Panic (Bloodlands collection)

by Harold Schechter

On the morning of Friday, September 16, 1938, after a last meal of ham, eggs, hotcakes, and coffee, Dyer was hanged—the second-to-last person to be executed by the noose in California before the state replaced the gallows with the gas chamber.[41]

For much of the summer of 1937, the sex crime panic raged mostly in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago (where the preferred term for the perpetrators was not “sex fiends” or “sex maniacs” but “sex morons”).[61]

there was that predictable scapegoat, the popular media: smutty motion pictures, obscene newsstand magazines, and indecent Broadway plays like Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, about a pair of female schoolteachers accused of lesbianism—a particularly “degrading kind of unnatural sin,” as described by the Reverend James M. Gillis, editor of The Catholic World, in a speech on the shocking rise of sex crimes.[67]

swing music “is far more harmful than obscene songs because the lust grips the listeners before they realize it.” With such sinister recordings as Benny Goodman’s “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” working their corrupting effects on millions of unwary listeners, it was hardly surprising that sex fiends were overrunning the country.

Edwin Sutherland, a prominent sociologist at Indiana University, examined “all homicides involving female victims reported in the New York Times” from 1930 to the end of the decade. “From the total of three hundred twenty-four, just seventeen involved rape or suspicion of rape,” he reported. Based on this data, Sutherland concluded that “the number of rape-related murders per year did not exceed one hundred across the whole country.”