Anti Comic Propoganda 2 2

[Fantastic Thor]

THIS WEBSITE has numerous anti-comic book related material.

 

Anyone know if this website was created by someone here on the boards?

 

Yes. I own the site, but it's had many contributors on & off the boards.

Very nice site! (thumbs u

 

excellent site !

[esquirecomics]

[esquirecomics]

[esquirecomics]

[esquirecomics]

[esquirecomics]

One of the first comic book spinner racks involving the Code:

 

 

[welcomebackpotter]

This was printed in 1943. There is a stamp on the back that says it is only to be sold at St. Aloysius in Detroit.

 

Anyone else see the Irony?

 

[Mr 9.8]

This was printed in 1943. There is a stamp on the back that says it is only to be sold at St. Aloysius in Detroit.

 

Anyone else see the Irony?

 

Using a comic book to talk about the evils of comic books.

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

The New York Times

January 5, 1898

 

Albany, Jan 4--Senator Ellsworth, the leader in the upper house, who introduced the Anti-Cartoon bill last winter, and Senator Grady of Tammany Hall, who was one of its most ardent supporters, have joined forces to push the measure at the coming session, and anticipate no difficulty in securing its passage by the Senate. The principal fight against the bill will be made in the Assembly, and the opponents of such legislation predict that it will be defeated.

 

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

There was some guy who published a response to Wertham's SOTI in a sociology journal back in 1959 that ripped him a new one for his highly questionable methodology. His impressive critique of Wertham's work didn't quite catch the interest of the media back in the day.

 

I can post the article tomorrow if anybody is interested.

[Mr 9.8]

There was some guy who published a response to Wertham's SOTI in a sociology journal back in 1959 that ripped him a new one for his highly questionable methodology. His impressive critique of Wertham's work didn't quite catch the interest of the media back in the day.

 

I can post the article tomorrow if anybody is interested.

Please do.

[esquirecomics]

There was some guy who published a response to Wertham's SOTI in a sociology journal back in 1959 that ripped him a new one for his highly questionable methodology. His impressive critique of Wertham's work didn't quite catch the interest of the media back in the day.

 

I can post the article tomorrow if anybody is interested.

Please do.

 

+1

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

There was some guy who published a response to Wertham's SOTI in a sociology journal back in 1959 that ripped him a new one for his highly questionable methodology. His impressive critique of Wertham's work didn't quite catch the interest of the media back in the day.

 

I can post the article tomorrow if anybody is interested.

Please do.

 

+1

 

I rearranged the footnotes to be endnotes for ease of reading while scrolling.

 

 

Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1949), pp. 195-205

 

THE COMICS AND DELINQUENCY:

CAUSE OR SCAPEGOAT

Frederic M. Thrasher

 

Frederic M. Thrasher is Professor of Education at New York University, member of the Attorney General's Conference on Juvenile Delinquency, former secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, on the board of directors of the National Board of Review, and author of The Gang.

 

Expert students of mankind have always tried to explain human behavior in terms of their own specialities. This is particularly true in the field of adult and juvenile delinquency, where anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists have been guilty of a long series of erroneous attempts to attribute crime and delinquency to some one human trait or environmental condition. These monistic theories of delinquency causation illustrate a particularistic fallacy which stems from professional bias or a lack of scientific logic and research, or both.

 

Most recent error of this type is that of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham who claims in effect that the comics are an important factor in causing juvenile delinquency. 1 This extreme position which is not substantiated by any valid research, is not only contrary to considerable current psychiatric thinking, but also disregards tested research procedures which have discredited numerous previous monistic theories of delinquency causation. Wertham's dark picture of the influence of comics is more forensic than it is scientific and illustrates a dangerous habit of projecting our social frustrations upon some specific trait of our culture, which becomes a sort of "whipping boy" for our failure to control the whole gamut of social breakdown.2

 

One of the earliest of these monistic errors was that of Lombroso and his followers of the so-called Italian School of Criminology,3 who asserted there was a born criminal type with certain "stigmata of degeneracy" which enabled the criminal to be distinguished from normal people. These included such characteristics as a cleft palate, a low re- treating forehead, a peculiarly shaped head, nose, or jaw, large protruding ears, low sensitivity to pain, lack of beard in males, obtuseness of the senses, etc. These "criminal traits" were explained as due to a reversion to a hypothetical “savage" (atavism), or to physical and nervous deterioration. Accompanying the physical divergencies in some unexplained manner always went a predisposition to delinquency. Exponents of this theory in its extreme form have even claimed that different types of criminals exhibit different sets of physical anomalies.

