On March 4, 1960, the CBS television show "The Twilight Zone" aired the now-iconic episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street." The episode centers on a neighborhood in Anytown, USA, as a series of strange phenomenon begin to rattle anxious and increasingly suspicious neighbors — a flashing meteor overhead, the loss of electricity in homes, phones not working, cars unable to start. A series of cascading events culminates in complete anarchy on Maple Street and presumably across the planet.
And, of course, there is the usual "Twilight Zone" surprise twist at the end: Alien invaders had arrived on earth, manipulating our daily routines to leverage a seemingly instinctive human propensity toward hysteria, suspicion and violence. "They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves," one alien muses to the other.
"Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling (himself an army paratrooper who fought in the Pacific and later saw firsthand the dangers of McCarthyism) used the half-hour science fiction show to make profound social commentary about American society. The episode revealed much about America circa 1960, a nation that was departing a consensus consciousness formed by the shared experience of World War II and heading fast toward the great tumult that would become the '60s.
America was also in the early stages of a presidential campaign in March 1960. Candidate John F. Kennedy had begun to highlight a so-called "missile gap" between the Soviet Union and the United States in ballistic missile capabilities. Scholars now identify the missile gap issue as exaggeration based on conjecture by both politicians and intelligence analysts. At a Yale commencement address in 1962, Kennedy acknowledged the corrosive role of uninformed conjecture (a key theme of the Maple Street episode), telling the graduates, "We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
Also a month before the monsters episode aired, in Greensboro, N.C., a group of young African-Americans began to stage sit-in protests at a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth's store. The sit-ins spread to dozens of cities, and the civil-rights movement would help define American public life for the rest of the decade. Serling's closing narration for the episode captured the corrosive effect of human prejudices and (perhaps) presciently foreshadowed the struggle for civil rights and tolerance that lay ahead: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy … ."
America arrives in 2020 with not-dissimilar public anxieties to those faced by the nation in 1960. The Cold War has given way to a fraying of the domestic social fabric that has been fueled in part by the immediacy of social media, the proliferation of online "news" that is overtly biased and often undocumented, as well as a seeming distrust of experts and institutions of authority.
A recent Associated Press-NORC poll of 1,074 adults nationwide found only 34% of respondents had a "great deal/quite a bit" of confidence that votes in the November election will be counted accurately, while 33% indicated "only a little/none at all" level of confidence.
Similarly, our collective anxiety over the coronavirus is fed by an often toxic online ecosystem that can serve to undermine critical public health messaging priorities. An unpublished report from the State Department's Global Engagement Center found 2 million dangerous and inaccurate tweets (posted from abroad) about the coronavirus in late January and early February. The tweets advanced bizarre conspiracies about the nature and source of the virus, often with a heavy dose of racism and prejudice. In the U.S., radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh recently dismissed the coronavirus crisis on-air: "I'm dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
