Seducing the Innocent - Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics.pdf

Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics Carol L. Tilley

Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Volume 47, Number 4, 2012, pp. 383-413 (Article) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: 10.1353/lac.2012.0024

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lac/summary/v047/47.4.tilley.html

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Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics

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Carol L. Tilley

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham and his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent serve as historical and cultural touchstones of the anticomics movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Although there have been persistent concerns about the clinical evidence Wertham used as the basis for Seduction , his sources were made widely available only in 2010. This article documents specific examples of how Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain.

Books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but upon the minds of those who mould the mass mind—upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion. The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all. —Memo from the United States Office of War Information, 1944 1 For anyone intereste interested d in twentieth-ce twentieth-century ntury print culture—esp culture—especially ecially comics and similar forms of child-selected media—Fredric Wertham and his book Seduction of the Innocent serve as historical and cultural touchstones. Seduction , a rousing call for limitations on the sale of comics to children based on the author’s clinical evidence of the format’s detrimental links to juvenile delinquency and general children’s welfare, captured the American public’s imagination when it was published in April 1954. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, writing in the New York Times , called it “a most commendable use of the professional mind in the ser vice of the public.” Margaret Martignoni, director of children’ children’ss work at the Brooklyn Public Library, writing in a letter that was excerpted for the book’s advertising campaign, called Seduction “‘must’ reading for thoughtful parents, teachers, librarians, social workers and all other adults concerned with children’s reading and with child development.” An advertisem advertisement ent for the book in the New York Times carried esteemed Information & Culture , Vol. 47, No. 4, 2012 ©2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 DOI: 10.7560/IC47401

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Carol L. Tilley

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham and his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent serve as historical and cultural touchstones of the anticomics movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Although there have been persistent concerns about the clinical evidence Wertham used as the basis for Seduction , his sources were made widely available only in 2010. This article documents specific examples of how Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain.

Books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but upon the minds of those who mould the mass mind—upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion. The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all. —Memo from the United States Office of War Information, 1944 1 For anyone intereste interested d in twentieth-ce twentieth-century ntury print culture—esp culture—especially ecially comics and similar forms of child-selected media—Fredric Wertham and his book Seduction of the Innocent serve as historical and cultural touchstones. Seduction , a rousing call for limitations on the sale of comics to children based on the author’s clinical evidence of the format’s detrimental links to juvenile delinquency and general children’s welfare, captured the American public’s imagination when it was published in April 1954. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, writing in the New York Times , called it “a most commendable use of the professional mind in the ser vice of the public.” Margaret Martignoni, director of children’ children’ss work at the Brooklyn Public Library, writing in a letter that was excerpted for the book’s advertising campaign, called Seduction “‘must’ reading for thoughtful parents, teachers, librarians, social workers and all other adults concerned with children’s reading and with child development.” An advertisem advertisement ent for the book in the New York Times carried esteemed Information & Culture , Vol. 47, No. 4, 2012 ©2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 DOI: 10.7560/IC47401

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I&C/Seducing the Innocent

children’s book editor May Massee’s exclamation, “Thanks to you for publishing Dr. Wertham’s SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT . It is certainly well named named . . . [f]rightening [f ]rightening . . . [c]onvincing . . . overpowering overpowering.” .” Joy Elmer Morgan, editor of the National Education Association’s Association’s NEA Journal , selected it as the book of the year, recommending it to parents, teachers, and librarians. Although he faulted Wertham’s rhetorical strategies, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim praised the book’s “irrefutable evidence” in a review in Library Quarterly . Literary critic Sterling North deemed it “the most important book of the year,” and fellow intellectual Clifton Fadiman wrote privately to Wertham that he knew “the book will do a lot of good.” 2 Within six months, the book had sold more than sixteen thousand copies in the United States, a figure Wertham’s literary agent believed would have been greater had the book not been discussed so extensively in various forums, including televised hearings of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. 3 After the conclusion of World War II, widespread public concern arose about the changing landscape of comics publishing. In the early 1940s, superhero titles dominated comics publishing. Some literary and cultural critics such as Sterling North and Stanley Kunitz objected to superhero super hero themes because of their perceived violent and Fascist elements, but as many superheroes contributed to the war effort through their story lines, and because most adult Americans were preoccupied with the the ongoing ongoing conflict, these objections never attained a critical critical mass. Superhero titles continued to be published following the end of the war, but publishers introduced new genres such as romance, jungle, horror, and true crime, which flourished. In part, publishers intended these new genres to capture the reading interests of more mature readers, especially veterans and other young adults who grew up on superhero comics but now wanted more substantive reading matter. That publishers intended these newer genres for a nonchild audience failed to keep young readers from devouring titles with deliciously provocative titles such as Untamed Love , Forbidden Worlds , and Shocking Mystery . One consequence of this young readership was that throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, cities and other municipalities promulgated legislation that attempted to restrict the sale of certain comics to adults only, while a variety of civic, professiona professional, l, and similar organizati organizations ons such as the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the American Legion, and the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges articulated their concerns about the purported deleterious effects that comics had on younger readers. readers.

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Wertham’s book and his earlier anticomics work was part of this landscape of concern. So although Wertham’s anticomics work was not the only factor that led to the 1954 creation of the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and its restrictive editorial code—which aimed to stave off government intervention in the industry and persisted with modifications until January 2011—it is considered by most scholars and comics aficionados as central to these developments. 4 The psychiatrist’s work spurred an already galvanized public to agitate successfully for changes in the editorial and advertising content of comic books. The CMAA’s resulting code, in turn, crippled the successful comics industry by ensuring that comics that carried its imprimatur were free of offensive content such as poor grammar, excessive violence, and supernatural beings.5 Even though comics publishers also faced increasing competition from the nascent television industry for children’s attention, the CMAA’s code effectively marked the end of comics’ reign as the most popular print medium among children in history. The popular whipping boy for this demise? Fredric Wertham. As comics scholar Jeet Heer noted in a recent Slate article, No wonder Wertham has often been caricatured by fans as a prissy, cold Germanic elitist who wanted to deprive American kids of their entertaining reading material. Catherine Yronwode, a popular historian and comic-book fan, spoke for many when she wrote, in 1983, “We hate [Wertham], despise him. He and he alone virtually brought about the collapse of the comic book industry in the 1950s.” Easy enough to mock, Wertham showed up in a brief and unsympathetic cameo in Michael Chabon’s [Pulitzer] prize winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay .6 Although Wertham’s wife, Hesketh, transferred ownership of his extensive personal archive to the Library of Congress soon after his death in the early 1980s, Wertham’s papers there remained under an embargo until the late spring of 2010. Until 2010, it appears only historian Bart Beaty had been granted access to the psychiatrist’s manuscript collection; the resulting book, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture , departed from much previous writing about Wertham in its generally favorable view of its subject and sought to rehabilitate Wertham’s popular and scholarly image. 7 My initial goal in using Wertham’s papers was not to discredit him; instead, I went in hopes of finding correspondence from librarians and teachers that might enhance my own research agenda on examining the relationship among children, gatekeepers

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of children’s reading, and comics during the mid-twentieth century in the United States. The quantity of materials available in the Wertham collection is daunting: more than two hundred boxes of papers. More than twenty-five boxes specifically focus on Seduction of the Innocent and his related anticomics writings, although I have found relevant materials scattered throughout the remaining files. At present, I have spent twelve days onsite at the Library of Congress, sifting through this wealth of papers—case records, transcripts of treatment sessions, newspaper clippings, notes from telephone conversations, personal correspondence, and more. Within the first few hours of my examination of his papers, many of which are filed to correspond with particular chapters in Seduction of the Innocent , I began to see patterns that both troubled and intrigued me. Wertham seems to have been an inveterate notetaker and underliner, often annotating documents to indicate that he was planning to use particular items in his writing. Thus between the filing arrangements and his notes, it is possible to discern much about how he constructed his writings. Ultimately, I found that, despite its accolades and its central role in moving comics further to the cultural sidelines, Wertham’s Seduction included numerous falsifications and distortions. This article documents specific examples of how Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain. I argue that Wertham privileged his interests in the cultural elements of social psychiatry and mental hygiene at the expense of systematic and verifiable science, an action that ultimately serves to discredit him and the claims he made about comics. Superheroes and Their Savonarola

