Trial by jury and legal counsel are a right of adults. Children are being sent away to reformatories undefended and sometimes without even having their guilt properly established. I know of cases of children sent to reformatories when I was convinced that they were not guilty. In some cases familiar to me the police, needing a solution, have obtained confessions from innocent children by tricky and unfair methods. They include serious crimes, even homicide. In the procedure in the Children's Court we find again the principle that good laws and procedures may turn into their opposites. Children's courts were a great step forward; but nowadays they have to deal with such serious delinquencies that it would be more in the interests of children if the procedure were less informal -- and a little less routine. The safeguards for children in court have turned into a danger for them. The secrecy in children's courts, in itself commendable, has prevented the public from knowing what it should know. It also was a progressive step that children were not fingerprinted. But this law has also to some extent turned against the interests of children. At the very time when murders and violent crimes by young children have become a serious social phenomenon, the Federal Government has no accurate statistics on them.
Even the libel laws can be and are used against the interests of children. Writers and editors are really frightened that the powerful comic-book industry will use these laws against its critics. I had two experiences of my own. I had written that in the "good" comic book The Mysteries of Paris blood shows beneath the bandage of a man whose eyes have been gouged out. The publisher demanded a retraction. But I stood my ground, because the blood was there.
The other instance also involved a "good" comic book. I had written an article for the National Parent-Teacher Magazine at their request, on "What Are Comic Books?" in which I said, "It is a great error not to realize that 'Western' comics are just crime comics in disguise. The comic book Tom Mix, for example, has the story of an insane killer who hacks off people's hands, with the bloody details fully illustrated."
After this article appeared I received a long-distance call from the editor in Chicago. She had been visited by a representative of the industry and also by their lawyer. She also received several letters. "They persist in threatening me with a libel action. They said that on account of the article they were losing a million a year." Later she sent me their letters. They objected to the one sentence in my article, calling it a "libelous reference," "untrue," "untruthful" and "inaccurate." They said the story was all about a "dummy." They demanded "a public retraction and correction," and threatened to turn the matter over to their attorney for libel action.
Naturally the editor was alarmed. So I wrote her describing the comic-book-story sequence in detail:
Early in the story "Hands Off" in Tom Mix Western there are three pictures showing a box in which are the hacked-off hands of a real man (not a dummy). One little boy, looking into this box, says: "GULP! IT'S A PAIR OF HUMAN HANDS CUT OFF AT THE WRIST!"
The sheriff says: "JUMPIN' RATTLESNAKES! SOME LOW-DOWN MURDERIN' VARMINT CUT OFF A PORE FELLOW'S HANDS!"
In four pictures you see the human corpse (not a dummy), the hands of which were in the box.
The insane killer knocks out Tom Mix (in person, not a dummy) by socking him on the head (CONK in large yellow letters and a big splash of color) with a gun, hangs him (in person, not a dummy) by the wrists from a tree and holding in his hand a big ax red with blood says: "... I'M AGONNA CUT YORE HANDS JEST LIKE I DID FRISCO FRANK'S!"
In the next picture you see a further close-up of this hanging-by-the-wrists man (not dummy), a bloody ax swinging, and all.
After some more struggle and fighting and kicking, with more talk about cutting off the (real) man's hands, Tom Mix gets free. He constructs a dummy -- which in the pictures is of course indistinguishable from a real man -- and you see two close-ups with the insane killer and his ax, in two of which the hand is actually cut off. In two of them again the ax is red-stained, presumably with blood. And the dialogue reads: "HA! HA! THAR GOES ONE OF YORE HANDS, MIX! AND NOW TUR CUT OFF THE OTHER!"
It's only in the fourth picture before the end, in one balloon, that it is stated: "YOU JUST CHOPPED THE HANDS OFF OF A STUFFED FIGURE!" (Of course this is lost on the many children who just study the pictures and do not read the text.)
I ended my letter: "Far from retracting what I have written, I reaffirm that this Tom Mix story is a bloody crime story disguised as a 'Western' totally unfit for immature minds. And I hope that this example will help parents to see the methods by which the comic-book industry continues the corruption of children's minds. In a democratic society there is no other way to cope with such an evil than a law -- even if in one story, one of two handless corpses is a dummy."
This letter was not published in the Parent-Teacher. The editor told me later that she telephoned to the publisher, telling him what it said, and told him that "if you people persist in threatening us, we will publish Dr. Wertham's letter in full."
Later she received a letter from the publishers which ran true to form for comic-book stories and comics publishers: "It [the Tom Mix story] is not a representative story and was purchased several years ago." The letter also conceded that some of the comic books on the newsstands "are shocking, a disgrace and probably harmful to children."
The trouble is that all this, except for my original article, is unknown to the public. There is another point, too. Supposing it had been true that an insane killer had only hacked off the hands of a dummy, would that be suitable for children?
Whenever there is any court action stemming from comic books the question of what is in comic books does not come up at all. The industry relies then on the constitutional guarantee of free speech. It draws people's attention away from the real issue and veils the business in an idealistic haze. The framers of the Constitution and its amendments would certainly be surprised if they knew that these guarantees are used to sell to children stories with pictures in which men prowl the streets and dismember beautiful girls. The industry regards selling books to children as its prerogative, that is to say as a right to be exercised without external control. To use constitutional rights against progressive legislation is of course an old story. Theodore Roosevelt encountered it when he campaigned for pure food laws.
