Can we finally kill the meme about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre?

[Tigress DEM]

130. For which? The word "FIRE" causing fear in people at that time or current mob panic?

http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2013/03/04/please-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-metaphor/

I DON'T Agree with Holmes using the analogy as a way to censor someone in legitimate free speech acts, but the actual limit of NOT doing something stupid that might cause a whole group to riot or panic is still valid.


http://crookedtimber.org/2013/02/17/falsely-shouting-fire-in-a-theater-how-a-forgotten-labor-struggle-became-a-national-obsession-and-emblem-of-our-constitutional-faith/

On Christmas Eve in 1913, the Ladies Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners local in Calumet, Michigan, held a party for the children of copper miners who had been on strike against their employer, the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, since July. About 500 children and 175 adults packed the second-floor auditorium of the Italian Hall in Red Jacket, a small mining town on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts out onto Lake Superior. The miners were mostly immigrants from the peripheries of Europe—Finland, Italy, and the Balkans—but their children were one in their quest for the nuts, candy, and presents from Santa that the Ladies Auxiliary had provided.

As the children lined up in the front of the large room, someone shouted “Fire.” Nobody smelled smoke or saw flames, but the panicked children and adults rushed to the main exit at the back of the hall. They raced down the stairway, a few stumbled on the steep steps, others piled on top of them, and still others, unable to stop the onrush behind them, piled on top of the pile.

The stampede was over in minutes. The tangle of bodies in the stairway was so dense that rescuers out on the street could not pull any victims out from the bottom. They had to go through the hall and lift them from the top. Seventy-four people died, most of them children, some still clutching their Christmas presents.

To this day, no one knows who, if anyone, shouted fire. One possible explanation is that a child had fainted and that someone cried for water. Water—or its Finnish equivalent vettä—sounds like watra, which means fire in Serbo-Croatian. Many witnesses, however, claim that they saw a man with a Citizens’ Alliance—a local anti-union group of businessmen—button on his lapel enter the hall, shout “fire,” and run down the stairs. To their dying day, survivors claimed that the stampede was the work of a company man.

FIRE KILLED BACK THEN. BIG TIME. READ YOUR HISTORY. LABOR UNIONS FOUGHT FOR BETTER CONDITIONS AFTER THE TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE because it was tantamount to murder by the owners.

http://history1900s.about.com/od/1910s/p/trianglefire.htm

Historical Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire March 25, 1911:
A fire at the Triangle Waist Company factory in New York City killed 146 workers. The large number of deaths exposed the dangerous conditions in high-rise factories and prompted the creation of new building, fire, and safety codes around the United States.


SO YOU NEVER HEARD OF THE SAN FRANCISCO "FIRE" actually MANY fires, but it was so bad the whole city burned more than once.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/fire.html

SAN FRANCISCO began its history in a baptism of fires. Hardly had the Gold Rush of ’49 assembled a nondescript collection of wooden houses, tents, the hulks of ships, anything, in fact, to afford protection to the ever-increasing multitudes gathering from the four corners of the earth, but a disastrous fire wiped out the most important part of the new city.

Six fires in the first two or three years of her history caused the people to make extraordinary efforts to protect themselves against their recurrence. It was from this determination that the present efficient fire-fighting force sprang. Yet fires continue and will continue, as they did in those early days, and the price of eternal vigilance and preventive methods are the two chief auxiliaries at least of equal importance to force itself.

.....

The first of the great fires that visited San Francisco occurred at 6 o’clock on the morning of December 24, 1849, when it was estimated that $1,000,000 worth of property was destroyed.

Six months later, on May 4, 1850, the second great fire occurred. It began at 4 o’clock in the morning and by 11 o’clock three blocks of the most valuable buildings in the City had been destroyed, with an attendant loss of property estimated to be $4,000,000.






Even in THIS millennium people have trampled over one another on Black Fridays.
http://blackfridaydeathcount.com/


IN OTHER COUNTRIES
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-44906/120-trampled-death-soccer-stadium-panic.html
120 trampled to death in soccer stadium panic

At least 120 fans died and hundreds more were injured after a stampede at a football match in Ghana last night.

It is the third soccer stadium disaster to strike Africa inside a month.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38393697/#.UrX8d7TdfTs

BERLIN — Crowds of people streaming into a techno music festival surged through an already jammed entry tunnel on Saturday, setting off a panic that killed 19 people and injured 342 at an event meant to celebrate love and peace.

The circumstances of the stampede at the famed Love Parade festival were still not clear even hours after the chaos, but it appeared that some or most of the 19 had been crushed to death.


http://www.buwor.com/india-89-people-killed-trampled-due-panic/#.UrX-FrTdfTs

MORE?
http://listverse.com/2010/11/26/10-tragic-human-panics-and-stampedes/