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The History Channel Original Podcast.
History This Week, February 4, 1955.
I'm Sally Helm.
The comics czar has been busy.
Judge Charles F Murphy is in charge of enforcing the new comics code, meant to make comic books less violent, more family-friendly, to address a growing backlash against them.
And Murphy's here today to report on that work to a New York state legislative committee.
He's provided them with a series of before and after panels.
In sum, it's clear that the comic's czar, or his minions, have ordered that a character be plucked from the jaws of death.
Before, three men come across a flaming car.
The speech bubble reads, we found all three dead.
After, same car, no flames.
And the speech bubble says the men had been knocked out when the car sideswiped into a.
The Comics Code has been good to these particular reckless drivers.
Another panel shows a dead woman in a tight black dress lying in a pool of blood.
There's a crowd of onlookers, one of whom appears to be randomly naked?
A note below the drawing reads, Criticism.
Put dress on girl in rear and change position on girl in foreground.
Take out blood.
In the next panel, No blood, and everyone is wearing clothes.
The victim, unfortunately, is still dead.
The committee praises Judge Murphy for his work.
He has indeed cleaned up comics, at least a little.
But later in the afternoon, another witness takes the stand.
He's a noted psychologist named Frederick Wortham, who has been at the very center of the backlash against comics.
And today, in this grand meeting room, he says that the industry has not nearly gone far enough.
Mariah Aiden describes the whole scene in her book The Brooklyn Thrill Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s.
At one dramatic moment of testimony, Wortham pulls out a whip and a knife, weapons he says he bought through ads printed in comic book.
And he points to the recent case of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, a group of teenagers who went on a violent murderous spree that Wertham says was partly inspired by what they saw in comic books.
He says one of the killers was obsessed with horror comics and even imagined himself as a vampire.
On the night of one of the murders, he made sure to wear the black leather pants of his quote.
Vampire costumes.
Wortham testifies, The hearing comes to a close, and the committee is left to decide.
What is the future of the comic book?
Today, the war on comics.
Why did one of the country's leading psychologists see them as a major threat to American children?
And what can the great comic book scare teach us about moral panics?
Before there were comic books, there was the humble comic strip.
One of the earliest, released in 1895, was The Yellow Kid about an Irish immigrant child who wore a big yellow nightshirt with different messages written on it.
Soon enough, there were the Katzenjammer kids, a set of German twins, and Foxy Grandpa, who's always getting the better of his mischievous grandsons.
And basically, as long as there have been comics of any kind, there have been people who thought they were ruining society.
They were faulted for corrupting morals, for encouraging illiteracy, for being bad for the eyes.
They were faulted for everything they were and everything they did.
That's Professor David Haydu.
He's a professor at Columbia University's School of Journalism and a cultural critic who wrote a book called The Ten-Cent Plague.
The Ten-Cent Plague is a phrase I made up, but it grows out of the idea that comics were a contagion.
They were a plague on American culture that was infesting young people in particular.
Haydu says this partly has roots in racism and xenophobia.
Comic strips were made by immigrants mostly, for immigrants mostly.
And there was also just the fact that they were new.
It's a classic story a backlash to the hot new art form that eventually goes away when that art form becomes not so new.
By about the 1930s, people have gotten used to the comics.
Yes, almost everybody reads the comics.
The moral panic about comic strips goes by the wayside.
And comic strips are, you know, as red, white and blue, and American is apple pie.
Jeremy Dauber is a professor at Columbia University and the author of a new book, American Comics.
He says by the 30s, You really had to follow what was going on in the comic strips.
This was just part of the cultural currency.
On Sunday morning at least, this is America.
But just when people are getting used to the comic strip, enter a new technological innovation.
The comic book.
It's a cheap form of entertainment that a kid can buy for a dime at a local store, unsupervised.
Here is a medium of entertainment that appeals to all ages, tastes, and backgrounds.
Then in 1938, another big breakthrough.
Action Comics No.
1 featured this new character of theirs, Superman.
Costumed heroes explode onto the scene.
Captain Marvel, Captain America, Wonder Woman.
Good guys taking on evil.
Which resonates especially as American troops go off to fight in World War II.
You had characters like Captain America, created by two Jews, who really appeared, you know, with a sock to Hitler's jaw.
But there are some parents and teachers and moral crusaders who look at this new trend and say You know, we're not so crazy about the rise of this superheroing that seems to disregard a kind of law and order.
Superman is not stopping mid-flight to check in with the government or the police.
And there's generally no due process for anyone in these stories.
They are establishing order through force, right?
All these superheroes end up punching out people and all this.
