The Truth About Poison Gas

COLLIER'S (September 26, 1942)

The Truth About Poison Gas

by Leonard Milliman

The most formidable thing about poison gas is the panic it can cause among uninformed populations. As a weapon it's reltively a flop when you know all the things to do about it, gas mask or no gas mask.

Nearly 2,400 years ago, during the Greek tribal wars, some warriors attacking the city of Megara put on a gas attack. They soaked kindling wood in sulphur and pitch and set it afire to windward of the town. The idea was okay--but the wind changed and the attackers cried their eyes out while getting away, fast. The Megara boys said it just went to prove poison gas never would replace the spear.

Down through the centuries since then, poison gas has been touted as the thing to replace bows and arrows, culverins, battleships, tanks, warplanes and snickersnees--but it never has. It is a great deal less deadly than high explosives or shrapnel: a lot easier to guard against or just simple dodge. Its greatest danger to us is that it may cause mass hysteria among people ignorant of its effects and how to combat them. But gas will fail, even as a panic-maker, against civilian population that knows what it is all about.

Fear of poison gas has been created largely by fictionists and by "facts," such as "a ton of mustard gas will kill 45,000,000 people." This last is theoretically true--if you could get 45,000,000 people to file slowly into a lethal chamber saturated with the gas.

A better fact, however, is that at the close of the last war, when most soldiers had some protection, it took eight tons of mustard gas to kill one fighter. In this same war, three and a half years of scientific and military effort to kill and injure men by gas and smoke resulted in 91,198 deaths and 1,205,655 nonfatal injuries. Americans kill more than 100,000 and injure more than 3,000,000 other Americans on highways--without trying.

Gas casualties in the other war would have been much lighter but for the fact that many soldiers at first were completely unprepared; other thousands were given no instructions in what to do after they had been gassed, and so died because they did not take simple precautions.

If gas is used against American cities in this war, it will be for one main purpose--to create panic. Defense against that is a clear understanding concerning various gases, how to foil them, how to nullify their effects.

Within the past decade, every great nation has been credited with possession of some new, mysterious and super-deadly gas. However, as far as American chemists know, these stories all are untrue. There may be and probably are new combinations of old gases, but that's about all: no "Dew of Death" to wipe out whole cities in a few seconds. As far as anyone knows, there is no gas that can't be guarded against by any intelligent citizen who knows what to do. One man who didn't quite know what to do was gassed, by mustard, on October 14, 1918--a guy named Hitler. Didn't get enough of it, though. Too bad.

There are six or seven major war gases. Let's have a look at some of them, in the hope that familiarity will breed, not contempt, but confidence.

First, there's chlorine. It comes in greenish-yellow clouds; gauze masks usually are sufficient protection. Then there's phosgene, a combination of chlorine and carbon monoxide. The latter, of course, is the odorless, invisible gas emitted by millions of automobiles in city streets, without ill effect because it is in small quantities and quickly dissipated upward. Phosgene is deadlier than straight chlorine, but is made harmless by masks dipped in a solution of sodium phenolate.

Then there's mustard, the so-called "King of War Gases." The vapor from this brownish, oily-looking stuff may persist in some spots for a week. It poisons everything it touches. It penetrates clothing and shoes, raises skin blisters, temporarily blinds, inflames the lungs and induces pneumonia. It is a nuisance gas, putting forty people out of action for every one it kills.

Another gas--lewisite--is American, invented just as the last war was ending. It's one-fifth deadlier than mustard, but not as persistent or stable. It's hard, dangerous and expensive to make, and contains arsine, a poisonous arsenic compound. There's arsine, too, in another poison gas--ethyldichlorarsine. This temporarily paralyzes the hands, raises blisters and causes vomiting, but it isn't as deadly as lewisite.

Chloropicrin and diphosgene are lung irritants, like phosgene, but not as troublesome. In addition, there are irritant smokes. One is called adamsite. These smokes cause great pain, if they get into your lungs.

Since all war gasses are heavier than air, they can be sprayed from planes as well as dropped in bombs or carried in artillery shells. What you should never forget is that gases flow downhill like water and drift with the wind. That means for you: Stay away from low places and get to windward of a gas bomb. There is, mathematically, only one chance in three million you will be directly hit by a bomb.

How to Seek Shelter

If you are caught near a gas-bomb burst, walk briskly across wind out of danger. Any near-by building will provide some protection; the lee side of a second floor is relatively safe. A third-floor apartment or office on the side away from the wind is good protection against anything except a long, tremendously heavy gas attack. Shut the windows and stay inside until the gas-decontamination squads have sounded an "All clear."

Anyone living in a home lacking second and third stories can quickly make a relatively gasproof room on the leeward side of the house. On the next windy day, survey your potentially gas-resistant room for leaks and drafts.

The antigas room should not be in a corner, if avoidable, and should have a minimum number of windows. It should also be a blackout room, because lights will be needed for gas-proofing at night.

If an attack comes, go into the room, close all doors and windows and ventilators, and put out the fire, if you have one. Stop up the flues as best you can with old clothes. Seal the joints of doors and windows with adhesive or plastic tape. Caulk any crevices, such as around radiator pipes. You may use wet newspapers for larger cracks. If you have plywood over the windows, seal it along the edges. If you don't have plywood, tack wet blankets over the windows in case high explosive blasts out the glass.

Five years ago, the British government proved the safety of a protected room against gas. A windy-side room was selected, to make it tougher, and the windows were boarded up and a single blanket hung outside the door. Nearly two tons of chlorine, released twenty yards away, seeped perceptibly into the other rooms of the house within seven minutes. Air in the gasproofed room stayed pure. Then mustard was sprayed on the house for an hour, followed by a 20-hour attack of mustard vapor. Animals held in unprotected rooms were not even seriously hurt, while those in the protected room were not harmed at all. Then tear gas was tried. It got into unprotected rooms in thirteen minutes, but not into the gasproofed apartment.

A few casualties have to be expected from a gas raid, but far fewer than from a high explosive attack. But, of course, any dolt can get himself killed or badly hurt by staying deliberately in a gassed area.

The persistence of any gas in a neighborhood depends largely on the weather. Rain, winds and updrafts are all death on gas. Decontamination squads, looking like invaders from Mars, eliminate gas in various ways and get rid of pools of liquid mustard or lewisite, which give off poisonous vapors. But, you could safely stand upwind from a pool of lewisite or mustard. It isn't recommended however; the wind might change or another bomb might burst farther upwind, putting you on a sort of lee shore.

Dread of poison gas is as natural as the fear of being killed by any other means. It was felt even by F.N. Pickett, who in 1918 had the job of destroying the most gigantic accumulation of war gas of all time, in ammunition dumps in France. Pickett probably went through more gas clouds than any other human being, and he went through unharmed. He used to tell his helpers. "You'll feel frightened, but don't be ashamed of it. Have complete confidence in the precautions you take. Once you have controlled your fear long enough to carry out the rules, your fear will vanish."

For bad cases of "gas nerves" Pickett used to recommend a couple of aspirin tablets or a five-grain tablet of potassium bromide.

If you want to go into the thing thoroughly, you can buy a $5 "Sniff Set" through the Office of Civilian Defense. This is a set of liquid-filled bottles with simulated odors of typical war gases, and sniffing them is completely harmless.

The generally accepted odor-descriptions are these:

Mustard smells like garlic, horseradish, or mustard. Lewisite is like geraniums and gives a biting sensation if concentrated. Phosgene smells like freshly cut corn, or like ensilage, if concentrated. Chloropicrin resembles anise, flypaper or licorice. Chloracetophenone (tear gas) smells like locust or apple blossoms or ripe fruit. Adamsite is like coal smoke.

Since 1918, the only acknowledged improvements in gas warfare have been in methods of protection, in development of the irritant smokes, and in the means of dispersing gases. The strangest variation in methods involves chloropicrin, a bad lung irritant used by the Germans against the Russians in the other war. Now gas-masked nurserymen near Olympia, Washington, sow chloropicrin in the earth to kill weeds, root rot and harmful fungi before planting evergreen tree seedlings.

Millions for Masks

These men, who work in a swirl of deadly gas, are most emphatic in telling you: Don't be afraid of poison gas.

Churchill has warned Hitler against using poison gas against the Russians. President Roosevelt has warned the Japanese, who have been repeatedly accused by the Chinese. The Roosevelt threat was that "retaliation in kind will be meted out in full measure," and probably no nation is better prepared to mete out this sort of punishment than our own. We never have subscribed to any of the international paper scraps outlawing gas.

Our own precautions, too, are more extensive than is usually realized. In February, Congress set aside $29,893,894 to by gas masks for civilians. They cost, in peacetime, about $3 each and, like Army masks, are invulnerable to all known war gases. In many combat zones, especially on the Pacific Coast, policemen, firemen, air-raid wardens, fire watchers and others, now carry masks. Precautions in Hawaii, where decontamination squads hold regular drills, include "Bunny Masks" for toddling youngsters.

For months, many Civilian Protection Schools, staffed by officers from the Chemical Warfare Service, have been offering courses in gas detection, dispersal and defense. Doctors have similarly been schooled in recognition and treatment of gas cases, to prevent repitition of mistakes made by some physicians in 1917--who at first diagnosed mustard gas blisters as scarlet fever. Nothing like that is likely to happen this time.

Remember this about gases: Respect them, don't fear them. Before an attack, learn what to do and practice doing it; in an attack, keep your head and do the right things, and the chances are you'll be all right.
--Collier's, September 26, 1942

---

It most likely won't come, but if it does--

Don't let Poison Gas panic you

by Paul W. Kearney

Military authorities have felt that the odds are againstthe use f oion gas by our enemies. Yet they concede that with Axis troubles piling up, the time may come when the Germans and the Japs will jettison discretion and resort to gas raids against civilians on an all-or-nothing gamble. Indeed, the Japanese have already several times used gas on the Chinese.

This speculation was most recently voiced by Hon. James W. Gerard, former Ambassador to Germany. It is logical, because gas has been pictured by thriller writers as a terrible killer and because apprehension of it is so exaggerated that, unless the truth is broadcast, it may become the ace of all panic weapons.

Not that gas isn't an efficient weapon of war; it most assuredly is. Yet defense against it improved so rapidly after 1915 that the total number of American troops who died from gas in World War I was only 1,399--as contrasted to 2,370 who died from measles! Soldiers trapped in trenches are much finer targets than civilians who can take refuge indoors.

