Youth as a moral-panic icon predates the postwar consumer boom

Evidence

Since the 1940s the category “youth” has constituted the prime icon of moral concern in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Under the Nazi regime a legion of spies were sent out to find out what was happening in the nightclubs where swing youth illicitly enjoyed the forbidden sounds of jazz (Peukert, 1987). Elsewhere on the streets of Los Angeles black men dressed in flamboyant “zoot suits” were stripped naked publicly and beaten up because their ostentatious style offended the patriotic austerity of wartime America (Cosgrove, 1984; see also Chibnall, 1985). Youth culture is conventionally thought of as a product of the postwar explosion of teenage consumption; however this version of cultural history obscures the connection between these “revolts in style” (Melly, 1970) and the cultural politics of race. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2965

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Cohen’s moral panic framework in the reader’s existing knowledge base, and to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article’s theme of moral panics as identity/political signaling. — connects to: Young people today are stranded between disciplined-subject and consumer roles — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 47; A trivial hairstyle change triggered cross-generational moral panic and mass commerce — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 10
• SHARE: The Nazi swing youth and LA zoot suit riots pairing as prewar/pre-boom moral panics would interest anyone who writes or thinks about moral panic history.