Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Rapeutationists and DIRA zombies are preconditioned for violent behavior by cinema and video game violence.

Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 5:44 am

Seduction of the Innocent
by Fredric Wertham, M.D.
© 1953, 1954, by Fredric Wertham
New material copyright © 2004 by James E. Reibman

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Table of Contents:

Introduction, by James E. Reibman
Publisher's Note To The Original Edition
Author's Note
1. "Such Trivia As Comic Books": Introducing the Subject
2. "You Always Have To Slug 'Em": What Are Crime Comic Books?
3. The Road To The Child: Methods of Examination
4. The Wrong Twist: The Effects of Comic Books on the Child
5. Retooling for Illiteracy: The Influence of Comic Books on Reading
6. Design For Delinquency: The Contribution of Crime Comic Books To Juvenile Delinquency
7. "I Want To Be A Sex Maniac!": Comic Books And The Psychosexual Development Of Children
8. "Bumps and Bulges": Advertising in Comic Books
9. The Experts For The Defense: The Scientific Promotion Of Comic Books
10. The Upas Tree: Making And Makers Of Comic Books
11. Murder In Dawson Creek: The Comic Books Abroad
12. The Devil's Allies: The Struggle Against The Comic-Book Industry
13. Homicide At Home: Television And The Child
14. The Triumph Of Dr. Payn: Comic Books Today And The Future

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."...

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....

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? ...

A century ago boys and girls of five and up had to work as chimney sweepers. They got skin diseases from the soot. The proposal was made that the practice of sending children up chimneys be stopped. You can well imagine what their employers would have answered if they had had the benefit of the type of experts the comic-book industry has now. They would have said that only those children who are predisposed get skin diseases, that it is the children's fault if they want to satisfy their need of motility by going up chimneys, that children who don't go up chimneys get skin diseases, too, and besides what better outlet for aggressive instincts is there than to climb up chimneys and do battle with soot? There being no such experts then, the Earl of Lauderdale stated that if something were done for the children by law through an Act of Parliament, private initiative for being benevolent and helping children would be affected and would disappear. And the Religious Tract Society joined in the anti-reform movement and urged these stunted and sick children to wash well on Saturdays, attend Sunday School and read the Bible: "Thus you will be happy little sweeps." It took the British Parliament ninety years to control this legally....

Whenever you hear a public discussion of comic books, you will hear sooner or later an advocate of the industry say with a triumphant smile, "Comic books are here to stay." I do not believe it. Someday parents will realize that comic books are not a necessary evil "which, but their children's end, naught can remove." I am convinced that in some way or other the democratic process will assert itself and crime comic books will go, and with them all they stand for and all that sustains them. But before they can tackle Superman, Dr. Payn, and all their myriad incarnations, people will have to learn that it is a distorted idea to think that democracy means giving good and evil an equal chance at expression. We must learn that freedom is not something that one can have, but is something that one must do.

-- Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 5:47 am

PART 1 OF 2

Introduction by James E. Reibman

Fredric Wertham's ideas on the harmful effects created by media-induced violence, first set out in the late 1940s, resonate with those who are concerned by the searing of our cultural fabric. Many now decry a pervasive lack of civility and attenuated mores that reveal a profound failure to agree on what constitutes acceptable moral and social behavior. Our common distress has led us to revisit the debate on the origins of human aggression and the extent to which one's environment contributes to the development of personality. Although technological changes have introduced videos, cable television channels, and computer networks to the issues raised by crime comic books, the fundamental elements of concern remain the same: rape and sexual abuse, gender bias, racial prejudice, and anti-social behavior. Moreover, constitutionally protected rights to free speech, economic power, and industrial self-regulation all continue to contribute to the problem of violence in mass media.

Of course, these issues have a long history on the transforming power of art in Western Culture. Although the debate centers on Plato's argument in The Republic that recognizes the dangers of the mimesis (imitation): "For the fact that it succeeds in maiming even the decent men, except for a certain few, is surely terrible ... ," [1] alerts us to ambiguity of a powerful image. Certainly, Plato's fear of the unintended consequences of poetry is challenged by Aristotle's notion of cathersis in the Poetics that allows one to " ... thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place ... "and then "to effect a proper purgation of these emotions .... " [2] These competing ideas frame the argument that Wertham considers the locus classicus of the attraction of violence. This is set out clearly in the episode of Alypius in The Confessiones (397-401) written by St. Augustine of Hippo. Alypius, a young student, refuses his friends' entreaties to join them as they view the spectacles in the Colosseum in Rome. One day, when his friends drag Alypius to the Colosseum, he sits in the stands but covers his eyes so that he will not see what is taking place. Nevertheless, Alypius hears the shouts and slowly peers through his fingers to view the action. The spectacle is so riveting that Alypius lowers his hands. As he becomes engrossed in the violence and gore, his eyes become so full of desire, concupiscentia oculorum, that he cannot turn away and he joins in the blood lust himself. [3] "The effect of mass seduction by public spectacles on an immature mind, especially in the direction of unconscious fascination by sadism and violence" and the "role of social temptation" are first credited by Wertham to St. Augustine, whom Wertham calls "the first modern psychologist." [4] The power that draws one into viewing violence is neither redeeming nor edifying, but it is real and often harmful to young minds.

In Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which sums up his early work on comic book violence and addresses the commercial forces driving popular culture, Fredric Wertham directly confronts the issue of censorship raised by those who maintain that his efforts to control crime comic books subvert constitutional protections of freedom of speech:

What is censorship? The industry has observed 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 a censor.

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 comic books has nothing to do with civil liberties.

In crime comic books, murder, violence and rape are the themes. 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. [5]

Wertham's argument is that the pernicious influence crime comic books wield on the minds of children constitutes primarily a public health issue, not a fundamental issue of censorship. While he does find moral bankruptcy in publishers hiding behind the veil of freedom of speech to cover the lucrative industry they have created, as a psychiatrist, Wertham's contention rests on the interpretation of clinical research. [6]

Alarmed by what he had discovered from his teenage patients at the Lafargue Clinic, Wertham set up a Hooky Club and a Comic Book Reader's Club, based on a group therapy model, to gain a better understanding of the relationship between juvenile crime and the patterns of behavior that were imitated from scenarios set forth in particular crime comic books they read. Soon, Wertham realized that he had misunderstood the nature of comics. At first Wertham paid little attention to the notion that comics influenced behavior, since he had assumed that most comics were essentially harmless, like those appearing in newspaper strips; however, he quickly realized his mistake. These patients provided testimony revealing the inspiration and method for their crimes came from comic books. This anecdotal evidence of patterning crimes from comics persuaded Wertham to investigate not only crime comic books, but also how these comic books shaped the moral and social universe of these patients. Wertham neither readily understood the influence crime comic books were exerting on impressionable young minds, nor did he fully appreciate the economic forces behind the proliferation of these books. His analysis of the publishing industry and their methods of distribution led him to focus on the power of the mass media and to argue that violence in the culture, if not challenged, would precipitate a public health epidemic affecting children.

At a symposium, The Psychopathology of Comic Books, which he organized, held 19 March 1948 at the New York Academy of Medicine, Wertham made the following introductory remarks:

Psychiatry was practiced intramurally in institutions originally, and only gradually concerned itself with the mental hygiene problems outside. In the same way psychotherapy was originally confined to the consultation room and is only now beginning to overcome its own claustrophilia and take an interest in the social forces that come to bear on the individual. It is, therefore, in the best scientific tradition to consider a social phenomenon so enormously widespread as comic books. The idea of this symposium originated in researches first carried out by the Lafargue Clinic. This is the first exhibition of comic books. You see here examples of about one-third of all the comic book titles. This is also the first report on scientific research about comic books which is not under the auspices of the comic book industry itself. It was carried out in clinics, in schools and in private practice.[7]

Wertham and his colleagues discovered from their clinical studies of children evaluated at the Lafargue Clinic [8] that the most benign influences that comics had on these patients include reading problems (which he labeled "linear dyslexia") and manifestations of inchoate sexual impulses or physical aggression. Their research indicated that more severe crimes of murder, robbery, and torture were accomplished by imitating story lines outlined in comic book scripts. Since many of these patients were committed to Wertham's clinic by either the New York courts or the Juvenile Aid Bureau, these children already evidenced hostile behavior and social dysfunction. Moreover, this pool of patients was increasing and their actions were becoming so egregious that Wertham, as a physician, felt impelled to act. Functioning as both a psychiatrist and an epidemiologist, [9] Wertham organized this first symposium ever held to discuss the social and psychological effect of comic books. This research attracted widespread national attention, opening additional fora for Wertham to publicize his studies on the enigma of preventable violence. [10] The quest to understand and to prevent violence, the core of Wertham's psychiatric practice, shaped his thinking on how the mass media create a climate permitting, indeed encouraging violent, anti-social acts. [11]

Fredric Wertham is remembered today, primarily as the author of Seduction of the Innocent, an incisive, blistering attack on the violence and horror purveyed by the comic book industry. This is ironic, for Wertham was in fact a distinguished psychiatrist of wide and deeply humane interests, an advocate of social reform, and a defender of civil liberties. His experience as a forensic psychiatrist in the 1920s led to a fascination with the ways in which violence shaped society and controlled human behavior. He insisted that "the power of human violence is very great, not only on the direct victims but in its influence on the orientation of a whole society as well. That is why the control of violence-producing factors occupies such a key position in the power structure of any society." [12] Wertham's professional career and personal actions were in part a dedication to understanding the nature of violence in society, the impact of violence on the individual, and the function of violence in determining the direction and the shaping of culture. From our vantage point today -- with our mass media filled with violence provoking rock videos and movies celebrating the exploits of characters like Rambo and Freddy Krugger, while drug related and youth gang violence fills the newspapers and television news -- Wertham's studies seem especially prescient.

Wertham's research took him through this era of crime comic books to the culture violent movies and television created. [13] Writing in 1966 Wertham clearly analyzed a problem still extant:

Television represents one of the greatest technological advances and is an entirely new, potent method of communication. Unfortunately as it is presently used, it does have something in common with crime comic books: the devotion to violence. In the School for Violence, television represents the classical course. Many of the movies being shown increasingly on the TV screen also have a lot of violence in them and so merge with the overall picture. [14]

At this time, however, both television and movies were mild in comparison to what appears today on network and cable channels. The climate of violence developing since this observation has, if anything, increased and become more dangerous. Competition for audience share, demand for advertising revenue, and misguided applications of First Amendment rights have all encouraged aggressive displays of violent behavior to be broadcast. [15] The proliferation of music videos with their vignettes of racial, sexual, and social violence has attenuated social restraints, actually making such behaviors acceptable. These media have legitimized for many young people amoral conduct as it defines, indeed privileges, a discourse celebrating victimization of the individual. The acceptability of brutality and brutish behavior has now become the norm, not something to be abhorred. Wertham's observations prophetic in the 1940s are relevant today. Like Cassandra, Wertham was often ignored or scorned by those social scientists who sought to chart a new, more advanced civilization in a celebration of modernity. Unfortunately, the drive to broaden the culture neglected the substantial intellectual principles developed in the humanistic heritage of Western civilization and instead focused on cleansing what are now labeled elitist notions, ones that once provided stability. What emerged, however, is this current ahistorical climate in which an ill-conceived marriage of pop psychology and pop culture are supported by sophisticated developments in communications. Our advanced technical age allows unevaluated ideas and images to predominate.

Of course, the irony in all this is that Fredric Wertham, a traditional left-wing European intellectual and product of the Enlightenment tradition, continues to be both castigated and characterized as a reactionary. In addition to this calumny, his ideas on violence in the mass media once embraced by either mainstream intellectuals or appropriated, to his chagrin, by the extreme right are now quoted by Susan Brownmiller among current social theoreticians [16] who want to restrain a culture they maintain portrays women in a degraded and hostile fashion. Certainly Wertham recognized such intellectual imperialism and decried hostile images of women. However, Wertham was not a Cato-like Censor, but a responsible physician who believed that children need protection from such violent images and activity: nevertheless, adults were free and capable to evaluate all types of material. [17] His fundamental issue involved the capacity for mature understanding. He did not endorse violent forms of art and literature but recognized that since violence is not innate, man learns from his environment, therefore children need protection and education in order to realize how this material diminishes the human spirit.

Born 20 March 1895 in Nuremberg, Fredric Wertham was one of five children of Sigmund and Mathilde Wertheimer, nonreligious, assimilated middle-class Jews. His father, a successful businessman, was an active member of the local political establishment and endorsed the prevailing German authoritarian culture. His mother abandoned the Jewish traditions of her family, accepting her husband's preference for assimilation with the Gentile culture. Of course, during the Nazi period, the family was considered Jewish under Hitlerite laws: while Fredric had emigrated to America in the 1920s, his siblings and his mother who were still living in Germany and Austria, took refuge abroad. His brother Paul spent the war years in a Rotterdam attic hidden by his housekeeper, whom he later married. The other brother, Emil, set up a plastics factory in England, joining sister Babi who lived near London, The younger sister, Ida, by then also a psychiatrist, fled Austria and settled in Lancashire where she remarried into the locally prominent Macapline family. Ida and her son Richard Hunter, a psychiatrist at Guy's Hospital, became eminent medical historians known for their major studies Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1535-1860 (1963) and George III and the Mad Business (1969). Throughout much of his adult life Fredric Wertham did not encourage family contacts, maintaining a cordial yet studied distance.

As a young man on the eve of the Great War (1914-1918), however, Wertham spent several summers in England with relatives, among whom was his cousin Ella Winter, who later became a controversial journalist and activist. He found the environment there open and relaxed -- a stark contrast to the rigid, disciplined, and intellectually pedantic German culture at home. During this period he explored Fabian socialism and the writings of Karl Marx. More importantly, he became an avid reader of the writings of Charles Dickens, impressed by their influence on the recognition and reform of social injustices. At the outbreak of the Great War Wertham, pursuing medical studies at King's College, University of London, found himself stranded in England and, as a German national, he was for a short time interned near Wakefield, then paroled. Since he so admired British society, Wertham happily remained in England during the war, reading medicine and literature. After the war he continued his studies at the Universities of Erlangen and Munich, obtaining his M.D. degree from the University of Wurzburg in 1921. Paris and Vienna were additional venues of postgraduate study before he joined the Kraepelin Clinic in Munich.

Emile Kraepelin, the distinguished classical psychiatrist who developed the standard system for the classification of mental diseases, was Wertham's first significant mentor. At this time psychiatrists generally made diagnoses on the basis of symptoms and theoretical preconceptions; Kraepelin believed the context -- family history, culture, environment, economic and political aspects -- must be considered in treating a patient. His technique owed much to Sister Castelli, the head nurse who spent more than thirty years working at the clinic. Of Sister Castelli, Wertham wrote: "Some of the doctors in the clinic were professionally snobbish and thought it beneath their dignity to ask her questions or discuss with her patients or procedures. On me, however, her knowledge, her authoritative manner yet coupled with modesty, made a great personal impression. I often discussed my patients with her and learned more from her about the Kraepelinian approach than from many formal lectures." [18] By rejecting the hierarchical constraints of German culture, especially in medicine, Wertham reveals his democratic nature not only in his relationship with this nun but also in his evaluation of her accomplishments: "to me she is a part of the history of psychiatry." [19]

Other significant figures in the history of psychiatry had varying influences on Wertham's development as a psychiatrist. Before leaving for America in 1922, Wertham, at the request of Walter Lippmann, visited Sigmund Freud to see if he would write an article on psychoanalysis for The Saturday Review. Freud told Wertham that one should not write on psychiatry for the popular press and that "Anyway, in America no one cares about psychoanalysis." [20] Freud did not write the article, and Wertham, as his career progressed, did not follow Freud's advice.

Wertham left Munich to accept a position working with Adolf Meyer, who had introduced to America Kraepelin's method of observation of abnormalities, first at Worcester (Massachusetts) State Hospital and then at Johns Hopkins University. It was with Meyer at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, where Wertham felt his training could best be continued. His arrival in Baltimore signaled a fundamental break with his European life. Not only did he Americanize his name, but he also applied for citizenship.

During his seven years at Johns Hopkins, Wertham refined his skills as a psychiatrist and began his career as a professor. In Baltimore Wertham established a friendship with H.L. Mencken (where he became a member of his Saturday Club) and worked with Clarence Darrow on legal issues to become one of the first psychiatrists willing to testify for indigent defendants, including blacks. Most importantly, Wertham met and married Florence Hesketh, an artist and Charlton Fellow in Medicine at Johns Hopkins. With her, Wertham co-authored "The Significance of the Physical Constitution in Mental Disease" (1926) and The Brain as an Organ: Its Postmortem Study and Interpretation (1934), for which Hesketh drew all the cell plate illustrations. Of The Brain as an Organ, Adolf Meyer wrote, " Psychiatry and neurology are in great need of internal harmonization. The present book is a most valuable contribution in the direction of such an orientation, not only among the specific data, but also among the broader relations." [21] The Brain as an Organ, for which Wertham received the first psychiatric grant made by the National Research Council in Washington, became a standard medical text published in several editions, for strange as it now seems, the brain had not been considered an organ by psychiatrists.

Wertham's marriage to the Maine-born, Wellesley-educated Florence Hesketh began a lifetime partnership and collaboration. Not only did Hesketh enjoy a distinguished career as a sculptor (her work was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Egan Gallery), but she also served as Wertham's editor, co-author, and protector. She created an environment, especially at 44 Gramercy Park, New York, and at Blue Hills, Kempton, Pennsylvania, in which the doctor, as she referred to him, could focus his energy and attention on his work. He used to say with gratitude that she made all the important decisions, allowing him to concentrate on psychiatry and writing. It was at her urging that they bought instead of the usual sedan, a two-seater M.G. motor car, so that their jaunts to the country were limited to themselves.

While at Johns Hopkins, Wertham was the first to publish a study on the effects of mescaline and did pioneer work on insulin use in psychotherapy. He also developed the mosaic test: by having a patient manipulate and assemble small multicolored pieces of wood into a freely chosen design, Wertham could evaluate the resulting pattern for what it revealed about the patient's ego organization. This diagnostic procedure was sometimes used in conjunction with paintings created by the patient, such as the watercolors done by Zelda Fitzgerald when under his treatment at the Phipps Clinic.

Wertham's acute critical judgment and his unassuming nature become apparent in his relationship with his cousin Ella Winter and her husband Lincoln Steffens. On a vacation visit to them in San Remo, Wertham discovered that Steffens was in the initial stages of the writing of his Autobiography (1931), seeking the right format for presenting the materials of his life. From their discussion Steffens decided that Wertham was the kind of reader he envisaged for his book. Steffens then sat Wertham down and read to him from the manuscript in order to gauge the effectiveness of the writing. Wertham's friendship and unacknowledged support for Steffens were returned, somewhat unkindly, many years later by Ella Winter. As Wertham told a close friend, on a visit to him, Winter was struck by admiration for the vivid colors of his El Lissitzky collection and learned that Madame Lissitzky, widow of the constructivist artist, was holding much of her husband's work for him since he was a longtime friend and collector. Within a week of her visit Winter set off to Russia, made contact with Madame Lissitzky, and by claiming to be Wertham's emissary, she obtained the collection for herself. Upon discovery of this treachery, Wertham refused to take action against her, though for the rest of his life he keenly felt the loss of those Lissitzky's promised to and saved for him. [22]

Named senior psychiatrist at Bellevue by the New York Department of Hospitals in 1932, Wertham that year organized and directed for the Court of General Sessions, now the State Supreme Court, the nation's first clinic providing a psychiatric screening for every convicted felon. In 1936 he was named director of Bellevue's Mental Hygiene Clinic. Four years later he moved to become director of psychiatric services at Queens Hospital Center. To fulfill as yet unmet critical needs in the health care system, Wertham founded in 1946 in Harlem the Lafargue Clinic and pioneered a clinic for sex offenders, the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center, in 1947. This center was a humane effort to treat sex offenders and bring them back into the mainstream of American society.

During the 1930s Wertham's expertise as a forensic psychiatrist became known to the general public. His involvement in a number of spectacular murder cases, discussed in Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (1941) and The Show of Violence (1948), led him to advocate the duty of the psychiatrist to bring the psychiatric background of murder into relationship with the law and the society it represents. Wertham's support for an intelligent use of McNaughton's rule determining legal insanity, his understanding of how environmental forces shape individual responses, his argument that violence and murder are diseases of society -- all persuaded him that violence is not innate, and so could be prevented.

Dark Legend investigates the story of Gino, a seventeen-year-old, Italian-American who, commanded by the ghost of his dead father, murdered his promiscuous mother. In his diagnosis Wertham found that Gino "suffered from a definite circumscribed mental disorder which rendered him defenseless and resourceless at the time of the deed." [23] As a result of Wertham's testimony at the trial, Gino was committed to a psychiatric institution: discharged nine years later completely recovered, he married and led a happy, productive life. Wertham's compelling narrative draws upon the myth of Orestes and the legend of Hamlet. The incisive analysis of matricide set out in this book prompted Ernest Jones to remark: "Freud and I both underestimated the importance of the mother problem in Hamlet. You have made a real contribution." [24] Later Jones discussed with him the issues concerning matricide raised in Wertham's work before the publication of his own study on Hamlet and Orestes.

Wertham sent his manuscript of Dark Legend (working title: Shadow of Madness) to Thomas Mann for comment and advice. In a 3 October 1939 letter, Mann told Wertham he had read the manuscript with "intense interest" and praised Wertham for drawing "in it brilliant lines of connection between the actual murder case and some great psychological types of world literature." Prophetically Mann observed, "I believe that the book will attract a great deal of attention, especially so in America, where psycho-pathological matters find a certain popularity... " [25] And Mann was correct, for four years after publication, Arthur Miller wrote Wertham: "I have finished reading your Dark Legend for the 2-1/2th time and want to congratulate you on a profound and to me a deeply significant work. I keep wondering whether I could corner you for an hour or two some afternoon or evening, when we might discuss aspects of the work and some of the things suggested by it to my mind ... I can promise you no thorough grounding in psychiatry, but my fascination for it is professional and if I have few answers I do have plenty of questions. If you could manage a little time would you let me know where and when? " [26]

The fascination Dark Legend engendered impelled Helene Frankel to write an adaptation of it for the theatre. In a 25 March 1952 New York Times review of the play, Brooks Atkinson complained that there was too much of the case history about it. "No one," he wrote, "expects Mrs. Frankel to write with the fire of Aeschylus or Shakespeare, for no one is in those major leagues today. But to escape mediocrity even a factual, realistic play needs some of the momentum and excitement of poetic feeling." [27] The excitement and feeling that inform Wertham's own telling of Gino's tale, with its resonates of Aeschylus and Shakespeare had been lost in the process of dramatization.

The focus on matricide in Dark Legend made many people uncomfortable. In England publication of the book was delayed on "the score of obscenity," giving rise to the demand that its distribution be limited to physicians and mental health professionals. Only after a detailed review appeared in the New Statesman was the book available to booksellers. Hollywood was likewise made nervous by the book. The director Reuben Mamoulian (whose projects included the movie "Queen Christina" with Greta Garbo, the movie version of Clifford Odets's play "Golden Boy," and the stage play "Porgy" by Du Bose Hayward) told Wertham over a congenial luncheon in the Oak Room at New York's Plaza Hotel how much he wanted to make a film of Dark Legend, emphasizing in his conversation the conception of "Family Honor." "Of course," he added, " in a movie either on stage or off stage a mother cannot be killed. This would be completely out of the question." [28] He suggested it would be easy to substitute for the mother some old woman, possibly an aunt. In an almost stereotypical Hollywood fashion, Mamoulian assumed that Wertham would readily assent to such a ludicrous change. Not so! Of course, Wertham, a man of character and integrity quickly refused the blandishments of Hollywood.

In The Show of Violence Wertham analyzes the role a psychiatrist must play in criminal court proceedings, explains for the layman his discovery of the Catathymic Crisis, where "a violent act -- against another person or against oneself -- provides the only solution to a profound emotional conflict whose real nature remains below the threshold of the consciousness of the patient, [29] and reveals his own role in several celebrated murder cases. In this book Wertham discusses his courtroom work in the pathetic case of Madeline, a young woman who killed her two children and then failed in her suicide attempt. He also details the cases of the notorious child-murderer Albert Fish, the "mad sculptor" Robert Irwin, and the professional gunman Martin Lavin, among others. In each case Wertham probed the social background, the medical history, the political implications, and the legal response, all of which led him to question "society's sense of guilt." Wertham reconstructs the individual, historical development of the murder impulse to uncover the effect societal forces had in its creation. He argues that

The violence that manifests itself in violent crimes is not the expression of an inborn instinct of aggression and destruction. People like to be non-violent. It is always other negative factors in personality development and in the social medium where growth of the personality takes place that lead to murderous acts of violence. The murderer can never kill without a transformation of values which may come from the innermost mind but is always derived ultimately from social prejudgments and prejudices. [30]

His discussion of both individual and mass murder cases in The Show of Violence presents an indictment against a culture that fails to act as "its brother's keeper."

In 1947 Wertham contributed the introduction and psychoanalytic notes to a collection of stories The World Within: Fiction Illuminating the Neuroses of Our Time, edited by Mary Louise Aswell, literary editor of Harper's Bazaar. This book attempted to evaluate the literary imagination working on the "inner kingdom" of the mind. Writings by Hoffmann, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, James, Proust, Kafka, Welty, and Faulkner, among others, are examined for their psychiatric insights. Using methods of interpretation he developed in an experiment with Richard Wright ("An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son," 1944), Wertham explored the unconscious elements (the dream process) he found in the stories in this anthology.

Cognizant of the misuse of psychoanalytic material in literary criticism, Wertham is careful to maintain the integrity of writing and to respect the artistic dignity of each author. In his introduction Wertham set out the essence of this relationship:

What brings the science of psychiatry in the psychoanalytic era into such close and fruitful relationship with the art of literature is that psychoanalysis is analysis of a special kind. It does not delve into the mind to isolate disparate elements. Psychoanalysis always aims to relate the detail, the symbol, to the living organism as a whole. It is here that the research of the scientist and the search of the artist find a common ground. Great writers know how to give a unified picture of a whole personality through minute observation of a meaningful expression, a characteristic mannerism, or an unconscious habit. [31]

Literature reveals the inner conflicts of the individual as it reflects the larger conflicts of the world without.