War gas is dangerous; but the above simple comparison sums up the story in a nutshell: the basic defenses against it are kowledge and training. Here are some salient points about war gases:
Modern war gases fall into two broad categories, Persistent and Nonpersistent--so called because some gases are harder to get rid of than others. The Persistent types, including Mustard and Lewisite, are oily liquids, which vaporize slowly after striking the earth. The Nonpersistent ones, such as Phosgene and Tear Gases, are actually clouds of vapor, which move with the wind. War gases aren't necessarily visible to the eye; some can be seen, others can't.

Those most likely to be used are Mustard and Lewisite, called "blister" gases because they blister the skin. Mustard (smelling like garlic or horseradish) and Lewisite (with a geranium odor) are least affected by wind and vaporize so slowly that they may give off poisonous fumes for days, even weeks, in cold, dry weather.

Most gases are heavier than air, hence tend to stay close to the ground, but will rise to the upper air levels wth warm air currents. Urban buildings are likely to be relatively safe refuges from the third floor up. Most American dwellings will be sufficiently gasproof if a room on any floor can have all openings tightly shut: windows, fireplaces, ventilating ducts, etc. A tight house, even if it is one-story, is the best protection against any gas. As a precaution, blankets or wooden panels should be kept in readiness to replace broken window glasses.

Unless you are trained in gas defense, don't waste time trying to identify gasses by their odors: get out of the area quickly or seek shelter indoors, preferably upstairs, and stay there. Avoid subways and basements.

If you hear the gas signal during a raid, stay indoors intil your warden notifies you it is safe outside. The gas alarm signal is made by rotating a wooden clacker like those used as noisemakers on New Year's Eve.

If caught outdoors in a gas attack, don't get panicky. Forget the fantastic yarns you've heard, and remember that exposure to war gases is usually not fatal and may not even be serious. People exposed to war gases usually recover completely. Get indoors; remain quiet; if necessary, carry out the self-aid measures recommended below.

If exposed to blister gas, remove your outer clothing before going indoors, leaving it outside. If first-aid materials aren't handy, remove all clothing without delay and get under a shower or pour water over yourself in a tub, using soap generously. Don't wait for symptoms: they may take a half-hour or more after exposure to appear.

Exposure to Mustard or Lewisite calls for quick first aid. But the details are simple and most homes have the necessary essentials, to wit: An enema bag (for irrigating eyes, nose, and throat); several bottles of any common laundry bleaching and disinfecting solution containing sodium hypochlorite (your grocer or druggist can tell you which they are); baking soda; soap; a metal container with a lid, such as a garbage can; an ample supply of cotton or dry cloths about half the size of a man's handkerchief.

The steps in emergency treatment, after removing outer clothing, are:

1. With the cotton or cloth, blot (don't rub) any liquid gas from the skin.
2. Saturate a washcloth or hand towel with laundry-bleach solution, and apply it to the affected skin areas. Sodium hypochlorite is the best available antidote for blister gas.
3. Irrigate each eye for two minutes with a 2-percent solution of baking soda (1 tablespoonful to a quart of water). This should be done within 5 minutes after exposure. If no enema bag is available, pour the solution from a pot that has a spout.
4. Take a shower, using plenty of hot water and soap; wash the hair, too. And be sure the drain is open. If you have no shower or bath spray, pour water over yourself from a pail. Do not take a tub bath; this may spread the liquid gas over your body.
5. Irrigate nose and throat with a solution like that used for the eyes.
6. If blisters form, don't touch or break them.
7. If your lungs feel heavy or oppressed, if you cough much, if smoking is distasteful, lie down and stay absolutely quiet; you will probably require medical attention.
8. Deposit all contaminated clothing, cotton, rags, etc., in the container; put the lid on tight; take it outdoor s soon as it is safe to do so. Do not touch the clothing with your hands; pick it up with sticks. Later it should be burned or should be decontaminated by the proper authorities.

Above all, remember that no time is to be lost in applying first aid. Serious injury from blister gas can result in five minutes or less--long before symptoms appear. So if all the items enumerated here are not immediately available, don't waste time collecting them, but get under the shower at once.

Gas is no play-toy; but a little knowledge pulls its teeth. It is definitely a panic weapon rather than a killer. Hence the more we know about it, the less chance there is of the enemy's using it against us successfully.
--Good Housekeeping, May 1943

Gas Rhymes

How To Tell The Gases

M-1

Grandma smelled geranium,
Started feeling kind of bum.
Sure, you guessed the trouble right--
Grandma whiffed some Lewisite.

PS

Don't you find my odor sweetish?
Said the flypaper to the fly.
I smelled just like chlorpicrin,
And you'll think you'd like to die.

CG

Maud Muller on a summer day,
Smelled the odor of new-mown hay.
She said to the Judge who was turning green,
"Put on your mask! That there's phosgene!"

CN

Apple blossoms, fresh and dewey?
Normandy and romance? Hooey!
For the charming fragrance then known,
Now is chloracetophenone.

HS

Never take some chances if
Garlic you should strongly sniff.
Don't think Mussolini's passed,
Man, you're being mustard-gassed!

-- FAIRFAX DOWNEY,
Major, Field Artillery.

The View from The Scientific Monthly

The Scientific Monthly

The Myth of Poison Gas

by Morris Goran

Seventy-eight thousand soldiers died from the effects of poison gas in the World War; one million more were counted as casualties from this weapon. On the other hand, approximately eight and one half million men were killed, and twenty-one million men were wounded through other means. Thus the poison gas toll is less than one per cent. of the total, with the great majority of casualties occurring during the early years of the war, when gas masks had not been developed.

These facts have not impeded a constant attack against poison gas; people shocked by modern warfare point to it as a symbol of horror. But whether or not worthy of the reputation, every new war weapon has been similarly received. When fire-arms were first used during the Middle Ages, there was a like vilification against the introduction of barbarian practices.

According to the most recent treatise on chemical warfare (by Lieutenant Colonel A.M. Prentiss, of the United States Chemical Warfare Service), the French were actually the first to use poison gas. Ethylbromacetate, a lachrimator or tear gas was used in French rifle grenades as early as August, 1914. Due to the shortage of bromine, a chlorine compound was substituted in November, 1914. The chloracetone used was a toxic lung injurant.

Whatever amount of tear gas was used in the French rifle grenades and German artillery shell, real gas warfare began with the German gas-cloud attack at Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915. Nearly six thousand large and small cylinders containing chlorine were installed by the Germans in their frontline trenches. After this attack, the poison gas weapon was adopted by the Allies and by every army division on both sides.

The credit for the German gas attacks has been given to Fritz Haber, chemist, patriot, soldier and statesman, who died in exile from the ungrateful Nazi government. Although having engineered the first and other successful gas attacks, he may have been merely the scapegoat to receive abuse in the event of world-wide protest. The real instigator may have been Professor Walter Nernst, professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin. Shortly after the use of gas had been started, Nernst was decorated by the Kaiser for his "notable services," while Fritz Haber gained only the title of captain in the army and abuse in scientific circles outside Germany.

Such a possible intrigue is not new in history nor in the history of poison gas. During the Crimean War in 1855, the English Admiral Lord Dundonald, having years before noted the suffocating character of the fumes near the sulfur mines in Sicily, proposed to conquer Sebastapol through the use of sulfur fumes. The English government disapproved the measure. But the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, discussing the matter in a personal letter to Lord Panmure, wrote: "If it succeeds, it will, as you say, save a great number of English and French lives; if it fails in his hands, we shall be exempt from blame, and if we come in for a small share of ridicule, we can bear it, and the greater part will fall on him."

The idea of poison gas warfare, however, did not originates with the English during the last century. In the war between the Spartans and Athenians (431-404 B.C.), the Spartans saturated wood with pitch and sulfur, and burned it under the walls of cities, asphyxiating gases being liberated. More famous is "Greek fire." Its composition as far as ascertained (for its secret has been lost) ()ows not only readily inflammable substances as pitch, resin and petroleum but also sand and quicklime. If such were the constituents, the quicklime by being quenched in water generated enough heat to ignite the petroleum, which in burning developed sufficient heat to ignite other combustibles. The light hydrocarbons evaporating from the petroleum formed an explosive mixture with air, and in exploding developed enormous quantities of smoke and soot. Also sulfur caught fire, and in its combustion formed the asphyxiating gas, sulfur dioxide. The invention of "Greek fire" is believed to have occurred at about 600 A.D., and there is evidence of its use during the Crusades.

Twenty-six nations at the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 pledged themselves not to use projectiles giving out suffocating or poisonous gases in warfare. Captain Mahan, the United States delegate, refused to sign, arguing that such pledges were meaningless when heavy arms and explosives were used without scruple. At the second Hague Peace Conference, in 1907, the United States delegate still refused to sign the document.

Although Germany violated this agreement with a large-scale attack, the use of poison gas by Germany should not have surprised the Allies. A deserter at Ypres, captured by the French, warned the French Divisional Commander of the impending attack, showed a primitive gas mask in support of his claims. General Ferry, believing the story, warned officers in the neighboring sectors and his superior officers. The latter ridiculed Ferry for believing the story and laughed at his suggestions that the German trenches be shelled in order to destroy the cylinders, and that the number of men in the front-line trenches exposed to the danger be reduced.

Besides the deserter's story the Allies had sufficient basis on which to expect a gas attack. Trench warfare and the power of modern impact weapons had brought a deadlock on the Western front. Gas had to be used in order to restore movement in battle, permit tactical maneuvers and open the way to victory for one side or the other. And gas was the weapon most available to Germany. Preceding the war, its chemical industry had been developing to an amazing extent. In 1913, there were nearly fifteen thousand chemical factories in Germany, many of which were in the dye industry. In 1913, Germany produced three fourths of the total world output of dyes and at the same time more than 85 per cent. of the dye-intermediates. A few simple chemical operations changed many dyes and dye-intermediates into poison gas chemicals. Hence the military importance of the dye industry. Also its mobilization for war purposes in Germany was simplified by the corporate structure. The major portion of the industry was controlled by a holding company, the Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie, and manufacturing activities were directed from a central office in Berlin.

With such tremendous resources for poison gas, Germany lost the war. The possibility of victory through its use was lost when Germany failed to produce greater and more frequent gas attacks when the Allies were unprepared, when defense measures were negligible. After the introduction of masks, gas became a very weak weapon.