 

More rigorous investigators shortly discredited this naive theory. One of these was England’s distinguished Charles Goring. He rejected Lombroso’s conclusion because it was based upon an inadequate sample of the criminal population, chiefly the inmates of an institution for the criminally insane. As Von Hentig succinctly points out, only "minute sections of crime are found in court or in prison, a certain proportion in institutions for the criminal- ly insane. Crime's most numerous and dangerous representatives are never seen by a judge, a warden, or a psychiatrist."' No valid conclusion concerning delinquents and criminals as a whole can be drawn from the small proportion of their number appearing in clinics or found in institutions.

 

Goring rejected Lombroso's theory further, and more importantly, because it ignored the possibility that the traits might be as prevalent among law abiding citizens. Goring was an exponent of the elementary scientific technique which insists on the use of a control group, a simple yet essential statistical maneuver designed to protect the scholar and the public against fallacious conclusions about human behavior. The use of the control group as applied to the study of the causation of delinquency simply means that the investigator must make sure the trait or condition to which he ascribes delinquency is not as prevalent among non-delinquents as among delinquents.

 

When Goring studied not merely the inmates of prisons, but a representative sampling of the unincarcerated population, he found “stigmata" to occur no more frequently among prisoners than among people at large. Lombroso's theory was knocked into a cocked hat.

 

Students of delinquent and criminal behavior were slow, however, to heed the lesson implicit in the collapse of Lombroso's theory. Continuing to seek a simple monistic explanation of anti-social behavior, repeating Lombroso's errors of inadequate sampling and lack of control, they have attributed the bulk of delinquency to mental deficiency, to focal infections, to lesions of the nervous system, to psychopathic personality, to poverty, to broken homes, to one after another of the characteristics of the delinquent or his environment.

 

More rigorous sampling and control have forced the abandonment of these one-sided explanations. The assertion of Tredgold and Goddard, 6 for example, that mental deficiency is the major cause of anti-social behavior was based on institutional samples of the delinquent population. It should be reiterated that such samples are highly selective, since more intelligent criminals are less frequenting. Indeed adequately controlled studies, such as those of Carl Murchison,7 E. A. Doll8 and Simon H. Tulchin have conclusively shown that low intelligence of itself is not an important factor in producing delinquency.

 

Sociological studies have shown marked correlations between poverty and delinquency. But again the sample is selective, biased by the fact that official statistics fail to re- cord the large number of delinquencies committed in more prosperous sections of the community; and again one is given pause by the necessity of accounting for the large numbers of children in the most dire economic need who do not become delinquent. As for broken homes, the studies of Slawson 0 in New York, and of Shaw and McKay"'1 in Chicago, have shown that the broken home in itself cannot be considered a very significant factor in explaining delinquency.

 

More recently it has been asserted that motion pictures are a major cause of delinquency. The controversy over the truth of this assertion closely parallels the present controversy over the role of comic books in the causation of anti- social behavior. The Motion Picture Research Council, with the aid of a research grant from the Payne Fund, and in cooperation with a number of universities, undertook a series of objective studies of the question. 12

 

The most conclusive of these studies as it bears upon the relationship of the motion picture to the causation of delinquency, was conducted at New York University by Paul G. Cressey."3 Cressey's findings, based upon thou- sands of observations under controlled conditions, showed that the movies did not have any significant effect in producing delinquency in the crime breeding area in which the study was made. Cressey readily admits that boys and young men, when suitably predisposed, sometimes have utilized techniques of crime seen in the movies, have used gangster films to stimulate susceptible ones toward crime, and on occasion in their own criminal actions have idealized themselves imaginatively as possessing as attractive a personality, or as engaging in as romantic activities as gangster screen heroes. 14 Cressey is careful to follow this statement, however, with the explanation that he does not mean that movies have been shown to be a "cause" of crime, that he does not mean that "good" boys are enticed into crime by gangster films, that he merely means what he has said that boys and young men responsive to crime portrayals have been found on occasion to use ideas and tech- niques seen at the movies. This type of analytical thinking is largely absent from the findings of such critics of the comics as Fredric Wertham.

