Monsters Are Due On Maple Street Analysis

The motives of a mob are never easy to determine: each person could want something else entirely or they could all want the exact same thing. Whatever their motives both the characters from Rod Serling’s “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, an insightful teleplay on the true nature of monsters, and the men from the 1923 Rosewood massacre, a bloodbath caused by a woman, a mindset, and a color— detailed in Michael Buchanan’s blog— formed mobs for very similar reasons. In fact both mobs formed for the exact same reasons. The quote from age twenty-one of Serling’s teleplay showcases the reasons that caused the formation of both mobs; these reasons can be organized into three main categories that pertain to both cases: fear, prejudice, and honor.

Both aforementioned texts are riddled with examples of characters that formed the mobs being

Prejudice presents itself as a major theme in both texts, both Serling’s teleplay and the blog entry from Buchanan. For example the white men assumed, they only assumed, that Fannie Coleman Taylor was “reporting the incident accurately” (Buchanan para. 2) and that Jesse Hunter was to blame (para. 4) — they had no proof nor did they have any evidence to support either claim. Nevertheless he was hunted for his alleged crimes. Les Goodman, from Serling’s teleplay, was also accused with no substantial evidence after his car started for no apparent reason and stopped just as mysteriously (Serling 763). Which led to him being branded as a possible threat to their neighborhood. This evidence supports the the claim that prejudice is an integral component in both stories by showcasing how unsubstantiated claims can often become reasons to act upon prejudice, that one may feel towards others, frequently to protect one's