Diffusion and Belief in a Collective Delusion: The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic

Abstract

W HILE individuals may at times lose touch with reality as their culture defines it, whole communities ordinarily do not. Yet instances are on record when this has very nearly happened: people in Illinois,. believed for a few days in September 1945 that a phantom anesthetist was prowling their town; 1 and a Martian invasion took place in the minds of many persons in the New York City area on October 30, 1938.2 Russia's Sputniks may be expected to give rise to a wide variety of mass hallucinatory phenomena similar to those that followed our first H-bomb explosions in March, 1954. This paper analyzes one such reaction: the windshield pitting epidemic that broke out in Seattle, in the Spring of 1954. Beginning March 23, 1954, Seattle newspapers carried intermittent reports of damage to automobile windshields in a city 80 miles to the north. Police suspected vandalism but were unable to gather proof. On the morning of April 14, newspapers reported windshield damage in a town about 65 miles from Seattle; that afternoon cars in a naval air station only 45 miles from the northern limits of the city were peppered. On the same evening the first strike occurred in Seattle itself: between April 14 and 15, 242 persons telephoned the Seattle Police Department reporting damage to over 3,000 automobiles. Many of these calls came from parking lots, service stations, and so on. Most commonly, the damage reported to windshelds consisted of pitting marks that grew into bubbles in the glass of about the size of a thumbnail. On the evening of the 15th, the Mayor of Seattle declared the damage was no longer a police matter and made an emergency appeal to the Governor and to President Eisenhower for help. Many persons covered their windshields with floor mats or newspaper; others simply kept their automobiles garaged. Conjecture as to cause ranged from meteoric dust to sandflea eggs hatching in the glass, but centered on possible radioactive fallout from the Eniwetok H-bomb tests conducted earlier that year. In support of this view many drivers claimed that they found tiny, metallic-looking particles about the size of a pinhead on their car windows. Newspapers also mentioned the possibility that the concern with pitting might have sprung largely from mass hysteria: people looking at their windshields for the first time, instead of through them. On April 16, calls to police dropped from 242 to 46; 10 persons called the police on the 17th, but from the 18th on no more calls were received about the subject of pitting. Another index of the concern with windshield pitting may be seen in the rise and decline in the combined number of column inches of windshield news in the two Seattle daily newspapers during March and April. As the figures in Table 1 show, the story grew gradually, with only occasional reports, until April 13, reached a peak of interest on April 15, and became newspaper history after the 19th. On June 10th, the University of Washington Environmental Research Laboratory, assigned by the Governor in April to investigate the pitting, issued its report.3 This * Read at the Southern Sociological Society meeting, April, 1956. final section of this paper has been revised, following discussion by William L. Kolb. authors are grateful to George A. Lundberg and to Harold W. Stoke, formerly Dean of the Graduate School, University of for their encouragement of the study. 1 D. M. Johnson, The Phantom Anesthetist of Mattoon, in Readings in Social Psychology, edited by Guy E. Swanson, T. M. Newcomb, and Eugene H. Hartley, New York: Holt, 1952, pp. 208-219. 2 Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars, ibid., pp. 198-207. 3 Harley H. Bovee, Report on the 1954 Windshield Pitting Phenomenon in the State of Washington, mimeographed, Environmental Research Laboratory, University of June 10, 1954.