The Beatnik Riot made a folk music dispute into front-page news

Evidence

Reinforcements arrived. Fights broke out. Both cops and protestors were knocked to the ground. “At the height of the battle,” the Times reported, “hundreds of young people, many of the boys with beards or banjos and many of the girls with long hair or guitars, fought with fifty policemen in clashes across the square. Hundreds more, including some baffled tourists, watched.” There were twenty serious injuries and ten arrests, among them Humes, who would be bailed out by John Mitchell. The event made front page news, occasioning an iconic headline in the tabloid New York Mirror: 3000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN VILLAGE. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 297

Categorization

• CANDY: The Times description of bearded boys with banjos fighting fifty policemen is a wonderfully vivid, tweetable image.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interests: the moment a subculture becomes legible to national media is exactly the scene-becomes-market inflection point the book tracks.