8. Teens were more respectful and law-abiding in the 1950s
The 1950s saw an explosion of juvenile delinquency in the United States (and elsewhere) leading to an almost obsessive fear among adults. The fear was reflected in films such as The Blackboard Jungle, Untamed Youth, and So Young, So Bad. According to a Saturday Evening Post story published in 1955, crimes committed by teenagers increased by 45% in the first half of the 1950s. Adults scrambled to identify the cause for the increase. They identified many, including films, books, comics, television, school gangs and cliques, the general attitude of teenagers, and, most of all, the emerging danger of a new form of music. Rock and Roll introduced White suburban teenagers to the rhythms of Black urban music. The rhythms of the new music were seductive, the lyrics suggestive, and listening to it meant a bad end. There were many new artists thus contributing to the corruption of the American teen.
Among them were Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the most feared of all (by parents) Elvis Presley. When the latter made his first national television appearances, on the popular Milton Berle Show, Ed Sullivan announced Presley was “unfit for family viewing”. Though the reasons for the explosion of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s were often attributed to Presley and other entertainers, more sober-minded thinkers found otherwise. What was in the 1950s considered delinquent behavior could be as innocent as chewing gum in class or failing to attend class at all, both considered somewhat less frightening at a later age. But there is little to indicate that teenagers, a word itself coined in the 1950s, were more respectful and law-abiding during the 1950s than they are today. Neither were they less so.
