Seduction of the Innocent

12. The Devil's Allies

The Struggle Against the Comic Book Industry

"Neutral men are the devil's allies."
- E.H. Chapin

Suppose a child comes to me with a gastro-intestinal disorder. I examine him carefully and come to the conclusion that the cause of the trouble is an impure well. I give some medication for the child and tell him not to drink that water any more. A little while later another child comes to me with the same condition, and after that still another. In each case my clinical judgment traces the trouble to the same well. What under such circumstances is the doctor's job? Should I wait until more and more children from this neighborhood come to me? Should I listen to those who say that after all there are children who have drunk water from this well and not got sick? Or to those who say it is good for children to get sick to the stomach occasionally, to "adjust them to reality"? Or should I listen to the owners of the well who claim first that children do not drink from their well, secondly that the well water is good for them and thirdly that interfering with the owners' right to use the well in any way they please is against their constitutional liberties?

I should certainly not be influenced by the child's opinion that he likes this well, nor by the assertions of those in the pay of the well-owners who claim that this particular well satisfies a "need" in children. It seems to me that my duty as a doctor is to make sure in the first place that these children have been drinking from this well. And then to be guided by an expert determination whether this well is sufficiently contaminated to have caused the trouble.

That is exactly what I did with comic books.

My conclusion as to the harmfulness of crime comic books got an ever larger foundation as my case material increased over the years. In the Lafargue Clinic, in the psychiatric service and the mental hygiene clinic of Queens General Hospital, in the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center, in practice and in consultation, some five hundred children a year came to my attention. In the clinics I built upon intimate relationship with the community so that I had frequent contact with practically every public and private agency in New York that deals with mental-hygiene problems of children and young people. My associates and I gained a survey of children of all classes and dealt both practically and scientifically with all factors known to influence children adversely, from physical to mental.

At the beginning of our comic-book studies, crime comic books were not recognized as a pathogenic factor. As we went along we had the advantage that we could study them in the setting of an all-inclusive mental-hygiene approach and in their interaction with all other psychological and environmental factors. Comic books transcend all class lines, all intelligence levels, all differences in home conditions. But there is no doubt that the long-range harm is greater and more insidious in all those children less well-endowed materially, intellectually, educationally and socially. The much-abused concept of the predisposed child is misleading in any such study. It is far more scientific to use the concept we worked out at Lafargue, of the endangered child.

I have testified six times under oath on the harmfulness of comic books. On only three of these occasions were comic books the original issue. On all six occasions comic books and/or photostats of comic-book pictures were received and filed as evidence by the court or the legislators. In all but one case (in which I testified in affidavit form), I was subject to searching cross-examination. In all six cases the issue was decided in accordance with my testimony, and for the side for which I testified. This sounds very optimistic, but that is not how it turned out in the long run.

At a Post Office hearing in Washington I had to give a psychiatric analysis of what constitutes obscenity. By way of comparison with nudity in art and photography, I introduced comic books which I called obscene. I pointed out that the picture of a nude girl per se may be the opposite of obscene, as compared to one of a girl in brassiere and panties about to be tied up, gagged, tortured, set on fire, sold as a slave, chained, whipped, choked, raped, thrown to wild animals or crocodiles, forced to her knees, strangled, torn apart and so on.

The people present evidently had not looked much at comic books, though they were bought by their children and on sale at stands within a stone's throw of the building. I suggested that as a test I would go out to any of these stands, and most of the comic books on sale would have episodes like those I had enumerated. From those I had with me, three were picked at random and marked and received in evidence.

The hearing was conducted with great fairness. Its result:

"In view of the testimony adduced at the hearing," the Post Office reversed its previous ruling according to which a magazine for adults had been barred from the mails.

It was on a similar problem that I testified about comic books next, but on this occasion I was not the one who introduced the subject. The first novel of a young writer, published by a respected firm, had been accused of being obscene according to the law. A quantity of copies of the book had been seized in a raid on the publishing house. I appeared as a witness for the defense at the trial and gave it as my opinion that the novel was not obscene and the ban should be lifted. While waiting to be called, I sat outside and analyzed the contents of comic books. When called to the stand, I thrust them hastily into my brief case.

In the course of the cross-examination the prosecuting counsel suddenly pointed his finger at my face and demanded:

"Let's get to another subject - with regard to comic books. You were the chairman of a meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine a short time ago, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"And in the course of your remarks you referred to the sexual content of comic books, Doctor?"
"Yes."
"And you condemned them thoroughly as having a demoralizing and injurious effect?"
"Yes."
"Now if one kind of book would have an effect, another book would?"
I reached into my brief case and pulled out one of the comic books and handed it, open to a typical sadistic illustration, to the judge. My cross-examiner objected to the introduction of a comic book as evidence. But, as the lawyers say, he himself had opened the door for it, by bringing up the subject. I used the opportunity to defend the character of the novel in comparison with comic books and made three points.

In the first place, the novel is for adults, while this type of comic book (according to my studies and as shown by the advertisements) is read mostly by children.

Secondly, the accused passages in the novel had to do with normal erotic relationships while comic books glorify such perversions as sadism, and all kinds of violence in relation to sex.

Thirdly, this novel belongs to the realm of literature and art and reaches a relatively small number of readers, while these comic books are mass produced and just trash.

The judge had been looking at the comic book, first with disbelief and then with dismay. "Who says these comic books are good?" he asked me.
"The defenders of the comic-book industry," was my answer. A few weeks later he handed down his decision, freeing the novel and dismissing the complaint against it.

Following a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy at which some of my associates and I presented scientific results of our study - the content analysis of comic books, the varieties of harm they do to children, case examples and the theoretical principles involved - the question of a remedy came more and more into the foreground. I have little patience with those who, when they hear of something wrong, immediately and without knowing the details ask, What should be done? First one should know. Pathology comes before therapeutics.

My writing and speaking had had at least one effect: parents began to look at comic books. I received letters and inquiries from all over the country. Many had the refrain expressed by one mother: "We who care about such things feel so helpless."

That crystallized for us a wider problem of comic books. It was no longer merely a question of what they do to children but what they were doing to the relationship between children and parents. Why in a democracy should parents feel "helpless?" Parents, I knew from many instances, had made all kinds of attempts to shield their children from comic books. Some had forbidden them. That did not prove to be a good method because it led children to the ubiquitous temptation to get or read them anyhow. Believe it or not, children do not like to lie. But we tempt them and almost force them to. That was very apparent from our studies.

In the beginning children were all too eager to tell us all about the crime comic books they had read. They were proud to tell us all they knew about the crocs (crocodiles) and crooks, the stranglers and the supermen, the machine guns and gun molls. But as knowledge and therefore condemnation of comic books spread, children knew more clearly what they had only unconsciously sensed before, that reading crime comic books was a half-forbidden pleasure. So they lied to their parents and became evasive with the many questioners who suddenly sprang up all over the country in the false belief that you can find out about a child by springing a lot of questions on him. Now, when questioned about comic books, children are apt to tell you how they read about floppety rabbits and Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck. But when their parents leave the room, or when you gain their confidence, they will take you wide-eyed into the "walls of horrors," "chambers of misery or ambushes for massacres.

Some parents went over their children's belongings and confiscated or destroyed hundreds of books at a time. That did not help either. Or they tried earnestly the advice handed out by numerous amateurish child experts: Why don't you read the comic books first and select the good ones? Many children read so many comic books that a housewife could get little else done if she tried that. Besides, who was going to tell her that if Batman were in the State Department he would be dismissed, and that Superman does not belong in the nursery? Can we put on mothers the burden of determining how many murders a child should have a week, or the job of evaluating in each new comic book the ethics of the jungle?

Not that there are no children who are influenced in the right direction by thoughtful parents with enough time to spend. The four-year-old son of one of my associates was taken to an infectious disease hospital with scarlet fever. There the nurses, to make him feel at home, gave him some comic books. But he earnestly refused them, explaining to the startled nurses that his father had said they are not good for children.

There was of course the possible remedy that the publishers would clear up the well. But I soon found that this was a naive belief. The very comic books that contained the ingredients that we found harmful were the most widely read. The publishers knew what they were doing and why. They had employed experts who justified the situation and fought off criticism.

So one day when I was in the country and saw how this locust plague had settled on a group of nice children whom I knew well, the idea came to me that the only honest and effective remedy would be a law or an ordinance against crime comic books.

I had been invited to speak about comic books at the 1948 Annual Congress of Correction of the American Prison Association in Boston, at a joint meeting of the National Conference of Juvenile Agencies and the National Probation and Parole Association. So I presented there an analysis of comic books and of clinical cases. I pointed out how harmful comic books were to the healthy development of normal children and how in some they produced anxiety and in others an obtuseness toward human feeling and suffering. Where one child commits a delinquent act, many are stimulated to undesirable and harmful thinking and fantasies. Some of the worst, I said, are marked "Approved Reading," "Wholesome Entertainment" and the like. The net effect of comic books, I stated, is anti-social: "Children who spend a lot of time and money on comic books have nothing to show for it afterwards. Many of them have gotten into trouble of one kind or another. The crimes they have read about in comic books are real; the people who supposedly triumph in the end are often very unreal superman types. How many more cases like the eleven-year-old comic-book addict who killed a forty-two-year-old woman in a holdup do we need before we act? The pure food and drug law, the ordinances against spitting in the subway and about clean drinking-cups protect bodies.

Surely the minds of children deserve as much protection. I do not advocate censorship, which is imposing the will of the few on the many, but just the opposite, a step to real democracy: the protection of the many against the few. That can only be done by law. Just as we have ordinances against the pollution of water, so now we need ordinances against the pollution of children's minds." I suggested a law that would forbid the display and sale of crime comic books to children under fifteen.

The response to my proposal was widespread. Dozens of towns and cities - eventually over a hundred-passed ordinances against the very comic books whose harmfulness I had indicated. In a number of states anti-comic-book laws were introduced in legislatures, but the comics conquered the committees, and the laws did not come off.

The most serious and efficient attempt to pass a county law was made in Los Angeles County in California. The County Counsel, Harold W. Kennedy, read about the proposal I had made in Boston about a law and framed one according to which the sale of comic books in which crime and violence were prominently featured could not be sold to anyone under eighteen. The Board of Supervisors passed this law. Then it was of course contested by the comic-book industry. Mr. Kennedy asked me to give detailed testimony for use in the courts, which I did in the form of a lengthy affidavit.

