Mob mentality

“ To be torn in pieces by a mob was a death too horrible! She turned imploringly to the judge, but there was no hope in his iron face. She closed her eyes, but the howling mob still swam before her vision; and when she buried her face in her robe, and strove to shut out their imprecations, their fierce, wild cries still rung in her ears. At each moment the tumult deepened, until the excitement of the populace became uncontrollable. ”

“ Are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your 319 houses,—that man your navy, and recruit your army,—that have enabled you to defy all the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair! You may call the people a mob; but do not forget, that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people. And here I must remark, with what alacrity you are accustomed to fly to the succour of your distressed allies, leaving the distressed of your own country to the care of Providence or—the parish. ”

“ Mobs, by reducing men to a state of nature, defeat the object of every social compact. The sober citizen who trembles in beholding the fury of the mob, seeks refuge from its dangers by joining in its acclamations. The laws are silenced. New objects of violence are discovered. The government of the nation and the mob government change places with each other. The mob erects its horrid crest over the ruins of liberty, of property, of the domestic relations of life and of civil institutions. ”

“ Older writers who saw the ragged throngs in the streets were led to identify the mob or crowd with the tattered, illiterate [47] populace. Our mob to-day is no longer merely tramping the streets. We have it at the breakfast table, in the subway, alike in shop and boudoir, and office—wherever, in fact, the newspaper goes. And the raggedness is not exterior, nor is the mob confined to the class of the ill-clad and the poor. The raggedness, and tawdriness have now become spiritual, a universal presence entering into the fabric of nearly all our mental processes. ”

“ A mob is a fearful thing, a dreadful power, and it developes a ferocity which does not inhere in any one of the multitude composing it—a material energy of awful force. A reasoner can take aside, one by one, an entire audience, and convince them thus of the justice of the cause he advocates ”

“ One would think that men would be afraid to commit any crime in a community where the mob is in the ascendency, and yet, such are the contradictions and subtleties of human nature, that it is exactly the opposite. And there is another thing in this connection—the men who constitute the mob are, as a rule, among the worst, the lowest, and the most depraved. ”

“ The mean and envious beast that lived in our midst,—as it lives in every other country,—unseen, but felt, and always ready to crush the acquirements of existing civilization,—the mob came out from the underground world; criminal hands let the mob on the streets. ”

“ None of us will forget the horrors of those bloody days and bloody nights lit up by the glare of fires, those sobbing women, those little children's bodies torn to pieces and left lying in the street. But for all that not one of us thinks that the police and the mob are the real origin of the evil. ”

“ In crowd-thinking it is often made the instrument of wholesale destruction and human slaughter. The mob is ever motivated by this logic of negation, and of automatic behavior. It is thus that compulsive thinking sways vast hordes of men and women, impelling them, in the very name of truth or righteousness, to actions of the most atrocious character. It is this which robs most popular movements of their intelligent purposiveness, unleashes the fanatic and the bigot, and leads men to die and to kill for a phrase. ”

“ A rude mob, consisting of the very dregs of the populace, made brutal by harsh treatment, by sanguinary decrees which dogged them in every town, scared from place to place and driven almost to despair, were compelled to worship their God, and to hide like a work of darkness the universal, sacred privilege of humanity. ”

“ Good-natured when dangling from the strap in the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of so much oppression and injustice, where is the supposed cruelty of the 'mob'? I am ready to affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional distorters of right thinking and right feeling. ”

“ You can no more move against the stream of custom, than you can make head against a crowd of people; the mob of lords and gentlemen will not let you speak or think but as they do. You are hemmed in, stifled, pinioned, pressed to death,—and if you make one false step, are ‘trampled under the hoofs of a swinish multitude!’ Talk of mobs! ”

“ How finely elemental, how responsive to the best and the worst, is the mob when the crisis comes!
"Although my thoughts were forming through my readings and the larger events about me, the everyday life in the shop was perhaps the deepest cause of my growing revolt. The atmosphere of the frenzied factory is well calculated to produce a spirit of sullen and smouldering rebellion in the minds of its less hardened inmates. From the domineering boss down to the smallest understrapper, the spirit of the jailer and turnkey is dominant. ”

“ Nothing is so horrible as the anger of a mob when it rages for blood and strangles its defenceless prey. Then there rolled through the streets a dark flood of human beings, in which, here and there, workmen in their shirt-sleeves seemed like the white caps of a raging sea, and all were howling and roaring—all merciless, heathenish, devilish. ”

“ We may say with perfect assurance that a mob becomes formed under the influence of some strange event, be it the dream of a lunatic, the fiery speech of insane man, the screams of a superstitious woman, or the mad dance of a crazy king. A strong sudden excitement makes men obedient and causes them to lose their will, their personality, and makes them ready to play a blind obedience to an external command. Can we find an analogous state in the life of the individual? ”

“ Let it once become known that you tried to defile the innocent, to work harm to one of mine, and you may suffer the fate of the unclean things to which you belong by nature. The mob kills without delicacy. It will tear you as the dogs tore the painted Jezebel. ”