And to some of those moral crusaders.
Not many, but to a couple of them that even had certain kinds of overtones of fascism.
During the war years, the Allies are busy fighting real life fascists.
But after the war, people have time to worry about other things again.
And they start to worry about the kids.
Upon America's youth.
The excitement and emotional tension of war is today exerting an influence which psychiatrists fear may be felt for years to come.
You know, the entire country has been on a war footing for years.
All sorts of social arrangements have been thrown up in the air.
There have been massive shifts in the labor system, tremendous strains and stresses on the family structure.
And so there are a lot of questions about are the kids going to be all right after all of this trauma?
And pretty soon Parents started noticing that young people were behaving They're riding motorcycles.
They're wearing leather jackets.
Youngsters are venturing into new and unwholesome worlds.
They're speaking in slang.
They're acting tough.
Experiments with new sensations, such as the smoking of marijuana, are tempting more and more teenage youngsters along dangerous paths.
And looking for reasons for this.
How could it be young people are acting so differently?
They're acting out.
What are the causes?
Heydu said the adults weren't totally wrong.
Young people were acting differently.
One reason we know now is that that's what young people do.
And two.
These are young people who grew up in the wake of World War II and saw that the world is a complicated place and the world is a dark place and horrible things can happen, and had a kind of cynicism about the world that their parents didn't have.
So that was a gift to young people at the time, but one that older people saw as a failing, saw as a sin, saw as a crime.
They begin looking around for causes.
And they find one.
Comics must be the cause.
In the post-war years, comics have been covering increasingly adult subject matter.
Partly because people who loved comics as kids in the 30s are now growing up.
So comic books are taking on new topics.
Sex, romance, crime.
They grew darker and darker and more serious.
And they spoke with particular urgency to GIs who continued to read comics during the war years and who came back from World War II with a dark feeling about the world.
But younger people are reading those darker comics too.
And the older people are getting worried.
They started to fear that These comics could incite violent behavior in young people, that they were the cause of this new phenomenon juvenile delinquency.
And then all hell broke loose.
The almost universal addiction of American youngsters to the comics is a cause of serious alarm to some parents.
Like this woman, featured on a 1948 report about comics.
Some comics are good, but most comics are killers.
They kill time, they kill imagination, and they kill the urge to read books.
One man in particular will become a key anti-comics crusader a psychologist named Frederick Wertham.
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In many aspects of his life, Wertham was a real hero.
He started one of the country's first free mental health facilities open to people of color in 1940s Harlem.
His work is later cited in the Brown versus Board of Education decision to end school segregation.
Both our experts told us.
He was a guy who had a lot of sympathetic features to him and the work that he did.
In comics history, however, he's considered kind of the arch-villain.
He was the Lex Luthor of the comic books debate.
In March 1948, Wortham is quoted at length in an article called Horror in the Nursery.
He describes research he's conducted at his Harlem clinic for troubled young people.
In the course of his treatment, he asked the young people how they lived, what they did, how they spent their time, what they read.
What they read were... comic books.
Now, there's nothing extraordinary about that, because at the time virtually all young people read comics.
To be a young person was to be a comics reader.
Though Wertham was in many ways a respected scientist, when it comes to comic books he seems to have gotten carried away.
He says, quote we found that comic book reading was a distinct influencing factor in the case of every single delinquent or disturbed child we studied.
Pretty soon, Wortham and the anti-comic movement start getting attention.
Their message speaks to the anxieties of the era.
Look at a newspaper from 1948 and see what the headlines are on the front page.
There's a story almost every day about either the horror of comic books or the Red Scare, or about flying saucers.
And they're kind of all of a piece, kind of a post-war paranoia.
Something has entered onto our shores that's changing our world.
What is it?
Comic book makers are looking around at this growing backlash and thinking we have to do something.
So a group of them forms a new association.
They're hoping to head off government regulation by regulating themselves.
Jeremy Dauber told us they come up with a code of standards.
They were not going to depict murders in a particularly gory light.
Crime should not be presented in such a way to throw sympathy against law and justice.
They outlawed scenes of sadistic torture.
Plus a whole range of other things.
No ridicule of racial or religious groups.
No women in sexy clothing.
No cursing.
Minimize slang.
Don't glamorize divorce.
But the code doesn't really have any teeth to it.
And the new association doesn't actually have the resources to screen every single comic that's being published.
And so over the next five or six years, almost everybody had left this association.
They didn't really care so much about it.
And their business was doing gangbusters, particularly and most notably, a company called EC Comics, led by a guy named Bill Gaines.
