The ‘fifth horseman of doom’: youth, media, and moral panics
In the US, youth has often been cast in a critical light. During the late nineteenth century America’s developing cities could be seen as breeding grounds for crime and violence, and their working-class denizens - especially the young — were habitually configured as dissolute and dangerous. Concerns continued into the following century, and by the 1920s fears of juvenile delinquency had prompted a flurry' of investigations. But an even greater sense of alarm came during the 1950s, when America was gripped by the perception that juvenile crime was spiralling out of control. The fears seemed borne out by a relentless rise in crime statistics, which fuelled a tide of exposes in magazines, newspapers, and newsreels that depicted a form of delinquency frighteningly new in its severity. The mood was captured in 1953 by Clymer Hendrickson, a New Jersey Senator, who contended delinquent youth represented the ‘fifth horseman of doom’, and that US youngsters were ‘harder, fiercer, more shocking than ever before in our Nation’s history’ (Washington Post, 12 April, 1953).
As historian James Gilbert shows, Gallup surveys suggest public concerns about delinquency saw a brief peak in 1945, followed by a more sustained period of alarm between 1953 and 1958 (Gilbert, 1986: 63). In response, that year saw the appointment of a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to investigate the problem’s cause. Headed by Estes Kefauver (Senator for Tennessee), the enquiry continued until the early 1960s, and its very existence helped confinn views that juvenile delinquency - or the J.D’. problem, as it was often dubbed — was a major social issue. According to Gilbert, however, the anxieties were exaggerated. The ‘juvenile crime wave’, he argues, was largely a statistical phenomenon produced by new strategies of law enforcement and changes in the collation of crime data (Gilbert, 1986: 66—70). Moreover, Gilbert suggests, there was a significant ‘symbolic’ dimension to the concerns, with the alann about youth crime serving as a focus for a broad sense of unease. In these terms, rather than being a response to a genuine eruption of adolescent vice, the postwar fears surrounding delinquency served as ‘a symbolic focus for wider anxieties in a period of rapid and disorienting change’, with the fears about juvenile crime articulating ‘a vaguely formulated but gnawing sense of social disintegration’ (Gilbert, 1986: 77).
Other countries have seen similar responses unfold. Historian Geoffrey Pearson, for example, argues that since the nineteenth century Britain has seen as ‘a long and connected history of fearful complaint and controversy’ in which ‘each succeeding generation has understood itself to be standing on the brink of some radical discontinuity with the past, and in which the rising generation has been repeatedly seen as the harbinger of a dreadful future’ (Pearson, 1984: 102). Victorians, for example, were preoccupied with an apparent explosion of street crime associated with packs of young thugs, christened ‘hooligans’ by the newspapers (Pearson, 1983, 1984: 74-118). And 1950s Britain was haunted by the spectre of Teddy boy gangs - youngsters with a taste for rock ‘n’ roll and
American style, who the press associated with an unprecedented wave of crime and violence (Pearson, 1983, 1984: 12—24)." According to sociologists Paul Rock and Stanley Cohen (1970), however, the welter of negative publicity was significantly overstated, and presented relatively minor incidents as though they were a problem running out of control.
By the early 1960s the Teddy boy’s image had been displaced by the chic, Italian-inspired styles associated with a new group of youngsters - the mods. Media responses to mod style, however, often reproduced the overwrought treatment given to the Teds. The mods’ appearance was often presented as a symbol of national decline, an approach that peaked in press responses to a series of ‘battles’ between the mods and their motorcycle-riding rivals, the rockers, in 1964. But in Folk Deoils and Moral Panics, his classic analysis of the events (first published in 1972), Cohen highlighted the dimensions of sensationalism endemic to the press coverage. According to Cohen, the total amount of violence in the disturbances was actually slight, but the events were presented as wholesale havoc by the media in an episode of overblown alarm he termed a ‘moral panic’.3
For Cohen, the concept of ‘moral panic’ denoted processes through which the media contributed to the escalation of social events through misrepresenting and magnifying the activities of real or imagined deviant groups, or what he referred to as ‘folk devils’. In the case of the mods/rockers ‘battles’, for example, hyberbolic press coverage of the initial events sensitised the police and the public, so that future trouble was anticipated and vigilantly watched for. And — in an archetypal case of self-fulfilling prophecy — more ‘mods and rockers violence’ was duly spotted and vigorously dealt with by the police. The over-dramatic press reports, therefore, had fanned the sparks of an initially trivial incident, creating a self-perpetuating ‘amplification spiral’ which had steadily escalated the phenomenon’s significance. The media coverage, moreover, ‘breathed life’ into the folk devils. The ‘mods and rockers’, Cohen argued, had initially been fairly ill-defined youth styles, but were given greater form and substance by the sensational news stories. And the two groups steadily polarized as youngsters began to identify themselves as members of either faction - the mods or the rockers.
