That Riotous Feeling

To thousands of high of school and college age youths, the Fourth of July was riot time. Barefoot, beer-swilling students massed in tiny resort towns to celebrate their own summertime independence, and by the time the fireworks were over, approximately $20,000 worth of damage had been wreaked, 90 people had been injured and 800 youths arrested. For the most part, the rioters were neither underprivileged, nor juvenile delinquents, nor members of a gang, but college students from middle-class families with middle-level incomes.

"We Want Booze." In the resort town of Arnolds Park, Iowa, the trouble began the minute the bars closed. Some 500 visiting youths poured, stumbled and fell out of taverns, chanting "We want booze! We want beer!" When a handful of police officers tried to quiet them down, someone shouted, "Hey, punk! We're going to take over the place!" and the riot was on. Armed with chunks of cement, rocks, beer bottles and splintered wood, they charged the cops, then smashed in the windows of cars and lighted a bonfire in front of one of the taverns. Police had to be called in from three towns, along with National Guardsmen, before peace was restored.

In Rockaway Beach, Mo., 3,000 visiting youths were incited when police arrested and jailed a drunken boy for giving a friend a piggyback ride on his motorbike. As word of the arrest spread along the beach front, kids in madras shorts and sweatshirts began to crowd onto the main street, chanting "Let him out! Let him out!" Hundreds climbed to the roof of a nearby dance hall, began to pelt the police below with bottles, cherry bombs and rocks. Others broke in the windows of nine stores, turned over a patrol car. When 125 policemen from neighboring counties arrived and began to search nearby tourist cabins, they discovered, among other things, a room that contained 42 people, including four nude girls.

The state with the most trouble was Ohio, where 590 National Guardsmen were mobilized to restore peace to two different towns--Russells Point and Geneva-on-the-Lake. Before they did, 1,500 youths at Russells Point had broken the glass of every store front in town, set fire to homes and businesses, driven firemen away with rocks. At Geneva-on-the-Lake, some 8,000 students rioted for three hours, mauling three police cruisers, smashing shop windows, and keeping residents awake with blasts from three-foot-long plastic horns.

Confused Role. When the smoke and debris was cleared away, sociologists around the country began to search for reasons. Most concurred that juveniles are becoming more and more delinquent because of the confused role that society forces them to play. On the one hand, they are expected to act "grownup" at an ever-earlier age, handle their own (and large) allowances in grade school, date seriously at twelve, find summer jobs at 15, and own their own cars at 16. On the other hand, in most states they are not allowed to drink until 21, and theoretically not expected to have sexual intercourse until they are married. Furthermore, the push toward college and graduate school has meant that many young men and women are still financially tied down to their parents until their late 20s.

John Stratton, assistant professor at the State University of Iowa, said of the riot in Arnolds Park: "I doubt that this was hoodlum inspired. Young people today haven't developed adult responsibility because they have been sheltered from it. They all are concerned about proving themselves adult, and they do so by standing up against authority, drinking and seducing young girls."

Outbursts & Birthrights. Another reason for the new rash of riots is that the student free-for-all has virtually become an American institution. Glamorized by such movies as West Side Story and The Wild One, outbursts of destruction have achieved a certain self-conscious status for the defiant young. Says Professor Bennett Berger, chairman of the sociology department of the University of California in Davis: "The resort riot is becoming like the campus panty raid. The kids expect that society expects them to riot on vacation weekends."

As for the kids themselves, most of them could not be less interested in the sociologists' theories on why they do it. Typical is one jailed teenager, who called his mother the day after, calmly explained: "I got mixed up in a riot somehow. I don't know how it happened but send Dad with some money."

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