In these assertions of freedom in the case of comic books, just the opposite is concealed. "We are allowing ourselves," said Virgilia Peterson, "in the name of free speech (oh, fatal misuse of a high principle) to be bamboozled into buying or letting our children buy the worst propaganda on the market. It is a tyranny by a handful of unscrupulous people. It is as much a tyranny as any other on the face of the earth."
What is censorship? The industry has obscured that by claiming that the publisher exercises a censorship over himself. That is not what censorship means. It means control of one agency by another. When Freud speaks of an internal censor in the human mind, he does not mean that instinctive behavior can control itself. He specifically postulates another agency, the superego, which functions as censor. The social fact is that radio, books, movies, stage plays, translations, do function under a censorship. So do newspaper comic strips, which all have to pass the censorship of the editor, who sometimes -- as in the case of the Newark News -- rejects advance proofs. Comic books for children have no censorship. The contrast between censorship for adults and the lack of it for children leads to such fantastic incongruities as the arrest of a girl in a nightclub for obscenity because she wrestles with a stuffed gorilla, when any six-year-old, for ten cents, can pore for hours or days over jungle books where real gorillas do much more exciting things with half-undressed girls than just wrestling.
It is a widely held fallacy that civil liberties are endangered or could be curtailed via children's books. But freedom to publish crime comics has nothing to do with civil liberties. It is a perversion of the very idea of civil liberties. It has been said that if comic books for children were censored on account of their violence "you couldn't have a picture of Lincoln's assassination in a textbook." Would that be such a calamity? There are many other pictures of Lincoln's time and life that would be far more instructive. But the whole inference is wrong, in any case. A picture of Lincoln's assassination would be incidental to a book expounding larger themes. In crime comic books, murder, violence and rape are the theme.
There seems to be a widely held belief that democracy demands leaving the regulation of children's reading to the individual. Leaving everything to the individual is actually not democracy; it is anarchy. And it is a pity that children should suffer from the anarchistic trends in our society.
When closely scrutinized, the objections to some form of control of comic books turn out to be what are psychologically called rationalizations. They rationalize the desire to leave everything as it is. The very newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, which pioneered in comic-book critique, said editorially later: "Censorship cannot be set up in this one field without undermining essential safeguards in other fields." The example of Canada alone, and of Sweden and other countries, has shown how spurious this argument is. A committee set up by comic-book publishers stated at their first meeting that censorship is an "illegal method." That certainly confuses things. An editorial in the New York Times entitled "Comic Book Censorship" says on the one hand: "We think the comic books have, on the whole, had an injurious effect on children and in various ways"; but goes on to say: "Public opinion will succeed in making the reforms needed. To wait for that to happen is far less dangerous than to abridge freedom of the right to publish." How long are we supposed to wait? We have now waited for over a decade -- and right now there are more and worse crime comic books than ever before. And would the forbidding of mad killers and rapers and torturers for children abridge the freedom of the Times to publish anything it wants to? Why should a newspaper that stands for the principle of publishing what is "fit to print" make itself the champion of those who publish what is unfit to print?
While the industry wants to put all the burden on the children to protect themselves as best they can against injurious influences, John Kieran has expressed his belief that books for little children should be censored: "They have their foods selected for them, and the same applies to books. If the right books are given very young children to read, if the reading habit is started early, then when the children grow up they can select their own books."
In the comic-book field the alternatives to censorship have been fully tried. Self-regulation -- to the extent that it was really attempted -- has completely failed. In connection with parent-teacher organizations and other similar groups there have been local committees evaluating comic books. Most of their work of wading through hundreds of comic books was originally undertaken with enthusiasm, but has of course bogged down. So would the work of a committee that had to sample all the items in a local drugstore to see that nobody gets harmed.
What must happen to the minds of children before parents will give up these amateurish extra-legal committee activities and ask for efficient, legal, democratic protection for their children?
Legal control of comic books for children is necessary not so much on account of the question of sex, although their sexual abnormality is bad enough, but on account of their glorification of violence and crime. In the reaction to my proposals I found an interesting fact: People are always ready to censor obvious crudity in sex. But they have not yet learned the role of temptation, propaganda, seduction and indoctrination in the field of crime and violence. Psychoanalytically we know a great deal about the repression of sexual impulses. But to apply that directly to the psychology of criminal and violent impulses is far too simple. The reading of corrupting literature is a significant contributing factor in the causation of criminal and violent acts of juveniles. How many more cases like those in California, in Canada, in Chicago, in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Germany, in Australia, in New York, in England, must we have before we acknowledge scientifically and legally what the good sense of the people is recognizing more and more?
Whenever you talk to a lawyer about the legal curb of crime comic books he more likely than not will answer you: "Yes -- but don't forget the Winters case." I heard this case mentioned so often as an argument (or rather, instead of an argument) that I decided to study it myself.
The Winters case is for the crime-comic-book industry what the lawyers call the case of main reliance. A bookdealer in New York was selling a magazine for adults containing articles with such titles as "Bargains in Bodies." The content of the magazine was nothing but crime and bloodshed illustrated with gruesome pictures of victims and other such material. Two thousand copies of this magazine were seized under a section of the penal law which prohibits publications "principally made up of ... pictures or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime."
