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ZOK! The influence of Seduction of the Innocent on the evolution of comic books in America

I wrote an essay on Seduction of the Innocent (by Dr. Fredric Wertham, published 1954) for my American History summative, and I figured comics = you might be interested? Anywho it's under the cut.

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The period between 1945 and 1959 was a time of great change for the United States. The general atmosphere was one characterized by domestic uncertainty about such issues as race and communism, and international concerns about the Cold War.[1] The bipolar worldview of America versus the Soviet Union during the Cold War encouraged and reinforced fear of communism and security threats to America. A 1950 Senate report entitled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government labeled “those who engage in overt acts of perversion” (homosexuals and other “sex perverts”) as security threats to the United States government, since they “lack the emotional stability of normal persons” – “One homosexual can pollute a government office.”[2] Anything that was outside of the norm could be connected to the Soviets. This fearful and paranoid atmosphere was the one in which the book Seduction of the Innocent, written by Dr. Fredric Wertham, was published. Seduction of the Innocent had a long-lasting impact on the comic book industry, and American youth culture.

During the 1950s, there was a fear that the mass media stood between parents and their children. The threat of atomic annihilation loomed over American society; part of that fear was a collection of smaller worries centered around the breakdown of the family.[3] Before the 1950s, popular culture had been blamed for delinquency many times; however, the heightened anxiety in post-war culture led to a panic that was more universal and intense than those before it. Before the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, the idea that mass culture had a more powerful influence than family, tradition, or history had existed; Wertham achieved his success by fully articulating what many parents were already thinking. Americans in the 1950s were plagued with fears of delinquency in their children; behavior that would today be labelled as normal teenage rebellion was considered worrisome and delinquent in the 50s. With both men and women working, reduced parental supervision led to a greater fear of juvenile delinquency than ever before; it was only in the late 40s and early 50s was the word “teenager” coined. The appearance of a new age group, between children and adults, and the apparent rise in delinquency, caused a need for more control over youth culture; there was fear of the medium nearly every child was reading, a perfect environment for Wertham’s book that charged parents with a duty to protect their children from inappropriate material and provided them with an easy target.

Seduction of the Innocent, a book James Gilbert calls “the most famous document” involved in the controversy surrounding teen culture and censorship of popular media, addressed and validated the concerns that parents had about their children being influenced by mass media, as opposed to being influenced by their parents and elders.[4] It did so by presenting comic books – one of the most popular forms of media at the time – as dangerous to the mental health of their assumed target audience, children. Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, and warned that comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency due to their sexual subtext and explicitly violent imagery and text. Its author, Fredric Wertham, came to the conclusion that comic books were corrupting young readers through working at the Lafargue clinic, a clinic for African-American children, where he witnessed many juvenile delinquents reading comic books. For the comic book industry, Wertham’s book meant the beginning of a long campaign against the entire industry, and created a change in comic book writing and content that has not yet been fully reversed.

After World War II, comics were extremely popular, and not just with young children. 95% of boys and 91% of girls from 6 to 11, 87% of boys and 81% of girls from 12 to 17, 41% of men and 28% of women from 18 to 30, and 16% of men and 12% of women above the age of 30 read comic books.[5] 540 million comics were printed in 1946; in the later 40s and early 50s, that number nearly doubled.[6] Many post-war comics took their inspiration from film noir and pulp fiction, moving away from the previously popular superhero genre. After 1944, no new successful comic book superheroes were introduced; 90% of DC comics during World War II featured superheroes, while only half of DC’s lineup featured superheroes after 1949.[7] The extremely scandalous publishing company EC (Entertaining Comics) specialized in horror comics, which portrayed gore, vampires, zombies, and monsters. MLJ created Archie, whileGleason printed crime comics, which, as the name would suggest, portrayed crimes and rarely ended with the justice system as the winning side. Fox’s Jungle comics featured “good girl art” (art which portrayed scantily clad women with exaggerated proportions).

