I thought it’d be timely to write a little about public attitudes to “the mob” in Lovecraft’s time, given that we’ve had a taste of it here in the UK over the last few nights.
The ‘mob mind’, riots, and Lovecraft:
The “mob mind” was a popular concept and talking point around 1919-1920, and built on very real public concerns about the dangers of increasingly crowded and ill-educated modern cities that were emerging in the 1910s and 1920s.
In the early 1900s there had been mass panic on the New York subway…
‘Indescribable scenes of crowding and confusion, never paralleled in this city. […] a deadly, suffocating, rib-smashing subway rush which began at 7 o’clock tonight. Men fought, kicked and pummeled one another […] grey haired men pleaded for mercy, boys were knocked down and only escaped by a miracle from being trampled underfoot. The presence of the police alone averted what would undoubtedly have been panic after panic, with wholesale loss of life.’ — New York Tribune, 28th October 1904.
On 1st August 1918, when a then-new subway shuttle system had opened in New York, there had apparently been another riot and stampede to get out of the station. This was before the installation of glowing guide-lines that led people out of the dark.
E.A. Ross’s best-selling book Social Control (1901) had suggested that people were increasingly subject to a primitive “suggestibility” in crowded modern cities. Partly this had to do with the rise of and change in the nature of advertising, partly with the rise of a violent leftist politics, but in America it was able to built on existing French thinking about the nature of the new modern urban crowd and its patterns of behavior. This writing had initially arisen in France after the terror of the French revolution — but it was later heavily developed as intellectuals tried to divine what sort of new politics might come out of the new crowds from the 1900s onwards.
In 1919 Ross’s student Robert Gault had published the book The Psychology of Suggestion, drawing heavily on Ross’s ideas and the concept of the mob mind, and this was no doubt reviewed in the sort of publications Lovecraft would have read. I expect that the race riots and the serious political unrest in 1919 gave Gault’s book a wide readership. On the links between ‘the mob crowd’ and race in 1919 and the years following, see Jan Voogd’s book Race Riots and Resistance: the Red Summer of 1919 (2008) which examines the Chicago race riots of 1919. Even the most violent of the pulps paled beside the vicious horrors described in false rumours that fanned the riots.
On 9th September 1919 the whole of the Boston police force deserted their posts, leaving the city virtually defenceless against the mob, leading to further strong cultural anxieties about Bolshevism (widely believed to have inspired the police strike). This time it was much closer to Lovecraft’s own Providence, and it no doubt conflated politicized unions and crime in the public mind.
These anxieties were, of course, set against the background of the terror of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its organised exporting of the Bolshevist [socialist] creed. And, closer to home and a little later, there was the major terrorist bomb attack on New York on 16th September 1920 using 100lbs of dynamite with metal curtain-weights packed around it. This had followed the discovery of two series of horrific parcel bombs in the mail. This must have further heightened tensions in New York and the cities of New England.
On the specific ‘hypnotic’ nature of crowds, which seems relevant to the columns of semi-hypnotised people in the Lovecraft story “Nyarlathotep” (1920), one might also point to Gustave le Bon’s earlier book The Crowd (published in America in 1896) which had argued that an individual who is too long in a crowd…
finds himself in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.
By the time Lovecraft arrived in New York in the mid 1920s these wider anxieties appear had quieted down somewhat. Nevertheless they undoubtedly left their mark on the psyches of ordinary people, including Lovecraft.
Further reading:
John Carey. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939. Faber and Faber, 1992.
J.S. McClelland. The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti. Taylor & Francis, 2010.
Paul S. Boyer. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Harvard University Press, 1992.