Only very few chemicals are suitable for use in poison gas warfare. In the World War, over three thousand chemical compounds were selected and investigated from the approximately four hundred thousand known. About thirty met requirements for actual use and only six were extensively employed by Allied and Central Powers.

Today the list is probably not larger, because a chemical to be used in gas warfare must meet other requirements besides being poisonous. It must be cheap, easy to manufacture, chemically stable and capable of vaporization. Very few compounds vaporize under ordinary conditions, or conditions on the battlefield. All the light molecules which vaporize are already known, and there is ample protection against the poisonous ones. Whatever the possibility (known to be very small) for the discovery of heavier, vaporizing molecules to be used as poison gas, protection is at hand. Charcoal can absorb such regardless of the composition.

As a poison, a gas is usually classified as either one of five: Lachrimator or tear tear gas, sternutator or sneeze-producer, lung injurant, vesicant or blister-producer, and nerve poison. When it is capable of being in many classes, the chemical gains favor for use. Both multiple effectiveness (in more than one class) and toxicity is found in phosgene, which accounted for 80 per cent. of the gas fatalities in the World War. Mustard gas, also deadly and multiply effective, was used during the last stages of the war. It was discovered after gas masks had been introduced, when German chemists sought either a lung injurant which would penetrate the mask or an entirely new type of gas which would attack other parts of the body. The result was mustard gas and diphenylchlorarsine. These were mainly vesicants as are more recent discoveries: Lewisite, methyldichlorarsine and dibromethyl sulfide. Protection for the entire body must be had to guard against vesicants, and every modern army has such protection.

The same can not be said for civilians. Outfitted with masks, they are immune to all gases save vesicants. For this reason, such gas attacks would seem to have a chance for use in the present conflict. But neither of the belligerents will care to initiate the weapon as long as the posdsibility of reprisal exists.

If and when Germany can severely incapacitate Britain's chemical industry, or vice versa, a mustard gas attack would be "safe" for the winning side. The fear of a retaliation would then be absent. That the chemical and not the aircraft industry can be put out of action is because Britain's chemical industry is concentrated in the Midlands, while Germany's is mainly in the Rhine valley. Bunched targets make for easier bombing.

The manner of dispersing the gas must then be solved. In the last war, gases were released with shell and grenade fire and through cylinders encased in dugouts. To repeat this procedure, Britain must invade the continent or Germany go over to England.

The release of gas through airplanes was tried by the Italians in their conquest of Ethiopia, against unprotected combatants. The same lack of wind and general climate conditions which the Italians found does not prevail in the European theater of war. New methods of airplane dispersal must therefore be found. Also air mastery must be gained. And with the latter, the necessity of a vesicant attack almost vanishes.

Should either side have control of the air, with the other refusing to surrender, vesicant attacks still seem unlikely. Britain will want to rely more upon arousing the conquered peoples of Europe. Besides alienating world opinion, gas attacks will not serve this end. Germany, too, will want to avoid the indignation of non-belligerents and not give her subjected nations more cause for discomfort. If a victory can be had through continued bombing, through invasion, through propaganda, through a war of nerves, why should gas be employed?

Chicago Herald-American, Sept 21

Mattoon Terror Like Salem Witch Hunt

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 21 -- Mattoon's gas phantom can boast a long and 100 per cent American ancestry, dating back to the witch hunts of colonial days.
According to Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist, who has just completed an investigation of Mattoon's epidemic of mass hysteria, the same forces which created the recent terror here have at one time or another manifested themselves in nearly every American community, sometimes with tragic, sometimes with comic results.
All of which is just the doctor's way of saying that Americans are a suggestible people, quick to take up a fad or a fetish. He wants it made clear that while it lasted Mattoon's terror of the supposed gas-sprayer was a fad.

COULD BE GRAVE

Though fads of this kind are harmless enough, the same emotional forces which give rise to them may, when centered on a different object, create ugly and even grim situations. Take, for example, the earliest manifestations of this kind in America--the Salem, Mass., witch hunts.
It all began with two hysterical girls who accused a hunchback woman of having bewitched them and exhibited self-inflicted blisters and swellings to prove it.
A lot of people paid off their secret hatreds on the witches.
The people of Rensselaer, Ind., in the year of our Lord, 1939, didn't, of course, believe in witches. But they did believe in lions, after farmers in the vicinity had reported mysterious killings of farm animals.

POSSES ORGANIZED

Dozens of armed posses were organized, expert big-game hunters called in, lions were seen here, there and everywhere in Jasper County. After a month's excitement, the big lion hunt came to a humiliating end with the killing of two dogs whose prints proved to be identical with tracks supposed to have been made by the marauding lions. As for police who have such a situation to deal with, Dr. Hulbert believes that they couldn't do better than follow the example of Mattoon's Police Commissioner Thomas V. Wright. When he gave every individual reporting an attack a choice of an immediate medical examination or a night in jail, the attacks ceased as if by magic.
As the antidote for fear is trust, Dr. Hulbert points out that in any similar situation every effort should be made to build up the faith of the people in constituted authority.
They should be assured and reassured that if there is a culprit at large, the police, using ordinary police methods, will soon have him under lock and key. And that, according to Dr. Hulbert, who is a criminologist as well as a psychiatrist, isn't just baloney. -- Thursday, September 21, page 5

Chicago Herald-American, Sept 20

Mattoon's Phantom 'Suggestive Fear'

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 20 -- No gas maniac, no noxious, paralyzing vapor, but rather paralyzing fear, rising to the surface from the deep-rooted insecurity of one woman and spread through a community by the power of suggestion--that's the scientific explanation of Mattoon's two week's reign of terror as given by Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, Chicago psychiatrist, after a thorough investigation involving the psychoanalysis of the entire city.
If the epidemic of fear was spread only by suggestion, how does the doctor account for the attack reported by Mrs. Beatrice Ryder?
The doctor's own investigation showed that all the excitement was touched off by the experience of Mrs. Bert Kearney, first victim of the phantom prowler.

HEARD NO GOSSIP

How then does he explain the fact that Mrs. Ryder suffered a similar attack the same evening well before anybody had any idea that a sinister sadist was loose in the city? As Mrs. Ryder said when she saw Dr. Hulbert:
"This couldn't have been imagination because I'd heard no gossip nor read anything in the newspapers." To anyone but a psychiatrist, this might seem unanswerable. But to a man trained in the foibles and tricks of the human mind, it is much less convincing than it seems, though none-the-less interesting.
So far as the doctor is concerned, Mrs. Ryder's is simply a case of retrospective rationalization.

DID NOT CALL POLICE

Though today she is a very frightened woman, believing as she does that the "prowler" will return to "finish the job", she was NOT frightened at the time the supposed attack occurred. This is evidenced, not only by her conduct on the evening in question, but by the fact that she did not call the police. Here, in brief, is Mrs. Ryder's account:
On the evening of Sept. 1, she was alone with her two small children, Ann, 5, and Joe, 2, who were asleep in the middle bedroom. Her husband, George, a postal clerk, was at work.
Like Mrs. Kearney, she too happened to have an unusual sum of money in the house that night--the proceeds of her husband's pay check. She was apprehensive about it, enough so to notice unusual noises--but, unlike Mrs. Kearney, not in a state of actual fear.

DOOR, WINDOWS CLOSED

Her uneasiness may have been enough to bring on a digestive upset. At any rate, she had one. After drinking "several pots" of coffee and taking a dose of medicine, her distress increased until finally, as she said, she "popped her cookies."
Notice that even then, the gas man did not appear.
After this incident, she went into the bedroom where the children were to lie down. Both door and windows had been closed because the baby had a cold. No sooner had she got into bed than she heard a strange noise--a kind of "plop"--noticed a strange odor and experienced a strange "floating" sensation accompanied by numbness of the legs and fingers.

BABY STARTED COUGHING

Then the baby started coughing and after the fashion of all mothers, Mrs. Ryder ignored her own malaise in taking care of the child. She carried to the kitchen where she rubbed camphorated oil on its chest. Was this, then, an attack by Mattoon's gas-spraying phantom? Mrs. Ryder firmly believes it was. Here is the doctor's answer:
"Yes, she believes it NOW and as a consequence is still in terror. But she didn't believe it THEN. It was only later, after she had heard of the supposed attack on Mrs. Kearney, that such a possibility entered her head."
After the main outlines of a fearsome picture had been supplied by others, it was all-too-easy to go back, weave in retrospective details and make them fit. Easy to take the circumstances of her own illness and its symptoms, add to them a strange noise and the smell of a stuffy roof and come up with the answer Mattoon as a whole was giving in those days to every untoward happening. The vicious prowler and his vapor explained everything--even things that didn't need explanation.
Continuing his analysis of the "case of the simultaneous attack," Dr. Hulbert said:
"This woman was not at all hysterical. On the other hand, her conduct was very ordered. She did not fly into a panic and call the neighbors or the police. The sensations of floating and numbness are not unusual following a vomiting attack, and when her child began coughing they were not so severe as to prevent her from taking care of it.
"If the next day Mrs. Ryder hadn't heard about the gas man, she would have remembered the night of Sept. 1 just as one of those times when everything seems to go wrong." -- Wednesday, September 20, page 5

Chicago Herald-American, Sept 19

Credulity Seat of Mattoon's Terror

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 19 -- Theme song of panic is "I believe!"
I believe this, I believe that. I believe the neighbors, the children, total strangers. I believe anything anybody wants to tell me.
This will to believe, according to Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist investigating the case of Mattoon's phantom gas man, is not only the hallmark of mass hysteria, but also the chief means by which the infection of fear is spread through a community.

ADD NEW DETAILS

One believes and tells another. This other passes on the story--and the infection--to one or two or maybe three and each new believer unwittingly adds new details. When Mattoon's scare first started nobody saw or even thought they saw the "mad anesthetist". At first, he moved about his work unseen, virtually unheard.
Then here and there people appeared who had heard a hissing noise as of a spray gun. By the time the phantom got around to paying a stealthy visit to the home of Mrs. Bertha Bence at 2605 Champaign av., not only the clump of his approaching feet could be heard, but also the whirring noise of his "gas machine" in action.
Dr. Hulbert's interview with Mrs. Bence was enlightening.
Still upset by her experience, Mrs. Bence first told the doctor that she isn't well and then added:
"I just can't stand all this excitement. And then I'm worried about my oldest boy. That's his picture there--he's overseas and I haven't heard from him since July."
Had she made any inquiries about him?
"Oh, yes. I've been to the fortune-teller. She says he's in the hospital. She says I mustn't worry too much. I can't stand it."
And now about the gas attack.

