In these times of global uprisings the study of crowd behavior has become more relevant and necessary. Crowds form for various reasons and purposes, but it is their behavior once they have been mobilized that will be the focus of this paper. Over a hundred years ago Gustave Le Bon posited that crowds, once formed, became open, “…to suggestion, credulity, mobility, the exaggeration of the sentiments good or bad, the manifestation of certain forms of morality, etc.”[1]. The individual according to Le Bon, “…became an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.”[2]. While the author gives many examples that attempt to persuade the reader, it appears that the truth is not that simple to arrive at. Another author by the name of George Rude attempted to solve the question of crowd behavior in his great work The Crowd In History. Rude asserts, “…the nature of disturbances and of the crowd’s activities are intimately connected with the composition (social, occupational, and other) of those taking part in them.”[3] While his argument is more persuasive that Le Bon’s it appears to also be to extreme in its claims.
It is the purpose of this paper to show that crowds don’t adhere to an exact set of behaviors, but that their behaviors are specific to the social environment in which they occur. Examples from the “Rebecca’s Daughters” uprising will be used to show that crowds formed for a specific purpose have the ability to largely maintain focus on their primary objective. On the other hand, examples from Nazis Germany will be used to illustrate Le Bon’s hypothesis, as man losses his consciousness and morality and the horror that was the Holocaust occurred.
The years 1839-1844 were interesting times in southwestern England as unemployment and the introduction of tollgates began to stoke the fires of rebellion in the common man. Beginning when, “…the Whitland Trust decided to build four new gates between Narberth and Haverfordwest on the Carmarthen-Pembrokeshire border.”[4] This act had immediate consequences as a certain number of men dressed in women’s clothes, with faces blackened commenced in destroying two of the new toll gates. These events were not violent in nature and ended the confrontation for a short period of time.
In 1842 the riots began again and their scope was much larger than before. The focus once again was on the toll gates that had been erected and that were raising the cost of transportation greatly. The important aspect of this movement was the selective nature of the ‘crowd’ involved. George Rude writes, “She was remarkably discriminating: only toll gates considered to be “unjust” were dealt with, particularly those studding the side roads, which, through their proliferation, placed heavy extra cost on the carting of the line.”[5] This sort of behavior is in stark contrast to the assertions of Eric Hoffer in his work The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements when he writes, “The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings.”[6] The very fact that crowds, that at times were in excess of 250 people, could maintain to a large extent it focus, purpose and morality seems to fly in the face of this line of thought. Throughout the whole campaign there was only one death attributed to ‘Rebecca’s Daughters’. This movement was disciplined in nature as George Rude points out that, “Rebecca (as her historian reminds us) was strictly Sabbatarian: she never worked on Sundays and even studiously avoided late night sessions on Saturdays and Monday early morning.”[7] These are hardly the actions of a mindless automaton.
On the other end of the crowd spectrum we have the Nazi Party and its’ rise among the Germans. This movement started as a very focused ideology that had grand aspirations to turn the downtrodden of Germany into a people with nationalistic ambitions. Hitler knew that there were certain dangers when a movement began to grow too large when he wrote the more, “…posts and offices a movement has to hand out, the more inferior stuff it will attract, and in the end these political hangers-on overwhelm a successful party in such a number that the honest fighter of former days no longer recognizes the old movement….When this happens, the ‘mission’ of such a movement is done for.”[8] The Nazi’s held true to these beliefs, as the majority of Germans were not members of the Nazi party and yet many followed blindly without a true knowledge of what the movement consisted of.
What then would cause the majority of Germans to follow Hitler as if he were a god? In this case Le Bon’s hypothesis seems to more prevalent when he stated, “We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning of feelings and ideas in an identical direction by means of suggestion and contagion, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts;”[9] This idea of contagion coupled with the defeat in WWI and the poverty that was devastating the nation made the German people ripe for any movement that gained momentum.
In the end, when history had declared Germany defeated in WWII, many of the atrocities that the average German committed he himself did not feel responsible for. As Eric Hoffer again writes, “It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders.”[10] The simple fact that Germany was able to regain its’ national pride soon after the war is evidence of the fact that the people truly believed they were simple pawns in a much larger game. An idea had come along that promised to bring them out of their circumstances creating a future that would forever make the Germans the envy of the world, and they were simply swept up in the frenzy.
Before the rise of the National Socialist Movement in Germany most Germans would have cringed at the thought of lining up their fellow Jewish citizens and firing a bullet pointblank into their head. The idea of rounding up young Jewish boys and girls and feeding them into furnaces would have flown in the face of their Christian ideals. It is hard to imagine, when we look back in history, how someone could change so dramatically in such a short period of time, but Le Bon’s contagion had run its’ course. These actions can be explained when Le Bon writes, “As the result of the contagion the perversions are of the same kind, and take the same shape in the case of all the assembled individuals.”[11] German’s began to blindly follow what was being suggested and eventually became devoid of virtually all moral instinct. Pulling the trigger and ending the life of an innocent person became just an act with no psychological repercussions for the individual performing the act.
When looking at the two movements there are some differences in size and scope of their movement, but one thing is clear, and that is crowds behave differently in each situation. There is no overarching theory that can be made to fit every social movement of individuals. The Rebecca’s Daughter movement was characterized by the lower working class of England and had very clear objectives that in many case once the goal had been achieved the movement ended until it was needed again. They were moral in nature as they used mostly acts of intimidation and rarely reverted to violent acts. Germany and the Nazi’s were also based on the idea of class warfare, but their movement had a much larger and tragic result on all of Europe. Whereas in the Rebecca’s Daughters riots there was only one reported death, WWII cost the lives of millions. Applying Le Bon or Rude’s theories to both instances of mass movements would disprove both claims in the end. The reality is when a crows begins to form there is no guarantee of the outcome of their actions or behaviors. One may end up with a non-violent peaceful movement such as with Ghandi, or one may end up with the Protestant Reformation and the mindless killing of people whose beliefs are nearly the same.
Jeffrey Brandon Lee
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