In it I described the clinical results of studies showing how crime comic books have had a bad effect on the mind and personality development of children - including normal children.

I gave detailed examples of cases and of comic books, and described the absence of regulation in the sale of crime comics to children as a state of anarchy which could be remedied only by a law. My affidavit was accompanied by twenty-nine exhibits, photographs and photostats of comic books sold to children.

The law won a great deal of acclaim in and beyond Los Angeles County. One large chain drugstore which sold many comic books, on the day after the ordinance was adopted, and with full knowledge that it would not be effective for thirty days, voluntarily removed from its shelves all the comic books in question.

Mr. Kennedy was no novice in devising such a law. In twenty-two years he had personally participated in the framing of no less than 389 bills that have become part of the statutory laws of California. It seemed to me significant that the 389th law was the Air Pollution Control or Anti-Smog Act, a good preparation for working on a comic-book law. "After all," he stated, "we don't feel that it is the true sense of the law that these publishers have the right to pollute the minds of young people under the guise of funny books and adventures and crime stories."

The subsequent legal history of this law was most involved, with the real issue of its clinical justification not taken up at all. The newspapers reported briefly that the law had been declared unconstitutional. The spokesmen for the comic-book industry have repeated this so often that many people, including lawyers and legislators, really believe that such a law was declared unconstitutional in California and would be unconstitutional anywhere else. But that is not how it was.

The comic-book interests (from New York) challenged the law through local attorneys as violating the freedom of the press. It was first a civil suit. In that phase the Appellate Department of the Superior Court, sitting as a trial court, denied a preliminary injunction sought by the distributors. The reason for the request of the injunction was the constitutionality of the law, so this court in denying the injunction did not consider the law unconstitutional. Then through two arrests for violation of the county ordinance, the stage was shifted to a criminal court. The two defendants were represented by the same firm which brought the civil suit. They were guided by the New York lawyers and needed their approval for every step. The question of whether crime comic books were bad for children was never allowed to come up. The final ruling of the Appellate Department of the Superior Court, consisting of three judges, was against the ordinance. But the reasons for their decision are interesting:

Analyzed, what does this mean? On each of the two questions, namely whether the law was too vague and whether it was against the freedom of the press, the judges had given a favorable vote of 2 to 1 for the law. Yet the case as a whole was lost and the law could not stand. More important still, the appeal on behalf of the people to the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington which Mr. Kennedy had planned was prevented by a further technicality: Since no two judges thought that the ordinance violated any guarantee under the federal constitution, no such appeal could be made!

To somebody not versed in the law all this seems absurd. The publishers of course were jubilant. They had worked hard to get such a result. They won. The children lost.

Despite the fact of these adverse court decisions and despite the fact that twenty-seven comic-book bills all over the country were killed in committee, the public - or rather, mothers - continued sporadic protests. The comic-book industry answered with a magic word, a "code."

About a month after my views were summarized in a national magazine a new code was announced. Let us decode these codes. They are not spontaneous expressions of self-improvement or self-regulation. They are determined efforts at defense. They do not stand alone, but are part of an avalanche of arguments thrust successfully at the public by the comic-book industry. The arguments go like this. First, any specific criticism of comic books is "not true." If proved true, it is only an exception, it slipped in and the man who drew the picture "has just been fired." Moreover, comic books are for adults, and besides they are very good for children. And then there is a code. If it is shown that the code is not adhered to, it is because they have not had time to put the code into practice; that will take an other "three months." If after these three months the criticism is repeated, there will be announced a new code which is even better.

Comic books may be a little subject, but they have given me an insight into one of the more terrifying aspects of our social and political life. I have learned from studying what happens with them how easy it is to propagandize a whole nation against its most treasured interests, its children. Editorial writers all over the country accepted the codes at their face value! Everybody thought something had been achieved.

What do the codes all add up to? The one announced in direct response to my criticism said that sexiness, "glorification of crime," "sadistic torture" and "race ridicule" would henceforth be left out. In other words, this is no longer just what I say. This is what the industry itself concedes. Why has all this gone on for over ten years? They indicted themselves by saying that now they would stop.

Here again the cynicism of the publishers breaks through. When I pointed out that a comic book had on its inside cover a code according to which blood was not to be shown anymore, and yet one page later shows a close-up with blood streaming from a man's face, the publisher announced that he had not had time yet to put the code into practice. Suppose a candy factory sells lollypops and one batch of lollypops is bad. A respectable firm would immediately recall all those lollypops that had been distributed. And the lollypop factory would not get away with getting out a code saying, "No poisonous lollypops will be sold by this firm in the future," - meanwhile letting the children vomit over the bad ones "until the code is in operation." (Incidentally, I have seen children vomit over comic books.) I looked for the following number of this comic book, after the one that had the code on the inside cover. Did they leave out the blood? No, that was shown again in four consecutive pictures. They left out the code.

But what about the "good" comic books? Whenever the industry is challenged by parents, teachers or mothers' clubs, it forgets all about the "good" comic books and relies on legal technicalities to ward off any attempt to regulate or force it into self-regulation. That happened in Chicago, in Detroit, in Los Angeles County and in New York. But "good" comic books are important because in some naive way many parents think that the "good" comic books are the answer to any problem that presents itself. So critics of the industry should look into the question of what they are, and how many there are of them, even though this is a question the industry itself always shuns.

Among the "good" comic books whose quantity counts at all are usually reckoned the animal comics, the Disney comics and their imitators, classical books in comic-book form, comic books that are reprints of newspaper comic strips, some teen-age girl comics and some boys' sport comics. The mainstay of the "good" comic books are the animal comics and a few of the relatively innocuous related comics.

It is estimated that at the present time (1954) the number of comic books fluctuates around 90 million a month. There are estimates which are lower; there are others of 100 million a month and more. According to The Wall Street Journal (1953) there were 840,000,000 units a year, 20 per cent more than four years earlier.

Precise figures, which of course would have to be based on records of printing orders, are not available. One has to estimate carefully from all available data the numbers printed, published, distributed and actually read. One has to take into account that crime comic books are traded so often and for so many years and are handed around to so many people and read so repeatedly. One must consider also that some crime comics have larger editions of each title than the "good" ones, and have more issues per year. On this basis I have concluded that the animal and related comics containing no harmful ingredients amount at the most to no more than between one and two tenths of the whole. That is what all the fuss about "good" comics boils down to.

The much-vaunted animal comics are read only by the very young, and are bought mostly by parents. They are showpieces prominently displayed where parents or teachers are apt to be shopping or passing by. They are the only one occasionally read aloud by parents. If a child tries to trade rabbit stuff with other children, he is jeered at because the only comics traded are killer ones.

Frequently the "good" comics have bad features, too. They sometimes show cruelty. Ducks shoot atomic rays and threaten to kill rabbits: "I'll kill the parents, I'm a hard guy and my heart is made of stone." They have advertisements for "throwing knives," for pistols shooting steel darts and of course for crime comics. The "good" comics are the pacemakers for the bad ones.

When one looks at these "good" comic books two things strike one: The ingredients of crime comics, the violence and sadism, break through in some "good" ones, too, no doubt through the processes of contagion and competition; and one becomes aware how blunted the tastes of the public have be come with regard to what is proper children's reading.

Henry, a boy of six, had frightened a little girl when he tried to scratch her leg under her dress with a piece of glass. His mother, a very intelligent woman, felt the ordinary comic books were not good for children and selected only the harmless animal ones for him. During playroom therapy the boy showed another boy one of his comic books. It was an animal one, but he grew very excited when describing the exploits in it: A little boy with his companions were fighting all kinds of animals. He had a little spear with which he poked one animal in the nose and another in the mouth. Into the face of still another he thrust a flaming torch. But the real high point was our old friend, the injury-to-the-eye motif: one character in the story directs a sharp-pointed spear at an animal's eye with the words:
". . . I'll put your eye out!"

Children have shown me a comic book which mothers must think is "good." It is produced by one of the biggest comic-book publishers, is given away free by a famous-brand food manufacturer and has the name of Hopalong Cassidy on it. It shows an insane" barber running loose with a sharp razor. He ties an old man to the barber's chair, brandishing a razor.

The old man: "He's stropping the razor! And he's got that mad look on his face! He'll cut my throat! GULP!"

A close-up follows with the face of the old man bound to the chair, the face of the barber, the knife and the neck. The same scene is shown a second time, and a third. Then comes Hoppy, twists the barber's arm backward and knocks him out so he sees stars: "WHAM!"

I have talked to children about this book. They do not say this book is about the West, or about Hopalong Cassidy, or about a barber. They say it is about killing and socking people and twisting their arms and cutting their throats.

Take one that looks even more harmless, Howdy Doody. I discussed this with a group of white and colored children. Their reaction was partly giggling, partly inhibited. The book depicts colored natives as stereotyped caricatures, violent, cowardly, cannibalistic and so superstitious that they get scared by seltzer tablets and popping corn and lie down in abject surrender on their faces before two little white boys.

The same theme of race ridicule is played up in the good animal comic book Bugs Bunny. Colored people are described as "superstitious natives" and you see them running away. The injury-to-the-eye motif is added, Bugs Bunny being shown throwing little diamonds into the eyes of the colored people. They are "big enough to blind a feller!" says Bunny. "Awk! I can't see!" says one victim. Is that not the same crime-comic-book ingredient adapted to the youngest set?

"Very young children," says the child psychiatrist Dr. David Levy, "have no prejudice. Their later antagonistic reactions to those who are different are regarded as the result of parental or group indoctrination." Has there ever been a greater and earlier and more insidious indoctrination with race hatred than American children are exposed to in comic books, "good" or bad?

Among other "good" comic books are those that teach history. Typical is one called Your United States. It devotes one page to each state and, although on bad paper and as smudgily printed as the others, it really contains some instructive information. But practically every state, although it gets only one page, has a scene of violence; if one doesn't, that is made up for in other states where there are two or three such scenes. For instance, a man hanged from a tree by a "vigilance committee"; Negroes in chains; corpses and dying men; a girl tied to a tree, her bound wrists above her head, her skirt blowing up in the wind and a coy facial expression of fright as in a sadist's dream; a girl about to be raped or massacred. Is that what you want your children to think is the history of "Your United States"?

