That's just, wow.

A pair of nail clippers took care of mine.

I Was a Teenage Moonie.

Yep, they recruited me almost right out of high school in the late 1970s. I stayed with them for about a year, until I got sick with pneumonia from trudging around in the rain for 14 hours a day selling candy and flowers. Getting sick allowed me to slow down and think. I came to my senses and "escaped" (actually I got on a Greyhound Bus with some of my candy-selling money and went home).

My sense of it then was that anybody with some sense would eventually realize it was a crock and head back to real life.

It basically started with the Gold Rush and the railroads, and continued well into the 20th century. But this looks late 18th or turn of the century to me.

From the SF Chronicle, 12/7/1957:

Asserting that the Russian Sputnik launches have signaled an all out and lengthy cold war, (vice president) Nixon said that, "our total danger is great. We are in the midst of a conflict in which the Sputniks are but a single episode," he said. "Call it a cold war; or a contest for man's minds; or a race for outer space." Call it whatever you will. It is, as Mr. Krushchev has bluntly told us, a war of many phases -- military, political, economic, psychological. A total war, calling for all our resoluteness, determination, patriotism and faith."

I used to go to school on an American Air Force base in England when I was a kid in the very early 70s, and we used to sneak into this underground complex that was obviously some kind of war room. Just like the movies: Gigantic table maps with little figures to move around on them, a big console area with phones and control panels, other huge maps on the walls that could slide back and forth in front of each other. Y'know -- just like Dr. Strangelove! Didn't take pix, sorry to say, but I have fond memories of post-apocalypse dreams from those days.