ABSTRACT
Among the public events that brought widespread notoriety to rock ’n’ roll were Alan Freed’s stage shows. When more than 15,000 teenagers descended upon midtown Manhattan on February 22, 1957, to attend Freed’s all-day Washington’s Birthday extravaganza at the Paramount Theatre, there was little doubt that the sizable crowds would draw the media’s attention. As the day’s events unfolded and reports surfaced of unruly youth, damaged storefront property, and the efforts of police to control the crowd, Freed’s spectacle mushroomed into a full-blown sensationalized story. During the mid-1950s newspapers routinely trotted out “stylized and stereotypical” depictions of these events, bolstered by the pronouncements of authority figures and diagnoses of “socially accredited experts”—all of which fed a growing “moral panic” among parents.1 For their own coverage of the Paramount show and rock ’n’ roll “craze,” the New York Times called on the “expert” opinion of Doctor Joost A. M. Meerloo, a Columbia University instructor of psychiatry and author of books on mass delusion and totalitarian brainwashing.2 Given Meerloo’s interests, it comes as little surprise that he characterizes rock ’n’ roll’s effects on youth in terms of a contagious disease, drug addiction, Fascist mind control, and social depersonalization. As reports of rock ’n’ roll riots continued to proliferate in the media, such portrayals became more and more common.