Here is another comic book dealing with history and education, especially sent to me as a shining example. It has a feature about the Olympic games: "The Olympic games were the greatest sporting event of the ancient world. But any ladies caught watching them were thrown over a cliff." Here I have gone all these years without knowing that! And lest the child miss the point, an illustration shows it: A well-developed girl with the same coy expression of alarm runs along a steep cliff hotly pursued by a he-man in a helmet. Another item for the child's information is that there was "fixing" in the Olympic games. One could call this the contemporary approach to ancient history.

Inaccuracies in historical comics are common. People are hanged during the French Revolution (when the gallows had been abolished), the trial of Edward Floyde, important in the fight of the Crown against Parliament, is falsified; the end of the Boer War is wrongly presented, while the story has such choice bits as "You dirty British swine!"

A good summary of comic books in which "history emerges from balloons" was given by May Lamberton Becker in the Herald Tribune: "I can't say I think much of any of them. If you try to meet Superman on his own ground, you will be beaten unless you jazz up history until it isn't history at all."

There are publicity comic books to influence adults. Sylvia F. Porter, the financial columnist, writes about a comic book got out by the American Bankers Association: "The aim is not just to amuse you. Not by a long shot. It is to mold your thinking in a specific way." If that is true of good comic books for bankers, isn't it true, too, of bad comic books for children? They mold a child's thinking in a specific way.

Political comic books are the exact opposite of crime comics. In The Story of Harry S. Truman, for example, characters who might well be featured in a crime comic book are suppressed. Boss Pendergast is not mentioned. And instead of him, there is at the beginning of the Truman saga this domestic scene: Young Truman coming home and saying to his wife, "Bess, the boys at the Legion meeting were talking about having me run for county judge."

Those who attempt to use comic books for educational purposes forget that crime comic books have set up in children associations which counteract their efforts. An educational comic book for teen-agers on juvenile drug addiction cannot do any good to adolescents who have been stimulated by other comics about a girl's dreams "of murder and morphine."

I have never seen any good effects from comic books that condense classics. Classic books are a child's companion, often for life. Comic-book versions deprive the child of these companions. They do active harm by blocking one of the child's avenues to the finer things of life. There is a comic book which has on its cover two struggling men, one manacled with chains locked around hands and feet, the other with upraised fist and a reddened, bloody bandage around his head; onlookers: a man with a heavy iron mallet on one side and a man with a rifle and a bayonet on the other. The first eight pictures of this comic book show an evil-looking man with a big knife held like a dagger threatening a child who says: "Oh, don't cut my throat, sir!" Am I correct in classifying this as a crime comic? Or should I accept it as what it pretends to be - Dickens' Great Expectations?

Elizabeth V. Brattig, a high school teacher, asked children as a class assignment to read the comic-book versions of classics and then compare them with the original book. In the case of George Eliot's Silas Marner the children laughed "at the droll discrepancies in the story and the incongruities in the illustrations": "Silas is represented as senile and hoary, somewhat like the Ancient Mariner throughout"; "the flavor of George Eliot, the warm human touches, the scenes of matchless humor, had been completely ignored by the Classic Comics."

The idea that by giving children something good to read, crime comics can be combatted, purified or eliminated has proved naive wherever it was tried. It does not take into account the mass character of the seduction, which is precisely why crime comic books are an entirely new phenomenon not equalled before at any time nor place. You cannot clean up the muddy water in a stream by planning a clear brook that flows in the opposite direction.

I had an opportunity to watch an experiment showing the hold of the crime-comic-bodk industry on the market and on public opinion. One day Wally, a five-year-old boy, went home to his parents in Mamaroneck with a comic book filled with half-dressed jungle queens and all kinds of sadistic exploits and cruelties. His parents, like millions of other parents, had thought he had been reading Donald Duck and other such animal comics. That experience gave Mr. Henry H. Stansbury the idea of combatting bad comic books with really good ones.

With eleven other fathers - having altogether forty-nine children - who had had similar experiences, he started a small publishing venture. There was to be a series of good comic books. The first, which has been called the only good comic book in existence, was the beautiful story of The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen. It is illustrated by the well-known water colorist Dong Kinuman and printed in beautiful colors. The paper is of much better quality than the usual comic book and the printing is good and clear. Although it cost ten cents The Nightingale was not a regular comic book because the dialogue was not in balloons. And it did not conform to the comic-book formula according to which a story is so abundantly illustrated that the action can be followed almost without reading any of the words.

With this series Mr. Stansbury hoped to deal a blow to the onslaught of crime comics. But how to bring this about by getting the project before the public? A national magazine, the Woman's Home Companion, was enthusiastic about it. They had already prepared a layout for an article dealing with this new comic-book series. But at the last moment Mr. Stansbury was told by the "child care expert" of the magazine, herself a senior staff member of the Child Study Association of America, that he must first "submit" the comic books to the Consultant of Children's Reading of the Child Study Association of America, who (according to the Kefauver Committee) is in the employ of the comic-book industry. Mr. Stansbury pleaded with the editors who had liked his plan and The Nightingale so much. He asked why he must go to "somebody whose name appears on some of the most objectionable comic books." But that is what had to be done before they would print his article. He refused, and the Woman's Home Companion never printed a word about the project. That is how things are sewed up in the comic-book field. The industry won again, and the children lost. I know many other similar examples. They show how unrealistic it is to think that the flood tide of crime comics can be stemmed by trying to launch good comics. The public, of course, does not know about these connections.

The whole question of "good" comic books can be summed up in this way: Crime comic books are poisonous plants. The "good" comic books are at best weeds.

Some "bad" comic books are universally acknowledged to be bad. These are the frankly pornographic little booklets which made their first appearance during the depression and have flourished ever since. In relation to real comic books their number is of course small. They are all caricatures of newspaper comic strips. For example, there are Burma, Flash Gordon, Blondie, Uncle Bim and Millie, Major Hoople, Popeye, etc.

Whereas in regular comic books the publishers remain in semianonymity, in pornographic ones the anonymity is complete. I have had a number of these books brought to me by adolescents, juvenile-aid officers and others who have to do with children. They are sold widely in schools and the authorities seem to pay little attention to them. One fifteen-year-old boy explained to me:

"I got this from a friend. They usually cost anywhere from a dime to half a dollar. The small kids pay more. They have never seen anything like it; they think it's great stuff! Guys in school sell them. You have to ask for a 'hot book.' There is a big traffic in it if you have time to peddle them. There are thousands of these books around. These guys sell them to certain kids and these are the kids that peddle them around. Girls buy them, too. I have shown them to a girl."

Apparently it is generally believed, and educators have told me so, that these pornographic comic books deal with sex while ordinary comic books do not. This is a greatly mistaken opinion. Both types of books are sexy. The difference is in the kind of perversions. This division is complete. The pornographic ones contain no violence. Children's crime comics abound in the perversions of sadism, masochism, flagellation, fetichism, and pedophilia. The little pornographic books have orogenitalism (mouth erotism), intercourse in unusual kinds of positions, including triolism (sex practices between three people), and anal erotism. Whereas in ordinary comic books virility is indicated in the advertisements and in inflated masculinity of supermen in tight uniforms, in the pornographic comic books the oversized erect penis is featured; whereas in the ordinary children's comic books the would-be raper grabs the half-nude girl violently and says: "You have your choice - come as my prisoner or I'll choke the life out of you!", in the little pornographic comics everything is done voluntarily.

It is strange that educators and child psychologists regard the first set of perversions as manifestly harmless in helping the child to get rid of his supposed aggressions, while the second set is not so condoned. Actually, my studies have shown that the first set of perversions are more injurious to fantasy-life and mental health in the long run. Violence is not a normal substitute for sex, but a morbid one. Moreover, when unscrupulous adults seduce and use children for sexual and criminal activities, they do not use these little pornographic comics, but shower the child with the ordinary crime comic books. In this way children have been softened up by adults for the numbers game, the protection racket, drug addiction, child prostitution (female and male); and girls have been softened up for crimes where they serve as decoys. A special way in which children are being used nowadays by adults is as "watchers." Adults who have sexual relations in a park engage children as young as seven to watch for policemen.

Many years ago, when the British House of Lords debated a law to abolish capital punishment for the theft of five shillings, the Lord Chief Justice remonstrated: "My Lords, if we suffer this Bill to pass we shall not know where we stand; we shall not know whether we are upon our heads or our feet. No man can trust himself an hour out of doors. . . ." This is the kind of opposition I encountered when I asked for a crime-comics law. I have been astonished by this aversion to law. Does not our whole social life exist and progress in the framework of laws? Yet again and again I have been told that legislation is the last thing I should think of in my efforts to protect children against crime comic books. For instance, the legal counsel of the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers declared: "The problem is not solved by a quick easy panacea like legislation." Is that what lawyers want us to think, that legislation is "quick," that it is "easy," that it is a "panacea"?

Other totally different groups seem to think along the same line. I was invited to speak at an annual conference of the American Civil Liberties Union. I outlined there my clinical objections to crime comic books, described the present comic-book situation as an irresponsible anarchy and suggested legislation as a social remedy. A law that would forbid the display and sale of comic books to children under fifteen, I explained, would preserve the civil liberties of adults to buy the goriest crime comic books for their children if they wanted to. The official summary of the meeting was as follows: "The discussion of comic books brought out strong support for curbs upon the type of material directed toward adolescent minds unable to determine good from bad. The sense of the group was to oppose censorship by legislation, but to support pressure on the industry to establish standards prohibiting publication of objectionable material." But how does one bring pressure on a hundred-million-dollar business without a law? And how can children bring pressure? As I listened to all these serious-faced reformers objecting to the only effective curb of crime comic books, I thought of David Low's cartoon: "Gad, sir, reforms are all right as long as they don't change anything!"

