Did The Beatles actually stop crime in America for one hour?
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of The Beatles‘ first performance on the US television program The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964. Basically, if you’ve ever read an interview with a successful American musician, filmmaker, author, or brick-layer of the Baby Boom generation, it’s a safe bet that they mentioned that specific winter night as a formative one in their creative awakening. It was the moment that launched the British invasion, took Beatlemania into the stratosphere, and gave young Americans a ray of positivity and hope just three months after the assassination of John F Kennedy.
But did the Beatles also transfix the Yankee youth so much that they literally “stopped crime” in America during their one hour on the airwaves?
Since the night itself, that’s been an oft-repeated narrative fueling the already ample legend of the Fab Four’s Sullivan debut, and despite a dearth of fact-checking in the aftermath, many mainstream news organisations, including the BBC, continued to use it as an anecdote well into the 21st century: “[The Beatles’] appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show reportedly led to a dip in the crime rate to a 50-year low as 73million people or 40% of Americans tuned into watch,” read one BBC story from 2008. Even The Beatles themselves enjoyed quoting similar stats, as both John Lennon and George Harrison are on record relating their crime-fighting success (Harrison’s retelling coming many years later during the interviews for 1995’s Beatles Anthology).
In truth, the only boys who were probably on their best behaviour that February night were the ones on the stage. “When it came to Ed Sullivan, it was, ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir,’” recalled photographer Harry Benson, who travelled with The Beatles throughout that first US tour. “They were very aware that this was the most important show they could do. They were quite gravely. Brian [Epstein] will have spoken to them, and they were aware of the status of the show and behaved very well. Ed Sullivan called them ‘charming young men’, and they were ready to play the role of polite English boys.”
As for whether that politeness gravitated out of the television to the whole of America, we must sadly report that this is almost certainly a tall tale. When Snopes dug into the story back in 2000, they quickly found that the root of the supposed “Beatles stopping crime” report was actually a single sarcastic comment—meant more as an insult than a compliment—by Washington Post news editor B F Henry. “Don’t knock The Beatles,” he said after the Sullivan performance. “During the hour they were on Ed Sullivan’s show, there wasn’t a hubcap stolen in America.”
The implication Henry was making was essentially that Beatles fans—being young rock ‘n’ roll hooligans—were at least held in check from their usual anti-social behaviour while their heroes were on TV. Henry’s joke was later quoted in print by Washington Post scribe Bill Gold and then again nationally in Newsweek magazine. Soon enough, the idea had a life of its own, taken at face value by many readers who didn’t get the joke.
As further proof of the Washington Post’s snobbish position on Beatlemania, the newspaper even printed a “correction” to their original hubcap story two weeks after the Sullivan performance. “It is with heavy heart that I must inform readers that this report was not true,” wrote Bill Gold. “Lawrence R Fellenz of 307 E. Groveton St., Alexandria, had his car parked on church property during that hour — and all four of his hubcaps were stolen. The Washington Post regrets the error, and District Liner Fellenz regrets that somewhere in Alexandria, there lives a hipster who is too poor to own a TV set.”
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