Many parents were concerned about the content of the comics their children were reading, but had no way to express their concern. Seduction of the Innocent provided an outlet for the tension in the nation and at the same time allowed parents to satisfy their concerns about their children’s reading material. Seduction of the Innocent became extremely popular, catapulting Wertham to an unprecedented near-celebrity status. It talked about crime and horror comics, but Wertham also criticized superhero comics for having inappropriate subtext. He considered the life of Batman and Robin, a.k.a Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, as the “wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” which he believed affected children’s sexual development.[8] He said that “the Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies,” something especially worrisome for parents during the Cold War years due to the belief of the time that homosexuals were security risks to the United States.[9] He considered Wonder Woman the female counterpart of Batman, stating that “the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely anti-masculine,” and quoting the Psychiatric Quarterly, which said that Wonder Woman “portrays extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian.”[10] Seduction of the Innocent was well-received by critics outside of the comics industry. Sterling North, a man who had campaigned against comics before the publication of Wertham’s book, hailed Seduction of the Innocent as “the most important book of the year.” Sociologist C. Wright Mills and critic Wolcott Gibbs both applauded Seduction of the Innocent and Wertham himself for performing an admirable public service in bringing to light the horrors that comic books caused.[11]

Wertham was not the only person to crusade against comics. Gershon Legman, in Love and Death, Gilbert Seldes, in The Great Audience, and Albert E. Kahn, in The Game of Death: Effects of the Cold War on Our Children, all devoted parts of these books to criticizing comic books for corrupting readers. However, Seduction of the Innocent was the first book completely devoted to the ill-effects of comic books on children, and was extremely popular with the general public, despite errors and distortion in his depiction of comic readership and content, and a lack of a bibliography. Fearful American parents, concerned for their children’s wellbeing, ignored the lack of scientific basis in Wertham’s “study” (considering that it lacked a control group, or any other necessities in a scientific experiment, despite making claims about a correlation between comic-reading and juvenile delinquency) and focused their energy on fighting against comic books. The points raised in Seduction of the Innocent caused a panic that led to comic book burnings in homes and even at schools, although there had been some before its publication. On December 10, 1948, St. Patrick’s Parochial School in Binghamton, New York, around 2000 comic books were burned in the school courtyard by students. There were similar burnings at Peter and Paul Parochial School in Auburn, New York, and at St. Cyril’s Parish School in Chicago.[12] Churches and concerned community organizations held campaigns against comic books, while newspapers warned readers against the harmful psychological effects of comic book reading.

Although Seduction of the Innocent was a major part of comic censorship, it was not the only factor. The Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency that occurred around the time of Seduction of the Innocent’s publication were a large factor in the demise of EC Comics, and the more popular comic genres of the early 1950s. The hearings on juvenile delinquency began in November of 1953, when Robert C. Hendrickson, the leader of the committee on juvenile delinquency, held hearings in Washington, Boston, Denver, and Philadelphia on the subject. The goal of these hearings was to raise public awareness of delinquency, and explore the reasons for juvenile delinquency. The evening before the first hearings in Washington, Hendrickson received 7,500 letters, 90% of which stated that an increase in sex and crime in public entertainment was the chief reason for juvenile crime.[13] Within three months of those first hearings in Washington, Hendrickson received 20,000 letters. Of these, 65-75% labeled comic books and crime shows on television as causes of juvenile delinquency.[14] A Senate hearing was then scheduled for April 21, 1954, just after the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. Bill Gaines, the main publisher and co-editor of EC Comics, and Fredric Wertham were both witnesses at the hearing. Wertham’s testimony was just before Gaines’; he essentially restated the main points of his book. He called all comics (not just crime or horror comics) major factors in causing juvenile delinquency and took quotes from comics out of context.[15] Bill Gaines then followed Wertham’s testimonial with a defense of comic books that was torn apart by the committee and, after the hearing, by the media.[16] Bill Gaines’ ill-timed testimony in defense of comic books backfired on the company and the industry; “the whole of comic books appeared to be on trial,” says David Hadju in The Ten-Cent Plague.[17] This highly publicized hearing provided fuel for the campaign against comics, but would hardly have been as successful without the appearance of Fredric Wertham and the newfound popularity of Seduction of the Innocent. The contrast between Wertham’s cool, professional testimony that outlined the dangers of reading comic books, backed by his impressive credentials, and Gaines’ passionate but unprepared and poorly defended support of horror comics further increased anti-comic hate in the United States.