Since the lawyers seemed so opposed to new laws, I studied the various laws that existed already pertaining in any way to comic books. And that led me to what seemed to me a startling discovery: As it stands, the law is heavily weighted against children, and in favor of adults, including of course the comic-book industry. This may appear unlikely, but is easily proved. I include in this statement existing laws that apply directly to this subject and others that apply more indirectly or whose application is more controversial, the whole judicial process with its appeals and lack of appeals, the administration of the law and even the penological aspects. Of the fact itself there can be no doubt. The law as it applies, or might apply, to crime comic books leaves the child unprotected, while it punctiliously safeguards the material interests of the adult.

Although in many children's lives comic books play a role, no adult court, no children's court, has ever made or ordered a full inquiry in a child's case. But when the publishers of the comic book Eerie sued the publisher of the comic book Eerie Adventures for using the word eerie on the cover, the New York Supreme Court gave a learned and comprehensive opinion bristling with details and citations. Justice Frank arrived at the truly Solomonic verdict that both publishers could use the word; but that the second publisher must print it "reduced in size." If the psychological effects of children would receive the same meticulous concern as the financial interests of publishers, some court would have long since ordered that what has to be "reduced" is not the eerie title but the eerie contents!

It would be senseless to blame an individual or a court. Law, as Justice Benjamin Cardozo said, accepts as the pattern of its justice the morality of the community whose conduct it assumes to regulate. The defect of the law and of the community is shown up by its complete unpreparedness to deal with something entirely new like crime comic books. Through their unprecedented quantities, which dwarf all other present or past publishing figures, and through their literally endless repetition of the sex-crime-superman-horror formula, crime comic books are something entirely new. That is why they could grow to such an octopus before they were scientifically challenged. The law was as unprepared as the parents and the child psychiatrists.

The many attempts all over the country to curb crime comics show that the community by sound instinct has at the very least grave doubts about them. What are the laws that give this commodity legal sanction and permit it to get away with so much?

The example of the copyright laws is very instructive. They exist to safeguard the property rights of those who produce works that might be pirated without authorization. It surely is equitable that such rights be protected. But this law as it is being used in the case of comic books works entirely against the interests of children.

I began to realize that there is an important principle at work here. A good law, when applied to something new or to a new set of circumstances, can lend itself to grave abuse. The greatest prop of the crime-comic-book industry was the silence with which it took over the children's market. When it was already established, and writers began to wish to inform the public of what was going on, the publishers forbade reproduction of drawings from comic books. That of course made it almost impossible to inform the public. Quite a number of national magazines wanted to print such illustrations, but were refused permission. This was the more misleading because the publishers' full-page advertisements in magazines contained special drawings of a very different kind, totally misleading as to what crime comic books are like.

The best example of the extent to which this abuse of the copyright law goes is presented by the Journal of the American Judicature Society, a learned journal read by judges, lawyers and legal scholars. This journal made comic books a topic of its discussions. It would have liked to secure an illustration or two, "but could not get any publisher to consent." It is obvious that no financial loss whatsoever was involved. The copyright law was used just to prevent a professional public from seeing what these books really contain.

Although comic books are not really magazines, and although even their defenders admit that many are objectionable, they enjoy second-class mailing privileges with the Post Office. This is under a law which applies to circumstances almost a hundred years ago (1879). Do not those who administer the law or the legislators who are supposed to bring laws up to date realize that they bestow a premium, a privilege, on those who mail objectionable material and that they make the taxpayers pay for the corruption of their own children? There are high officials in the Post Office Department in Washington who are fully aware that many comic books are harmful and who "have long deplored the fact that many of these publications enjoy the second class privilege under which they are transported in the mails at a considerable loss to the postal service.

The comic-book industry uses the second-class mailing privilege also as an alleged proof of the worth of its product. The general manager of one of the largest publishers has stated that since he has to submit every comic book in order to gain second-class mailing privileges for it, that shows that they are all right "so far as morals are concerned."

The Post Office also has laws against fraud. For example, they can interfere with a publisher who has misleading advertisements. But here, too, the comic-book industry seems to be immune. The Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906 seems to me to apply to the medicine advertisements in comic books for children. They have been severely criticized by a local department of health. But no health law has interfered with them and they get bolder all the time.

There are laws to control the sale and carrying of dangerous weapons such as guns and knives. One would expect that such laws would protect children. Just the opposite is the case. Children caught with guns - converted toy guns - or switchblade knives face the severest penalty, however young they may be. "Any boy," a judge said recently, "who comes before me for having a gun will be treated as a gangster. . . . When we come face to face with gangsters this court will give no consideration." But in millions of advertisements the possession and use of guns and switchblade knives is made as attractive as possible and the youngest child can buy them from these advertisers by mail. Is this not an instance where the law punishes the victim who falls for these advertisements while the instigator who advertises and sells them goes scot free?

A special case consists in the laws about B.B. air rifles. The penal law of New York makes it a punishable offense to offer and sell these "to any child under the age of 16 years." It also makes a child of sixteen and under "guilty of juvenile delinquency" if he merely possesses such a gun. Actually, official agencies have repeatedly warned against these weapons, because they have "resulted in many accidents causing loss of sight or serious eye injuries." But in this respect also the superman purveyors of Superman and the other crime-comic-book publishers and the experts endorsing them are immune, although these comics bristle with the most glamorous ads for these forbidden weapons.

Not long ago I saw a thirteen-year-old boy who was arrested for shooting an air gun from a window. In psychiatric examinations and psychological tests no abnormalities were found. This boy was under the Children's Court, and I have seen a number of similar boys who have been sent to reformatories for long stretches. In this case there was the usual description of the arrest in the form of a petition to the court: "N.N., detective, alleges that Joseph Smith, aged 13, is a delinquent child for the reason that he violated a law of the State of New York in that he was in possession of a dangerous weapon, to wit an air pistol, in good firing order, together with six darts and a quantity of lead pellets which may be fired from said air pistol."

In such cases I am often tempted to make a petition of my own: "F.W., psychiatrist, alleges that the publisher of the N.N. comic book and the experts endorsing the said comic book are delinquent adults for the reason that in concert with one another they violated a law of common decency in that they published and lent their names to a publication for children which advertises dangerous weapons, to wit air pistols, in good firing order together with steel darts and lead pellets which may be fired from said air gun and may get the innocent child who falls for these advertisements into terrible trouble with the Children's Court."

The Federal Government has laws restricting interstate commerce under certain circumstances injurious to the people. Could not such laws be made to include the shipment of objectionable comic books? Assistant District Attorney John E. Cone, who has investigated teen-age gangs, has stated as a result of his findings that crime comic books should be "done away with because not only do they list advertisements through which guns can easily be purchased by juveniles, but they give a synthetic thrill which kids cannot fulfill in real life without actually committing crime." The suggestion for Federal legislation to bar interstate advertisements and sale of knives and toy weapons that can be converted was made by Domestic Relations Justice Louis Lorence. Hundreds and hundreds of such illegal weapons have been confiscated by the police in New York. "For a number of years," Judge Lorence stated, "all over the city boys have approached other students in schools and have demanded money for protection. If money is not given, beatings often ensue. In the past two months, particularly, there were many cases in my court where parents complained of this protection racket." I myself have seen more than twenty-five children who have either been victims of such threats or have played the racket game themselves, usually with switch blade knives. Although switchblade knives serve no purpose except quick violence, they are still advertised in comic books for the youngest children.

There are laws according to which it is a punishable offense to "contribute to the delinquency of a minor." Yet the text, pictures and advertisements in crime comic books do that constantly. A 1936 amendment to the New York City Domestic Relations Court Act says: "Such court shall also have jurisdiction, whenever the issues involving a delinquent child are before the court, summarily to try, hear and determine any charge or offense less than the grade of a felony against any person alleged to have contributed to such child's delinquency and may impose the punishment provided by law for such offense."

The New York State constitution confers on the Domestic Relations Court jurisdiction "for the punishment and correction of adults responsible for contributing to such delinquency . . . such courts may hear and determine such cases with or without a jury, except those involving a felony."

Similar laws against contributing to the delinquency of a minor exist in other states. But although children have so often been softened up for juvenile delinquency and although there are cases where it can be demonstrated that the delinquent child bought his first switchblade knife through comic-book advertisements, and learned from comic-book text how to use it, no district attorney, no judge, no complainant, has ever had the courage to make a complaint against a comic-book publisher. Thus comic books make cowards of us all.

There are also the "attractive nuisance" laws which have been on the books since 1873 and which have been upheld by the United States Supreme Court. If you have an attractive pool to which a child has access from the street, you can be held responsible if a child drowns in it. They may not apply directly to comic books, but they provide an interesting analogy. Parents of children who get into trouble from too much crime-comic-book reading and with .22-calibre guns or switchblade knives purchased through comic-book advertisements could at least try to hold the publishers responsible.

Trial by jury and legal counsel are a right of adults. Children are being sent away to reformatories undefended and sometimes without even having their guilt properly established. I know of cases of children sent to reformatories when I was convinced that they were not guilty. In some cases familiar to me the police, needing a solution, have obtained confessions from innocent children by tricky and unfair methods. They include serious crimes, even homicide. In the procedure in the Children's Court we find again the principle that good laws and procedures may turn into their opposites. Children's courts were a great step forward; but nowadays they have to deal with such serious delinquencies that it would be more in the interests of children if the procedure were less informal-and a little less routine. The safeguards for children in court have turned into a danger for them. The secrecy in children's courts, in it self commendable, has prevented the public from knowing what it should know. It also was a progressive step that children were not fingerprinted. But this law has also to some extent turned against the interests of children. At the very time when murders and violent crimes by young children have be come a serious social phenomenon, the Federal Government has no accurate statistics on them.

Even the libel laws can be and are used against the interests of children. Writers and editors are really frightened that the powerful comic-book industry will use these laws against its critics. I had two experiences of my own. I had written that in the "good" comic book The Mysteries of Paris blood shows beneath the bandage of a man whose eyes have been gouged out. The publisher demanded a retraction. But I stood my ground, because the blood was there.

The other instance also involved a "good" comic book. I had written an article for the National Parent-Teacher Magazine at their request, on "What Are Comic Books?" in which I said, "It is a great error not to realize that 'Western' comics are just crime comics in disguise. The comic book Tom Mix, for example, has the story of an insane killer who hacks off people's hands, with the bloody details fully illustrated."