For a long time, Wertham had recognized that poor blacks in America were not only discriminated against in law and society but were also denied psychiatric medical services. Fully cognizant of this social and medical reality, Wertham, after trying -- and failing -- for almost ten years to obtain funding to open a clinic, decided that he must act even without governmental or philanthropic sponsorship. As Richard Wright noted, this presented not only an economic risk, but also a bold challenge to political establishments:

There occurred to the one psychiatrist who is striving to build a "social psychiatry," bold, sub rosa idea as to how to break the deadlock and subvert the defensive "idealism" of psychiatry in New York City. Dr. Frederick Wertham, one of the nation's leading psychiatrists, devised a stratagem that was extraordinary in its directness, simplicity, honesty, and passion to serve. Wertham's attitude is that psychiatry is for everybody or none at all. He came to the conclusion that "reform is possible only if one keeps away from the reformers." [32]

Working from this desire to serve and to make psychiatry responsive to all races and classes, Wertham, with the encouragement of and advice of Earl Brown, a writer for Life Magazine, Marion Hernandez, district secretary of the Hannah Stone Center for the Planned Parenthood Foundation, the singer and activist Paul Robeson, and writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, undertook the organizational tasks necessary to start a clinic.

Provided with a church basement to house his clinic, Wertham enlisted a multiracial, volunteer staff to establish in Harlem a clinic dedicated to alleviating the "free-floating hostility" afflicting many in Harlem and to understanding the realities of the black in America. Named in memory of Karl Marx's son-in-law, Dr. Paul Lafargue -- a Cuban-born Black-French physician, politician, social reformer, and philosopher -- The Lafargue Clinic became one of the most noteworthy institutions in the United States to serve poor Americans and to promote the cause of civil rights. In "Harlem is Nowhere" (1948) Ralph Ellison writes:

This clinic (whose staff receives no salary and whose fee is only twenty-five cents -- to those who can afford it) is perhaps the most successful in the nation to provide psychotherapy for the underprivileged. Certainly it has become in two years one of Harlem's most important institutions. Not only is it the sole mental clinic in the section, it is the only center in the city where both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care. Thus its importance transcends even its greatest value as a center for psychotherapy: it represents an underground extension of democracy. [33]

Wertham, who became known in Harlem as "Doctor Quarter" (this fee was charged because he believed strongly that a feeling of responsibility for oneself should be encouraged), kept this clinic open for about a decade. During this time he studied at the request of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the effects of segregation on children [34] and developed his ideas on the contribution horror comic books made to a climate of juvenile violence.

In order to prepare for their discrimination cases in the State of Delaware Chancery Court against local Boards of Education [Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 87 A. 2d. 862 (Del. Ch. 1952), 91 A. 2d.137 (1953), 347 U.S.483(1954)], attorneys Louis Redding and Jack Greenberg needed medical testimony on the impairment segregation had on children. Although they were able to assemble a distinguished panel of experts in education and psychology, they felt psychiatric evidence would strengthen their case. Richard Kluger in Simple Justice: The H
istory of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1975) wrote of the search to enlist a prominent medical authority willing to help:
Greenberg wanted to add a qualitative evaluation by a prominent clinical psychiatrist with full medical credentials. If such an authority would first examine in depth a group of both black and white Delaware youngsters and then report to the court on how segregation affected them, the effect might be powerful. But psychiatrists were expensive, and to find one who would give a good deal of time to such a project without charging for it seemed an unlikely prospect. Yet Greenberg did find one, and an eminent one at that, with a touch of genuine Viennese in his speech. The effect on the courtroom in Wilmington proved not only powerful but nearly hypnotic. [35]

Wertham's presence and his cogent argument detailing the results of his research so persuaded Chancellor Collins Seitz that in his legal opinion he both quotes from and paraphrases at length Wertham's testimony. Seitz supported his ruling outlawing current Delaware school segregation by underscoring Wertham's analysis that the practice of racial separation "creates a mental health problem in many Negro children with a resulting impediment in their educational progress." [36] Wertham's testimony was significant because his research was the first to examine both black and white children attending segregated schools. The evidence revealed the possibility that white children, too, may be harmed by segregated schools.

Wertham's research and testimony in the Delaware cases became part of the legal argument used in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, [F. Supp. 797 (1951), 347 U.S. 483 (1954), 349 U.S.294(1955)]. Thurgood Marshall in a 25 May 1954 letter to Wertham pointed out the critical nature of his work and thanked him,

for the important assistance which you gave us in the school segregation cases which were recently decided by the Supreme Court. It is unfortunate that the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States could not, in so many words, give recognition to all of those who were of assistance to us. However, I hope that you and the members of your clinic will have the satisfaction in knowing your great efforts contributed significantly to the end result. Not only was your testimony in the Delaware case before the Court in the printed record of testimony, but the Chancellor in Delaware came to his conclusions concerning the effects of segregation largely upon the basis of your testimony and the work done by your clinic. You may recall also that the Chancellor referred to you as one of America's foremost psychiatrists. Besides this, you and your clinic's work were mentioned in our briefs on several occasions. [37]

The Lafargue Clinic that had begun so modestly had now achieved major national recognition.

As gratifying as Marshall's remarks were to him, Wertham, after a Harvard Law School symposium on the 25th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, observed: "Psychologically the Supreme Court's decision made a great difference for blacks and whites. It gave legal sanction to a moral judgment. But practically and historically it is an unfulfilled promise. While a lot has been accomplished in the South, in the largest cities of the North and West desegregation has not materialized. The Court's order of 'deliberate speed' has been translated into relentless slowness." [38] Wertham's disenchantment with the pace of segregation, however, did not result in bitterness.

His renown as a forensic psychiatrist, his compassion for his fellow man, and his personal integrity and courage suggested to attorney Emanuel Bloch that Wertham might agree to interview his client Ethel Rosenberg, who was suffering incapacitating mental anguish. Bloch felt that Rosenberg, now on death row at Sing Sing prison, was on the verge of a severe mental breakdown and would be unable to confer with him on her appeal. Aware especially of Wertham's work at the Lafargue Clinic, Bloch believed that he might be willing to appear for the defense in the espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Convicted as members of a conspiracy to send stolen atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, the Rosenbergs, nevertheless, always maintained their innocence and averred that they were victims of a United States government frame-up. Political passions, fears of the Red menace, charges of treason and betrayal, swirled at the time against the backdrop of the Korean War. Such circumstances persuaded many prominent individuals to keep a low profile in order not to be tainted by helping the Rosenbergs. Bloch hoped that Wertham would risk involvement.

The petition Bloch drafted seeking permission for Wertham to examine Ethel Rosenberg at Sing Sing was denied. Although the court absolutely refused to allow Wertham direct access to Rosenberg, it gave him permission to testify in federal court under oath about her mental condition. Not only did this order deny Rosenberg due process, but it also created the paradoxical situation of permitting Wertham to testify about the mental condition of a patient whom he was not allowed to examine. Although he would now have to rely on second-hand information and would have to use Bloch as an intermediary, Wertham accepted these limitations and testified twice.

The cross-examination to which Wertham was subjected was vicious and often improper. Nevertheless, his understanding of the condition "prison psychoses" and his humanitarian concern for Rosenberg's health made his testimony compelling. Later he wrote:

The results of my testimony were most startling. With record speed in a few days Washington, which had been so adamant before, completely reversed itself. Husband and wife were no longer to be kept separate. Mrs. Rosenberg's husband was forthwith transferred from the Federal House of Detention in New York to Sing Sing. The warden of Sing Sing announced officially that husband and wife would now be allowed to visit regularly. I got some congratulatory phone messages. For Mrs. Rosenberg it meant that a heavy load was lifted from her. She improved dramatically and for the last two years of her life could at least live a more dignified, less morbid, emotionally tolerable life. [39]

This, however, did not end Wertham's services for the Rosenbergs. He was brought in to deal with the two children, Michael and Robert, whom he advised and helped to secure adoption by the Meeropol family.

Nothing so characterizes the climate of the period as Wertham's observation many years later:

Never in my life have I been blamed so much for anything I did as I have been for testifying for Mrs. Rosenberg. This happened not only with uneducated people but also with those who think of themselves as informed and liberal-minded. Some people even stopped speaking to me! A prison doctor after all treats all inmates as best he can regardless of what crimes they may have committed. He is not held accountable for them. Sometimes the fact that psychiatry has not only a scientific aspect but is humanitarian as well is in danger of getting lost sight of. A psychiatric colleague of mine, one of my best friends, approached me one day on this subject. My testimony had hardly been mentioned in the press and he had just heard about it. He felt it was very wrong and was really perturbed about it. "You see," he said, "if you do that kind of thing you will be losing your reputation." [40]

Wertham, after reminding his colleague of many ill-advised and frowned upon court appearances, including his testimony defending George Moore's translation of Daphnis and Chloe, which had been banned as obscene, replied, "You see, I have lost my reputation so often I can hardly call it my own any more." [41]

It was precisely this reputation for fearlessness and integrity that encouraged Senator Estes Kefauver to appoint Wertham sole psychiatric consultant to the Senate Subcommittee for the Study of Organized Crime. Not only did Wertham bring his expertise as a forensic psychiatrist to Kefauver's committee, but his experience in dealing with New York crime and governmental institutions made his observations particularly valuable. Of course, in the 1950s, the role organized crime played in American society was one that engendered fear, revulsion, respect, cynicism, and even admiration, especially for the way in which violent crime could be of service to politics.

Wertham's fascination with the mob's relationship to politics heightened as he observed some of the security precautions Senator Kefauver took. For example, Kefauver would often secretly confer with Wertham at his Gramercy Park apartment. During those conferences Kefauver would make several, rather long telephone calls, instead of making them from either his office or his hotel room. At first Wertham was puzzled by this until he happened to mention Kefauver's telephone activity to an attorney who frequently served as a consultant to governmental committees. This lawyer was not at all surprised by Kefauver's caution: "Sure," he told Wertham,

"Kefauver was wise in the use of concealed bugs. Nobody could know that and when he went to your apartment he was sure that that phone was not bugged. He went on to explain to me that members of his own party were suspicious of Kefauver and called him "dangerously sincere." They were fearful that his investigations would come too near to sensitive spots -- which indeed they did -- and would elicit too much that might be politically harmful." [42]

These observations are particularly revealing, for they explain why the Senate's investigation stopped abruptly and its recommendations proved inconsequential.

At this time America faced two primary fears: communism and juvenile delinquency. The axis on which these two met found Wertham, whose studies probed the social dynamic permitting the development of these fears and the underlying violence inflaming their intensity. Despite his Fabian proclivities and his close association with progressive intellectuals, Wertham escaped severe censure from Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers. Moreover, he was able to develop his greatest public influence, drawing considerable media attention, with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, the culmination of his seven-year long study on the effect of comic books on children.

In Seduction of the Innocent Wertham sets out his argument on the connection between the rise in juvenile delinquency and the role of comic books, attractive to children and easily available, in promoting violent activity. Wertham maintained that such comics created a culture of violence and encouraged anti-social behavior. The deleterious effect these comics had on child development led Wertham to the conclusion that access to these books for those under fourteen or fifteen years of age must be controlled. Although Wertham was mistakenly maligned as a censor -- a charge that angered him -- his work did stimulate the comic book industry to adopt a code (the Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America, 26 October 1954), labeling the suitability of each comic book now published.

However, the adoption of a comic book code did not come without intense resistance from the comic book publishing industry or without abuse directed at Wertham. After he had published a series of articles and given lectures describing his research detailing the harmful effects of mass media violence, Wertham decided his accumulated work merited a book-length study. Mindful of Henry Steele Commager's observation that "The ideals that grown-ups think should obtain are to be found more readily in children's literature than anywhere else. All our innocences are there." [43] Wertham planned to entitle his book All Our Innocences, but his editors had him change it to Seduction of the Innocent. This title, more gripping and evocative than the one originally proposed, continues today to incite an anti-Werthamite reaction among comic book aficionados as well as those who feel Wertham's work threatens the democratic thrust of American popular culture. Moreover, the emerging dominance of American popular culture was itself considered as posing a threat to re-establishing the authority of European culture in the postwar years. [44]
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 5:48 am

PART 2 OF 2 (INTRO CONT'D.)

Of course, this is supremely ironic because the publishing history of Seduction of the Innocent and the vilification Wertham personally endured are anything but democratic. For example, the Book of the Month Club selected Seduction of the Innocent as an alternate choice and planned to run in its club newsletter a favorable review of it by Clifton Fadiman. However, the Book of the Month Club abruptly canceled both the offering and the review. Although an advance copy of Fadiman' s review survives among Wertham's private papers, it is yet to be published. More disturbing was the news Wertham received from many book stores and outraged book buyers who found their copies of Seduction of the Innocent had pages 399-400 missing. These pages contained the "Bibliographical Notes" where Wertham had listed the publishing sources for the book's illustrations. Apparently, Wertham's own publisher, Rinehart and Company, Inc., succumbed to extreme pressure from both comic book publishers and distributors and agreed to have the offending pages excised. Thus a finished book was mutilated neither with the knowledge nor the consent of the author.

In addition, Wertham was investigated and harassed by agents of the comic book industry, much in the same manner that Ralph Nader was treated years later by agents of General Motors. An entire public relations campaign was directed against Wertham. David Finn, who served at the time as a consultant to the comic book publishers, wrote in The Corporate Oligarch about his creation of the "Scorn Wertham" club and the efforts he made on behalf of his clients to discredit Wertham. The unfortunate legacy of that campaign remains, for among comic book cognoscenti, his name has become a by-word for the censorious, the narrow-minded, and the ill-informed. In addition, by devising its own code the comic book industry believed, as Finn pointed out, that it had circumvented dealing with the substance of Wertham's objections:

It was also clear that the industry had solved its problem without coming to grips with the basic social issues implicit in its business. And there was no immediate prospect that the heads of the companies would assume responsibility for the emotional consequences of their product -- whatever those consequences might be. [45]

Today both the vilification of Wertham and the harmful effects of violent comics continue. [46]

According to Robert M. Overstreet, editor of the series Comic Book Price Guide and one of the most reasoned voices in today's comic book culture, Wertham's intentions and influence have not been fully appreciated:

His (Wertham's) concern for the influence of comics and television was genuine. The direction the comics industry took was greatly affected by this man. Hopefully his true place in history and contribution to our hobby will soon be recognized and noted. [47]

His legacy has been recognized in some unfortunate ways: comic books whose illustrations appear in Seduction of the Innocent are now collector's items; Eclipse Comics published in November 1985 a lurid series of books under the cover title Seduction of the Innocent; vicious caricatures of Dr. Wertham appear in many comic books; and historians continue to mischaracterize his work and blame him for the demise of comic books. Wertham's reputation among many of those involved in the comic book culture may be gauged from Catherine Yronwode's 1983 column in The Comics Buyer's Guide:

Probably the single individual most responsible for causing comic books to be so reviled in America is our good friend and nemesis, Dr. Frederic (sic) Wertham... We hate him, despise him... he and he alone virtually brought about the collapse of the comic book industry during the 1950's. That he was so misguided only adds to the injustice of it all, and we, fandom collectively, seem to perceive this injustice as a child does. In truth, many of us were children when Wertham destroyed comics, and even the younger of us know the legend well, for it is repeated among us like some tribal myth. [48]

This tribal myth is re-energized in Adult Comics: An Introduction (1993) where Roger Sabin writes about the "crusade against comics" and "the institution of a restrictive code" in a chapter entitled "1954-seduction of the experienced." Sabin, who posits that it is the simple-minded that blame social disorder on art and on the technology that makes artistic expression accessible, excoriates Seduction of the Innocent:

This was Wertham's magnum opus, the Mein Kampf of comics. It drew together all the threads of his campaigning over the years, and took in every kind of comic, raising objections to them all. He used the term 'crime comic books' to designate any kind of comic in which crime was depicted -- thus extending the negative implications of the 'crime' label until it encompassed almost the whole industry. Specific comics had specific dangers: super-hero comics were essentially fascist, 'ubermensch' fantasies, often with homo-erotic undercurrents (especially in the case of Batman's relationship with Robin); the romance comics were lasciviously sexual and morally bankrupt. Worst of all, of course, were the ersatz crime and horror comics. These were so pernicious they could actually lead to delinquency, 'a fact' that Wertham attempted to prove by recounting true case histories of juvenile murders and sex crimes. [49]

Moreover, Sabin criticizes Wertham's methodology, the logic of his argument with its attribution of delinquency based on comic panels, and the assertion that many of Wertham's examples were clearly taken out of context. Calling Wertham's approach "blatantly sensationalist," his analysis "cod[e]-Freudianism," (sic) thus reflecting its concomitant titillation and the repression of the 50s, Sabin maintains that "Ultimately, there was not evidence in the book that comics were a corrupting influence." [50] Finally, Sabin acknowledges that Wertham was not calling for a total ban on comics, but was seeking a way to distinguish comics suitable for children from those appropriate for adults.

To Wertham, a card-carrying member of the liberal intelligentsia, such animosity and misunderstanding were particularly painful. He did not believe in censorship but in protection of those whose extreme youth made them prey to manipulation and influence. Testifying before a televised Senate Subcommittee Hearing, 21 April 1954, Wertham stated: " ... if I may speak in seriousness about one suggestion that I have, I detest censorship. I have appeared in very unpopular cases in court defending such novelties as The Gilded Hearse, and so on, as I believe adults should be allowed to write for adults. I believe what is necessary for children is supervision." [51] In his analysis of the competing interests of unfettered free expression and responsible protection for those whose values have not been formed, Wertham believed there is a positive duty to ensure a safe environment for a child's value system to develop.

Wertham's studies on juvenile delinquency led him to probe deeper into the role various media have in creating, in perpetuating, and in distorting the social problems of teenagers. Comic books were certainly one important element that shaped teenage activity, but mass news publications also influenced behavior. In The Circle of Guilt (1956) Wertham, using investigation techniques he developed as a psychiatrist, discovered the truth behind the death of "model boy" Billy Blankenship, murdered allegedly without provocation by Puerto Rican "hoodlum" Frank Santana in a New York City street fight. The paradigm of fear, racism, distrust, and prejudice many New York City residents held conveniently fit Santana. Journalistic stereotyping: "New York was shocked to the core by the heartless, pointless murder," for example, and "the cold-blooded shooting of a high-school boy by a teen-age gangster, the tragedy that had a thunder-clap effect in awakening the general public," -- set the stage for Wertham's involvement on the defense team. [52]

Asked by two young pro bono attorneys, Mark Lane and Seymour Ostrow, if he would examine Santana and would testify about his findings in court, Wertham willingly agreed. Faced with the uncertain admissibility of an insanity plea, with a district attorney pressing for "a speedy and vigorous prosecution," and with a hostile press, Wertham accepted the challenge. His intuition told him that the case as presented by the press reflected more cultural prejudice than an understanding of the violent circumstances present. After an exhaustive investigation exposed Blankenship's active participation in teenage gang activities and revealed Santana's undeveloped personality, Wertham had the facts to confirm his intuition:

Santana is not a criminal who lashes back at life. Hostility, anger or resentment are notably absent from his whole make-up. He is a mixture between a lack of interest, compliance, withdrawal, chronic discouragement, self effacement, docility, lack of initiative and immature impulsiveness ... Essentially he is not a rebel but a conformist. That seemed to me to be one of the keys to the whole case ... But as a boy without a father, member of a hard-pressed family and especially Puerto Rican in a ruthlessly hostile environment, he could not orient himself... He belongs to that large group of people who do not have the opportunity or capacity to place themselves. He belongs to that category which I call the unplaced. Although not given serious consideration, they are a psychological and social reality. [53]

In the case of Santana the court did not give him any consideration; the judge in response to a bargained guilty plea to a second degree murder charge handed down a harsh sentence: twenty-five years to life.

It was Wertham's outrage at this sentence and at the prevailing climate of violence that compelled him to write The Circle of Guilt. In his final analysis of this case Wertham presented a forceful indictment against the society which creates its own teenage tyranny:

In Santana's case, there was added a sense of personal inadequacy and the effect of mass indoctrination with violence. Inversely, this feeling against Puerto Ricans affected young Blankenship as well. Neither boy learned race prejudice in his home. It came from outside. Where there is so much hostility in the environment. It would mean looking through the wrong end of the telescope to stress the hostility of the individual child. It was on the altar of community prejudice and antagonism that Billy Blankenship was sacrificed. [54]

The Circle of Guilt exposes both failure and hypocrisy on the part of the legal system in complicity with the social service establishment. More importantly, it is a mirror reflecting our violent society and our refusal to confront our own insidious cultural stereotyping.

In 1966 Wertham published his major study on human violence: A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence. To answer the paradoxical question: "Can we abolish violence without violence?" Wertham probed why violence is becoming more entrenched in our society than many believe and argued that, if willing, it is within our capacity "to conquer and to abolish it." A sociological history of violence in Western culture, A Sign for Cain focuses on the harmful effects of prolonged exposure to the mass media; deals with the virulence of political tyrannies in this century; explores the emergence of the legal and medical legitimization for violence; and probes the willing acceptance of the value of violence in our society.

Since he maintained that "in principle, violence is indivisible; but has many faces," [55] Wertham believed that all the Hydra-like manifestations of violence must be overcome. He recognized that the eradication of violence would be extremely difficult, but he was sure it could be done. His diagnosis and prescription are curiously relevant:

To make the world unviolent requires a greater state of disinterestedness than our everyday selves have. It cannot be done without sacrifices. Those who speak so much of an "open society" usually have a closed mind. An intimate relationship exists between individualism, selfishness, and latent violence. When -- and wherever -- we can, we must oppose hyper-individualism and hyper-nationalism, both of which seek satisfaction for themselves at the cost of others. An equitable social-economic structure of societies must be the basis for bringing about a universal revulsion against violence. If the individual -- all individuals -- and society become the integrated unity which they truly are in a fully developed civilization, motives for killing will yield to habits of nonviolence, and nobody will have to be afraid any longer of violent interference with his life or that of his children. [56]

Although this seems to be a utopian vision, it is based on the conviction Wertham developed from both his scientific and clinical studies that violence is not innate but is culturally determined.

Wertham's thinking on the nature of violence provokes controversy among social theorists who interpret scientific data in ways to explain away outrageous behavior. Although admitting the existence of cultural shaping, they argue an instinctive drive for aggression is present at birth. An acceptance of this principle, however, limits the boundaries which frame responsibility. By controlling the parameters of how aggression manifests itself, ideas of correct behavior or of defined values become political and ideological. This is especially true when notions of punishment are considered. And in our society it often devolves upon the psychiatrist to discern if behavior is instinctive, thus absolving man from his anti-social actions. Wertham, however, rejected this line of reasoning as specious. He believed that punishment, for example, is a legitimate response to crime: Many say punishment is old-fashioned and obsolete. That I think is wrong. Punishment is a language, a form of communication. When a man is killed society speaks or should speak both to the persons involved and to all other people." [57] His focus on communication as a cultural value derives from his belief that man is educable and his society can become nonviolent.

It is the perversion of communication as a social value that disturbs Wertham. For example, the widespread acceptance of this idea of "an inborn biologically fixed instinct of violence in man," he finds to be, "a theory that creates an entirely false and nihilistic destructive image of man." Violence may be the result of "negative factors in the personality and in the social medium where the growth of the personality takes place." Indeed, he argues "the primary natural tendency [of man is] to maintain and care for the intactness and integrity of others. Man does not have an 'instinct' of violence; he has the capacity and the physiological apparatus for violence." [58] To Wertham man has survived because he valued cooperation, not inherited violence.

The ethical dimension to Wertham's scientific studies on violence brings him to indict mass culture, not because it is 'low level' but because it represents all too accurately the reality of present violence. His special concern with the mass media (comic books, television, movies, magazines, certain paperbacks, and would now certainly include rock music videos) is based on its celebration of violence. These forms of communication Wertham maintained:

. . . feed on violence in all its forms and implications. In them violence has been variously glorified, romanticized, idealized, routine-ized. Often they teach the thrill of violence or are object lessons in how to kill. At other times they affirm that violence is really the best or the only method to get things done. Even outer space is made into a glorious battlefield. What is extolled is often not the heroic perpetrator of the violence but violence itself. The mass media are a reflection of our social life and at the same time they help to mold it. There is a continuous dynamic interaction between conscious, unconscious and social forces.

With comic books (there are of course harmless ones, too) we are confronted with the most promiscuous exploitation of suggestive violence. Many of them have violent themes, plots, pictures and brutal scenes. Violence is made alluring and cruelty heroic. [59]

What is particularly pernicious is the abundance and accessibility of these forms of communication. They confront us everywhere and their influence is pervasive, creating what Wertham described as a "naturalness and inevitability of human violence." [60]

The American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians named Wertham the recipient of its Annual Sigmund Freud Award, in 1971, in recognition of his distinguished career. In her address, "Fredric Wertham: Pillar and Prophet," Dr. Natalie Shainess reminded her colleagues on that occasion of Wertham's contributions to psychoanalysis and the scientific study of violence. She lauded Wertham who "had the vision to see truly, and from the broad perspective of past, present and future, as well as the courage to stand firm in opposition to popular and prevailing ideologies." [61] His pioneering studies on relationships among violence and mass media, she noted, reflect Wertham's ethically responsible notions of preventive medicine. Shainess disclosed the imperative behind his vigorous advocacy on behalf of children "noting that adults -- which includes psychiatrists! -- conceal their disregard for social responsibility behind "scientific abstractions"." [62] She concluded her assessment of him by observing that "perhaps unknown to himself, he was a woman's liberationist long before the current brouhaha, and a lover of women in the Greek sense of Agape, of brotherly love, -- which simply cannot be more, and certainly not less, than being a man of deep compassion." [63]

Wertham's interest in youth and how communication by the young shapes our culture led him to publish his last book The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication (1973). Arguing that fanzines are a revealing form of communication because they are "free from outside interference, without control or manipulation from above, without censorship, visible or invisible," [64] Wertham sees them not just of our society but a reaction to it. Fanzines show the capacity of the individual fan to reshape violent material in a socially useful way. The paraculture that is the world of fanzines contains patterns of fantasy, art, and literature manifesting healthy creativity, independence, and social responsibility. The fan-produced magazine expresses a genuine voice wanting to be heard, defying the oppressive roar of the mass media. Since fanzine artists and writers stress the role of heroes who have "cleared their minds of cant," Wertham sees in the integrity of these heroes and super-heroes "a message for our unheroic age." [65]

The last years of Fredric Wertham's life were spent at his beloved Blue Hills, a former Pennsylvania Dutch farm near the Hawk Mountain Bird Sanctuary at Kempton. A gentle man, he did not go gently into that good night but rather continued to study and write. While he would work in the restored barn that served as his library, using the old piggery for his study, Hesketh continued to sculpting the chicken stable and loft for her studio. Together they remained a vigorous, dynamic, intellectually active partnership until his death on November 18, 1981. Hesketh lived on at Blue Hills until her death in her eighty-fifth year on May 20, 1987. Her last years were spent refining a vision of how best to build upon the work Fredric and she had begun.