Fredric Wertham was a German-born American psychiatrist who specialized in forensic psychiatry. He devoted much of his practice in the 1940s and 1950s to the diagnosis and treatment of children identified by schools, social welfare agencies, law enforcement, and court officers as juvenile delinquents. These young people often came from impoverished homes in New York City neighborhoods rife with street gang activity and other criminal activity. Although a portion of the children Wertham treated had diagnosed neuroses or psychoses, many of them had behavior disorders, a catchall diagnosis that included truancy, shoplifting, and daydreaming. 8 Along with a somewhat nonspecific diagnosis, what almost all of Wertham’s young patients shared—and what

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he sought most to understand—was their pastime of and passion for reading comic books. Moreover, that his patients read comics was to Wertham’s mind both causal and symptomatic of the conditions he diagnosed. This belief fueled his work with young people and secured his popular legacy—Wertham died in 1981—as a secular Savonarola, eager to quash comic books and their publishers in an attempt to save the young people of America from illiteracy, delinquency, mental illness, and other certain dooms.9 During the time Wertham sought to suppress comics reading, research and market surveys indicated that more than 90 percent of children and more than 80 percent of teens in the United States read comics, often avidly.10 At ten cents each for most new issues compared to a typical two-dollar price for a juvenile hardcover book, comics were affordable print matter for young people. Unlike the “shallow and inane” content that characterized much of mainstream juvenile literature, comics gave young readers an opportunity to participate, at least vicariously, in “the rumbling realities” of the everyday adult world. 11 Comics also served as an important social currency for young people, who frequently developed elaborate trading procedures and shared purchasing arrangements. For instance, in her study of children’s readership of comics, psychologist Ruth Strang reported that a mother told her that “during one day sixteen children rang her doorbell, asking if they could trade comic magazines with her child.” 12 Another researcher remarked, “Comics are traded for junk, for things to eat, for other comics, or for different magazines.” 13 Of course, not all children read comics: among the children communication researchers Katherine Wolf and Marjorie Fiske interviewed, for example, one can find readers who found particular comics’ genres boring, others who outgrew comics altogether, and still others who identified comics as trash, “the sort of thing that children who are not well brought up read.” 14 Children’s tastes in reading have never been monolithic; still, the pervasiveness of comics as reading materials points to this medium as the most dominant cultural force in children’s lives during the 1940s and 1950s. Most critics of comics, including Wertham, conceded that “not every comic book is bad for children’s minds and emotions.” Wertham, however, derogated these claims with statements such as the following: “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.”15 Certainly, though, the psychiatrist was not alone in his crusade: throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, librarians, educators, police officers, pharmacists, religious leaders, and many other

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concerned adults spoke out about children’s seemingly insatiable reading appetite for the inexpensive, four-color tales of superheroes, funny animals, jungle queens, and gangsters. 16 Even hyperbole was normal for many of the critics who railed against comics. Perhaps the best-known example comes from Sterling North, then a literary critic for the Chicago Daily News . Having just completed service as a member of the American Library Association’s Committee on Intellectual Freedom, North inaugurated the widespread criticism of comic books in May 1940. Writing in an editorial colorfully titled “A National Disgrace (and a Challenge to American Parents),” North characterized comic books as a “poisonous mushroom growth” that drained “the pockets of America’s children” in exchange for a “hypodermic injection of sex and murder.” 17 Other examples abound. For instance, Stanley Kunitz, the future US poet laureate but in 1941 the editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin , compared comics to Nazis, calling them “a training school for young impressionable minds” that could “spawn only a generation of Storm Troopers, Gauleiter, and coarse, audacious Supermen.” 18 John Mason Brown, a literary critic and columnist for the Saturday Review of Literature , famously deemed comics “the marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the home, the curse of the kids, and a threat to the future” in a 1948 radio episode of Town Meeting of the Air .19 The comic books that North, Wertham, and others railed against were a new innovation. Although newspaper comic strips had been collected into book format for resale as early as 1903 and into pamphlet format for promotional purposes as early as 1929, comic books did not begin to reach a wide audience until publishers introduced Superman and other original characters in the late 1930s. 20 Whereas in 1939 “twenty-three weekly and comic periodicals which continue the adventures of the daily and Sunday funny paper characters” could be found on newsstands and in drugstores, by 1945 readers could select from more than one hundred comic book titles. 21 Sales figures for that year indicate that readers purchased almost twenty-five million comics each month, equal to the combined sales of the four best-selling noncomics magazines, including the Reader’s Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal .22 A popular title such as Batman could easily sell more than a million copies for each issue.23 By the early 1950s more than six hundred titles could be found on newsstands, and sales were as high as one hundred million new issues monthly. 24 In comparison, the top-selling children’s book of 1953, Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion Revolts , sold fewer than sixty thousand copies. 25 Public libraries in the United States during that same era circulated approximately four hundred million items annually,

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with approximately half of those items categorized as juvenile materials, although it is important to caution that neither sales figures nor circulation numbers are indicative of actual readership. 26 If anything, sales figures shortchange readership, as the pass-through rate for comics— that is, the number of people who may have read each issue that was sold—was between five and eight. 27 More recently, sales for the top three hundred comic book titles of 2011 totaled seventy-two million issues for the entire year .28 The United States’ entry into World War II dampened some of the criticism for comics, even as sales of comics climbed, but as comics publishers sought to retain and grow readership in postwar America, comic books veered into increasingly mature, dark, and gory thematic territories. Even though the format had never been intended for a solely child audience, children nonetheless represented a significant portion of comics sales and readership. Thus, as the content developed beyond superheroes and funny animals, adult gatekeepers of children’s reading and culture renewed their attacks on the comics industry. Fredric Wertham, who had not spoken or written about comics during the earlier wave of criticism, entered the public debate over the suitability of comics as reading material for children in March 1948, when he organized a symposium, “The Psychopathology of Comic Books,” that included folklorist Gershon Legman and psychiatrist Paula Elkisch as speakers. 29 Although Wertham privately confided that same year to Judith Crist, the author of a 1948 Collier’s Magazine article about his anticomics work, that he “repeatedly thought that [he] could retire from the comic-book field,” he realized that he would “have to keep up this work for a while.”30 In fact, Wertham became the leading public figure of the American anticomics movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He wrote and spoke prolifically on the subject of crime comics and their contributions to youthful delinquency and mental infirmity. For instance, he published articles on comics in periodicals as diverse as the Saturday Review of Literature , National Parent-Teacher , and Ladies’ Home Journal .31 His comics-related speaking engagements included a meeting of the American Prison Association, the Summer Session Institute at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and a meeting of the Women’s National Book Association. Wertham’s expertise on comics caused him to be consulted by the United States Senate’s Committee on Organized Crime in 1950 and by its Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954 as well as by the New York Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics in 1951. Seduction of the Innocent , published

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in early 1954 by Rinehart and Company, was the ultimate expression of Wertham’s thoughts on the impact of reading comics on children’s welfare. The book’s thesis, popularly remembered, is a simple one: reading crime comic books harms children’s moral, social, physical, and mental development. For Wertham, crime comics were not only those such as Crime Must Pay the Penalty , in which “crime” was a featured part of the title or contents; instead, for him, “ crime comic books are comic books that de- pict crime , whether the setting is urban, Western, science-fiction, jungle, adventure or the realm of supermen, ‘horror’ or supernatural beings.” 32 Consequently, almost no sector of the comics-publishing industry was immune from Wertham’s critiques. A deeper reading of Seduction , however, demonstrates that Wertham’s thesis is more nuanced. Wertham viewed the violent content of comics and other mass media as a public health concern that demanded regulation. That children, in particular, encountered violent content in mass media was especially insidious, as it harmed “their ethical development,” which he believed was not a moral issue; rather, “orientation as to what is right and wrong is part of normal mental health.” 33 For Wertham, culture, as part of a greater social order, contributed to a person’s health and well-being. This holistic view of health, along with Wertham’s thesis in Seduction , conforms to his professional orientation as both a social psychiatrist and a mental hygienist. 34 These two fields complement one another: the first seeks to understand mental illness within social and cultural contexts, not simply behavioral and physical manifestations, while the latter endeavors to promote mental wellness, again with a focus on larger social and cultural factors. His intake questionnaire for the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, which sought information about a patient’s family life, recreational pursuits, educational background, physical condition, and behavioral symptoms, exemplifies Wertham’s concerns. 35 Wertham’s apprenticeships, first in 1922 with Emil Kraepelin at his clinic in Munich and then for much of the remainder of the decade with Adolf Meyer at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, informed his approach to psychiatry. Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist, was a pioneer in psychiatric nosology whose influence is visible today in the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. In addition to his contributions to the procedures of differential diagnosis of mental illness, Kraepelin seems to have posited neo-Lamarckian ideas about the role of addiction and mental illness in society (e.g., that alcoholism leads to broader social degeneration). 36 It seems unsurprising that Wertham might have been interested, then, in the societal