After this article appeared I received a long-distance call from the editor in Chicago. She had been visited by a representative of the industry and also by their lawyer. She also received several letters. "They persist in threatening me with a libel action. They said that on account of the article they were losing a million a year." Later she sent me their letters. They objected to the one sentence in my article, calling it a "libelous reference," "untrue," "untruthful" and inaccurate." They said the story was all about a "dummy." They demanded "a public retraction and correction," and threatened to turn the matter over to their attorney for libel action.

Naturally the editor was alarmed. So I wrote her describing the comic-book-story sequence in detail:

Early in the story "Hands Off" in Tom Mix Western there are three pictures showing a box in which are the hacked-off hands of a real man (not a dummy). One little boy, looking into this box, says: "GULP! IT'S A PAIR OF HUMAN HANDS CUT OFF AT THE WRIST!"
The sheriff says: "JUMPIN' RATTLESNAKES! SOME LOW-DOWN MURDERIN VARMINT CUT OFF A PORE FELLOW'S HANDS!"
In four pictures you see the human corpse (not a dummy), the hands of which were in the box. The insane killer knocks out Tom Mix (in person, not a dummy) by socking him on the head (CONK in large yellow letters and a big splash of color) with a gun, hangs him (in person, not a dummy) by the wrists from a tree and holding in his hand a big ax red with blood says: ". . . I'M AGONNA CUT YORE HANDS JEST LIKE I DID FRISCO FRANK'S!"
In the next picture you see a further close-up of this hanging-by-the-wrists man (not dummy), a bloody ax swinging, and all.
After some more struggle and fighting and kicking, with more talk about cutting off the (real) man's hands, Tom Mix gets free. He constructs a dummy - which in the pictures is of course indistinguishable from a real man - and you see two close-ups with the insane killer and his ax, in two of which the hand is actually cut off. In two of them again the ax is red-stained, presumably with blood. And the dialogue reads: "HA! HA! THAR GOES ONE OF YORE HANDS, MIX! AND NOW TUR CUT OFF THE OTHER!"
It's only in the fourth picture before the end, in one balloon, that it is stated: "YOU JUST CHOPPED THE HANDS OFF OF A STUFFED FIGURE!" (Of course this is lost on the many children who just study the pictures and do not read the text.)

I ended my letter: "Far from retracting what I have written, I reaffirm that this Tom Mix story is a bloody crime story disguised as a 'Western' totally unfit for immature minds. And I hope that this example will help parents to see the methods by which the comic-book industry continues the corruption of children's minds. In a democratic society there is no other way to cope with such an evil than a law - even if in one story, one of two handless corpses is a dummy."

This letter was not published in the Parent-Teacher. The editor told me later that she telephoned to the publisher, telling him what it said, and told him that "if you people persist in threatening us, we will publish Dr. Wertham's letter in full."

Later she received a letter from the publishers which ran true to form for comic-book stories and comics publishers: "It [the Tom Mix story] is not a representative story and was purchased several years ago." The letter also conceded that some of the comic books on the newsstands "are shocking, a disgrace and probably harmful to children."

The trouble is that all this, except for my original article, is unknown to the public. There is another point, too. Supposing it had been true that an insane killer had only hacked off the hands of a dummy, would that be suitable for children?

Whenever there is any court action stemming from comic books the question of what is in comic books does not come up at all. The industry relies then on the constitutional guarantee of free speech. It draws people's attention away from the real issue and veils the business in an idealistic haze. The framers of the Constitution and its amendments would certainly be sur prised if they knew that these guarantees are used to sell to children stories with pictures in which men prowl the streets and dismember beautiful girls. The industry regards selling books to children as its prerogative, that is to say as a right to be exercised without external control. To use constitutional rights against progressive legislation is of course an old story. Theodore Roosevelt encountered it when he campaigned for pure food laws.

In these assertions of freedom in the case of comic books, just the opposite is concealed. "We are allowing ourselves," said Virgilia Peterson, "in the name of free speech (oh, fatal misuse of a high principle) to be bamboozled into buying or letting our children buy the worst propaganda on the market. It is a tyranny by a handful of unscrupulous people. It is as much a tyranny as any other on the face of the earth."

What is censorship? The industry has obscured that by claiming that the publisher exercises a censorship over himself. That is not what censorship means. It means control of one agency by another. When Freud speaks of an internal censor in the human mind, he does not mean that instinctive behavior can control itself. He specifically postulates another agency, the superego, which functions as censor. The social fact is that radio, books, movies, stage plays, translations, do function under a censorship. So do newspaper comic strips, which all have to pass the censorship of the editor, who sometimes - as in the case of the Newark News - rejects advance proofs. Comic books for children have no censorship. The contrast between censorship for adults and the lack of it for children leads to such fantastic incongruities as the arrest of a girl in a nightclub for obscenity because she wrestles with a stuffed gorilla, when any six-year-old, for ten cents, can pore for hours or days over jungle books where real gorillas do much more exciting things with half-undressed girls than just wrestling.

It is a widely held fallacy that civil liberties are endangered or could be curtailed via children's books. But freedom to publish crime comics has nothing to do with civil liberties. It is a perversion of the very idea of civil liberties. It has been said that if comic books for children were censored on account of their violence "you couldn't have a picture of Lincoln's assassination in a textbook." Would that be such a calamity? There are many other pictures of Lincoln's time and life that would be far more instructive. But the whole inference is wrong, in any case. A picture of Lincoln's assassination would be incidental to a book expounding larger themes. In crime comic books, murder, violence and rape are the theme.

There seems to be a widely held belief that democracy demands leaving the regulation of children's reading to the individual. Leaving everything to the individual is actually not democracy; it is anarchy. And it is a pity that children should suffer from the anarchistic trends in our society.

When closely scrutinized, the objections to some form of control of comic books turn out to be what are psychologically called rationalizations. They rationalize the desire to leave everything as it is. The very newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, which pioneered in comic-book critique, said editorially later: "Censorship cannot be set up in this one field without undermining essential safeguards in other fields." The example of Canada alone, and of Sweden and other countries, has shown how spurious this argument is. A committee set up by comic-book publishers stated at their first meeting that censorship is an "illegal method." That certainly confuses things. An editorial in the New York Times entitled "Comic Book Censorship" says on the one hand: "We think the comic books have, on the whole, had an injurious effect on children and in various ways"; but goes on to say: "Public opinion will succeed in making the reforms needed. To wait for that to happen is far less dangerous than to abridge freedom of the right to publish." How long are we supposed to wait? We have now waited for over a decade - and right now there are more and worse crime comic books than ever before. And would the forbidding of mad killers and rapers and torturers for children abridge the freedom of the Times to publish anything it wants to? Why should a newspaper that stands for the principle of publishing what is "fit to print" make itself the champion of those who publish what is unfit to print?

While the industry wants to put all the burden on the children to protect themselves as best they can against injurious influences, John Kieran has expressed his belief that books for little children should be censored: "They have their foods selected for them, and the same applies to books. If the right books are given very young children to read, if the reading habit is started early, then when the children grow up they can select their own books."

In the comic-book field the alternatives to censorship have been fully tried. Self-regulation - to the extent that it was really attempted - has completely failed. In connection with parent-teacher organizations and other similar groups there have been local committees evaluating comic books. Most of their work of wading through hundreds of comic books was originally undertaken with enthusiasm, but has of course bogged down. So would the work of a committee that had to sample all the items in a local drugstore to see that nobody gets harmed.

What must happen to the minds of children before parents will give up these amateurish extra-legal committee activities and ask for efficient, legal, democratic protection for their children?

Legal control of comic books for children is necessary not so much on account of the question of sex, although their sexual abnormality is bad enough, but on account of their glorification of violence and crime. In the reaction to my proposals I found an interesting fact: People are always ready to censor obvious crudity in sex. But they have not yet learned the role of temptation, propaganda, seduction and indoctrination in the field of crime and violence. Psychoanalytically we know a great deal about the repression of sexual impulses. But to apply that directly to the psychology of criminal and violent impulses is far too simple. The reading of corrupting literature is a significant contributing factor in the causation of criminal and violent acts of juveniles. How many more cases like those in California, in Canada, in Chicago, in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Germany, in Australia, in New York, in England, must we have before we acknowledge scientifically and legally what the good sense of the people is recognizing more and more?

Whenever you talk to a lawyer about the legal curb of crime comic books he more likely than not will answer you: "Yes - but don't forget the Winters case." I heard this case mentioned so often as an argument (or rather, instead of an argument) that I decided to study it myself.

The Winters case is for the crime-comic-book industry what the lawyers call the case of main reliance. A bookdealer in New York was selling a magazine for adults containing articles with such titles as "Bargains in Bodies." The content of the magazine was nothing but crime and bloodshed illustrated with gruesome pictures of victims and other such material. Two thousand copies of this magazine were seized under a section of the penal law which prohibits publications "principally made up of pictures or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime.

It took eight years from the time of the sale of the books to the final decision of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, which had the case for more than three of those years. The bookdealer was originally convicted. The conviction was upheld in higher courts and then reversed by the United States Supreme Court. When the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision it overruled the opinion of no less than seventeen (17) judges. And if one includes the dissenting judges of the U.S. Supreme Court, six (6) judges outweighed twenty (20). This does not indicate that some judges are good and some bad, or some right and some wrong. It does show that the judiciary with changing times has come up against a new social problem; namely, the necessity of censoring not only obscenity but also violence as well. The division of the Supreme Court is the reflection of a social conflict. It is the expression of the growing pains of democracy. The conflict pertains to the social control of what I have called the new pornography, the glorification of violence and sadism. It also pertains to the root problem of my studies, the protection of children against temptation, seduction and unfair punishment after they have succumbed.

In the Court of Appeals of the State of New York, Judge Loughran, expressing the opinion of the majority, wrote: "Collections of pictures or stories of criminal deeds of bloodshed or lust unquestionably can be so massed as to become vehicles for inciting violent . . crimes...." He clearly distinguished this type of social harmfulness from the ordinary objections to sexual obscenity. He took into account the question of free speech and pointed out that the interest in controlling social harm far outweighs any value such a publication might be construed to have.

