Behavior: The Gathered Tribes

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In 1895, the pioneer crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon wrote: "Isolated, a man may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian." Le Bon's insights can be applied to all kinds of crowds—Nuremberg rallies and peace rallies, lynch mobs, the crowds at trials or soccer matches, even the "psychological crowd" swayed by images in TV commercials. Le Bon found that crowds tap the unconscious: individual responsibility and civilized restraints fade, giving way to exaggerated feelings, high suggestibility and impulsive, primitive behavior. These views, expanded and refined by later scholars, were amply illustrated last week in the crowd of 16,000 spectators who gathered to see Evel Knievel's fizzled but nonfatal attempt to rocket across Idaho's Snake River Canyon. The scene, as reported by TIME Correspondent Leo Janos:

It was a bizarre spectacle, garnished with machismo and the threat of death: the ultimate expression of the motorcycle culture and, according to one Evel Knievel aide, "a blue-collar Woodstock." Squadrons of bikers roared through Twin Falls, their girls and gear nestled against their backs. Fans from every state in the union formed a camper city that was soon awash in beer, dope, cocaine and false rumors of savage beatings and rapes.

Two days before the jump, Knievel appeared at the launch site to pose for pictures. When someone asked him to smile, Knievel responded by snarling "I don't smile unless I want to. Who asked me to smile?" Singling out NBC Cameraman Jim Watt as the culprit, Knievel sprang at him and beat him to the ground with his $22,000 gold-and-dia-mond-headed walking stick. A crowd of bikers, kept behind a chain-link fence, roared their approval, and moments later stomped on a U.P.I, reporter and ground out a cigarette butt on his forehead. Enraged by the surly Knievel's unavailability for interviews, reporters joked about "holding a pep rally for Snake Canyon," and one reporter, Larry McMullen of the Philadelphia Daily News, wrote: "Even though the canyon is the underdog, it is rapidly becoming a sentimental favorite."

Meanwhile, crowds awaiting the jump were partying and building bonfires against the night chill. Bikers and their women stripped naked and drove through the fires on drunken dares. Two beer trucks were ransacked and a few latrines burned to the ground. Some 25 people lurched off the jump ramp, apparently intent on burning it, but were turned aside by shotgun-toting deputies and the sobering information that Knievel could not perform without his ramp.

On launch day, screaming crowds surged against the chain-link fence that sealed off the press and VIP stands. Outside the fence a biker raised a homemade sign: SHOW YOUR TITS. Several girls obediently shed their shirts and climbed aboard their boy friends' shoulders. A group of bikers hoisted a naked woman aloft and tossed her over a fence into the press compound. One girl stripped and, encouraged by the crowd, performed fellatio on her boy friend while he shouted: "For you, Evel! For you, man!" Others chanted a constant refrain: "The tribes have gathered!" When the crowd shouted obscenities at a public-address announcer who was ineptly trying to reduce tensions, the announcer boomed back an electronic "—you too!"