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consequences of young people reading about violent acts in comic books. Wertham’s second mentor, Meyer, was a Swiss-born psychiatrist who served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and today is largely remembered for modernizing the practice of psychiatry through valuing record keeping and the taking of comprehensive case notes. Of particular importance in his influence on Wertham, “Meyer viewed mental disorders as a disorganization in a person’s habit system arising at a specific point in time for specific reasons. In his perspective, mental illness was only an extreme form of mental disorder; rather, mental disorder included many forms of socially inefficient behavior, such as criminality, pauperism, alcoholism, and vagrancy. By developing a psychiatry of adjustment [as opposed to one focused on neurology and brain lesions], Meyer broadened the scope of psychiatry to include all forms of socially undesirable behavior.” 37 Wertham clearly viewed comics reading as a form of socially undesirable behavior, at least among children. In turn, he believed, this behavior contributed to improper ethical development and poor mental health. Although Wertham is today frequently remembered as a caricature at best—a footnote in the annals of cultural criticism—his work on comics formed only a portion of his career. He had a lengthy career with the New York Department of Hospitals as a senior psychiatrist, including time as director of Bellevue’s Mental Hygiene Clinic. He wrote numerous books, including the National Research Council–funded The Brain as an Organ: Its Postmortem Study and Interpretation (1934) and popular profiles in criminology, Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (1941) and The Show of Violence (1949). His published research appeared in respected peer-reviewed journals such as Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry , American Journal of Psychiatry , Journal of Psychotherapy , and Journal of Criminal Psychopathology . He testified at high-profile trials, including that of cannibalistic serial killer Albert Fish in 1935 as well as the 1951 Delaware desegregation hearings that helped lead to the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 overturn of segregated education in Brown v. Board of Education . The doctor also testified before a judge in an unsuccessful attempt to secure psychiatric treatment for Ethel Rosenberg, who was being held at Sing Sing Prison in solitary confinement prior to her 1953 execution for espionage; later he worked with the Rosenbergs’ two sons, helping secure their adoption. In 1946, encouraged by African American novelist Richard Wright, Wertham founded the Lafargue Clinic, a low-cost mental hygiene clinic in Harlem that was one of the first of its kind to provide comprehensive social and mental health ser vices primarily to people of color.

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Manipulating the Innocent: Wertham and the Clinical Evidence

At the Lafargue Clinic, Wertham and his staff treated nearly fifteen hundred adults and juveniles between 1946 and 1956. Of the total patients, approximately one-third were children, and of these, approximately one-quarter were white; the majority were black and Latino. 38 The words and experiences of these children formed the basis for much of the clinical evidence presented in Seduction of the Innocent . Lafargue’s protocols for treating younger patients were connected to mental hygiene’s corollary field of child guidance. Child guidance clinics developed in the 1920s, initially to respond to growing social concerns about juvenile delinquency, although the mission for these clinics quickly expanded to treat conditions consistent with Meyer’s ideal psychiatric purview. Ralph Truitt, a psychiatrist who studied under Meyer and a leader in the child guidance movement, characterized the scope of conditions relevant to these clinics as including “undesirable habits” (e.g., masturbation and nightmares), “personality traits” (e.g., daydreaming and restlessness), and “undesirable behaviors” (e.g., truancy and disobedience).39 Although typical child guidance clinics did not treat young people who had more severe disorders such as dementia praecox (i.e., schizophrenia), the Lafargue Clinic treated persons with both mild and severe maladjustments. According to one set of clinic statistics, calculated by a staff member by examining a sample of 250 charts, more than 70 percent of children under the age of sixteen treated at Lafargue had diagnoses of behavior problems, that is, those conditions Truitt identified as problematic rather than severe. 40 For the evidence presented in Seduction , Wertham also drew on the experiences of children he and his associates, including Dr. Hilde Mosse, treated at other New York City venues such as Bellevue Hospital Center, Kings County Hospital, and Queens General Hospital. In many instances, the young people whom the psychiatrists saw in these settings tended to have much more extreme disorders that required hospitalization. For example, the young woman Wertham quoted as remembering about comics, “I like one where a man puts a needle in a woman’s eye,” was one of Dr. Mosse’s patients at Kings County. This teenager had been admitted because she wanted to kill her younger brother, a fantasy she had experienced consistently for more than six years. 41 But these other venues also served as sites for some of the group therapy and mental hygiene programs Wertham directed. For instance, both the Hookey Club and the Remedial Reading Clinic, which he documented in Seduction , were conducted at Queens General Hospital. Although Wertham

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signaled his indebtedness to his colleagues in the acknowledgments for Seduction , he never consistently indicated in the book which examples he drew from firsthand knowledge rather than his colleagues’ reports. The following examples document instances where Wertham seemed to place himself in an observational position where it was not warranted. Additionally, they highlight occurrences where Wertham edited and altered children’s statements and clinical presentations to make his rhetorical position more compelling to readers. Finally, the examples give evidence that Wertham inaccurately characterized his own clinical research and frequently failed to attribute ideas that he liberally borrowed from others. The examples presented here are not intended to be exhaustive; to correlate all of Wertham’s sources for Seduction , while perhaps technically possible given the quality and quantity of archival material he preserved, would be a labor of many years.

Eroticism and Wish Dreams

Wertham found the gratuitous linking of violence and sexuality to be one of the most disturbing features of the comics he studied. Indeed, many of the male comics readers with whom he spoke were intrigued, if not outright stimulated, by the depictions of women that featured bondage or torture scenarios. In the chapter of Seduction about the relationship between comics reading and children’s psychosexual development, he recalled, with relative accuracy, that when he asked a group of boys “if they actually had a little girl in a lonely place, would [they] really like to tie her up, beat her and torture her. . . . Everybody smiled— and every hand went up.” 42 The incident he reported here occurred during a June 1948 meeting of the Comic Book Readers Club. One of the two girls who attended that day’s meeting brought a recent copy of Crime Reporter , a comic that ran for only three issues. Wertham asked each of the six boys present “whether he liked girls being tortured. Each says ‘Yes.’ ‘It is more exciting.’” Later he asked them if they liked seeing girls tortured in real life as well as in comics. “They all smile and Paul says, ‘I haven’t said a word.’” 43 Wertham embellished the context for his questions and, interestingly, chose to omit any mention of the Tijuana Bible —a cheaply produced erotic comic—that Paul brought with him. 44 In Seduction , Wertham proposed that homosexual men identified strongly with the Batman comics because of the camaraderie between the superhero and his younger sidekick. More specifically, Batman and Robin offered readers “a wish dream of two homosexuals living

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together.”45 As part of his evidence for this identification, Wertham shared the insights of a young homosexual man who stated, “I think I put myself in the position of Robin. I did want to have relations with Batman.” 46 The young man from the anecdote was actually two men, ages sixteen and seventeen, who had been in a sexual relationship with one another for several years and had realized they were homosexual by the age of ten. Wertham combined their statements, failing to indicate that the seventeen-year-old is the one who noted, “The only suggestion of homosexuality may be that they seemed to be so close to each other,” and omitting the phrase that followed, “like my friend and I.” 47 Further, Wertham did not make any mention that the two teens had found the Submariner and Tarzan to be better subjects than Batman and Robin for their early erotic fantasies. In the same chapter, Wertham introduced the case of a thirteen-yearold boy who was on probation and receiving counseling because he urinated in another boy’s mouth. 48 About him, Wertham wrote: “Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: ‘Sometimes I read them over and over again. They show off a lot. I don’t remember Batman’s name, but the boy’s name is Robin. They live together. It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy. . . . Batman could have saved this boy’s life. Robin looks something like a girl. He has only trunks on.’” 49 The case file presents a different account. (Italics indicate text that was omitted from or changed in Seduction .) My favorites are the war comics. I have read Batman. I liked it once but not so much now . They show off a lot. I don’t know Batman’s name but the boy’s name is Robin. They live together. It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy. Batman could have saved this boy’s life. He may have made him take his thing in his mouth. Robin looks something like a girl. He has only trunks on. I read CRIME Does Not Pay, also Superman .

