The Ten Cent Plague - The Great Comic-book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu
Hardback, 448 pages, £17.99, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
*
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
Late in 1948 the mayor and city council of New Orleans commissioned a report on comic books which, among other things, announced that comics ‘rank with jazz music as being one of the few truly American art forms’. But, as many jazz musicians would have been able to report in the late-40s, America is rarely kind to its artists, particularly those popular arts that are seen to be in any way transgressive. By February 1949 the New Orleans city council had issued an ordinance blacklisting a third of all comics. It wasn’t alone, cities across the country were caught up in the same fevered dread that comics were the root cause of juvenile delinquency, and many communities went even further than New Orleans. Over the next few years the war against comic books escalated, with bans, public book burnings and eventually a congressional inquiry. In the end dozens of publishers would be forced out of business and several hundreds of artists and writers would find themselves out of work. This is the extraordinary situation chronicled by David Hajdu in this enthralling book.
America’s relationship with the comic book was always uneasy. The form dates back to the latter years of the 19th century when, in the eternal struggle for readers, Joseph Pulitzer bought a colour press to produce a Sunday supplement for his New York World. The supplement featured illustrated stories on supposedly titillating subjects designed to appeal to the lower classes, and cartoon strips to attract an audience that wasn’t always fluent in English (or even able to read at all). The very first strip was called ‘Hogan’s Alley’, though it quickly became known as ‘The Yellow Kid’ after the bald little boy in a yellow nightshirt who was its central character. (Hajdu seems to link this with the origin of the phrase ‘yellow press’, though I’m not so sure.) The New York World’s example was quickly followed by other papers, and ‘The Yellow Kid’ faced rivals such as the ‘Happy Hooligan’ and ‘The Katzenjammer Kids’. All these cartoon strips followed the same general pattern: street kids scoring little victories over figures of authority, often associated with barely intelligible speech and crude racial stereotypes. They were hugely popular while attracting the perhaps inevitable disdain of the literary establishment; in 1906 one writer in The Atlantic Monthly called them ‘a thing of national shame and degradation’, a theme that would crop up with astonishing regularity over the next half century.
Early in the century the strips from the supplements began to be republished in little booklets, originally as a promotional device though it wasn’t long before the publishers found that there was a market for them. The comic book was born. The early stories of New York’s poor immigrant streets were gradually replaced with a wider range of story, especially surreal fantasies such as ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’, ‘Krazy Kat’ and E.C. Segar’s ‘Thimble Theater’ which became especially popular when he introduced the character Popeye. These sometimes were well received: in 1924 the distinguished critic and publisher Gilbert Seldes published The Seven Lively Arts, a clarion call for the serious recognition of popular art forms such as ragtime, movies and the comic book. More often they were condemned by serious-minded social reformers such as the author Sterling North and the Catholic bishop John Francis Noll.
Meanwhile the comic book was developing as a generation of innovative artists and writers, who had learned their craft copying the strips in the colour supplements when they were children, drifted into comics as a way of making a decent living during the lean years of the 30s. People like Will Eisner, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, Jerry Siegel and a host of others found the comic book environment full of sharks and shysters who would cheat and connive over every last penny, but at the same time it was an environment in which they were free to do pretty much what they wished. In the years before the Second World War crime became a big seller, and sex, and costumed super-heroes (particularly when, like Wonder Woman, they combined action with sexual innuendo), and towards the end of the decade, led by publisher Bill Gaines of EC (Educational Comics), horror. The art in these comics was often of a very high quality, but the production was invariably crude and so, often, was the writing. Hajdu, in telling the story of the development of the comics in parallel with the story of their persecution, makes it clear that many comics actually lived up to the garish image presented by their critics, though it does seem that as often as not the comics only moved on to the next profitable level of horror, violence and sexual innuendo after they had already been accused of this excess by their attackers. At least the crudity of one and the splenetic frenzy of the other kept pace with each other.
Public unease about the effect that comic books were having on the nation’s children grew in the years before the war, fanned by people like North and Noll, but those working in the industry seemed to inhabit an hermetic bubble, unaware of any of this criticism, simply pushing their work on from extreme to extreme at the behest of publishers who were finding this an unexpectedly lucrative industry. During the war itself, criticism of comic books fell away, partly because they were popular with American soldiers overseas, but once the war was over it redoubled. This was a troubled time for America. Joseph McCarthy used the House Un-American Activities Committee to foment an anti-communist witch hunt that infected every level of society from government to popular entertainment, feeding on and amplifying a persistent insularity in American popular sentiment that saw the outside world primarily as a mysterious threat to their newfound power and prosperity. Hajdu is at pains to distance the campaigns against comic books from the McCarthy witch hunts, but with the comics accused of being tools of both fascism and communism it is clear that the fears of the time played a significant part in this whole episode. Moreover, McCarthy showed that one charismatic politician could become a national figure by attacking the enemy within; so another charismatic politician, Estes Kefauver, used another enemy within (crime, juvenile delinquency and comic books) as a springboard to national fame and a shot at the presidency. (The Democratic hierarchy closed ranks behind Adlai Stevenson as their candidate, but Kefauver beat Senator John F. Kennedy to the vice-presidential slot on the 1956 ticket; the disastrousness of the Democratic loss that year cleared the way for Kennedy’s own campaign for president four years later. So the anti-comic book frenzy had a curious if oblique part to play in shaping the 1960s – though in other respects, the second part of Hajdu’s subtitle overstates the case extravagantly.)