“ There is a deal of truth in mob law, and those who are shocked at the mere mention of it are respectable outsiders. But suppose you belong to the mob yourself (and mobs are made of men, women, and children) , how then? Is there no wholesome gratification in the thought that you, addressed in the riot act, dispersed, moved on, &c., &c., have yet after all a quick rough sense of justice. Yes, you don’t want disorder, but only protest against some passing abuse or petty police encroachment. The licence of our English mobs is most useful in resisting this last. ”

“ The healthy-minded prosperous man is irritated beyond endurance by this stranger within the gate—this incorrigible, ineffectual critic, cumbering his road. The mob, too, always ready, like spiteful, cawing rooks, to fall upon a wounded comrade, howl remorselessly for his destruction. ”

“ This is but a trifle to the demands that will be made upon us, if we yield now under the threats of a mob,—for men acting under passion or terror, or both, are a mob, no matter what their numbers and intelligence. ”

“ Mob rule in this country must be stopped, and when mobs attack the home of a millionaire, of a laborer, or of the I.W.W., it is not only the right but the duty of the occupants to resist with every means in their power. ”

“ The result of which is that a ferocious mob surrounds you, and with invectives, insults, and provocative gestures assail and outrage you, till it please your tormentor to drive on; which you do at length amidst hooting and uproar that even convicted felons would feel ashamed of. ”

“ The mob, the political convention, the abysmal brutality and stupid ignorance, of all concourses of people, give the lie to this theory. In a mob the collective intelligence and mercy is that of the least intelligent and most brutal members that compose the mob. ”

“ Knowing the character of an American mob, and also knowing how little they value the life of a man of color, I expected, [Pg 107] as I saw the multitude surrounding the house, to die—in fact, prepared for death.
Having assembled about the premises, they began to cry out in the most uproarious manner, "Bring him out!" "Kill the Nigger!" "Hang him!" "Tear down the house!" Shouts, groans, maledictions of all sorts and degrees followed. No one who has not witnessed an American mob can have the slightest idea of the scene which presented itself at this point. ”

“ Those who have never seen a mob placed in such a situation as to have cast off all moral restraint whatever, at the same time that it feels there is no physical power to cope with it, can form no notion of the mass of terrible passions which lie slumbering under what, in ordinary cases, have appeared harmless bosoms, but which now run riot, and overcame every principle of restraint. ”

“ Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that breaks things—even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. ”

“ This was a mob's proceeding all over, and we regret very much to say, that it is very much the characteristic of English mobs. What an uncommonly strange thing it is that people in multitudes seem completely to get rid of all reason—all honour—all common ordinary honesty; while, if you were to take the same people singly, you would find that they were reasonable enough, and would shrink with a feeling quite approaching to horror from anything in the shape of very flagrant injustice. ”

“ It is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. ”

“ They want warmth and protection—they are afraid. A mob is the quintessence of cowardice—a dirty, mad, hydra-headed monster, that one good valiant Saint George can thrust to the heart. When a mob speaks I say, Vox populi, vox devil! ¶ At the time the Israelites tumbled pellmell upon the Philistines, Moses had long been dead. ”

“ The remedies suggested here for lawlessness and contempt for the law, may be applied with equal benefit where mob spirit is rampant. The mobist, to coin a phrase, that starts out to do murder upon a defenceless prisoner, is on a par with the bushwhacker—even inferior to him in courage. For mobs are courageous only through mass numbers; or when under strong and aggressive leadership. Mobs have been known to slink away ignominiously when confronted by one or two loyal citizens. ”

“ The ever-increasing frequency of outbreaks of mob violence has its source in the crowd-thinking which is everywhere encouraged. The mob which may at any time engulf us is, after all, but the logical conclusion and sudden ripening of thought processes which are commonly regarded as highly respectable, idealistic, and moral. ”

“ This owing to the absence of leaders and in the absence of organization, a mob is simply a herd. Its mistrust of its natural leaders, of the great, of the wealthy, of persons in office and clothed with authority, is inveterate and incurable. ”

“ The mob, always the first to execute justice, in their own inimitable way took vengeance upon Crauford by burning the house no longer his, and the houses of his partners, who were the worst and most innocent sufferers for his crime. ”

“ These leading men have used the cry of "abolitionism" over the mob, much as a huntsman uses the "set on" to his dogs. Whenever they have a purpose to carry, a man to put down, they, have only to raise this cry, and the monster is wide awake, ready to spring wherever they shall send him. Does a minister raise his voice in favor of the slave?—Immediately, with a whoop and hurra, some editor starts the mob on him, as an abolitionist. Is there a man teaching his negroes to read?—The mob is started upon him—he must promise to give it up, or leave the state. ”

“ The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob [139] is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution; it persecutes a principle ”

“ Yet wiser men have seen defiance of law fail to stop crime, have seen mobs act upon suspicions afterward proved groundless, have seen mob action widely extended, and have seen the growth of a spirit of lawlessness. Where one mob has had its way, another is always more easily aroused, and soon the administration of the law becomes a farce. ”