Seduction of the Innocent had a significant effect on the comic book industry and culture. Publishing companies who had boomed post-World War II were suddenly struggling to survive, with the notable example of EC.[18] The Senate hearing on juvenile delinquency was also a major part of the decline in comic sales - however, its popularity most certainly skyrocketed beyond what it would have with the presence of Wertham as an expert witness. While Fredric Wertham was not an official part of the CCA[19], his book was undoubtedly a main reason for its formation; by feeding the fears of American parents, Wertham forced comics to clean up their act, leaving superhero comics, without any violence or storylines that questioned social norms, as the main genre. Comics that did not carry the CCA seal were rarely given space on newsstands, essentially destroying the horror, crime, and romance comic genres. More than half of comics on the newsstands were discontinued; the number of titles published in the U.S. dropped from 650 to around 250.[20] Those involved in the comic industry were shunned because of their profession; Will Eisner, writer of Spirit comics, said that, “You were held in disdain if somebody knew what you did.”[21] Lampert, an artist for Flash, once noticed a boy reading a Flash comic, and told him he drew the comic. His first taste of the growing discontent over comics came when the boy was amazed, but someone near them said, “I wouldn’t brag about it, buddy.”[22] Pete Morisi, a comic artist who lost his job after the period between 1954 and 1956 when comic sales fell drastically, ended up as a police dispatcher in Brooklyn. He said, “The comics were dead. I was heartbroken.”[23] Comic book artists suddenly had nothing to put on their resumes, since, as Carmine Infantino said, “If you said you drew comic books, it was like saying you were a child molester.”[24] More than eight hundred writers, artists, and editors involved in the comic book industry lost their jobs after the hysteria over comic books.[25]

The publication of Seduction of the Innocent was a significant turning point in comic book history and culture. Comic books were far more popular in the post-war era than they had ever been or ever would be; censorship of comics affected the estimated 90% of children who read comics. Before the publication of Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, post-war comics were characterized by crime and horror, a sharp change from the superheroes of World War II, and were loved by children growing up in an era of fear and paranoia. Wertham took a stand against an entire industry that catered to the needs of the era’s teens by portraying all comic readers as children, and ignoring the creativity of comic artists who felt “powerless, by virtue of their class, race, education” during the time.[26] Grant Morrison, author of Supergods and many current DC titles, writes that Wertham was “at the heart of this attempt to annihilate an art form [...] His 1954 best-seller Seduction of the Innocent blamed the comics and their creators for every social ill to afflict America’s children.”[27] Wertham created one of the first post-war moral panics, affecting one of the largest facets of youth culture.[28] Comics, read by both adults and pre-teens during the Golden Age of comic books, became stereotyped as worthless depictions of violence aimed at young children.[29] The hysteria over comic books led to censorship that turned explorations of controversy over race and other contemporary issues into simple storylines with black and white villains and heroes.[30] Comic books were the first real “youth culture” icons; they set the stage for the popularity of movies, television, rock ‘n‘ roll, radio, and more recently, video games and the internet. This overt and exaggerated campaign against the most popular teen medium of the time set a precedent for the more famous anti-rock ‘n’ roll ideas that came after the anti-comic campaigns. Today, most comic book fans and creators dismiss Seduction of the Innocent as unfounded and unprofessional. Grant Morrison calls Dr. Wertham’s attack on superhero comics inexplicable; his anti-comic campaign was a “one-handed attack that was conducted with the same brutish, ignorant disregard for the truth that was said to characterize America’s enemies.”[31] Seeing this attack in any other light is difficult, particularly after Wertham went on to describe his belief that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”[32]

Word Count: 2,443

Endnotes:

1 Dunar, Andrew J.. "Origins: Postwar America and the Roots of the Fifties." In America in the Fifties. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 3.