HEARD FUNNY NOISE

Well, she had gone to bed in the front room. All at once, she heard a funny noise like a machine whirring and the room began to fill with gas. Believing she was "passing out", she screamed and her three boys came running and helped her out on the porch. "We stayed out there till 4 o'clock in the morning. I was afraid to come back. That stuff would kill you. Junior said if he had got another whiff of it, he would have died. He has asthma. He'd have died if he'd smelled that stuff another minute."
When the police came, could they smell it, too?
"No, I don't know why, but they couldn't. It's funny though. My neighbor could and she didn't get here till after they had gone. But she could smell it--plain. And a boy who had been to five other places could. He said it smelled just the same. Just exactly the same.
"Junior chased the fellow that night but he couldn't catch him. The next day, though, we found four little holes in the earth under the window where he had set up his machine."
Why would the gas man want to attack her?
"Well, sir, that's something I just can't figure out. It couldn't have been money. We haven't got any. Everybody knows that. I guess it's sabotage--or an escaped German. And I'm afraid he'll be back."
There was terror in her voice as she said it. Why the trail of sabotage should have led to her neat little home or why a fleeing Nazi should take time to indulge in such risky practices were things Mrs. Bence just hadn't thought about.
There, said the doctor afterwards, you have the picture of the whys and wherefores of community terror.
A woman so honest and well-meaning herself, she is completely uncritical of others or what they tell her. Deeply troubled, far from rugged, a woman of this type, according to Dr. Hulbert, is a typical example of the basically insecure and hence, the highly suggestible person--ripe to become a victim of terror at the slightest stimulus.
A prey of constant fears, she seeks reassurance, even in the visions of a fortune-teller, who would "tell more for a dollar" as Mrs. Bence so frankly said than for the 50 cents she had to spare.

WARTS ON FACE

And yet, one wonders. For the climax of that credulity which serves so well to keep alive and to spread community hysteria was reached in the story told police by that very fortune teller, Mrs. Edna James, the only prop on which Mrs. Bence in her anxiety had to lean. Mrs. James maintained she had not only smelled the sickening perfume-like gas, but saw its sprayer, crouched "ape-like" with his spray-gun in his hands staring at her with evil, yellow eyes. The light was faint, she said, but it was enough to reveal an ugly face made more repulsive by the presence of warts! -- Tuesday, September 19, page 5

Chicago Herald-American, Sept 18

Alienist Declares Mattoon Attacks 'Fear Contagion'

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 18 -- What caused Mattoon's reign of terror?
When hysteria sweeps a large number of people there may be other forces at work than fear, according to Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist, who for the first time in history is psychoanalyzing an entire community and diagnosing its illness.
The most important of these, Dr. Hulbert says, is SUGGESTIBILITY--that is, the accepting by one person of the ideas and emotions of another.
Now take the case of Mrs. Carl Cordes of 921 N. 21st st., who was overcome when she picked up a cloth on her front porch on the evening of Sept. 5 four days after the phantom gas-sprayer had first made his appearance in Mattoon.
Like all the other victims, Mrs. Cordes answered the doctor's questions readily, described her symptoms in detail and told all the circumstances of the attack. She began by saying:
"I know I'm a very nervous person. I haven't been well in some time, but I know I didn't imagine this. It was real. I'm sure of that."
The cloth, which was clean, lay on the front porch neatly folded when she first saw it. Thinking that one of the neighbors had wrapped something in it and placed it there, she picked it up. Surprised at finding it empty and noticing a round wet-looking splotch in the center, she involuntarily put it to her nose and smelled. She was over come. She said:
"It went through me like an electric shock. My legs got numb to the knees, my mouth was like it had been scalded with a hot cup of coffee and my nose and throat were awfully sore for two days afterwards.
"No, it didn't bother my eyes."
This gave the doctor the clue he needed and after thanking Mrs. Cordes, we left.
Gas? The doctor answered:
"No--couldn't have been. Remember the eyes. They couldn't have escaped a volatile, poisonous gas."
What then? Mrs. Cordes is a nice woman. A sincere woman, pleasant to deal with. She wouldn't have made this up?
The answer is, of course, that she didn't make it up.

UNCONSCIOUS VICTIM

She was a victim of suggestibility. Unconsciously, she accepted the ideas and emotions of others. She had heard about the gas man. Indeed, he and his depredations were on every one's tongue.
Suggestibility is heightened during times of unusual strain. It is especially marked, Dr. Hulbert says, in two groups of people--those not in a sturdy state of health and those whose mental makeup predisposes them to dread: the type of persons who might think "Wouldn't it be dreadful if that gas man came here" and thus launch themselves on a whole train of imaginings as to the dire results of such a visitation.
But does suggestibility account for the very real illnesses, pains and bodily discomforts these people suffered?
Again the doctor answers yes--suggestibility plus certain rather mysterious tricks that mind and body can perform under stress. Dr. Hulbert explains:
"At times when anxiety tension becomes too great, it is converted into bodily symptoms and the anxiety is thereby relieved. It's a good thing, too, because it helps people to live through some pretty tough spots. It may result in an increase, decrease or distortion of any function of the body.
"Remember that fear--you can call it whatever you want, anxiety, worry, insecurity--is at the bottom of all this business.
"People tell us they were sick at the stomach, nauseated, vomiting. That was a conversion under stress accompanied by increase of function. Their legs were numb or paralyzed, or so weak as to cause them to stagger--a decrease of function. Some reported heavy beating of their hearts--another increase. Some light-headedness or dizziness--decrease again.
"Notice, that no two reported an identical series of symptoms. Similar, yes, but not exactly the same. That is significant, too--"

IT WASN'T GAS

The doctor broke and we put in:
"But, they really were sick, weren't they?"
Whereupon the doctor exploded:
"Of course they were sick "They smelled things, too--our houses are always full of odors and they are coming in from outside all the time. But they weren't smelling poison gas and they weren't sick from it. That is the point." -- Monday, September 18, page 1, 2
(Further details of psychoanalysis of Mattoon gas hysteria in tomorrow's Chicago Herald-American.)

The View from the Men in Blue

New Radio Doubled Police Efficiency.

by C. Leland Wood
City Manager
Watertown, N.Y. ...Radio has permitted wider and better coverage of the city with the same number of men. Before radio, the prowl car operators contacted headquarters by telephone once every half hour, with no contact the rest of the time. This isolation greatly reduced the effectiveness of the prowl car. With installation of the two-way radio system, prowl-cars are in touch with headquarters at all times, and the ability to render service has been immeasurably increased. These cars are now often able to apprehend transgressors much more easily after receiving a broadcast from police headquarters, especially when they happen to be in the vicinity of the occurrences. -- from AMERICAN CITY Magazine, November 1943

The View from Mr. Luce

TIME Magazine, CRIME (September 18, 1944)

At Night in Mattoon

The Mad Anesthetist of Mattoon, Ill. (pop. 17,500) is a tall, thin man who wears a black skullcap, and carries an instrument not unlike a Flit gun. He moves through the night as nimbly and secretly as a cat, squirting a sweetish gas through bedroom windows. His victims cough, awaken with burning throats, and find themselves successively afflicted with: 1) nausea, 2) a temporary paralysis, and 3) a desire to describe their experiences in minutests detail. This latter result often enables them to overcome their symptoms with startling dispatch.

None of them has seen the Mad Anesthetist at his work, nor heard his hollow laugh. But last week citizens of Mattoon were watching for him, any and every midnight.

The Mad Anesthetist began his nocturnal visitations two weeks ago, mainly concentrating his fiendish attacks on women. One said a smell like gardenias "made her legs tingle." Another said a fat man had squirted perfume into her bedroom. Mrs Carl Cordes discovered a damp pink cloth on her back porch. She sniffed it and immediately "felt as though a charge of electricity had gone through me." She was taken to a hospital with burns and temporary paralysis.

It was at once obvious to Mattoon's housewives that the anesthetist had baited Mrs. Cordes' porch with a cloth soaked in the same substance he squirted through windows. After that the number of his victims increased. Mattoon's ten policemen, who had been ignoring the arch-criminal, now sallied forth at night, seeking they knew not what and not finding it. Chicago newsmen swept joyfully down upon Mattoon and wired leering accounts of The Gas Fiend, The Thin Man of Mattoon, The Mad Phantom and The Screwball Chemist.

The Illinois Criminal Investigation Laboratory sent an investigator named Richard T. Piper to Mattoon to get the pink cloth from Mrs. Cordes' porch. The laboratory could find no indications of gas or other chemicals upon it. Piper sat up all night reading chemistry books and announced the next day that the anesthetist was probably using chloropicrin, a heavy, colorless liquid made by chlorinating picric acid.

Five Chicago chemists disturbed the case with cries of "Hoax!" But the next night 17 families on one block reported that they had been gassed. Victims continued to say the mysterious substance made them vomit and sometimes affected the use of arms and legs.

By week's end Mattoon was gripped by semi-hysteria. Authorities were poring over records of patients released from Illinois insane asylums, seeking a clue to the Mad Anesthetist's identity: five state police cars arrived to help. Private automobiles full of vigilantes armed with shotguns rolled slowly along the streets at night. Other citizens were taking pistols and shotguns to bed, and sleeping behind closed windows. Mattoon's police commissioner, as alarmed by this display of armament as by the depredations of the Anesthetist, pleaded with the vigilantes to disband.

Said he: "I wouldn't walk through anybody's backyard at night now for $10,000."

