David Hajdu leads a slide show on the comic book scare of the 1950s (photo by Michael Dashkin)

May 11, 2008
It's Mother's Day and we wish a happy one to Rachel London, Freebird's co-founder, who gave birth to a little girl a couple of weeks ago. No pictures yet of little Cali, but we may catch a glimpse of her at the next reading that Rachel set up (Fiona Maazel and Sara Goodyear on Sunday, May 18).

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On Thursday David Hajdu spoke about his new book The Ten-Cent Plague. Using period photographs (for example the staged picture above of a child surreptitiously reading a lurid comic book called "Menace"), David discussed some of the central figures of a forgotten controversy at the birth of the counterculture. You can listen to a podcast of David's talk and flip through a different slide show of vintage comics now on The New Republic's site.

Before legalized porn distracted our attention and got stuffed under the mattress, comic books were an over-the-counter thrill for a generation discovering rebellion and defying their parents' tastes. The Ten-Cent Plague is the story of how the medium evolved from innocuous Sunday funnies to government-investigated contraband. And all on sale for a dime at the check out counter of your local grocery.

We've written previously with a certain sneer about the 1950s as a watershed of paranoia. Conspiracy was in the air and nowhere was it considered more insidious than in the hallowed American home. So it was no shock that the decade took a considered look at what the youth were consuming when unsupervised. After World War II comics turned darker and more sensational. Drawn for children by men and women not necessarily that much older than their audience, the comic book became a rare form of escapism for kids from an adult-controlled society.

By the end of the '40s, comics were already selling in the millions and could no longer escape the notice of parents. The idea of the juvenile delinquent mortified adults and created a cottage industry of experts and books (many on sale at Freebird) attempting to explain the social breakdown behind deviancy. Gang activity, violence, and crime amongst the underaged set off a nationwide witch hunt for causes. Comic books were certainly the most obvious scapegoat. And a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham its most visible critic.

Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent set off a firestorm of controversy and became the bible of sorts for Senate committees probing the effects of comics on an impressionable American public. Though we were not able to get deep into the details of those investigations and the self-imposed "comics code" it led to (much like the Hays code the film industry created in the 1930s), David did show us photos of the central figures and events: from Bill Gaines, the inheritor of EC Comics who revolutionized the industry and later created Mad Magazine, to the comic book burnings around the country that echoed some of the creepy Nazi youth rallies of recent memory. He ended with a slide of the cover of the Hartford Courant, one of the oldest papers in the country, which ran an investigatory series exposing the evils of comics above their masthead. As David pointed out, not even Pearl Harbor earned such a place of honor.

With EC expert Fred von Bernewitz on hand for additional commentary (Fred was not only one of EC's greatest fans, but also the first to recognize its importance culturally--his early interviews with Gaines and his staff are still invaluable resources), David showed a rare "Reefer Madness"-like film clip from the height of the hysteria. The short film matched its subject in sensation, making outrageous claims (illustrated by enactments) that children developed blood lust from exposure to comic books.

Produced as part of an early TV news magazine format called Confidential File (along the same lines as the sleazy "To Catch a Predator" segments on Dateline NBC), the film aired on October 9, 1955 and was narrated by LA columnist, Paul Coates. In a manner less Edward R. Murrow than grade Z Joe Friday, Coates discusses matter-of-factly the slippery slope of comic book consumption as a group of white boys (and it's made clear this is exclusively a male domain) play in the woods. With rolled up comics in their back pockets they stab at trees with pocket knives and mock brain bash each other with large rocks. Coates bemoans that when he was young mischief was about taking expeditions, tipping garbage cans, roasting potatoes, and maybe writing nasty remarks in chalk about the teacher on the sidewalk. He concludes with the punch line, "We never spent an afternoon like this: reading." You can watch a portion of the film caught second hand at a recent lecture David gave on his book tour:

All of this would be laughable if the social commentary from more enlightened news magazine programs today had evolved intellectually. However, one look at Coates's proteges Chris Hansen and John Stossel and it's plain to see that over the last fifty years we have only exchanged one manufactured crisis for another.
--Peter Miller