San Francisco, as we all know, is a lawless place. Over one 72-hour period during the summer, a mob of young men tore absolutely savagely through the city, looting liquor stores, overturning streetcars, defacing statues, and attacking women in the streets. Some 1,000 people were injured, 13 of them killed. No one knows how many women were sexually assaulted, but at least a half a dozen women required medical attention following violent rapes. You wouldn’t know about that rampage from reading the mainstream media — unless you happened to be reading an issue of Life magazine from August 1945, when thousands of young men suddenly liberated from the prospect of being sent to fight in the Pacific celebrated Japan’s surrender with riots and rapes.
Ten years after those awful (and quickly forgotten) events, the nation would be scandalized by the relatively benign pelvic performances of Elvis Presley. Ed Sullivan swore that Elvis would never appear on his show, but the rising popularity of the singer forced him not only to reverse his edict but to pay Elvis a record-setting fee for his appearance. Elvis’s concert performances were labeled obscene, and a Florida judge threatened to jail him if he did not constrain his gyrations.
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