A close comparison of the texts reveals that Wertham gave much greater weight to the boy’s readership of Batman than the case transcript indicated. Whereas Wertham remarks that the boy read these comics repetitively, if not obsessively, and that his readership was contemporaneous with his therapy, the boy places his Batman readership in the past. A comparison reveals other, less obvious changes. For instance, the elision that Wertham documented actually comes after, not before, the sentence “Batman could have saved this boy’s life.” Although this

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is a small deviation that in other circumstances could be overlooked as a mistake, in Wertham’s case it belies a more systematic carelessness in his treatment of evidence. Finally, Wertham claimed that the boy had homosexual tendencies and that those tendencies correlated with the boy’s interest in Batman. Yet as the textual comparison indicates, the boy’s interest in Batman lay in the past. Moreover, Wertham failed to inform his readers that, prior to the boy’s arrest, the other boy had sodomized him. Wertham also believed that comics offered girl readers their own lesbian wish dreams. For example, he wrote, “I have seen an elaborate, charming breakfast scene, but it was between Batman and his boy, complete with checkered tablecloth, milk, cereal, fruit juice, dressing-gown and newspaper. And I have seen a parallel scene with the same implications when Wonder Woman had breakfast with an admiring young girl.”50 It was comic book images of another strong woman, Sheena, that Dorothy, a thirteen-year-old African American girl and a habitual truant from an impoverished family, described as enjoying. 51 According to the book and the case notes, Dorothy read jungle comics with strong females like Sheena as well as crime comics, including Penalty , which she regretted never showed the criminals getting away with their crimes. Wertham quoted Dorothy saying about jungle comics, “I like to see the way they jump up and kick men down and kill them! . . . Sheena got a big jungle she lives in and people down there likes her and would do anything for her.”52 In the case notes, Wertham commented that the images of strong women reinforced “violent revenge fantasies against men and possibly creates these violent anti-men (therefore homosexual) fantasies. . . . Sheena and the other comic book women such as Wonder Woman are very bad ideals for them.” Yet Wertham omits from Seduction —and seemingly from his analysis—a revealing story about Dorothy’s everyday reality. In the case notes, she related an incident in which her aunt was accosted by gang members, taken to a rooftop, and robbed of less than one dollar. Wertham also declined to mention in Seduction that Dorothy—in addition to being habitually truant—was a runaway and a gang member, was sexually active, and had both a reading disability and low normal intelligence. On the final page of Dorothy’s case notes, Wertham instead wrote: “She would be good and non-aggressive if society would let her—Comic Books are part of society.” 53 Most telling of all, however, is a key fact Wertham omitted from Seduction : Dorothy was Dr. Mosse’s patient, not his, and as she was hospitalized at Kings County Hospital, where he did not practice, he would have never spoken with or observed her.

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The Not-So-Headless Captain Marvel, Kafka for Kiddies, and Love Comics

Richard, an eleven-year-old Caucasian boy, was brought to Lafargue by his mother, who claimed the boy had “wild imaginations” and engaged in rough play with neighborhood children. 54 In Seduction , Wertham painted a picture, colored with copious quotations from the boy, of a life debased by comics: he delighted in depictions of bondage, mock-threatened playmates with eye gouging and hanging, and scratched a child in the face. All of these actions, Wertham proposed, could not be explained adequately in existing books on child psychiatry or guidance; instead, comics were “a new kind of bacillus” for which psychiatrists could provide a prophylaxis. 55 In the case notes, Richard himself supported the idea that comics promote problematic behaviors: “I think something else about story and adventure comics. I think they shouldn’t have them on the stands, it is bad for children. 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 children shouldn’t have them.” 56 That Richard engaged in the activities Wertham described or even that he spoke many of the words Wertham attributed to him is not in dispute, but a careful comparison of his case as presented in Seduction of the Innocent with the archival notes demonstrates how Wertham manipulated evidence to persuade readers of the ill effects of comic book reading on children’s behavior. For instance, in the book Richard says, “If I had a younger brother . . . 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!” In the case notes, however, Richard referred not to “horror comic books” but to “fiction comic books,” and Captain Marvel is not mentioned until a later session. Although Richard did remark about a headless man, he indicated only a page in Captain Marvel #101 (October 1949); the case notes include Wertham’s comments that “there are 5 pictures like this on one page.” Readers of Seduction are free to use their own “wild imaginations” in visualizing what could be a potentially gory decapitated man. In reality, though, it is simply Captain Marvel himself; he has been splashed in the face with an invisibility potion. Finally, nowhere in Seduction did the psychiatrist provide the richer context for Richard that he professed to believe was key to understanding the etiology of a patient’s disease. Consequently, readers are not privy to knowing that Richard’s mother is actually his stepmother, that she is also a patient at Lafargue, that he has stolen from

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her, that he often cries, that he has a scar on his cheek from a fight, or that his paternal grandmother had once attempted suicide. Although any of these issues may have been worth investigating in relation to the boy’s behavior, Wertham’s file for his case—at least as preserved in the archival record—demonstrates that comics were the principal focus for the therapeutic sessions, even remarking that the boy was “anxious to explain comic books.” 57 In another passage from Seduction , Wertham described a seven-yearold boy, Edward, who had been having nightmares induced by reading Blue Beetle comics. The boy described the Blue Beetle as “like Superman. He is a beetle, but he changes into Superman and afterwards he changes into a beetle again.” 58 Commenting in the text, Wertham wrote, “It is not difficult to understand that a child stimulated to fantasies about violent and sadistic adventures and about a man who changes into an insect gets frightened. Kafka for the kiddies!” 59 Although Wertham described Blue Beetle as a “very violent crime comic book,” he could not have studied it closely: the Blue Beetle is a man, not an insect. 60 Moreover, Edward neither fantasized about the Blue Beetle nor had nightmares about him. The case notes, which depart significantly from the report in Seduction , state: “Boy says he reads Blue Beetle. Father says he does not read that at home, he saw it at a friend’s house. Boy says he does not remember anything about the nightmares.” 61 Wertham also counseled a thirteen-year-old African American girl, Vivian, whom he pronounced “an expert on love comics,” which, her mother purportedly stated, “she reads . . . all the time.” 62 Through Vivian’s example, Wertham sought to demonstrate that romance comics inspired criminal acts. According to Seduction , her mother brought Vivian to Lafargue because “she had stolen some money from a lodger,” although the case notes also identify her as indifferent in school and a liar.63 To make the connection between theft and the romance comics, Wertham writes, “I asked her about stealing in love comics. She laughed, ‘Oh, they do it often.’” 64 The evidence from the archival material fails to support the connection. Rather, it indicates that Wertham falsified statements made by both the girl and her mother. For instance, the exchange with Vivian that Wertham purportedly quotes actually reads, “The story where somebody steals is in Crime Does Not Pay . In the Love Comics they sometimes steal.” 65 He created the illusion of dialogue and even emotion—in itself this does not warrant a high level of concern, as readers can reasonably expect that a psychiatrist and his patient would engage in conversation, and perhaps he remembered her laughter— but as he did in the example provided in this article’s introduction,

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he also distorted the facts. Wertham transforms that act of stealing in romance comics from “sometimes” to “often.” Further, the mother actually reported that her daughter was reading comics less avidly than she had before, as the family now had a television set. Carlisle and the Crime Comics