Bill Gaines is the anti-Wortham, the hero of the comic book story.
He'd taken over EC Comics from his father.
The name had been an abbreviation for educational comics, but Gaines changes it to entertaining comics.
Here's David Haydu again.
Bill Gaines published comics with lots of noir content, stories of suspense and crime and intrigue and sci-fi stories.
EC Comics is also responsible for the invention of an entirely new genre, the horror comic.
It was hard for people to see them as appropriate for kids, because they really weren't meant for kids.
They were meant for young adults.
But parents have it in their minds that comics are a thing for children.
And as Gaines is publishing more innovative dark stories, parents and governments are taking notice.
In April 1948, Detroit becomes the first city to legislate against comics.
The city's police commissioner orders police to seize comics from newsstands to look for objectionable material.
A few weeks later, the mayor of a town in Illinois bans the display or sale of any comic books.
By 1950, there are over 100 acts of legislation around the country to regulate comics.
There is a rising current of protests from parents, welfare workers, and educators.
There were dozens of public burnings of comic books in schoolyards and other locations around the country.
That echoed the burnings of books in Nazi Germany just a few years earlier.
Jeremy Dauber told us about a movement of concerned shoppers who would fill their supermarket carts with frozen food and refuse to pay as long as the store was selling comic books.
And everyone would have to hustle and put it back before the frozen food got ruined.
Whether or not this story could be absolutely verified, it's a wonderful example of ground level communal pressures.
And, of course, if you were a store and there's a local boycott of your business because you sell comic books, you know comics are not a very, they're a low cost item.
You're just going to get rid of them.
You're not going to bother sort of dealing with the pressure.
In 1954, Frederick Wortham publishes his ideas in a book called Seduction of the Innocent.
It's more or less a manifesto of the anti-comics movement.
Now, to be fair, some of Wortham's ideas were reasonable, even noble.
Things like limiting sexist and racist stories or enforcing a rating system to indicate how racy a comic was.
But...
Some of the stuff that he says really largely seems very, very far-fetched.
He basically says that comic books cause youth crime.
He also claims that Wonder Woman is an unwomanly, lesbian, and horrific model for young girls.
He has a whole tirade against superheroes' relationships with their sidekicks.
He thinks they're creepy and encourage homosexuality.
The book gets rave reviews, and the anti-comics movement continues to grow.
You have this increasing drumbeat of concern, of anxiety, of panic.
About comics.
But it's coming at the same time that there's a growing drumbeat of concern about communism.
These two trends are not directly linked.
But the Red Scare is leading to increased censorship.
There's panic about communists in Hollywood.
For his book.
Heydu talked to an artist who had worked on some EC comics who said, quote it was a bad time to be weird because people would accuse you of being either a communist or a juvenile delinquent.
In 1953, by some measures, juvenile delinquency is down.
Still, the Senate chooses that year to form a subcommittee to look into it.
In its first three months.
The subcommittee's chairman receives 20000 letters from concerned citizens.
About 70% of them are about crime shows and comic books.
And so in early 1954 the subcommittee chairman announces for two days this spring they will devote the Senate investigation to comics.
Thousands of American parents are greatly concerned about the possible detrimental influence of certain types of crime and horror comic books upon their children.
And just like that, the anti-comics crusade takes the Senate stand.
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It's April 1954.
Members of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency gather in a courthouse in New York.
Old-timey microphones, coffee pots and graphic pictures taken from the pages of comic books.
The next comic is entitled Mysterious Adventure.
This particular issue contains a total of six stories in which 11 people die violent deaths.
An investigator makes his way solemnly through a series of posters.
The following picture shows the school teacher as she stabs her husband to death in order to inherit his money.
He shows the senators the mail order ads that appear at the back of these books.
On one page, they were killing two men.
On the opposite page, they were advertising dolls for little girls.
After a lunch break, Frederick Wertham himself takes the stand.
Coming out in a white jacket that looked like a lab coat with his severity, clipped accent.
This research was sober, painstaking. a laborious clinical study.
Just exuded authority and expertise.
Wertham's testimony goes through the greatest hits of his anti-comic arguments.
Other people punished over and over again.
Complete contempt for the police.
Evil triumph.
They want to be like Superman, not like the hard-working, forsaken father and mother.
All supporting his thesis.
It is my opinion, without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.
Wertham's a tough act to follow, but My name is William Gaines and I am the publisher of the Entertaining Comics Group.
Bill Gaines had heard there wouldn't be any comic book creators testifying at this hearing, so he volunteers.
Here's Jeremy Dauber.
Gaines has a very good opening statement.