In the United States Supreme Court the majority overruled this opinion. They made the dubious assertion that such words as "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent or disgusting" are "well understood through long use in the criminal law." In contrast, they held that massing stories to incite crime and stories of deeds of bloodshed and violence is too "vague" and unclear. If they had looked into this literature for children, sold not in 2,000 copies but - at the very minimum- in 250,000 copies, they would have found fifty-two murders and patches of blood in one book and eighty-one acts of violence in another. There is nothing "vague" about that. In other words, they did not take into account fully Judge Cardozo's concept of the "morality of the community" because they did not know what was going on in the children's segment of the community. They actually objected to the New York law because it "does not limit punish ment to the indecent and obscene"! They rejected the emerging new morality expressed by the New York State Court of Appeals.

I have no doubt that the next generation will regard Justice Frankfurter's dissenting opinion in the Winters case, in which Justice Jackson and Justice Burton concurred, as one of the great documents of legal and social philosophy of our time. He pointed out that the majority opinion could have been written by anybody who had never read the magazine in question. It is like playing "Hamlet without Hamlet." (Remember that this is exactly what the comic-book industry is doing and is permitted to do all along, with every legal case.) Justice Frankfurter pointed out "the bearing of such literature on juvenile delinquency." He took full account of the acknowledged fact that there is uncertainty about the alleged "causes" of crime. But as I understand his opinion, since one does not know exactly the causes of crime and juvenile delinquency, that does not mean that one should not act. On the contrary, since one cannot be absolutely precise one should play safe with regard to dangerous influences on children.

Justice Frankfurter pointed out the heart of the problem when he considers it wrong to find "constitutional barriers to a state's policy regarding crime, because it may run counter to our inexpert psychological assumptions or offend our presuppositions regarding incitements to crime. . . ." That is exactly what happened in the case of crime comic books. Psychiatrists and lawyers were so convinced that delinquency must have obscure, hidden and complex causes that they closed their minds to my findings that simple factors may touch off complex mechanisms. Justice Frankfurter expressed that in this way: "It would be sheer dogmatism . . . to deny to the New York legislature the right to believe that the intent of the type of publications which it has proscribed is to cater to morbid and immature minds - whether chronologically or permanently immature. It would be sheer dogmatism to deny that in some instances, deeply embedded, unconscious impulses may be discharged into destructive and often fatal action." As an example Justice Frankfurter referred to a youth barely seventeen who killed the driver of a taxicab in Australia. This case came before the High Court of Australia which - more progressive than some of our courts - took into consideration that the boy "had on a number of occasions outlined plans for embarking on a life of crime, plans based mainly on magazine thrillers which he was reading at the time. They included the obtaining of a motor car and an automatic gun." I was surprised to find in the High Court of Australia and in the United States Supreme Court in Washington an acceptance of facts which troubled children, weeping mothers, impatient fathers and eager young psychiatric assistants had brought to my attention over and over again in the dingy basement rooms of psychiatric clinics at Lafargue and in Queens!

Justice Frankfurter made it clear that such a law would not interfere with freedom of speech and certainly not with that of the legitimate writers, their publishers and booksellers, including those who write fictional or fact stories of crime: "Laws that forbid publications inciting to crime [are] not within the constitutional immunity of free speech." He tersely expressed the sense of the type of law that I had asked for in Boston with regard to children when he says that the state gives notice "that it is outlawing the exploitation of criminal potentialities."

When I asked for a law against children's crime comics I expressed the logical result of my clinical studies. But at the same time I was crystallizing and giving expression to the vague gropings of the more enlightened part of public opinion which seeks a curb on the rising tide of education for violence. Justice Frankfurter admirably translated this vague groping into verbal clarity by assuming that the legislators who framed the statute on which the Winters case is based had expressed their reasons in words. This, Justice Frankfurter said, is what they would or could have said:

"We believe that the destructive and adventurous potentialities of boys and adolescents and of adults of weak character . . . are often stimulated by collections of pictures and stories of criminal deeds of bloodshed or lust so massed as to incite to violent and depraved crimes against the person; and . . . we believe that such juveniles . . . do in fact commit such crimes at least partly because incited to do so by such publications, the purpose of which is to exploit such susceptible characters . . . such belief . . . is supported by our experience as well as by the opinions of some specialists qualified to express opinions regarding criminal psychology and not disproved by others . . . in any event there is nothing of possible value to society in such publications, so that there is no gain to the State, whether in edification or enlightenment or good of any kind . . . and the possibility of harm by restricting free utterance through harmless publications is too remote and too negligible a consequence of dealing with the evil publications with which we are here concerned."

From this legal document I derived courage in what through no wish of mine, but by its own logic, had developed into a contest with the crime-comic-book industry. What respect they had for freedom of expression I could, see from one of the minor episodes. As my material accumulated I decided to put it in book form. One day one of the most prominent experts for the defense visited my prospective publisher and told him what an error it would be to publish a book by me. This expert said I was "completely wrong in my ideas about comic books and that I "stand absolutely alone" in my opinions about them. It is certainly fortunate that there are still publishers whose respect for freedom of expression takes other forms than those of the comic-book industry!

In my attempts to formulate the principles of a children's-crime-comics law, I realized that it is necessary to introduce scientific public-health thinking for the protection of children's mental health. A large part of the mental-hygiene movement exists solely on paper. Concrete measures like those against comic books come up against all kinds of conventions and interests. There is a lot written and said about mental hygiene, but one point is usually forgotten: the mental-hygiene movement as a whole has not been very successful so far. We have not less, but more alcoholism. We certainly do not have fewer neuroses. We have more and more violent juvenile delinquency and drug addiction has invaded the schools. The reason for this relative failure is that mental hygiene has separated itself so much from other fields and has succumbed to an ostrich policy with regard to concrete social evils, explaining them away rather than helping to fight them. The intricacies of parent-child relationship explain a great deal, but they alone cannot carry the weight of a really dynamic mental hygiene. The influences from outside the family must be added.

Laws in the service of preventive medicine do not necessarily deal with criminal intent. They cope with what the lawyers call public welfare offenses, dealing with food, drugs and sanitation. What I wanted to accomplish in these years was to add mental health to these categories.

Speaking of the food, drug and cosmetic act, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association points out that legislation in these fields "stemmed from the unusual responsibility held by those who produce and handle such essentials as food and drugs." What I submit is that mental health is an even greater responsibility. That is why I advocated a public-health approach to the comic-book problem.

What should a public-health law accomplish? Its purpose is not the punishment of crimes, although as an example that may be necessary. When proposing a comic-book law I have often been told:

"You can't make a law unless you enlighten the public first."
Or:
"Good laws cannot help when there are bad attitudes."

Can't they? Over and over again the objection has been made to my proposals that you have to educate the people first. But if you look over the history of social betterment you will find that the law is the best instrument of adult education. If nothing else, a comic-book law would make people think. It would inform them that there are responsible people who take seriously the subtle harm that crime comics do. One of the functions of law is to inform the public.

The progress of public-health legislation has not been easy either. Theodore Roosevelt and LaGuardia, when they came out for laws controlling drugs and food, faced the same counter arguments made now against comic-book laws. A good example of the obstacles in the path of public-welfare laws is a court case of 1892. A landlord had failed to provide running water on each floor of a large tenement house. That seems to us now a self-understood requirement of public health. But at that time the Court of Appeals ruled: "There is no evidence, nor can the Court judicially know, that the presence and distribution of water on the several floors will conduce to the health of the occupants. . . There is no necessity for legislative compulsion on a landlord to distribute water through the stories of his buildings; since, if the tenants require it, self-interest and the rivalry of competition are sufficient to secure it."

This is like what the comic-book industry and its experts and legal defenders say now: How can a court judicially know that a child needs good reading? Why not leave it all to the competition of the good books (leaving out the defenselessness of the tenants in the one case and of children in the other)?

It is no argument to say that many people have been exposed to a public-health hazard, as children are exposed to crime comics, without suffering any harm. Many people speed in automobiles, pass others on hills, ignore red lights, have defective lights and brakes, live in unsanitary dwellings, drink untested water or milk, eat uninspected meat, are exposed to all kinds of infectious diseases, are not vaccinated, and still are none the worse for it. But that does not do away with the need for safety and public-health laws. Public health aims to prevent possibilities, not to Count casualties.

Mental health is just as important as physical health. Its protection should be based on the same kind of scientific clinical thinking as public health. The individualistic thinking in psychology becomes unscientific when applied to a mass problem of social life. Public-health legislation is not directed against the past injury to an individual, but against the potential future injury to all.

The threadbare argument that only the predisposed are potentially harmed by comic books is without merit from the point of view of public health. In the first place, it is not true. I have seen many troubled children and juvenile delinquents who were predisposed to achieving good things in life and were deflected from their course by the social environment of which comic books are an important part. Postulating beforehand who will be harmed by what, has long been replaced in public-health thinking by scientific observation. During the great flu epidemic of 1918 we learned that many regular subway riders and slum dwellers were immune while strong young men from the country succumbed. There is not only a psychopathology, there is also an epidemiology of juvenile delinquency.

In public health we also have little sympathy with the claim that we do not have to prevent illness because if we rule out one factor people would get sick sooner or later anyway, if not with this disease then with something else. Yet that is how the comic-book industry and its experts reason.

Attention to the individual in mental hygiene is not decreased, but increased, if the mass effects of social causes are given their due. Preventive work is trying to bring it about that the circumstances injurious to people do not occur. In public-health thinking the generalization cannot be postponed until every detail is established. The clinical fact of the harm to some is the signal of the potential danger to all.

I had occasion to try out these ideas of mine in a totally different field - although at one point comic books were involved there, too. I was giving expert testimony in Wilmington in the Delaware test case concerning segregation in elementary and public schools. I presented to the court in detail the thesis that regardless of the quality or inequality of the physical facilities, the fact of segregation itself constitutes a definite hazard for the mental health of children.

Segregation in school is only one factor in the social context of other factors, I went on. One cannot postulate a fixed hierarchy of factors operative in every case: The very fact that these children are exposed to race prejudice in other spheres highlights the school segregation. In this connection I mentioned the race prejudice taught in comic books. The court accepted my public-mental-health point of view and ordered the children admitted to the schools from which they had been excluded.