Carlisle, a fifteen-year-old boy, received counseling from Wertham for chronic truancy, although he also admitted to petty thievery and gang membership. In one of his sessions with Wertham, Carlisle brought several comics with him, including Crimes by Women #2 (August 1948), Headline Comics #41 (May/June 1950), and [Crime Must Pay the] Penalty #15 (August 1950). During the session, which like many of Wertham’s sessions was transcribed, Carlisle commented on the comics, saying about Headline Comics , “There’s one that looks sexy. Her headlights are showing half way.” About Crimes by Women he remarked, “Her legs are showing above her knees. Her headlights are showing, with a gun in her hand smoking, as though she had already shot somebody—with hate and disgust for the cop.” About a different image in the same comic, Carlisle noted, “When you see a girl and you go see her headlights, and she is beaten up, that makes you hot and bothered because you see parts that you shouldn’t be shown. . . . If she will take a beating from a man, she will take anything from him.” Finally, about Penalty he said, “It shows how to commit burglaries, holdups, a gangster has a hand on the girl’s shoulder. He is going to work his way down to her headlights.” 66 Yet in Seduction Wertham reported Carlisle’s words so that they appear to be spoken by two boys taking part in a group therapy session: At some of the sessions of the Hookey Club, when there were only adolescent boys present, no younger ones and no girls, discussions about comic books were sometimes pretty outspoken. One boy discussed the comic book, Crimes by Women . “There is one that is sexy! Her legs are showing above her knees and her headlights are showing plenty! She has a smoking gun in her hand as though she had already shot somebody. When you see a girl and you see her headlights and she is beaten up, that makes you hot and bothered! If she will take a beating from a man she will take anything from him.” Another boy defended Crimes by Women and showed a copy of Penalty which he said was worse. “It shows how to commit burglaries, holdups. A gangster has a hand on a girl’s shoulder. He is working his way down to her headlights.”67

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In this example Wertham not only fabricated the context and one of the speakers but also elided and conflated comments about specific images. Carlisle was an important source of information for Wertham; at least fifteen single-spaced transcribed pages of sessions with Carlisle are part of Wertham’s research materials for Seduction . For instance, Carlisle makes an appearance as a thirteen-year-old boy who shares with Hookey Club members that when young readers saw an advertisement in comics for a kitchen knife set, “the kids immediately know what to use them for. They buy them and split them up. In the schools where I was, the boys use them. They have straps and strap them on their legs.” 68 In another passage, Carlisle, here reported to be a fourteen-year-old member of the Hookey Club, was the source of the story about the shoeshine boys’ protection racket. Wertham changed small details. For example, the thirty-five or forty boys that Carlisle noted became twenty-five in the book. Similarly, Carlisle stated that the scheme lasted for four months, which Wertham changed to a less definite “several.”69 He was also the source for the example of how comics inspire young people to steal women’s purses. Wertham quoted Carlisle in part: “In the comic books it shows how to snatch purses. You should read them if you got the time [To me.]. It shows a boy going to a woman and asking her where the church is. She naturally drops her arm and goes waving. So you just grab the purse and run.” The quotation is generally accurate, although Wertham substituted “boy” for Carlisle’s more evocative “runt, a shrimp about my size.” Most important, Wertham omitted the beginning of Carlisle’s anecdote in which he says that although he has read about robbery in comics, he also “saw it in the movies. Movies help a lot.” 70 Looking beyond Children’s Files

Wertham’s characterization of his own research is also troubling. In Seduction he described his work as “clinical research” consisting of “large case material.” 71 In his testimony before the Senate subcommittee, Wertham described the number of children he had studied as part of his comics investigation as “more than 500 . . . a year” for a total of “many thousands.”72 These figures are inconsistent with treatment data from the Lafargue Clinic. For example, the total number of children under the age of sixteen who were examined at the clinic between 1946 and 1956 was fewer than five hundred.73 Of course, Wertham still practiced psychiatry at Queens General Hospital and elsewhere during a portion of these years, so it is possible that some of the young people whose cases formed part of the basis for his arguments in Seduction were

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seen at these other facilities; unfortunately, the archival record does not adequately support this option. Moreover, he inaccurately characterized the Hookey Club at Queens General Hospital, writing in Seduction that he founded it “at the beginning of World War II” and that “the usual age range of members . . . was from thirteen to sixteen.” 74 As early as 1948, however, Wertham seemed unclear about the club’s chronology and composition, as he requested information about it from one of his associates at Queens, who informed him that it “started in the spring of 1944. After a summer vacation, it started again in the following fall, and ended with vacation in 1945. The club was dropped for summer vacation in June 1946. We never did revive it. The ages were from 11 to 17.”75 A separate but similar club, the Comic Book Readers Club, began in May 1948 and appears to have continued irregularly through 1952. A preliminary survey of the available transcripts of these two groups suggests that comics dominated the discussions only infrequently and seldom without some encouragement from Wertham, which seems to contradict his assessment that the club was “one of the most revealing channels of information about the influence of comic books.” 76 Instead, the “many thousands” of children Wertham claimed to have studied likely included a large number for whom he had only anecdotal knowledge, such as the eight-year-old niece of a Mrs. Axelrod, who was either a client or a staff member at Lafargue. 77 The woman reported to Wertham on a conversation she had with her niece on how many comic books she purchased; Wertham reported this anecdote in Seduction without acknowledging that it was gathered secondhand.78 Similarly, he recounted an anecdote wherein “an eight-year-old girl said to her mother, ‘Let’s play a game. Someone is coming to see us. I’ll stamp on him, knock his eyes out and cut him up.’” As with the previous example, this one was provided to Wertham secondhand: a private patient reported to him that her niece had said these things. 79 Only on occasion, such as with the examples of what young boys had learned about delinquency from comics, did Wertham provide some attribution— here, “a very experienced youth counselor”—when he did not have firsthand knowledge.80 It seems, however, that even among the young people to whom Wertham had direct access, reading comics was seldom a significant clinical issue even by his standards. In statistics for Lafargue representing a period of several years, only 26 of a total of 133 patients age fourteen and younger were designated as “comic book cases.” 81 The psychiatrist also appropriated ideas from peers and acquaintances without offering any attribution. He claimed, for instance, to

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“have seen children vomit over comic books,” but this assertion was actually suggested to Wertham by his confidant Gershon Legman, the folklorist whom comics publisher William Gaines famously—and some what accurately—accused of being Wertham’s ghostwriter. 82 Legman even suggested the example that Wertham used to frame this claim: “Suppose a candy factory sells lollypops and one batch of lollypops is bad.” 83 In another example, Wertham asserts early in Seduction , “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 standing on the ground, or to stop an airplane in midair while flying himself.” 84 Yet, this statement was not original to Wertham; instead, his notes reveal the source to be “an Electrophysicist who has two children age 4 and 8” whom Wertham met at a friend’s house.85 One of the most extensive instances of Wertham’s failure to attribute the source of his material also demonstrates his willingness to alter details to fit his rhetorical need. I found a good opportunity to study what one might call the cultural role of comic books in small stores in very poor neighborhoods where immigrants or migrating minorities have moved into a section of the city. For example in a small candy store frequented almost entirely by Puerto Ricans who had moved into the district there is no other reading matter aside from comic books. But of them there is a large secondhand supply limited to the violent and gruesome and sexy kinds. There are always children around, including very young ones, and this is their first contact with American culture. They cannot even speak English, so of course they only look at the pictures. They have not yet heard that the experts of the comic-book industry have found that comic books teach literacy, so they don’t learn to read from them. But here their little money is taken away from them. Late in the evening, and into the night, children collect at this store, which is also a place for that much hushed-up phenomenon child prostitution of the youngest and lowest-paid kind. 86 It is quite possible that Wertham himself never saw or visited this store, as his colleague Dr. Hilde Mosse provided him with this report almost verbatim. Although her report did mention prostitution, Wertham added “incl. childhood” in the report’s margin. 87

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Discussion Seduction of the Innocent is filled with examples like the preceding ones in which Wertham shifted responsibility for young people’s behavioral disorders and other pathologies from the broader social, cultural, and organic physical contexts of these children’s lives to the recreational pastime of reading comics. Wertham often played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics, even leading some of his contemporaries to raise concerns about the way in which he marshaled evidence in support of his assertions. Indeed, several months before Seduction was published, Vernon Pope, who at the time was head of public relations for DC/ National Comics, wrote to psychiatrist Lauretta Bender, a member of DC/National’s editorial advisory board, to get her opinion on whether the comics publisher should try to counter “some of [Wertham’s] most blatant distortions? I’ll bet some of those illustrations, which are presented as current examples, are well over 5 years old.” 88 Even the legal counsel for the United States Senate’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which called Wertham as a key witness in the hearings it held on the contributions of crime comic books to juvenile delinquency, viewed Wertham’s arguments and evidence as problematic: “He represents the extreme position among the psychiatrists and disapproves on psychiatric grounds of many crime comics which ‘the middle of the roaders’ do not believe make any significant contribution to ju venile delinquency. . . . The line of questioning will be to determine on the basis of Dr. Wertham’s experience whether and to what extent his clinical findings have taken into account the other causative factors in the child’s background, i.e., broken homes, environment, etc.” 89 A more sympathetic party, Bertram Beck, an esteemed psychiatric social worker who led the Special Juvenile Delinquency Project for the United States Children’s Bureau, a federal agency charged with investigating a variety of children’s social welfare issues, found fault with Wertham’s approach in Seduction , despite his general agreement with the doctor’s thesis. In a letter to Wertham from April 1954, Beck wrote: “Your treatment of contrary evidence and, in fact, anyone who disagrees seems to me to be as unscientific as you demonstrate the defenders of the comic book have been. These lapses, inaccuracies, and misinterpretations seem more unfortunate to me since they will alienate some of the professional support which you should have.”90 Wertham, however, did not shy away from alienating those persons who questioned his expertise, evidence, or conclusions, even if they might have proved useful for his efforts to regulate comics sales. For example, in his letter of reply to the president of the Hawaii Congress of Parents and Teachers, who had been somewhat