It took eight years from the time of the sale of the books to the final decision of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, which had the case for more than three of those years. The bookdealer was originally convicted. The conviction was upheld in higher courts and then reversed by the United States Supreme Court. When the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision it overruled the opinion of no less than seventeen (17) judges. And if one includes the dissenting judges of the U.S. Supreme Court, six (6) judges outweighed twenty (20). This does not indicate that some judges are good and some bad, or some right and some wrong. It does show that the judiciary with changing times has come up against a new social problem; namely, the necessity of censoring not only obscenity but also violence as well. The division of the Supreme Court is the reflection of a social conflict. It is the expression of the growing pains of democracy. The conflict pertains to the social control of what I have called the new pornography, the glorification of violence and sadism. It also pertains to the root problem of my studies, the protection of children against temptation, seduction and unfair punishment after they have succumbed.
In the Court of Appeals of the State of New York, Judge Loughran, expressing the opinion of the majority, wrote: "Collections of pictures or stories of criminal deeds of bloodshed or lust unquestionably can be so massed as to become vehicles for inciting violent ... crimes...." He clearly distinguished this type of social harmfulness from the ordinary objections to sexual obscenity. He took into account the question of free speech and pointed out that the interest in controlling social harm far outweighs any value such a publication might be construed to have.
In the United States Supreme Court the majority overruled this opinion. They made the dubious assertion that such words as "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent or disgusting" are "well understood through long use in the criminal law." In contrast, they held that massing stories to incite crime and stories of deeds of bloodshed and violence is too "vague" and unclear. If they had looked into this literature for children, sold not in 2,000 copies but -- at the very minimum -- in 250,000 copies, they would have found fifty-two murders and patches of blood in one book and eighty-one acts of violence in another. There is nothing "vague" about that. In other words, they did not take into account fully Judge Cardozo's concept of the "morality of the community" because they did not know what was going on in the children's segment of the community. They actually objected to the New York law because it "does not limit punishment to the indecent and obscene"! They rejected the emerging new-morality expressed by the New York State Court of Appeals.
I have no doubt that the next generation will regard Justice Frankfurter's dissenting opinion in the Winters case, in which Justice Jackson and Justice Burton concurred, as one of the great documents of legal and social philosophy of our time. He pointed out that the majority opinion could have been written by anybody who had never read the magazine in question. It is like playing "Hamlet without Hamlet." (Remember that this is exactly what the comic-book industry is doing and is permitted to do all along, with every legal case.) Justice Frankfurter pointed out "the bearing of such literature on juvenile delinquency." He took full account of the acknowledged fact that there is uncertainty about the alleged "causes" of crime. But as I understand his opinion, since one does not know exactly the causes of crime and juvenile delinquency, that does not mean that one should not act. On the contrary, since one cannot be absolutely precise one should play safe with regard to dangerous influences on children.
Justice Frankfurter pointed out the heart of the problem when he considers it wrong to find "constitutional barriers to a state's policy regarding crime, because it may run counter to our inexpert psychological assumptions or offend our presuppositions regarding incitements to crime.... " That is exactly what happened in the case of crime comic books. Psychiatrists and lawyers were so convinced that delinquency must have obscure, hidden and complex causes that they closed their minds to my findings that simple factors may touch off complex mechanisms. Justice Frankfurter expressed that in this way: "It would be sheer dogmatism ... to deny to the New York legislature the right to believe that the intent of the type of publications which it has proscribed is to cater to morbid and immature minds -- whether chronologically or permanently immature. It would be sheer dogmatism to deny that in some instances, deeply embedded, unconscious impulses may be discharged into destructive and often fatal action." As an example Justice Frankfurter referred to a youth barely seventeen who killed the driver of a taxicab in Australia. This case came before the High Court of Australia which -- more progressive than some of our courts -- took into consideration that the boy "had on a number of occasions outlined plans for embarking on a life of crime, plans based mainly on magazine thrillers which he was reading at the time. They included the obtaining of a motor car and an automatic gun." I was surprised to find in the High Court of Australia and in the United States Supreme Court in Washington an acceptance of facts which troubled children, weeping mothers, impatient fathers and eager young psychiatric assistants had brought to my attention over and over again in the dingy basement rooms of psychiatric clinics at Lafargue and in Queens!
Justice Frankfurter made it clear that such a law would not interfere with freedom of speech and certainly not with that of the legitimate writers, their publishers and booksellers, including those who write fictional or fact stories of crime: "Laws that forbid publications inciting to crime [are] not within the constitutional immunity of free speech." He tersely expressed the sense of the type of law that I had asked for in Boston with regard to children when he says that the state gives notice "that it is outlawing the exploitation of criminal potentialities."
When I asked for a law against children's crime comics I expressed the logical result of my clinical studies. But at the same time I was crystallizing and giving expression to the vague gropings of the more enlightened part of public opinion which seeks a curb on the rising tide of education for violence. Justice Frankfurter admirably translated this vague groping into verbal clarity by assuming that the legislators who framed the statute on which the Winters case is based had expressed their reasons in words. This, Justice Frankfurter said, is what they would or could have said:
"We believe that the destructive and adventurous potentialities of boys and adolescents and of adults of weak character ... are often stimulated by collections of pictures and stories of criminal deeds of bloodshed or lust so massed as to incite to violent and depraved crimes against the person; and ... we believe that such juveniles ... do in fact commit such crimes at least partly because incited to do so by such publications, the purpose of which is to exploit such susceptible characters ... such belief ... is supported by our experience as well as by the opinions of some specialists qualified to express opinions regarding criminal psychology and not disproved by others ... in any event there is nothing of possible value to society in such publications, so that there is no gain to the State, whether in edification or enlightenment or good of any kind ... and the possibility of harm by restricting free utterance through harmless publications is too remote and too negligible a consequence of dealing with the evil publications with which we are here concerned."