The analogy with the comic-book question is obvious. But whereas in the ease of school segregation something new was accomplished, with crime comic books the same reasoning did not work.

One obstacle was the attitude of some writers, editorialists and columnists on child welfare whose minds are closed to something new. They regard juvenile delinquents as if they were totally different from other children. Even liberal writers write of "the mark of Cain which an evil destiny brands on some of our children." They believe that emotionally strong children are unaffected, while only emotionally insecure children are exposed. This is pure speculation. It means the distinction between an invulnerable elite and a vulnerable common group. Reflect what snobbishness is involved.

He is a naughty child, I'm sure-
Or else his dear papa is poor.

Even when they write about comic books - asserting that they have nothing to do with normal children's troubles or with juvenile delinquency, however - they admit that comic books are "lurid enough to chill the blood"; that they have a "potentially adverse effect on juvenile culture generally"; that they show a "sly, smutty suggestiveness"; that "sadism" is a "key motif'; and that comic books "demonstrate pictorially to the child reader how to gouge eyes with the thumb, kick in the stomach, bite ears" and other such "dangerous information." These quotations are from a book on juvenile delinquency by Albert Deutsch. Despite all these admissions, he denies firmly that comic books may be a "significant factor in child delinquency" and even denies that they have anything at all to do with the violent forms of delinquency.

Juvenile delinquency cannot be regarded as a self-contained entity. Children's behavior does not fall into such rigid classifications. If you take a hundred delinquent children and a hundred non-delinquent children, you will find that the difference between them is not one of ingrained emotional make-up, but one of socio-psychological circumstances. It is only human (and scientific) to realize that just a hairline separates the child who does not get into trouble from the one who does. The belief that delinquent children are totally different from others is one reason why they are so harshly treated. Even the difference be tween a mild delinquent act and a serious one is not the difference between black and white. I have seen children at every stage of this sequence: A young boy experiments in talking about sex with a little girl; he has the impulse to inspect her; he experiments; he wants her not to tell; he threatens her with one of his comic-book-bought knives; he really harms her. Is it reasonable to assume that each act has a different causation, the serious act a "very deep" cause and the mild act a very superficial one?

Deutsch states that "emotionally healthy children are unharmed by them." If sadism, as he himself says, is a motif of this children's literature, must the children be emotionally un healthy to get sadistic ideas from it? That is contrary to all human and scientific experience.

He also uses the ostrich argument that the child-delinquency rate "was actually declining." It was not. Moreover, delinquency statistics are most unreliable. Whenever a social or private agency needs more appropriations or contributions to combat juvenile delinquency, the delinquency rate goes up; when they make reports accounting for the money spent, the rates go down. The rosy statistics offered by the New York City Youth Board in 1953 are a case in point. About three facts there can be no doubt: Delinquency rates are at present very high; the nature of the delinquencies has become more violent; the age of the delinquents has become lower.

Harper's magazine, in its "Personal & Otherwise" department, has been taking up cudgels for the comic-book institution. The statement that the increased brutality in juvenile delinquency and the mass production of crime comic books are related "got our blood pressure up," they admit. As a doctor, of course I deplore that, not only for their sake but because the injustice done to children both before they commit delinquencies and afterwards needs calm reflection as well as knowledge of the facts.

The violence is, in P. & O.'s opinion, the "product of a moral and social confusion." How can one better defend the status quo than by blaming something so vague and general, to the exclusion of concrete facts? P. & 0. reproaches me for over-simplification and states that I neglect socio-economic conditions. Does he think that comic books drop from heaven? They are a clear expression of economic conditions and are a part of the social environment of these children.

P. & 0. finds my case against the comic books "full of holes." One of these holes is that they do not contain any more violence than Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Last of the Mohicans. For a literary critic in a good magazine this is a shocking statement to make. Are girls strung up by their ankles in these books? Are their acts of violence fully illustrated so that you can see blood gushing, cut-off shapely legs, and corpses disposed of in every conceivable manner? More important, these books are art, they have nuances of descriptive narrative and they have a theme which is not the theme of violence. P. & 0. also defends the thesis of so many other writers in connection with comic books, that demonstrably bad reading matter does not have demonstrably bad effect on children. I have found that it does.

When such writers defend crime comic books so vehemently, what are they actually defending? The very inconsistency of their arguments makes one wonder. Crime comics are a severe test of the liberalism of liberals.

And so it went. The writers discussed the "problems," the public thought comics were getting better, the industry flourished.

One day in the Queens General Mental Hygiene Clinic I was visited by an older and very influential professional friend. After some friendly preliminaries he hesitated and cleared his throat.

"You know," he said, "you do it all wrong. Why do you have to keep on doing this work with comic books? The research is all right. But why do you have to talk about practical solutions? That is bad for your reputation. It is petty. You have stated your results. Now if you do absolutely nothing, the people will come to you for advice. But you go on and want to change something! You have written articles about comic books. Why do you have to ask for a law and get into the fight? If you keep on acting like this, you'll be marked."

It really seemed for quite a while that Superman had licked me. But then, as so often happens, things took a new turn. It came in the form of a telephone call from Washington. Would I be willing to confer with the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime on the subject of crime and juvenile delinquency? I agreed to do so and a few weeks later the senator came to my apartment, for what turned into a long conference. He told me that while his committee was mainly interested in organized crime in interstate commerce, he was concerned about children. He had inquired in Washington whom to consult and several high officials had given him my name. He added that President Truman had urged him especially to look into the childhood roots of criminal behavior.

I had on my desk a speech President Truman had made a short while before in which he asked for "prevention and cure and for "wholesome recreation." "If those children," the President had said, "have the proper environment at home, and educationally, very, very few of them ever turn out wrong. . . . I am particularly anxious that we should do everything in our power to protect the minds and hearts of our children from moral corruption. . . . We must not permit the existence of conditions which cause our children to believe that crime is inevitable and normal."

"You know, Senator," I said, "there is a strong organized force in our society which does exactly the opposite of what the President wants. It provides unwholesome recreation, it claims that many children will go wrong whatever influences they are exposed to, it exposes them to moral corruption and leads them to believe that crime is normal. Why not investigate this force, the crime-comic-book industry?"

"Oh, I've heard about them," he replied. "Those horror books that describe the perfect murder or some other crime, ostensibly for educational purposes."

The senator combined a certain dignity with what seemed to be a sincere homespun friendliness, and he seemed eager to do something for children. I told him that for a number of years I had been making clinical investigations on the subject in three different clinics.

"Can you show me some of your material?" he asked. I showed him comic books, clinical records, converted toy guns. We spent some time going critically over the evidence in a manner that reminded me that he was a lawyer.

He explained to me the tremendous power that his committee had. They could subpoena anybody and anything, question witnesses under oath, trace business transactions and scrutinize whole industries. What could the committee do about this? Was there anything the Federal Government could do?

"The Federal Government does not even have accurate statistics on murders and violent acts committed by children," I said. "Any child who can write his name can order a dangerous switchblade knife from comic books' advertisements. With these knives countless children have been threatened and coerced and injured. The Federal Government seems to be the only agency with the power to ascertain the truth. How many crime comic books are there that glorify crime? I don't mean guesses and propaganda figures, but actual printing-orders, sales, shipments abroad, and so on.

"Could something be done with interstate commerce?" he asked.

"That has been suggested," I said. "For example, Nevada has passed a resolution requesting Congress to regulate comic books by law." And I explained that I thought the evidence would show the necessity for a law-possibly on an interstate commerce basis - that would prevent the sale and display of crime comic books to children under fifteen.

Then and there he appointed me as psychiatric consultant to his committee. I made my co-operation dependent on some conditions:

- that the far-flung propaganda of the industry would be scrutinized;

- that there would be a careful legal investigation of tie-in sales, juvenile drug addiction and childhood prostitution;

- that the recruiting of children for work with adult gangs and racketeers be investigated; that illustrations from comic books would be used.

He agreed to all that, reiterating the enormous powers he had and his paramount wish to do something for children. His final inquiry was whether I thought the public would be interested in such an investigation.

Soon afterwards he wrote to thank me, sent me messages and conferred with me by telephone from Washington. Aides of the committee came to me and I outlined for them in detail preliminary steps. I can't say that I expected this to lead to a curb of the industry, but I did think that there would be at least some kind of an investigation.

Questionnaires went out to a number of people. Then the whole thing stopped abruptly - or maybe it was just that it took a different direction.

I was on vacation when I got a wire saying that the committee contemplated publication of a report on juvenile delinquency and wanted a written contribution from me for inclusion in the report. Of course I refused, replying that such a hasty publication without investigation was certainly not in the interests of the public.

The next thing I heard was a news broadcast from Washington: "Crime Comic Books have nothing to do with juvenile delinquency, Senator Kefauver reported today." Next day there were front-page headlines:

STUDY FINDS DOUBT COMICS SPUR CRIME

COMICS DON'T FOSTER CRIME

FBI HEAD DISCOUNTS HARMFUL EFFECTS OF CRIME COMIC BOOKS

Editorials elaborated. The Times editorial stated that the majority opinion of child-guidance experts was "that there is no direct connection between the comic books dealing with crime and juvenile delinquency"; that "the facts show that some comic books are read more by adults than by children" (it did not mention whose "facts"); and that "it is the emotional make-up the child brings to his life experiences that conditions his reactions to them" (in other words, it's all the child's own fault again).

The Sunday News editorial commented: "It's a pleasure to pass along the news that Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate Crime Investigating Committee has now gone deeply into the subject of the crime comic books and has brought up a mass of testimony which ought to spur the earnest souls to look around for something else to worry about. . . . The Kefauver Committee took its testimony largely from unprejudiced sources. . . . The verdict of the majority gave a clean bill of health to the comics. So we hope that the public has heard the last of this earnest-soul gripe."

Why is it a front-page story that comic books do not have any effect?

Ironically enough, it was I who had inadvertently given the crime-comic-book industry the biggest advertising it had ever had!