Popular Music from September 1944

Billboard's TOP 10 Best Selling Retail Records

Week of September 2, 1944

1. Swinging on a Star - Bing Crosby
2. I'll Be Seeing You - Bing Crosby
3. You Always Hurt The One You Love - The Mills Brothers
4. I'll Walk Alone - Dinah Shore
5. Time Waits for No One - Helen Forrest
6. G.I. Jive - Louis Jordan
7. Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma Baby) - Louis Jordan
8. I'll Get By - Harry James, vocal by Dick Haymes
9. I'll Be Seeing You - Tommy Dorsey, vocal by Frank Sinatra
10. His Rocking Horse Ran Away - Betty Hutton

Chicago Herald-American, Sept 16

Psychoanalyze Mattoon to Find Cure for Terror Wave, Gas Victims Quizzed

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 16 -- Social and medical history is being made here today. For the first time anywhere a city is being psychoanalyzed.
Fear-stricken, bewildered Mattoon is being placed under the scientific scrutiny of an expert in the hidden, subconscious causes of acute emotional tension--Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist and criminologist of Chicago.
Terror, such as has gripped this comfortable and thriving little city during the past two weeks, causing its citizens to huddle nightly, behind locked windows and doors, is pathological. Whatever its cause, it is a symptom of community infection--an infection of fear.

CONTAINS THREAT

That this infection is mental and emotional rather than physical does not make it any the less dangerous. Indeed, it is fraught with much more ominous threats to the health of this community, and even to that of the nation, than the worst epidemic of bodily disease. It is a manifestation America is likely to see repeated time after time and with increasingly disastrous results here, there and everywhere in post-war days. For these reasons, The Herald-American has enlisted the services of Dr. Hulbert to diagnose this community illness, to get at its roots and to suggest a cure.
Dr. Hulbert is interviewing victims who have detected in their homes the peculiar sweetish odor of the mysterious gas sprayed by a phantom night prowler: who have heard the sound of running feet, or caught glimpses of a shadowy, retreating form.
By studying the time of each attack, the circumstances under which it was made, the symptoms induced--sometimes nausea, sometimes paralysis, sometimes choking and burning of the lips and throat. Dr. Hulbert will attempt to discover:

1. Whether or not a real, flesh-and-blood culprit exists.
2. To determine from the pattern of his attacks what manner of man (or woman) he is--sadist, maniac, or prankster.
3. If he, perhaps, only initiated the whole business which is now kept going by imitators.
4. In case the phantom proves to be a phantom in truth, what really happened and why.

Touched off on the evening of Sept. 1, when Mrs. Bert Kearney of 1408 Marshall av. reported she had been stricken by a mysterious flower-like gas which left her paralyzed and nauseated. Mattoon's reign of terror spread like wildfire.
Thereafter scores of citizens called police to report that they, too, had been victimized. Armed patrols roamed the streets in the hope of catching the spray-gun prowler until Police Commissioner Thomas P. Wright, alarmed at the explosive possibilities of the situation, ordered them to put up their guns, go home and leave the hunt to the constituted authorities.

BRED BY FEAR

If it should turn out that there was no prowler and no gas, Dr. Hulbert will answer the question of why such obviously sincere and worthy citizens should have reported "imaginary" attacks, how they smelled a "gas" that did not exist and what caused the detailed symptoms of their distress--burning lips, swollen tongues and throats, sickness, prostration and all the rest. Mass hysteria is an ugly thing. It may be touched off by incidents of great or small importance, by actual or imagined danger.
Bred by fear, it banishes reason and humor, the great stabilizers of human conduct. It heightens credulity and is accompanied by anger, confusion and hatred. And it often brings disastrous violence.
Psychiatrists everywhere realize that post-war days hold special dangers of such outbreaks. They fear waves of food-poisonings, kidnappings and even murder. That is why the eyes of the scientific world will be riveted on the results of Dr. Hulbert's investigation of what is probably the first case of community war neurosis. In a sense, Mattoon today is a laboratory in which the causes and cure of community hysteria are being worked out.

WILL TALK TO VICTIM

In the course of his research Dr. Hulbert will confer with Commissioner Wright, Police Chief Eugene Coles, Health Commissioner Edward X. Link and other state and city authorities. He will also interview Mrs. Kearney, first victim, her sister Mrs. Edgar Reedy, Mrs. Dorothea Backer and her mother, Mrs. Norma Tatley, who detected the gas in their home on the night of Sept. 8, Mrs. Laura Junkin, who reported she was paralyzed by gas on Sept. 6, Mrs. Carl Cordes, who was overcome when she picked up a cloth she found lying on her front porch, Mrs. Bertha Bence, a later victim, Mrs. Cordie Taylor, who awoke from sleep one night to find her room full of noxious vapor, and others who had first-hand experience. -- Saturday, September 16, page 1, 2

---

Chicago Psychiatrist Analyzes Mattoon Gas Hysteria

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 16 -- Is it possible for an entire community to fall a prey to its own fears?
To barricade itself nightly behind locked doors and windows against a non-existent madman and a noxious vapor which emanated only from the mind? To take up arms and to patrol the streets in search of nothing more substantial than a fear-bred phantom?
The answer is yes
That is exactly what happened in Mattoon, according to the findings of Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist and criminologist, who at the request of The Herald-American made a scientific investigation of the wave of hysteria that has swept this city during the past two weeks.
If gas and its sprayer had no existence in fact, were the people who reported attacks malingering? Did they seek to deceive? Did they want to cause trouble? Not at all. They are good, honest, sincere people. Not for one moment did they want to mislead anybody.
But as Dr. Hulbert told Police Commissioner Wright in a conference at the close of his investigation, in times like these the soul of a community, like the minds and hearts of members, is troubled. He said:
"One way or another, everybody is afraid...afraid of sabotage, of the postwar world, of what may happen to their boys in the service. Fear upsets people, makes them unstable. That is why this thing didn't die out after the first day or so."
Dr. Hulbert's diagnosis agrees with that of Health Commissioner Dr. Edward X. Link, who said yesterday that there is no scientific proof that any of the many victims showed symptoms of gas poisonings.
Mattoon's terror began in a modest little tree-shaded home at 1408 Marshall av., rising suddenly out of the night to terrify a sweet, motherly woman and to throw her whole family into confusion.
It was here, then, that Dr. Hulbert began his investigation.
When Dr. Hulbert arrived in Mattoon to search... -- Continued on Page 3, Column 1.

Illness of First Gas 'Victim' Blamed for Wave of Hysteria in Mattoon
Psychiatrist Lays Origin of Terror to Sickness, Worry

Continued from First Page.
...out the hidden causes of the community's panic, he had in mind three possibilities:

1. That a cowardly sadist was loose in the city--an individual who derived malicious pleasure from hurting others and who had devised a novel means of doing so.
2. That the gas poisoner had inspired others to imitate him, thus making possible gas-spraying attacks in many parts of town at one time.
3. That no such malicious individuals existed or had ever existed, but that Mattoon as a community had become a victim of its own collective and deep-rooted fears, fears bred and brought to unbearable tension by war.

He began with Mrs. Bert Kearney, first victim of the phantom prowler, because he felt that here was the key to the whole situation. Her experience, so terrifying that it caused her to summon her husband home from work and call the police, touched off the excitement. It was the focus of the infection which was later to spread through the whole city.
Young and rather heavily built, Mrs. Kearney is quiet and even subdued of manner. Meeting her, you are impressed with her calm good nature and feel instinctively that she would not easily be thrown off balance.
This was fully indicated by the domestic situation which we met on our arrival. We came in at a moment when grief and illness were by themselves giving Mrs. Kearney enough to cope with, and yet she greeted us calmly and graciously.

Remains Calm Despite Harassing Situation

Her sister, Mrs. Edgar Reedy, who makes her home with the Kearneys while her husband is in the navy, had just received word of her mother-in-law's unexpected death in another city. To make matters worse, Mrs. Reedy was ill--still in bed after an appendicitis operation. There were wires to be sent, telephone calls to be made, a sister's grief to comfort and three small, insistent children to look after, her own two baby girls and her sister's toddling boy--and yet Mrs. Kearney showed no signs of being fussed. She took care of first things first and then sat down to talk to us and to answer the doctor's kindly questions in a co-operative and friendly manner.
The attack, she said, came about 11 o'clock on the evening of Sept. 1. They had had company earlier. The children were all in bed. Her sister was lying down in the front room in the bed she now occupied and she herself was in bed in the back room, reading the paper.
No, she didn't remember what she was reading. She had been so frightened when the attack came, so sick afterward that everything else had been driven out of her head.

Sister Also Smells 'Cheap Perfume'

Yes, she had been violently nauseated--terribly sick. First though, her legs got numb. Afterwards, she had a headache and her lips were dry and burning, her tongue thick and swollen.
How about her eyes--did they burn, too?
No, her eyes were all right.
Now, what about this odor? How did it smell? Did it come a little at a time or all at once?
This was more difficult to answer. The odor was puzzling. Mrs. Kearney went on:
"At first I thought it was the flowers. I have a lot of flowers on that side of the yard. Then it became unpleasant, heavy--like a cheap perfume."
Then Mrs. Reedy interposed:
"She called me and asked if I smelled anything. I didn't, but later, when I went into help her after she got sick, I did. That was the way it smelled--like cheap perfume."

Clue Discovered by Psychiatrist

The doctor said:
"I am puzzled as to why anyone should want to molest this nice little home. Have you any ideas about that?" No, Mrs. Kearney couldn't say. Nobody would want to, unless, she added, they were after the money.
"Oh, you had money in the house, then?"
Yes, Mrs. Kearney had had an unusual sum of her own and her sister had that day cashed her allotment check for $75. It was all in the house.
Her husband wasn't at home. He drives a taxi and has worked nights for a good many years. She was used to being alone and she'd never been nervous about it.
That was all. A straight forward story told in a straight forward way, and confirmed by one who had been present when it occurred. On the face of it, it would seem to an observer, there was scant material for a psychiatrist to work on. And yet Dr. Hulbert found here the clue he sought and was able to draw from it certain important conclusions.
Strangely enough, the symptoms described by Mrs. Kearney were not those of gas poisoning but of paralyzing fear.
That was of first importance
If she didn't have the symptoms of gas poisoning, then she couldn't possibly have been poisoned. That's cold, scientific, medical fact, and there is no way to get around it.
How then to account for her illness? Undoubtedly she had been suddenly and alarmingly ill immediately after detecting a sickeningly sweet and overpowering odor. Every detail of her story was stamped with truth. It was impossible to doubt it and, if it had been doubted, there were her sister, her husband and the police to confirm it. What, then, is the answer to this puzzle?

