Word: hysterias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...more excitement is called for. Hysteria over the "Red" issue is everywhere. At Peekskill over a hundred people were injured in stone throwing after a concert. Local vigilantes have suggested running a Harvard professor out of town. Page one of the same CRIMSON says that the Navy wants to know, among other things, what sort of social affairs its ROTC men attend. The jury and the judge in the Hiss case were threatened after the trial. And now leaders of the Communist Party are jailed for "teaching, advocating, and encouraging." This hasn't been a crime in the many other...
...Hysteria. As Washington reporters drew blanks on any further bomb news from usually willing sources, the papers fell back on man-in-the-street interviews and unsubstantiated rumors from "reliable Swedish sources." Almost alone the Hearst papers made a try at spine-chilling; the New York Journal-American ran a half-page picture showing Manhattan engulfed in atomic "waves of death and havoc." Scripps-Howard's Newspaper Enterprise Association dug up an "exclusive" story: RUSSIA HAS 4 ATOM PLANTS. (N.E.A. got the tip from an "escaped Soviet industrial official.") The New York World-Telegram's scareheads...
...hysteria spread through Massachusetts. Young girls lived in dread of a spectral rape by the devil and of giving birth to a demon child, while young men (and older) were haunted by the "shapes" of comely matrons who at midnight dropped down from a beam and snuggled close. The devil worked overtime; he was described by one hysteric as "a short and black man-a Wretch no taller than an ordinary Walking Staff ... he wore a high crowned hat with straight hair; and he had one Cloven Foot." Another accuser casually referred...
Walk in the Clouds. With a kind of perverse logic, those who "confessed" were set free while those courageous enough to deny the accusations were almost all sent to the gallows. Scores of people were jailed, but a few hardy souls began to speak up against the hysteria; a Salem Quaker, a few clergymen, a Boston merchant. Those still in jail were quietly set free-on condition they pay the expense of their imprisonment...
...John Hale, who had been a witness against one of the witches: "We walked in clouds and could not see our way. And we have most cause to be humble for error . . . which cannot be retrieved." And indeed it could not be retrieved, for before the nine months' hysteria spent itself 20 innocent men & women had been executed in Salem...