The ten-cent plague : the great comic-book scare and how it changed America

Title:

Author:

Hajdu, David.

ISBN:

9780312428235

Personal Author:

Hajdu, David.

Publication Information:

New York : Picador, 2008.

Edition:

1st Picador ed.

Physical Description:

434 pages, [8] pages of plates : illustrations ; 21 cm

Abstract:

"In the years between World War II and the mid-1950s, the popular culture of today was invented in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content."--Cover, p.4.

Contents:

Society iss nix -- It was work -- Crime pays -- Youth in crisis -- Puddles of blood -- Then let us commit them -- Woofer and tweeter -- Love--LOVE--LOVE!! -- New trend -- Humor in a jugular vein -- Panic -- The triumph of Dr. Payn -- What are we afraid of? -- We've had it! -- Murphy's law -- Out of the frying pan and into the soup.

Subject Term:

Comic books, strips, etc. -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Comic books, strips, etc. -- Social aspects -- United States.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library	Book	PN6725 .H33 2008	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told -- until The Ten-Cent Plague . David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress--only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.

When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how -- years before music -- comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.

The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life ) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street ), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

After writing about the folk scene of the early 1960s in Positively 4th Street, Hajdu goes back a decade to examine the censorship debate over comic books, casting the controversy as a prelude to the cultural battle over rock music. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, the centerpiece of the movement, has been reduced in public memory to a joke-particularly the attack on Batman for its homoeroticism-but Hajdu brings a more nuanced telling of Wertham's background and shows how his arguments were preceded by others. Yet he comes down hard on the unsound research techniques and sweeping generalizations that led Wertham to conclude that nearly all comic books would inspire antisocial behavior in young readers. There are no real heroes here, only villains and victims; Hajdu turns to the writers and artists whose careers were ruined when censorship and other legal restrictions gutted the comics industry, and young kids who were coerced into participating in book burnings by overzealous parents and teachers. With such a meticulous setup, the history builds slowly but the main attraction-EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines's attempt to explain in a Senate committee hearing how an illustration of a man holding a severed head could be in "good taste"-holds all the dramatic power it has acquired as it's been told among fans over the past half-century. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The movies and rock 'n' roll have had brushes with censorship, but the comic-book industry was nearly wiped out in the 1950s by do-gooders concerned about their hypothesized detrimental effects on young readers. As Hajdu shows, comics were controversial right from their turn-of-the-century origins in newspapers, but the post-World War II development of lurid crime comic books depicting the exploits of violent gangsters aroused virulent opposition that intensified with the medium's next step gruesome horror titles. The latter became the target of newspaper crusades, the psychiatric establishment (led by Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 screed Seduction of the Innocent became a bestseller), congressional hearings, and censorship boards in more than 50 cities. The industry, a refuge for ethnic minorities and other outsiders who reveled in the freedoms gained by working under the radar of adult audiences, survived only through self-regulation in the form of a Comics Code that stripped comics of much vitality. As a telling coda, Hajdu appends a list of nearly 900 creators who, after the crackdown, never worked in comics again.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2008 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