'Victim' Exhausted, Excited and Worried

The doctor found it in the unusual sum of money in her keeping. This money represented, he pointed out, especially in the case of the sister's allotment, not just so many dollars, but 75 necessary, irreplaceable dollars. For a gentle, non-aggressive woman like Mrs. Kearney, none too secure at any time, it meant a heavy responsibility. An extra responsibility, for, as Mrs. Reedy pointed out, she usually paid her bills the moment she cashed her check and so as a rule had very little extra cash on hand.
Extra responsibility plus a basic though unconscious and unrecognized feeling of insecurity frightened her and she did not have the temperament to deal with fright. She was tired. She had had company that night, with unusual work and unusual excitement. Undoubtedly, according to the doctor, she was due for a bilious attack.
So what do you have? A burdened woman, in a state of fatigue, a stomach getting set to rebel, the scent of flowers drifting in through the open window.
As you know, if you've ever had a sick stomach, any scent at all, particularly a sweet one, is distasteful at such a time. But, the doctor explained, there is also another factor. Any person about to be sick at the stomach will get whiffs of unpleasant odor from that source. Mingle the two together and you can see that you might get something resembling a cheap and disgusting perfume, the odor of which would become more apparent as the sickness increased.
Numbness of the legs, a foul taste in the mouth, clamminess--are all a part of the preliminaries of a vomiting attack.
And don't forget that Mrs. Kearney was genuinely frightened. Not by anything that happened outside, but by unconscious fears rising out of her insecurity and stimulated by extra responsibility. This fright reinforced and made worse every symptom that she experienced.
Is she then to be thought of as an irresponsible, hysterical woman who willfully and maliciously touched off a community reign of terror?
Never!
She merely reported what was to her a fearsome experience.
She didn't realize that it had its origins within, rather than without. When she tried to explain it, she explained it in terms of sensations from the outside world.

Contrasting Case of Tired Woman

Now, for contrast, come with the doctor while he interviews a later victim, Mrs. Laura Junkin, who experienced an attack by the phantom gas man Sept. 6, four days after Mrs. Kearney's misfortune had been reported in the daily papers and when the terror in Mattoon was at its height. This case also occurred at night between 11 and 12. At 11, Mrs. Junkin went to the bedroom of her apartment back of the Big Four restaurant, which she owns and operates.
She noted the dread odor of gas on her pillow and along the edge of the mattress. It made her ill, although not to the point of vomiting, and caused her to lose control of her legs.
She was tired and sleepy. Her mind was full of the phantom prowler whose exploits were on every tongue. It was a time of night when the critical faculty is not too keen. She probably did smell something. How natural, then, in her keyed-up state, in her fatigue, to attribute it to the thing which every one then feared--the unknown and fantastic sprayer
The case of Mrs. Junkin, according to the doctor, was simply one of suggestibility in a weary woman. -- Sunday, September 17, page 1, 3
(Further details of the psychoanalysis of Mattoon's gas hysteria will be revealed in Monday's Herald-American)
Photo Caption
MRS. BERT KEARNEY soothes daughter, Dorothy, 4, a victim of mysterious Mattoon malady blamed on a 'gas madman' and which has struck terror through the thriving central Illinois city. Another daughter, Carol, 2, watches.
Photo Caption
POINTING to bedroom window, Mrs. Laura Junkin explains to police and Mattoon city officials how she was 'gassed' while sleeping.

Chicago Daily News, Sept 15

MATTOON FIEND--IF HE EXISTS--STILL AT LARGE

Mattoon, Ill. Sept. 15 -- (Special to The Daily News) -- The phantom prowler credited with spraying a sweet-smelling gas on 35 victims, remained at large today, and police continued to label the phantom "a complete myth."
A contradictory opinion was voiced not only by the victims, who declared that they had been partly paralyzed and made ill by the gas, but by Richard T. Piper, superintendent of the state bureau of criminal identification and investigation at Springfield.
Piper said today that he thought "something much more tangible than fumes from a local war plant" was responsible for the panic that spread through Mattoon after the first victims reported being attacked.
Police had sought to explain the entire incident by saying that the gas was nothing but carbon tetrachloride fumes from the plant of the Atlas Diesel Engine Co., manufacturers of shell casings. W.J. Webster, plant manager, was quick to point out that the plant had been in operation four years, during which time the carbon tetrachloride had been in constant use, and that no complaint about the fumes had been voiced previously.
Police Sgt. Edward Jacobson reported that all five state highway police squads, sent here to quell the hysteria, had returned to their substation at Champaign.
"The hysteria is all over," he said, "and we haven't had a complaint about the prowler for three nights."
State's Attorney William K. Kidwell indicated that he would make a separate inquiry when police had ended their investigation. -- Friday, September 15, page 8

Chicago Herald-American, Sept 14

Suspect Woman Gas Terrorist
Find Prints of High-Heeled Shoes

BY LEROY (BUDDY) McHUGH
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 14 (Special) -- The phantom anesthetist who terrorized this town may be a woman!
The finding of a lipstick near the home of a recent victim was the first clue to the sex of the phantom, but today additional information was given The Herald-American which adds a new twist to Mattoon's bizarre case.
Mrs. Bertha Bence, 54, a widow who lives with her three sons in a one-story frame cottage at 2605 Champaign av., reported to Police Sgt. Edward A. Davidson that she almost was positive the person who shot gas into her bedroom was a woman dressed in man's clothing.

TELLS EXPERIENCE

She related to the policeman:
"Monday night I was asleep in the front bedroom of our home when I heard a peculiar whirring noise through a partly opened window.
"Suddenly I felt faint and nauseated.
"My sons ran from their bedrooms in the rear of the house. My son, Orville, ran out the back way." Orville, 20, whose brothers are Norbert Jr., 22, and Ray, 16, continued the story:
"When I ran out I saw a shadowy form. Before I could get to the alley the form disappeared.

PRINTS FROM HIGH HEELS

"Next morning all of us searched the yard. Under the window of mother's bedroom we found several imprints of high-heeled shoes." The lipstick clue was found on the lawn of Mrs. Carl Cordes, 921 N. 21st st. When she smelled of a cloth she found near-by, she experienced all the symptoms of other victims. -- Thursday, September 14, page 3

FORTUNE Magazine,Part 2

The Main Street Front
A Report on an American Community After One Year of War

A disaster committee and a motor corps and canteen service have been organized by the Red Cross and six mobile first-aid units are equipped for action. Six hundred women have taken first-aid courses, 1,000 are sewing and knitting, and 150 turning out surgical dressings in the rooms given by the National Bank. High-school girls are taking home-nursing courses. Every physically fit boy in Senior High is in the R.O.T.C., and every senior boy is taking a refresher course in mathematics designed by the U.S. Navy, and studying a series of simple straightforward pamphlets on health, sex, Army regulations, and civics. The study of aeronautics and meteorology is worked into regular science courses, and Superintendent of Schools Howard Black is determined that his boys shall have a headstart when they join the Army or Navy. A good many of them have gone already. Six enlisted last year before graduation, and there are fifty fewer boys in school this year than there were two years ago. Six men teachers have gone into the Army, too, and one woman has joined the WAACs. Two Mattoon High star athletes, Paul Munson and Robert Ingle, have been killed in flight training. War has not dimmed the enthusiasm for sports, and the football season was as important as ever this year though fewer townspeople went to out-of-town games, and many decided that they couldn't drive up for both Dad's Day and Homecoming at the University of Illinois.
Church attendance has increased since the war, particularly on the part of the families of boys in the services. Spiritual life seems to mean more when physical life is so precarious, says the Reverend J. Fred Melvin of the First Methodist Church, who often preaches to a congregation of 1,000 members. People are more generous with money since the war began, he says, and this fall on Black Diamond Sunday, when each member of the congregation was asked to give a penny for each pound of his weight, the collection amounted to over $400, enough to pay the winter's coal bill. Mr. Melvin organized a study class for women, to discuss postwar problems and the establishment of permanent peace, and he reports that "after six weeks of real study and research, the ladies of the study group were definite and unanimous in their feeling and thought we could not be an ostrich any longer in our view of world affairs and world peace. They felt that some kind of a worldwide league should be formed to bring about a just and lasting readjustment of the mess of today." He finds that the boys who talk to him before they leave for camp are unafraid but confused about what they are fighting for. They want to know what is to follow the war, whether they will be "gypped by the politicians after this war as their fathers were after the last."
Except for blaming unfortunate events on "the politicians" the people of Mattoon do not talk much about politics at the moment. Coles County has been pretty consistently Republican for many years until 1932, but in the last three elections Roosevelt has carried the county, by a smaller margin each time. There is no talk about a fourth term, and there are not many, even among the Chicago Tribune readers, who call Roosevelt "that man" and blame the war on the Administration. They have accepted the war and are willing to fight it. They are not isolationists so far as fighting the war goes, and winning the war means complete victory with the Japs and Germans horsewhipped and hog-tied, the U.S. peaceful and prosperous and powerful. But, except for the ladies of Mr. Melvin's study class, people are not thinking much about the postwar world. Most of them think that the U.S. should never have been disarmed, and that after the war has been won "we ought to do something about policing the idiots who are eternally breaking out of the fold and causing trouble."
The Daily Journal-Gazette, published and edited by William B. Hamel, the farm boy from Taylorville who came to Mattoon twenty years ago as a sodajerker, married the daughter of the rich lumber dealer, and now owns a large block of the stock of the newspaper, is all-out for fighting the war and winning the victory. Mr. Hamel's jaunty editorial columns preach a war-bond buying, and tire conservation, and scrap collecting. "There is no speed limit to the scrap-metal drive--the faster the better." "Buying bonds means good sense right now and good dollars in the future." He believes that "the most important functions of the press in this war are: first, to report; second, to criticize; third, to clarify; and fourth, to unify or to make us 'one'." Nearly everybody in town reads the paper, and along with the local news they read the highlights of war news each day and Mr. Hamel's patriotic cartoons and editorials, but their war thinking is more apt to be influenced by radio commentators and newspapers from St. Louis and Chicago. Secretary of the Navy Knox's Daily News is twice as popular as Colonel McCormick's Tribune.

