The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [50]
Is Society Sick?
We adults have developed a pair of theories to justify both our fear of children and our maltreatment of them. One holds that the world is worse than it ever was. The other holds that some kids are just born defective.
According to the first of these theories, a unique set of social realities has conspired to turn today’s children into monsters. “The world has changed in the nearly 20 years Judge Lacey has been on the bench,” the Times asserted, referring to the judge in the juvenile court where little Jacob Gonzales awaited trial. “There was a time when men could look forward to a job on the automobile assembly line, when the majority of inner-city children were born to married women, not single mothers, when people fought with fists, not guns, and crack did not exist.”59
This sort of statement validates an observation attributed to Harry Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” In actuality, violent youth have always been with us. “A new army of six million men are being mobilized against us, an army of delinquents. Juvenile delinquency has increased at an alarming rate and is eating at the heart of America,” a juvenile court judge warned in 1946. Earlier, in nineteenth-century America, hordes of teens and preteens, labeled “predatory beasts” by police and the press, ran wild in city streets, dodging authorities, “gnawing away at the foundations of society,” as a commentator put it at the time. In 1850 alone New York City recorded more than 200 gang wars fought largely by adolescent boys. In 1868 in San Francisco a gang of teenagers robbed a Chinese man and then beat him, sliced up his face, and branded parts of his body with hot irons. Violence by teens against Chinese immigrants was common during this period in U.S. history.60
Earlier still, in 1786, a Connecticut girl murdered a baby in her care. Twelve years old, she holds the distinction of being the youngest American ever to receive the death penalty.61
In support of the idea that the world is worse today than ever before much bogus evidence has been put forward. An example was a pair of lists, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal in 1992, comparing “top problems in the public schools as identified by teachers” in 1940 and 1990. The contrast was shocking. The main problems in 1940 were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, wearing improper clothing, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. By 1990 the leading problems had become pregnancy, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, rape, robbery, and assault.
Barry O’Neill, a professor at Yale, revealed in 1994 in an expose published by the New York Times that by the time the Journal printed the two lists they had already been in wide circulation. Passed around in fundamentalist Christian circles since the early 1980s, they first appeared in a national magazine in 1985, when Harper’s published them as a curiosity piece. Two years later in his Newsweek column George Will printed the lists as factual, and they were quickly picked up by CBS News. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the lists appeared in literally hundreds of news outlets, books, and political speeches authored by luminaries as disparate as Anna Quindlen, Ann Landers, Joycelyn Elders, and William Bennett.62
“They have become the most quoted ‘results’ of educational research, and possibly the most influential,” O’Neill reported in the Times (a paper that had cited the bogus lists six times itself and did so yet again, without comment, two years later when it quoted them in full from a speech by presidential candidate Ross Perot). The best O’Neill could determine, the original source for the later list of problems was a survey conducted in 1975 by the National Center for Education Statistics. That survey, which was of principals rather than teachers, asked about crimes, not general problems. When teachers have been asked about the