 

Furthermore Cressey found that urban patterns of vice, gambling, racketeering and gangsterism, including large components of violence, were so familiar to the children of this district that movies seemed rather tame by comparison. That this section of New York is typical of the housands of other delinquency areas in American cities cannot be doubted. 5 It is from these areas that the large proportion of official juvenile delinquents come and there is no reason to doubt that the role of the motion picture in producing delinquency is any greater in these areas in other American cities than it was found to be in New York.

 

The behavior scientist has learned that the causes of anti- social behavior - like the causes of all behavior - are complex. Delinquent and criminal careers can be under- stood only in terms of the interaction of many factors. Evaluation of their relative influence demands research based upon the most rigorous sampling and control, and re- quires the utmost objectivity in the interpretation of the data the research yields.

 

Let us now turn to researches dealing with the influence of comics. After surveying the literature we are forced to conclude such researches do not exist. 16 The current alarm over the evil effects of comic books rests upon nothing more substantial than the opinion and conjecture of a num- ber of psychiatrists, lawyers and judges. True, there is a large broadside of criticism from parents who resent the comics in one way or another or whose adult tastes are of- fended by comics stories and the ways in which they are presented. These are the same types of parents who were once offended by the dime novel, and later by the movies and the radio. Each of these scapegoats for parental and community failures to educate and socialize children has in turn given way to another as reformers have had their interest diverted to new fields in the face of facts that could not be gainsaid.

 

As an example, let us examine the position of the leading crusader against the comics, New York's psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham's attitude and arguments in condemning the comics are very similar to those of the earlier critics of the movies. Reduced to their simplest terms, these arguments are that since the movies and comics are enjoyed by a very large number of children, and since a large component of their movie and comics diet is made up of crime, violence, horror, and sex, the children who see the movies and read the comics are necessarily stimulated to the performance of delinquent acts, cruelty, violence and undesirable sex behavior. This of course is the same type of argument that has been one of the major fallacies of all our monistic errors in attempting to explain crime and delinquency in the past.

 

Wertham's reasoning is a bit more complicated and pretentious. His disclaims the belief that delinquency can have a single cause and claims to adhere to the concept of multiple and complex causation of delinquent behavior. But in effect his arguments do attribute a large portion of juvenile

offenses to the comics. More pointedly he maintains that the comics in a complex maze of other factors are frequent- ly the precipitating cause of delinquency.

 

We may criticize Wertham's conclusions on many grounds, but the major weakness of his position is that it is not supported by research data. His findings presented for the first time in Collier's magazine" are said to be the result of two years' study conducted by him and eleven other psychiatrists and social workers at the Lafargue Clinic in New York's Negro Harlem. In this article the claim is made that numerous children both delinquent and non-delinquent, rich and poor were studied and that the results of these studies led to the major conclusion that the effect of comic books is "definitely and completely harmful."

 

That Wertham's approach to his problem is forensic rather than scientific is illustrated by the way in which his findings are presented in the Collier's article. Countering his claim that the effect of comics is definitely and completely harmful are statements in this article that comics do not automatically cause delinquency in every reader, that comic books alone cannot cause a child to become delinquent, that there are books of well-known comics which "make life better by making it merrier" and others "which make it clear even to the dullest mind, that crime never pays," and that there are "seemingly harmless comic books," but "nobody knows with any degree of exactness what their percentage is."

 

A further illustration of this forensic technique is the way in which he introduces extraneous facts and statements which by implication he links with his thesis that the comics are a major factor in causing delinquency and emotional disturbance in children. An example is New York's

 

Deputy Police Commissioner Nolan's statement that "the anti-social acts of the juvenile delinquents of today are in many instances more serious and even of a more violent nature than those committed by youth in the past." Even if this statement could be proved, there is not the slightest evidence, except Wertham's unsupported opinion, that the increase is due to the reading of comic books. Wertham then cites a series of sensational child crimes headlined in the press (not his own cases), which he imputes to the comics without any evidence at all that the juvenile offend- ers involved ever read or were interested in comic books. A final example of the improper use of extraneous material is the statement in the Collier's article that "Children's Court records show that delinquent youngsters are almost five years retarded in reading ability," and Wertham is quoted as saying that "Children who don't read well tend to delinquency." These statements are unsupported, but even if true, there is not a scintilla of evidence that the reading retardation or disability of delinquents is due to reading comics. It is quite likely that the percentage of reading disability among delinquents was equally high or higher before the comic book was invented. As a matter of fact there are in this article no data which could be accept- ed by any person trained in research without documentation.