Kefauver’s congressional inquiries into crime and juvenile delinquency were televised, just at the point when the new medium was becoming available across the country, which certainly helped his cause. That cause was also helped by the fact that a prominent psychologist, Fredric Wertham, had a new book to publicise. Wertham was an extraordinary figure who had written an innovative study of the leading black novelist Richard Wright, and who had, with the support of Ralph Ellison, established the first psychiatric clinic in Harlem. But alongside this valuable and important work, he had also come to believe that all comic books without exception had a pervasive evil influence on their young readers, and he propounded that view in his new book, Seduction of the Innocent. In this book he argued that all the children he saw who suffered from psychological problems, and all the children he saw who had been involved in crime, were addicted to what he called crime comics. That is perfectly possible, given that the vast majority of children in the country read comics, and they were especially popular among the disadvantaged and poor neighbourhoods that provided the majority of his patients. But he studied no control groups, provided no clinical explanation of how the children were affected by the comics, drew no direct correlation between any specific comics and any specific cases. In fact, though Hajdu is no sociologist, let alone a psychologist, his analysis of the academic failings of Wertham’s work is very clearly laid out for the layman, and he neatly illustrates the academic standing of Wertham’s book by noting that extracts from it appeared not in peer-reviewed publications but in The Ladies’ Home Journal. But panic rarely pauses to weigh the evidence, and what was happening across the country was a panic.
Church groups and school boards in just about every state organized collections of comic books that were then publicly burned (most of them, apparently, in blissful ignorance of the image conjured up by book burning, or indeed of the damage they were doing to the first amendment). In most of these instances, children were used to collect the comic books, and Hajdu includes lots of testimony from people who say they went along with it because their parents or teachers told them it was the right thing to do, but once the fires started they realized it was wrong. The publicity for this book presents it, in passing, as an account of the generation gap, but that is not an angle that Hajdu himself pursues; more precisely, I think, such testimony points to this as one of those pivotal moments when the gap started to open. But still, many children were happy to go along with these actions, organizing boycotts of local shopkeepers who continued to stock comic books, or trading in the bad stuff for more wholesome fare.
But let us not imagine this is a one-sided affair. In parallel with his account of the campaign against comic books, Hajdu describes how comic books themselves were developing. The impression is irresistibly one of venality, insularity and self-regard. Images that were shocking or sexy sold well to their target audience of teenagers, so of course the publishers pushed their writers and artists to be ever more shocking and sexy. Although the meat of this book clearly revolves around the persecution of comic books, the parts of this volume that describe the development of comic books and the men (and a few women) who shaped them are often more engaging. And yet, despite the constant chorus of horror and dismay that was coming from the popular press, from serious commentators (and despite what we may think of his methodology, Wertham was undoubtedly a serious commentator), and eventually from politicians ever ready to jump on a popular bandwagon, those within the industry seem to have been blissfully unaware of any possible threat to what they were doing. Now of course there were comics that touched on serious issues, such as prejudice; of course there were comics that were educational; of course there were senior policemen prepared to say that actually the crime figures didn’t really justify the fear of juvenile delinquency that swept the country in the wake of the Second World War; of course there were academics who said that far from damaging children, comics were at worst neutral and at best good for them. (It is worth noting, of course, that though the comic books often appealed to their readers, no-one on either side really gave much attention to the views of the children who were actually buying and reading the comics. Hajdu, who has assiduously sought out a number of them, such as the prominent sf fan Ted White, here gives them a voice perhaps for the very first time.) But none of this counted for anything in the face of public hysteria, and the comics industry was as complicit in that hysteria as anyone.
Then there was the climactic moment when Bill Gaines, pumped up on Dexedrine, appeared as a voluntary witness at the senate hearings. Ever anxious to stress his own legitimacy, Gaines’s testimony was cool and powerful, until the drugs began to wear off. When he was shown the cover of one of his own comics in which we see a woman’s body stretched on the floor and someone standing over her with a dripping axe clutching her head, he was asked if it was in good taste. Yes, he replied: ‘A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.’ If it wasn’t already over, the comic book cause was finished at that point.
The aftermath was more farce than tragedy. A bunch of publishers got together and created the Comics Code Authority (whose symbol was still displayed on the comics I remember reading in the 1960s), though they didn’t expect their own censor to actually apply the rules. When he did, rigidly and carelessly, most comics were rendered nonsensical. Even so, it wasn’t enough for the campaigners who had got the scent of blood. Boycotts and blacklists continued, and within a couple of years the entire industry had virtually collapsed, and wouldn’t recover until the rebirth of publishers like Marvel in the 1960s.
Hajdu, whose previous books have been on Duke Ellington and on Bob Dylan, is more a pop culture journalist than a historian or academic critic. He tells the story well, but he prefers the pithy anecdote to serious analysis, so although he provides, for example, a succinct account of what was academically wrong with Wertham’s study, you look in vain for any in depth account of what lay behind his beliefs and arguments. Since Hajdu’s sympathies clearly lie with the comic books, the social, psychological, criminal and political underpinnings of the attack on comic books don’t always get an equal crack of the whip. And he has done a tremendous amount of journalistic research, quoting from a vast array of newspapers, and interviewing seemingly hundreds of people involved in the events, like Harry Harrison who lost his job as a comics writer as a result of the fall out from the congressional inquiry. But there are fewer citations for historians, scholarly papers, congressional records or elsewhere, and other than a few of the children who were involved in the book burnings (nearly all of whom say they now regret it) there are no voices from the other side. If so many people who worked in the comics industry in the 40s and 50s are still with us, surely some of those who campaigned against comics must still be alive? Nevertheless, these are no more than quibbles about a book that is a brisk, fascinating, engaging and often revealing account of a strange and dramatic moment in the history of our culture.
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Paul Kincaid is the author of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction and editor (with Andrew M. Butler) of The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology. He received the 2006 Thomas D. Clareson Award for services to science fiction.
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