On July 4, 1975 a group of artists assembled in front of the Cow Palace in San Francisco and delivered a legendary performance piece called "Media Burn." Members of the Ant Farm collective stacked a pyramid of televisions in a parking lot, drenched them with kerosene, and set them on fire. Then two white-firesuit-clothed drivers took the helm of a souped up Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz and revved the engine. While viewing their target through a video monitor parked between their seats, they drove through the wall of burning TVs.

"Television, because of its technology and the way it must be used," a pseudo-version of President John F. Kennedy warned prior to the launch, "can only produce autocratic political forms."

"If smashing a '59 Cadillac into a wall of old television sets is art, then the world may rest tonight with a new masterpiece," said a bemused reporter for KPIX television news, on hand for the event. "If it is culture, then perhaps we are all in a degree of difficulty not previously experienced in this society."

Americans have always loved to bash and trash media, both figuratively and literally. The motives of the bashers have been very different throughout history, of course. When most civil liberties folk think about these events, they're reminded of book burning (or "libricide" as it is sometimes called), a specialty of anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock of the New York Anti-Vice Society.

In the early 1870s, Comstock convinced Congress to pass a law which authorized him, as an assistant postmaster, to seize any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" content traveling through the mails. It is generally estimated that in this capacity Comstock and his army of followers burned no less than fifteen tons of books. Pornographic images and literature about birth control were favorite targets for incineration.

As the Victorian era subsided, this got a little old for the public. Two years before he died, Comstock went on a rampage against the painter Paul Chabas' famous nude oil painting, "September Morn," banning prints of it from the postal service. "Soon it was hanging everywhere," one account of the debacle notes. "Judges were openly chuckling at [Comstock] by now, and he took to shouting at them in court."

Not that the bonfires didn't continue. John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five went to the torch on more than one occasion. As late as 2003, piles of Harry Potter novels were burned at the stake by church officials who conceded that they hadn't even read them.

Historians classify these incidents as "moral panics," events which occur when "segments of society uncritically blame a phenomenon for undermining their society's order." Violent video games or unrestricted content sharing qualify as typical culprits here.

But what we often miss about these moral panics is the sheer passion with which Americans have burned, smashed, or even exploded media—not just a century ago, but in our very recent past. Here are three post-World War II incidents in which this sort of collective mayhem took place: comic book burning, disco record bombing, and the more amorphous phenomenon of television smashing. What was really going on?

Super heroes

In his book The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America, David Hajdu tells the story of David Mace, a comics-loving boy who attended Spencer Elementary School in West Virginia. One day, a teacher he respected asked Mace to stick around after class for a long lecture about the evils of the genre.

"She told me that we could do something about it, and I said 'Well, let's go!'" Mace later recalled. Popular and energetic, the boy assembled his peers and convinced them to round up all the comic books in the city for a mass burning. "By the last week of October," Hajdu writes, "Mace's brigade had collected more than two thousand comic books of all sorts, from reprints of the Dick Tracy strip to crime comics."

On October 26, 1948, no less than 600 kids arrived with the comics and brought them to the schoolyard grounds.

"Do you, fellow students, believe that comic books have caused the downfall of many youthful readers?" Mace asked the crowd.

"We do," the children replied.

"Do you believe that you will benefit by refusing to indulge in comic-book reading?"

"We do," they repeated.

"Then let us commit them," Mace declared. He set a matchbook to a copy of Superman and tossed it on the pile. "The flames rose to a height of more than twenty-five feet as the children, their teachers, the principle, and a couple of reporters and photographers from the area papers watched for more than a hour," Hajdu wrote. Other schools soon had burnings of their own.

Hajdu cautions us against a simple interpretation of this phenomenon. "Easy to mistake from the distance of time as the puppetmastery of reactionary adults exploiting children too sheepish to defend their own enthusiasms," he writes, "the comic-book burnings of the late 1940s were multilayered demonstrations of the emerging generation's divided loyalties and developing sense of cultural identity."

The story of Binghamton, New York's comic burning ritual illustrates this paradox. There, students from St. Patrick's Academy took the lead. They literally marched about the town, demanding local retailers take comics off their shelves. Dealers who refused to sign a "no comics" pledge faced the threat of boycott.

But these kids didn't stop indulging in the contraband items. "We all read the comics—the comics were huge!" one later told Hajdu. "But I separated the good ones and the bad ones in my mind."

Another identified a comic that he wanted a news dealer to understand was a bad one. The boy then purchased the magazine, "thereby removing it from the shelf," and took it home to hide it under the living room sofa. Alas, the space was already taken; his dad kept his detective magazines there.

Eventually, St. Patrick's saw the same comic conflagration as Spencer had. This one lasted four hours and came complete with a singing of "The Catholic Action Song" as flames leapt thirty feet into the sky.

These events fueled the anti-comics hysteria of the mid-1950s, exemplified by Dr. Fredric Wertham's famous polemic, The Seduction of the Innocent. But in these high school bonfire moments, who was being used? Were these teens being manipulated by their teachers? Or did they take advantage of this moral panic to boss around town adults?

Hajdu sees the latter explanation all over this story. These kids had "so embraced [the] superhero comics' ethos of eradicating evil that they employed it against other comics," he writes—their cause foreshadowing sixties activism as much as it exemplified 1950s conservatism.