The Werthams had great interest in the relationship between law and psychiatry -- the law representing the external forces operating in society and psychiatry revealing the internal forces shaping personality. The law creates an outer order of safety, in the security of which psychiatry helps maintain the orderly structure of personality. The dynamic interaction of law and psychiatry creates the kind of society we have, and will have. In her search for a framework to explore this idea and to convey its importance to students, Hesketh found Harvard College willing to undertake this unusual challenge. From her bequest in memory of her husband the Fredric Wertham Professorship of Law and Psychiatry in Society and the Fredric Wertham Fund were established.

This legacy is not only for Harvard students, but also for all those who are deeply concerned with the violent nature of society. The response to a new generation of violent crime and horror comics is part and parcel of a culture inured by increased racial tension, economic dislocation, tabloid television news, and a virulent species of degrading, violent film and video images. Contemporary society suffers from an alienation and despair rooted in a loss of traditional values, an inability to accept the dignity of each individual, and to respect shared values shaped by the contributions from diverse cultures. Fredric Wertham embodied the fundamental principles of a humane psychiatrist.

_______________

Notes:

1. Plato, The Republic, Book X, line 605.

2. Aristotle, Poetics, Book 14, 1453; Book 6, 1449.

3. St. Augustine, The Confessions, Book VI, part 8.

4. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc. 1953, 1954).

5. Ibid. pp. 326-327.

6. See James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950's, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 93: "Yet beneath his moncausal theory and simple solution, Wertham proposed arguments that struck at a more complex contemporary problem and suggested a profounder analysis. Over and above the problem of comics, the psychologist (sic) had raised two important considerations. The first aimed at defending a pragmatic social psychiatry. Was there such a thing as a sociological psychiatry that could define the relationship between an individual and the surrounding culture? he asked. Did culture mold individual psychologies to such an extent that it could be considered a cause of behavior? If so, his theory of delinquency implied a larger cultural determinism, which, if true, had extraordinary implications for social analysis. The second idea was more vaguely stated. It underlay Wertham's suggestion that commercial culture, specifically advertising, was the problem. Commercial culture with its economic allegiances and motives had, according to Wertham, stifled the relationship between parent and child. Thus he argued that the market economy could be stronger, in its impact, than traditional modes of character formation."

7. Wertham, The Psychopathology of Comic Books: A Symposium, N.Y. Academy of Medicine, March 19, 1948: unpublished notes, Wertham's remarks appear in The Saturday Review of Literature, March 29, 1948. See, Judith Crist, "Comic Books Dissected at Psychiatric Forum: Symposium at Academy of Medicine Joins 75% of Writers Town Meeting of the Air in Condemning the Books as Harmful to Children," Herald Tribune, March 21, 1948; George V. Denny, Jr., moderator, Al Capp, George J. Hecht, John Mason Brown, and Marya Mannes, speakers, "What's Wrong With the Comics?" in Town Meeting: Bulletin of America's Town Meeting of the Air, Broadcast by Stations of the American Broadcasting Co., (N.Y.: The Town Hall, Inc., March 2, 1948, Vol. 13, no. 45); Time Magazine, March 15, 1948, The Press.

8. Fredric Wertham, "The Comics ... Very Funny!" The Saturday Review of Literature, 29 May 1948, p. 29; Patient Notes, unpub., 1946-1954; Hilde L. Mosse "Aggression and Violence in Fantasy and Fact," American Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. II, no. 3, July 1948.

9. Fredric Wertham, "Comic Book Control Needed as Public Health Measure," The Daily Compass, Friday, 5 November 1949.

10. Ob cit. footnote 1; Fredric Wertham, "The Psychopathology of Comic Books, The Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, 19 March 1948, See also "Poodles of Blood" in Time Magazine, 29 March 1948, pp, 66-68.

11. "Penologists Urged to Combat Comics, in The Christian Science Monitor, 3 September 1948; "Psychiatrists Urged Action to Clean Up Comic Books," ibid.; "Crime Does Not Pay," (editorial) ibid., 22 September 1948; "School for Sadism," The Art Digest, vol. 23, no. 15, 1 May 1949; "Psychiatrist Asks Comic Book Ban," The New York Times, 14 December 1950; see also Wertham correspondence with Arthur J. Freund, chair, American Bar Association Committee on Motion Pictures, Radio Broadcasting, and Comic Strips in relation to the Administration of Justice, beginning 30 January 1948 and ff. The Wertham-Freund papers include published reports, ABA sponsored hearings, Congressional testimony, and unpublished letters.

See also: Fredric Wertham, "The Catathymic Crisis: A Clinical Entity," Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. 37 (1937), p. 974 ff: Wertham defines this condition in which one conquers internal restraints because there is a need to do violence to both oneself and to others, Environmental influences like crime comics reshape and eventually atrophy internal prohibitions.

12. Fredric Wertham, "Human Violence and Society," unpublished lecture, n.d. pp.2-3.

13. Fredric Wertham, "Are the Movies Teaching Us to be Violent?" The New York Times, Sunday, 30 June 1968.

14. Fredric Wertham, The Sign of Cain, p. 199.

15. See Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LeMay, Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and The First Amendment, (New York: Hill and Wang, A Division of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), p. 6: "Instead of talking seriously about [how] to improve television for our children, Americans argue to a statement about broadcasters' rights and government censorship. We neglect discussion of moral responsibility by converting the public interest into an economic abstraction, and we use the First Amendment to stop debate rather than enhance it, thus reducing our first freedom to the logical equivalent of a suicide pact." See also Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972); Leonard Eron, "Statement of Dr. Leonard Eron, American Psychological Association, Institute For Social Research, University of Michigan," in Television Violence: Hearing of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate (One Hundred Fourth Congress, Fist Session, July 12, 1995) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 232: " ... the debate about whether TV violence affects children in profound ways is over. We know that prolonged exposure to TV violence increases risk for later aggressive behavior, and that this risk reduces the quality of life and degree of safety for all of us. Congress is appropriately seeking solutions to this problem that balance the First Amendment rights of broadcasters and consumers with the need for industry regulation -- be it self-imposed or government imposed -- that will reduce this risk."

16. Steven I. Friedland, "Date Rape and the Culture of Acceptance. 43 Florida Law Review 487 (July 1991): "According to Ms. Brownmiller, over ten million women "read romance, confession, and other comics and magazines." ibid. Dr. Fredric Wertham also stated the "comic books create sex fears of all kinds." Seduction of the Innocent: S. Brownmiller, supra note 37, at p. 342.

17. See Fredric Wertham's testimony in People of New York on the complaint of Harry Kahan vs. Creative Age Press before the Hon. Frederick L. Strong, City Magistrate, Lower Summons Court, Borough of Manhattan, (April 8, 1948) where he defends the publication of Charles O. Gorham's novel The Gilded Hearse against challenges raised by John S. Sumner, secretary of the former Society for the Prevention of Vice. Moreover, in response to defendant's counsel's question: "Confine yourself to the reason why you find The Gilded Hearse is not corrupting and these comic books are (re: comic book True Crime Magazine, marked "Exhibit D"). Wertham replied: "These comic books, very many of them, like the one I have here, depict sadism. That is to say, violence in relation to sex. This particular book (the witness refers to True Crime Comics of May 1948, page 8, picture in the lower left-hand corner) shows a man jabbing a hypodermic needle into the right eye of a young blonde girl. I think that can only have two effects on young people: either it would cause anxiety -- even to adults who look at it; or it makes them completely obtuse to sympathy and to any kind of human feeling about inflicting pain or suffering on other people, especially a girl. And I think that this kind of picture would have a very deleterious effect on adolescents and children. Another reason, your Honor, is this: these books have a very wide circulation. There are 200,000 copies of this book .... And I don't think that The Gilded Hearse would go to so many copies." Also see Wertham, "Sworn Affidavit Prepared for Los Angeles County Counsel Harold W. Kennedy, January 1949, (34 pages); "Can Comic Books for Children Be Effectively Controlled Without Legal Censorship," (n.d.): "When in 1948 I first advised parents to ask for an ordinance to control the spoiling of their children's eyes and the corruption of their minds by comic books, my proposal had nothing whatsoever to do with adult reading. But the comic book publishers, whom Sterling North long ago characterized as having the minds of racketeers, have used the red herring of freedom of the press to great advantage. They have been unwittingly aided in this by such incompetently drawn-up laws as the Feinberg bill [1949 Session of the Legislature, Senate Bill Introductory Number 351), which would have been unworkable even if Governor Dewey had not vetoed it. ... The word censorship in its ordinary meaning is not applicable to the control of children's reading. An ordinance regulating what is being forced down children' s throats in the way of corrupting pictures and words (that is the correct sequence) is nothing but a public health measure. It is no more a restriction of freedom of speech than not selling whiskey to children is restraint of trade .... It shows the confusion and the precarious state of our own civil liberties, if an ordinance to protect children can be construed in any way as a threat to free expression for adults." State of New York, Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee To Study The publication of Comics (Albany: Williams Press, 1951) provides a history of the legislature's efforts. However, by 1954, Dewey signed three bills dealing with comics and indecent literature.

18. Fredric Wertham, "Episodes: From the Life of a Psychiatrist," un. pub. Manuscript, n.d., p. 135.

19. Ibid., p. 136.

20. "Peace Loving Psychiatrist," MD Medical Newsmagazine, 11, no. 7 (July 1967), pp. 229-235; Wertham, "Episodes," p. 133.

21. Adolf Meyer, Introduction to The Brain as an Organ, Fredric and Florence Wertham, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934), p. xii.

22. Charles T. Noonan, Esq., interview, December 1989; Wertham, "Episodes," p. 133.

23. Wertham, "Episodes," p. 128.

24. 14 October 1948.

25. 3 October 1939.

26. 18 December 1945.

27. Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times, 25 March 1952, p. 24; see also: Sam Zolotow, "Bow Tonight Set for Dark Legend, New York Times, 24 March 1952.

28. Wertham, "Episodes," p. 131.

29. Fredric Wertham, Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce), p. 253.

30. Fredric Wertham, The Show of Violence (Garden City: Doubleday, 1949), p. 253.

31. Fredric Wertham, "Introduction: The Dreams That Heal," in The World Within: Fiction Illuminating the Neuroses of Our Time, edited by Mary Louise Aswell (New York: McGraw-Hill, Whittlesley House, 1947), p. xvi.

32. Richard Wright, "Psychiatry Comes to Harlem," Free World, September 1946.

33. Ralph Ellison, "Harlem is Nowhere," in Shadow and Act, (New York: Signet, New American Library, 1953, 1964), p. 282.

34. Fredric Wertham, "Psychological Effects of School Segregation," 6 [No. I] American Journal of Psychotherapy 94-103 (1952).

35. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 440; see also: Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How A Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution, (New York: BasicBooks, A Division of Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1994), pp. 35-139.

36. Chancellor Seitz, Belton v. Gebhart, 32 Del. Ch. 87 A. 2d. 137 (Delaware); see also Fredric Wertham, "Psychiatric Observations on Abolition of School Segregation," unpublished lecture, n.d.

37. 25 May 1954

38. Wertham, "Episodes," p. 104.

39. Ibid., p. 142.

40. Ibid., p. 143.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., p. 92.

43. Henry Steele Commager quoted in "Episodes," p. 69.

44. Soren Schou, "Postwar Americanisation and the revitalization of European culture," in Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media, edited by Michael Skovmand and Kim Christian Schroder, (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 156: "A final point I would like to make is that the impact of America after the war may have been increased by the fact that American popular culture was regarded as a threat by school authorities and the high culture establishment. The Danish writer Tork Haxthausen published the book Opdragelse til terror (Seduction to Terror) in 1955, in which he discussed the damaging effects of American comics on children. This book, influenced by Frederic [sic] Wertham, is just one example of the concern over Americanisation of the period; many others could be given. The cries of alarm about the seduction of the innocent and adult warnings about the depraving influence of American films and comic books may well have had unintentional effects. It may be that young people tended to regard American popular culture as the proverbial forbidden fruit, a way of turning one's back on the establishment and of rebellious showing off, years before the real youth rebellion began."

45. David Finn, The Corporate Oligarch, (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983; c. 1969), pp. 175-76.

46. Kristen Droter, "Modernity and modern panics," in Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media, pp. 45-46: "In the history of mass communication, print media naturally offer the first examples of media panics. Perhaps best known is the so-called comics campaign that swept many European countries as well as North America in the 1950's. The American psychiatrist Frederic [sic] Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham 1954) has gone down as the archetypal reaction to a new mass medium. The title indicates Wertham's view of the comics as morally contagious sexually dangerous. It also expresses his view of children as vulnerable creatures whose innocence must be protected by conscientious adults. The contents of the book confirm the cultural perspective shown in its title, and Wertham's form of argumentation, as well as his strategy of selecting the most extreme examples taken out of context, is entirely typical of other panics. Seduction of the Innocent became enormously influential and was used in countries as diverse as Italy, Sweden, and Britain as proof of the detrimental effects caused by comics. (Barker 1984); see also Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, (London, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984), for a discussion of the political aspects of the comics campaign in the United Kingdom.

47. Robert M. Overstreet, ed., The Comic Book Price Guide, 1983.

48. Catherine Yronwode, The Comic Buyer's Guide (Iola, Wisconsin: Krause Publications, 1983).

49. Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction, (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.157-158; see also: Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins, "Some Bat Channel Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory," in Roberta E. Pearson and William Uriccio, eds., The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-163.

50. Sabin, p. 158.

51. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Delinquency, (Comic Books); hearings pursuant to S. 190; 21, 22 April and 4 June 1954.310 (83:2), 1954. See note 11.

52. Wertham, "Episodes," 107; The Circle of Guilt (New York: Rinehart, 1956), 191-192.

53. Ibid.

54. Wertham, "Episodes," 105.

55. Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 374.

56. Ibid.

57. MD Magazine, 234.

58. Wertham, "Human Violence and Society," 4.

59. Ibid., 11.

60. Ibid.

61. Natalie Shainess, M.D., "Fredric Wertham: Pillar and Prophet," (Discussion of Psychoanalysis and the Scientific Study of Violence) given 3 April 1971 at the Annual Convention, American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians, New York City, 4.

62. Ibid., 5.

63. Ibid., 8.

64. Fredric Wertham, The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication. (Carbondale and Edwardsville, III.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 130.

65. Ibid.

Image

James E. Reibman teaches literature and media studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. A specialist on law and literature, he has published on legal writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and on Samuel Johnson and his circle. His most recent lectures and writings are concerned with the graphic novel, popular culture, Twentieth-century American intellectual history, and violence in the media. Reibman is the biographer of Fredric Wertham, M.D., and is co-editor of the forthcoming Fredric Wertham Reader. Professor Reibman received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 5:50 am

Publisher's Note to the Original Edition

This book, Seduction of the Innocent, is the result of seven years of scientific investigation conducted by Dr. Fredric Wertham. He has had long experience in technical research and was the first psychiatrist to be awarded a fellowship by the National Research Council. From his studies on the brain came an authoritative textbook, The Brain as an Organ, used all over the world. His clinical investigations resulted in the discovery of a new mental disease now incorporated in leading psychiatric textbooks.

Dr. Wertham was senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals in New York City from 1932 to 1952, directed the mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue Hospital and Queens Hospital Center, and was in charge of the Court of General Sessions Psychiatric Clinic. For over twenty-five years Dr. Wertham has been giving expert opinion in medico-legal cases. His advice has been sought by defense counsels, district attorneys, judges and legislators. His views have been discussed before state and Federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. An "expert opinion" by a psychiatrist is an opinion based on facts, facts that can be demonstrated and proved.

This book, thoroughly documented by facts and cases, gives the substance of Dr. Wertham's expert opinion on the effects that comic books have on the minds and behavior of children who come in contact with them. He has studied all the varieties of comic books. His findings are presented, therefore, against the background of all kinds of comic books. He has directed this book specifically at crime comic books which he defines as those "comic books that depict crime," whether the setting is urban, Western, science-fiction, jungle, adventure or the realm of supermen, 'horror' or supernatural beings."  
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 5:51 am

Author's Note

ONLY THE COMIC-BOOK CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE FICTITIOUS. ALL THE OTHERS ARE REAL.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 6:35 am

1. "Such Trivia As Comic Books": Introducing the Subject

"And I verily do suppose that in the braines and hertes of children, whiche be membres spirituall, whiles they be tender, and the little slippes of reason begynne in them to bud, ther may happe by evil custome some pestiferous dewe of vice to perse the sayde membres, and infecte and corrupt the softe and tender buddes." -- Sir Thomas Elyot (1531)


Gardening consists largely in protecting plants from blight and weeds, and the same is true of attending to the growth of children. If a plant fails to grow properly because attacked by a pest, only a poor gardener would look for the cause in that plant alone. The good gardener will think immediately in terms of general precaution and spray the whole field. But with children we act like the bad gardener. We often fail to carry out elementary preventive measures, and we look for the causes in the individual child. A whole high-sounding terminology has been put to use for that purpose, bristling with "deep emotional disorders," "profound psychogenic features" and "hidden motives baffling in their complexity." And children are arbitrarily classified -- usually after the event -- as "abnormal," "unstable" or "predisposed," words that often fit their environment better than they fit the children. The question is, can we help the plant without attending to the garden?

A number of years ago an attorney from a large industrial city came to consult me about an unusual problem. A group of prominent businessmen had become interested in a reformatory for boys. This attorney knew of my work in mental hygiene clinics and wanted me to look over this reformatory and advise whether, and how, a mental hygiene department could be set up there. "Very good work is done there," he told me. "It is a model place and the boys are very contented and happy. I would like you to visit the institution and tell us whether you think we need a mental hygiene clinic there."

I spent some time at that reformatory. It was a well laid out place with cottages widely spaced in a beautiful landscape. I looked over the records and charts and then suggested that I wanted to see some individual children, either entirely alone or with just the attorney present. There was considerable difficulty about this. I was told that it would be much better if the director or some of his assistants would show me around and be present during any interviews. Eventually, however, I succeeded in going from cottage to cottage and seeing some boys alone. I told them frankly who I was and finally asked each child, "Supposing I could give you what you want most, what would you choose?" There was only one answer: "I want to go home."

The children's logic was simple and realistic. The adults said this was not a jail because it was so beautiful. But the children knew that the doors were locked -- so it was a jail. The lawyer (who heard some of this himself) was crestfallen. He had never spoken to any of the inmates alone before. "What a story!" he said. "They all want to get out!"

I remember contradicting him. The real story is not that they want to get out, I said. The story is how they got in. To send a child to a reformatory is a serious step. But many children's court judges do it with a light heart and a heavy calendar. To understand a delinquent child one has to know the social soil in which he developed and became delinquent or troubled. And, equally important, one should know the child's inner life history, the way in which his experiences are reflected in his wishes, fantasies and rationalizations. Children like to be at home, even if we think the home is not good. To replace a home one needs more than a landscape gardener and a psychiatrist. In no inmate in that reformatory, as far as I could determine, had there been enough diagnostic study or constructive help before the child was deprived of his liberty.

The term mental hygiene has been put to such stereotyped use, even though embellished by psychological profundities, that it has become almost a cliche. It is apt to be forgotten that its essential meaning has to do with prevention. The concept of juvenile delinquency has fared similarly since the Colorado Juvenile Court law of half a century ago: "The delinquent child shall be treated not as a criminal, but as misdirected and misguided, and needing aid, encouragement, help and assistance." This was a far-reaching and history-making attitude, but the great promise of the juvenile-court laws has not been fulfilled. And the early laws do not even mention the serious acts which bring children routinely to court nowadays and which juvenile courts now have to contend with. The Colorado law mentions only the delinquent who "habitually wanders around any railroad yards or tracks, or jumps or hooks to any moving train, or enters any car or engine without lawful authority."

Streetcar hoppings, like streetcars themselves, have gone out of fashion. In recent years children's-court judges have been faced with such offenses as assault, murder, rape, torture, forgery, etc. So it has come about that at the very time when it is asked that more youthful offenders be sent to juvenile courts, these courts are ill prepared to deal with the types of delinquency that come before them. Comic books point that out even to children. One of them shows a pretty young girl who was herself picked up by men in cars and then robs them, after threatening them with a gun. She calls herself a "hellcat" and the men "suckers." Finally she shoots and kills a man. When brought before the judge she says defiantly: "You can't pin a murder rap on me! I'm only seventeen! That lets me out in this state!"

To which the judge replies: "True -- but I can hold you for juvenile delinquency!"

Some time ago a judge found himself confronted with twelve youths, the catch of some hundred and fifty policemen assigned to prevent a street battle of juvenile gangs. This outbreak was a sequel to the killing of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been stabbed to death as he sat with his girl in a parked car. The twelve boys were charged with being involved in the shooting of three boys with a .22-caliber zip gun and a .32 revolver. The indignant judge addressed them angrily, "We're not treating you like kids any longer .... If you act like hoodlums you'll be treated like hoodlums." But were these youths treated like "kids" in the first place? Were they protected against the corrupting influence of comic books which glamorize and advertise dangerous knives and the guns that can be converted into deadly weapons?

The public is apt to be swayed by theories according to which juvenile delinquency is treated as an entirely individual emotional problem, to be handled by individualistic means. This is exemplified by the very definition of juvenile delinquency in a recent psychopathological book on the subject: "We have assigned the generic term of delinquency to all these thoughts, actions, desires and strivings which deviate from moral and ethical principles." Such a definition diffuses the concept to such an extent that no concrete meaning remains. This unsocial way of thinking is unscientific and leads to confused theory and inexpedient practice For example, one writer stated recently that "too much exposure to horror stories and to violence can be a contributing factor to a child's insecurity or fearfulness," but it could not "make a child of any age a delinquent." Can such a rigid line be drawn between the two? As Hal Ellson has shown again recently in his book Tomboy, children who commit serious delinquencies often suffer from "insecurity and fearfulness." And children who are insecure and fearful are certainly in danger of committing a delinquent act. Just as there is such a thing as being predelinquent, so there are conditions where a child is pre-insecure, or prefearful. Would it not be better, for purposes of prevention, instead of making an illogical contrast between a social category like delinquency and a psychological category like fearfulness, to think of children in trouble -- in trouble with society, in trouble with their families or in trouble with themselves? And is it not likely that "too much exposure to horror stories and to violence" is bad for all of them when they get into trouble, and before they get into trouble?

In the beginning of July, 1950, a middle-aged man was sitting near the bleachers at the Polo Grounds watching a baseball game. He had invited the thirteen-year-old son of a friend, who sat with him excited and radiating enthusiasm. Suddenly the people sitting nearby heard a sharp sound. The middle-aged man, scorecard in hand, slumped over and his young friend turned and was startled to see him looking like a typical comic-book illustration. Blood was pouring from his head and ears. He died soon afterwards and was carried away. Spectators rushed to get the vacant seats, not realizing at all what had happened.

In such a spectacular case the police go in for what the headlines like to call a dragnet. This had to be a pretty big one. In the crowded section of the city overlooking the Polo Grounds there were hundreds of apartment buildings in a neighborhood of more than thirty blocks, and from the roof of any of them someone could have fired such a shot. As a matter of fact, at the very beginning of the search detectives confiscated six rifles from different persons. Newspapers and magazines played up the case as the "Mystery Death," the "Ball Park Death" and "The Random Bullet."

Soon the headlines changed to "Hold Negro Youth in Shooting" and the stories told of the "gun-happy fourteen-year-old Negro boy" who was being held by the authorities. Editorials reproached his aunt for being "irresponsible in the care and training of a youngster" and for "being on the delinquent side of the adult ledger."

In the apartment where this boy Willie lived with his great-aunt, and on the roof of the building, the police found "two .22-caliber rifles, a high-powered .22-caliber target pistol, ammunition for all three guns, and a quantity of ammunition for a Luger pistol." This served as sufficient reason to arrest and hold the boy's great-aunt on a Sullivan Law charge (for possession of a gun). She was not released until the boy, who was held in custody all during this time, had signed a confession stating that he had owned and fired a .45-caliber pistol -- which, incidentally, was never found. In court the judge stated, "We cannot find you guilty, but I believe you to be guilty." With this statement he sentenced Willie to an indeterminate sentence in the state reformatory.

For the public the case was closed. The authorities had looked for the cause of this extraordinary event, which might have affected anyone in the crowd, in one little boy and took it out on him, along with a public slap at his aunt. They ignored the fact that other random shooting by juveniles had been going on in this as in other sections of the city. Only a few days after the Polo Grounds shooting, a passenger on a Third Avenue elevated train was wounded by a shot that came through the window. But with Willie under lock and key, the community felt that its conscience was clear.

It happened that I had known Willie for some time before all this. He had been referred to the Lafargue Clinic -- a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem -- by the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop as a school problem. He was treated at the Clinic. We had studied his earliest development. We knew when he sat up, when he got his first tooth, when he began to talk and walk, how long he was bottle fed, when he was toilet trained. Psychiatrists and social workers had conferences about him.