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critical of Seduction , Wertham wrote, “You ask me whether I am ‘an authority of the techniques of learning to read.’ Yes, I am.” 91 When the executive editor of Woman’s Home Companion wrote to inquire about the source of Wertham’s evidence for an anecdote in Seduction that featured the magazine, his response was a single, teasing sentence: “I’m awfully sorry you haven’t kept your records because, as you well know, a physician is not at liberty to divulge his sources.” 92 Here, Wertham seemed to apply doctor-patient privilege more broadly than medical ethics guidelines ever intended. Wertham’s treatment of evidence in Seduction and his responses to questions about his comics-related research were indicative of a larger pattern of spurious and questionable behaviors. Gabriel Mendes, in his historical examination of the Lafargue Clinic, notes that “throughout his entire career in psychiatry Wertham would continuously fail to observe the codes of professionalism that marked one as a candidate for institutional leadership and prestige in the wider world.” 93 To support his assertion, Mendes points to archival evidence that demonstrates Wertham had problems working collegially with others at the Phipps Clinic during the 1920s and that he misrepresented his position and status to colleagues at the Munich Institute when he was employed there later that decade. Mendes also describes that in the Delaware desegregation hearings in which Wertham testified on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Jack Greenberg, the NAACP’s attorney and the person who had sought Wertham’s help, recalled the psychiatrist as “temperamental and imperious, and ‘everything had to be precisely as he wanted it.’” 94 Wertham’s irascibility was evident in the transcript of a 1955 meeting of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics at which he repeatedly evaded requests to answer questions directly. 95 So what of the distortions, falsifications, and misrepresentations that pervade Wertham’s case against comics? The publisher’s note that opened Seduction of the Innocent framed the book as “the result of seven years of scientific investigation” and deemed Wertham as possessing an “expert opinion . . . based on facts , facts that can be demonstrated and proved.”96 For much of its history and despite scattered efforts such as the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, psychiatry cannot be considered an exact science with standards of evidence that resemble other biological and medical sciences. Only since the 1950s, with the introduction of clinical drug trials, can psychiatric evidence be more widely viewed as systematic and rigorous; even then, the emphasis is on therapeutic intervention rather than on etiology. Of course, Kraepelin

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and others such as Meyer helped systematize psychiatric information gathering and record keeping, while other psychiatrists, including Wertham, helped establish the physiological dimensions of the field. But assembling all of the pieces of information to arrive at a fuller understanding of a patient’s condition and its potential causality relied on the expertise and discretion of individual psychiatrists. 97 Even had Wertham provided others with access to his “evidence,” it was still in many ways his professional prerogative to tell the stories he wanted to tell. Yet, in light of the source evidence now available for independent verification, Wertham’s book appears clearly to be an attempt at cultural correction rather than an honest report of scientific inquiry, whether from a psychiatric or a social sciences perspective—a conclusion that has long been the source of speculation. 98 Although his work contains no overt references to Frankfurt School theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Wertham’s rhetoric advances a similar argument. For him, mass culture and capitalism, as embodied by the coarse world of comics, was not perhaps a triumph of Fascism over true art and culture but a real threat to a healthy society. Wertham was not a cultural conservative, but he did equate comics and comics reading with a broader social and cultural failure. 99 As he wrote in Seduction : 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. 100 Although its possible relationship to the Frankfurt School bears exploration, Wertham’s argument and even its construction seem indebted to his mentor Kraepelin. Medical historian Eric Engstrom proposes that Kraepelin’s later stance—which Wertham would have likely encountered personally during his apprenticeship in Munich—was increasingly focused on social and cultural explanations for mental disease. As Engstrom writes, for Kraepelin, “high culture and ‘life- experiences’ threatened not only to countermand Darwinian laws of natural selections by shielding human beings from their environment, but also to

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impinge directly on the development of germ cells. Kraepelin viewed the effects of culture as contributing to a deterioration, indeed to the degeneration of the individual and the ‘race.’” 101 In Wertham’s view, comic books threatened both social and cultural integrity. Additionally, Engstrom notes that Kraepelin marshaled a vast system of informants to provide him with psychiatric material for his research, and “he appears to have few qualms about drawing on the observations of officials not trained in psychiatry. This use of information could never have satisfied his own critical standards of clinical observation.” 102 Again, Wertham— perhaps quite unconsciously—adopted the practices of his mentor, collating the reports of a network of observers to advance his rhetoric. Meyer’s influence is not wholly absent in Wertham’s logic. In fact, Meyer’s admonition that “if the facts [of the case] do not constitute a diagnosis we must nevertheless act on the facts” could be seen as a spur to Wertham’s desire to incite action on comics, because even if elements of his reporting and interpretation of it are specious, Wertham’s clinical evidence did confirm that young people read comics. 103 In the more than half a century that has elapsed since the publication of Seduction of the Innocent , much has changed in the cultural landscape. Libraries and schools throughout the United States have turned to comics as sources of shared reading for classroom assignments and as inducements for reluctant readers. Comics characters appear on promotional posters for reading that are distributed by the American Library Association. Teachers and librarians participate in comics conventions, and comics vendors and programming can be found at library and educational conferences. Programs and tools encourage young people to create their own comics. Mainstream book publishers such as Scholastic and Penguin distribute comics, albeit in long form, not the pamphlet form familiar to Wertham. Many of Hollywood’s most lucrative film properties are based on superhero comics that the young people in Wertham’s Hookey Club might have read. Yet, as the epigraph for this article proposes, books are enduring propaganda. Wertham’s argument about comics in Seduction of the Innocent , grounded inconsistently in frequently spurious clinical evidence, has cast a long shadow over the place of comics in society. Consequently, many persons, influenced—often unknowingly—by Wertham’s popular rhetoric, continue to view comics as childish, violent, oversexed trash. That shadow is visible, too, in academe. True, in the past few decades scholarship on comics has shifted, slowly though steadily, from the margins toward the center of humanities and social sciences research. Still, it is often ghettoized in specially created journals and conferences rather

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than included in more catholic venues. In particular and despite its one-time place at the head of children’s print culture, it has been little represented in areas such as book history, print culture, and children’s literature. 104 In John Hench’s recent and admirable Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II , from which this article’s epigraph is drawn, comics are excluded from his discussion of the propaganda efforts made by the Office of War Information (OWI) even though the OWI extensively studied and experimented with comics in strip and book format early in the war. 105 In Anne Lundin and Wayne Wiegand’s edited volume Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children’s Literature , only a single essay even mentions comics, and then only in the context of individuals’ reading histories. In Carl Kaestle et al.’s volume Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 , comics are glossed twice, and in both instances the reference is to newspaper comic strips, not comic books. 106 Children’s literature scholars tend to distance themselves from comics as well. As children’s literature professor Charles Hatfield noted a few years ago, “Children’s literature scholars have not acknowledged comics as a foundational element of [children’s culture] . . . and have been slow to put aside assumptions about the Otherness of comics vis-à-vis the literary tradition.” 107 That scholars continue to neglect or marginalize the historical realities of comics, their readers, and the medium’s social milieu is regrettable. For historians of the role of information in society and culture, the deceptions Wertham perpetrated raise questions in a number of areas. For instance, were his distortions acceptable because he seemed to have the welfare of children in mind? In instances where information from sensitive—and hence not easily revealed—resources such as medical intake records and treatment reports is used to bolster arguments, how can publishers and readers ensure the authenticity and reliability of that information? Similarly, as Wertham’s book was intended for a popular audience, was he bound to the same standards of evidence as if he were writing for an academic one? Likewise, how can we be certain that children’s voices are recorded, filtered, and reported accurately by adult mediators? In contemporary culture, it is arguably more difficult to perpetrate fraud or even practice creative deception in writing; the cases of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, memoirist James Frey, and essayist John D’Agata, who is the subject of a recent book on fact checking, bear witness to that assertion. 108 Even so, to what degree can we accept evidence presented for any rhetorical purpose? Although adults read comics too, for many young people growing up in the

