When Washington Feared Its Snakes in 1932

The Evening Star's November 13, 1932 edition ran a snake story that made Washingtonians nervous. A century later, the anxiety reads as quaint—but the underlying tension is still alive in every American city. Snakes in urban areas were already rare by 1932. What the newspaper captured was the gap between how common people actually thought they were and reality. A sighting was newsworthy partly because it was unusual. The article tapped into something primal: the sense that a city's order could be upended by something wild slipping through the cracks. That fear made sense in one direction. Washington's growth had consumed wetlands and meadows where snakes lived naturally. Push a species out of its habitat and it becomes desperate, visible, dangerous-seeming—even though most North American snakes are harmless. A snake in a city street looks like an invasion. It's actually a refugee. The modern version is different in scale but identical in shape. Today's urban wildlife stories—coyotes in Los Angeles, deer in suburbs, bears in Asheville—follow the same script. Animal appears in a place it "shouldn't" be. People panic. Journalists cover the panic. Nobody quite acknowledges that the animal was there first. What's shifted is our language, not our behavior. We've stopped calling it an invasion and started calling it a "resurgence." We've gotten better at explaining why it happens. But the Evening Star reader in 1932 and the Nextdoor user in 2024 are having the same conversation: *Why is this animal here, and what do we do about it?* The honest answer—that we built over its home—was true then. It's just harder to ignore now.