Willie had been taken care of by his great-aunt since he was nineteen months old. His parents had separated shortly before. This aunt, an intelligent, warm, hard-working woman, had done all she could to give Willie a good upbringing. She worked long hours at domestic work and with her savings sent him (at the age of two) to a private nursery school, where he stayed until he was eight. Then she became ill, could not work so hard and so could not afford his tuition there. He was transferred to a public school where he did not adjust so well, missing the attention he had received in the private school. At that time his aunt took him to the Lafargue Clinic. He had difficulty with his eyes and had to wear glasses which needed changing. According to his aunt he had occasionally suffered from sleepwalking which started when he was six or seven. Once when his great-aunt waked him up from such a somnambulistic state he said, half-awake, that he was "going to look for his mother." He was most affectionate with his aunt, and she had the same affection for him. She helped him to get afternoon jobs at neighborhood grocery stores, delivering packages.

Willie was always a rabid comic-book reader. He "doted" on them. He spent a large part of the money he earned to buy them. Seeing all their pictures of brutality and shooting and their endless glamorous advertisements for guns and knives, his aunt had become alarmed -- years before the Polo Grounds shooting -- and did not permit him to bring them into the house. She also forbade him to read them. But of course such direct action on the part of a parent has no chance of succeeding in an environment where comic books are all over the place in enormous quantities. She encountered a further obstacle, too. Workers at a public child-guidance agency connected with the schools made her distrust her natural good sense and told her she should let Willie read all the comic books he wanted. She told one of the Lafargue social workers, "I didn't like for him to read these comic books, but I figured they knew better than I did."

The Lafargue Clinic has some of his comic books. They are before me as I am writing this, smudgily printed and well thumbed, just as he used to pore over them with his weak eyes. Here is the lecherous-looking bandit overpowering the attractive girl who is dressed (if that is the word) for very hot weather ("She could come in handy, then! Pretty little spitfire, eh!") in the typical pre-rape position. Later he threatens to kill her:

"Yeah, it's us, you monkeys, and we got an old friend of yours here .... Now unless you want to see somp'n FATAL happen to her, u're gonna kiss that gold goodbye and I am out of here!"

Here is violence galore, violence in the beginning, in the middle, at the end:

ZIP! CRASH! SOCK! SPLAT! BAM! SMASH!

(This is an actual sequence of six pictures illustrating brutal fighting, until in the seventh picture: "He's out cold!")

Here, too, is the customary close-up of the surprised and frightened-looking policeman with his hands half-raised saying:

NO -- NO! DON'T SHOOT!

as he is threatened by a huge fist holding a gun to his face. This is followed by mild disapproval ("You've gone too far! This is murder!") as the uniformed man lies dead on the ground. This comic book is endorsed by child specialists who are connected with important institutions. No wonder Willie's aunt did not trust her own judgment sufficiently.

The stories have a lot of crime and gunplay and, in addition, alluring advertisements of guns, some of them full-page and in bright colors, with four guns of various sizes and descriptions on a page:

Get a sweet-shootin' --- [gun] and get in on the fun!

Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed would be offered to children, and in such profusion. Here is one man mugging another, and graphic pictures of the white man shooting colored natives as though they were animals: "You sure must have treated these beggars rough in that last trip through here!" And so on. This is the sort of thing that Willie's aunt wanted to keep him from reading.

When the Lafargue staff conferred about this case, as we had about so many similar others, we asked ourselves: How does one treat such a boy? How does one help him to emotional balance while emotional excitement is instilled in him in an unceasing stream by these comic books? Can one be satisfied with the explanation that he comes from a broken family and lives in an underprivileged neighborhood? Can one scientifically disregard what occupied this boy's mind for hours every day? Can we say that this kind of literary and pictorial influence had no effect at all, disregarding our clinical experience in many similar cases? Or can we get anywhere by saying that he must have been disordered in the first place or he would not have been so fascinated by comic books?

That would have meant ignoring the countless other children equally fascinated whom we had seen. Evidently in Willie's case there was a constellation of many factors. Which was finally the operative one? What in the last analysis tipped the scales?

Slowly, and at first reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that this chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, are contributing factors to many children's maladjustment.

All comic books with their words and expletives in balloons are bad for reading, but not every comic book is bad for children's minds and emotions. The trouble is that the "good" comic books are snowed under by those which glorify violence, crime and sadism.

At no time, up to the present, has a single child ever told me as an excuse for a delinquency or for misbehavior that comic books were to blame. Nor do I nor my associates ever question a child in such a way as to suggest that to him. If I find a child with fever I do not ask him, "What is the cause of your fever? Do you have measles?" I examine him and make my own diagnosis. It is our clinical judgment, in all kinds of behavior disorders and personality difficulties of children, that comic books do play a part. Of course they are not in the textbooks. But once alerted to the possibility, we unexpectedly found, in case after case, that comic books were a contributing factor not to be neglected. I asked psychiatric colleagues, child psychologists and social workers. They knew nothing about comic books. They knew that there were such little books; they may even have had them in their waiting rooms. And they knew about funny animal stories that children liked to read. Comic books, they assumed, were just reprints of comic strips from newspapers or Sunday supplements -- like 'Bringing Up Father,' you know" -- or other such humorous sequences. Why, they felt, should any physician take a serious interest in them?

No one had any idea of the enormous number of such books. The industry had not given out any figures, nor had a magazine or newspaper published any. When I made public the result of my own estimates and computations, namely that there were (then) some sixty million comic books a month, my statement was met with absolute incredulity. Some people thought that it was a misprint, and that sixty million must be a yearly figure. But shortly afterwards authoritative magazines and newspapers (such as Business Week) repeated my figure as an authentic one.

Nor was I believed at first when I stated that children spend an inordinate amount of time with comic books, many of them two or three hours a day. I asked those working with groups of children, "How can you get the 'total picture' of a child when you leave out entirely what occupies him two or three hours a day?" Again and again it happened that when they made inquiries they told me of finding out to their surprise how many comic books children read, how bad these books are and what an enormous amount of time children spend with them.

Some time after I had become aware of the effects of comic books, a woman visited me. She was a civic leader in the community and invited me to give some lectures on child guidance, education and delinquency. We had a very pleasant conversation. It happened that on that very morning I had been overruled by the Children's Court. I had examined a boy who had threatened a woman teacher with a switchblade knife. Ten years before, that would have been a most unusual case, but now I had seen quite a number of similar ones. This particular boy seemed to me a very good subject for treatment. He was not really a "bad boy," and I do not believe in the philosophy that children have instinctive aggressive urges to commit such acts. In going over his life, I had asked him about his reading. He was enthusiastic about comic books. I looked over some of those he liked best. They were filled with alluring tales of shooting, knifing, hitting and strangling. He was so intelligent, frank and open that I considered him not an inferior child, but a superior one. I know that many people glibly call such a child maladjusted, but in reality he was a child well adjusted to what we had offered him to adjust to. In other words, I felt this was a seduced child. But the Court decided otherwise. They felt that society had to be protected from this menace. So they sent him to a reformatory.

In outlining to the civic leader what I would talk about, I mentioned comic books. The expression of her face was most disappointed. Here she thought she had come to a real psychiatrist. She liked all the other subjects I had mentioned; but about comic books she knew everything herself.

"I have a daughter of eleven," she said. "She reads comic books. Of course only the animal comics. I have heard that there are some others, but I have never seen them. Of course I would never let them come into my home and she would never read them. As for what you said about crime comics, Doctor, they are only read by adults. Even so, these crime comics probably aren't any worse than what children have read all along. You know, dime novels and all that." She looked at me then with a satisfied look, pleased that there was one subject she could really enlighten me about.

I asked her, "In the group that I am to speak to, do you think some of the children of these women have gotten into trouble with stealing or any other delinquency?"

She bent forward confidentially. "You've guessed it;" she said. "That's really why we want these lectures. You'd be astonished at what these children from these good middle-class homes do nowadays. You know, you won't believe it, but they break into apartments, and a group of young boys molested several small girls right in our neighborhood! Not to speak of the mugging that goes on after dark."

"What happens to these boys?" I asked her.

"You know how it is," she said. "One has to hush these things up as much as possible, but when it got too bad, of course, they were put away."

There was no doubt that this was an intelligent and well-meaning woman, and yet the unfairness of it all had not occurred to her. Children of eleven do not read only animal comics -- whether the parents know it or not. They see all the crime, horror, superman and jungle comics elsewhere if they are not allowed at home. There is a whole machinery to protect adults from seeing anything that is obscene or too rough in the theater, in the movies, in books and even in night clubs. The children are left entirely unprotected. They are shown crime, delinquency and sexual abnormality, but the punishment they get if they succumb to the suggestions is far more severe than what an adult gets if he strays from the path of virtue.

After this conversation, I felt that not only did I have to be a kind of detective to trace some of the roots of the modern mass delinquency, but that I ought to be some kind of defense counsel for the children who were condemned and punished by the very adults who permitted them to be tempted and seduced. As far as children are concerned, the punishment does not fit the crime. I have noticed that a thousand times. Not only is it cruel to take a child away from his family, but what goes on in many reformatories hurts children and does them lasting harm. Cruelty to children is not only what a drunken father does to his son, but what those in high estate, in courts and welfare agencies, do to straying youth.

This civic leader was only one of many who had given me a good idea of what I was up against, but I took courage from the fact that societies for the prevention of cruelty to children were formed many years after societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.

I began to study the effects of comic-book reading more consistently and systematically. We saw many kinds of children: normal ones; troubled ones; delinquents; those from well-to-do families and from the lowest rung of the economic ladder; children from different parts of the city; children referred by different public and private agencies; the physically well and the physically ill and handicapped; children with normal, subnormal and superior intelligence.

Our research involved not only the examination, treatment and follow-up study of children, but also discussions with parents, relatives, social workers, psychologists, probation officers, writers of children's books, camp counsellors, physicians -- especially pediatricians -- and clergymen. We made the interesting observation that those nearest to actual work with children regarded comic books as a powerful influence, disapproved of them and considered them harmful. On the other hand, those with the most highly specialized professional training knew little or nothing about comic books and assumed them to be insignificant.

Our study concerned itself with comic books and not with newspaper comic strips. There are fundamental differences between the two, which the comic-book industry does its best to becloud. Comic strips appear mainly in newspapers and Sunday supplements of newspapers. Comic books are separate entities, always with colored pictures and a glaring cover. They are called "books" by children, "pamphlets" by the printing trade and "magazines" by the Post Office which accords them second class mailing privileges.

Comic books are most widely read by children, comic strips by adults. There is, of course, an overlap, but the distinction is a valid and important one.

Newspaper comic strips function under a severe censorship exercised by some 1,500 newspaper editors of the country who sometimes reject details or even whole sequences of comic strips. For comic books there exists no such censorship by an outside agency which has the authority to reject. When comic strips are reprinted as comic books, the censorship that existed before, when they were intended for adults, disappears and the publisher enjoys complete license. He can (and sometimes does) add a semipornographic story for the children, for example, and a gory cover -- things from which censorship protects the adult comic strip reader.

Some of my psychiatric friends regarded my comics research as a Don Quixotic enterprise. But I gradually learned that the number of comic books is so enormous that the pulp paper industry is vitally interested in their mass production. If anything, I was fighting not windmills, but paper mills. Moreover, a most important part of our research consisted in the reading and analysis of hundreds of comic books. This task was not Quixotic but Herculean -- reminiscent, in fact, of the job of trying to clean up the Augean stables.

As our work went on we established the basic ingredients of the most numerous and widely read comic books: violence; sadism and cruelty; the superman philosophy, an offshoot of Nietzsche's superman who said, "When you go to women, don't forget the whip." We also found that what seemed at first a problem in child psychology had much wider implications. Why does our civilization give to the child not its best but its worst, in paper, in language, in art, in ideas? What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers" How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?

The opposition took various forms. I was called a Billy Sunday. Later that was changed to Savonarola. Millions of comic books in the hands of children had whole pages defending comic books against "one Dr. Wertham." A comic strip sequence syndicated in newspapers was devoted to a story of the famous child psychologist Dr. Fredrick Muttontop who speaks against crime comic books, but on returning to his old home town for a lecture on "Comic books, the menace to American childhood" is told that when he was a boy he used to read much worse things himself. And the cover of a crime comic book showed a caricature of me as a psychiatrist tied to a chair in his office with mouth tightly closed and sealed with many strips of adhesive tape. This no doubt was wishful thinking on the part of the comic-book publishers.

But as our studies continued, it seemed to us that Virgilia Peterson, author and critic, stated the core of the question when she said: "The most controversial thing about Dr. Wertham's statements against comic books is the fact that anyone finds them controversial." There were counterarguments and counter actions. These we took very seriously, read and followed carefully, and as a matter of fact incorporated into the social part of our research into the comic-book problem.

Little did I think when I started it that this study would continue for seven years. A specialist in child psychology referring to my correlation of crime comic books with violent forms of juvenile delinquency wrote disdainfully that no responsibility should be placed on "such trivia as comic books." I thought that once, too. But the more children I studied, the more comic books I read, and the more I analyzed the arguments of comic-book defenders, the more I learned that what may appear as "trivia" to adults are not trivia in the lives of many children.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Fri Nov 29, 2013 8:09 am

2. "You Always Have to Slug 'em"

What Are Crime Comic Books?

"And children grow up where the shadows falling
From wall and window have the light exiled,
And know not that without the flowers are calling
Unto a day of distance, wind and wild."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke


"Every boy has his idol! He may be a star athlete, a two-fisted Hollywood Western actor or a famous general. But some boys veer away from such heroes, and admire the bad men."

This is the beginning of a comic-book story in which a ''hood" teaches two little boys: "If you kids wanna learn to be like me, you gotta be tough! Never give the other guy an even break!"

He shows them a well-dressed young boy. They proceed to threaten this boy and he hands over his money to them. But that does not satisfy the tough teacher. He bangs their heads together and exclaims: "You always have to slug 'em! Remember that!" This is the elementary lesson of crime comics.

Many adults think that they know all about crime comic books because they know mystery and detective novels, comic strips in newspapers and have cast an occasional glance at a comic book at a newsstand or in a child's hands. But the Lafargue group of researchers has often convinced itself that most adults have really no idea of the details and content of the majority of crime comic books. I have heard public discussions where only the publishers and their representatives knew what was being talked about; the parents, teachers and doctors who asked discussion questions spoke of comic books as if they were fairy tales or stories of folklore, Children, however, do know what comic books are. The whole crime-comic-book trade is designed for them and is dependent on them, even though there are adults, too, who read such comics.

For years we have been testing this in many ways, including interviews with people who sell comic books in big and little newsstands in cities and towns, in big drugstores and little candy stores, in general stores and ice-cream parlors. Our studies included several states and did not overlook the smallest villages in the country. We have found crime comic books shown in display cases side by side with -- and mingled with -- comic books not featuring crime, intended for the very youngest children. And in many non-crime comic books we have found alluring advertisements drawing the child's attention to crime comics. The wording of advertisements for toys in many of the worst crime comics make it apparent that the books carrying these advertisements are intended for children, and some of the most irresponsible crime comic books have approving letters from child readers.

Of course there are people who still fall for the contention of the comic-book industry that their products deal not with crime, but with the punishment of crime. Is not the very title of some of these books, Crime Does Not Pay? Here, too, adults are more readily deceived than children. Children know that in quite a number of crime comic books there is in the title some reference to punishment. But they also know that just as that very reference is in small letters and inconspicuous color, the parts of the title that really count are in huge, eye-catching type and clear sharp colors: CRIME; CRIMINALS; MURDER; LAW BREAKERS; GUNS; etc. The result of this is, of course, that when comic books are on display only the crime and not the punishment is visible. Often the type of the second part of the title is so arranged that in the display case it does not show at all, concealed as it is behind the tops of other comic books. These are a few examples:

LAWBREAKERS Always Lose
There Is No Escape For PUBLIC ENEMIES
The West Thunders with the Roar of GUNS
CRIME Can't Win
Western OUTLAWS and Sheriffs
CRIMINALS on the Run


The great attraction of crime comic books for children is alleged to be continuous fast action. There may be some. But when the stories come to details of a delinquency or depiction of brutality, the action slows noticeably. A typical example, vintage autumn, 1950: In one story there are thirty-seven pictures, of which twelve (that is, one in three) show brutal near-rape scenes. The story begins like this:

"Late one night, in the suburbs of a large city, the moon looks down on the figure of a lone girl as she walks along a block of slumbering homes. . .. Anything can happen at this hour!"

Forthwith it does. For example:

1) The girl walking along with a dark figure, his arm stretched out toward her, lurking behind.

2) The girl falling over, her breast prominent, her skirt thrown up to reveal black net panties, the "attacker" a black, shadowed figure leaning over her.

3) He "drags her into the gloom," holding his hand over her mouth and tearing off her coat.

4) He has her on the ground behind some bushes.

5) A girl, murdered, and presumably raped, is shown on the ground with her clothes disordered and torn.

6) Another girl being choked from behind. Screams: "AIEEEK!!"

7) "The Strangler" locks her in a warehouse, saying: "I'll kill you just like I did the others -- Then I'll crawl down the trap door and get away under the dock -- HA! HA!"

When Mr. E. D. Fulton, member of the Canadian House of Commons, introduced his anti-crime-comic-book bill before that House, he characterized them as "the kind of magazine, forty or fifty pages of which portray nothing but scenes illustrating the commission of crimes of violence with every kind of horror that the mind of man can conceive."

In our clinical research on crime comic books we came to the conclusion that crime comic books are comic books that depict crime, whether the setting is urban, Western, science-fiction, jungle, adventure or the realm of supermen, "horror" or supernatural beings. We found that to study the effect of comic books on children it is necessary to study the comic books themselves, too. To read them like an adult is not enough. One must read them in the light of how children read them. The comic book as a whole has a number of features which children single out habitually and which reinforce one another.

First of all there is the cover. It is always printed on much better paper than the rest of the book, and of course has much larger print and the colors stand out more glaringly and forcefully. The title also counts for a lot. The scene depicted on the cover is usually violent. It is intended to catch the child's attention and whet his appetite.

For example, in a comic-book reprint of a newspaper comic strip -- the cover shows a scene which does not occur at all in the strip. In transforming this comic strip, intended chiefly for adults, to a comic book for children, this scene is added: A young woman with prominent breasts and nude legs is lying on a cot. Her lips are rouged, her hair falls loosely in masses over her bare shoulders and her face has a coquettish expression. This is supposed to be the scene of a surgical operation! There are two white-gowned and white-capped men beside her, one about to put a chloroform mask over her face, the other holding scissors in his right hand and in his left a knife whose sharp blade is surrounded with a yellow zigzag halo (used in comic books as a rule to designate the effects of cutting or shooting). The whole scene has nothing to do with medicine and is unmistakably sadistic.

The covers often have little encircled messages. Conspicuous ones may indicate that the stories are based on true police cases or F.B.I. files. Inconspicuous ones may bear heartwarming words to the effect that the law will prevail eventually. Other messages on the cover are like seals. They may indicate that the comic book conforms or professes to conform to some special code, or very similar signs may indicate just the firm or the publisher.

A typical sample has inconspicuously above its crime title, "A force for good in the community'" and underneath that in a small circle, "Crime does not pay," and then in a square, "TRUE criminal case histories'" and, in smaller type, hard to read, the words "Dedicated to the eradication of crime!" Average, normal boys have often told me that if they read such signs at all they know of course that they are only "eyewash" intended to influence parents and teachers who have no time to read the whole comic book.

The cover of this sample depicts a corpse with blood on his mouth, with the killer who has just beaten him to death beside him.

Another important feature of a crime comic book is the first page of the first story, which often gives the child the clue to the thrill of violence that is to be its chief attraction. This is a psychological fact that all sorts of children have pointed out to me. Macbeth in comic book form is an example. On the first page the statement is made: "Amazing as the tale may seem, the author gathered it from true accounts" -- the typical crime comic book formula, of course. The first balloon has the words spoken by a young woman (Lady Macbeth): "Smear the sleeping servants with BLOOD!"

To the child who looks at the first page "to see what's in it," this gives the strongest suggestion. And it gives the whole comic book the appeal of a crime comic book. As for the content of this Macbeth, John Mason Brown, the well-known critic, expressed it in the Saturday Review of Literature: "To rob a supreme dramatist of the form at which he excelled is mayhem plus murder in the first degree .... although the tale is murderous and gory, it never rises beyond cheap horror .... What is left is not a tragedy. It is trashcan stuff." It is interesting that what adult critics deduce from the whole book, children sense from the first balloon. They know a crime comic when they see one, whatever the disguise.

The educational page, skipped by many children, pointed to with pride by the publishers and approved (but not sufficiently scrutinized) by parents and teachers, could conceivably contain a counterstimulant to the violence of the stories, but often it just gives some historical rationalization of it. For instance, in jungle comic book what does the educational page show? This one is entitled "The First Americans." A young girl in modern evening dress, her wrists chained to a tall upholstered structure so that she leans backward in a recumbent position revealing the full length of her legs, with a definite erotic suggestion, is being menaced with a big knife held by a gruesome masked figure: "At harvest and planting time they would cut out the heart of a living victim." In other words, the education to sadism permeating this whole book is here fortified in the guise of history.

Other features in the structure of a crime comic book are the first page of or before each individual story, the content of the stories, the type of language used, recurring details of plot or drawing as opposed to the professed ideology, the advertisements and the endorsements in the form of names of endorsers and the prominent institutions with which they are connected.

Endorsements came into fashion after Sterling North, the literary critic, early in the forties, published a number of critical articles based on his reading of comic books. As one boy told me when I asked him what these endorsements by psychiatrists and educators meant to him, "Oh, the more endorsements they need, the more they have." The claim that crime comic books might instill in any adolescent or pre-adolescent of average intelligence the idea or sentiment that prevention of crime or of antisocial activity is their goal, is so farfetched that mere reading of the comic books in question will answer it.

Take a comic book with a characteristic crime title, a lurid cover with a picture of one gangster about to be murdered by some other gangsters, and an inconspicuous circle with a purple passage of ethical make-believe: "This magazine is dedicated to the prevention of crime. We hope that within its pages the youth of America will learn to know crime for what it really is: a sad, black, dead end road of fools and tears." Compare with this sentiment some of the highlights inside this cover:

1) A criminal terrorizes a family on a farm, makes advances to the farmer's young wife and beats the farmer when he objects.

2) He takes the little boy into the woods as a hostage.

3) The little boy, after a while, says: "I can't go any faster an' I don't care! You're gonna kill me anyhow!" -- to which the criminal replies: "Ya wise little rat! I'll kill ya! But before I do I'll knock yer teeth out!!"

4) The little boy, as he is being beaten, "OH-H-H-H-H-H-H ..."

5) In the end, the criminal, who of course commits many other crimes in the course of the story, is not punished by the law, but like a hero refuses to give himself up, and shoots himself.

This story has ninety-seven pictures where the criminal is winning and one for the apotheosis of his suicide. Of course there is a gun advertisement, too. If the child who read the purple passage on the cover -- if he did read it -- reads the book this far, he knows that this passage has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the comic book.

As far as literate adults were concerned, this type of children's literature got into mass circulation unnoticed. A best seller for adults which is distributed in 10,000 copies or so is discussed in learned book reviews for its art, its technique, its plot, its social significance. A crime comic book is printed in from 250,000 to 500,000 or more copies, and most copies are read by several children, and exchanged, sold, retraded. However, these books are not reviewed or taken notice of.

It has been said by experts of the industry that children have to learn about the life around them, and that for this comic books are a big help. Do children really have to learn this sort of thing, and in this way? Here is a comic book whose cover bears the slogan: "Every word true!" Inside is an orgy of brutality, crime, "dope selling," men tortured, girls with half-bared bosoms, pictures of men stabbed in the stomach, shot, their arms twisted and, of course, an advertisement with a half-page picture of a gun.

Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children.

The comic-book stories about drug addiction are an instructive angle. The lead story of one crime comic, for instance, deals with narcotics. It is clear from the wording of the advertisements that the book is intended for children: "Dad and Mom will want it too." Traffic in narcotics is described and the high profits alluringly pointed out. Another crime comic describes the wonderful effects of morphine: "One needleful of joy-juice and you get so satisfied with the world you forget your obligations!"

When I criticized these morphine and heroin comics stories for children I came up against the objection that in reality children have nothing to do with drug addiction, so this meant nothing to them. That was several years before newspapers and news magazines had headlines like "New York Wakes Up to Find 1500 Teen-Age Dope Addicts."

We had known about childhood drug addiction for some time. It was one of the Lafargue child-guidance counsellors who brought the first child drug addict to official attention. This boy of fourteen had come and asked for help.

"I am a mainliner," he said. "I want to get rid of the habit. I have been popping myself. I have been hitting the mainline."

He rolled up his sleeves and showed the sores on his arm. He had a needle with a plain eyedropper attached with which he had given himself injections. A regular hypodermic needle was too expensive for him. He had been stealing to buy the narcotics.

The facts are that there are heroin addicts who are only twelve years old, that peddlers have been giving school children free samples, that fourteen-year-old boys have been selling heroin on the street, that eight-year-old children have been used by adults as messengers in the drug racket, that a seventeen-year-old girl earned $1,000 a week through the sale of narcotics, and that many children under thirteen have been introduced to heroin. It was found that in certain sections almost two thirds of the high school seniors had been offered narcotics.

All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers. In the lives of some of these children who are overwhelmed by temptation the pattern is one of stealing, gangs, addiction, comic books and violence. The parallel with crime comic stories is striking. When one knows the social milieu of some of these children one realizes that the spirit that permits crime comic books to exist and flourish is what permits the possibility of childhood drug addiction. And whatever factors come into play in the cases that we have studied, the conclusion is inescapable that crime comics do their part in the education of these children, in softening them up for the temptation of taking drugs and letting themselves be drawn into participation in the illegal drug traffic.

In the light of these facts it is indicative of the general misconception about crime comics, and a matter of regret, that a public agency like New York City's Youth Board lends its name to a "public service page" in crime comic books. This page, supposed to fight drug addiction among juveniles, shows the progress of a boy addict and bears the legend: "The Comics Magazine Industry pledges itself to aid youngsters in their fight against the enemies of youth -- the dope peddlers." Are the children supposed to fight the adult drug-racketeers? That should be the concern of the adults. This page is in reality just an advertisement for "The Comics Magazine Industry" and is highly misleading to parents and children alike. A typical comic book with this page is one of the worst crime comics. Is this the proper setting for honest or effective advice to youth?