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United States during the mid-twentieth century, comics were a primary means for them to engage with the world around them. Comic books and comics reading were more than a marketing phenomenon, more than cultural junk, more than a pastime, more than a pathology. Fredric Wertham wanted to curtail that engagement in a significant manner. That he cloaked his rhetoric in the guise of science and professional authority makes his claims more egregious. I want to be clear, however, that my intent in highlighting Wertham’s falsifications is not to add my name to the list of the psychiatrist’s detractors. In fact, I find myself conflicted about Wertham. Having examined thousands of pages of documents that he created and collected, I discovered that he had a genuine passion for children and their welfare, though it is difficult to document that passion meaningfully. At the same time, he gave readers a clear indication that rhetoric must trump evidence: commenting about a colleague, Wertham wrote, “Neutrality— especially when hidden under the cloak of scientific objectivity—that is the devil’s ally.”109 Notes 1. Quoted in John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 70. 2. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1954); C. Wright Mills, “Nothing to Laugh At,” New York Times , April 25, 1954, BR20; Margaret Martignoni to Dudley Frasier, March 10, 1954, box 123, folder 7, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter Wertham Papers); advertisement for Seduction of the Innocent , New York Times , April 26, 1954, 23; Joy Elmer Morgan, “Seduction of the Innocent,” NEA Journal 43 (1954): 473; Bruno Bettelheim, review of Seduction of the Innocent , Library Quarterly 25 (1955): 129–30; the quote from Sterling North comes from advertisements for Seduction of the Innocent taken out by Rinehart and Company (see, e.g., “[Advertisement: Seduction of the Innocent],” New York Times , April 26, 1954, 23); Marie Loizeaux, “Talking Shop,” Wilson Library Bulletin 28 (1954): 884; Clifton Fadiman to Fredric Wertham, August 17, 1954, box 124, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 3. Rene de Chocor to Fredric Wertham, August 5, 1954, box 124, folder 3, Wertham Papers. In comparison, the book would have needed to sell more than seventy-three thousand copies in cloth and paper combined to be ranked among the top ten nonfiction bestsellers for 1954, according to Alice Hackett’s 70 Years of Best Sellers (New York: Bowker, 1967). Sales might indeed have been higher: Wertham claimed that Seduction had been optioned by the Book of the Month Club (BOMC) as one of its summer selections but that the offer was rescinded because of pressure by comics publishers (see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s [New York: Oxford

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University Press, 1986]). Clifton Fadiman, then a member of BOMC’s editorial board, sent Wertham a postcard in August 1954, stating in part, “Sorry the thing worked out the way it did. I know the book will do a lot of good” (August 17, 1954, box 124, folder 3, Wertham Papers). Interestingly, Fadiman’s first wife, Pauline (they divorced in 1949), was editor of the Child Study Association of America’s (CSAA) journal; Wertham had a great dislike for the CSAA, primarily because of CSAA staff member Josette Frank’s advisory work with DC/ National Comics. 4. For scholarly perspectives, consider Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage ; Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). For popular perspectives, consider, for example, David Hajdu, The Ten- Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Macmillan, 2009); Stephen O’Day, Seduction of the Innocent , 2011, http://www .lostsoti.org. There is also a documentary film, Diagram for Delinquents , focusing on Wertham, scheduled for a 2012 release (the Website http://www.kickstarter .com/projects/sequart/diagram-for-delinquents has additional information). 5. Not all publishers sought the CMAA’s approval: Dell Comics, which specialized in comics featuring funny animals and properties licensed from other media (e.g., Donald Duck, Gene Autry), was a notable exception. Furthermore, as Nyberg argues in Seal of Approval , other factors such as distribution problems contributed to the evisceration of the comics industry. Whatever the exact proportions in the constellation of factors that the comics industry faced in 1954, the industry looked quite different in subsequent years. Specific data about the changes in new titles and related publication details can be found in Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books , trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 6. Jeet Heer, “The Caped Crusader: Fredric Wertham and the Campaign against Comic Books,” Slate , April 4, 2008, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2008/04/the_caped_crusader.html. 7. Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005). Prior to Wertham’s death, historian James Gilbert interviewed Wertham, who also granted Gilbert access to a portion of his personal papers. See Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage . 8. Statistics for Wertham’s Lafargue Clinic indicate that more than 70 percent of the children treated there had “behavior disorders,” a diagnosis that did not exist for adults (“Statistics—Lafargue Clinic 1946 to 1956,” March 6, 1956, box 52, folder 15, Wertham Papers). J. Wallace Wallin’s Personality Maladjustments and Mental Hygiene (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949) provides insights into thencontemporary views of childhood behavior disorders. 9. Wertham acknowledged this comparison in Seduction , 15. 10. Cf. David T. Armstrong, “How Good Are the Comic Books?,” Elementary English Review 21 (1944): 283–85, 300; Clara Louise Kessler, “Leisure Time Interest Questionnaire,” Illinois Libraries 30 (1948): 168–74; W. W. D. Sones, “Comic Books Are Going to School,” Progressive Education 24 (1947): 212. In addition, see Carol L. Tilley, “Of Nightingales and Supermen: How Youth Services Librarians Responded to Comics between the Years 1938 and 1955,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2007.

409 11. Julia L. Certain, editorial in Elementary English Review 18 (1941): 160; Gweneira Williams and Jane Wilson, “They Like It Rough: In Defense of Comics,” Library Journal 67 (1942): 204. 12. Ruth Strang, “Why Children Read the Comics,” Elementary School Journal 43 (1943): 336. 13. Margaret Frost, “Children’s Opinion of Comic Books,” Elementary English Review 20 (1943): 330. 14. Katherine M. Wolf and Marjorie Fiske, “The Children Talk about Comics,” in Communications Research 1948–1949 , ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 24. 15. Wertham, Seduction , 10, 26. 16. For additional information about concerns about comics during this time period, see, for example, Tilley, Of Nightingales ; Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague ; and Nyberg, Seal of Approval . 17. Sterling North, “A National Disgrace (and a Challenge to American Parents),” Chicago Daily News , May 8, 1940, 56. 18. SJK [Stanley J. Kunitz], “Libraries, to Arms!,” Wilson Library Bulletin 15 (1941): 671. 19. American Broadcasting Company, “Town Hall: What’s Wrong with the Comics?,” March 2, 1948. An audio excerpt of Brown’s comments—complete with audience laughter—can be heard at http://www.archive.org/details/ WhatsWrongWithTheComics. 20. For additional information about the early comics industry, see, for example, Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); and Ron Goulart, The Adventurous Decade (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975). 21. The quote is from Florence Brumbaugh, “Children’s Choices of Reading Materials,” Elementary English Review (1939): 226. 22. Harold C. Field, “Are the Comic Books a Problem?,” New Jersey Library Association Bulletin 13 (1945): 75–83; Carl H. Melinat, “Magazine Best Sellers,” Wilson Library Bulletin 21 (1946): 171–72. 23. Harry E. Childs to Josette Frank, February 5, 1942, box 24, folder 239, Child Study Association of America records, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. 24. “The Hundred Million Dollar Market for Comics,” Publishers Weekly 165 (1954): 1906. 25. “Farley Leads the List,” Publishers Weekly 165 (1954): 898. 26. Robert D. Leigh, The Public Library in the United States: The General Report of the Public Library Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). 27. Field, “Are the Comic Books a Problem?” 28. The Comics Chronicles, “Comic Book Sales by Year,” accessed January 13, 2012, http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html. 29. The papers from this symposium were published later that year in the American Journal of Psychotherapy 2 (1948). 30. Judith Crist, “Horror in the Nursery,” Collier’s Magazine 121 (1948): 22– 23, 95–97; Fredric Wertham to Judith Crist, August 17, 1948, box 116, folder 6, Wertham Papers. 31. A staff correspondent for the Ladies’ Home Journal stated that the magazine had been “deluged with so many additional orders” for reprints of Wertham’s

