ABSTRACT
Sweeping the country and even the world, the craze “demonstrated the violent mayhem long repressed everywhere on earth,” Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo asserted. Psychologists suggested that while the rock ’n’ roll craze seemed to be related to rhythmic behavior patterns as old as the Middle Ages, it required full study as a phenomenon. During the mid-1950s newspapers routinely trotted out “stylized and stereotypical” depictions of public events, bolstered by the pronouncements of authority figures and diagnoses of “socially accredited experts”—all of which fed a growing “moral panic” among parents. For their own coverage of the Paramount show and rock ’n’ roll “craze,” the New York Times called on the “expert” opinion of Meerloo, a Columbia University instructor of psychiatry and author of books on mass delusion and totalitarian brainwashing. Among the public events that brought widespread notoriety to rock ’n’ roll were Alan Freed’s stage shows.