Cohen’s ideas have been widely influential, and the concept of moral panic has been applied to a broad range of social phenomena.4 But youth culture, especially, has been a prominent focus for episodes of moral panic. As Cohen himself observed, since 1945, youth groups have ‘occupied a constant position as folk devils’, with a ceaseless demonology of young terrors lining up in the ‘gallery of types that society erects to show its members which roles should be avoided and which should be emulated’ (Cohen, 2002: 1—2).
Galleries of young folk devils also appeared beyond Britain and the US. Indeed, in 1960 the scale of concern prompted a World Health Organization report to the United Nations that spotlighted the ‘New Forms of Juvenile Delinquency’ seemingly sweeping the world (World Health Organization, 1960). In Australia and New Zealand anxieties focused on ‘bodgies’ and
‘widgies’ (see Chapter 2), while Katie Mooney (2005) shows how ‘ducktail’ youths (known for their distinctive ‘ducktail’ hairstyle’) provoked alarm in 1950s South Africa. Across Europe the media also conjured with images of rebellious youth as it reported on groups of young people with a taste for American-style rock ‘n’ roll, jeans and black leather jackets. In Holland they were dubbed ‘nozetri (derived from ‘penzone’, Dutch slang for ‘underworld’), in Sweden ‘skinnknutte’ (‘leather-jackets’) and in Italy ‘teppisti’ (‘thugs’), while historian Eli Avdela shows that in Greece fears coalesced around the spectre of young ‘tediboismos’ (the English term ‘Teddy boy’ adapted to Greek grammar) (Avdela, 2008).
In Austria, Switzerland, and West Germany, meanwhile, the leather-jacketed 'halbstarken (‘half-strong’) were blamed for a wave of violent disorders.5 And in France alarm surrounded the 'blousons noirs’ (‘black jackets’) - young, leatherclad motorcyclists who were branded by the press as dangerously delinquent due to their provocative style and raucous gatherings. Anxiety was also prompted by the large groups of young people who congregated at French coastal resorts. Perceived as antisocial gangs, they attracted considerable press coverage, as did the growing following for indigenous rock ‘n’ roll stars such as Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell. Matters peaked in 1963 when crowds of youngsters clashed with police after an open-air rock ‘n’ roll concert in Paris, events that sparked a deluge of sensational newspaper headlines.6
Moral panics about youth culture were, then, legion during the 1950s and 1960s.' In a period of profound change ‘youth’ became, in many countries, a symbolic focus for a broader sense of postwar apprehension. The ‘youth debate’ articulated widespread concerns about the direction of social change; and anxieties about the rise of consumerism, changing moral standards, and shifting class relations were all projected into visions of menacing youth. Issues of gender also loomed large. Historically, moral panics about crime and violence have tended to focus on young men. But young women have been prominent in moral panics about sexual behaviour. Marilyn Heggarty (2008), for instance, shows how wartime America saw a press outcry about ‘Victory-girls’ or ‘V-girls’ — young women whose ‘free and easy’ liaisons with servicemen were presented as evidence of a breakdown in national morality. And Amanda Lit-tauer (2003) shows how similar concerns arose in the 1950s as ‘Bar-Girls’ or ‘B-Girls’ were configured as prime-movers in an upsurge of shocking vice.
And moral panics about young women and morality remain a feature of the contemporary media. Sharon Mazzarella (2020), for instance, presents a series of modern-day case-studies in which the US media has constructed girls’ sexuality, sexual expression, and sexual identity as troublesome and in need of adult policing. Such episodes are, as Shayla Thiel-Stern argues, part of a long history of moral panics that ‘are often tied to the feeling that the adolescent girls are not performing gender in a way that is consistent with the dominant understanding of girlhood in their own community, and this has often fostered a cultural crisis that journalists might not necessarily start but do certainly foster and perpetuate’ (Thiel-Stern, 2014: 7). In these episodes of concern, issues of violence have been relatively rare, but are far from unknown. Christine Barron and Dany Lacombe (2005), for example, analyse the way the Canadian media configured a series of incidents of female violence during the late 1990s as a new, threatening ‘Nasty Girl’ phenomenon in a moral panic that was constituent in a broader backlash against feminism. Indeed, on occasions when young women are involved in violent crime, the media coverage is often especially damning. This intensity derives from the way female ‘folk devils’ are presented as — to use a phrase coined by criminologist Ann Lloyd (1995) — ‘doubly deviant’. That is to say, they are condemned not only because they have broken the law but also because they have transgressed social expectations of feminine behaviour.
