The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960)
A nation, once again, slips into the Twilight Zone.
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I.
In 1922, a family of sharecroppers moved north from Georgia after a failed harvest had left them on the verge of financial ruin. Wilbur and Patsie Walker Lawrence landed in Springfield, Ohio, where, with the help of extended family, they established a new life. Three years later, in 1925, their fifth of six children, Brooks Lawrence, was born.
Brooks Lawrence turned out to be one of the best athletes in the history of the town. In 1941, he became the first black quarterback in the history of Springfield High School. He played basketball and ran track; he would have played baseball except that the team wasn’t yet integrated.
Lawrence was an intelligent young man who enjoyed reciting poetry. He joined the military during the war and won a bronze star. After the war, he attended Miami (Ohio), joined the baseball team, tried out for a minor league team in Ohio as pitcher, and worked his way up the ladder, debuting with the St. Louis Cardinals when he turned 29. His rookie season, he went 15-6 with a 3.74 ERA, and later claimed he would have been named National League rookie of the year except that five black men in a row had won the award, “and I was told there wasn’t going to be a sixth.”
In 1956, Lawrence won 19 games with the Cincinnati Reds, and later argued he wasn’t given many opportunities to win his 20th in a city roughly 80 miles south of Springfield, where the racial divide was still stark. “I was told that no black boy was going to win 20 games in a Cincinnati uniform,” he said. (Best as I can tell, the Reds have only had one black 20 game winner in their long history: Johnny Cueto, in 2014.)
Lawrence played seven seasons in the major leagues before returning to Springfield to work at International Harvester, then became the first black man to hold an administrative job in the Reds’ front-office in 1972. He lived out his final years in Springfield before his death in 2000; he lamented to that reporter in 1992 that the current generation was in danger of forgetting the hardships that black athletes experienced in the mid-20th century.
“You better believe it was a tough time,” he said. “We were outsiders.”
II.
The most impactful episode of the most influential show in television history aired on March 4, 1960, just a few months before Brooks Lawrence, at the age of 35, pitched his final major-league game. It was the 22nd episode of the first season of a new anthology television series called The Twilight Zone; it was titled, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” It is about a small suburban community that divides itself and descends into a predictable pattern of violence when they begin suspecting one of their own of being a (literal) alien, and it is perhaps the most timeless half-hour of television ever aired.
In a tight 25 minutes, series creator Rod Serling exposes the racism and xenophobia that divided America both during the era of McCarthyism and foreshadows the cultural divide of the 1960s. And six decades later, it feels as if it hasn’t aged at all.
There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, Serling utters at the end of the episode, to be found only in the minds of men.
III.
This week, I stumbled across another 25 minutes of television that felt like a perverse bookend to “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” This episode was filmed by a right-wing media influencer in Springfield, Ohio, who interviewed people in the town about an influx of Haitian migrants. I think he was trying to make a point about how immigration had destroyed Springfield, but instead what he did was expose the weaponizing of attitudes and prejudices that had led an actual candidate for the presidency of the United States to claim that those Haitian migrants were consuming domesticated animals for sustenance. You don’t have to watch the whole 25 minutes of that video, though the self-own is pretty fascinating at times; you can just watch the first few seconds, in which a white resident spots a Haitian immigrant down the street and immediately shouts a racial slur at him.
If you’ve seen this enough times, you start to recognize the pattern. It carries on from one era to the next, from civil rights to terrorism and beyond. There will always be, as Serling said, a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat that threatens to tear us apart. In Springfield, one Haitian newspaper reported, immigrants fearing violence are now keeping their kids home from school. The cycle is the same. Once again, summoned by the minds of men, the monsters have arrived on Maple Street.
“We’re all victims this morning,” one Haitian woman said. “They’re attacking us in every way.”
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It’s the Haitians. It’s the Mexicans. It’s the Muslims. It’s the Jews. It’s the gays. It’s the Italians. It’s the Chinese. It’s the Irish. It’s the Catholics. It’s the Japanese. It’s the Germans. It’s “THEM.” History is replete with examples of humans finding the “Other” or having demagogues telling us who the “Other” is that are allegedly destroying our way of life, threatening our children, etc. Hate used to travel at the speed of sound, which was bad enough, but now it travels at the speed of light.