Abstract
In September 1948, Agnes Maxwell-Peters wrote a letter to Fredric Wertham, a noted psychiatrist, in which she expressed her worries concerning the behaviour of her sons:
We have two boys, 7 and 13, with unusually high intelligence and excellent ability in school and in sports [...]. They have a library of fine books of their own and read library books almost daily, yet in the presence of comic books they behave as if drugged and will not lift their eye or speak when spoken to. [... ] My boys fight with each other in a manner that is unbelievable in a home where both parents are university graduates and perfectly mated. [... ] We consider the situation to be as serious as an invasion of the enemy in war time, with as far reaching consequences as the atom bomb. If we cannot stop the wicked men who are poisoning our children’s minds, what chance is there for mankind to survive longer than one generation, or half of one?1
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Notes
See, for example, James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outage: America’s Reaction to the Iuvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
When talking about the “West”, this chapter refers to the construction of a geopolitical category that was used to construct a global centre by distinguishing allegedly modern and liberal societies from those that were marked as undemocratic and underdeveloped, such as the Soviet Union and the “third world”. On Cold War cultural politics on the home front, see, for example, David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994)
Kyle A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005).
See, for example, Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977 [1969])
Mary E. Odern, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–;1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Nina Mackert, “‘But recall the kinds of parents we have to deal with...’-Juvenile Delinquency, Interdependent Masculinity and the Government of Families in the Post-war U.S.”, in Isabel Heinemann (ed.), Inventing the Modern American Family. Family Values and Social Change in 20th Century United States (Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2012), pp. 196–219.
See, for example, William S. Bush, Who Gets a Childhood? Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010).
Cf., for example, Albert K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955)
Howard L. Myerhoff and Barbara G. Myerhoff, “Field Observation of Middle Class ‘Gangs’”, Social Forces, 42, 3 (1964): 328–336.
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 (New York: Vintage 1990 [Paris: Gallimard 1984]), p. 27
Nicolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990).
Hendrickson quoted in Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 293.
G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Society, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 Vols. (New York: Appleton and Co., 1904)
Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 17.
Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 252–255
Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Batäe for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 178.
Cf., for example, David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950)
William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956].
Weston La Barre, “How Adolescent Are Parents?” National Parent-Teacher, 54, 4 (1959), p. 6.
Robert M. Lindner, Must You Conform? (New York: Rinehart, 1956), p. 11.
Edward A. Richards, ed., Proceedings of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth (Raleigh: Health Publications Institute Inc., 1951), p. 243.
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© 2014 Nina Mackert
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Mackert, N. (2014). Danger and Progress: White Middle-Class Juvenile Delinquency and Motherly Anxiety in the Post-War US. In: Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850–2000. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349521_9
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