A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s

A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (1986)
By James Gilbert

Synopsis: Gilbert investigates the increased fear of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, and examines the various factors that meshed together to create or to deal with this "problem." In this way, the book is "about the interconnection of ideas, individuals, and institutions that at first glance, might appear only to have a marginal relationship to each other" (10). Plans to deal with/investigate delinquency included sociological studies and increased pushes for censorship of pop culture, especially of crime comic books, demonstrating the "increased social and cultural power of the mass media and the marketplace over ourselves and our children" (10). Gilbert argues that a lot of this fear was brought about by general postwar anxieties about the changing society, which reached a peak in the mid-1950s, only to "cave in" via a rejuvenated appreciation for/acceptance of the power of the emerging youth culture of the 1960s (which was quickly engulfed by media attention). Gilbert's argument "focuses on the terrible but reoccurring accusation that modern American culture deprived adolescents of their innocence, their childhood, and their independence" (10). Shows that people were scared of both a burgeoning youth population and of the power and pervasiveness of "mass culture" - and mass culture's ability to wrest control away from parents (ironic in an age of nuclear family exaltation). Parents were also worried about elements of lower-class culture sneaking into youth culture (i.e. Elvis, etc). This "seduction of the youth by culture" should be seen as episodic - i.e. it comes up every so often [1920s?]. Basically, fears of juvenile delinquency were also really about fears of mass culture, and of parents losing control over their kids.

Interesting Specifics:

In a way, 1950s America has become the mass society dreamed about in the 1930s (6).

"The radical dreamers of the 1930s awakened to the dystopia of suburbia" (109).

Disputes over mass culture in the 1950s were shaped by the homogenization of American society (7).

Frederic Wertham wrote The Seduction of the Innocent (1954), and was very interested in the influence of the media on youth, but was also interested in larger sociological and cultural influences as well. He later wanted to ban sales of crime comic books to kids under 15 (106).

1950s saw a lot of fears over this new "mass culture."

Argues that issues of class were central to pop culture fears.

The Kefauver (a senator) censorship hearings were among the biggest, and he headed the Senate Subcommittee on Delinquency which "urged more self-regulation and internal censorship on the comic book, television, and film industries" (162).

In 1922, Hollywood created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Hays, to demonstrate attempts at self-policing (164). Says that in a way, "the Code was like a Victorian hemline, defining an erogenous zone" (169).

Big "youth gone awry" films included The Wild One (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and West Side Story (1961).

By the 1960s, elites even started viewing mass culture as "American culture" (214). [So, was dangerous youth culture ultimately tamed by its value in the marketplace?]

"Struggle took a new form, for despite the power of American culture to homogenize, to sanitize protest, and to absorb the energies of subcultures, the process of protest, renewal, and invention is also perpetual" (217). **

Interacts With:

The Lonely Crown, Organization Man (re. fears of mass culture)
Golden State, Golden Youth (relationship between youth and media imagery)
Pre-Code Hollywood (censorship issues)
** This quote here makes the book blend in with all those other pop culture books that are focused on the malleability of culture. I'm not exactly sure though, what this particular statement is referring to.