Word: hysterias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Certainly the hysteria that swept the West Coast after Pearl Harbor set the stage for some kind of drastic action. No rumor about Japanese Americans was too wild to be believed. Treasonous farmers were said to be growing tomatoes in arrow-shaped patches that pointed the way for enemy pilots to California defense plants. Nisei students were reported to be pouring into German- language classes at UCLA, presumably to help the Nazis. One story said wily Japanese saboteurs had quietly bought up land around West Coast military installations...
...yearning for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. After such falls from grace are revealed, the question always arises: Were the sinners truly devout souls brought to perdition or fiendish fakers from the start? That is precisely the issue raised by American literature's most exuberant portrait of religious hysteria and hypocrisy, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 Elmer Gantry...
Baldwin charged that the hearing was not conducted fairly. He claimed the hearing took place in an atmosphere of "lynch-mob hysteria." He also said the panel's non-voting chairman, Dean of the College Edward Shanahan could not be impartial because Shanahan's direct superior, Dartmouth President James O. Freedman, last week issued a statement condemning the incident...
...coverage, the McCoy trial rocks New York City as the racial incident of the decade. Of course, in the year Wolfe's book came out the city had at least two of those. Yet Wolfe's message remains clear--the public frenzy generated about the trial is the empty hysteria of an uncomprehending city. In a final touch of verisimilitude, Wolfe concludes his work with an old journalist-style fake New York Times article...
...there must be an extra day in the calendar. These extra-long years, called leap years, are perfect for cramming in one whole extra day of commercials onto the bandwagon of monster events. Furthermore, by staging the Olympics in the same year as Presidential elections, each feeds on the hysteria generated by the other until the American public is convinced that something important is actually happening...