MANPOWER AND WOMANPOWER

The shortage of manpower is becoming a lot more than a threat in Mattoon and Coles County. The farmers were just able to get their crops harvested this fall by hiring old men and young boys, by importing labor from the unprosperous farms of Southern Illinois, and by paying double the usual wage. The broomcorn crop, a specialty in Coles County, was short this year but, even the broomcorn cutters who normally make $4 or $5 a day had to be paid from $10 to $16, and ordinary farm wages were up 50 per cent. Coles County raises about 70,000 acres of soybeans and 90,000 acres of corn, called Indian corn here to distinguish it from broomcorn. Some of the soybeans were caught by an early September frost but the corn crop was heavy and farmers had to work out a cooperative system to use combines and corn-picking machines and hired hands to the best advantage. Certain farmers were deferred by the draft board for the harvest and a new ruling in Illinois may exempt many of them altogether, but next spring the labor shortage is expected to be so acute that plans are being made to excuse farm boys from school and to recruit businessmen and city workers for a few hours each week. Farming comes very close to Mattoon, both physically and financially, and many businessmen own farms as investments. The Lumpkins, for instance, richest family in town, own a dozen farms as well as the local telephone company, and from Lumpkin Heights, where Mrs. William Cutler Lumpkin and her son Richard live in big town houses, they can see the flat stretch of the cornfields that grow close against the city limits. Sixty-five per cent of the Coles County farms are operated by tenants and there has been an increased amount of investing in farms lately, at an average price of $200 an acre. Farm prices were good this fall. County Farm Advisor Myers says "prices are good compared to what they used to be--but not in comparison." (Which means "parity.") Not many Coles County farmers took time to worry much about the parity struggle in Congress.
Farm girls used to go up to Mattoon to work as domestic servants or as waitresses in restaurants and taverns. Now they are pumping gas at Gene O'Malley's filling station or operating presses at the Journal-Gazette or going into factories to learn how to make brooms or furniture or shoes. Because of gas rationing they rent rooms, if they can find them, in town: they are making $18 and $20 a week, which is more than they ever made before, and spending it in Mattoon. They have no desire to go back to waiting on table at $10 a week or to work on their families' farms for nothing but their room and board.
Atlas (engines), Kuehne (furniture), and Brown (shoes) are the three largest factories in town and Atlas is the only war plant. Last year the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Co. had a small factory with only enough business to employ 100 men. This year the company has 550 employees, has added new shops to the plant, and is turning out marine and stationary engines for the Army, Navy and Maritime Commission, making shell casings for the Army. The 450 new employees are not skilled mechanics nor have they been imported from other engine and ordnance plants. They have been recruited from Coles County farms and from white-collar jobs in Mattoon and neighboring towns. A licensed embalmer is a foreman in the engine shop, a broom manufacturer is supervisor of ordnance, a preacher is a heat-treatment worker, a gravedigger is a utility man, and "every auto salesman in town is here." Even the new manager, Muirson Wright, had to be brought in from the outside, from the company's office in Seattle. Karl Mosley, the new (and first) personnel director at Atlas, is pretty near the busiest man in town. His main problem is finding men. He could get them from the furniture factory (average pay 50 cents) but if he hired them away from Kuehne it would cause bad feeling in town. This fall he had to fix up a powder room and hire half a dozen women workers. He thinks women will do well on certain repetitive jobs but he has noticed in other factories that they are likely to be more profane than men and that when they get mad at somebody they stop work and fight it out right there. However, it can't be helped, and there will be more women in there soon.
Women are already doing a large share of the work in the other factories. At the Kuehne furniture plant on the edge of town, 66 of the 450 workers have gone into the services and a lot more have quit for higher paid jobs. Fred Kuehne has hired three times as many women as he used to have, chiefly farm girls or small town girls who had never done any factory work before. Outside organizers for the United Mine Workers have been around for the last six months, and in an election held in the plant last August the U.M.W. won out by two votes. In contract bargaining, Kuehne met the union on everything but wage increases and the negotiations are still bogged down. Mr. Kuehne says he has raised wages 20 per cent this year and that the cost of living in Mattoon is up only 9.3 per cent. Production is off 43 per cent because of the lack of materials. With prices for his dinettes frozen he just doesn't see what he can do about higher wages. Union leaders scoff at Kuehne's hard-luck stories, say he has a long antilabor record (he moved to Mattoon ten years ago to get away from unions), and that he is still making plenty of money.
The company has found it impracticable to convert the plant to war use. A WPB regional advisor came down to see if Army cots and Navy bunks could be made and decided that only a small portion of the plant was suitable for conversion. Gliders were another thing they talked about but it takes a skilled worker to make gliders and there is no worker in Mattoon, a Kuehne official says, who ever saw a micrometer or a blueprint. So, unless "they" think up something to convert to, Fred Kuehne will go on making dinettes until he has to shut down his factory for lack of materials and manpower.
Out at the Brown Shoe Co. (Don't Spend Your Life Two Feet from Happiness) 440 of the 760 employees are women and half of them are new workers brought in to fill the places of men who have left. The girls commute from small towns within a radius of twenty miles of Mattoon and some of the men run farms after putting in an eight-hour day at the factyory. Superintendent Al Pauley doesn't like to think what gas rationing is going to do to them. He's not going to face that problem until he has to, and maybe he won't have to because the Association of Commerce is already doing something about establishing a bus service for factory workers who live outside the city limits.
Bigger than any of the factories, and more essential to the war effort, are the two railroads, the Illinois Central and the Big Four whose main lines meet at Mattoon in a noisy, smoke-hung crisscross of tracks and sidings and yards. Between them they have 1,500 employees, 300 more than last year, and are looking for more. They have already used up all returned pensioners and have hired green men in all the departments. Bud "Speck" Milligan, division superintendent of the Big Four for many years, has to spend a lot of time in his office next to the dispatching room and doesn't have much chance to get off on hunting and fishing trips or to attend to his Indiana farms, or even to work in his garden or sit and admire the oil paintings he collects. To run a greatly augmented schedule without enough trained men is a full-time job. Last year there were sixteen freight trains a day and twelve regular passenger trains on the Big Four. This year there are twenty-three through freight trains every day and twenty passenger trains. The I.C. has sixty-nine trains a day, making a total of 112 for both railroads--or one every twelve and a half minutes, all fully loaded with freight or passengers.

LET'S RIDE OUT TO LOU'S

Richard A. Lumpkin, principal stockholder of the Illinois Consolidated Telephone Co., which has thirty-three exchanges in Central Illinois, is a dollar-a-year man now with the Communications Branch of the WPB in Washington, but he still comes home once in a while to see how things are going. So far as business goes he finds that his company's toll calls have dropped 4 per cent since the war began--in contrast to a rise of 25 per cent throughout the U.S.--and he attributes the drop to the lack of war plants in Mattoon. He finds that there is a tremendous turnover in labor, every six months where it used to be every two years. Linemen are hard to get, and operators' minimum wages are 50 per cent higher than the maximum in the big year of 1929. In terms of war consciousness he finds Mattoon very different from Washington--not that Mattoon is less patriotic than Washington, but that the manifestations of patriotism are different. The war is not talked about half so much here as in Washington (and no one has just heard from someone who knows all about everything that such and such a thing is going to happen). Older men and men with families do not enlist as they do in the East, and fewer men and women volunteer for civilian duties. All these things, Mr. Lumpkin believes, are entirely natural, given the geographical location of Mattoon. Dick Lumpkin himself may try to get back into naval Aviation or he may stay with WPB, but whatever he does, he's coming home to live in Mattoon as soon as the war is over. When he first got out of college he thought of going to work in Chicago or New York, but now he has decided that Mattoon is good enough for him.
Most of the citizens think Mattoon is good enough for them. They've been in lots of other small cities, and big ones, too, but there's something different about Mattoon, they say. It's prosperous and progressive and friendly, and everybody has a good time. Almost everybody, that is. To a few rather "queer" people, Mattoon isn't the finest little city in the country. Those few are bored and don't want to take their boredom out in drinking. There are the Rotary Institute of Understanding lectures to go to, and the few concerts that are sponsored by the Civic Music Associaton but there sn't much else to do, they say, besides going to the movies and playing bridge. They even go so far as to think that Mattoon's prosperity is smug and its progressiveness unimaginative and imitative. But there aren't many of these eccentrics and they don't have influence enough to change the town. For the most part, everyone is getting along all right. The mayor of Mattoon, Dr. E.E. Richardson, doesn't need to worry much about how the city is getting along, and doesn't spend much of his time on municipal duties. "It's not a full-time job, and I'm just mayor because nobody else wants to be. Nothing much exciting happens and we never have any trouble--it's just a plain town and everything goes along peacefully."
The WPA finished a drainage project out by the city waterworks last mot a that wspactcally the endof the WPA in Matoon. (The yes ago there wer 661 men on the rolls.) Thereaeos for anyone able to work, and the city relief load has been cut from 1,434 people (in 1936) to 133. The dislocation of employment is still a problem in Mattoon but so far it has been more stimulating than harmful. New jobs have meant new interests and new security. No one has been deeply affected by shortages of food or clothing--in fact many people have more food and clothing than they ever had before. For the busy merchants, curtailed vacations last summer simply meant more parties at the Country Club, more weekends at Lake Mattoon.

