"Mental Epidemics": Crowd Psychology And American Culture, 1890-1940

Abstract

In 1900, disillusioned with high-powered newspaper work and weary of cities, progressive journalist Ray Stannard Baker quit New York and fled to Arizona. Going west to find himself was a gesture of affiliation sanctified by both national myth and his family folklore of pioneer stock ancestry and his father's move west to start over after failing in business. But the Arizona deserts had no power to heal him. In his memoirs he recounted a moment of reckoning with the omnipotence of crowds: he could not forget the congestion that lay just beyond the horizon. For better or worse, to him America was epitomized by suffocating New York:

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