A history of America's midcentury war against the comics industry. MY first hallucinatory experience had nothing to do with drugs, unless you consider comic books to be a form of drug. On a spring morning in 1953, I strolled into Mrs. Shelburne's sixthgrade classroom at the Mark Twain School and spotted a classmate covertly flipping through a Superman comic. Only it wasn't quite Superman. Not the Man of Steel I idolized, but a grinning thugimposter in red cape and blue tights, gutpunching a helpless geezer on crutches as his false teeth flew out and a mob of citizens cheered, and a babe far leggier and bustier than Lois Lane leered her approval. The monster's name bulged in thick red letters atop the panel: Superduperman. My goodguy stomach rolled. Everything stretched and went slantwise; a parallel universe yawed open, like jaws, and threatened to suck me inside. Then Mrs. Shelburne waddled into class; the kid stowed the comic; the jaws evaporated. Too soon, I realized dizzily. Wait! I wanted in! This shockbaptismal of my grade school self into the new houseofmirrors comic that was Mad (it was the magazine's fourth issue I'd glimpsed) reinforces several themes in David Hajdu's "TenCent Plague." It suggests how deeply the comics had implanted themselves in kidhood consciousness in only their second decade as a normative popcultural universe; how shocking and yet irresistible we found each new and more subversive permutation; and how recklessly indifferent to adult America's ever hardening hostility were the wild misfit artists who, even as I buckled under Superduperman's (and Lois's) seditious antics, were dancing into the flames of selfdestruction. Flames, quite literally. As in book burnings, comicbook burnings. My pals and I were mostly clueless that our dimes were supporting an industry that, virtually from its inception, had driven to hysteria the reallife defenders of the American Way. Comics were "furnishing a prefascist pattern for the youth of America," a critic fumed in 1941; another, as World War II drew toward a close, declared that in the derringdo of these socalled superheroes, the "vigilante spirit is rife; ... the Gestapo method is glorified." Fighting fascism on the homefront by building book bonfires is among the halfforgotten travesties of our yeasty paranoid style in America; an irony that beggars the tepid limits of those naughty Mad satirists. The meticulously researched evidence of how easily America can be gulled into trashing its defining ideals in the name of Americanism as if we needed any reminders are among the highlights of Hajdu's book. The comics' impact on American life is an inexhaustibly fascinating topic which is probably why it has nearly been exhausted as a topic. Hajdu, the author of the wellreceived "Positively 4th Street" is but partly successful at making it fresh again. As his subtitle suggests, Hajdu intends to establish the transformative impact of comics on society. This is a wellworn path, and one that his own evidence stubbornly proves to be headed in diametrically the wrong direction. It was society that again and again transformed the comics; it was society, represented by churches, reformers and the United States Congress, that sought to all but eradicate the comics from the cultural landscape. America's exploding youth population was hungry for a cultural referent of its own when comic books came along (in 1933, 1934 or 1937, depending on how one defines the form). It was the kids, not the surprised writers and illustrators, who decided the comics spoke to their repressed outlaw souls. (In 1948 alone, 80 million to 100 million comic books sold each month.) Moreover, as Hajdu's exhaustive reportage makes clear, "the comics" were repeatedly transformed by the shifting concerns (and anxieties) of their host nation. At the same time that censorious authorities labored to make their very name synonymous with deviancy and macabre trash, comic books proliferated in countless genres, from zany clowns and cute ghosts to biblical characters to the creepy CryptKeeper and the VaultKeeper, as their creators searched for responsive chords within the booming youth market. Even their dominant motifs shifted with the prevailing winds: from the primitive noirish panels of the '30s to the superheroesasantiAxis superpatriots of the war years, to the violent crimebusters of the late '40s, to the weepy romance heroines who replaced the outoffavor tough guys, to horror and sciencefiction monsters as America's postwar paranoia deepened, and then on to Mad and its imitators as a hipster subculture began to bubble up from the depths of the repressed '50s. Let us not even get started on Donald Duck. Hajdu clearly cherishes "the great comicbook scare." He reveres the blunt streetlevel expressiveness of the immigrants, the lowerclass urban Jews and the other societal fugitives who poured their raw passions into their new jazzlike idiom; and he likewise respects that idiom's neglected aspirations to high art. He illuminates such idealists as Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller, two aspiring novelists who thought of comics as "picture novels" a quartercentury before the concept became a vogue. "The attitude was, for an adult to read a comic book was a mark of ignorance," Drake tells him." But Les and I knew we were geniuses, so we thought we would simply change the world." The pioneering artist/publisher Will Eisner had used similar language in 1941. It was not to be. The forces of offended decency hovered over comic books virtually from their inception. A bluenosed literary journalist in Chicago, wonderfully named Sterling North, attacked the genre in May 1940, in his essay "A National Disgrace (And a Challenge to American Parents)." North condemned the "poisonous mushroom growth" of "color 'comic' magazines" over the previous two years. Not even the nebula of superheroes was exempt; in fact, Superman and his caped colleagues were nothing more than sadists and bullying vigilantes. World War II drained off much of the reformers' energy and attention. But at the dawn of the jittery 1950s just when comics sales were peaking at (according to one estimate) a billion copies a year the reformers remobilized and pounced. In 1954 a new prophet of doom, the selfpromoting psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published "Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth." Dovetailing with the antifascist/ protofascist wave of comicbook bonfires around the country, and with the spread of censorship boards and arrests of newsdealers in towns and cities, Wertham's intellectually shoddy book dwarfed "A National Disgrace" in its influence. "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comicbook industry," Wertham suavely remarked, even as his jingoism prompted urban police forces, churches and eventually Congress to join the chanting burners and cripple a flourishing industry, ruin the livelihoods of hundreds of artists and demonstrate (not for the last time) how fragile are the integuments of American democracy. A frustrating obstacle to full readerly engagement in "The TenCent Plague" is Hajdu's otherwise touching affection for the men and women who wrote and drew the comic books. He seeks to memorialize them all thousandodd of them, individually, it sometimes seems, by emptying his notebook of their names, soundbite quotations and thumbnail descriptions: their pencil mustaches, cigars, derby hats, pageboy cuts and pet monkeys. This is kind, but it clogs the narrative and diffuses the attention owed the giants like Eisner; Jerry Iger; M.C. Gaines and his son, Bill; and the illstarred cocreators of "Superman," Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who prematurely sold their copyright on the greatest comic character of them all. That said, "The TenCent Plague" is a worthy addition to the canon of comicbook literature: a super effort, if not a superduper one. Ron Powers is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Kirkus Review

