Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 9

Rebellion and Conformity in
Fifties Juvenile Delinquency Films
Fifties America was a society plagued by real and imaginary internal threats.
Sociologists like David Riesman, law enforcement men like J. Edgar Hoover, cler
gymen like Billy Graham, and politicians like Senator Kefauver looked at postWorld War II America and saw not prosperity but signs of internal decay. Eric
Shaefer, in his study of exploitation films argues that “Internal subversion became
a national obsession after World War II. Whether it came in the form of commu
nists, juvenile delinquents, organized crime, homosexuals, comic books, or rock
and roll, middle Americans girded themselves for an assault from within on the
values they believed had helped them win the war” (241).
Juvenile delinquency became a visible form of internal subversion based upon
a larger investigation into crime in the United States. Hoover and Attorney Gen
eral Tom Clark helped reframe the delinquency issue for a post-World War II
America. The widely publicized Kefauver hearings on crime in 1951 aided in so
lidifying America's fear of internal criminal activities. Like Hoover, Kefauver fo
cused attention on the issue of crime through the use of the media. As David
Halberstam notes, “Estes Kefauver became America’s first politician to benefit
from the glare of television” (193). The influence of media portrayals is key to
how Juvenile delinquency was perceived by Fifties Americans. Media exaggera
tions and Hollywood representations of teenage crime were the primary means
through which most Americans understood the issue of youth and crime.
The most exaggerated media accounts of Juvenile delinquency associate it
with anarchy and madness. Robert Lindner, a psychologist who wrote a prewar
study of Juvenile delinquency, Rebel Without a Cause, linked the delinquency prob
lem to madness.' In an address given in Los Angeles in 1954, Lindner diagnosed
the teenagers of America as “literally sick with an aberrant condition of mind for
merly confined to a few distressed souls but now epidemic over the earth” (qtd. in
Oakley 270). Yet, one striking feature of Hollywood representations of the Juve
nile delinquent (JD) is that the teenagers’ delinquency is not produced by rampant
individualism, instinct, or i