When adolescent drug addiction had finally come to public attention, it led to the publication of lurid new comic books devoted entirely to the subject, like the one with the title, Teenage Dope Slaves. This is nothing but another variety of crime comic of a particularly deplorable character.

A further adornment of crime comics may be a seal on the cover indicating that the book is "Authorized A.C.M.P." (Association of Comics Magazine Publishers) and "Conforms to the comics code." This association, which is not listed in the telephone book, was formed following one of my most outspoken statements about what parents don't know about comic books. A representative sample of a comic book bearing this endorsement shows the customary unrelieved succession of crimes and violence. And among the weapons advertised in this comic book are guns, knives and whips -- with thirty-seven illustrations of guns altogether, one of them a high-powered air pistol at $19.95. A District Attorney in New York City has definitely linked such arsenal advertisements to the actual arsenals confiscated from juveniles by the police.

Two stories are characterized on their first pages as "true F.B.I. cases," two as "true police cases." In one story, the first, out of fifty-one pictures no less than forty-five are scenes of violence and brutality. This, according to the seal on the cover, is an authorized percentage conforming to the comics code. I wonder how high the percentage must run before a comic book is considered as not conforming to the code? In no book for adults, including detective and mystery stories, in no movie, is such a proportion even approached.

The comic book I have just mentioned belonged to the early period of the much-publicized comics code. One might expect that at that time the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers would have wanted to do it particularly right, to show that the seal had a meaning. On the other hand, they may not have been able to mend their ways so quickly, and the improvement might come about gradually.

So we carefully followed developments. In a crime comic that came out after the code had been in existence for some time, a representative specimen of this group shows killing; a policeman knocked out with the usual smart contemptuous wisecrack: "I can't stick around to explain, copper!"; a man shot in the stomach; a woman mugged and then killed with a hammer to get her pocketbook; blood; the up-to-date ending of one murder story: "Archer Frize didn't die in the electric chair! The state psychiatrists found him to be insane!"; detailed instructions about how to hold up a big grocery store; and a brutal murder story with the murderer not caught by the law, but dying by accident. (In the story murder is called a "mistake": "I knew it! They all make mistakes!")

The difficulty in arriving at accurate figures about comic books is considerable. One must distinguish between comic books printed, published, sold and, of course, read. The last item, the pass-on circulation, is most important, for many comic books after having been sold once for ten cents are not only traded for others, but are also sold repeatedly at lower prices: eight cents, six cents, two cents and even one cent. Even in such sales large sums are involved because the total numbers are so staggering. There are clandestine and half-clandestine stores, and backrooms of stores, about which adults know very little, which do business in these cut-rate transactions. On the whole crime comic books are monthly publications rather than bi-monthly like some of the harmless ones like Super Duck or Terrytoon Comics. They tend to have the largest editions and they are the ones most widely traded.

Owing to the conditioning of children by the industry, crime comic books are more widely read than harmless comics. As the editor of one publishing house stated, "The sports line of comic books is the cleanest type of comic book in America. We are going to drop it." (It was not "lucrative.")

One crime comic book announces on its cover that it is read by six million readers. It is interesting that this is one of the worst comic books, a veritable primer for teaching Junior juvenile delinquency. The Minister of Justice of the Dominion of Canada called this particular book "a shocking instance of abuse of freedom of the press."

At the time when the industry began to promulgate new codes -- the first general one announced after my first public criticism of crime comics -- the number of crime comic books began to increase tremendously, both absolutely and in relation to non-crime comics. From 1937 to 1947 only nineteen crime comic titles existed, sixteen of them obvious crime comics, three of them so-called Western comic books that actually featured crimes. But during 1948, 107 new titles of crime comic books appeared, 53 straight crime comics, 54 "Westerns" featuring crime.

It seems that the comic-book industry was in considerable conflict. On the one hand, they were not anxious for the public to know that the comic-book business and its influence was so enormous -- though one publisher said in a revealing public statement, "When you get that big you just can't escape public attention!" On the other hand, since a sizable amount of advertising is carried in comic books, they like to use figures as large as possible. So while one could still find figures lower than my estimates, one could also find figures as high as 75 million a month (Advertising Age) or 80 million a month (Association of Comics Magazine Publishers).

The number of comic-book titles is a particularly elusive figure. As Advertising Age put it, "Statistics in the comic book field are somewhat misleading. A certain amount of duplication and consequent distortion ..." are present. A number of times when I cited a specific comic book it disappeared -- to reappear promptly under a different name. Other titles just disappear, and new ones crop up constantly. So do names of "new" publishing firms. That is why I have called crime comic books "hit and run publications." Often the public does not even know which firm publishes which crime comic, because the names of the firms publishing crime comic books are almost as elusive as the titles. They change, and quite a number of concerns function under different names for different comic books. To count the number of crime-comic titles at any given moment is therefore just as futile as to publish the names of objectionable comic books.

Crime comic books represented about one tenth of the total of all comic books in 1946-1947. In 1948-1949 they increased to one third of the total. By 1949 comic books featuring crime, violence and sadism made up over one half of the industry. By 1954 they form the vast majority of all comic books.

The problem of the effect of crime comic books is like a combined clinical and laboratory problem in infectious diseases. You not only have to study the possibly affected individuals; you have to investigate the potentially injurious agents themselves, their varieties, their lives, their habitat. There is a considerable distance from the pure culture of the bacillus to the clinical case.

What about the "wholesome" adventure stories, the "Westerns," for example? The vast majority, if not all Western comic books are crime comic books. They describe all kinds of crime and brutality. For example, one marked on the cover as "Your Favorite Western Star" has an "arsenal advertisement" on the inside cover with the endorsement of _____ M.D., psychiatrist, on the page facing it. On the back cover is a full-page gun advertisement with a gun pictured across the whole page. This book is especially badly printed, and shows, among other things, the close-up of a dying man with blood streaming from his mouth.

In another Western, one man has gold dust thrown in his eyes (an example of what I call the injury-to-the-eye motif, this being a very frequent feature in comic books).

Another comic book expresses the whole philosophy: "Since when do we worry about killin' people?"

Between its gory pages is a whole page devoted to an attack on "A Dr. Wertham [who] discussed the problem of juvenile delinquency in America today and pinned the blame for some of these cases on comic magazines." This page ends by drawing attention to "Dr. _____'s [a psychiatrist] endorsement on the first page of every one of our magazines."

Jungle, horror and interplanetary comics are also crime comics of a special kind. Jungle comics specialize in torture, bloodshed and lust in an exotic setting. Daggers, claws, guns, wild animals, well- or over-developed girls in brassieres and as little else as possible, dark "natives," fires, stakes, posts, chains, ropes, big-chested and heavily muscled Nordic he-men dominate the stage. They contain such details as one girl squirting fiery "radium dust" on the protruding breasts of another girl ("I think I've discovered your Achilles' heel, chum!"); white men banging natives around; a close-up view of the branded breast of a girl; a girl about to be blinded.

Whenever I see a book like this in the hands of a little seven-year-old boy, his eyes glued to the printed page, I feel like a fool to have to prove that this kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children! What is wrong with the prevailing ethics of educators and psychologists that they have silently permitted this kind of thing year after year, and that after I had drawn attention to it some of them still continued to defend it as helping children to learn about life and "get rid of their pent-up aggressions"? However obvious it might seem, when I saw children getting into trouble and getting sent wholesale to reformatories, I felt that I had to go on with this tedious work.

While the white people in jungle books are blonde and athletic and shapely, the idea conveyed about the natives is that there are fleeting transitions between apes and humans. I have repeatedly found in my studies that this characterization of colored peoples as subhuman, in conjunction with depiction of forceful heroes as blond Nordic supermen, has made a deep -- and I believe lasting -- impression on young children. And amidst all the violence between slaves, apes and humans in these books are big pictures of lush girls, as nude as the Post Office permits. Even on an adult, the impression of sex plus violence is definite.

Quite apart from its sadistic groove, the imagination expressed in comic books is mechanical rather than in any way creative. For instance, in a jungle book with the subtitle "The Jungle Girl," the "Satanic Dr. Zanzere ... transplants a pair of bat's wings on to a tiger." The rest of this book is the usual parade of invitation to sadistic perversion, race hatred and violence for violence's sake.

What about the "emotional release" a child is supposed to get according to the defenders of the comic-book industry? One story concludes with a close-up of a fist holding a gun and these words:

"A gentle squeeze of the trigger and the last breath of life will be squeezed out of Nyoka! Read on for Part Three of 'The Treasure of the Tiger's Paw.'''

In the jungle books the jungle is not really a place but a state of mind. It is easily transposed into outer space in the interplanetary and science-fiction books. The girls are similarly dressed and similarly treated. Torture is more refined. If someone is to be blinded it is done with some extra-scientific instrument:

"Now, ye Maid of Auro, reveal where the thorium has been hidden or my electric prong will burn the eyes from your pretty head."

The supermen are either half-undressed like their jungle brothers or dressed in fancy raiment that is a mixture of the costumes of S.S. men, divers and robots.

In one comic book of this group old-fashioned mugging -- in recent years so frequently practiced by juveniles in large cities -- is a recurrent theme, despite the interplanetary trappings. Blood flows freely, bosoms are half-bared, girls' buttocks are drawn with careful attention.

The Superman group of comic books is superendorsed. A random sample shows on the inside cover the endorsement of two psychiatrists, one educator, one English professor and a child-study consultant. On the page facing this array is depicted a man dressed as a boy shooting a policeman in the mouth (with a toy pistol). This is a prank -- "Prankster's second childhood." In the story there is a variant of the comic-book theme of a girl being thrown into the fire: "Her dress will be afire in one split second! She'll need Superman's help!"

In another story a tenement building is set afire -- also to be taken care of by Superman after it is afire. Until near the end of the book, attempts to kill people are not looked upon askance, and are not to be prevented apparently by humans but only by a superman. Then the lesson that after all you should not kill is expressed like this: "You conniving unscrupulous cad! Try to murder Carol, will you!" This is scarcely a moral condemnation. The lawyer who does not share in a million-dollar swindle is praised by Superman because he "remained honest." In fact this honesty is rewarded with a million dollars! A gun advertisement with four pictures of guns completes the impression that even if you can't become Superman, at least you can rise above the average by using force.

This Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman group is a special form of crime comics. The gun advertisements are elaborate and realistic. In one story a foreign-looking scientist starts a green-shirt movement. Several boys told me that they thought he looked like Einstein. No person and no democratic agency can stop him. It requires the female superman, Wonder Woman. One picture shows the scientist addressing a public meeting:

"So, my fellow Americans, it is time to give America back to Americans! Don't let foreigners take your jobs!"

Member of the audience: "He's right!"

Another, applauding: "YEAHHHH!"

The Superman type of comic books tends to force and superforce. Dr. Paul A. Witty, professor of education at Northwestern University, has well described these comics when he said that they "present our world in a kind of Fascist setting of violence and hate and destruction. I think it is bad for children," he goes on, "to get that kind of recurring diet ... [they] place too much emphasis on a Fascist society. Therefore the democratic ideals that we should seek are likely to be overlooked."

Actually, Superman (with the big S on his uniform -- we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and "foreign-looking" people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasy themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them -- by force.

Superman not only defies the laws of gravity, which his great strength makes conceivable; in addition he gives children a completely wrong idea of other basic physical laws. Not even Superman, for example, should be able to lift up a building while not standing on the ground, or to stop an airplane in midair while flying himself.

Superwoman (Wonder Woman) is always a horror type. She is physically very powerful, tortures men, has her own female following, is the cruel, "phallic" woman. While she is a frightening figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be.

We have asked many children how they subdivide comic books. A thirteen-year-old boy, in a letter to a national magazine commenting on one of Sterling North's excellent articles on the subject, named five groups of harmful comics: "Fantasy comics, crime comics, superman or superwoman comics, jungle comics (the worst, in my opinion) and comics which still pretend to be funny but throw in a lot of nudity to help them sell."

Many children have a simpler classification. They distinguish between "jokey" books and "interesting books." The latter they also call "exciting books" or "danger books." Very young children who supposedly read only harmless animal comic books often see others in the hands of their older siblings or in other places.

One Lafargue researcher asked a little six-year-old girl what comic books she liked and was told "corpsies." This baffled the researcher (that name would fit so many!). It finally developed when she produced the book that she meant "kewpies." It was one of the very few artistic comic books and had on its inside back cover a charming "Map of Kewpieville" showing Kewpie Square, Willow Wood, Mischief Grounds, Welcome Bridge, a Goblin Glen, Forsaken Lake, Blue Lake and a Snifflebrook. What was impressed on this child's mind, however, were the "corpsies" she had seen in the crime comic books of her friends.

Of course there are also super-animal magazines, like Super Duck. In one of them the duck yells: "No! I kill the parents [of the rabbits]. I am a hard guy and my heart is made of stone!" The scene shows a rabbit crying and begging for mercy, the duck poised to kill him with a baseball bat.

Just as there are wonder women there are wonder animals, like Wonder Ducks. In one such book there is a full-page advertisement for guns, "throwing knives" and whips, and a two-page advertisement for "Official Marine Corps knives, used by the most rugged branch of the armed forces, leathernecks swear by them."

There are also super-children, like Superboy. Superboy can slice a tree like a cake, can melt glass by looking at it ("with his amazing X-ray eyes, Superboy proves the scientific law that focussed concentrated X-rays can melt glass!"), defeats "a certain gang chief and his hirelings." Superboy rewrites American history, too. In one story he helps George Washington's campaign and saves his life by hitting a Hessian with a snowball. George Washington reports to the Continental Congress: "And sirs, this remarkable boy, a Superboy, helped our boys win a great victory."

One third of a page of this book is a picture of Washington crossing the Delaware -- with Superboy guiding the boat through the ice floes. It is really Superboy who is crossing the Delaware, with George Washington in the boat. All this travesty is endorsed by the impressive board of experts in psychiatry, education and English literature.

Comic books adapted from classical literature are reportedly used in 25,000 schools in the United States. If this is true, then I have never heard a more serious indictment of American education, for they emasculate the classics, condense them (leaving out everything that makes the book great), are just as badly printed and inartistically drawn as other comic books and, as I have often found, do not reveal to children the world of good literature which has at all times been the mainstay of liberal and humanistic education. They conceal it. The folklorist, G. Legman, writes of comic books based on classics, "After being processed in this way, no classic, no matter who wrote it, is in any way distinguishable from the floppity-rabbit and crime comics it is supposed to replace."

A writer of children's books, Eleanor Estes, has said of these comics (in the Wilson Library Bulletin), "I think that worse than the comic books that stick to their own fields are the ones that try to rehash the classics. They really are pernicious, for it seems to me that they ruin for a child the fine books which they are trying to popularize."

David Dempsey, writing in the New York Times Book Review, has said of the comic book Julius Caesar that it has "a Brutus that looks astonishingly like Superman. 'Our course will seem too bloody to cut the head off and then hack the limbs ...' says Brutus, in language that sounds like Captain Marvel ..." and he notes that "Julius Caesar is followed by a story called 'Tippy, the Terrier.'"

An adaptation from one of Mark Twain's novels has the picture of two small boys in a fight, one tearing the other's hair -- a scene not the keynote of Mark Twain's novel. Inside, three consecutive pictures show a fight between two boys ("In an instant both boys were gripped together like cats") and the last picture shows one boy with a finger almost in the other's eye (the injury-to-the-eye motif again).

At the end of 1948 the 60-million-comic-books-a-month were split up between over four hundred comic-book titles of assorted types. All through 1948 the trend of the industry was toward crime comics. Experts of the industry were busy explaining to credulous parents that the industry was only giving to children what they needed and wanted, that scenes of crime and sadism were necessary for them, even good for them, and that the industry was only supplying a demand. But in the meantime my advice to parents had begun to take at least some hold. They had begun to look into crime comic books, and different groups and local authorities started to contemplate, announce, attempt -- and even to take -- steps.

In direct response to all this the industry executed a brilliant and successful maneuver. Leaving their psychiatric and child experts with their explanations and justifications, they struck out on their own. The experts had said that what the children need is aggression, not affection -- crime, not love. But suddenly the industry converted from blood to kisses. They tooled up the industry for a kind of comic book that hardly existed before, the love-confession type. They began to turn them out quickly and plentifully before their own experts had time to retool for the new production line and write scientific papers proving that what children really needed and wanted -- what their psychological development really called for -- was after all not murder, but love! In this new genre, shooting a girl in the stomach was out, though previously it had been so necessary.

There had of course been teen-age comics before. But they were mostly not about love or kissing, but in large part about humiliations, a disguised kind of psychological sadism. The confession type, on the other hand, implies a love relationship. There are misunderstandings, jealousies and triangle troubles. The girl is either too shy or too sociable, the boy friend is either the wrong one altogether or he says the wrong things. In many of them, in complete contrast to the previous teen-age group, sexual relations are assumed to have taken place in the background. Just as the crime-comics formula requires a violent ending, so the love-comics formula demands that the story end with reconciliation.

If we were to take seriously the experts of the comic-book industry, the psychology of American children completely reversed itself in 1949. In order to provide for the "deep psychological needs" of children, the industry had been supplying more and more comic books about violence and crime. Now suddenly it began producing dozens of new titles of love comics, to satisfy children's new needs. Murder, Inc. became My Private Life; Western Killers became My True Love. With the new and profitable policy of the industry, the needs of children had changed overnight. All this would be funny if the happiness and mental development of children were not involved.

Just as some crime comics are especially marked on the cover "For Adults Only" (which of course entices children even more), so some of the love-confession comics are marked "Not Intended For Children." And just as there were supermen, superwomen, superboys and super-ducks, so the industry now supplied a "super-lover." Studying these love-confession books is even more tedious than studying the usual crime comic books. You have to wade through all the mushiness, the false sentiments, the social hypocrisy, the titillation, the cheapness.

Every investigation has its dark moments. One day I received a letter from a highly intelligent and socially active woman who had taken great interest in the curbing of crime comics. She wrote me that in her opinion the love and confession comics may be in bad taste, but at least they do no harm to children although they "give a false picture of love and life." This letter gave me the first doubt that I could ever achieve any practical results from my time-consuming investigation. What more harm can be done a child than to give him "a false picture of love and life"?

It is a mistake to think that love comics are read only by adolescent and older children. They are read by very young children as well. An eight-year-old girl living in a very comfortable environment on Long Island said, "I have lots of friends and we buy about one comic book a week and then we exchange. I can read about ten a day. I like to read the comic books about love because when I go to sleep at night I love to dream about love."

Another confession comic book is the reincarnation of a previous teen-age book with an innocuous title. That one was, despite its title, one of the most sexy, specializing in highly accentuated and protruding breasts in practically every illustration. Adolescent boys call these "headlight comics." This is a very successful way to stimulate a boy sexually. In other comic books, other secondary sexual characteristics of women, for example the hips, are played up in the drawing.

The confession comic into which this one turned has a totally different style, the new love-comics formula. One story, "I Was a Spoiled Brat," begins with a big picture of an attractive girl looking at herself in the mirror and baring herself considerably. The dash of violence here is supplied by a hit-and-run driving accident and by the father's dying of a heart attack when he hears about his daughter's life. It all comes out right in the last picture: "But I did live down my past. Tommy is now a leading merchant in Grenville."

Flooding the market with love-confession comics was so successful in diverting attention from crime comic books that it has been entirely overlooked that many of them really are crime comic books, with a seasoning of love added. Unless the love comics are sprinkled with some crime they do not sell. Apparently love does not pay.

In one love comic a demonstration is given of how to steal a "very expensive gown, Paris original" from a department store:

''I'll slip it on in the dressing-room. They won't notice me! I'll put it in that box and walk out, while the saleslady is busy with someone else! ... I walked out, trying to keep calm, trying to look and act natural ... Nobody has seen me! Ohh! If I can only reach the door!"

The youthful reader can also acquire the technique of how to seduce a girl. First you get her boy friend away on a fictitious errand, "knowing it would keep him for most of the night." After a dance you invite the girl for "a little bite" at "a roadhouse just over the state line": "Here we are, Gale! A nice little private booth! Like it?"

The girl: "'Yes' -- I wouldn't for the world let Nicky think I wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate it!"

Then you make love to her.

"Nicky! Let me go! All these people!"

Nicky: "You're right, honey! What do we want all these people for? Let's go upstairs to the terrace!"

"Upstairs was a long, narrow hall with five or six doors! Nicky opened the nearest one and I found myself in a small, shoddy-looking room!"

Nicky: "I think we'll be much more comfortable in here, don't you, honey?"

Heroine: "Nicky! I want to go home! Please let me go!"

Nicky: "Home was never like this, baby! Come on, give papa a kiss!"

A nice friendly girl of twelve was brought to me by her mother because she had stolen some money from a lodger. "She has a mind of her own," the mother said to me. "It goes and comes. The teacher complains that she can't get any work out of her at times." Careful study of the girl over a period of time showed little that was wrong. A social worker asked the mother how the girl spent her time after school. "Reading love comics," the mother replied. "I have nothing against comic books, but she reads them all the time."

This girl I found to be an expert on love comics. She told me she bought some, "but mostly I trade them." I asked her about stealing in love comics. She laughed, "Oh, they do it often. A boy stole a bracelet from a girl he loves very much. He got caught but she still loved him. He spent a term in jail. When he got out he did it again and got sent up to jail again. The girl went to jail to see him, but she fell in love with another boy and got married." This girl was full of such plots. It was hard to determine whether she had daydreamed more of loving or of stealing.

In the Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) Arnie Myers reports on an interesting study of love comics like Intimate Love, My Desire, My Love Life, Love Scandals, Lovelorn and dozens of other similar titles. They are read mostly by "adolescent and pre-adolescent girls." The heroine invariably falls in love at first sight "probably because of space limitations ... The books contain crime aplenty -- murder, suicide, abduction, arson, robbery, theft and various types of mayhem -- but crime is always subordinated to love.... The heroines indulge in vast amounts of waywardness, infidelity, cheating, lying and assorted kinds of trickery." One national Parent- Teacher-Association publication termed them "unsuitable for any age." Some newsdealers considered them "as bad as, or worse than, crime comics." One reported "a sale of thirty love comics to a sailor in his mid-twenties." Whatever the mentality of this lonely sailor may have been, is this how we want to bring up eleven- or twelve-year-old girls nowadays?

During the time when the trend toward love-confession comics seemed to be in the ascendancy, those crime comics which continued without changing their policy were read more than ever. Toward the latter part of 1950 a reversal started. Having betrayed their experts by suddenly proclaiming that psychological need and popular demand was not for murder but for love and confession, the industry reversed itself again and set sail for sadism on the old and much-publicized theory that this is what children really need to get rid of their aggressions.

New crime comic books sprang up. Where formerly Murder, Inc. had become My Private Life, and Western Killers had changed to My True Love, it was now the other way around; My Love Memoirs became Hunted, All Romances became Mr. Risk, and My Intimate Affair became Inside Crime. Thus does an alert industry follow the abrupt changes in the psychology of American children. Or is it perhaps the other way around?

In one sample of this new psychotherapeutic aggression-removal, there are seventy-three scenes of violence, corpses, wounded, murders and assault. In another a policeman who asks a criminal for his driving license is shot outright. Recently I was asked to help in the defense of a youth who had committed exactly this crime in Connecticut.

Many children read all varieties of crime comics and even poor children get hold of them in astonishingly large numbers. A thirteen-year-old girl, in trouble for habitual truancy, said, "I like jungle books. But I read the others, too. My sister buys romance books, Diary of Real Life, True Romance, Sheena, Jo-Jo, Jungle Jim -- they are exciting! I like to see the way they jump up and kick men down and kill them! I like Penalty, Crime Does Not Pay. I don't like them because the crook gets caught. I'd like him to get away with it. They show how you steal. A woman walked in a store and took a dress and walked right out and a woman caught her. I like to see women catch them. Sheena got a big jungle she lives in and people down there likes her and would do anything for her. When I get ready to go to bed I read them -- about four comic books. We don't all the time have enough to eat, because my mother hasn't got enough money to buy any."

In this case I saw a previous report by a psychologist which stated: "Marked sexual preoccupation hampers her objectivity." It makes no mention of comic books -- but it seems to me that they "hampered her objectivity" most.

Frequently children remember only snatches from comics. A fifteen-year-old girl, asked which comics she remembered, said, "I like one where a man puts a needle in a woman's eye. The eye is all bloodshot and frightened. And another one with a hunchback man carrying a woman from the grave or to the grave. I read four or five a day." This is typical of how crime comics are reflected in a child's mind. Nothing here of crime prevention or of ethical lessons.

Many children, when asked what comic books they like, answer simply like the ten-year-old who reads ten a week, "I like murder comics."

One of the horror-type comic books for children is called Nightmare, A Psychological Study. It is about a young man who mixes up nightmares with reality and dies a horrible death, buried when the cement foundation of a building is poured over him. He has received incompetent advice from a psychiatrist, Dr. Froyd, who, on his office door is called "Dr. Fredric Froyd, psychiatrist." (Shades of Dr. Frederick Muttontop!)

The literary style of this "psychological study" shows the same predilection for non-language expletives familiar in other comics. The psychiatric defenders of the comic-book industry maintain that this kind of thing helps Junior with his emotional self-expression. And the educational defenders of the industry claim it helps him with his literary expression.

Another story, a "scientific Suspenstory" (sic!), illustrates how many crime comic stories cannot be described as giving any "emotional release" because apart from their other inadequacies they do not come to any end. The taste for violence is aroused -- and maintained. The story begins with "a hideous thing" and ends:

"The doctor is dead! But where is the THING? WHERE?? WHERE IS IT RIGHT NOW?"