What happened when Americans discovered what their children were reading between luridly colored covers. "The panic over comic books falls somewhere between the Red Scare and the frenzy over UFOs among the pathologies of postwar America," writes Hajdu (Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fari¿a, and Richard Fari¿a, 2001, etc.). The road that led from opportunistic moralists through a newly militarized and nationalistic society to paper bonfires was swiftly traveled during the 1950s, according to this sobering history. Hajdu begins by laying out the exponential growth of the comics industry in the early 20th century, covering some admittedly well-traveled territory with aplomb. A thick network of improbably talented and productive artists, writers and money men worked at dizzying speed, and outrage was nearly always snapping at their heels. Twice it seemed the industry was about to be submerged by a wave of indignation--pre-1917 moral watchdogs decried crude Sunday funnies for distracting the lower classes from the Sabbath; their 1930s counterparts critiqued Superman as a proto-Nazi authoritarian--but world wars intervened to divert people's attention. The 1950s, however, were a different story. Superheroes had been shoved to the side in a fickle marketplace by lurid crime and horror pulps. By the end of 1954, with McCarthy on the wane and no great national crisis to absorb a country accustomed to witch hunts, scolds quickly whipped up an outcry over comics, quoting so-called experts who linked them (with no evidence) to a perceived growth in juvenile delinquency. A wave of Senate hearings and outraged editorials led to an ugly coast-to-coast parade of comic-book burnings and the end of a popular art form. Half the comics on newsstands disappeared between 1954 and '56; five major publishers folded. An ugly and hysterical episode in American history, vividly rendered by a dogged student of the era. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

