"The Eye Is The Window for the Soul:" Essays on the American Anti-Comics Movement

Abstract

For almost twenty years, from the advent of superhero comics in 1939 to the end of the 1950s, comic books were a profound cultural phenomenon in midcentury America. Millions of Americans read comics, child and adult alike, but comics retained a perception as a medium consumed primarily by children. A powerful anti-comic book movement arose to combat their influence because of perceived threats to the wellbeing and development of children, its members arguing at once for their regulation, restriction, and elimination. In modern historical memory, the movement often reduces to a “classical phase” that foregrounds only the sensationalist critiques of Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist, and the governmental investigation of comic books by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. Though Wertham was undoubtedly the most prominent critic of comic books and the hearings were the high-water mark of the anti-comics movement, this dissertation contends that reducing the entire movement to these two points obscures both the longer antidemocratic origins of the midcentury “decency” movements and marginalizes other perspectives and critiques of the anti-comics movement that demonstrate that views of comics at midcentury were hardly monolithic. This dissertation argues overall that the primary driver of the anti-comics movement was a deep-seated fear of images and iconocentric culture among a generation raised primarily on the written word -- Americans who feared that the epistemological shifts occurring in the production and consumption of culture would threaten their legitimacy as parents, teachers, ministers, and politicians. These shifts dovetailed with the ramped-up antidemocratic tendencies of the Cold War, whose logic came to define the actions of the movement during its later years. This study also argues that the anti-comics movement was a clear and important aspect of domestic Cold War culture. Through primary source investigations of organized right-wing Catholic censorship organizations, local-level civic decency groups, government documents and legal materials, the writings of public intellectuals, and nonprofit organizations, this study aims to present an expanded portrait of an often-misremembered period of repression in American history.