Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [63]
Born Frederic Wertheimer in Munich in 1895, Wertham spent the early portion of his life racking up impressive credentials in psychiatry. He earned a medical degree at the University of Würzburg and studied in Paris and London before moving to the United States in 1922 and taking a job at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Five years later, he legally changed his last name. (The alteration of his first name came later.)
While at Johns Hopkins, he built an impeccable reputation as a clinician, teacher, and scholar. After eight years, he left Johns Hopkins for New York City, where he conducted psychiatric evaluations of convicted felons for the New York Court of General Sessions and later worked for Bellevue Hospital, a facility known for its psychiatic treatment of patients. While at Johns Hopkins, he had worked for Dr. Adolf Meyer, who strongly believed in a correlation between environment and mental disorders, and in New York, while working with criminal and troubled juveniles, Wertham began to apply Meyer’s beliefs to his own theories. In 1946, he opened the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, a facility offering free or low-cost psychiatric services to the neighborhood’s poor, non-white residents.
He also learned how to gain the spotlight in the country’s largest city. His courtroom testimony, offered as an expert witness, made headlines; the press knew he was always good for a quote or two. His fluid writing style, found in his 1941 book, Dark Legend (an account of a seventeen-year-old’s murder of his mother that was later made into a Broadway play), garnered him writing assignments for newspapers and magazines.
In his landmark book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu might have offered the best capsule characterization of Wertham to date:
Wertham was a nest of contradictions—intelligent and contemplative, yet susceptible to illogic, conjecture, and peculiar leaps of reasoning; temperate in appearance and manner, yet inclined to extravagant, attention-grabbing pontification. He abhorred comics, which were born of the immigrant experience, while he was deeply empathetic to the Negro condition …
The Collier’s article added an air of legitimacy to anti-comics rumblings heard since the end of the war. Local church, education, and civic groups around the country were making noises about what they considered to be inappropriate material in comics, especially the most mature material aimed at soldiers returning home from the war—young men no longer as captivated by superheroes as they might have been at one time but now definitely interested in true-crime and detective stories. The anti-comics crusade followed a tried-and-true method of attacking almost anything in popular culture: first, intellectuals (critics, writers, teachers) vilified, ridiculed, and cast doubts on the value of the target; if that failed, there were attacks on the local level, where greater degrees of success might be expected than on a national scale; if that failed, you brought out the big guns—the national press and authorities. The key was to be relentless.
The same month in which the Collier’s article appeared, ABC radio broadcast a panel discussion, “What’s Wrong with the Comics?” on its America’s Town Meeting of the Air program. John Mason Brown, drama critic for the Saturday Review, and novelist Maryn Mannes, author of “Junior Was a Craving,” an article in the February 1948 issue of New Republic, took the anti-comics side; Al Capp and George Hecht, publisher of Parents magazine, spoke in defense of comics. The overheated rhetoric hinted of the days ahead, when an all-out assault on comics would prompt Senate hearings. Brown, taking the lead from Mannes’s New Republic piece, in which she labeled comics “the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market,” called comics “the marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse of the kids; and a threat to the future.” Capp, known for his quick wit and biting sarcasm, must have wondered what gods