When the US Senate Put Comic Books on Trial

Initially dismissed as mere pulp entertainment, Comic books had, by the 1950s, burgeoned into an integral component of American culture. Yet, beneath the vibrant panels and popular characters lurked a growing unease. Concerns began to mount among American adults regarding the content and influence of comic books, particularly their alleged role in shaping juvenile delinquency. In 1954, the United States Congress took up the role of addressing the comics’ perceived danger—real or imagined.

History tends to recall the past with rose-colored glasses, and the 1950s decade is perhaps the best example of the pitfalls of such thoughts. Just a decade removed from the greatest conflict the world had ever witnessed, the United States was soaring through economic prosperity unmatched since before the Great Depression.

Spurred on by the GI Bill, American homeownership and the standard of living of the new middle class skyrocketed. Blanketed by the comforts of cultural conformity and stability, the American people saw themselves as an idealized society based on traditional family values, gender roles, and social etiquette.

Yet, among this widespread sense of optimism and confidence, the American society, revered by so many, was slowly deteriorating from the very foundation responsible for its future: the youth. Historian Joyce Appleby would later point out the staggering numbers. Between 1948 and 1953, the United States saw a forty-five percent increase in crimes perpetrated by its youth.

Soon dubbed juvenile delinquency by the press and the media, the number would grow to see nearly 1 million juveniles involved in crime activities. Cases such as the 1953’s largest indictment for a single murder in American history up to that point in the small town of Denville, New Jersey, which saw thirteen teenagers take the life of one man, sparked a national debate.

Juvenile Delinquency & the Media

While most of those concerned disagreed with what caused the societal upheaval, many blamed the new and rising entertainment mediums, such as television, movies, and comic books. Although many social critics leaned more toward the growing divorce rates, the lack of religion, and two working parents as the main culprits behind juvenile delinquency, enough people agreed with the former triggers to turn them into the main focus of a national debate.

Comic books drew particular condemnation from critics because, while television and films aimed at a broader viewership that included adults, comic publishers produced and marketed their fare specifically to children. It was a lucrative market as the post-war Baby Boom caused a massive influx of school-aged kids, with elementary school enrollments by the mid-1950s increasing by thirteen million.

The comic book industry worked hard to keep up with the demand for their colorful and easily readable pages printed on cheap newspaper paper and bound for quick sale. In 1954 alone, the publishers sold over one billion comic books, all at the affordable cost of ten cents an issue.

Comic books were also changing. Gone were the colorful and funny strips with cartoony characters. War-era comics introduced the public to crime fighters, superheroes, and heroines who were not afraid to use violence to attain their goals. And now, with the lurking sense of anxiety caused by the Cold War and the age of the atomic bomb, writers began churning out crime and horror stories at twenty million issues a month, making the ultra-violent titles take up nearly a quarter of all comics published. Grotesque images of death and blood greeted young kids on almost every cover and inside page of titles such as Weird Tales, The Vault of Horror, or Crime Stories.

A prominent German-American psychiatrist, Dr. Frederick Wertham, chose to hang his argumentative hat on this latest comic book genre. The publication of his bestselling book, The Seduction of the Innocent (1954), would set into motion events that would ultimately see the United States Senate Judiciary Committee form a subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to investigate the problem of, among other factors, the rise and effect of violent comic books.

In his work, Wertham began his national social crusade against comic book publishers by concluding that the new wave of youth crime occurred concurrently with the rise of crime genre comics. According to historian James Gilbert’s extensive study on the subject of juvenile delinquency in his 1986 release, A Cycle of Outrage, the 1950s psychiatrist blamed comics for being racist, fascist, and sexist, with situations containing the said motifs being heavily internalized by children reading them.

In a closer analysis of a particular issue of a Crime Does Not Pay comic, Wertham counted forty-seven of forty-eight picture frames contradicting the book’s title. In his book, he pointed out that “along the way to the villain’s demise, there were ten guillotinings, seven stabbings, six shootings, one fatal shove from a ladder, two shockings, one drowning, and one bludgeoning.”

When speaking about his findings to a group of psychotherapists, he stated plainly, “You cannot understand present-day juvenile delinquency if you do not take into account the pathogenic and [infectious] influence of comic books.”

The Road to Congressional Hearings

While most psychiatrists in the nation disagreed with the assertion that a single factor such as comic books was responsible for the demise of the national youth’s morality, Wetham’s book and the conversation it sparked in national newspapers was enough to put pressure on both the state and national governments to address the issue head-on. The first state to tackle the comics problem was New York, which established a censorship commission to curb the sale and distribution of violent comics. Other states soon followed.

Although these commissions, helped by local organizations, secured ordinances restricting the sale to those below the age of 13 and, at the least, moving the more violent comics toward the back of the comic book racks, the gains toward Wertham’s quest of outlawing the comic industry were marginal. The German-American psychiatrist’s most significant victory and a testament to how big the conversation of comic books corrupting the youth had become was the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency’s decision also to examine the comic book industry in its broader quest to find the impetus for the demoralization of America’s youth. The committee was scheduled to begin in the spring of 1954. The comic book hearings would ultimately take three days.

Wertham, who would be the committee’s most prominent witness, found allies in two senators willing to make comic books the center of the Federal government’s discussion on juvenile delinquency, New Jersey Republican Robert Hendrickson and Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver. While Hendrickson saw the anti-comic book crusade as just one piece of a larger puzzle responsible for the rise in youth crime, albeit one not any less important, Kefauver was more aligned with Wertham’s views.