Tarnish still lingers on the graphic narrative from anticomics crusades peaking in the 1950s. Remembering the past will hopefully prevent a replay, and this detailed history by Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina) fills the bill admirably as a prompt. Several trends powered the crusades: a bright and talented but ignored out-class working in comics, a rising youth culture before television and rock music, a national Cold War witch-hunt mentality, and the prewar intelligentsia's desire to retain their cultural hegemony over all ages and ethnicities. Comics took serious critical heat as early as 1906, but it was the escalation of crime and horror comics in the 1940s and 1950s that became linked to "juvenile delinquency" (especially by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham) and led to legislation, book burnings, the Comics Code Authority, and the evisceration of the industry, with hundreds of people put out of work. Hajdu documents this painful, fascinating story and includes over 80 pages of notes and sources. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. See also Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign, edited by John Lent, for reverberations around the world, and Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/07.]--M.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Prologue Sawgrass Village, a tidy development about twenty-five miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, is named for the wild marsh greenery that its turf lawns displaced. It has 1,327 houses, each of them pale gray on the outside. On the inside, the one at 133 Lake Julia Drive is a dream shrine--a temple not to the past, like many other homes of retirees, but to a life imagined and denied. All the walls in its eight rooms, as well as the halls, are covered with framed paintings by Janice Valleau Winkleman, who moved there from Pittsburgh with her husband, Ed, in 1982, when he ended his four-decade career in sales (first, chemicals, then steel products). She had been painting almost every day for nearly thirty years. Having shown artistic talent at an early age, she had taken some formal training in fine art and illustration, and, at age nineteen, she began working professionally, drawing for Quality Comics in Manhattan. Then, one evening eleven years later, she came home from work and never went back. For more than fifty years after that, Winkleman made no mention of the fact that she had had artwork prominently published as Janice Valleau. Her daughter Ellen grew up reading comic books without knowing that her mother had once helped create them. In 2004, the Winklemans' living room held seventy-four paintings--vigorous watercolor seascapes with violent waves, rendered in heavy blues and blacks; an acrylic of two seagulls suspended in flight, positioned upright in a golden-brown sky and surrounded by other gulls darting about them in every direction; watercolor after watercolor of old sailing ships, moldering in dry dock; a few abstracts of angular shapes and patterns done in pastel; portraits of exotic, alluring young women, one of them topless, with her face either unfinished or painted over. The images--at once lovely and tortured, all skillfully done but madly varied--could occupy a graduate art student or a psychoanalyst for some time. At age eighty-one, Winkleman was a fragile woman, weakened by age and illness, though she still painted when she felt up to it, usually one or two days each week. "I like art--it's important to me," she said in a small but firm voice. Her eyes were bright behind grand, squarish glasses that covered most of her face. She sat straight-backed in a thin-cushioned metal chair that went with the desk in a half-room that also had her easel and taboret, a few boxes of art supplies, and a tea set. Her hands formed a teepee on her lap. She wore a pressed linen house dress and well-used tennis shoes, and she kept her legs crossed tightly with her calves angled back under the chair, as if to hide the shoes. Hanging in a frame on the wall to her right was the original pen-and-ink art to the first page of a Blackhawk comic-book story drawn by one of her old studio mates, Reed Crandall. In the days when they were working together, Winkleman had sneaked the page home in her portfolio, because she admired Crandall's dynamic compositions and sure line. "I wanted to be a magazine illustrator, but I loved comics, too," she said, pointing her teepee toward the Blackhawk page. "I would have been happy being in any kind of art at all." Why, then, had she stopped working professionally half a century earlier? The paintings all over her house show that Winkleman had the skill and the versatility to have done commercial illustration. She had the experience in comics and the affection for the medium to have continued in that field. With the imagination she applied to some of her canvases, she might even have pursued fine art professionally. Why not? "My God," she said. She separated her hands and slapped them on her lap, then slowly brought them back together. "I couldn't go back out there--I was scared to death. Don't you know what they did to us?" In the mid-1940s, when Janice Valleau was thriving as an artist for Quality Comics, the comic book was the most popular form of entertainment in America. Comics were selling between eighty million and a hundred million copies every week, with a typical issue passed along or traded to six to ten readers, thereby reaching more people than movies, television, radio, or magazines for adults. By 1952, more than twenty publishers were producing nearly 650 comics titles per month, employing well over a thousand artists, writers, editors, letterers, and others--among them women such as Valleau, as well as untold members of racial, ethnic, and social minorities who turned to comics because they thought of themselves or their ideas as unwelcome in more reputable spheres of publishing and entertainment. Created by outsiders of various sorts, comics gave voice to their makers' fantasies and discontent in the brash vernacular of cartoon drawings and word balloons, and they spoke with special cogency to young people who felt like outsiders in a world geared for and run by adults. In the forties, after all, the idea of youth culture as it would later be known--as a vast socioeconomic system comprising modes of behavior and styles of dress, music, and literature intended primarily to express independence from the status quo--had not yet formed; childhood and young adulthood were generally considered states of subadulthood, phases of training to enter the orthodoxy. Comic books were radical among the books of their day for being written, drawn, priced, and marketed primarily for and directly to kids, as well as for asserting a sensibility anathema to grown-ups. Most adults never paid much mind until the comics--and the kids reading them--began to change. During the early postwar years, comic books shifted in tone and content. Fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, many of the titles most prominent in the late forties and early fifties told lurid stories of crime, vice, lust, and horror, rather than noble tales of costumed heroes and heroines such as Superman, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, whose exploits had initially established the comics genre in the late thirties and early forties. These unprecedented dark comics sprouted from cracks in the back corners of the cultural terrain and grew wild. Unlike the movies and the broadcast media, comic books had no effective monitoring or regulatory mechanism--no powerful self-censoring body like the film industry's Hays Office, no government authority like the FCC imposing content standards. Uninhibited, shameless, frequently garish and crude, often shocking, and sometimes excessive, these crime, horror, and romance comics provided young people of the early postwar years with a means of defying and escaping the mainstream culture of the time, while providing the guardians of that culture an enormous, taunting, close-range target. The world of comics became a battleground in a war between two generations, delineating two eras in American pop-culture history. "Comic books are definitely harmful to impressionable people, and most young people are impressionable," said the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of an incendiary tract, Seduction of the Innocent, which indicted comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. "The time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores." Churches and community groups raged and organized campaigns against comic books. Young people acted out mock trials of comics characters. Schools held public burnings of comics, and students threw thousands of the books into the bonfires; at more than one conflagration, children marched around the flames reciting incantations denouncing comics. Headlines in newspapers and magazines around the country warned readers: "Depravity for Children--Ten Cents a Copy!" "Horror in the Nursery," "The Curse of the Comic Books." The offices of one of the most adventurous and scandalous publishers, EC Comics, were raided by the New York City police. More than a hundred acts of legislation were introduced on the state and municipal levels to ban or limit the sale of comics: Scores of titles were outlawed in New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and other states, and ordinances to regulate comics were passed in dozens of cities. Soon, Congress took action with a set of sensational, televised hearings that nearly destroyed the comic-book business. Like Janice Valleau, the majority of working comics artists, writers, and editors--more than eight hundred people--lost their jobs. A great many of them would never be published again. Through the near death of comic books and the end of many of their makers' creative lives, postwar popular culture was born. Page-one news as it occurred, the story of the comics controversy is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars and one that defies now-common notions about the evolution of twentieth-century popular culture, including the conception of the postwar sensibility--a raucous and cynical one, inured to violence and absorbed with sex, skeptical of authority, and frozen in young adulthood--as something spawned by rock and roll. The truth is more complex. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books. It is clear now that the hysteria over comic books was always about many things other than cartoons: about class and money and taste; about traditions and religions and biases rooted in time and place; about presidential politics; about the influence of a new medium called television; and about how art forms, as well as people, grow up. The comic-book war was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in America, and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight. Excerpted from Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu. Copyright (c) 2008 by David Hajdu. Published in March 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpted from The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.