David Schmid (editor) - Violence in American Popular Culture [2 volumes]

Volume 1: American History and Violent
Popular Culture

David Schmid, Editor

Foreword by Harold Schechter

Volume 1: American History and Violent
Popular Culture

David Schmid, Editor

Foreword by Harold Schechter

Copyright 2016 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Violence in American popular culture / David Schmid, editor ; foreword by Harold Schechter.

volumes cm

Includes index.

Contents: Volume 1. American History and Violent Popular Culture Volume 2. Representations of Violence in Popular Cultural Genres.

ISBN 978-1-4408-3205-5 (print : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4408-3206-2 (e-book)1. Violence in popular cultureUnited States.2. Violence in mass media.3. ViolenceUnited States.4. Mass media and cultureUnited States.I. Schmid, David (David Frank), editor.

P96.V52U6752016

810.9'3552dc232015025368

ISBN: 978-1-4408-3205-5

EISBN: 978-1-4408-3206-2

201918171612345

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Harold Schechter

David Schmid

VOLUME 1: AMERICAN HISTORY AND VIOLENT POPULAR CULTURE

Tim Bryant

Erica L. Ball

Kent A. McConnell

Robert K. Chester

Jennifer Louise Field

Susan J. Tyburski

Erik Mortensen

Chris Richardson

David McWilliam

Abby Bentham

David Hoogland Noon

Katarina Gregersdotter

Maryam Khalid

I have incurred many debts in working on this collection. The most important are as follows: to my wife and children, for their love and support; to the contributors, for their original and thought-provoking work; and to Rebecca Matheson at Praeger, easily the most patient and professional editor with whom I have ever worked.

He got hold of my two ears and gave me a butt right in the front part of my head that almost blinded me, for the fellers skull was as hard as the two sides of an iron pot. So we wrassled and jerked and bit for a long time, till I got a chance at one of his eyes with my thum nail. Then I begun to put on the rail Kentucky twist, he knew it was all day with him, and he fell on his knees and begged for mercy. His eye stood out about half an inch, and I felt the bottom of the socket with the end of my thum.

Crockett Almanac, 1839

In postCivil War Boston, an adolescent sociopath named Jesse Harding Pomeroyinfamous as our countrys youngest serial killerperpetrated a string of attacks on younger children that began with savage beatings and escalated into mutilationmurder. After his arrest in 1874, outraged observers struggled to account for his fiendish behavior. It didnt take them long to find an answer. There is plenty of evidence to show that the reading of dime novels constituted a good share of the boys mental nourishment, declared the Boston Globe. It was Pomeroys fondness for such insidious fare as Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccaneer, Rattlesnake Neds Revenge, and Mohawk Nat: A Tale of the Great Northwestcheap blood-and-thunder stories replete with graphic depictions of frontier violencethat first put it in his mind to torture boys.

Forty years after his diatribe, Professor Matthews made a startling confession. During his own boyhood, he himself had been an ardent fan of dime novels. Reminiscing about these disreputable diversions from the vantage point of old age, he now praised them for their thrilling and innocuous record of innocent and imminent danger. By then, of course, the dime novel had long been supplanted by new and presumably more pernicious varieties of pop entertainment that made the earlier, once-demonized genre seem positively wholesome.

One of these was the comic strip. Hard as it is to believe about the medium that produced Krazy Kat, Lil Abner, and Pogo, the newspaper funnies were once widely condemned not just as lowbrow trash, but also as a leading cause of mental and moral degeneracy among the young. As early as 1909, magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping described the Sunday funnies as a crime against the children of America, hideously vulgar productions whose crude art and perverted humor would promote lawlessness [and] debauched fantasy in their juvenile readers. By the 1930s, moralists were lashed into even greater frenzies of disapproval by the popularity of action-packed adventure strips such as Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy. Sadism, cannibalism, bestiality, one Depression-era critic fulminated. Torturing, killing, kidnapping. Raw melodrama, tales of crimes and criminals All these, day after day, week after week, have become the mental food of American children. With such things are the comic strips that take up page upon page in the average American newspaper filled.

The story was the same with every new medium of popular entertainment. Barely twenty years after it was invented, the motion picture was already being attacked as a perverter of youth and a breeder of crime. Asked in 1918 what proportion of disciplinary cases were attributable to movies, one child-rearing expert replied without hesitation: I should say they almost all were.

Clearly there is a highly predictable pattern here. Every time a new type of mass entertainment comes along, high-minded reformers are quick to denounce it as a sign of social decay and a danger to the young. Examples are adduced that purportedly demonstrate a direct correlation between the commission of sensational crimes and the consumption of the latest form of violent make-believe. Eventually, with the advent of a new technology, another, more exciting, fast-paced, and action-packed pastime is created, and the onetime media menace comes to be looked at nostalgically as a harmless, old-fashioned form of play. Can there be any doubt that, say, twenty years from now, critics will be decrying gore-drenched, virtual-reality first person shootersgames that allow players to actually feel the blood and brain matter exploding from the skulls of their targetswhile pining for the good old days of benign diversions such as Grand Theft Auto and House of the Dead: Overkill?

History has proved that for all the hysteria of the finger-wagging moralists, their dire predictions have never come true. The little readers of dime novels didnt become a generation of outlaws. The boys who thrilled to