2 Whitfield, Stephen J.. "The Stigma." In The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 44.

3 Costello, Matthew J.. "The Cold War and the Forging of the Liberal Consensus." In Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2009. 55.

4 Gilbert, James Burkhart. "Introduction: The Social History of an Idea." In A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. London: Oxford University Press, 1988. 8.

5 Wright, Bradford W.. "Confronting Success." In Comic Book Nation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. 57.

6 ibid, 88.

7 ibid, p.57

8 Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954. 190.

9 ibid, p. 191

10 ibid, p.193

11 Hajdu, David. "The Triumph of Dr. Payn." In The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 243.

12 Wright, p. 86

13 ibid, p. 251

14 ibid, p. 251

15 For example, an EC story that protested bigotry towards Mexican immigrants contained the word “Spic,” which was quoted by Wertham as evidence of the comic industry teaching racial hatred.

16 During the hearing, Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator who helped Hendrickson during his hearings, asked Bill Gaines if a man holding a woman’s head and a bloody ax was in good taste. Gaines replied that it was, for a horror comic. The next day, this incident was the subject of newspaper articles from New York to Ohio.

17 Hadju, p. 273

18 All EC comics were discontinued when their new CCA-friendly line failed, and Mad only survived by becoming a magazine, to which the Comics Code Authority (see footnote below) did not apply. Mad was eventually bought by DC.

19 The CCA stands for Comics Code Authority. The Comics Code Authority was the first successful attempt at self-censorship of comic books; self-censorship had been proposed in 1948, but National Periodicals, a major producer of comics, did not support it. The CCA was based on a code drafted by the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, and was implemented in late 1954, after the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. The CCA was adopted by most comic book companies, with the exception of EC, since a code that banned words such as horror or terror, or content such as zombies, vampirism, or werewolfism, was obviously anti-horror or crime comics. The CCA’s effect lasted until 2011, when Archie Comics became the last comic publishing company to remove the CCA seal from their comics.

20 Hadju, p. 326

21 ibid, p. 228

22 ibid, p. 103

23 ibid, p. 327

24 ibid, p. 326

25 ibid, p. 7

26 ibid, p. 238

27 Morrison, Grant. "Chapter 4: The Explosion and the Extinction." In Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, 54. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011.

28 “Moral panic”: a term coined by Stanley Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex in the 1960s. A moral panic occurs when a group of people, a condition, or a type of media is portrayed as harmful to society by the media and right-wing thinkers, leading to a deterioration or disappearance of the media or group of people.

29 Kelley, Mark. The Golden Age of Comic Books: Representations of American Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Publication. April 1, 2009. Accessed May 21, 2012. http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=dittman.

30 Gagne, Kenneth A.. "Moral Panics Over Youth Culture and Video Games | Gamebits." Gamebits. http://www.gamebits.net/other/mqp/ (accessed May 21, 2012).

31 Morrison, p. 54

32 Hadju, p. 6

Bibliography:

"1954 Comics Code Authority." Comicartville- the ORIGINAL comic art community site. http://www.comicartville.com/comicscode.htm (accessed May 17, 2012).

Costello, Matthew J.. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009.

Dotinga, Randy. "Why comic books scared us so - CSMonitor.com." The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com. http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2008/0325/p13s02-bogn.html (accessed May 21, 2012).

Gagne, Kenneth A. "Moral Panics Over Youth Culture and Video Games." Gamebits. April 27, 2001. Accessed May 21, 2012. http://www.gamebits.net/other/mqp/ (accessed May 21, 2012).

Gilbert, James Burkhart. A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Hajdu, David. The Ten-cent Plague: The Great Comic-book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Kelley, Mark. The Golden Age of Comic Books: Representations of American Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Publication. April 1, 2009. Accessed May 21, 2012. http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=dittman. (accessed May 21, 2012).

Lewis, A. David. "Seduction of the Insolent (or, Retraction of the Innocent)." Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/jan03/rdm_0103.shtml (accessed May 17, 2012).

Morrison, Grant. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011.

Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Wright, Nicky, and Joe Kubert. The classic era of American comics. Lincolnwood: Contemporary Books, 2000.

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