From this legal document I derived courage in what through no wish of mine, but by its own logic, had developed into a contest with the crime-comic-book industry. What respect they had for freedom of expression I could see from one of the minor episodes. As my material accumulated I decided to put it in book form. One day one of the most prominent experts for the defense visited my prospective publisher and told him what an error it would be to publish a book by me. This expert said I was "completely wrong" in my ideas about comic books and that I "stand absolutely alone" in my opinions about them. It is certainly fortunate that there are still publishers whose respect for freedom of expression takes other forms than those of the comic-book industry!
In my attempts to formulate the principles of a children's crime-comics law, I realized that it is necessary to introduce scientific public-health thinking for the protection of children's mental health. A large part of the mental-hygiene movement exists solely on paper. Concrete measures like those against comic books come up against all kinds of conventions and interests. There is a lot written and said about mental hygiene; but one point is usually forgotten: the mental-hygiene movement as a whole has not been very successful so far. We have not less, but more alcoholism. We certainly do not have fewer neuroses. We have more and more violent juvenile delinquency and drug addiction has invaded the schools. The reason for this relative failure is that mental hygiene has separated itself so much from other fields and has succumbed to an ostrich policy with regard to concrete social evils, explaining them away rather than helping to fight them. The intricacies of parent-child relationship explain a great deal, but they alone cannot carry the weight of a really dynamic mental hygiene. The influences from outside the family must be added.
Laws in the service of preventive medicine do not necessarily deal with criminal intent. They cope with what the lawyers call public welfare offenses, dealing with food, drugs and sanitation. What I wanted to accomplish in these years was to add mental health to these categories.
Speaking of the food, drug and cosmetic act, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association points out that legislation in these fields "stemmed from the unusual responsibility held by those who produce and handle such essentials as food and drugs." What I submit is that mental health is an even greater responsibility. That is why I advocated a public-health approach to the comic-book problem.
What should a public-health law accomplish? Its purpose is not the punishment of crimes, although as an example that may be necessary. When proposing a comic-book law I have often been told: "You can't make a law unless you enlighten the public first." Or: "Good laws cannot help when there are bad attitudes." Can't they? Over and over again the objection has been made to my proposals that you have to educate the people first. But if you look over the history of social betterment you will find that the law is the best instrument of adult education. If nothing else, a comic-book law would make people think. It would inform them that there are responsible people who take seriously the subtle harm that crime comics do. One of the functions of law is to inform the public.
The progress of public-health legislation has not been easy either. Theodore Roosevelt and LaGuardia, when they came out for laws controlling drugs and food, faced the same counterarguments made now against comic-book laws. A good example of the obstacles in the path of public-welfare laws is a court case of 1892. A landlord had failed to provide running water on each floor of a large tenement house. That seems to us now a self-understood requirement of public health. But at that time the Court of Appeals ruled: "There is no evidence, nor can the Court judicially know, that the presence and distribution of water on the several floors will conduce to the health of the occupants .... There is no necessity for legislative compulsion on a landlord to distribute water through the stories of his buildings; since, if the tenants require it, self-interest and the rivalry of competition are sufficient to secure it."
This is like what the comic-book industry and its experts and legal defenders say now: How can a court judicially know that a child needs good reading? Why not leave it all to the competition of the good books (leaving out the defenselessness of the tenants in the one case and of children in the other)?
It is no argument to say that many people have been exposed to a public-health hazard, as children are exposed to crime comics, without suffering any harm. Many people speed in automobiles, pass others on hills, ignore red lights, have defective lights and brakes, live in unsanitary dwellings, drink untested water or milk, eat uninspected meat, are exposed to all kinds of infectious diseases, are not vaccinated, and still are none the worse for it. But that does not do away with the need for safety and public-health laws. Public health aims to prevent possibilities, not to count casualties.
Mental health is just as important as physical health. Its protection should be based on the same kind of scientific clinical thinking as public health. The individualistic thinking in psychology becomes unscientific when applied to a mass problem of social life. Public-health legislation is not directed against the past injury to an individual, but against the potential future injury to all.
The threadbare argument that only the predisposed are potentially harmed by comic books is without merit from the point of view of public health. In the first place, it is not true. I have seen many troubled children and juvenile delinquents who were predisposed to achieving good things in life and were deflected from their course by the social environment of which comic books are an important part. Postulating beforehand who will be harmed by what, has long been replaced in public-health thinking by scientific observation. During the great flu epidemic of 1918 we learned that many regular subway riders and slum dwellers were immune while strong young men from the country succumbed. There is not only a psychopathology, there is also an epidemiology of juvenile delinquency.
In public health we also have little sympathy with the claim that we do not have to prevent illness because if we rule out one factor people would get sick sooner or later anyway, if not with this disease then with something else. Yet that is how the comic-book industry and its experts reason.
Attention to the individual in mental hygiene is not decreased, but increased, if the mass effects of social causes are given their due. Preventive work is trying to bring it about that the circumstances injurious to people do not occur. In public-health thinking the generalization cannot be postponed until every detail is established. The clinical fact of the harm to some is the signal of the potential danger to all.