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1953 preview of Seduction of the Innocent that production and distribution costs had become prohibitive (Holly W. Butler to Fredric Wertham, February 8, 1954, box 123, folder 7, Wertham Papers). 32. Wertham, Seduction , 20. 33. Ibid., 347. 34. Wertham discussed his professional orientation in the opening chapter of Seduction , but these ideas permeate his writing. For additional information on his approach to social psychiatry and mental hygiene, see Gabriel N. Mendes, “A Deeper Science: Richard Wright, Dr. Fredric Wertham, and the Fight for Mental Health Care in Harlem, NY, 1940–1960,” PhD diss., Brown University, 2010. 35. “Conference—Tuesday, March 25, 1947,” box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers. 36. Eric J. Engstrom, “‘On the Question of Degeneration’ by Emil Kraepelin (1908),” History of Psychiatry 18 (2007): 389–404. 37. Johannes Coenraad Pols, “Managing the Mind: The Culture of American Mental Hygiene, 1910–1950,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997, 14. 38. “Statistics—Lafargue Clinic.” 39. Ralph P. Truitt, “Community Child Guidance Clinics,” in The Child Guidance Clinic and the Community , ed. Ralph P. Truitt et al. (New York: Commonwealth Fund Division of Publications, 1928), 5–6. 40. “Statistics—Lafargue Clinic.” This report suggests that a total of 455 children under the age of sixteen were treated at the clinic during the ten-year period documented. An undated report, probably from 1950, based on an actual count of cases offers a different picture: the clinic treated 133 children under the age of fourteen, including 13 in 1950. Depression was diagnosed in more than one-third of these cases and organic brain disease in more than 10 percent of them. See “Children under 14—total cases—133 (13 of these in 1950),” box 52, folder 15, Wertham Papers. 41. Wertham, Seduction , 43; “Norma E. [Note from Dr. Mosse, 3/23/50],” box 109, folder 12, Wertham Papers. 42. Wertham, Seduction , 184. 43. “Comic Book Readers Club—Session No. 45—June 2, 1948,” box 121, folder 4, Wertham Papers. 44. The book Paul brought was Bag O. Nuts Presents Uncle Bim and Millie , which appropriated characters from the well-known Gumps comic strips. 45. “Comic Book Readers Club—Session No. 45.” 46. Ibid. 47. Box 111, folder 1, Wertham Papers. 48. “Case—1/18/XX,” box 111, folder 1, Wertham Papers. Although these records are publicly accessible, I have omitted patients’ surnames and provided only partial file dates—in instances of an individual’s records rather than group transcripts—in both the text and the citations to protect their and their families’ privacy. In cases involving sexual abuse, I have omitted all names. In Seduction , Wertham sometimes uses patients’ first names, but often patients are described only in terms of age, gender, and, occasionally, race. 49. Wertham, Seduction , 192, ellipses in original. 50. Ibid., 236. The story Wertham described is “Little Miss Wonder Woman,” from Wonder Woman #49 (September/October 1951).

411 51. “Dorothy P.—6/13/XX,” box 109, folder 12, Wertham Papers; Wertham, Seduction , 42–43. 52. Wertham, Seduction , 42. 53. “Dorothy P.—6/13/50,” box 109, folder 12, Wertham Papers. 54. “Richard B.—Age 11—#M3307,” box 110, folder 1, Wertham Papers; Wertham, Seduction , 87–88. 55. Wertham, Seduction , 87. 56. “Richard B.—Age 11.” 57. Ibid. 58. Wertham, Seduction , 106. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. “Edward P.—Age 71/2—#M2413—10/9/XX,” box 110, folder 1, Wertham Papers. 62. Wertham, Seduction , 41. 63. Ibid., 40; “Vivian J., Age 13—#M2884—2/5/XX,” box 109, folder 12, Wertham Papers. 64. Wertham, Seduction , 40. 65. “Vivian J., Age 13.” 66. “Carlisle C., Age 15, #A85135, 5/22/XX,” box 111, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 67. Wertham, Seduction , 178. 68. Ibid., 215. The actual quote is, “Kids immediately know that they can put them in the shoulder holster or they have straps and strap them on their legs” (“Carlisle C., Age 15, #A85135, 5/12/XX,” box 111, folder 3, Wertham Papers). 69. Wertham, Seduction , 157–58; “Carlisle C., Age 15, #A85135, 4/5/XX,” box 111, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 70. Wertham, Seduction , 171; “Carlisle C., Age 15, #A85135, 4/24/XX,” box 111, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 71. Wertham, Seduction , 20, 118. 72. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the United States , 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1954, 93. 73. “Statistics—Lafargue Clinic.” 74. Wertham, Seduction , 68. 75. A. Heise to Fredric Wertham, July 19, 1948, box 121, folder 2, Wertham Papers. 76. Ibid.; Wertham, Seduction , 68. Based on the numbering at the top of many of the transcripts, the group transcripts available in box 121, folders 2 and 4 of Wertham’s papers do not appear to represent the complete record of meetings. Of those included in these folders, approximately one-third of them contain discussions of comics. The club likely ended in 1952, as Wertham resigned his position at Queens effective August 1, 1952 (see Fredric Wertham to Queens General Hospital, June 30, 1952, box 35, folder 15, Wertham Papers). 77. Note (Mrs. Axelrod at Lafargue, December 1950), box 109, folder 12, Wertham Papers. 78. Wertham, Seduction , 39. 79. “Note—10/50,” box 110, folder 1, Wertham Papers.

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80. Wertham, Seduction , 169–71. Interestingly, this counselor was Hal Ellson, who went on to write juvenile delinquency stories such as Duke (Scribner, 1949) and Jailbait Street (Monarch, 1959). See Hal Ellson to Wertham, February 7, 1949, box 115, folder 10, Wertham Papers. 81. “Children under 14—total cases.” 82. Wertham, Seduction , 306. Note (source Legman), July 5, 1948, box 113, folder 1, Wertham Papers. For information on Gaines, see “Are You a Red Dupe?,” in Haunt of Fear #24 (July/August 1954), which was published by Bill Gaines and EC (Entertaining Comics). 83. Note (source Legman), n.d., box 113, folder 1, Wertham Papers. Although I have been unable to do a close comparison of extant drafts of Seduction , it may be that Wertham intended to rely on Legman’s ideas to an even greater degree. In a letter to Legman in which he recounted his experiences with Rinehart & Company’s attorneys, Wertham wrote, “Among other things they objected to quite a number of things that I had quoted from you, so all that had to go” (Fredric Wertham to Gershon Legman, August 20, 1954, box 3, folder 14, Wertham Papers). 84. Wertham, Seduction , 34. 85. Note, n.d., box 109, folder 12, Wertham Papers. 86. Wertham, Seduction , 261–62. 87. A handwritten note on the report indicates that the store was on the south side of 21st Street between Second and Third Avenues, presumably in Manhattan. “Report from Dr. Mosse,” box 112, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 88. Vernon Pope to Lauretta Bender, October 23, 1954, folder 6, Lauretta Bender Papers, Brooklyn College Library Archives and Special Collections. 89. “Background statement—Dr. Fredric Wertham” (n.d., but ca. 1954), box 171, folder “Witness Lists and Backgrounds,” Records of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 10E3/16/11/2, National Archives, Washington, DC. 90. Bertram Beck to Fredric Wertham, April 16, 1954, box 123, folder 7, Wertham Papers. 91. Fredric Wertham to J. Ralph Brown, December 29, 1954, box 125, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 92. Fredric Wertham to Helen C. Otis, April 4, 1954, box 125, folder 3, Wertham Papers. 93. Mendes, “A Deeper Science,” 61. 94. Ibid., 180. 95. New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comic Books, “Transcript of Proceedings 4 February 1955,” box 211, folder “Comics material—pamphlets, articles, books, etc.,” Records of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 10E3/16/11/2, National Archives, Washington, DC. 96. Publisher’s note in Wertham, Seduction , n.p. 97. Of particular use in understanding the nature of psychiatric evidence is Stefan Priebe and Mike Slade’s edited volume of essays, Evidence in Mental Health Care (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2002). 98. See Beaty, Fredric Wertham , for more about historical and contemporary concerns about Wertham’s methods, evidence, and conclusions. The last half of chapter 4 contains most of this discussion. As I continue to do work in

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