Hajdu, the Ten-Cent Plague
"Since I have written about comic books, I have heard from quite a number of young adults who told me that their childhood emotional masturbation problem was started or aggravated by comic books."[footnoteRef:0] This is an actual quotation from Dr. Fredric Wertham's notorious mid-1950s attack on the comic book industry, Seduction of the Innocent, and it demonstrates the extent to which Wertham ignited a "moral panic" about comic books, and ultimately caused an entire industry to cave to public pressure and change the content and artwork of comics for more than a generation. Does anyone nowadays -- sixty years after Wertham got Congress to take an interest in the censorship of comic books -- still believe that masturbation is a serious moral plague? Does anyone believe that comic books seduce and corrupt the innocent? In an era where any child who can spell can have access to information and images concerning any possible subject, good or bad, via the Internet, the 1950s attack on comic books is bound to see the whole episode as somewhat quaint and distinctly troubling. The tale of Wertham's bizarre crusade is told in David Hajdu's informative readable history The Ten-Cent Plague, and it raises fascinating questions about an artform that aims at a mass audience, about the type of influence such art can or cannot have, and about the real motives and mindsets of those obsessed with censorship. [0: Fredric Wertham, MD. Seduction of the Innocent. Introduction by James E. Rebman.Laurel, NY: Main Road Books Reprints, 2004.]
Dr Fredric Wertham was a medical doctor and psychiatrist who "studied in England and Austria, and received a medical degree from the University of Wurzburg" then "moved to the United States to teach at Johns Hopkins." [footnoteRef:1] Disturbed by the content of comic books at the time, Wertham launched a public campaign for censorship, eventually reaching the United States Senate, which investigated the industry -- the...
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