Did Beatlemania help recover the nation from Kennedy's assassination? | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

AliJaggerMcCartney said

Let’s try this again.

As I mentioned, I’m back from the dead (offline since 2012).

The Beatles arrived in the US less than 4 months after President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. The nation was still in mourning during their arrival. The shadow of sadness began to dissipate a few months after the boys’ arrival, were they responsible? 

I think this whole theory – Beatles helping *America* has become a bit of unquestioned folklore. (And intelligently covered in Jonothan Gould’s well-worth-reading “Can’t Buy Me Love “, if you come across a copy.) Certainly a lot of young Americans succumbed to Beatlemania, and no doubt a lot of those fans had been traumatized by the assassination a few months earlier, and the Beatles gave them a reason to be happy again. But there had to be a lot of gloomy folks for whom the Beatles’ arrival made them feel even worse! Like, “first our President gets shot; and now all these long-haired foreign freaks have taken over – country’s going to hell in a handbasket”, etc. (Or even “We Americans invented rock ‘n roll, and now these limeys are doing it better than us and selling ten times as many records: America has truly lost it’s way!”) Also, apparently there was still a lot of misery in 1964 America, with the cold war still going strong and increasing racial unrest and all that. And really, there had to be a lot of Americans who were similarly cheered up in 1964 by, I dunno, Louis Armstrong singing “Hello, Dolly!” or by Julie Andrews in “Mary Poppins” (top-grossing film of that year) or whatever.