Are we afraid of our own children?
He says, do we forget that they are citizens too and entitled to select what to read or to do?
Or do we think our children so evil, so vicious, so simple-minded that it takes but a comic magazine story of murder to set them to murder, of robbery to set them to robbery?
So he's really taking on that point that just because you read something, that doesn't make you a delinquent.
But the strong start doesn't last.
Gaines had really been working most of the night on his opening speech, and he had been taking dexedrine, speed, you know, amphetamines, to kind of kick in at the time of his testimony, but the hearing was delayed, so the speed was wearing off and he was kind of crashing.
During cross-examination, Gaines is presented with the cover of one of his own comic books.
It's a drawing of a blonde woman's severed head.
The examiner asks him, Do you think that's some good taste?
Yes, sir, I do.
He says, yes, this is a good taste for a horror comic, but this is a good taste.
He says that bad taste for a horror comic would be to say show the bleeding stump of the head, which he doesn't do.
It's outside the frame of the image.
But he's like, a little blood here and there, a little severed head.
What do you expect?
That's kind of what this genre is.
Whether or not Gaines has a point... Sort of in the court of public opinion, he had really lost.
A New York Times headline the next day reads, Comics Publisher Sees No Harm in Horror, Discounts Good Taste.
When the hearings end, the subcommittee releases a report.
It tells comics publishers they have a responsibility to the nation's youth to ensure that their comics meet certain standards of morality and decency.
It's not a regulation.
It's an ultimatum.
Clean up your own house before we do it for you.
That summer, comic publishers get organized.
They develop a new comics code.
It's more extensive than their first attempt, and it'll be enforced by a paid director and staff.
But two days before the new code is set to be announced, Gaines holds a press conference.
Bill Gaines, for his part, stopped working in the industry, right?
He got out of the comics business entirely.
EC will no longer publish crime and horror comics.
The winter, after the Senate hearing, New York politicians and lawyers and publishers gather in a conference room on that day in February to take stock of how things are going in the world of comics.
That's when Wertham on the stand pulls out the weapons that he says he bought from comic book ads and he talks darkly about the Brooklyn thrill killers.
Afterwards, a report concludes that the new comics code just isn't enough.
New York passes a law cracking down on comics, and other states soon follow suit.
The comics industry essentially collapsed after this.
The most...
Mature sophisticated, adventurous kinds of comics all folded up and comics for a while became juvenile happy, cheerful and just a shadow of what they had been.
David Haydu said the whole comics controversy is really a classic story.
And this goes back historically back to Plato.
Every generation embraces art that engages with a set of ideas and themes and values that overtly challenge the values of the preceding generation.
And that's what comics were doing at this time.
You can see the same cycle play out today with something like video games.
Jeremy Dauper says, one thing the comic book controversy can teach us, don't panic.
All sorts of new things happen. have some kind of moral anxiety that often comes about them.
The kids are generally better off.
They're more all right than we think that they're going to be by virtue of this material.
We should be very leery about assigning any kind of monocausal explanation for social phenomenon.
People are more sophisticated readers and understanders of these things than we might give them credit for.
And we should really give those works more credit for kind of the richness and variety that is in them than we often do in trying to reduce them to what we perceive to be some problematic moral component to them.
Over the years, radical comics do make a comeback.
In the 60s, there's a movement of underground comics publications that refuse to follow the code and are released without its seal of approval.
As those comics gain an audience, more publishers ignore or reject the code, which will be updated and reduced in the.
Finally, in 2011, the last of the comic publishers would finally abandon the code altogether.
So it's a happy ending.
But where does it leave our hero, Bill Gaines?
When he quits the comic industry, Gaines decides to focus his efforts on another publication, one that isn't about horror or crime, but about humor.
It's called Mad Magazine.
Mad Magazine of course became a central urtext in the development of juvenile delinquency, and countercultural feeling would go on to influence all the countercultural things.
By 1960, almost 60 percent of American college students are reading Mad and being influenced by its countercultural ideas.
The adults are not happy.
And so the cycle keeps on going.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching.
Check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today.
If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address historythisweek at history.com or you can leave us a voicemail 212-351-0410.
Special thanks today to our guests David Haydu, author of The Tencent Plague, and Jeremy Dauber, author of American Comics.
This episode was produced by Julia Press.
History This Week is also produced by Julie Magruder, Ben Dickstein, and me, Sally Helm.
Our editor and sound designer is Dan Rosato.
Our researcher is Emma Fredericks.
Our executive producers are McKamey Lin, Jesse Katz, and Ted Butler.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
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