5 Of the Weirdest Things Americans Were Once Afraid Of

There are many recurring fears throughout the course of human history. The levels of public concern about wars and pandemics over the past decade illustrates these kinds of legitimate worries, and things like armed conflict and mass illness have caused justified anxiety on numerous occasions in centuries long past.

But what about certain historical fears which would have been widespread during some periods, or which were very strong in a particular time and place, but which aren’t quite so comprehensible in the modern world? Here is an look of some of the strangest things which Americans were once afraid of.

1. Canoes
2. Dime Novels
3. Dungeons & Dragons
4. Martian Invasions
5. Tomatoes

Canoes

In the early 20th century, a moral panic developed over the rise in popularity of canoes, due to the belief that young people were using them as a way of organizing clandestine romantic meetings.

There were times when even the names given to canoes would cause suspicion amongst those members of the public who saw them as a moral danger for the younger generation. Concerns like this even led to attempts to introduce restrictions in the way they could be used in Minneapolis, which tried to implement a rule which would have obliged two people of the opposite sex to sit facing opposite each other, although public opposition to such an extreme idea meant the measure was quickly dropped.

Dime Novels

In the late 19th century, there was a notable rise in the popularity of reading fiction, which led to the emergence of what is known as “dime novels.” Named as such due to the fact that each of them only cost one dime—which was substantially less than most other novels which tended to be sold for at least $1—they helped make stories more accessible to the public.

However, they also became a source of fear for some in society, due to a belief that these books carried the ability to subvert social behavior and corrupt readers. This led to the censorship of these works by the controversial Anthony Comstock in the 1873 Comstock Law, along with other works of fiction regarded as sensationalist and dangerous. This was one of numerous things Comstock sought to suppress during his time at the US Postal Service.

Dungeons & Dragons

One of the strangest American fears focused on the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which became the center of a moral panic in the 1980s.

The game, often known by its acronym D&D, was wrongly believed to be the cause of a student’s suicide in 1980. The media attention to this gradually developed into a wave of fear which led to campaigns by religious groups against the game, who stoked further anxiety by claiming it opened up young people to the influence of demons. Eventually, a number of organizations sought to clear up the misinformation, and several studies investigated and found no link between suicide and the game.

Martian Invasions

Curiosity about the idea of aliens has been a part of American culture for a long time. However, this reached an unusual peak in 1938, with the broadcast of a radio drama which some people drastically misunderstood.

The day before Halloween, Orson Welles presented a dramatization of the H.G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds, which focuses on an alien invasion of Earth by creatures from Mars. However, some listeners who tuned in midway through the program did not realize that it was fictional, and thought it was a radio announcement that this had actually happened, leading to panic evacuations in public places by people who head heard the “news.”

Tomatoes

Until the early 19th century, people had a fear of tomatoes as they were incorrectly thought to be poisonous—and potentially associated with witchcraft. These beliefs originated in Europe but spread across the Atlantic to America.

Things began to change in the early 1800s, and then even more substantially during the Civil War, as canned goods were often used to feed soldiers, and tomatoes were a produce which could comfortably be contained in that form. Their popularity grew further after the post-war increase in the use of canned goods, as well as due to growing awareness of their health benefits. Today it is hard to imagine that such a popular element of American eating was once a source of fear and distrust.

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