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"Language of the most disgusting kind is uttered, and plans of robberies, no doubt, concocted," claimed a letter to a London newspaper in 1838, urging suppression of "the penny theatre nuisance" or cheap and unlicensed stage entertainments put on for wage-earning children and adolescents among makeshift urban surroundings. The writer added, echoing charges made eighty years later against the silent cinema, "boys and girls are not only tempted to pilfer from shops, but even to rob their parents that they might have the means of attending these receptacles of vice" (Burgess). To properly understand how exaggerated fears such as the above, "out of all proportion" to the actual threat offered, emerge over a lengthy time span, forms of cultural production need to be studied in relation to other cultural practices and to social and historical structures. "Moral panic" implies that public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm. The role of individuals, pressure groups, and bureaucratic agencies, often involved in a complex and shifting pattern of alliances, supports interest group interpretations of panicky social crusades over popular culture that supposedly incited juvenile crime, among other iniquities, but only within an historical climate of underlying fears and social anxieties (Goode and Ben-Yehuda). What follows here focuses on campaigns for censorship of the early 1930s Hollywood cycle of gangster movies and the late 1930s cycle of slum gang and reform school movies to exemplify that extravagant fears of mass culture provoking delinquent forms of social behavior are not confined to the violent crime movies or gangsta rap lyrics of the 1990s.'
On the other hand, British commentator Andrew Neil has claimed that, while recent Hollywood action movies espouse a "culture of violence," there was "a time, within my memory, when popular culture sought to lift our spirits and encourage what was good, honourable and just in our society. We aspired to what we saw on our screens, and evil was generally given a bad press" (Sunday Times 17 Mar. 1996: 12). This conveniently overlooks the violent gangster films of the early 1930s, not to mention the American "horror comics" and sleazy British paperbacks of Neil's Glaswegian childhood in the early 1950s. One inescapable conclusion to be drawn from...