Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [77]
Some of Wertham’s criticism, such as his dismissal of comics as being poorly written and illustrated, leading to poor reading habits among youths, was old and tired, but that didn’t prohibit him from repeating these assertions. He stopped short of stating that comic books were the cause of juvenile delinquency, or that every comic book reader would go on to engage in bad behavior, but he viewed them as influential to impressionable minds. He listed the areas in which comic books could have ill effects on their readers:
1. The comic-book format is an invitation to illiteracy.
2. Crime comic books create an atmosphere of cruelty and deceit.
3. They create a readiness for temptation.
4. They stimulate unwholesome fantasies.
5. They suggest criminal or sexually abnormal ideas.
6. They furnish the rationalization for them, which may be ethically even more harmful than the impulse.
7. They suggest the forms a delinquent impulse may take and supply details of technique.
8. They may tip the scales toward maladjustment of delinquency.
Wertham had been waiting years for this moment. He’d given lectures, participated in panel discussions, written for scholarly and general interest publications, appeared before committees. His body of work on the subject, incontestably the most voluminous in the world, had made him, at least in the public eye, the final word on the topic of comics and a protector of children’s interests. A new electronic contraption called television, now finding its way into households across America, brought him even more of the national spotlight.
His timing couldn’t have been better. By spring 1954, within days of the appearance of Seduction of the Innocent, another Senate subcommittee, this one focusing on juvenile delinquency and chaired by Robert C. Hendrickson, was ready to reexamine the comic book business. Hendrickson had begun his work months earlier, in November 1953, with lengthy hearings in Washington, D.C., Boston, Denver, and Philadelphia, covering such issues as gangs and gang violence, pornography, and drugs. The examination of comics was slated for New York, home of the huge majority of comic book publishers and, to cynical observers, the location where the most political hay might be made from the televised hearings. Estes Kefauver, still stinging from an unsuccessful bid for the 1952 presidential nomination yet hopeful for another shot in 1956, was a committee member, and history would eventually attach his name, more than Hendrickson’s, to the proceedings.
The hearings opened on April 21, 1954, in the same Manhattan courthouse room that had housed the Kefauver committee four years earlier. As in the previous hearings, the roster of invited witnesses was impressive—twenty-two spoke and answered questions over a three-day period, including the usual assortment of comic book publishers and distributors, comic strip artists, child psychologists, law enforcement officials, and authorities on juvenile delinquency. Fredric Wertham, absent from the 1950 organized crime hearings, was on hand this time around, taking full advantage of an opportunity to continue his crusade and, not coincidentally, the opportunity to stand before television cameras and promote Seduction of the Innocent by referring to it continually.
Wertham’s testimony rehashed his old position, by now familiar to anyone with the slightest interest in the comic book controversy. As expected, he took aim at the horror and crime