Fredric Wertham was a brilliant psychiatrist and philanthropist who corresponded with Sigmund Freud, fought racial segregation and wrote about the complicity of medical professionals in the Holocaust — but that’s not why we are talking about him today.
As diverse and brilliant as Wertham’s work was, he is primary remembered as a one-man crusader against comic books. In the 1950s, his book, Seduction of the Innocent, put the blame squarely on comic books for a perceived rise in “juvenile delinquency.” In the midst of the McCarthy era, his theories caught on and lead to national hearings before Congress, where he told a sympathetic Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that comics books lead to violence, sexual depravity and murder.
To be fair to Wertham, many of the comic books of the day were depraved, sexist and violent — and that material was often marketed to children. But there was a lot of brilliance mixed in among the exploitation; and there was an adult audience who read the books as well. And frankly, Wertam saw often sexual depravity where there was none (e.g. - Wonder Woman was obviously a lesbian because she was a strong, independent woman.)
The comics industry did a poor job of presenting their side of the case or of making a clear argument on obvious First Amendment grounds. Instead they had an inarticulate and disheveled (and reportedly strung out) EC Publisher William Gaines explaining that gore and sex were good for small children and that parents had no right to be concerned.
After the disastrous Senate hearings and fearful of governmental censorship, the industry preemptively created the industry-sponsored Comics Code Authority, which imposed draconian rules that not only banned extreme violence or sexuality, but also prohibited entire words and concepts such as “terror” or “zombie”. Children could never be seen in danger. Criminals could never prevail. Authority figures could never be shown as corrupt.
This creative straight-jacket destroyed most of the best books on the market — especially the work of EC Comics, which published such classic titles as Tales from the Crypt and Two-Fisted Tales — and threw the industry into an infantile tailspin that only a few carefully neutered superheros were able to survive.
The imposition of the Comics Code Authority ended the explosive creativity and expansion of the Golden Age of comics with a blow that the industry never fully recovered from. It took years for superheroes to become popular again; and more years yet for a few brave books to ignore the Comics Code Authority. But in an era of television, video games and the World Wide Web, the comics industry will likely never reach the level of popularity and success it enjoyed before Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent and the CCA.
I recently came across an issue of Reader’s Digest from 1948. Imagine my delight when I realized that it contained a critique of the comics industry from Wertham himself — six full years before the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. In fact, it is likely even older than that, since it was a reprint from The Saturday Review of Literature.
What we see is a man who was all too willing to scapegoat comic books for every evil perpetrated by children. Time and time again he outlines some violent atrocity, then ominously notes that “the little boy read comic books” — conveniently ignoring that in 1948, every child pretty much read comic books.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any sign of the civil rights leader and psychological wunderkind who corresponded with Freud. What is left is a cautionary tale; a glimpse into a mindset that can turn a brilliant and kind man into a misguided book-burner, and can turn a country founded on freedom of speech into a nation opposed to the free expression of ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