Once in the waiting room of the Clinic I saw a little boy crouched over a comic book, oblivious to everything around him. In passing I could see the title of the story he was reading. Big capitals spelled out TARZAN. Surely, I thought, the adventures of Tarzan are harmless enough for juveniles of any age. But I was misled, as many parents no doubt are. When I looked at this comic later I found on the inside cover the picture of a man tied up in an agonizing position -- a man "found dead in a Dallas park, his hands tied behind him and two bullets in his worthless carcass"; another man shot in the back as he is thrown out of a car ("Get out, ya stinking rat!") -- and more of the same. Tarzan was not the whole title of the story I had seen the boy in the waiting room reading. There was a subtitle "The Wyoming Killer" and two other headings, "From Police Files" and "A True Crime Story." The story was not about Tarzan, but about a hero who robbed a bank and shot five men to death.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 12:22 am

PART 1 OF 2

3. The Road to the Child

Methods of Examination

"And then one should search . . . for connections, conditions and situations that have acted at once or slowly, and with which perhaps the origin of the abnormal deviation may be justifiably linked . . . Moreover, it is necessary to understand why these conditions and situations have brought about such results in the patient, when in another person they would occur without the slightest effect; and furthermore, why they all lead in the case of one person to just such an abnormal complex, while in another to a totally different one."
-- Pavlov


The problem of what comic books do to children, or rather what they have already done to a whole generation, is three-fold. Its solution requires a knowledge of comic books, of the minds of children, and of the processes, the mechanisms, by which comic-book reading influences children. When, for example, a young child hangs himself and beneath the dead child is found an open comic book luridly describing and depicting a hanging (as has happened in a number of cases), the mechanics of the relationship between the two have to be investigated, e.g. the processes of imitation and experimentation in childhood.

To study the psychological effects of comics on children one must first have more than a superficial and scanty knowledge of what is in them. For if in children's nightmares or in their play or in their productions in psychological tests, any association or reference occurs to the "Venusians" or "Voltamen," to "a syntho-shade" or to the precise instructions on how to "case wealthy homes" for burglaries, you will not understand the response if you do not know the stimulus.

Several times when some of the earlier results of our research were presented, somebody from the field of child care would get up to state that he had never seen a child who was influenced by comic books. This statement in itself is preposterous, of course. For nothing that occupies a child for several hours a day over a long period can be entirely without influence on him. The trouble with these arguments was that these people had not studied the contents of comic books, had failed for years to take notice of their very existence as a potentially harmful factor, and had never examined children for their influence. Or the proud protagonists of negative results had -- without realizing the implications -- even encouraged children to read crime comic books as recreation and proper mental nourishment!

The same is true for superintendents of institutions for delinquents who have stated their opinion that there is no connection between the behavior of juveniles and crime-comic-book reading. How would they have found out, sitting at their desks far removed both physically and psychologically from the lives of the inmates, to whom for years in these institutions crime comic books have been fed as a steady diet? One Lafargue psychiatrist who worked for a time in a big state reformatory for boys has vividly described how many hours these confined children spend on crime comic books (with which the reformatory is filled to the brim) and his dismay at seeing how children who had got into trouble while reading many crime comics were sentenced to years of incarceration to read even more of them. That is one of the paradoxes of the social problem of crime comic books: that those with authority over children have for years neglected to pay any attention to this literature, which for many children is practically their only reading, have prescribed it for children in their charge as remedy and recreation, have paid no attention to the consequences, and now state as their professional opinion that comic books do not do any harm. Those are not the ways of science.

Such opinions show that these reformatory officials not only do not have enough contact with their charges, but also are not sufficiently acquainted with the observations of their employees. A number of psychologists and social workers employed in reformatories have told us over the years what an unwholesome influence comic books are in these institutions. Others have told us that supervisors in reformatories -- like many parents -- give lots of crime comics to children in order to keep them quiet. As an example of the problems comic books present in reformatories, one social worker stated that "when it came to drawing, the boys drew pictures from the comic books that showed violence or a preoccupation with unhealthy sexual attitudes."

The method we have used is to read, over the years, very many comic books and analyze and classify them from as many points of view as possible. Many different patterns can be discerned in them, according to publisher, writer, draftsmen, the prevailing trend and the special genre. A lot of comic books have come to us from children themselves. And if it was feasible, whenever children referred to something they had seen in a comic book we asked them to bring us that particular comic book. When they no longer had it, we added its name to a list of "wanted" comics and tried to get it later on.

It is not scientifically sound to narrow down the problem to whether the influence of comic books is just "good" or "bad." That cannot be a sound starting-point. The question is, do they have a discernible influence, and if they have how does it work, how intense and lasting is it, and in what fields and regions of the child's mind does it manifest itself. This is exactly how I started.

When Time magazine, at one stage of my investigations, reported my statement that the violence of crime comic books is a contributing factor to the increasing violence in juvenile delinquency, the father of a boy of four wrote a critical letter to the magazine in which he said, "It occurs to me that Dr. Wertham takes a child's mind too seriously." Is it possible to take a child's mind "too seriously"? Is anything to be gained by the current cheap generalization that healthy normal children are not affected by bad things and that for unhealthy abnormal children bad things do not make much difference either, because the children are bad anyhow? It is my growing conviction that this view is a wonderful excuse for adults to do whatever they choose. They can conceal their disregard for social responsibility behind a scientific-sounding abstraction which is not even true and can proceed either to exploit children's immaturity or permit it to be exploited by whole industries.

In the ordinary process of education children are told that they should listen and learn. In the psychiatric investigation of children's minds just the opposite is true: it is we who have to listen and learn. And this is what I and my associates have tried to do throughout our research.

Child psychologists often publish results of studies based on the questionnaire method. They take a group of children and ask them: "Do you do this (or that)? How often do you do it? Do you read this (or that)? What do you like better (this or that)?" -- and so on. This questionnaire method is inadequate. To ask children a series of simple questions and expect real enlightenment from their answers is even more misleading than to carry out the same procedure with adults. The younger the child, the more erroneous are the conclusions likely to be drawn. Children love to express themselves, but giving hard and fast answers to hard and fast questions is neither their favorite nor their natural method. Even if they do their best, the procedure is crude and leaves out all the finer shades of the dynamics of childhood thinking. On this premise we decided from the very beginning not to rely on any single method, but to use all the methods of modern child psychiatry which were suitable and possible in the individual case.

If one wants to go beyond narrow formal questions and intends to include the largest variety of different children, it would be a top-heavy procedure to start and execute a study devoted to one factor such as comic books alone. For this reason we have from the beginning integrated our studies of comic books with our general routine work in mental hygiene and child psychiatry. Good clinical work is good clinical research. In other words, in doing thorough clinical work the psychiatrist cannot help reaching into unexplored no-man's land. It will happen again and again that in cases that seem baffling in their symptomatology, refractory to treatment or show unusual manifestations, he will come up against new factors that are not in the books.

Starting on such a wide basis, the material available for this study covered the largest cross-section of children as they are seen in mental hygiene clinics: children who were referred by every variety of public and private child-care agency; who had come to the attention of the juvenile part of the Police Bureau or the Children's Courts; who were seen in the course of private practice or were confined for observation in psychiatric wards for adolescents, or were confined for physical diseases in pediatric wards, or seen in pediatric clinics. A large proportion of children were normal children who came to our attention for some social reason, including children of superior endowment, who were candidates for scholarships for special educational facilities. The upper age limit of children in whom we were most interested (although we did not adhere to it rigidly) was sixteen. Data were obtained also from older teen-agers and adults referring to their earlier comic-book-reading stage.

The reasons given why contact was sought for these children with physicians or psychiatrists or psychologists or social workers usually did not include any reference to comic books. But from the very beginning there were cases where the reading of comic books was part of the complaint. In these cases the main complaint was what the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an authority on juvenile gangs, called the "extreme avidity" of their comic-book reading. "These comics may be a counterpart of what youngsters see in the movies," he said, "but at least they cannot live with the movies day in and day out as they do with their comics. They take them to bed with them. They walk along the street on their way to school reading them. When they go on an outing for sheer fun, for vacation, along goes an average of five or six magazines per child, and an abnormal amount of attention is given them. They read them going; they read them there; they read them coming home; they swap them; so that the whole thing borders on extreme and abnormal avidity."

If all the children who pass through a period of this "extreme and abnormal avidity" were really sick children in the first place, as experts of the comic-book industry would have us believe, this would be a sick generation. But such arguments are so superficial, and so evidently special pleading, that the only thing worth noting about them is that so many adults are naive enough to give them credence. It is necessary to analyze the comic books themselves, the children in relation to them and the social conditions under which these children live.

The cases in which comic books figured in the original complaint can be illustrated by a typical statement that we have heard many times. A social acquaintance asked me about his nephew: "My sister has a little boy. He reads comic books all the time. And I've seen him -- it is all the time! He lives in one of those dream worlds. He's always interested in these books. All his concentration goes to that. All his excitement comes from these comic books. He doesn't even go out to play ball." I have never heard such a complaint about harmless animal comics.

The very fact that in the beginning we did not know the best advice to give in such cases was an added incentive to keep up our studies. The common assumption that the child must be "unhealthy in the first place" proved in most instances to have no relation at all to the facts. What was unhealthy in most instances were the comic books when we inspected them. Children, like adults, without necessarily being sick or neurotic, are different in their powers of resistance to such stimulations.

Another typical case where comic books figured in the reasons for referral was an eight-year-old boy who had suddenly begun to take money in his home. This boy was brought up in a cultured and secure home. He had been reading comic books, some of which he bought in a nearby candy store where large quantities of them were alluringly displayed. His father, a physician, told me, "He says he knows he's doing wrong, but he wants the money for comic books. He hasn't spent it on anything else. He has comic books all over the house. He reads them at the table and doesn't eat properly. Last summer when he went to camp every child had comic books and he brought a big bundle home with him. These books distract him from doing his lessons. Why, he's even gotten a sex angle from them. He told his mother that if she'd take off her blouse she'd be as pretty as a comic-book girl! What shall we do about him?" The father himself, a gentle person, had taken the drastic step of burning up all the comic books he found in his house.

Over the last few years cases of this type have greatly increased: the young child in the grip of the lure of comic books, the frustrated parent who is baffled by this invasion of his home by a powerful industry. But even so, cases that came to our attention just on account of comic-book reading form only a small proportion.

The psychiatric study of children is in general not nearly so standardized as that of adults. The so-called mental status, that is to say the formal examination for the more gross symptoms, such as disorientation or defects of judgment, or mood disorders, is not very productive. In adults we can take the life history of a patient and learn a great deal about him from his reactions to typical outer events. And we can proceed to study his inner life history as a sequence unfolding according to a certain pattern. The life history of children is not only briefer, but presents the paradox that while one can understand it only if one has a good picture of the child's environment, the story itself is an inner life history.

I have gone over many psychiatric charts of children taken in hospitals, in clinics and by consultants of private agencies. And I have often been astonished how few quotes, if any, they contain, of what the children themselves actually say.

We have given routine psychiatric examinations to children where they are interviewed by a psychiatrist. We have taken the history of the child's development from his parents, or from those with whom he has lived and who brought him up. Whenever possible, social workers have studied the child's social environment, obtained school reports, interviewed teachers, and relayed information from other agencies who had contact with the child or his family. In the same way, pertinent information was obtained from hospitals, private doctors and clergymen. In cases where courts were involved, probation reports were added to the record or probation officers interviewed.

In cases where children confided to us that they belonged to gangs and gave us permission to speak to other gang members, we made an attempt to hear their story. As much as possible we tried to ascertain the recreational influences to which children are exposed: games, community centers, radio, television, books. It is in that setting and with that perspective that we began to realize and ascertain the influence of comic books.

To establish proper circumstances which give a child the chance to express himself is difficult. Children do not like doctors' offices any more than adults do. Nor do they like being asked embarrassing questions in front of their parents. The way to gain their confidence is to treat them as persons in their own right. The paradox that this goes beyond examination and in itself is a step in therapy should not deter one. All child psychology worthy of the name is very close to educational and re-educational methods. It is in the very process of education that the child is best understood.

If one wishes to obtain the spontaneous expressions of children, it is only the amateur who attempts to exclude himself and then observe some pseudospontaneous reaction of the child. Children do not dislike authority. On the contrary, they have a strong inner urge to find and follow authorities whom they can trust. They may not always understand what is best for them, but they learn that, and a large part of a child's inner life consists in this search, disappointment, finding and retrospective correction. If the examining psychiatrist tries to eliminate himself as a personality and as an adult whom the child knows to be older and therefore more experienced, he will get only artificial results.

In children's lives other persons, parents especially, of course, but also older and younger siblings, play an important role. So it is necessary to obtain a picture of these other dramatis personae, not only as they are reflected in the child's mind, but as they really are. Interviewing younger children to hear what they have to say of a child is often very enlightening, sometimes more so than what parents say. Yet I have rarely seen in charts a quotation of what brothers or sisters have to say about a young patient. In our study of crime comic books it was interesting to see siblings because comic books are often a family affair. Younger children clandestinely or openly read the comics of their older brothers and sisters.

The application of psychological tests is apt to be overdone in a mechanical way. Yet they are indispensable to child psychiatry. The Rorschach (ink blot) Test, if expertly and judiciously interpreted, was an important tool in our study. This test consists of a series of ten ink-blot pictures. The subject is asked what he sees in them. It should not be given by itself, but should always be correlated with clinical findings and other tests. We have noticed that in Rorschach tests children may see forms that adults usually do not see. Investigated, they often turn out to be forms related to what they have seen in comic books, especially weird and horror comics, e.g. ghost forms, fantastic hands, etc. These are apt to be misinterpreted by psychologists as meaning complex-determined anxieties and phobias, whereas actually they are just reminiscences from comic-book illustrations. Here according to our findings an important inroad has been made into children's imagination and imagery, and of course also into their actions.

A boy of ten came to the Clinic with the main complaint that "he won't concentrate on his schoolwork." He had previously had a psychiatric examination through a public social agency where he received the customary cliche diagnosis of "deep emotional disorder" and where it was noted that "his mother is seductive and stimulating to him." A Rorschach report stressed his "underlying feelings of hostility and destructiveness" and stated that the boy "is attempting to repress his hostile and destructive tendencies at the expense of spontaneity."

When we studied this boy carefully, we found that he had a difficult father, but the imagery of his destructiveness came mainly from the fact that he was an inveterate reader of "murder comics." His real life difficulty was that he could not read. ("I don't read comic books. I only look at pictures.") Thus the correct interpretation of the Rorschach Test responses needs a knowledge of the whole picture and of the period in which the child lives. Circumstances in the United States today are different from those in the Switzerland of decades ago when Dr. Rorschach devised and worked out his test.

When pronounced hostile and threatening images are found in the Rorschach Test, they usually come from one of three causes. First, a special atmosphere of hostility in the early environment, parents' fights and family discords, or gang-dominated schools or neighborhoods. Secondly, such images occur in a relatively very small number of really psychotic and psychopathic children. Thirdly, they are derived from outside influences such as comic books. In the frequently hackneyed routine of the examination of children, ingrained tendencies or the narrower family situation are usually held responsible. But careful examination of factors shows usually a combination of the first and third groups. An eleven-year-old boy of superior intelligence showed in the Rorschach Test (and in his drawings) strife, hostility and threatening images. He lived with parents who for years had gone from battle to battle, and from court to court. In addition, he was steeped in crime-comics lore:

"My mother doesn't like me to read crime comic books, but I see them anyhow. I like Superman, Penalty. I like the Jumbo books. They have a lot of girls in them. There is a lot of fighting in them. There are men and women fighting. Sometimes they kill the girls, they strangle them, shoot them. Sometimes they poison them. In that magazine Jumbo they often stab them. The girl doesn't do the stabbing very often, she gets stabbed more often. Sometimes the girls stab the men, sometimes shoot them. I read one comic book where they tie people to the trees, tie them in front of stampeding herds. They tie them to the trees, then cut the trees and the sap runs over that person and the bugs are drawn to that sap, then they eat the people. Sometimes they torture girls the same way, by stabbing and beating them. They throw them in rivers and make them swim where alligators come. Sometimes they hit them with weapons on the back. They don't have much on when they hit them with weapons. It excites me a little bit."

Is it not natural that the Rorschach of the boy shows hostility and aggression?

The Rorschach Test is a valid scientific method. I was one of the first psychiatrists to use it in this country and published research on it over twenty years ago. In my experience with children and adults I have found it a revealing auxiliary method. But in recent years it has been too often used uncritically, interpreted with the bias of a purely biological determinism, leaving out all social influence, and given by psychologists with either faulty clinical orientation, or with no clinical orientation at all. Under these circumstances, the Rorschach Test like any other wrongly applied scientific method has given wrong results. It has been used, for example, to bolster the conception of more or less fixed psychological-biological phases of childhood development. And this is a conception which has caused parents whose children do not conform to textbooks a great deal of anxiety. It has led psychologists to socially unrealistic generalizations. A recent text on children's Rorschach responses describes as the "essence" of the average normal seven-year-old child a most abnormal preoccupation with morbidity, mutilation, pain, decay, blood and violence. But that is not the normal essence of the average American child, nor of any other child! You cannot draw true conclusions from any test if you ignore the broad educational, social and cultural influences on the child, his family and his street. These influences, of which comic books are just one (although a very potent one), favor, condone, purvey and glorify violence. The violent meaning of the Rorschach responses is not the norm for the age of seven; unfortunately it seems to be becoming the norm for a civilization of adults.

A popular syndicated column for parents on child behavior (emanating from the Gesell Institute) processes these findings for the popular consumption of parents. It concludes that "the environment -- the radio, movies and funny books" have nothing to do with the child's lust for gore, his love of the horrible. "We believe these preferences to be the normal expressions of the child's likes at his age." Parents who read such a misleading column are of course disarmed by the supposed evidence of such a scientific method as the Rorschach Test. They tend to blame their child or themselves and in so doing they give the industries that peddle stories and programs of violence for children a free hand.

In. the Thematic Apperception Test the child is shown a series of pictures depicting various scenes and is asked to tell stories about them. We found in some children preoccupation with stories of murder, blood-letting and violence in one form or another. But if one does not appreciate that this kind of production occurs much more in avid crime-comics readers than in other children, one is apt completely to misinterpret the test. This test also showed us that comic-book reading leaves definite traces in the child's mind which crop up as spontaneous manifestations in a projective test.

The Mosaic Test we give routinely to the children. The child has a choice of a large number of mosaic pieces of different colors and shapes. He is asked to put them on a tray and make any design he pleases. The test is very useful in a diagnosis or for ruling out of psychotic conditions, even inconspicuous and incipient ones. These tests revealed in a large series of cases that there is nothing intrinsically abnormal about those children who either became very addicted to reading crime comics or are influenced by such reading to delinquent acts. As a matter of fact, the Mosaic Test -- in conjunction, of course, with clinical findings -- indicated or confirmed our finding that those children who suffer from any really serious intrinsic psycho-pathological condition, including those with psychoses, are less influenced by comic-book reading.

Intelligence tests and aptitude tests were of course given routinely in all cases where there was any question of the adequacy of intellectual endowment and resources. For the study of the effects of comic books, complete tests for reading ability were found to be of crucial importance. Many statements about children's reading have been made off and on which are not based on a really full and specific study of reading by the various tests devised for this purpose. The harmful effect of comic-book reading on children's ability to read is a special chapter and a sorry one.

A test which is no longer used as much as it should be, the Association Test, we found particularly useful. The associations to words which are complex indicators may reveal preoccupations and fantasies which cannot be obtained on a conscious level, certainly not by questioning. In cases where children are accused of serious delinquencies, the Association Test functions like a "lie detector" test and has helped us to reconstruct what really happened.

A boy of ten was referred to the Clinic after he had been accused of pushing a younger boy into the water so that the small boy drowned. Another boy had seen him do it, but since he himself denied it the authorities felt it was one boy's word against another and the case was dismissed as "accidental death." The Clinic was asked to give the suspected boy emotional guidance. He had previously thrown stones at windows and on one occasion had hit and almost injured a woman in this way.

He was a voracious comic-book reader. His mother stated that he read whatever comic books he could get hold of. He said, "I like all the crime comic books. I like all kinds, science, everything that is ever in the house. I buy quite a few. I get them from my friends. Some of them give them to me and some of them loan them to me. I like crime comics such as Clue. It is all about when this man, he and three other men, they robbed jewelry and broke windows and they took the rings and ran away and a cop's car comes and shoots them. Sometimes they get killed, the gangsters, the cops kill them. Sometimes they hit each other when one of them does something wrong. Sometimes they use knives."

He was known to be a bully. He had bullied the boy who was drowned to such an extent that the boy's mother had gone to the authorities to ask for protection for her boy. Steeped in crime-comics lore, his attitude was a mixture of bravado and evasiveness. Nothing indicated that he had any feelings of guilt. The Association Test showed a definite blocking to key words such as drowning, water, little boy and pushing. After careful study of the whole case we came to the conclusion that the little boy would not have drowned if our boy had not pushed him in, and that our patient would not have been pushed to the murder if his mind had not been imbued with readiness for violence and murder by his continuous comic-book reading.

Another useful method for closer examination of young children is the Duess Test, which has been worked out in Switzerland and used in France. It is indispensable for the correct understanding of some children. With its help one can sometimes unearth subtle psychological factors not brought out by other methods.

The test consists in ten very brief fablelike stories. They are incomplete and after they are told to the child he is asked what the end of the story would be. In this way the child can complete the story in any way he likes. This test should be used in an elastic way. It should not be applied rigidly and should not be scored like a test. One can modify the original stories and can even add new ones to adapt them to the original case. I give the test in a way that is a mixture between telling a story, playing a game and asking a question. The Duess Test is often an interesting starting-point for further talks with a child.

The Duess Test can be given only to young children, the upper age limit being, in my experience, about eleven. In suitable cases the child projects himself into the story and identifies his own situation with that in the fable. In this way typical emotional complexes may be elicited, but, as in other tests, one should be careful not to view the child as if he were an adult neurotic or read too much abnormality into him.

Two contrasting examples will illustrate the method. A boy of ten was treated at the Clinic for a behavior disorder. He gave inconspicuous answers to the first nine fables. The tenth fable goes like this:

A child wakes up tired in the morning, and says: "Oh, what a bad dream I had!" What did he dream?


This boy replied, "He dreamed about something he didn't like. It might have been something like a murder. He's gonna get murdered and he woke up."

Study of this boy did not reveal any special hostilities or resentments. During one talk with him he told me that he liked Classics comics. "What are they?" 1 asked. "The Classics," he explained to me, "are the kind that tell a story, like under the water. -- I can't remember them." When 1 told him I was very much interested in all kinds of comic books he confided in me that what he really liked and read a lot was crime comics. "I got a whole pile of Crime Does Not Pay!" Would it not be surprising if such a child did not have murder on his mind?

The other case is a girl of nine, referred to the Clinic because she has a severe reading problem and was described as "very nervous." She also was a great comic-book reader. These are her responses to three fables:

FABLE I

A father bird and a mother bird and their little baby bird are asleep in their nest on the branch of a tree. But there comes a big storm. It breaks the branch of the tree and the nest falls to the ground. The father bird flies quickly to one tree, the mother bird to another tree. What will the baby bird do? He knows how to fly a little.

HER ANSWER

He will die because he can't fly so well.

FABLE III

A mother sheep and her little lamb are in a field. Every evening the mother sheep gives the little lamb good warm milk, which the little lamb likes very much. But it can already eat grass. One day the mother sheep has a new little lamb which is hungry for the mother to give him milk. But the mother sheep has not enough milk for both little lambs, so she says to the first lamb: '"I haven't got enough milk for both of you, go and eat some fresh grass."

What will the lamb do?

HER ANSWER

Eat the grass. Get mad because he doesn't want the other little lamb to drink the milk.

FABLE IV

Somebody in the family has taken the train and has gone very far away and will never return home.

Who is it? Who can go away in the family?

HER ANSWER

The mother. She can go out in the country. Maybe she doesn't come back because she is mad at the father. Maybe she liked it there better. Or they could get hurt by a car. They could be dead. The mother could be dead.


The test results show indications of intrinsic psychological factors. The extrinsic situational influence of comic-book reading played only a minor role. Further analysis of this child showed that she had ticlike movements at times and suffered from compulsions. For example, she had to touch the ground with her hand. She had death wishes and profound feelings of hostility. Comic books did not intrude in her emotional life because she was too preoccupied with herself and had already built up such abnormal defenses as compulsions. All this started five years previously at the birth of her baby sister, of whom she was intensely jealous.

Children are apt to express themselves more easily and naturally when other children are around. Playroom observation is an indispensable adjunct of scientific psychiatric studies of children. It is almost the opposite of the questionnaire method. There are no questions, but only answers. There are no inquisitive adults, but only fellow children. One or two adults observe inconspicuously -- but not pretending that they are not there. They participate only as catalysts. A group of children for the playroom does not have to be of the same age, and the sexes should be mixed. We have found that the most suitable age is from about five to ten, but children up to twelve can also be included.

Playroom techniques have been criticized because they are at once a diagnostic and a therapeutic tool. But in my experience this is actually a great advantage. Play technique is frequently successful in both areas. And it is theoretically a sound principle to do psychological exploring studies on a child in the process of treatment, education and re-education. Pedagogy, psychotherapy of children and child psychology should become recognized more and more as closely related and inseparable disciplines.

With a grant from the Child Neurology Research Foundation to work out methods for the observation and treatment of children, I organized a playroom in the middle thirties, while I was director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Bellevue Hospital. The case material and our methods in general were the same as those on which these studies are based. One of the main differences in the outer circumstances of the children is that until the end of the thirties there were no crime comic books to speak of, whereas in the forties they had, with respect to the time they take up, become one of the most important influences on children's lives.

In our play observations and therapy, children are engaged in spontaneous play activity of a type that permits them to express themselves as fully as possible. Any games with set rules or reading of books are considered an obstacle. The children construct buildings with mechanical building sets of wood and metal, draw, paint, make mosaics with colored stones, and work with clay.

Watching children in this setting, one learns how false is the idea that if left to themselves, with opportunity for constructive play, they will pay no attention to that and will instead seek outlets for "aggression."

In the early forties one of the activities children sometimes wanted to keep up instead of engaging in spontaneous activity was reading comic books. Protocols of the play group would contain entries like this: "Entered playroom with his own comic book and kept looking at it," or "Greeted the others, friendly, then took a comic book and sat down to read it." This was in the early period of the rise of the crime comic book. In this atmosphere of the playroom it is easy to ask a child why and what he reads.

Comparison of our continuing observations led to definite conclusions. Of course young children are apt to be "wild," and I saw plenty of them in the thirties. But it was a natural wildness. Many children in the period some ten years later showed a kind of artificial wildness, with a dash of adult brutality and violence far from childlike. From comic books they derive ideas of activity and excitement not in the form of concentrated imaginative play, but in the form of crude and combative action. Of course this kind of thing is not found by those who work with questionnaire methods or with preconceived conclusions.

