Phobias and fear have been integrated into the American culture for almost the entirety of its establishment. According to Sean Quimby, Syracuse University librarian and facilitator of the lecture “American Phobia: Collecting the History of Fear”, there are many manifestations of fear but two primary trends in the American way of life. The first is a dogged invasion of fantasy and the second is the gradual emergence of therapeutic culture.
The first trend that Quimby talks about is Americans’ obsession with the posed threat of invasion. One example that he gives of this is Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race in which he speaks about Henry Osbourne and his belief is the greatest danger is that people with the traits of religious grounding, or the Aryan race, dying out. The non-Aryan race threatened their existence. The next example that Quimby gives was the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. This radio show gave a fictional story of Aliens invading the world and it resulted in about six million people actually believing the story was a reality and instilling fear among all of them. Hadley Cantrill, a Princeton Professor, commented on this naiveté of the American public by saying that it was due to Americans’ inability to distinguish reality from fiction. The second trend that Quimby talks about, and spends a significantly less amount of time discussing, is the therapeutic culture of fear. The example that Quimby gives is God. He says that God is now being absorbed into this path of fear in a way that people’s belief in a higher being helps alleviate the uncertainty and horror of phobias.
The lecture as a whole did not present a clear thesis and nor was it very informative. Rather Quimby jumped around speaking of different figures and books that dealt with fear and the concepts of fear that Americans face, but had no unifying thought for all of these examples. The lecture was also not very in depth. It was a brief and only scratched the surface of the patterns and commonality of Americans’ fears and phobias. The lecture would have been better and more informative if Quimby gave historical examples and spoke more of the typical phobias that present themselves in American culture.