Even still, unlike the psychiatrist, the Tennessee politician concentrated more on pinning the blame for the kids’ deteriorating morality on the media, including television and big production films. Rumors of political motivations and aspirations for higher office might have influenced Kefauver’s antics in the much-publicized hearings. It was also apparent that not everyone favored condemning a single industry, such as comic books, as the sole scapegoat for the issue, only complicating the Tennessee man’s aspirations. Thus, the televised hearings began with Senator Hendrickson looking for more complex issues behind juvenile delinquency while not discarding comic books as a potential influence; his counterpart went all in on the attack.

The Debate

One of the most heated and controversial statements made during the committee’s portion discussing the effects of comic books came from Senator Kefauver himself.

“Well, I hate to say that, Senator, but I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry. They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four before they can read,” he exclaimed to the shock of all those in the audience.

According to at least one source, exchanges such as these drew about 86 percent of operating television sets to tune into the hearings. Psychologists, child specialists, educators, law enforcement, and comic book publishers and their advocates testified for days in heated exchanges. Each day looked the same: witnesses poring over details of how comic books corrupt the youth, followed by analyzing specific issues and titles to showcase the brutality and immorality of the comic book industry.

The debate shifted from positive to negative as some of those called on to testify, including the comic book publishers, accompanied by several psychologists supporting the industry. For instance, when Wertham attacked Superman for encouraging children to bask in “sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again,” another psychologist, Dr. Lauretta Bender, countered with how reading the stories and making capes with children part of her occupational therapy helped them relieve stress.

More specialists on the stand agreed with the assertion that comic books needed to tone down their violence but not necessarily cease publication nor be solely blamed for juvenile delinquency. A committee memo now had acknowledged that Wertham represented “the extreme position among the psychiatrists and disapproved on psychiatric grounds of many crime comics which ‘the middle of the roaders’ do not believe make any significant contribution to juvenile delinquency.”

Even the casual observer could deduce that the conversation was turning toward the argument between causation and correlation, with no clear winner in sight. Kefauver continued his fight, but his superior, Senator Hendrickson, the chairman of the proceedings, was ready to move the committee toward another medium, television.

The situation began to resemble the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial. At the time, a staunch opponent of evolution, William Jennings Bryan, tried to turn the case of a high school science teacher violating the law by teaching evolution into a grander crusade to counter modern scientific thought with traditional religious beliefs. In the end, the judge failed to move the conversation into the broader debate about the role of science, religion, and education in American Society and instead adhered to the initial purpose of the case. He found that John T. Scopes indeed broke the state law banning the teaching of evolution. The teacher was fined $100, and the case ended.

In 1954, Senator Kefauver and Dr. Wertham watched a similar pattern unfold. Instead of influencing the subcommittee to wage war against the comic book industry, Hendrickson adhered to the committee’s original goals, spelled out in its name, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

The committee heard the case for comic books, and it was time to move on to other possible factors. After all, contrary to Wertham’s great hope for the hearings, this was never meant to be a single case about outlawing the comic book industry but about finding the reasons for juvenile delinquency.

No official position would be taken regarding banning comic books or their restrictions. Wertham, and partially Kefauver’s, great opportunity had slipped away. While the latter mission of getting media exposure continued as the conversation shifted to television and films, the former was crushed.

The day before the committee’s closing statements, the German-American psychologist wrote to his friend, “Very little is to be expected from the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. They have already come out against the law.” He then added, “I testified for them, but they had a great deal of testimony from comic-book businesses, interested people, and psychiatrists, so my testimony will probably not prevail.”

The subcommittee’s official published report, Senate Report No. 84-62, confirmed Wertham’s worries. Although the committee did criticize the industry for disseminating crime and horror books to children, it ultimately announced that “Juvenile delinquency does not result from a single cause.” The senators running the commission placed the responsibility of cleaning up the product on the media industry.

While the film industry already had its self-regulatory code of ethics, television networks and comic book publishers would now follow, spurred on by federal pressure. The societal emotion and frustration on the issue persevered past the hearings, prompting the Comic Magazine Association of America, the industry’s trade group, to create the Comics Code Authority in late 1954. The new self-regulatory body oversaw the comic books’ content and ensured it adhered to a strict set of guidelines. Its new restrictions included prohibitions on depictions of graphic violence, gore, sexual content, drug use, and references to the occult.

For the next fifty years, the Comic Code Authority (CCA), resulting from the 1954 US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, enabled the publishers to voluntarily self-regulate their content and thus avoid federal or state interference in their industry. Publishers had to submit their comics to the CCA for approval before distributing them to newsstands. The issues that did not receive the CCA’s seal of approval faced significant challenges in getting distributed, as many retailers refused to carry non-approved titles.

Dr. Wertham lived until 1981 to witness the Comic Code Authority partially fulfill his goals from the 1950s. The CAA effectively led to the demise of horror, crime, and some science book genres, as publishers opted to adhere to the code rather than risk financial losses.

The code remained in place for decades, although it gradually relaxed its restrictions as societal attitudes toward censorship evolved since the Senate hearings and paranoia of the 1950s. By 2000, the influence of the Comic Code Authority waned as publishers increasingly embraced more mature and diverse content. In 2011, the CAA officially ceased operations, pushing the legacy of a time when the federal government felt compelled to question comic books into the annals of history.