I had occasion to try out these ideas of mine in a totally different field -- although at one point comic books were involved there, too. I was giving expert testimony in Wilmington in the Delaware test case concerning segregation in elementary and public schools. I presented to the court in detail the thesis that regardless of the quality or inequality of the physical facilities, the fact of segregation itself constitutes a definite hazard for the mental health of children.
Segregation in school is only one factor in the social context of other factors, I went on. One cannot postulate a fixed hierarchy of factors operative in every case. The very fact that these children are exposed to race prejudice in other spheres highlights the school segregation. In this connection I mentioned the race prejudice taught in comic books. The court accepted my public-mental-health point of view and ordered the children admitted to the schools from which they had been excluded.
The analogy with the comic-book question is obvious. But whereas in the case of school segregation something new was accomplished, with crime comic books the same reasoning did not work.
One obstacle was the attitude of some writers, editorialists and columnists on child welfare whose minds are closed to something new. They regard juvenile delinquents as if they were totally different from other children. Even liberal writers write of "the mark of Cain which an evil destiny brands on some of our children." They believe that emotionally strong children are unaffected, while only emotionally insecure children are exposed. This is pure speculation. It means the distinction between an invulnerable elite and a vulnerable common group. Reflect what snobbishness is involved.
He is a naughty child, I'm sure --
Or else his dear papa is poor.
Even when they write about comic books -- asserting that they have nothing to do with normal children's troubles or with juvenile delinquency, however -- they admit that comic books are "lurid enough to chill the blood"; that they have a "potentially adverse effect on juvenile culture generally"; that they show a "sly, smutty suggestiveness"; that "sadism" is a "key motif"; and that comic books "demonstrate pictorially to the child reader how to gouge eyes with the thumb, kick in the stomach, bite ears" and other such "dangerous information." These quotations are from a book on juvenile delinquency by Albert Deutsch. Despite all these admissions, he denies firmly that comic books may be a "significant factor in child delinquency" and even denies that they have anything at all to do with the violent forms of delinquency.
Juvenile delinquency cannot be regarded as a self-contained entity. Children's behavior does not fall into such rigid classifications. If you take a hundred delinquent children and a hundred non-delinquent children, you will find that the difference between them is not one of ingrained emotional make-up, but one of socio-psychological circumstances. It is only human (and scientific) to realize that just a hairline separates the child who does not get into trouble from the one who does. The belief that delinquent children are totally different from others is one reason why they are so harshly treated. Even the difference between a mild delinquent act and a serious one is not the difference between black and white. I have seen children at every stage of this sequence: A young boy experiments in talking about sex with a little girl; he has the impulse to inspect her; he experiments; he wants her not to tell; he threatens her with one of his comic-book-bought knives; he really harms her. Is it reasonable to assume that each act has a different causation, the serious act a "very deep" cause and the mild act a very superficial one?
Deutsch states that "emotionally healthy children are unharmed by them." If sadism, as he himself says, is a motif of this children's literature, must the children be emotionally unhealthy to get sadistic ideas from it? That is contrary to all human and scientific experience.
He also uses the ostrich argument that the child-delinquency rate "was actually declining." It was not. Moreover, delinquency statistics are most unreliable. Whenever a social or private agency needs more appropriations or contributions to combat juvenile delinquency, the delinquency rate goes up; when they make reports accounting for the money spent, the rates go down. The rosy statistics offered by the New York City Youth Board in 1953 are a case in point. About three facts there can be no doubt: Delinquency rates are at present very high; the nature of the delinquencies has become more violent; the age of the delinquents has become lower.
Harper's magazine, in its "Personal & Otherwise" department, has been taking up cudgels for the comic-book institution. The statement that the increased brutality in juvenile delinquency and the mass production of crime comic books are related "got our blood pressure up," they admit. As a doctor, of course I deplore that, not only for their sake but because the injustice done to children both before they commit delinquencies and afterwards needs calm reflection as well as knowledge of the facts.
The violence is, in P. & O.'s opinion, the "product of a moral and social confusion." How can one better defend the status quo than by blaming something so vague and general, to the exclusion of concrete facts? P. & O. reproaches me for oversimplification and states that I neglect socio-economic conditions. Does he think that comic books drop from heaven? They are a clear expression of economic conditions and are a part of the social environment of these children.
P. & O. finds my case against the comic books "full of holes." One of these holes is that they do not contain any more violence than Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Last of the Mohicans. For a literary critic in a good magazine this is a shocking statement to make. Are girls strung up by their ankles in these books? Are their acts of violence fully illustrated so that you can see blood gushing, cut-off shapely legs, and corpses disposed of in every conceivable manner? More important, these books are art, they have nuances of descriptive narrative and they have a theme which is not the theme of violence. P. & O. also defends the thesis of so many other writers in connection with comic books, that demonstrably bad reading matter does not have demonstrably bad effect on children. I have found that it does.
When such writers defend crime comic books so vehemently, what are they actually defending? The very inconsistency of their arguments makes one wonder. Crime comics are a severe test of the liberalism of liberals.
And so it went. The writers discussed the "problems," the public thought comics were getting better, the industry flourished. One day in the Queens General Mental Hygiene Clinic I was visited by an older and very influential professional friend. After some friendly preliminaries he hesitated and cleared his throat.
