I am thinking of the Beetles’ Abbey Road conspiracy theory. But there were many more.
I won’t go into all the details of Abbey Road. But people were obsessed with the idea Paul McCartney was dead (he’s still alive and well–if anyone’s wondering ). So in desperation they looked to the album cover for answers. And yadda yadda yadda McCartney was the corpse or something, because he was barefoot and out-of-step.
These conspiracy theories spread with lightning speed. And without an internet.
What’s the evidence that they spread at the same lightning speed as today?
But it has been noted for centuries that untruths have a certain flair for disseminating quickly.
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…
Jonathan Swift, 1710
Granted, that’s more about lies than rumor, but the impact is the same.
The same way Beatles music spread so fast: Radio. There used to be these guys called DJs who had their ears to the ground and amplified what they heard a million-fold.
I’m reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s book about the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. Rumors and facts about the disaster and its aftermath circulated rapidly through the whaling community, reaching Nantucket well before ships carrying survivors could arrive in home port.
One saving grace of ‘‘lightning speed’’ rumor transmission today is the near-lightning speed debunking of rumors by the same media.
Even at that, it almost certainly took longer than it does today. I mean, if someone in NYC comes up with the rumor, it could spread within NYC within a matter of days on the radio or otherwise, but getting out of there, would take word of mouth making it to a DJ somewhere else, whether that’s on the telephone with someone from the NYC area, or via someone traveling somewhere else.
I suppose syndicated radio shows might make that faster, but in my experience, the syndicated DJs have typically been less likely to engage in that sort of thing relative to the local ones.
I’d be willing to bet that rumor spread is VERY similar to disease spread as well.
Well they also had this thing called Tee Vee that had late night shows that disseminated information nationwide to help spread of gossip, rumors and hot topics of the day. And newsprint other than the major sources. The National Enquirer was big at this kind of thing. It all added up to being an effective means to spread the word
That’s how it was in for example WWI - German propaganda purposefully spread communist ideology in Russia to try and get them out of the war, and it worked; but by word of mouth from the Russian soldiers the same ideology spread into the German and French lines and led to desertion and mutiny.
Well we could go back even further and talk about that guy who claimed ti be the son of God and was nailed to a cross. All of which is before the internet.
IIRC, it was Shelley Winters on the Tonight Show who spread the rumor that Leave It to Beaver’s Jerry Mathers had been killed in Vietnam. Mathers discussed the problem of trying to explain to people that he wasn’t really dead.
That’s a nice short article. But if anyone wants a very readable book on the subject, get The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage, available on Amazon and elsewhere.
). So in desperation they looked to the album cover for answers. And yadda yadda yadda McCartney was the corpse or something, because he was barefoot and out-of-step.