 

Wertham asserts that the content of the comics is almost universally one of crime, violence, horror, "emphasis of sexual characteristics" which "can lead to erotic fixations of all kinds," and "sadistic-masochistic mixture of pleasure and violence." Of the millions of comic books which Wertham claims deal with crime and brutality, he is con- tent to rest his case on the selection of a few extreme and offensive examples which he makes no attempt to prove are typical. No systematic inventory of comic book content is presented, such as that compiled by Edgar Dale for the movies in 1935. to Without such an inventory these conjec- tures are prejudiced and worthless.

 

Wertham's major claims rest only on a few selected and extreme cases of children's deviate behavior where it is said the comics have played an important role in producing delinquency. Although Wertham has claimed in his various writings that he and his associates have studied thousands of children, normal and deviate, rich and poor, gifted and mediocre, he presents no statistical summary of his inves- tigations. He makes no attempt to substantiate that his illustrative cases are in any way typical of all delinquents who read comics, or that the delinquents who do not read the comics do not commit similar types of offenses. He claims to use control groups, (non-delinquents) but he does not describe these controls, how they were set up, how they were equated with his experimental groups (delinquents) to assure that the difference in incidence of comic book-reading, if any, was due to anything more than a se- lective process brought about by the particular area in which he was working.

 

The way in which Wertham and his associates studied his cases is also open to question. The development of case- studies as scientific data is a highly technical procedure and is based on long experience among social scientists in anthropology, psychology, and sociology. 20 An adequate case study, which involves much more than a few inter- views, gives a complete perspective of the subject's biological, psychological and social development, for only in this manner can a single factor such as comic book-reading be put in its proper place in the interacting complex of be- havior-determining factors. 21 On the basis of the materials presented by Wertham with reference to children's experience with the comics, it is doubtful if he has met the requirements of scientific case-study or the criteria for handling life history materials. He does not describe his techniques or show how they were set up so as to safeguard his findings against invalid conclusions.

 

Were the subjects he interviewed studied with the same meticulous care employed by a Healy or a Shaw? Did he get complete data on them? Were the circumstances surrounding the interviews such that the subjects gave honest answers to the questions asked by Wertham and his associates? Were safeguards set up to control individual differences in the interview techniques of the eleven different investigators? Even if it is assumed that such subjects will or can give a correct picture of the role of the comics in their lives, how are we to be sure that the interviewers did not ask leading questions and stimulate the responses of the subjects to reply along a preordained line of thinking or imagining? Unless and until Wertham's methods of investigation are described, and demonstrated to be valid and reliable, the scientific worker in this field can place no credence in his results.

 

In conclusion, it may be said that no acceptable evidence has been produced by Wertham or anyone else for the conclusion that the reading of comic magazines has, or has not a significant relation to delinquent behavior. Even the editors of Collier's in which Wertham's results were first presented are doubtful of his conclusions, as is indicated by a later editorial appearing in that magazine in which they say:

 

"Juvenile delinquency is the product of pent-up frustrations, stored up resentments and bottled up fears. It is not the product of cartoons or captions. But the comics are a handy, obvious uncomplicated scapegoat. If the adults who crusade against them would only get as steamed up over such basic causes of delinquency as parental ignorance, in- difference and cruelty, they might discover that the comics are no more a menace than Treasure Island or Jack the Giant Killer."22

 

The danger inherent in the present controversy, in which forensic argument replaces research, is that having set up a satisfactory "whipping boy" in comic magazines, we fail to face and accept our responsibility as parents and as citizens for providing our children with more healthful family and community living, a more constructive developmental experience.

 

 

End Notes

'Wertham, who is a prominent New York psychiatrist, has stated his position on the comics in the following articles: "The Comics-Very Funny I" Saturday Review of Literature, May 29, 1948; "What Your Children Think Of You," This Week, October 10, 1948; "Are Comic Books Harmful to Children?" Friends Intelligencer, July 10, 1948; "The Betrayal of Childhood: Comic Books," Proceeding of the Annual Conference of Correction, American Prison Association, 1948; "The Psychopathology of Comic Books," (a sym- posium) American Journal of Psychotherapy, July 1948; and "What Are Comic Books ?" (a study course for parents), National Parent Teacher Magazine, March, 1949.

2 Cf. Katherine Clifford, "Common Sense About Comics," Parents Magazine, October, 1948. anded later into three volumes. See Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies. Translated by H. P. Horton. Boston: Little, Brown, 1911.

4Hans Von Hentig, Crime: Causes and Conditions. New York: McGraw Hill, 1947.