"You know," he said, "you do it all wrong. Why do you have to keep on doing this work with comic books? The research is all right. But why do you have to talk about practical solutions? That is bad for your reputation. It is petty. You have stated your results. Now if you do absolutely nothing, the people will come to you for advice. But you go on and want to change something. You have written articles about comic books. Why do you have to ask for a law and get into the fight? If you keep on acting like this, you'll be marked."
It really seemed for quite a while that Superman had licked me. But then, as so often happens, things took a new turn. It came in the form of a telephone call from Washington. Would I be willing to confer with the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime on the subject of crime and juvenile delinquency? I agreed to do so and a few weeks later the senator came to my apartment, for what turned into a long conference. He told me that while his committee was mainly interested in organized crime in interstate commerce, he was concerned about children. He had inquired in Washington whom to consult and several high officials had given him my name. He added that President Truman had urged him especially to look into the childhood roots of criminal behavior.
I had on my desk a speech President Truman had made a short while before in which he asked for "prevention and cure" and for "wholesome recreation." "If those children," the President had said, "have the proper environment at home, and educationally, very, very few of them ever turn out wrong.... I am particularly anxious that we should do everything in our power to protect the minds and hearts of our children from moral corruption .... We must not permit the existence of conditions which cause our children to believe that crime is inevitable and normal."
"You know, Senator," I said, "there is a strong organized force in our society which does exactly the opposite of what the President wants. It provides unwholesome recreation, it claims that many children will go wrong whatever influences they are exposed to, it exposes them to moral corruption and leads them to believe that crime is normal. Why not investigate this force, the crime-comic-book industry?"
"Oh, I've heard about them," he replied. "Those horror books that describe the perfect murder or some other crime, ostensibly for educational purposes."
The senator combined a certain dignity with what seemed to be a sincere homespun friendliness, and he seemed eager to do something for children. I told him that for a number of years I had been making clinical investigations on the subject in three different clinics.
"Can you show me some of your material?" he asked. I showed him comic books, clinical records, converted toy guns. We spent some time going critically over the evidence in a manner that reminded me that he was a lawyer.
He explained to me the tremendous power that his committee had. They could subpoena anybody and anything, question witnesses under oath, trace business transactions and scrutinize whole industries. What could the committee do about this? Was there anything the Federal Government could do?
"The Federal Government does not even have accurate statistics on murders and violent acts committed by children," I said. "Any child who can write his name can order a dangerous switchblade knife from comic books' advertisements. With these knives countless children have been threatened and coerced and injured. The Federal Government seems to be the only agency with the power to ascertain the truth. How many crime comic books are there that glorify crime? I don't mean guesses and propaganda figures, but actual printing-orders, sales, shipments abroad, and so on."
"Could something be done with interstate commerce?" he asked.
"That has been suggested," I said. "For example, Nevada has passed a resolution requesting Congress to regulate comic books by law." And I explained that I thought the evidence would show the necessity for a law -- possibly on an interstate commerce basis -- that would prevent the sale and display of crime comic books to children under fifteen.
Then and there he appointed me as psychiatric consultant to his committee. I made my co-operation dependent on some conditions: that the far-flung propaganda of the industry would be scrutinized; that there would be a careful legal investigation of tie-in sales, juvenile drug addiction and childhood prostitution; that the recruiting of children for work with adult gangs and racketeers be investigated; that illustrations from comic books would be used.
He agreed to all that, reiterating the enormous powers he had and his paramount wish to do something for children. His final inquiry was whether I thought the public would be interested in such an investigation.
Soon afterwards he wrote to thank me, sent me messages and conferred with me by telephone from Washington. Aides of the committee came to me and I outlined for them in detail preliminary steps. I can't say that I expected this to lead to a curb of the industry, but I did think that there would be at least some kind of an investigation.
Questionnaires went out to a number of people. Then the whole thing stopped abruptly -- or maybe it was just that it took a different direction.
I was on vacation when I got a wire saying that the committee contemplated publication of a report on juvenile delinquency and wanted a written contribution from me for inclusion in the report. Of course I refused, replying that such a hasty publication without investigation was certainly not in the interests of the public.
The next thing I heard was a news broadcast from Washington: "Crime Comic Books have nothing to do with juvenile delinquency, Senator Kefauver reported today." Next day there were front-page headlines: STUDY FINDS DOUBT COMICS SPUR CRIME, and: COMICS DON'T FOSTER CRIME, and: FBI HEAD DISCOUNTS HARMFUL EFFECTS OF CRIME COMIC BOOKS. Editorials elaborated. The Times editorial stated that the majority opinion of child-guidance experts was "that there is no direct connection between the comic books dealing with crime and juvenile delinquency"; that "the facts show that some comic books are read more by adults than by children" (it did not mention whose "facts"); and that "it is the emotional make-up the child brings to his life experiences that conditions his reactions to them" (in other words, it's all the child's own fault again).
The Sunday News editorial commented: "It's a pleasure to pass along the news that Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate Crime Investigating Committee has now gone deeply into the subject of the crime comic books and has brought up a mass of testimony which ought to spur the earnest souls to look around for something else to worry about.... The Kefauver Committee took its testimony largely from unprejudiced sources. . . . The verdict of the majority gave a clean bill of health to the comics. So we hope that the public has heard the last of this earnest-soul gripe."
Why is it a front-page story that comic books do not have any effect?