A boy of seven suffered from asthma and was "inattentive" in school. He improved with play therapy. It was noted that instead of playing he liked to pore over comic books a lot of the time. We weaned him away from them by giving him material to draw and paint with. But the comic-book spirit was very evident in his art productions. He drew Donald Duck with a gun and his drawings always showed "the robber shooting the cop." (That the opposite could also occur never seemed apparent from any of his numerous drawings.)

A number of children whom I had observed at an early age in the playroom I followed up later as adolescents. That provided a good background for evaluating the later impact of comic books and other factors. After I had convinced myself that comic books like this are a bad influence, I had to face the question, Why not advise parents to forbid children to read crime comics in the very beginning, to forestall adverse influences? But that is not so simple. Crime comic books are not an individual problem, they are a social problem. While it is not true that every child is a crime comics reader, crime comic books are available nearly everywhere children go. To forbid what is constantly and temptingly available is bad pedagogic practice. Moreover, children come constantly in contact with other children and get the effects from them, either with or without comic books. As far as abstaining from reading them is concerned, that is not easy for any child in this comic-book-selling and promoting world. It is unfair to put that task on their shoulders. They need the help of adults, not only in one family at a time but on a much larger scale.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 12:22 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 3 CONT'D.)

To advise a child not to read a comic book works only if you can explain to him your reasons. For example, a ten-year-old girl from a cultivated and literate home asked me why I thought it was harmful to read Wonder Woman (a crime comic which we have found to be one of the most harmful). She saw in her home many good books and I took that as a starting point, explaining to her what good stories and novels are. "Supposing," I told her, "you get used to eating sandwiches made with very strong seasonings, with onions and peppers and highly spiced mustard. You will lose your taste for simple bread and butter and for finer food. The same is true of reading strong comic books. If later on you want to read a good novel it may describe how a young boy and girl sit together and watch the rain falling. They talk about themselves and the pages of the book describe what their innermost little thoughts are. This is what is called literature. But you will never be able to appreciate that if in comic-book fashion you expect that at any minute someone will appear and pitch both of them out of the window." In this case the girl understood, and the advice worked.

Play observation and therapy are sometimes misunderstood by those inexperienced in the method and by the public. Violently destructive play is interpreted as a natural phase of child development and the erroneous idea is propagated that it will be advantageous to the child to let him indulge in violence as much as he likes. For example, a recent popularized medical column is headed "Play Therapy Lets Child Vent His Anger On Toys." And then it goes on to describe, as if it were a common occurrence, how a little boy who hated his mother and sister strangled two dolls and tried to dismember them. The same boy stuck pins into another doll supposed to represent the doctor. The physician who writes the column takes for granted that the emotion which children express in the playroom should be hostility. He says, "The therapist accepts fighting and interrupts only when it is obvious that someone is going to be hurt." He takes it for granted that chairs will be broken! But this is all wrong. Most children do not engage in such violence, and certainly not from ingrained tendencies, and if they do, a good therapist would certainly analyze the causes for such violence early and help the child to understand and overcome it.

As another procedure of investigation, children were allowed to play with a marionette stage. They made up their own plays, usually with one child doing the outline and filling it in with suggestions from one or two other children. The plot outline was usually very simple, with the play consisting largely in improvisations. The marionettes represented such figures as permitted the child to symbolize a father-figure, a mother-figure, siblings and other dramatis personae in his life. Marionette shows sometimes reveal very well the psychological factors in the family constellation.

We used this method for children from five to twelve. Before joining this group children were not asked about comic books. It was interesting to see how the concrete inspiration for a plot, such as it was, came usually from a real event or from a movie, radio or comic book. Typical crime-comic-book methods appeared in the plays: knife-throwing, throwing somebody out of the window, stomping on people, etc. I later classified the productions (which were taken down by a stenographer) in two groups, constructive plays and destructive plays. The constructive plays were about parties, family reunions, lovers, dancing, painters in the house, etc. One production was entitled "A Day in Dr. Wertham's Office." Destructive plays were about crime, robbers, spies: "The Robbery in Your Neighborhood Store"; "A Night in Chinatown." Comic-book influences played a role only in the destructive plays. I have seen no constructive play inspired by a comic book. The language in the destructive plays sometimes came directly from comics. In the end the bad man went free or got killed. (He was never caught by the authorities and punished.)

When the performance of the play was over, the child audience of about eight or ten was asked to discuss it and ask questions of the author. This audience reaction had a great deal of spontaneity and was often very revealing with respect to both the child who asked and the child who answered. For example, one child in the audience asked, "Why didn't you make the robber kick the cop?" Or a child author answered a question about where he got the idea for his play, "I got part of it out of a comic book -- the part where they throw the Chinaman into the river. The rest I made up for myself."

The children drew their own sets. These sketches were a supplementary source for psychological interpretations. For instance, in a constructive play an eight-year-old boy drew a "playground," a "house" and "on the street." Children who produced destructive plays often made correspondingly aggressive sketches.

I regard it as a major finding that no good marionette-show plots ever came from comic books, although the children read so many of them. The "inspiration" from comic books was never artistic, literary or even a good story. It was a precipitate of fragmentary scenes, violent, destructive and smart-alecky cynical. This was in marked contrast to the inspiration children derived from movies, of which they had seen a much smaller number. It might be objected that a young child is not capable of absorbing and retaining a really good and artistic story from a movie or a real book. Even very young children get something out of a good story and can make something of it. During one of the audience reaction periods after a marionette show, an eight-year-old boy gave his account of the movie The Grapes of Wrath:

"I saw The Grapes of Wrath. It was very good. It was about a man who got out of prison. He was in Sing Sing, I think. He walked to a place where he heard music. A man came along in a car. He asked for a ride. The man said, 'Don't you see that sign?' Then he said, 'Hop on till we get around the bend.'

"They were walking to the barnyard. A big storm was coming. All the people were gone from the house because the cats came -- big tractors. The people had to go to Uncle George. They had to get off the land, and travel, and travel, and travel. The oldest man died. The woman died. They were riding and riding. You see them in the dark without lights, and then it shows the end.

"Only in the end they were happy. They weren't happy at first because they had to get off the land."

Like a good child's drawing, such an account gives essentials in very simplified form. It is children with beautiful minds like this, who can summarize The Grapes of Wrath by telling how the people in it "travel and travel and travel," whom we corrupt by throwing them to the 100-million-dollar enterprise of the comic-book industry.

With adolescents, group methods are also useful, as play therapy is for younger children. With the younger children in a group we give more attention to what they do; with older children we get more from what they say.

At the beginning of World War II, I started a special form of group therapy for delinquent and predelinquent children in the Mental Hygiene Clinic of the Queens General Hospital. This was intended primarily for treatment, but it turned out unexpectedly to be one of the most revealing channels of information about the influence of comic books. When this group started I had no intention of taking up that problem, but the subject turned up spontaneously again and again.

The usual age range of members of this group was from thirteen to sixteen. The majority were boys, but there were always some girls. As therapy, the club was more successful than any other method of child guidance, especially of delinquents. This was attested by probation officers and juvenile law enforcement authorities. Some 90 per cent of all those who attended the sessions for prolonged periods (that is, at least one year) are no longer problems to their families, the authorities or themselves. Only children who had got into some kind of trouble were eligible, and the minimum trouble was playing hookey. In many cases much more serious offenses were involved. Most of the children came from one-family-house, middle-class sections of the population.

The name Hookey Club started in this way. I was confronted with several children one day who were truants. While interviewing them as a group, they began questioning one another. This went so well that I asked them to return in a group. Little by little, whenever children with truancy problems came, my assistants would feed them into the group-therapy class. Once, before one of the weekly meetings, I said to a social worker, "I see the Hookey Club is coming in today." She laughed and repeated the remark, and the name stuck. The Hookey Club developed into a regular institution. The sessions were strictly secret, with only myself and usually a stenographer present. All details remained confidential. At each session the case of one boy or girl or some general topic on someone's mind was discussed. One child functioned as chairman to maintain order. Every boy or girl at the session could question the child whose case was taken up. And everyone could express his opinion about the case. Among the children were always some experts in various forms of delinquency who questioned the child who was up for discussion. Whatever a child might have learned from comic books for the commission of a delinquent act, the group never accepted that as an excuse. Nor did any child ever spontaneously bring it up as an excuse.

Children are more isolated than we think, and have few in whom they can confide without fear of misunderstanding or recrimination. Adults rarely realize how serious children are about their conflicts. They want to be straightened out. They shrink from a judge; but in the Hookey Club, where they were even more severely questioned by their peers, they could speak out fully and openly about anything whatsoever. When children question one another, one can readily see how the troubles of children reflect the troubles and conflicts of society. My experiences with the Hookey Club have confirmed me in my opinion that valuable personality assets slumber in delinquent children. By regarding these children as inferior or emotionally sick or psychopathic, we miss the constellation of social and individual forces that leads to delinquency and deprives these children of really scientific help. To characterize them merely by negative qualities is both unjust and scientifically inaccurate.

Forms of delinquency that adults know little about and children frequently encounter, like juvenile extortion rackets, were discussed. "Why did you steal the five dollars?" the thirteen-year-old chairman of one session asked. "I'll explain it to you," answered the fourteen-year-old whose case was being probed. "The older kids in school were getting up a mob and if I did not pay them some money they'd get after me and beat me up." To an adult this may sound like an untrue excuse, but there were always some juvenile experts in the Hookey Club who recognized a social reality when they saw it.

Often boys who practiced the extortion racket themselves were questioned by the group:

Q.: Where did it happen?

A.: In the schoolyard.

Q.: How did you know he had money?

A.: I asked him how much money has he got, he said a dollar.

Q.: How old was the boy?

A.: About thirteen.

Q.: How did you know he couldn't beat you?

A.: I took money from him before, two weeks before that. I got a wallet and fifteen cents before that.

Q.: Did you do anything worse than the other things?

A.: Yes. I stabbed a boy.

Q.: When was that?

A.: That was last year. The boy was about twelve years old. I stabbed him with a knife, a pocket knife. I stabbed him in the back. They put me in the shelter for two weeks.


In such cases I often found that the whole comic-book ideology and methodology were apparent in both those who answered and those who questioned. The boys evaluated this influence in a matter-of-fact way. A boy replied to questions about a burglary he committed:

"I read comic books where they broke into a place. I got the idea to break into the house. I wanted the money. I couldn't go through the front door because I didn't have the key. I didn't think of the comic book."

Questioner: "You don't have to think of it, it is in the back of your mind, in your subconscious mind."

A boy who had been arrested because he kicked another boy was questioned:

Q.: What did you do?

A. : We were pitching pennies in school. This kid was cheating. One guy grabbed me and pushed me against a water faucet. He bent down to get the pennies. I took my foot and kicked him in the head. He had two or three stitches in the head.

Q.: It wouldn't have been so bad if you had punched him in the head, but kicking is not right. When you see a comic book, the point is with most fellows, they see that a certain fellow in there does that, they want to be like him and think they are tough and can do the same. In the comic book they might get away with it, in this case you don't.

ANOTHER BOY: The guy who thinks he is a tough guy, he isn't really tough.


The effect of comic-book reading was scrutinized by the club members, because there were always some who had reading difficulties. The members were more critical than some of the pseudo-educators who proclaim that comic books are good for reading. At a session where classics comic books were mentioned, a fourteen-year-old boy said in reply to questions:

"I don't read the comic books. I just look at the pictures. I can read, but I just don't take the time out. Sometimes, when it is a good story, I read it. You would be surprised how much you can learn just by looking at the pictures. If you have a good mind, you can figure things out for yourself. I like the horror science-fiction ones. I just look at the pictures."

In the Hookey Club the group was both judge and jury. I functioned merely as advisor. The children could recommend that a boy be allowed to leave school and be given his working papers, or that he should stay in school. They could suggest that a boy should not be taken off parole or that he should be. When I had to make a report about a child, the Hookey Club members discussed whether the child should be referred to the Children's Court or should receive supervision by the Juvenile Aid Bureau or should just be left under Hookey Club jurisdiction. Sometimes they suggested that no report be made until they had seen the child in question longer.

Going over the protocols of the Hookey Club it is hard to see how adults can be so naive about the role comic books play in the lives of children. The accounts of the sessions bristled with revealing bits about comic books, a topic that came up again and again in very different connections: a boy bought his switchblade knife through an advertisement from a comic book; a girl bought some phony medicine from a comic book to reduce her weight, which she was self-conscious about; different methods of stealing, burglarizing and hurting people were learned from comic books; comic books were cited to justify cunning, distrust and race ridicule; and so on. The excuses of the industry's experts that comic books show methods to hurt, wound and kill people in order to teach children self-defense did not go with the experts of the Hookey Club. They knew better. Nor did they believe that comic books taught not to commit delinquencies. They knew that what they demonstrate is that one should not make mistakes in committing them. A girl of fourteen who had been stealing had a comic book with her at one session:

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD-CHAIRMAN: Which comic books do you read mostly?

A.: Girls read mostly Crimes by Women.

Q:: Which crimes do women commit?

A.: Murder. They marry a man for his life insurance and then kill him, then marry another man and then just go on like that until they finally get caught. Or they will be a dancer and meet the wrong kind of a guy and get involved in a bank robbery.

Q.: What's the fun for you in reading that?

A.: It shows you other people's stupid mistakes.


Here are some samples from Hookey Club proceedings:

A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD DELINQUENT GIRL: In some of the crime comic books kids pick up ideas. They give them ideas of robbery and sex....

Q.: Sex?

A.: Yes, plenty of sex. They show you unexposed [sic] women, men beating up girls and breaking their arms. The fellows see that and they want to try it. They try to wrestle with them and get ideas. I know of fellows who do imitate comic books. When I was young I used to read comic books and I watched the fellows and how they imitated what they did in the books. They tried it with the girls around my way. They tied them up. The boys were around ten or twelve, the girls were the same age. They used to always read the comic books. I asked them what made them do that. They said they saw it in the comic books. They read Crime, Murder Inc., Crime Does Not Pay, most of those crime books.


A boy who burglarized stores explained, "I read the comic books to learn how you can get money. I read about thirty a week. I read Crime Does Not Pay, Crime and Punishment, Penalty, Wanted. That is all I can think of. There was this one case. It was in back of a factory with pretty rich receipts, money. It showed how you get in through the back door. I didn't copy that. I thought the side door was the best way. I just switched to the skylight. I carried it out practically the same way as the comic book did it, only I had to open two drawers to do it. I didn't do every crime book, some of them were difficult. Some of them I just imitated. I had to think the rest out myself. I know other boys who learned how to do such jobs from comic books."

From the discussion of the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been caught shoplifting:

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY: I saw a comic book where they do shoplifting. This girl was shoplifting and she was caught. They took her down to the Police Department. It was a love story. When she got married she still shoplifted and she broke down and told her husband. I didn't like it. It was the only thing I had to read. It might give a girl ideas to shoplift.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY: They get the idea, if she gets away with it, why can't I get away with it. I saw a book where a man has a hanger in his coat with hooks on. He opens his coat and shoves things in and it disappears. It was a crime comic book. ... The kids see that these men get away with it. They say, let's try it. They learn the method of putting it in a jacket. They teach you how to do it in the comic book. They didn't notice it until somebody jumped on this man and the things fell out. Otherwise they would not have caught him.


From a discussion on fighting in school:

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY: I learned from crime comic books when you want to hit a man don't get face to face -- hit him from the back.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD (contradicting): In comic books they hit them in the eye!


From an all-round discussion on fairy tales:

Superman is a fairy story.

No, it is not a fairy story. It is a comic book. The comic books, they are mostly murder or something funny, but the fairy tales, they are just stories.

The comics like Superman are not true, they don't happen, but they might happen or could happen. The fairy tales, they just can't happen.

In the fairy tales they don't get killed.


At one Hookey Club session I had another psychiatrist present as a guest. The question of comic books and my criticism of them came up:

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD (addressing Dr. W.): I think it is stupid. You are the only psychiatrist who is really interested. Maybe there are five others ... out of five thousand -- how can you get any headway? You spend close to maybe a thousand dollars and it is stupid. You can't stand a chance against these comic-book publishers.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD: That is right, because they got the police to put in a good word for the comic books. Like before, they used to have policemen and policewomen say it is a good influence for the children. They had a police lady and a police chief in every edition of Crime Does Not Pay. That is one of the reasons why you have no chance.

THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD: I noticed in Crime Does Not Pay they give two dollars a letter for what's on your mind. People write beautiful letters saying this comic book is good for children -- anything to earn two dollars.

ANOTHER FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD: Gals don't approve of guys going to poolrooms in Brooklyn. They pay for protection. They take a switchblade and if a guy don't pay them a dollar, they will rip up the table.... I have been in with them.... You could learn that from a comic book, too. ... I read some of that in Crime Does Not Pay.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD: The guys, the big racketeers and stuff, they pay the guys maybe to put something in crime comic books that is good. The other boys think it is a good idea. So they start doing it and get into the Youth House, and when they get back they work for the racketeers. They make a lot of money and everything and stuff. They want the young boys to read the crime comic books to get ideas. The boys are about seventeen when the racketeers use them for dope and stuff, to peddle it, and to run the numbers.... I think crime comic books are there to make the kids into bad boys, so that they can make some money. I figure maybe these gangsters they say: a couple of years from now, when these guys grow up, I'll give them a number racket and I can be the big guy then. Sometimes they need gunmen to eliminate the other big guys. The comic books show about that, too, about racing and stuff.

GUEST PSYCHIATRIST: What was that you said about Youth House?

THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD: The racketeers want to send you to Youth House, and Warwick, too, so that you get really bad.... They want you to go there so that people will be scared of you.... If you have a record, everybody will be scared of you. You know how people are in the neighborhood, people say so-and-so was in Youth House and in Warwick.... If you walk in with a gun, they are scared of you.

THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD: (addressing the psychiatric guest): This is no insult to you. If you got a thousand dollar check for these funny books, would you talk against them? They give some people side money, so they write, "Approved by Dr. So-and-So: Good Reading Matter for Children."


My psychiatric guest felt that the Hookey Club was a little rough.

An indispensable method in psychological studies of children is to let them draw. There is an extraordinary discrepancy between all the details, especially sexual details, found by psychologists in children's drawings, and their having overlooked the much grosser, endlessly repeated sexual symbolizations in countless comic-book illustrations. Had they analyzed comic books as searchingly as they analyzed children's drawings, the results would have shown an utterly abnormal and unhealthy literature.

Sometimes I have asked children to copy anything they like out of their comic books. Then I have shown these productions to psychologists (without telling that they were copies from comic-book illustrations) and asked for interpretations -- routine interpretations such as they make of other children's drawings. Here is a psychologist's interpretation of a drawing made by a boy of a typical comic-book illustration of a pirate:

This drawing is bristling with phallic symbols -- the sword, the outstretched arm, the big gun stuck under the belt, the conspicuous belt buckle and the shirt opened down to the belt; the way the legs are posed and the boots are drawn has some phallic quality, too. The actual genitals are extremely accentuated. The figure is that of a very glamorous man. He looks seductive. The whole body is emphasized more than the head, and there is very little attempt at control.

This child was preoccupied with sexual ideas. He is very aggressive sexually -- not someone who would ask nicely, but who takes (rapes).


This drawing was a more-or-less exact copy of a comic-book illustration. All the features mentioned in the psychologist's report were present equally -- if not more so -- in the original comic-book picture (which, incidentally, had right next to it the picture of a sexy girl with half-nude and bulging breasts). This was just a run-of-the-mill comic-book illustration. If the psychologists find in the child who makes such a drawing an excessive and aggressive preoccupation with sex, why should the same description not apply to innumerable comic-book illustrations? And does one get rid of excessive preoccupation with sexual aggression by just looking at a lot of pictures like this?

Spontaneous children's drawings which are not copies are often influenced by the pictures in comics. As a matter of fact, the child psychologist who does not take into account these subconscious reminiscences of imagery is apt to fall into error. If he disregards the comic-book influence, he misinterprets the result. He will ascribe to early subconscious complexes of the child what really are late and extraneously produced impressions.

Comic-book-inspired drawings show how imbued children have become with the special forms of sadism dwelt on in comics, pictures of horror with glorified gangsters, with superman types, with "mad scientists," with sexual confusion.

The finer analysis of children's drawings gives us important leads with respect to a child's development in two significant areas: his relation to authority, disturbance of which may lead to other disorders such as jealousy; and his capacity for male and female identification. It is in these two fundamental areas that comic books do a great deal of harm.

In addition to all the other methods, the most important one is to treat the child and observe what progress he makes. How can one understand a troubled child fully unless one has tried to help him? The establishment of a proper transfer relationship is essential. Pre-adolescents and adolescents, like other people, want to be appreciated. In the first place, one must take their side in their struggle for self-expression, for recognition, for emancipation. But at the same time one must give them guidance on the strength of one's authority of more experience and more knowledge. It is an error to do only the one without the other. By treating a child, or guiding him or educating him, one learns about him. And that alone clarifies the real diagnosis.

These are the main methods used in our investigation. One of our problems was to scrutinize how children read comic books. The purpose was to determine what goes on in the child when he reads them. The first question was, what is actually reflected in the child's mind, what picture of the world does he get from comic books? It is with comic books as with any life experience. Not the experience itself, as an observer records and evaluates it, but the way it is reflected and experienced by the person himself, is what counts and what explains the psychological results.

Just to learn what children retain from comic-book reading is enlightening for anybody who really wants to become acquainted with the question. A boy of seven and a half is studied at the Clinic because he was "bad in school" and daydreams a lot. Previously psychiatrists at a public agency had made the diagnosis of "schizophrenic tendencies." Getting on the subject of comics he says, "Sometimes I read a comic book ten times a day. I look at the pictures a long time. I just imagine as if they are real. They go around stabbing people. They have eight knives, and they rob a liquor store. They stab a woman with a knife. They stab two women with a knife. One man started killing people: five cops, six women and eighteen others. If anybody ever crossed him, he didn't give them no chance. This famous artist painted this picture and it was smuggled. Then it said the picture was tom up but then I found out it wasn't. Everybody got swindled. I like adventure." This boy was successfully treated and even steered to good literature. He has now been followed up by personal interview for six years. We could never discover any "schizophrenic tendencies," that convenient snap diagnosis for troubled children.

Such statements from children, which are or should be the raw material of any comic-book study, can be obtained only if you get the child's confidence and show him that you are interested in him. Often children talk at first about the policemen; but then when they warm up and get more confidence they talk about the ones they really admire and think about -- the crooks. This preference does not come from any moral perversity, but results directly from the fact that the criminal is depicted as more glamorous and dominant.

By and large much younger children read crime comics than is commonly and conveniently assumed. Even children under six look at the pictures. Younger children do not see so many new comic books because the child of six or seven does not have so much money at his disposal as the child of ten or eleven.

Crime comic books are available almost anywhere. Any child who meets other children has access to them. They are in kindergartens, pediatric clinics, pediatric wards in the hospitals. They are in playgrounds and schools, at church functions and, of course, in the homes of the child or his friends. Again and again I have found quantities of comic books in my own clinics, although I certainly did not want them there. Many children, owing to their life circumstances, are less able to resist this ingeniously contrived seduction to read more and more crime comics than are others. The question should not be so much why children get the habit as how are so many of them able to protect their integrity against them. Often there is a typical vicious circle: the comic books lead the child into temptation to commit delinquencies and stimulate him sexually. Then this is followed by fears and worries -- as a result of which he reads even more comics to forget them.

During the first few years of our investigation it was easy to obtain information from children about which crime comics they prefer and how many they read. But since criticism of comics has spread and parents have begun to make some protests against them, children are apt to be on the defensive when asked about them. It has often happened that when I ask a child in the presence of his mother he replies promptly that the comics he prefers are "Donald Duck, animal comics and jokey books." But if I see this child alone on a subsequent occasion he corrects his previous statement, "What I really like are the murder ones!" -- and he will go on to enumerate the usual list. So it is no longer so easy to obtain quickly accurate results.

What children expect and find in comic books is well illustrated by the case of a nine-year-old boy. He was excellently brought up in a cultured and intelligent home. He got twenty-five cents weekly for spending money and he nursed it very carefully. One day he turned up after school and said, "I just spent three cents today." He displayed with satisfaction a tabloid newspaper he had bought. "They had some marvelous pictures of that gangster up in the Bronx that killed the policeman. And they had a suicide!" His father asked, "Why did you buy that?" and was answered by the boy, proud of his discovery, "It's just as good as the comics -- and costs much less!" Without realizing it, however, this small boy was a spendthrift; comic books have many more murders and acts of violence than two for three cents. He also forgot to take into account what more experienced crime-comics readers know, and what was pointed out by a boy on the New York Times Youth Forum: "Comic books tell more than newspapers about the details, and show how the murders were committed."

How and why children stop reading comics, when they do, is as important a study as how they came to read them and how they keep it up. Any child psychiatrist will miss an avenue to the child's superego if he fails to let the child tell him why he gave it up. New influences come into his life, real reading may commence, sadistic fantasies may be outgrown. Many children give up crime-comics reading like a bad sexual habit.

I have frequently asked children who talked about the good and bad things in comic books to tell me what the worst is that they have seen. That is often very enlightening as to the child's psychology. Usually they have an ambivalent attitude about these "worst" things. They abhor them and yet have been fascinated by them. Usually they point out scenes of torture and/or murder. A thirteen-year-old boy told me once that he saw in a comic book a picture of gangsters tying two living men to their car and dragging them to death on their faces over a rough road. He could not remember which comic book it was in, but said it was one of the most popular ones.

At first I did not believe him and thought that this must be his own spinning-out of a cruel fantasy, perhaps stimulated by something similar. What he had told me about was one of the cruel, primitive, bloody rites which did exist in prehistoric times, but disappeared at the dawn of history. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles, after slaying Hector, ties the dead body to his chariot and triumphantly races around the city of Troy. Homer described with repugnance and pity the bloody rite of dragging a dead body behind a war chariot -- repressing the earlier, still bloodier one of dragging a living captive to his death.