FORTUNE Magazine, July 1943

FORTUNE Magazine, Part 1

The Main Street Front

A Report on an American Community After One Year of War

The audience for the first show drifted into the lobby of the Mattoon Theatre. Farm families parked their cars slantwise against the curb and came in along with mechanics from the Diesel-engine shop, a couple of soldiers home on leave, and a half-dozen high-school girls. A big red-faced man, a stranger in town, stared a minute at the bills announcing "Fingers at the Window" with Lew Ayres and Larraine Day. He hurried to the ticket window, and in a loud angry voice asked for the manager. Mr. Clarke was out to supper, the girl said, was anything the matter? There was plenty the matter. Didn't they know it was a national disgrace to show a picture with a conscientious objector in it? Didn't they realize this was America? The kids in the lobby giggled and the girl behind the ticket window answered the red-faced man politely. She didn't know a thing about it and she doubted Mr. Clarke did either; the pictures were just sent to them and they just put them on--they couldn't stop the show. The red-faced man stamped out to the street, stopped to call over his shoulder, "You folks don't seem to know there's a war going on." One of the kids yelled back, "And you don't seem to know Lew Ayres is in the Army now." Lew Ayres is in the Army now, and the 17,000 inhabitants of Mattoon, Illinois, do know there's a war going on. They've seen 800 of their young men go into the Army or Navy (320 of them--a high percentage--volunteered); they've met their war-bond quota; they've left peacetime jobs and started working on war-time jobs. They've seen prices go up, and wages, too. Their unemployed have found jobs, and along with increased employment, union organizers have come to town. Women and girls have quit housework and stenography and gone to work in factories, and as bartenders and filling-station operators. Troop trains and heavy-loaded freights roll through town in an almost steady stream, and retired railroad men have gone back on the payrolls of the Big Four and the Illinois Central. There's more money than ever in Mattoon--and less to spend it on. People are paying off their debts. They can't buy new cars or refrigerators or washing machines; they've had to cut down on sugar and coffee and meat and (much harder to bear) on driving fast along the straight prairie roads. The restaurants and taverns are packed. Broadway on Saturday night is crowded with soldiers from Chanute Field sixty miles away, and every couple of weeks the Illinois Central depot is crowded with a new bunch of Mattoon boys being sent up on the early morning train to the Army induction center in Chicago. A good many of the boys have gone abroad with the A.E.F. "I had to look up New Caledonia on the map when his letter came." "He says he saw Shakespeare's home and some old historic castles." "I bet he was first off the boat at Guadalcanal." Eleven Mattoon boys have been reported missing, and five have been killed since last December 7. The people of Mattoon know there is a war going on, all right. What the war is doing to them, and what they are doing about the war is the subject of this story. But Mattoon is not to be considered typical of every town in America, because economic conditions and geography affect men's lives and thoughts even more in war than in peace, and no town is typical. No town is average. Mattoon is not a war-boom town--of its five small factories, employing 2,000 men and women, only one has been converted to war production. It is not even a predominantly industrial town, for half the wealth comes from the black and fertile soil of the surrounding farms. It is a small middle western city in the Illinois corn belt, 175 miles south of Chicago, equidistant from Indianapolis and St. Louis. Except for the day in 1861 when Ulysses S. Grant took his first Civil War command here, except for the tornado in 1917 that killed sixty people, except the discovery of the southern Illinois oil fields in 1936, which gave Mattoon a vicarious boom, things have gone along pretty quietly since the town was founded in 1854. There are many well-to-do families, but no millionaires, and the poor are conveniently hidden beyond the Big Four roundhouse. Less than 2 per cent of the population is of foreign birth, and only 1 per cent is colored.

WAR TIMES ARE GOOD TIMES

The depression did not bring hardship to Mattoon as a whole, and recovery has been rapid, partly because of the nearby oil boom. In the last five years Horace Checkley, dealer in real estate and insurance, has built 500 houses in town, and this fall he completed the last of thirty workers' houses he had planned with uncommon foresight on the morning of December 8, 1941. It is hard to find a house to rent or buy in Mattoon but there are no trailer camps, no need for government housing. A few merchants (hardware men, auto and tire and electric-appliance dealers) have gone out of business--there are fifteen store vacancies now where there were none a year ago--but all the men dislocated are now either in the Army or have other jobs, and many of the stores on Broadway are glossed over with new and shiny facades. Almost everybody has a car, and half a dozen people own their own planes and fly from the municipal airport. The Kuehne Manufacturing Co. makes "more breakfast-room furniture than any other plant in the world." The U.S. Grant Hotel is "the finest little hotel this side of St. Louis." Mattoon is a prosperous small city that still looks like a country town with its long main street, its elm- and maple-shaded residential districts, its drab outskirts ending abruptly in the rich cornfields. In addition to the 800 men who have been drafted or enlisted in the services, about 300 have left town for work in big war plants. But statistically the town has suffered no loss. Farm boys and girls, and the former unemployed of rural districts and villages have come in to take the jobs the soldiers left; increased employment and increased wages and high farm prices have more than made up for the loss of the soldiers' money. There has been a 20 per cent liquidation of bank loans in the last year. Consumer credit loans (for such things as cars and houses) have been reduced 50 per cent, and the business of the savings and loan companies is almost at a standstill. Deposits in the two banks are higher than they've ever been: $6 million now, where last year they were $5 million, and in the earlier high year of 1929 only a little over $4 million. The cost of living has gone up 9.3 per cent since October 1, 1941, according to the Association of Commerce, but wages are up from 15 to 20 per cent. If things were to stay just as they are now, nearly everybody, with the exception of the families of boys missing and killed, would be better off than they were in peacetime. Last year the Association of Commerce made surveys and drew maps of industrial conditions and transportation facilities to try to lure new war industries to Mattoon, but no new industry came. Secretary Hoffman of the Association says that the lack of sufficient labor kept industry away, and he vigorously denies rumors that local manufacturers didn't want competition and deliberately kept it out. Many think that the town is getting on well enough as it is and that readjustment after the war will be easier because they haven't a big plant and a spectacular boom. Retail stores report increased sales. Henry Newgent's shoe store, for example, has more business this year than last, and Mr. Newgent figures that it would run 25 per cent over last year if he could get all the leathers and rubbers and hosiery his customers demand. "If people would buy what they need instead of what they want," he says, "there'd be plenty to go around." Mr. Sawin of the Sawin-Jones department store says his business is ahead of last year and he notices a lot of newcustomers in the store, women who used to trade at Woolworth's and Kresge's. The only lines that haven't improved are silk hose and carpets because he can't get them. The attendance at the three movie houses runs about the same as last year, around 14,000 a week. Mr. Clarke expected that the exodus of young men would hurt attendance, but it hasn't. The merchants know that the good times can't last forever, know that consumers' goods are going to get scarcer and that--if the war goes on long--their boom days will end. One of the business houses that has already been hit is the Wolfe Auto Supply Co. A year ago Benny Shoaf, manager and part owner, had nineteen employees in two stores. Each month they sold about $15,000 worth of refrigerators and washing machines and radios and auto supplies. Today Benny has only one store with six employees. The remaining stock, worth less than $6,000, is all on the floor. There are seventy-five radios (unpopular models), two washing machines, and one refrigerator, and when they are sold there won't be any more until the war is over. Business used to be 10 per cent cash and 90 per cent finance; now, when it's anything at all, it's the other way around. "I never saw so much folding money in my life," says Roe Moore, sales chief, who is still there, sitting around. He has bought a lunch counter down the street, The Theatre Grill, and his wife is making $200 month net there, enough to support her when he is drafted. Benny Shoaf expects to close up the salesroom pretty soon and just keep the service department going. Service alone won't make money, Benny and Roe say, but maybe it will keep the place in business until after the war, and after the war the boom will begin. The belief that the end of the war will bring a great boom in consumers' goods is shared by all the auto and auto-supply dealers, and by all the plumbers and builders in Mattoon. Louis Bartelsmeyer, the Chevrolet dealer, has cut out his sales force entirely and is keeping the business going on the service department. He is looking forward to a big time after the war, and, as a matter of fact, it isn't too bad right now, even if he can't sell cars, because he managed to corral the combined service businesses of the Studebaker, Cadillac, Hudson, Oldsmobile, and Chrysler dealers when they closed up shop for the duration. The company is making an $800 a month net profit from the service department. Tom Purvis, the Ford dealer, has moved from a big garage into a service station, employs four men instead of thirty-two, but he can keep going and expects a tremendous postwar business, not only in cars but in planes. He and his parts manager, Lowell Field, think it logical that auto dealers will become the plane dealers of the future. Purvis, a pilot himself, is already in the business in a small way and he has sold fourteen new and used planes this year in Mattoon and neighboring towns. There is no waiting until after the war for the boom in the business of the bars and taverns, of which there are seventeen in town--one for every thousand people. Knight's Buffet, near the I.C. and Big Four depots, has a 50 per cent increase in sales over last year. Part of it is brought by the weekend soldiers from Chanute Field, part by the increased wages and the decreased supply of consumers' goods in town. "After they've paid their debts and bought war bonds they figure they might as well have some fun. Nobody knows how long it will last." Out at Lou's Rendezvous one thousand people buy four or five thousand drinks on a Saturday night."The big two-fisted drinkers have gone into the Army," Lou says, looking around her crowded, noisy establishment. "But people have been awful nice to me. I have a hell of a lot of fun." The war hasn't hurt Lou yet. Business is wonderful, and she has a good supply of liquor and coffee on hand, and she's near enough to town so gas rationing won't keep people from coming--though it will cut the transient trade some. Lou is inclined to believe that the war was started by politicians and Wall Street, but just the same she does what she can about fighting it. She gives the boys home on leave a good time; and she sends free food to the U.S.O. rooms, buys war bonds, and contributes to the Red Cross. Whatever started the war, it's got to be won pretty quick--and it's our business, Lou says, to win it.

THIS IS OUR WAR

Mattoon subscribed $6,000 to the Red Cross War Fund, overreaching its quota by 25 per cent. The Mattoon Service Organization raised $5,000 to buy cigarettes and candy for the drafted men, and to send a three-months' subscription to the local Journal-Gazette to every boy in the service. In September the war-bond quota for Mattoon and the surrounding countryside was $126,180; the amount raised--half of it in a Salute-To-Your-Heroes street festival--was $202,232, and all but a few factory workers have put 10 per cent of their wages into bonds. (So far the post office has had to cash about 2 per cent of the bonds sold.) The first Scrap Drive wasn't very successful, but after the Journal-Gazette and the Kiwanis Club took over the campaign 75,000 pounds were collected in a week. When Pete Sutter of the Victory Cafe started out to raise $1,000 for the Greek Relief Fund he got $1,280 the first day. People give generously to the organizations and causes they believe in and make sacrifices willingly if they're sure they'll help. They're sick of hearing that they don't know there's a war on, sick of being labeled isolationists. They know that this is their war and not for a moment do they believe that they could lose it. They think it possible that New York or Washington or San Francisco will be bombed, but the idea that Mattoon might be bombed seems absurd. The commander of the Citizens Defense Corps, Carus Icenogle, has built up a skeleton defense organization and established a control center in the police station, but not enough people in town have volunteered as air-raid wardens and auxilary police. "They're patriotic, but they're too far away." Mr. Icenogle keeps a globe in his law office and points to the short northern air routes, but people can't believe that enemy planes could get this far, he says, or that they would waste bombs on Mattoon. They have no fear of invasion or defeat. They have complete faith in the power of American production and in the superiority of American fighting men. They want a second front now. They admire the Russians' courage and strength, but want to be sure that America doesn't get mixed up with Communism when the war is over. Many of them believe that the war will be over this winter, that the Germans and Japs have exhausted their forces and will be starved into surrender. FORTUNE Magazine, March 1943