Ironically enough, it was I who had inadvertently given the crime-comic-book industry the biggest advertising it had ever had!
I got hold of the published report of the Senate Crime Investigating Committee and studied it. At the taxpayers' expense it prints statistical charts on the frequency of juvenile delinquency prepared by -- the comic-book industry! It reprints the whole comic-book issue of the scientific journal edited by one expert for the defense, with contributions by three experts for the defense (and one article entirely devoted to newspaper comic strips, which has nothing at all to do with comic books) and with one article devoted only to attacking me. It contains unchecked statements by crime-comic-book publishers, some of whom brazenly defy the most modest requests made by the committee: "Our organization has published hundreds of titles and issues of comic magazines during the past ten years, and it would be an impossible task to begin to answer .... " (this in reference to questions about circulation and income from comic books). There are no illustrations, although I had been assured there would be.
The report gives the opinions of eight "child guidance experts." Two of them are not and do not claim to be child-guidance experts. Both are lawyers. One of the other experts is designated editorially in the report as a doctor, although she is not, and as a psychiatrist, which she is not either. Five of the eight experts, according to the report itself, are or have been employed by the comic-book industry -- some for as long as ten years! It is these five experts who say that comic books are all right. The three independent experts condemn comic books severely. The division is clear-cut: Those connected with the comic-book industry defend comic books; those independent of the industry consider them harmful. It needed no Senate inquiry to tell us this.
The report also contains replies to a questionnaire from probation officers and other officials, most of whom had never thought of studying the influence of crime comic books. They had not even asked prisoners or children in their charge about comic-book reading. Some of them speak unblushingly about "the consistent decrease" of juvenile delinquency. There are some condemnations of crime comics, including the case example of the little boy comic-book reader who leaped from a telephone pole believing himself to be Superman.
The report bristles with all the cliches and platitudes that have ever been uttered in defense of comic books: that they are too simple an explanation; that the children would do it anyhow; that comic books are here to stay; that they give release of aggressive instincts; that children who do something wrong have "definite antisocial tendencies" in the first place; that only unstable children become unstable and comic books have "no effect on the emotionally well-balanced boy or girl"; that a judge calmed a child witness down by handing him a pile of comic books; that comic books make an impression only on "impressionable minds"; and so on and on. And all this is published without comment, without analysis, without any investigation whatsoever, and with only a minimum of editing -- and that mostly wrong.
Omitted from the report are items that would have belonged there. For example, the answer to their inquiry by the president of the Newport Council of Social Agencies, a psychiatric social worker with a great deal of experience with children, which states that from her contact with children in Washington, D.C. and in Rhode Island she had become increasingly aware of the link between comic books and delinquency and had had "contact with non-delinquent minors whose cultural background seemed solidly rooted in this literature." Omitted also is the testimony before the committee of one of the most experienced criminologists and penologists in the country, Mr. James V. Bennett, secretary of the Criminal Law Section of the American Bar Association and director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He had told the committee that crime comic books are connected with crime and asked for an investigation into the business of crime comic books, "the traffic in which now amounts to seventy million copies a month ... " (this was in 1950).
After the report was published one of the senator's aides telephoned me that the senator wanted me to know that "his whole statement had been twisted in the press," that I "should have faith in him" and that "he's determined to do it the way he said to you." That was the last I ever heard.
A few weeks after the report was out I received a letter from a prominent member and committee chairman of the American Bar Association. "I was very much disappointed," he wrote, "in the publication of the Kefauver report. And I think a serious mistake has been made in its publication. It is unfortunate that so much of it is from media sources and from persons in the employ of or under obligation to the media."
As for me, I learned a great deal from this report. It taught me that comic books really are a test of the reaction of a society not only to children's literature but to children themselves. Assume for a moment that a senate committee with such unlimited powers had investigated the raising of hogs. Would they not have informed themselves and the farmers a little better?
The further history of the Kefauver Committee's crime investigation is well known. It was referred to in television circles as "the biggest hit of the season." Arthur Miller wrote that he was struck by "the air of accomplishment among the people that is really not warranted by the facts." I do not entirely agree with this. I think these hearings actually did accomplish something: They demonstrated not only the link between politics and crime, but also the link between politics and crime investigation.
I kept on with my studies as before. There were always new comic books and always new children. I was not in the mood to participate in any more investigations. But my telephone rang again: The New York State Legislature had appointed a Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics. Would I collaborate with them as a psychiatric expert, help them in their investigation and testify on the effects of comic books on children?
I had become a little skeptical of investigating committees. Superman always seemed to get the best of them. So I asked to be excused. But later on when the committee got in touch with me again I changed my mind and agreed. I had convinced myself that this committee had gone at its work seriously and sincerely. They wanted to get at the facts and in all fairness had given the comic-book industry every break. They started with the premise that no law was necessary and gave the industry more than two years' time to make some kind of improvement by self-regulation.
During one of the first conversations I had with members of this committee to study comics, one of them said to me, "The general counsel of the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers said to me, 'Somewhere right now a little boy has a gun and reads crime comics. That boy will be president some day: What do you say to that?"
"All I can say," I answered, "is that that is precisely what I would like to prevent."
