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“Horbachewski’s love for his three daughters was so great that he shot them to death to save them from sex degenerates.”[2]
Sociologists refer to these periodic alarms as “moral panics” and describe them as a form of mass hysteria, typically ignited by a handful of shockingly similar crimes that happen in rapid succession. Sensationalistic reporting in the news media—coupled with the doomsday pronouncements of moral crusaders—persuades the public that these incidents represent a new and terrifying threat to the social order.
A distinguishing feature of moral panics is that the fear they provoke is far out of proportion to any actual threat.
Empirical evidence, however, has little effect on irrational belief. A few terrible crimes are all it takes to set a moral panic in motion.
Cremin, however, was undeterred. Anticipating the implicitly racist attacks that would be leveled at Elvis Presley and his hip-shaking peers two decades later, he insisted that swing was an active threat to “modern civilization.” “Swing is atavistic and finds its beginnings in the dark jungles of the early savage,” he fulminated. “There’s an old saw that music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.” In the case of “hot” jazz, however, the opposite was true, he said. As the recent wave of sex crimes proved, music “also creates the bestial species.”
Like other moral panics before and since, the sex crime hysteria of 1937 had far more to do with fantasy than reality. The monster that haunted the American imagination—the maddened sex-beast preying on women and children—was the incarnation of widespread anxieties generated by the social conditions of the Great Depression: fears about family dissolution; the threat of social anarchy; the impotent fury of vast numbers of men, suddenly deprived of their traditional roles as breadwinners. It was no accident that the panic would come to a very abrupt end.[72]