I got hold of the published report of the Senate Crime Investigating Committee and studied it. At the taxpayers' expense it prints statistical charts on the frequency of juvenile delinquency prepared by - the comic-book industry! It reprints the whole comic-book issue of the scientific journal edited by one expert for the defense, with contributions by three experts for the defense (and one article entirely devoted to newspaper comic strips, which has nothing at all to do with comic books) and with one article devoted only to attacking me. It contains unchecked statements by crime-comic-book publishers, some of whom brazenly defy the most modest requests made by the committee: "Our organization has published hundreds of titles and issues of comic magazines during the past ten years, and it would be an impossible task to begin to answer. . ." (this in reference to questions about circulation and income from comic books). There are no illustrations, although I had been assured there would be.

The report gives the opinions of eight "child guidance experts." Two of them are not and do not claim to be child-guidance experts. Both are lawyers. One of the other experts is designated editorially in the report as a doctor, although she is not, and as a psychiatrist, which she is not either. Five of the eight experts, according to the report itself, are or have been employed by the comic-book industry - some for as long as ten years! It is these five experts who say that comic books are all right. The three independent experts condemn comic books severely. The division is clear-cut: Those connected with the comic-book industry defend comic books; those independent of the industry consider them harmful. It needed no Senate inquiry to tell us this.

The report also contains replies to a questionnaire from probation officers and other officials, most of whom had never thought of studying the influence of crime comic books. They had not even asked prisoners or children in their charge about comic-book reading. Some of them speak unblushingly about "the consistent decrease" of juvenile delinquency. There are some condemnations of crime comics, including the case example of the little boy comic-book reader who leaped from a telephone pole believing himself to be Superman.

The report bristles with all the cliches and platitudes that have ever been uttered in defense of comic books: that they are too simple an explanation;

that the children would do it anyhow;

that comic books are here to stay; that they give release of aggressive instincts;

that children who do something wrong have "definite antisocial tendencies" in the first place;

that only unstable children become unstable and comic books have "no effect on the emotionally well-balanced boy or girl";

that a judge calmed a child witness down by handing him a pile of comic books;

that comic books make an impression only on "impressionable minds";

and so on and on. And all this is published without comment, without analysis, without any investigation whatsoever, and with only a minimum of editing - and that mostly wrong.

Omitted from the report are items that would have belonged there. For example, the answer to their inquiry by the president of the Newport Council of Social Agencies, a psychiatric social worker with a great deal of experience with children, which states that from her contact with children in Washington, D.C. and in Rhode Island she had become increasingly aware of the link between comic books and delinquency and had had "contact with non-delinquent minors whose cultural background seemed solidly rooted in this literature." Omitted also is the testimony before the committee of one of the most experienced criminologists and penologists in the country, Mr. James V. Bennett, secretary of the Criminal Law Section of the American Bar Association and director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He had told the committee that crime comic books are connected with crime and asked for an investigation into the business of crime comic books, "the traffic in which now amounts to seventy million copies a month . . . " (this was in 1950).

After the report was published one of the senator's aides telephoned me that the senator wanted me to know that "his whole statement had been twisted in the press," that I "should have faith in him" and that "he's determined to do it the way he said to you." That was the last I ever heard.

A few weeks after the report was out I received a letter from a prominent member and committee chairman of the American Bar Association. "I was very much disappointed," he wrote, "in the publication of the Kefauver report. And I think a serious mistake has been made in its publication. It is unfortunate that so much of it is from media sources and from persons in the employ of or under obligation to the media."

As for me, I learned a great deal from this report. It taught me that comic books really are a test of the reaction of a society not only to children's literature but to children themselves. Assume for a moment that a senate committee with such unlimited powers had investigated the raising of hogs. Would they not have informed themselves and the farmers a little better?

The further history of the Kefauver Committee's crime investigation is well known. It was referred to in television circles as "the biggest hit of the season." Arthur Miller wrote that he was struck by "the air of accomplishment among the people that is really not warranted by the facts." I do not entirely agree with this. I think these hearings actually did accomplish something: They demonstrated not only the link between politics and crime, but also the link between politics and crime investigation.

I kept on with my studies as before. There were always new comic books and always new children. I was not in the mood to participitate in any more investigations. But my telephone rang again: The New York State Legislature had appointed a Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics. Would I collaborate with them as a psychiatric expert, help them in their investigation and testify on the effects of comic books on children?

I had become a little skeptical of investigating committees. Superman always seemed to get the best of them. So I asked to be excused. But later on when the committee got in touch with me again I changed my mind and agreed. I had convinced myself that this committee had gone at its work seriously and sincerely. They wanted to get at the facts and in all fairness had given the comic-book industry every break. They started with the premise that no law was necessary and gave the industry more than two years' time to make some kind of improvement by self-regulation.

During one of the first conversations I had with members of this committee to study comics, one of them said to me, "The general counsel of the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers said to me, 'Somewhere right now a little boy has a gun and reads crime comics. That boy will be president some day.' What do you say to that?"

"All I can say," I answered, "is that that is precisely what I would like to prevent."

I testified for the committee, at length and under oath, on two separate occasions separated by an interval of a year. With many examples from comic books and children's cases I testified to what I had seen and found, what I had done and thought. The main bad effect of crime comic books on children, I said, is on their ethical development. I made it clear that I was not saying this as a moralist, but as a doctor who believes that orientation as to what is right and wrong is part of normal mental health. I explained that juvenile delinquency is only one part of the crime-comic-book question, although a very serious one. The greatest danger of crime comic books is to the normal child.

I answered the counterarguments of the industry, like the one about law and order winning. A typical crime story has this ending: "And so the story ends in blood, as it began in murder."

What about the crime comic books, I was asked, that are educational and teach children not to commit delinquencies? I have never seen one, I answered. If you find one, I shall be glad to return and modify my statements.

When I testified the second time the committee had convinced itself that the proclaimed self-regulation of the industry had completely failed and some legal control was necessary. On that occasion, again under oath, I pointed out that the cover of the comic book draws the child's attention to a crime, the text describes one, the pictures show how it's done and the advertisements provide the means to carry it out.

For years I had been seeing children who get into trouble with switchblade knives. I had bought several of these knives, signing a child's name on the order, in answer to comic-book advertisements. When I testified before this committee for the second time, I produced one of them quickly, as I was talking, flashing open its blade. A switchblade knife is a good symbol of the crime-comic-book industry as a whole. Then I outlined my idea about a public-health law against the threat comic books offer to the general mental health of children. The law is not concerned with what doctors think, but with what they can prove. Many comic-book stories are nothing but perverse and violent fantasies of adults and it is these perverse fantasies that are sold to children. Censorship legislation requires a "clear and present danger." My idea of a public-health law is totally different. Anything clear or unclear, present or future, which under any circumstances may cause damage or harm to health, can be controlled by legislation. There is only one question: Is it harmful or not? Such a law could enlighten the public, just as laws about hoof and mouth disease enlighten farmers about livestock. I am not a lawyer, but from a medico-legal point of view I would suggest that the sale and display of crime comic books to children under fifteen be forbidden.

The committee, which had taken the testimony of sixty-two witnesses, accepted my findings and my suggestions. They issued altogether three reports. In the first "Interim Report," before I testified, they made this important observation:

"It is strange but true that the questions heretofore propounded to individuals charged with greater or lesser crimes by probation officers have not touched upon the question of the reading of comics." (Compare with the Kefauver committee which published unanalyzed the uninformed opinions on crime comics of just such probation officers.)

The second report concludes that crime comic books "impair the ethical development of children" and are "a contributing factor leading to juvenile delinquency." It states that "the comics which sell best are crime comics."

The third report contained the committee's legislative proposals. The chairman, Assemblyman Joseph F. Carlino, stated that the bills were the result of the failure of the comic-book industry to "realize their public responsibility and, in the cause of common decency, take up the necessary steps to set up self-regulatory provisions."

The committee's report states: "The publishers and their representatives . . . completely rejected and refused to recognize the reality that children are influenced and stimulated by what they read, see and hear in the same way in which adults are influenced or stimulated."

It calls crime comic books "a threat to the health of children" and concludes that the committee "has been obliged to recommend the adoption of legislative controls. It had no more choice in doing so than it would have in suppressing disease-causing acts which were found to be a threat to the public health or safety."

Before the law proposed by the committee was voted on by the legislature, it was publicly opposed by the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, the New York State Council of Churches, the Mystery Writers of America, the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations.

The technical aspects of the bill had been worked out most carefully by the committee. They had done research on the Winters case, the Los Angeles County case, the Chicago case and other legal cases having a bearing on such a law. Their legal consultant was Reuben A. Lazarus, an authority on constitutional law and on bill drafting. He had drafted more bills affecting the City of New York than any other person, living or dead, and is responsible for the present New York City charter. So if there was any legal authority to judge the constitutionality of the proposed law, it was this comics committee's legal consultant. The committee's bill was drafted and redrafted in many conferences; the head of the New York State Legislative Bill Drafting Committee, Theodore E. Bopp, participated and members of his legal staff passed on it.

When the crime-comic-book control bill came before the Assembly, they voted for it: 141 to 4. The Senate voted for it, too, unanimously.

So it really seemed that a step forward had been made. But Governor Dewey attended to that. He vetoed the bill, giving as his reason that "it fails to meet fundamental constitutional requirements." Superman has many disguises.

This decision was strange. When Columbia University Press published its educational comic book Trapped which deals with juvenile drug-addiction, Governor Dewey stated: "It is a superb job. I hope millions of copies are distributed." (They could not distribute more than 30,000.) If the governor thinks that a single "good" comic book can do so much good, should he not have refrained from interfering with the democratic will of the parliamentary majority which believed that hundreds of millions of bad comic books can do so much harm?

When I discussed this outcome with my associates in the comic-book research I was pleased to note that they were not discouraged by it. Nor was I. But I was bothered by something else. I had lunch one day with Henrietta Additon, an authority on delinquency and penology for whom I have the greatest admiration. She had another guest, the head of a civic committee on children and a woman with great influence in such matters. In the course of lunch I asked this guest what she thought about crime comic books. She answered, "I know there are people for them and people against them. I don't take any side. I am absolutely neutral."

At that moment it became clear to me for the first time that I was defeated. This business of not taking sides on the part of those who could help to make conditions easier for the young to grow up, was more deadly than Kefauver's desertion or Dewey's veto. Neutrality - especially when hidden under the cloak of scientific objectivity - that is the devil's ally.

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

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