The Caped CrusaderFrederic Wertham and the campaign against comic books.
Posted Friday, April 4, 2008, at 7:38 AM ET
For comic-book fans, Fredric Wertham is the biggest villain of all time, a real-life bad guy worse than the Joker, Lex Luthor, and Magneto combined. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wertham was the intellectual spearhead of the anti-comics crusade, arguing in many articles and his 1954 best-seller, Seduction of the Innocent, that comic books stultified the imagination of normal kids (giving them a taste for blood and gore that would prevent them from ever appreciating literature and fine art) and severely damaged the socially vulnerable, contributing to juvenile delinquency. For Wertham, even the most beloved comic-book heroes were suspect: Superman reminded him of Nazi Germany's SS (a cadre of self-styled supermen), the adventures of Batman and Robin had homoerotic overtones, and Wonder Woman threatened to turn healthy young girls into lesbians. At the time Wertham made his attack on comics, the medium was at the height of its popularity, selling between 80 million and 100 million copies every week in scores of genres, ranging from funny animals and superheroes (for kids) to romance and horror (for teenagers and young adults).
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StumbleUponAs David Hajdu reminds us in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Wertham's ideas had remarkably wide currency in postwar America. Countless religious and patriotic organizations organized book burnings to set comics aflame, and leading politicians held congressional hearings where William Gaines, the owner of EC Comics, publisher of the gory Tales From the Crypt and the satiric Mad comic book (later retooled as a magazine), was grilled as if he were a mobster.
As a result of this moral panic, the once-thriving comic-book industry went into a severe decline. In the two years after Wertham's book came out, more than a dozen publishers and hundreds of cartoonists left the field. Those publishers that remained were severely restricted by a self-imposed code that prevented comics from publishing anything but the most anodyne kiddies' fare. Only with the rise of graphic novels in the last few years have comics recovered from the stigma of the Wertham years. For Hajdu, the comic-book crackdown was a "purge," a precursor to later panics over rock music and video games.
No wonder Wertham has often been caricatured by fans as a prissy, cold Germanic elitist who wanted to deprive American kids of their entertaining reading material. Catherine Yronwode, a popular historian and comic-book fan, spoke for many when she wrote, in 1983, "We hate [Wertham], despise him. He and he alone virtually brought about the collapse of the comic book industry in the 1950s." Easy enough to mock, Wertham showed up in a brief and unsympathetic cameo in Michael Chabon's prize-winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
And yet Wertham is not without his defenders, primarily scholars who argue that the view promulgated by authors like Hajdu and Chabon is pure calumny. Chief among these academic defenders is Bart Beaty, a Canadian communications theorist whose 2005 book Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture argues that the psychiatrist's work has been unfairly dismissed. Wertham, Beaty notes, is often libeled as a pop-culture McCarthyite, when he was in fact a progressive scholar who ran a clinic in Harlem, and his research on black children was used in the legal challenges to segregation. Beaty contends that Wertham had legitimate questions about the social impact of art on socially vulnerable children.
Wertham was particularly concerned about the violence, misogyny, and racism that were endemic in comics (and other popular art forms). He wasn't wrong on this point. Many of the comics now nostalgically celebrated by Hajdu and Chabon were extremely unsavory in their social attitudes. EC comics regularly featured husbands and wives ending marital spats with knives, axes, and poison. On the racial front, Will Eisner's much-loved Spirit featured a Sambo-like sidekick named Ebony White, who was childish, had thick lips, and spoke in an illiterate minstrel dialect.
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Note from the Fray Editor:
Jeet Heer replies to Michael Chabon below. See also a post from Bart Beaty, author of a book on Frederic Wertham mentioned in the article, here. For an overview of response to the article, go to the current "Fraywatch", here.
Reply from Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Jeet Heer writes, "Easy enough to mock, Wertham showed up in a brief and unsympathetic cameo in Michael Chabon's prize-winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." He goes on to paraphrase Bart Beaty's argument as claiming that "the view [of Wertham] promulgated by authors like Hajdu and Chabon is pure calumny" and later writes, "Many of the comics now nostalgically celebrated by Hajdu and Chabon were extremely unsavory in their social attitudes. EC comics regularly featured husbands and wives ending marital spats with knives, axes, and poison. On the racial front, Will Eisner's much-loved Spirit featured a Sambo-like sidekick named Ebony White, who was childish, had thick lips, and spoke in an illiterate minstrel dialect..."
It seems simpleminded, or at least awfully lazy, to conflate my novel, which offers no arguments, with Mr. Hajdu's nonfiction, which is built of them, but the lapse could also be explained by Mr. Heer's having failed to read the novel, or at least to have read it carefully or recently.
