A brief history of the anti-comics movement and the birth of the Comics Code
In the quiet neighborhoods of Binghamton, New York, masses gather behind St. Patrick’s Parochial School around a roaring fire as parents and their children toss armfuls of comic books into the blaze amongst onlookers who watch with glee. It’s December 10, 1948, three years after World War II and comics are under attack. The rally in Binghamton would spark similar fires around the country as crusaders for children’s morality waged war against America’s newest medium.
By the end of World War II comic books had become a huge presence in American pop culture. Soldiers read comics, housewives read comics, and children of all ages read them as well. In 1946, Publishers Weekly reported an estimated 540 million comic books were printed that year. A few years later that figure had nearly doubled. Comic books were, without a doubt, big business, but this all encompassing presence had its downsides.
By 1948, scapegoating comics had become something of a national pastime for America. As early as 1906, protests about early comic strips had sprung up across the country. These crusades, however, ended abruptly in 1911 as the United States entered World War I.
Then in 1937, comic strips shifted focus from humor to action/adventure and the crusades began again. One study published in 1937 on comic strips appearing in Boston papers argued that children and adults who read comic strips regularly run the risk of lowering their artistic appreciation. As the decade came to a close, criticism shifted from comic strips to focus on the newest of mass mediums, comic books.
The first attack came from Sterling North, a literary critic for the Chicago Daily News, in an editorial on May 8, 1940 headlined “A National Disgrace.” Among other things in the editorial, North wrote that “The antidote to ‘comic’ magazine poison can be found in any library or good bookstore. The parent who does not acquire that antidote for his child is guilty of criminal negligence.”
More than 40 newspapers and magazines reprinted the editorial. And a wave of editorials denouncing comic books filled papers nationwide linking comic books to everything from straining eyes and nervous systems to lowering IQ.
Perhaps a most significant aspect of North’s criticism, was his identification of comic books as a form of juvenile literature. By categorizing comic books this way, North and other critics helped shape the public perception that comic books were strictly for children. This would enable legitimacy when future critics like John Mason Brown made the hyperbolic statements on a 1948 radio broadcast that comic books were “the marijuana of the nursery” and “a threat to the future.”
The National Office of Decent Literature (NODL) was established in 1938, shortly after the Legion of Decency pressured the film industry into enforcing a rating system. The NODL’s concerns were with “morality” and comic books’ presence within American pop culture. Nationwide community decency campaigns would take to the streets in teams armed with lists of objectionable comics and visit local newsstands, urging dealers to remove the “bad” comics.
A major factor in the success of these campaigns against comic books was the linkage of comic book reading to juvenile delinquency. And never was this link more burned into the American consciousness than when a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham began his critique of comic books. This critique would start with articles move to a book and continue onward all the way to a U.S. Congressional inquiry.
In 1946, Wertham helped open the Lafargue Clinic in the basement of St. Philip’s Church in Harlem, New York. It was here that Wertham, along with his associates, first began a systematic study of the effects of comic books on children. The flaw in his study was that the subjects were all patients from his clinic. This eventually caused him to conclude that all juvenile delinquents read comic books ergo, comic books were the cause of juvenile delinquency.
Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham was published in Spring of 1954 and, among its reprintings of single panels pulled out of context from various comic books and sensationalists chapter titles like “The Devil’s Allies” and “I Want to Be a Sex Maniac!”, the book went on to conclude that Superman was a fascist, Wonder Woman was a lesbian, Batman and Robin were gay lovers and that comics were the cause of juvenile delinquency.
The success of Seduction of the Innocent and Wertham’s credentials would lead him to appear before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, led by anti-crime crusader Estes Kefauver, in the comic book hearings of 1954 held in New York. It was here that Wertham would testify “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.”
All the negative press garnered by Seduction of the Innocent and the Senate hearings would eventually pressure the comic book publishers to institute the self-censoring organization known as The Comics Code Authority. Putting bans on what could be shown, said and/or discussed within the pages of comic books. Assuring that comics would be just for kids for the foreseeable future. As for the crusaders and critics concerned for the welfare of children, they moved on to the next juggernauts to take a hold of American pop culture; television, Rock and Roll, and, eventually, video games. Leaving the fires to burn out and comics to slowly outgrow and move beyond the Code that had been forced upon them.
References:
- Fredric Wertham and the critique of mass culture by Bart Beaty
- Seal of approval : the history of the comics code by Amy Kiste Nyberg
- Comic book nation : the transformation of youth culture in America by Bradford W. Wright
- Pulp demons : international dimensions of the postwar anti-comics campaign, edited by John A. Lent
- History of Comics Censorship, The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
- Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham
- The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum