Alan ScherstuhlEach Monday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets around Los Angeles.
The Truth About Juvenile Delinquency
Author: Dan Gilbert
Date: 1943
Publisher: Zondervan Publishing, Grand Rapids
Discovered at: Goodwill, 6933 La Tijera
Representative Quotes:
“Eighty per cent of the venereal infections among servicemen are derived from high school girls. Juvenile delinquents are putting more soldiers in the hospital than the Germans and Japs combined.” (page 1)
“The advocates of free love are the worst of traitors, the Japs' best friends and co-workers in America. They should be treated accordingly. They should be interned with other enemies of our country.”
(page 29)
Like most crazy preachers, crazy preacher Dan Gilbert spent his life monetizing his big ol' outraged tears.
He shed his over the rape of American innocence, that chaste ideal that to his mind was forever getting cornholed by dancehalls and movies and FDR and the “yellow peril” of Japan.
Then he'd smear those tears onto .35 cent pamphlets like The Conspiracy Against Chastity and Un-Americanism in America Textbooks for hocking to concerned Americans who most likely had real problems to deal with.
Apparently, this makes people feel better.
Crazing preachers from Byrd to Beck have peddled the blame that balms. If any of your friends and family are falling for it these days, you might want to tip them off to Gilbert's The Truth About Juvenile Delinquency.
In it, Gilbert lays a cocked-up a theory about how the Germany and Japan had devised a clever way to spoil America's most precious resource: its hymens.
“So far, the Nazis and the Japs have not succeeded in invading America,” he writes.
“The agents and co-workers of the foe – the enemies within our gates – have carried out a blitzkrieg against the purity and chastity of American youth.”
Gilbert describes a nation enthralled to swing bands and “jitterbug orgies,” an Americans whose once-good kids are “writhing within the tightening and spiritually suffocating grasp of the forces of fornication and indecency.”
The cause?
“Japan is failing to conquer with battleships and bombing planes. But she is conquering through the propaganda of those degenerate radicals who prefer the Jap system of sexuality to our Christian morality.”
Then, just like the Americans of today who insist on Facebook that it's a fundamental tenant of Islam to erect mosques upon battlefields, Gilbert backs up his point with entirely unsourced knowledge:
“Japan has always had the most depraved, pagan, anti-Christian system of sexuality in all history. It is this system of Jap sexuality which is today being spread about America.“
No wonder the Japanese flag looks like a bloody sheet!
Also discovered at this store: A $2 David Krakauer klezmer CD and this painting, which seems sweet and pure. . .
Through the “wretched” efforts of a “filth column” of Hollywood stars and academics like Bertrand Russell and Havelock Ellis, by 1943 the Japanese had managed to infiltrate American underpants.
Gilbert's facts, each as unsourced as you uncle's Obama's-a-Kenyan e-mails:
“Styles in women's clothing have reached an all-time high in indecency since the war began.”
In Michigan, “more than twenty-five per cent of the high school girls of representative cities have contracted venereal disease since Pearl Harbor.”
“There are 1,400,000 young girls acting as barmaids in America today.”
“Since the war began, an estimated half-million young girls under sixteen years of age have been lured into vice and immorality.”
“Next to alcoholism, venereal disease is the greatest single factor in incapacitating war workers. The enemies of America are well aware of this fact. They know that an immoral generation is certain to be a diseased and enfeebled generation.”
“Japan's 'geisha girls' are the equivalent of our current crop of 'Victory Girls,' who are trained to believe that it is a 'worthy calling' to sacrifice their virtue to the lusts of soldiers.”
. . . until you flip it over. Damn you, Japan!
Because homeland security starts in our glands, Gilbert returns again and again to the idea of soldier-pleasing “Victory Girls,” teens who believe surrendering their virginity to be “the one means whereby they might give 'their all' for their country.”
The problem, he feels, goes much deeper than the obvious immorality of using the tingly parts his God saw fit to fashion us with.
“Should she be regarded as a patriot? A thousand times no. Rather she should be regarded as a public enemy, as a common traitor. A soldier who goes from an affair of immorality into the thick of battle is no prepared to die, to meet his Maker. Immorality breeds cowards, not heroes.”
Gilbert describes a preacher who encouraged the young women in his congregation to attend a dance with soldiers.
“Of the dozen or more girls who accepted his advice, two are now in the hospital suffering from 'Victory diseases' and a third is about to become a 'Victory mother.'”
Number of times in 39 pages Gilbert condemns “Victory Girls”: 8
Number of times in 39 pages Gilbert condemns the horny soldiers who love them up: 0
Shocking Detail:
Seriously, “Victory Girls” were a real thing.
According to Marilyn Hegarty's excellent book Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies and Patritoutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II, “a discourse of obligatory sensual patriotism circulated around American women. Magazines and newspapers featured stories, articles and advertisements that encouraged women to do their part.” At the same time, women who were too brazen “in their part” were predictably shunned.
Hegarty does not seem to think this was a Japanese plot.
Also, Hegarty reports that all this inspired U.S. physician Otis Henderson to combine patriot and prostitute to coin patriotutes, which completely confirms every bit of that “greatest generation” jazz.
Highlight:
Besides internment camps for wanton women and sex-ed teachers, here's Gilbert's solutions to the plague of lusty teen action:
- “Closing of the beer taverns, night clubs and dance halls.”
- “The closing of the indecent motion picture industry.”
“The Word of God should be taught in the schools of America, as a patriotic measure to save our youth from delinquency and our nation from ruin.”
“The return – by government compulsion if necessary – of war-working mothers to their homes, to build character in their offspring, which is a more important task even than building motors for bombing planes.”
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