west coast of Alaska, with forty miners, having among them seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of gold, brought down from the Klondike. When the bags and cans and jars containing it had been emptied and the gold piled on the counters of the establishment to which it was brought, no such sight had been seen in San Francisco since the famous year of 1849.

On July 18 the _Portland_ arrived in Seattle, on Puget Sound, having on board sixty-eight miners, who brought ash.o.r.e bullion worth a million dollars. The next day it was stated that these miners had in addition enough gold concealed about their persons and in their baggage to double the first estimate. Whether all these statements were correct or not does not signify, for those were the reports that were spread throughout the states. From this last source alone, the mint at San Francisco received half a million dollars' worth of gold in one week, and it was certain that men who had gone away poor had come back with fortunes. It was stated that a poor blacksmith who had gone up from Seattle returned with $115,000, and that a man from Fresno, who had failed as a farmer, had secured $135,000.

The gold fever set in with fury and attacked all cla.s.ses. Men in good positions, with plenty of money to spend on an outfit, and men with little beyond the amount of their fare, country men and city men, clerks and professional men without the faintest notion of the meaning of "roughing it," flocked in impossible numbers to secure a pa.s.sage. There were no means of taking them. Even in distant New York, the offices of railroad companies and local agencies were besieged by anxious inquirers eager to join the throng. On Puget Sound, mills, factories, and smelting works were deserted by their employees, and all the miners on the upper Skeena left their work in a body. On July 21 the North American Transportation Company (one of two companies which monopolized the trade of the Yukon) was reincorporated in Chicago with a quadrupled capital, to cope with the demands of traffic. At the different Pacific ports every available vessel was pressed into the service, and still the wild rush could not be met. Before the end of July the _Portland_ left Seattle again for St. Michael's, and the _Mexico_ and _Topeka_ for Dyea; the _Islander_ and _Tees_ sailed for Dyea from Victoria, and the _G. W.

Elder_ from Portland; while from San Francisco the _Excelsior_, of the Alaska Company, which had brought the first gold down, left again for St. Michael's on July 28, being the last of the company's fleet scheduled to connect with the Yukon river boats for the season. Three times the original price was offered for the pa.s.sage, and one pa.s.senger accepted an offer of $1,500 for the ticket for which he had paid only $150.

This, however, was only the beginning of the rush. Three more steamers were announced to sail in August for the mouth of the Yukon, and at least a dozen more for the Lynn Ca.n.a.l, among which were old tubs, which, after being tied up for years, were now overhauled and refitted for the voyage north. One of these was the _Williamette_, an old collier with only sleeping quarters for the officers and crew, which, however, was fitted up with bunks and left Seattle for Dyea and Skagway with 850 pa.s.sengers, 1,200 tons of freight, and 300 horses, men, live stock, and freight being wedged between decks till the atmosphere was like that of a dungeon; and even with such a prospect in view, it was only by a lavish amount of tipping that a man could get his effects taken aboard.

Besides all these, there were numerous scows loaded with provisions and fuel, and barges conveying horses for packing purposes.

A frightful state of congestion followed as each successive steamer on its arrival at the head of the Lynn Ca.n.a.l poured forth its crowds of pa.s.sengers and added to the enormous loads of freight already acc.u.mulated. Matters became so serious that on August 10 the United States Secretary of the Interior, having received information that 3,000 persons with 2,000 tons of baggage and freight were then waiting to cross the mountains to Yukon, and that many more were preparing to join them, issued a warning to the public (following that of the Dominion Government of the previous week) in which he called attention to the exposure, privation, suffering, and danger incident to the journey at that advanced period of the season, and further referred to the gravity of the possible consequences to people detained in the mountainous wilderness during five or six months of Arctic winter, where no relief could reach them.

To come now to the state of things at the head of the Lynn Ca.n.a.l, where the steamers discharged their loads of pa.s.sengers, horses, and freight.

This was done either at Dyea or Skagway, the former being the landing-place for the Chilcoot Pa.s.s, and the latter for the White Pa.s.s, the distance between the two places being about four miles by sea. There were no towns at these places, nor any convenience for landing except a small wharf at Skagway, which was not completed, the workmen having been smitten with the gold fever. Every man had to bring with him, if he wanted to get through and live, supplies for a year: sacks of flour, slabs of bacon, beans, and so forth, his cooking utensils, his mining outfit and building tools, his tent, and all the heavy clothing and blankets suitable for the northern winter, one thousand pounds' weight at least. Imagine the frightful ma.s.s of stuff disgorged as each successive vessel arrived, with no adequate means of taking it inland!

Before the end of September people were preparing to winter on the coast, and Skagway was growing into a substantial town. Where in the beginning of August there were only a couple of shacks, there were in the middle of October 700 wooden buildings and a population of about 1,500. Businesses of all kinds were carried on, saloons and low gaming houses and haunts of all sorts abounded, but of law and order there was none. Dyea also, which at one time was almost deserted, was growing into a place of importance, but the t.i.tle of every lot in both towns was in dispute. Rain was still pouring down, and without high rubber boots walking was impossible. None indeed but the most hardy could stand existence in such places, and every steamer from the south carried fresh loads of people back to their homes.

Of the 6,000 people who went in this fall, 200 at the most got over to the Dawson Route by the White Pa.s.s, and perhaps 700 by the Chilcoot.

There were probably 1,000 camped at Lake Bennett, and all the rest, except the 1,500 remaining on the coast, had returned home to wait till midwinter or the spring before venturing up again. The question of which was the best trail was still undecided, and men vehemently debated it every day with the a.s.sistance of the most powerful language at their command.

As to the crowds who had gone to St. Michael's, it is doubtful whether any of them got through to Dawson City, since the lower Yukon is impa.s.sable by the end of September, and, at any rate, in view of the prospects of short rations, it would have been rash to try. The consequence would be that they would have to remain on that desolate island during nine months of almost Arctic winter, for the river does not open again till the end of June. Here they would be absolutely without employment unless they chose to stack wood for the steamboat companies, and their only amus.e.m.e.nts (save the mark) would be drinking bad rye whiskey--for Alaska is a "prohibition" country--and poker-playing. For men with a soul above such delights, the heart-breaking monotony of a northern winter would be appalling, and it is only to be understood by those who have had to endure similar experiences themselves on the western prairies.

2. Ma.s.s Movements and the Mores: The Woman's Crusade[309]

On the evening of December 23, 1873, there might have been seen in the streets of Hillsboro, Ohio, persons singly or in groups wending their way to Music Hall, where a lecture on temperance was to be delivered by Dr. Dio Lewis, of Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts.

Hillsboro is a small place, containing something more than 3,000 people.

The inhabitants are rather better educated than is usually the case in small towns, and its society is indeed noted in that part of the country for its quietude, culture, and refinement.