I testified for the committee, at length and under oath, on two separate occasions separated by an interval of a year. With many examples from comic books and children's cases I testified to what I had seen and found, what I had done and thought. The main bad effect of crime comic books on children, I said, is on their ethical development. I made it clear that I was not saying this as a moralist, but as a doctor who believes that orientation as to what is right and wrong is part of normal mental health. I explained that juvenile delinquency is only one part of the crime-comic-book question, although a very serious one. The greatest danger of crime comic books is to the normal child.
I answered the counterarguments of the industry, like the one about law and order winning. A typical crime story has this ending: "And so the story ends in blood, as it began in murder."
What about the crime comic books, I was asked, that are educational and teach children not to commit delinquencies? I have never seen one, I answered. If you find one, I shall be glad to return and modify my statements.
When I testified the second time the committee had convinced itself that the proclaimed self-regulation of the industry had completely failed and some legal control was necessary. On that occasion, again under oath, I pointed out that the cover of the comic book draws the child's attention to a crime, the text describes one, the pictures show how it's done and the advertisements provide the means to carry it out.
For years I had been seeing children who get into trouble with switchblade knives. I had bought several of these knives, signing a child's name on the order, in answer to comic-book advertisements. When I testified before this committee for the second time, I produced one of them quickly, as I was talking, flashing open its blade. A switchblade knife is a good symbol of the crime-comic-book industry as a whole. Then I outlined my idea about a public-health law against the threat comic books offer to the general mental health of children. The law is not concerned with what doctors think, but with what they can prove. Many comic-book stories are nothing but perverse and violent fantasies of adults and it is these perverse fantasies that are sold to children. Censorship legislation requires a "clear and present danger." My idea of a public-health law is totally different. Anything clear or unclear, present or future, which under any circumstances may cause damage or harm to health, can be controlled by legislation. There is only one question: Is it harmful or not? Such a law could enlighten the public, just as laws about hoof and mouth disease enlighten farmers about livestock. I am not a lawyer, but from a medico-legal point of view I would suggest that the sale and display of crime comic books to children under fifteen be forbidden.
The committee, which had taken the testimony of sixty-two witnesses, accepted my findings and my suggestions. They issued altogether three reports. In the first "Interim Report," before I testified, they made this important observation: "It is strange but true that the questions heretofore propounded to individuals charged with greater or lesser crimes by probation officers have not touched upon the question of the reading of comics." (Compare with the Kefauver committee which published unanalyzed the uninformed opinions on crime comics of just such probation officers.)
The second report concludes that crime comic books "impair the ethical development of children" and are "a contributing factor leading to juvenile delinquency." It states that "the comics which sell best are crime comics."
The third report contained the committee's legislative proposals. The chairman, Assemblyman Joseph F. Carlino, stated that the bills were the result of the failure of the comic-book industry to "realize their public responsibility and, in the cause of common decency, take up the necessary steps to set up self-regulatory provisions."
The committee's report states: "The publishers and their representatives ... completely rejected and refused to recognize the reality that children are influenced and stimulated by what they read, see and hear in the same way in which adults are influenced or stimulated."
It calls crime comic books "a threat to the health of children" and concludes that the committee "has been obliged to recommend the adoption of legislative controls. It had no more choice in doing so than it would have in suppressing disease-causing acts which were found to be a threat to the public health or safety."
Before the law proposed by the committee was voted on by the legislature, it was publicly opposed by the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, the New York State Council of Churches, the Mystery Writers of America, the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations.
The technical aspects of the bill had been worked out most carefully by the committee. They had done research on the Winters case, the Los Angeles County case, the Chicago case and other legal cases having a bearing on such a law. Their legal consultant was Reuben A. Lazarus, an authority on constitutional law and on bill drafting. He had drafted more bills affecting the City of New York than any other person, living or dead, and is responsible for the present New York City charter. So if there was any legal authority to judge the constitutionality of the proposed law, it was this comics committee's legal consultant. The committee's bill was drafted and redrafted in many conferences; the head of the New York State Legislative Bill Drafting Committee, Theodore E. Bopp, participated and members of his legal staff passed on it.
When the crime-comic-book control bill came before the Assembly, they voted for it: 141 to 4. The Senate voted for it, too, unanimously.
So it really seemed that a step forward had been made. But Governor Dewey attended to that. He vetoed the bill, giving as his reason that "it fails to meet fundamental constitutional requirements." Superman has many disguises.
This decision was strange. When Columbia University Press published its educational comic book Trapped which deals with juvenile drug-addiction, Governor Dewey stated: "It is a superb job. I hope millions of copies are distributed." (They could not distribute more than 30,000.) If the governor thinks that a single "good" comic book can do so much good, should he not have refrained from interfering with the democratic will of the parliamentary majority which believed that hundreds of millions of bad comic books can do so much harm?
When I discussed this outcome with my associates in the comic-book research I was pleased to note that they were not discouraged by it. Nor was I. But I was bothered by something else. I had lunch one day with Henrietta Additon, an authority on delinquency and penology for whom I have the greatest admiration. She had another guest, the head of a civic committee on children and a woman with great influence in such matters. In the course of lunch I asked this guest what she thought about crime comic books. She answered, "I know there are people for them and people against them. I don't take any side. I am absolutely neutral."
At that moment it became clear to me for the first time that I was defeated. This business of not taking sides on the part of those who could help to make conditions easier for the young to grow up, was more deadly than Kefauver's desertion or Dewey's veto. Neutrality -- especially when hidden under the cloak of scientific objectivity -- that is the devil's ally.