Topic: Papers from 'Seduction Of The Innocent' anti-comics crusader released.

[Freakshow]

Great read here.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/papers-of-the-dr-evil-of-comics-now-open.ars

Among comic books aficionados his name is still synonymous with prudery and repression. Several years ago I was perusing the goods at a comics store in Southern California, when I came across reprints of that exquisitely gruesome series, Tales from the Crypt.

"Say," I asked a teenager at the register, just as an experiment. "You ever heard of that guy who went ballistic on comics back in the 1950s?"

"You mean Dr. Wertham?" the kid replied with a big, knowing smile. "Fredric Wertham?"

Yes, him—the psychiatrist whose 222 boxes of papers the Library of Congress has opened to the public. In comics lore, Dr. Wertham has become something of a cryptic figure himself. But long before Tipper Gore, Edwin Meese, Andrea Dworkin, and our current crop of anti-video game crusaders took their turns at policing the national palette, Wertham was on the job, insisting that comics turned America's kids into crooks and worse.

He laid it all out in his 1954 best seller, The Seduction of the Innocent.

"The average parent has no idea that every imaginable crime is described in detail in comic books," Wertham warned. "If one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised."

When civil libertarians reminded Wertham about the First Amendment, the doctor cried foul.

"I do not advocate censorship," he pushed back, "which is imposing the will of the few on the many, but just the opposite, a step to real democracy: the protection of the many against the few. That can only be done by law. Just as we have ordinances against the pollution of water, so now we need ordinances against the pollution of children's minds."

He was only calling for a law "that would forbid the display and sale of crime comic books to children under fifteen," he insisted.

Sure, Wertham didn't advocate censorship. He just wanted the government to make it illegal for comic books publishers to sell to the people who actually bought them.
A small mountain

After years of pummeling by historians, it's now a bit unfashionable to be too hard on the guy. The Library of Congress blog offers a broader portrait of him. Born in Munich, Germany, Fredric Wertheimer came to the United States in 1922. In the 1940s he opened an outpatient mental health clinic in Harlem for the poor.

Wertham was an eloquent critic of Jim Crow segregation. His research on its harmful psychological effects was cited in the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education Supreme Court case. And he spoke out for the welfare of people behind bars, including Ethel Rosenberg, who was eventually convicted and executed for espionage, along with her husband, Julius.

Unfortunately, Wertham used his good reputation, idealism, and erudition to help whip up national hysteria against a form of literature. As he made the rounds before state governments and televised Senate Committee hearings, cities passed laws against comics that included prison sentences for selling them. Encouraged by school administrators, children staged mass comic book burnings, one described in David Hajdu's gripping book about the crusade, The Ten Cent Plague.

This particular burning took place in Spencer, West Virginia in 1948.

"The kids brought them into school on Tuesday, October 26, a cool, dry, sunny day, and they piled them on the grounds behind the building," Hajdu recounts. "The books made a small mountain about six feet high. At the end of the day, the six hundred children who attended the school emptied into the yard and assembled in a semicircle facing the comics."

After a student lit the cover of a Superman comic and threw it on top of the pile, "the flames rose to a height off more than twenty-five feet as the children, their teachers, the principal, and a couple of reporters and photographers from the area papers watched for more than an hour."
Special devotees

To be fair, Wertham was right about the raunchy side of comics. Their producers packed them with lurid crime scenes, ethnic stereotypes, and sexual violence. But the doctor's analysis went beyond these concerns, betraying prejudices that, in retrospect, make the case against his stance more strongly than his critics.

Here's what Seduction said about Batman and Robin, for example:

    At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and "Dick" Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a "socialite" and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: "Something's wrong with Bruce. He hasn't been himself these past few days." It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend's arm. Like the girls in other stories, Robin is sometimes held captive by the villains and Batman has to give in or "Robin gets killed."

"A boy of thirteen was treated by me in the Clinic while he was on several years' probation," Wertham added. "He and a companion had forced a boy of eight, threatening him with a knife, to undress and carry out sexual practices with them. Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman."

And here's what Wertham wrote about Wonder Woman.

    "The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman and Black Cat," he observed. "The homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable. The Psychiatric Quarterly deplored in an editorial the 'appearance of an eminent child therapist as the implied endorser of a series . . . which portrays extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian'."

Wertham cited various gay men who told him that they enjoyed Batman comics. And over the years a small battalion of feminist writers have approvingly noted Wonder Woman's alleged lesbian tendencies. But that's besides the point. For the author of Seduction, the presumed homosexuality of these characters was yet another reason to effectively ban a literary/art form.
Correction

And that's almost what happened. Following a series of McCarthy-like nationally televised hearings on comics, the terrified industry famously adopted a self-regulatory code that included the following production rules:

    * Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.
    * Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.
    * Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered.
    * The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.

In other words: obey, obey, obey, and obey. Did this self-correction turn our nation's comic book readers into nicer people and better citizens? Who knows.

Two things are for sure. Comic books got a lot less creative and interesting following the adoption of the code, and New York, the center of the comics industry, experienced a huge murder wave beginning in 1960 that didn't taper down until the mid-1990s.

As for Wertham, he continued to promote his ideas, which he tried to extend to television (apparently publishers were less interested in this subject at the time).

But there's an irony to the Wertham story. The psychiatrist was inadvertently a comic books collector himself.

"His copy of 'Kid Colt, Outlaw' (1967) includes a note that of the 111 pictures, 69 were scenes of violence," the Library of Congress notes. "An issue of 'Justice League of America' (1966) includes markings calling attention to the sounds of violence like 'thudd,' 'whapp' and 'poww'."

These documents and the rest of Wertham's papers are now part of the public record and open to all scholars.

Funny how this guy's stuff reads side-by-side with a lot of the recent political issues making the rounds these days.  Just replace 'comics' with 'Socialism' and you've got a ready-made rant suitable for Drudge.