This is what the novel has to say about Dr. Wertham, who does not quite make "a cameo appearance," at least not in the sense that that other real-life figures, such as Orson Welles or Salvador Dali, do. I'd say it's closer to a namecheck, but that's a semantic matter, I suppose.
Here is what I wrote:
"Dr. Frederic Wertham, a child psychiatrist with unimpeachable credentials and a well-earned sense of outrage, had for several years been trying to persuade the parents and legislators of America that the minds of American children were being deeply damaged by the reading of comic books. With the recent publication of the admirable, encyclopedic, and mistaken Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Wertham's efforts had begun to bear real fruit; there had been calls for controls or outright bans, and in several southern and midwestern cities local governments had sponsored public comic book bonfires, onto which smiling mobs of American children with damaged minds had festively tossed their collections." (p. 478)
The tone settles on mockery right at the end, I suppose, but not of Dr. Wertham himself, or even of his flawed work; it mocks those who took that work as license to engage in censorious and barbaric behavior as bad as anything in the pages of Tales from the Crypt.
Later, in my fictional version of the Kefauver subcommittee hearings, I wrote:
"The first [witness] was Dr. Fredric [sic!] Wertham, the considerable and well-intentioned psychiatrist and author of The Seduction of the Innocent, who was, morally and popularly, a motive force behind the entire controversy over the pernicious effects of comic books. The doctor testified at great length, somewhat incoherently, but dignified throughout and alive, ablaze, with outrage." (p. 613)
The phrase "somewhat incoherently" might be construed as mocking, but if so, it is mockery qualified and counterbalanced by admiration if not quite approval. In any case I believe that a consultation (admittedly time-consuming and tiresome for Mr. Heer) of the transcripts from the hearings, available at any major library, would bear out the accuracy of those adverbs.
As far as I can tell or recall, that's pretty much all the novel has to say about Wertham, except for one minor character who refers to him as a "fountain of gloom." (p. 478)
None of these statements constitutes calumny; they barely qualify as mockery in my view, certainly in comparison to the tone the novel takes with other witnesses at the hearings, such as the pornographer Samuel Roth.
In fact my personal view of Wertham, reflected in the novel itself, had progressed beyond the simplistic condemnation ("Easy enough to mock...") or demonization that Heer suggests well before I actually wrote the relevant scenes in the novel itself. No one who does even the most rudimentary research into Wertham's career and accomplishments can fail to admire him for his compassion, his intelligence, his desire to help children, and his fairly snappy prose style. He was not wrong about the meretriciousness or offensiveness of many of the comics he condemned, though he was wrong about a lot of them; nor was he wrong when he argued that many of the stories featured inappropriate material for young children. It was Wertham's boneheaded inferences about the direct causal connection between, say, "headlight" comics and "deviance" in children, not to mention the hysteria his inferences helped to foster (along with a counter-hysteria among comics fans) that have tarnished his admirable legacy.
As for the racist, misogynist, violent comics for which I am averred so nostalgically to pine, I defy anyone to find evidence for such a sentiment in anything I have ever written or said, in Kavalier & Clay or elsewhere. Talk about easy generalizations.
--Michael Chabon
Find this post, or reply, here
Reply to Michael Chabon from Jeet Heer, author of the original article:
My response to Chabon is brief.
1) I said that Wertham makes "brief and unsympathetic cameo" in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; the quotes Chabon provides from his book support this description of how Wertham is presented in the novel, briefly and unsympathetically.
2) I wrote "Many of the comics now nostalgically celebrated by Hajdu and Chabon were extremely unsavory in their social attitudes." Chabon contests this. But surely any good reader of Kavalier & Clay would acknowledge that the novel is suffused with a nostalgic appreciation of the early comic books (that's one of the strengths of the book: that it evokes the excitement of the pioneering days of the superhero). As for many of these books being "extremely unsavory in their social attitudes", a few minutes flipping through reprints of the early stories of Will Eisner and Jack Kirby (two artists Chabon and I both love) will answer that question.
3) My purpose wasn't to cast aspersions on Chabon as a novelist or to upbraid him for his nostalgic celebration of early comics. He's a great writer and like him I find the early comics to be imaginatively nurturing (I love Chabon for many reasons but especially for calling attention to the greatness of Jack Kirby). My only point was that there is a complexity to Wertham as a historical figure that doesn't come through in many accounts of his career, including the brief and unsympathetic references to him in Kavalier & Clay.
--Jeet Heer
To find this post, or reply, click here
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