5 Charles Goring, The English Convict. London: Stationary Office, 1913.

6A. F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency, New York: William Wood, 1914; and Henry H. Goddard, Feeblemindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Macmillan, 1914

7 "American White Criminal Intelligence," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, August and November, 1924.

8 "The Comparative Intelligence of Prisoners," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, August 1920.

9 Simon H. Tulchin, Intelligence and Crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.

10John Slawson, The Delinquent Boy. Boston: Badger, 1926.

11 Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, Social Factors in Juvenile De- linquency. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1931, pp. 261-284.

12 For a history of this controversy, the results of the Payne Fund Studies, and a critical evaluation of them, see: Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children, New York, Macmillan, 1933; Martin Quigley, Decency in Motion Pictures, New York, Macmillan, 1935; Frederic M. Thrasher, "Edu-

cation Versus Censorship," Journal of Educational Sociology, January, 1940; W. W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary New York Macmillan, 1933; Mortimer J. Adler, Art and Prudence, New York, Longman's Greene, 1937.

13 Paul G. Cressey, The Role of the Motion Picture in an Interstitial Area. (Unpublished manuscript on deposit in the New York University library.)

14 Paul G. Cressey, "The Motion Picture Experience as Modified by Social Background and Personality,” American Sociological Review, August 1938, p. 517.

15 See Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, "Report on Social Factors in Juvenile Delinquency," National Commission on Law Observance and En- forcement, (No. 13, Vol. II), Washington: Government Printing Office; Delinquency Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929; and-,

Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.

16 There is the possible exception of the study of Katherine M. Wolfe and Marjorie Fiske at Columbia University. "The Children Talk About Comics," published by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton, Communications Research 1948-1949, New York: Harper, 1949. This study, which was based on a small number of cases, was inconclusive.

17 Wertham's position was stated in some detail in an article by Judith Crist, "Horror in the Nursery," Collier's, March 27, 1948. See also material by Wertham cited earlier in this article.

18 Loc. cit., pp. 22, 2

19 Edgar Dale, The Content of Motion Pictures. New York: MacMillan, 1935.

20 See Paul Horst, et al., The Prediction of Personal Adjustment. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1941, especially "The Prediction of Individual Behavior from Case Studies," pp. 183-249; Gordon W. Allport, The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science, New York: Social

Science Research Council, 1942; and Louis Gottschalk, Clyde Kluckhohn and Robert Angell, The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology and Sociology. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1945.

21 Examples of case studies are to be found in the earlier studies of William Healy and Augusta F. Bronner in Case Studies, Series I, Nos. 1-20, Boston: Judge Baker Foundation, 1923, and in the more complete studies of Clifford R. Shaw, et al, The Jackroller, The Natural History of a Delinquent Career,

and Brothers in Crime. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1930, 1931, and 1938.

22 "The Old Folks Take it Harder than Junior," Collier's, July 9, 1949.

 

[welcomebackpotter]

This is a page from the anti comics booklet I previously posted. Has anybody seen the ad written about in the third paragraph? Could these "novelties" have been that bad?

[SOTIcollector]

I'll have to dig out the ad I'm thinking of... I'm thinking this might be one of the ads for the Johnson-Smith Co. Sure, it's obscene if you consider x-ray glasses that don't work and whoopee cushions obscene. I'll see if I can find one this weekend and see if it matches the description.

[SOTIcollector]

Yup, I'd say it's the catalog for Johnson Smith Co. In the ads on the back covers of Action 1 and 'Tec 27, their catalog was hundreds of pages and cost only 3 cents... unless you wanted the cloth bound copy for a quarter. I didn't find a reference to the "9000 items" on either of those ads, but since their ads were more ubiquitous than the Charles Atlas ads in the 50's and 60's, I'm sure somebody with a much larger collection than mine would be able to find a Johnson Smith ad that exactly matches the description in the pamphlet you have.

 

Although we'd probably find many of Sister Mary Clare's "obscene" items to be tame by today's standards, some of them are still rather shocking. Check out this page devoted to them:

 

Darwinscans Johnson Smith page

[SOTIcollector]

This is a page from the anti comics booklet I previously posted. Has anybody seen the ad written about in the third paragraph? Could these "novelties" have been that bad?

Thanks to Chuck Gower's latest sales thread, I found a version of the Johnson Smith ad that fits the description in this book. Check out the back of Jungle #8:

 

[Ares]

Any New additions to the list?