The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

III. MYTHS

There arise among groups of people various stories with little or no basis in fact, which, through repetition and unvaried association with the same persons or incidents, come to be regarded as true. These stories, when they persist through years and even through generations, are myths. They are usually the response to a prejudice or a desire.

In general they have some plausible and apparent justification. In turn they lend stability not only to the beliefs out of which they were born, but to themselves. Frequently they are the result of the assumption that because two things happen at the same time they are connected by the relationship of cause and effect. So long as these stories are uncorrected they hold and exercise a marked degree of control over personal conduct.

Myths are important in any consideration of the instruments of opinion-making. Fernand von Langenhove, a Belgian scientist associated with the Solvay Institute for Sociological Study at Brussels, has made probably the first researches in this field. He took as his material the reports spread in Germany by German soldiers concerning the Belgian priests. These myths, for the most part unfounded, began to spread and eventually were taken up by German authorities and given the stamp of official sanction. The reports were investigated and found to be false and libelous by German authorities themselves. The method by which these myths arose is thus described in his book The Growth of a Legend:

Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors began to circulate. They spread from place to place. They were reproduced by the press and they soon permeated the whole of Germany.... Public credulity accepted these stories. The highest powers in the state welcomed them without hesitation and indorsed them with their authority. Even the Emperor echoed them and, taking them for a text, advanced in the famous telegram of September 8, 1914, addressed to the President of the United States, the most terrible accusations against the Belgian people and clergy.

... It was the German army which, as we have seen, constituted the chief breeding ground for legendary stories. These were disseminated with great rapidity among the troops; the liaison officers, the dispatch riders, the food convoys, the victualling posts assured the diffusion of them....

Submitted to the test of the German military inquiry these stories are shown to be without foundation. Received from the front and narrated by a soldier who professes to have been an eye witness, they are nevertheless clothed in the public view with special authority. Welcomed without control by the press, the stories recounted in letters from the front appear, however, in the eyes of the readers of a paper clothed with a new authority—that which attaches to printed matter. They lose in the columns of a paper their individual and particular character.... The statements thus obtain a substance and an objectivity of which they would otherwise be devoid. Mixed with authentic news, they are accepted by the public without mistrust. Is not their appearance in the paper a guaranty of accuracy?...

All these pseudo-historical publications are, however, only one aspect of the abundant literary production of the Great War....

So one finds in this literature of the lower classes the principal legendary episodes of which we have studied the origin and followed the development; accommodated to a fiction, woven into a web of intrigue, they have undergone new transformations; they have lost every indication of their source; they are transposed in the new circumstances imagined for them; they have usually been dissociated from the circumstances which individualize them and fix their time and place.

The evolution of myths concerning Negroes shows a striking resemblance to these mentioned by von Langenhove. In this category would fall the myths concerning Negro mentality, or the closing of the frontal sutures at the age of fourteen; the "rape myth," or the belief that some character weakness and inordinate sexual virility in Negroes make them rapists by nature; and the "insurrection myth," or the recurrent assertion and belief that Negroes are plotting the downfall of the government. These are general in their acceptance. They illustrate the tendency of authors observed by Langenhove in his study "to incorporate new ideas with the complex old ones and show that they are not surprising and that all earlier facts tend to prove it." The efforts of some recent writers on the Negro question may be noted.