Could a popular comic book for children, I asked myself, return to pre-Homeric savagery to stimulate children's fantasy to such barbaric cruelty?

Later the boy remembered that he had swapped this comic book along with other choice ones with another boy, and he brought it to me. Underneath the title a little enclosed inscription reads: "Every word is true!" Then comes the picture of a car that is speeding away. Two men are tied by their feet to the rear bumper and lie face down. One has his hands tied behind his back and the lower part of his face is dragging in the road. The other man's hands are not tied and his arms are stretched out. The text in the balloons indicates that three men in the car are talking:

"A couple more miles oughta do th' trick!"

"It better! These #--"**!! GRAVEL ROADS are tough on tires!"

"But ya gotta admit, there's nothing like 'em for ERASING FACES!"

Next to these balloons is a huge leering face, eyes wide and gloating and mouth showing upper and lower teeth in a big grin:

"SUPERB! Even Big Phil will admire this job -- if he lives long enough to identify the MEAT!"

The boy who brought me the comic book explained to me that of course these men were still alive: "They may have been roughed up a little, but they are being killed by being dragged to death on their stomachs and faces." You can see that very plainly, he pointed out to me, from the carefully drawn fact that they both desperately try to hold up their heads -- the one with outstretched hands still succeeding at it, the other still jerking his head up but now failing to do so enough to keep his face off the gravel road. "Corpses," my young expert explained, "couldn't do that."

Two years later this story was reprinted. This time the story was promoted from the middle of the book to first place, and the dragging-to-death illustration was the frontispiece.
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Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 7:10 am

PART 1 OF 2

4: The Wrong Twist

The Effects of Comic Books on Children

"A man who gives a wrong twist to your mind, meddles with you just as truly as if he hit you in the eye; the mark may be less painful, but its more lasting," -- Santayana


A typical comic-book drawing shows a blonde young girl lying in bed. She says: "Then I was dreaming, of murder and morphine." This is a crime-comic-book dream. Murder, crime and drug traffic are offered to children in a literature which the defenders of comic books call the modern version of the stories of the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or Mother Goose. But are there heroin addicts in Grimm, marihuana smokers in Andersen or dope peddlers in Mother Goose? And are there advertisements for guns and knives?

A counterpart to the girl who dreams about murder and morphine is the equally blonde girl in another comic book who muses over a cigarette: "I like to remember the past! ... It was so wonderful!"

What was "so wonderful"? This girl was the young wife of a Nazi concentration-camp guard. You see him hit a half-nude prisoner with a truncheon while she says: "Hit him again, Franz! Make him bleed more! Hit him!"

Evidently the industry thinks that some children learn slowly, for the same scene is repeated in a close-up: "Hit him some more, Franz! Hit him! . . . Make him bleed more, Franz! Make him bleed!"

And later she says: "I like to remember the prisoners suffering, the beatings and the blood!"

In one of the pictures of this story there are three balloons with the exclamation "HEIL HITLER!" This comic book appeared at about the time when a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys had a "Nazi stormtrooper club" in which every prospective member had to hit a Negro on the head with a brick.

I undertook and continued the study of the effects of crime comics on the minds of children in the face of an extraordinary complacency on the part of adults. Typical of this attitude is the Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books, which has existed now for several years. It uses methods which are amateurish and superficial and, from the point of view of the mental hygiene of children, its classification is most lenient and unscientific. It divides comic books arbitrarily into four classes: a) no objection, b) some objection, c) objectionable, d) very objectionable. At one time the Committee reported that it found "only" thirty-nine comic books "very objectionable." This committee distinguishes fifteen categories of comic books, failing to realize that for most of them the harmful ingredients are the same, whatever the locale. Of "undesirable effects" the committee in question mentions only three: "bad dreams, fright, and general emotional upset." How they know that one comic book causes that and not another, and why they fail to mention the really serious harmful effects is not explained. No wonder that these evaluations lend themselves to gross misstatements in which those not rated "very objectionable" have been lumped together with other categories as if they were all right. What has made the committee's evaluations even more confusing to the public is the fact that the Children's Bureau of the Federal Security Agency has given its findings as the only statistics in an official statement about comic books.

Children's minds are at least as sensitive and vulnerable as a man's stomach. Supposing you divide eggs into such groups and say that to some you have "some objections," others you find "objectionable" and still others "very objectionable." You can grade good eggs. But what sense is there in grading bad eggs? Isn't a bad egg bad, especially if one child eats hundreds of them? Even with this questionable yardstick, this committee found at one time that almost half of the comic books were not "satisfactory." Imagine that your neighborhood grocer would sell you eggs for your children, almost half of which were bad!

This leniency toward what adults sell to children is in marked contrast to the severity of adults when children commit minor moral infractions. If a comic book is classified as "some objection" it is called satisfactory and "suitable for children." But let a child commit a delinquent or sexual act to which there is "some objection" and the enormous machinery of children's courts, police, social agencies, psychiatrists and child-guidance people goes into action and the child is crushed. I have observed that many times.

The distinction of a greater from a lesser evil is an old one. But the committee inaugurated the practice of distinguishing between a greater, a medium and a lesser evil. The resultant confusion has done a lot of harm.

Some time ago the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene issued a press release. It spoke of "the much-maligned comic book" and said "the universal appeal of the comic book stems from its color, action and drama." Modern psychopathology, however, teaches that it is not the form but the content that is dynamically important. This release reminds one of the old story of the boy called into conference by his father to receive sexual enlightenment. After listening to a tedious discourse about the flowers, the birds and the bees for some time, the little boy interrupts his father impatiently, "And there is no intercourse at all?" So one might ask about crime comic books: And nobody gets shot? Or stabbed or tortured? And no girls are beaten or choked or almost raped?

Anyone wishing to study scientifically the psychological causes of human behavior must always be on guard against the error of assuming that something has causal significance just because it happened in the past. He must think in terms of psychological processes and developments which connect cause and effect. And he can hold a new factor responsible only if he has taken into account all other possible factors, physical, individual, psychological and social. On the other hand, he should not be deterred if the same factor affects different people differently and some people seemingly not at all.

Improper food deserves attention not only because it may cause indigestion, but also because it may cause totally different mild or serious manifestations of malnutrition. The mind is not something that grows by itself; it is nourished. Some nourishment is good, some is bad. Before one knew about vitamins one could not make the diagnosis of avitaminosis. The same reasoning should apply to scientific psychiatry. In order to diagnose the operative cause of any disorder, two requirements are necessary: one must know the nature of the factor that may be a possible cause, and one must think of it when confronted with a case. That is the essence of clinical thinking.

A young mother came to see me about her ten-year-old son. "He has wild imaginations," she complained. "When he plays with the children on the block, all younger than he, he takes a knife and says, 'I'll take your eyes out!' He slashed a girl's doll carriage with the knife. I caught him with a three-year-old boy. He was saying to him, 'Now I must gouge your eyes out!' Then he said to the boy, 'I must hang you!' Then he said, 'I must rope you up!'''

What you read in the usual books of child psychiatry or child guidance, or in Freud's works, is just not adequate to explain such a case. This is a new kind of harm, a new kind of bacillus that the present-day child is exposed to.

This boy was an inveterate reader of comics. This fact came out accidentally when he saw comic books on my desk and asked me, "Doctor, why do you read comic books?"

"I read crime comics," he went on. "In some they tie up the girls. They tie their hands behind their backs because they want to do something to them later.

"Once I saw in a science comic where this beast comes from Mars. It showed a man's hand over his eyes and streams of blood coming down. I play a little rough with the kids sometimes. I don't mean to hurt them. In a game I said I would gouge a child's eyes out. I was playing that I was walking around and I jumped out at him. I scratched his face. Then I caught him and sucked the blood out of his throat. In another game I said, 'I'll scratch your eyes out!'''

In one of our later sessions this boy told me that younger children should not read comic books. "If I had a younger brother," he explained, "I wouldn't want him to read the horror comic books, like Weird Science, because he might get scared. I don't think they should read Captain Marvel. Look at this one with all the pictures of the man without his head! The boy downstairs is six years old. Whenever he sees any monsters he always starts crying. He thinks it's real. It is bad for children because after they read that they keep on thinking about it. When they buy the comic books they start thinking all sorts of things, playing games. I played such games because I got them from the comic books. That's why I think younger children shouldn't have them."

To overlook the comic-book factor often means great unfairness to children -- and of course to their parents, whom it is so easy to blame. Taking money away from younger children by threats or use of force is nowadays a frequent delinquency which often does not come to the attention of the authorities. A girl of eleven hit a six-year-old girl, pushed her and took her money out of her pocket. An official psychiatrist, after a routine examination, made the drastic and, under the circumstances, cruel recommendation that she be sent to a psychiatric hospital first, then be taken from home and placed in an institution. He wrote the usual cliche that she had "deep-seated problems" (which he did not specify) and remarked that she had "very little awareness of the consequences and implications of her action."

But on closer study we found that she had very definite ideas about these "consequences and implications." She and her friends were imbued with the superman ideology: the stronger dominates the smaller and weaker. She told us a comic-book story of a bank robbery which ends in a Superman rescue. She laughed because she knew that the bank robbery was real while the Superman rescue was not. The man-hating comic-book figure, Sheena, was her favorite. And no other vista of life except the ideal of being stronger than the next one was presented to her.

"I read more than ten comic books a day," she said. "There was a girl who stole in a department store and nobody saw her. So she is going out of the store, so this man he grabbed her. When she got to her home she thought nobody was following her. Then they took her to the police station and said if she did it any more they'd have to put her away. That shows if you steal anything you never know who follows you or whoever is watching you. If she was more clever maybe it could have been different."

In other words, this girl was well aware of consequences and implications as demonstrated to children in comic books. The "consequences" are that you may be caught. The "implications" are that you should be clever and not get caught.

I have found the effect of comic books to be first of all anti-educational. They interfere with education in the larger sense. For a child, education is not merely a question of learning, but is a part of mental health. They do not "learn" only in school; they learn also during play, from entertainment and in social life with adults and with other children. To take large chunks of time out of a child's life -- time during which he is not positively, that is, educationally, occupied -- means to interfere with his healthful mental growth.

To make a sharp distinction between entertainment and learning is poor pedagogy, and even worse psychology. A great deal of learning comes in the form of entertainment, and a great deal of entertainment painlessly teaches important things. By no stretch of critical standards can the text in crime comics qualify as literature, or their drawings as art. Considering the enormous amount of time spent by children on crime comic books, their gain is nil. They do not learn how to read a serious book or magazine. They do not gain a true picture of the West from the "Westerns." They do not learn about any normal aspects of sex, love or life. I have known many adults who have treasured throughout their lives some of the books they read as children. I have never come across any adult nor adolescent who had outgrown comic-book reading who would ever dream of keeping any of these "books" for any sentimental or other reason. In other words, children spend a large amount of their time and money on these publications and have nothing positive to show for it. And since almost all good children's reading has some educational value, crime comics by their very nature are not only non-educational; they are anti-educational. They fail to teach anything that might be useful to a child; they do suggest many things that are harmful.

Since murder is the mainstay of crime comics, you might expect -- provided you think education about murder is educational -- that children would learn something positive about that. They do not. Here is a typical statement made by a fourteen-year-old boy: "First degree is when you kill for no reason at all. Second degree is when you kill for a lame excuse -- like when you think somebody talked about you. Third degree -- you have a reason, but it still isn't very good. . . . Manslaughter is when you kill a person with a knife or any weapon except a gun."

Where crime comics pay a hypocritical obeisance to educational demands they show their true colors even more clearly. For example, under the lame pretext of self-defense, they show pictures of "Vulnerable Areas" in the human body with such notations as:

EYES: finger jab or thumb gouge
BRIDGE OF NOSE: edge of hand blow


When I pointed out this anti-educational aspect of crime comics, the industry answered by inserting occasional educational pages of advertising for organizations advocating better schools or some health campaign. Some of the worst crime comics contain notices about the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, or mention in the stories the Damon Runyon Fund or the Red Cross. This, of course, does these organizations no good; but it camouflages the comics. So the characteristics of crime comic books might be summed up as violence in content, ugliness in form and deception in presentation.

The most subtle and pervading effect of crime comics on children can be summarized in a single phrase: moral disarmament. I have studied this in children who do not commit overt acts of delinquency, who do not show any of the more conspicuous symptoms of emotional disorder and who may not have difficulty in school. The more subtle this influence is, the more detrimental it may be. It is an influence on character, on attitude, on the higher functions of social responsibility, on superego formation and on the intuitive feeling for right and wrong. To put it more concretely, it consists chiefly in a blunting of the finer feelings of conscience, of mercy, of sympathy for other people's suffering and of respect for women as women and not merely as sex objects to be bandied around or as luxury prizes to be fought over. Crime comics are such highly flavored fare that they affect children's taste for the finer influences of education, for art, for literature and for the decent and constructive relationships between human beings and especially between the sexes.

A boy of eleven who reads his own crime comics and his sister's love comics has this conception of girls: "In the love comics the girls have dresses and wearing apparel. The girls in the crime stories are always on the gangsters' side. The gangsters pick them up, like. They just roam around with the gangsters. They are always dressed up in new clothes; practically every day they buy new clothes. The dresses have a V-shape in the front. The girls are in the room. They do something bad or something, and then a man slaps them and beats them up."

When children confide in you, they will tell you that younger children should not read comic books. Here are notes of a typical dialogue with a boy of thirteen:

Q.: Why do you say that younger children shouldn't read them?

A.: Because.

Q.: Can't you explain it?

A.: No.

Q.: Tell me your reasons.

A.: It gives them ideas.

Q.: What kind of ideas?

A.: Things they shouldn't do.

Q.: But a very young child couldn't do these things that are in comic books anyhow.

A.: Maybe. But when they read these books they don't think right.

Q.: What do you mean by that?

A.: I mean they don't know what is right.


That is precisely the point. Psychiatrists in court cases often have to answer questions about a person's ability to distinguish right from wrong in an individual act or in general. And yet it is astonishing how little concrete and systematic work has been done on the ethical equilibrium of the person as a whole. We know that every person has in his brain a picture of his body, the so-called "body image." I believe that individuals also have a mental self-knowledge in a form that one may call an "ethical image." It is this that makes possible a stable and yet not rigid ethical equilibrium. Speaking of the mildest disorders of the personality, of adults or children, this "ethical image" which a person has of himself unconsciously is a cornerstone of mental health.

Discussion of ethics is not popular in psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. It smacks too much of a moralistic attitude and a lack of the objectivity of natural science. It is true that in a society like our own in which ethical norms are undergoing great changes, the psychiatrist or psychoanalyst inevitably introduces a personal, socially conditioned factor in this sphere. But that does not prevent his patient from having ethical problems. Many if not all sexual conflicts, for example, are fundamentally ethical difficulties. Such an acknowledgment may of course open the door to obscurantism and bigotry, but there is no reason why it should not also open the way to a socially oriented science.

Clinical psychiatrists used to pay very little attention to the examination of ethical feelings or ethical judgment. A new departure was the "Fernald Method." This Ethical Discrimination Test consisted of rating ten misdeeds, such as throwing hot water on a cat or taking apples from another man's orchard, in the order of their gravity. The idea was to measure a supposed natural moral attitude independent of general intelligence, judgment and other mental faculties, and also independent of the environment. Both the method and these general assumptions have proved too primitive. But Fernald did achieve an extension of the previously more restricted schemes of personality examination. It was found that the results of his test are not so significant in themselves, but often led the person tested to fuller statements about his ethical and social views which are revealing for the psychiatric estimate of his personality.

This line of inquiry was later considered too old-fashioned and has been much neglected. I have found that in modified form, more adjusted to the individual's special life circumstances, his ethical judgment in comparing two or several acts can be used almost as a projective test.

The greatest impetus to the study of the ethical aspects of behavior came of course from psychoanalysis, especially from Freud's discovery of the influence of unconscious guilt feelings. But conservative psychoanalysis has not progressed much further. It seems to regard the glib distinction between normal feelings of guilt and neurotic feelings of guilt as the solution of a question, when actually it is merely the statement of the question. And it got into real logical complications when it attempted to regard the tendencies to aggression from a purely biological point of view. In reality the whole significance of aggressive attitudes for the organism becomes of less and less significance with social progress. If we carry out experiments on the brains of cats, aggression is a biological problem. If we study the minds of children it is preponderantly a social and ethical problem.

The cultural background of millions of American children comes from the teaching of the home, the teaching of the school (and church), the teaching of the street and from crime comic books. For many children the last is the most exciting. It arouses their interest, their mental participation, their passions and their sympathies, but almost entirely in the wrong direction. The atmosphere of crime comic books is unparalleled in the history of children's literature of any time or any nation. It is a distillation of viciousness. The world of the comic book is the world of the strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief. All the emphasis is on exploits where somebody takes advantage of somebody else, violently, sexually or threateningly. It is no more the world of braves and squaws, but one of punks and molls. Force and violence in any conceivable form are romanticized. Constructive and creative forces in children are channeled by comic books into destructive avenues. Trust, loyalty, confidence, solidarity, sympathy, charity, compassion are ridiculed. Hostility and hate set the pace of almost every story. A natural scientist who had looked over comic books expressed this to me. tersely, "In comic books life is worth nothing; there is no dignity of a human being."

Children seek a figure to emulate and follow. Crime comic books undermine this necessary ingredient of ethical development. They play up the good times had by those who do the wrong thing. Those who at the tail end of stories mete out punishment use the same violence and the same lingo as those whom they punish. Since everybody is selfish and force and violence are depicted as the most successful methods, the child is given a feeling of justification. They not only suggest the satisfaction of primitive impulses but supply the rationalization. In this soil children indulge in the stock fantasies supplied by the industry: murder, torture, burglary, threats, arson and rape. Into that area of the child's mind where right and wrong is evaluated, children incorporate such false standards that an ethical confusion results for which they are not to blame. They become emotionally handicapped and culturally underprivileged. And this affects their social balance.

Whatever may give a child some ethical orientation is dragged down to the crime-violence level. Inculcation of a distorted morality by endless repetition is not such an intangible factor if one studies its source in comic books and its effect in the lives of children. It is of course a question not of pious slogans like "Crime never pays" but of the emotional accents within the stories themselves.

In one comic an old man is killed during the hold-up of his jewelry store. He had not obeyed the order to back up against the wall quickly enough. After other crimes and murders the captured criminal says: "It was not right to kill him.... That man couldn't have obeyed me! ... That old man was STONE DEAF!"

The moral principle is clear. If you hold up a man and he does not obey quickly enough because he is deaf, you are not supposed to shoot him. But if he is not deaf, shooting him is all right.

In one comic story called "Mother Knows Best," the mother advises her children: "I brought you kids up right -- rub out those coppers like I taught you!"

One son answers: "Don't worry, ma! We'll give those flatfeet a bellyful of lead!"

Several boys have shown me this story. They themselves condemned and at the same time were fascinated by this anti-maternal story.

In the same comic book, a man attacks a high school girl ("All I want is a little kiss! C'mon!") and chokes her to death.

What in a few words is the essential ethical teaching of crime comics for children? I find it well and accurately summarized in this brief quotation:

It is not a question of right, but of winning. Close your heart against compassion. Brutality does it. The stronger is in the right. Greatest hardness. Follow your opponent till he is crushed.


These words were the instructions given on August 22, 1939, by a superman in his home in Berchtesgaden to his generals, to serve as guiding lines for the treatment of the population in the impending war on Poland.

In modification of the Fernald method of letting children judge the severity of offenses, I have often asked them about punishment. Why do people get punished, what is just punishment, how does it come about that people get punished? Frequently the reply is that it serves the criminal right, whatever the punishment may be: "He got caught, didn't he?" My clinical findings leave no room for doubt that children learn from crime comics that the real guilt is getting caught. They have little faith in any ordinary public processes of having an offense evaluated and justly and humanely dealt with. The law enforcers are criminals in reverse. They use the same methods. If they are also stronger and there are more of them, they win; if not, they lose. In many subtle and not so subtle forms the lynch spirit is taught as a moral lesson. Many children have told me that lynching is all right and have shown me examples from their comic books. In one such story the townspeople get together, hunt the criminal and he is finally shot and killed. The lesson is in the last sentence: "The story of Lee Gillon proves that fearless people banded together will always see that justice triumphs."

In the same book, a man slaps a girl's face and says: "Give me trouble and you'll have a board full of spikes smashed into your kisser!"

The form in which this distrust for democratic law and the morality of taking punishment -- or rather vengeance -- into one's own hands has done most harm to the ethical development of young people is the superman conceit. Analyzing children's fantasies and daydreams, I have often found in them a wish for overwhelming physical strength, domination, power, ruthlessness, emancipation from the morals of the community. It may show in various half-repressed ways or openly as admiration for these traits. Spontaneously children connect this with crime comic books of the Superman, Batman, Superboy, Wonder Woman type. In the individual case this superman ideology is psychologically most unhygienic. The would-be supermen compensate for some kind of inferiority, real or imagined, by the fantasy of the superior being who is a law unto himself. I have had cases where children would have had a good chance to overcome feelings of inferiority in constructive ways at their disposal if they had not been sidetracked by the fancied shortcuts of superman prowess.

The superman conceit gives boys and girls the feeling that ruthless go-getting based on physical strength or the power of weapons or machines is the desirable way to behave. When I have had to examine young adults at the Clinic off and on for driving recklessly, I was interested to find the same attitude. Particularly dangerous is the superman-speed-fancy in girls who in turn influence boys. One young girl told me that she would only go out with boys who would not let other cars pass them on the road. That was the idea of the proper male behavior that she had got from comics.

In these children there is an exact parallel to the blunting of sensibilities in the direction of cruelty that has characterized a whole generation of central European youth fed on the Nietzsche-Nazi myth of the exceptional man who is beyond good and evil. It is an ethical confusion. If such persons are analyzed psychiatrically, it is found that the trouble lies not so much with the impulse to do the wrong thing as with the false rationalization which permits the impulse to grow and to express itself in deeds. The very children for whose unruly behavior I would want to prescribe psychotherapy in an anti-superman direction, have been nourished (or rather poisoned) by the endless repetition of Superman stories. How can they respect the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air? Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children.

When I described how children suffer in their ethical development through the reading of comic books, the industry countered by pointing with pride to the "moral" lesson imprinted on many crime comics, that "crime does not pay." In the first place, this is not true. In comic books crime usually does pay, and pay very well, until the last picture or two. The crimes are glamorous; the end is dull. Frequently the ratio of "crime" to "does not pay" is as high as fifty to one. More important, the slogan "Crime does not pay" is not moral, but highly immoral. It is strange how responsible adults have accepted this slogan and refer to it on platforms, over the radio and in articles as admirable. Great harm has been done by teaching children that they should not play hookey, that they should not steal or lie, that they should not hit girls (as comic-book figures so often do) -- because it "doesn't pay"! I have seen many children who were confused by this vicious crime-comic-book morality. The reason why one does not hit girls, even if comics have made it so attractive, is that it is cowardly and that it hurts them; the reason why one does not steal or break into stores is that that is not how one lives in a civilized community; that whether crime pays or does not pay, it is not what a decent person wants to do. That should be the lesson for children.

When I pointed out the hypocrisy of the "Crime does not pay" slogan and its bad effect on children, the industry accused me of "unfairness" in attacking their highest endeavors and introduced some more slogan morality. In one comic book are two pages by a police captain attacking me: "Don't let reformers kid you!" He is "shocked by what I read today about the people who condemn crime comics. These people are the menace." He goes on: "Children don't like to be kicked around by reformers who want to decide what's good for them to read." And he extols "the strong moral force" that comics exert on children.

Frequently I have been in the position of having to defend children who have received harsh judgments in courts and on psychiatric wards and equally harsh treatment in places of detention and reformatories. There is no better illustration of the state of affairs where we first victimize children and then put all the responsibility on them, the victims, than this same comic book. It has a story where two policemen are killed -- and a real police captain pointing out what a "strong moral force" such a book is!

In the midst of bloody scenes in another book are two full-page announcements, one advocating "better schools" and the other with an oversized headline in capitals: "WITH GOD ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE!" advocating "a new way of prayer." If one tried to set out deliberately to create ethical confusion in children, better ways could hardly be devised. No wonder that a minister heard his young son exclaim: "Hands up, in the name of the Lord!"

The detrimental effect on character is if anything worse on girls than on boys. Their ego-ideal formation is interfered with by the fascination of the sadistic female comic-book heroines. Comic books do not permit these children even in their imagination to view a non-violent life. A girl of eleven examined because of stealing showed in her Thematic Apperception Test a profusion of stories with murder and hostility. Her drawing of a woman showed a masculine type with violent aggressivity. Of average intelligence, she had a reading retardation undoubtedly caused by constant reading of comics. She had incorporated the comic-book morale into her character.

"I read about ten a day," she stated. "I like the stories when you get in trouble and everything. You learn like it does not pay if you kill a person for nothing that isn't right[!]. They have to go to prison for a certain length of time, then they come out and do it all over again. Then they go up the river again."

Without rationalization and without an ideal image of oneself one cannot learn to exert self-discipline. That is why good reading is such a character-building influence. Comic books work in the opposite direction. A thirteen-year-old girl examined because of "truancy and disobedience" said about her reading, "I used to buy a love comic every day. I like to read Sheena because I like the way she fights. She fights like a man, swings on the vines and kicks people in the face."

Ethical development of children, so intimately bound up with their mental development, has to do not only with relations with an individual but also with integration in groups. The development of the superego, of conscience or, more simply, the sense of decency, takes place not only on the basis of identification with parents but also with successive parent-substitutes who are at the same time representatives and symbols of group demands and group responsibilities. In this sphere, comic books are most pernicious. They expose children's minds to an endless stream of prejudice-producing images. This influence, subtle and pervasive but easily demonstrable by clinical psychological methods, has not only directly affected the individual child, but also constitutes an important factor for the whole nation. It is currently fashionable to speak of "inter-group tensions," "group adjustments" and so on. The old term race hatred (or race prejudice) is more honest and more to the point. What we call "minorities" constitute the majority of mankind. The United States is spending at present millions of dollars to persuade the world on the air and by other propaganda means that race hatred is not an integral part of American life. At the same time, millions of American comic books are exported all over the world which give the impression that the United States is instilling race hatred in young children.
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