From: [b--ea--y] at [po-box.mcgill.ca] (bart)
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 15:23:40 -0500
Subject: The Kefauver Committee

- -Poster: [b--ea--y] at [po-box.mcgill.ca] (bart)

(This will be mostly speculative and will rely too heavily on an analogy
that may not be sufficient, but let's try it out regardless)


Charles on the 50s problem:
>I agree with the idea that
>the negative publicity generated by the Committee/_Seduction_ was
>incredibly pernicious in its effect on the public perception of
>comics.

When I was writing my thesis I went back and forth quite a bit on the
question of how much influence Wertham and Kefauver had on the ways in
which comics were viewed in the 1950s and it's a question which still nags
at me. Some days I agree with Charles that it was "incredibly pernicious"
while on others I feel that there was probably little that can actually be
laid specifically at their feet. Since it's difficult to go back and
actually ask these types of questions we're left with the traces left by
the media and contemporary equivalents to suss all this out.

Some of the things we do know include:

- -As Jeff pointed out the anti-comics crusade can be traced to the turn of
the century and was by no means new in 1950. This indicates at least a
small reservoir of ill-will directed at comics which W/K could have
capitalized on.

- -Wertham was widely published in the middlebrow press and had a potential
audience in the millions. He was printed by The Reader's Digest, at the
time the most read periodical in the world, which had already demonstrated
by the time the ability to place moral crusades in front of the public with
great success (the first American anti-smoking crusade was launched by the
Digest, as was the first car safety crusade). The Digest also made cheap
photostats of many of their articles available to civic-minded
organizations for public education (the most famous case being the
circulation in Boston of the PT-109 story, generally considered by JFK
biographers as having won him his first seat in Congress). I have no
indication that Wertham's piece was circulated, and I've read the archives,
but knowing what I do about the Digest it seems likely that this piece
would have been circulated beyond the magazine itself. One-third of all
adult Americans read the Digest in 1950 (amazing, eh?), so if there was an
impact from Wertham it was there, not in the book.

- -SotI was, however, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and was well-circulated.

- -The Kefauver hearings got national media play, but not huge media play.
Newsweek's story was a half-page buried in the back, for instance. There is
no indication that this was seen as important news in any contemporary
reporting I can recall.

- -Kefauver's biographers barely mention comics at all, seeing the hearings
as a minor event in his history that neither helped him nor hindered him.

- -Outside of a circle of 50s historians, communications scholars and comics
fans the hearings are barely remembered. Who remembers Kefauver today? Who
remembers McCarthy?

I think in trying to work all of this out it's useful to use a contemporary
example of a similar phenomena. Most people would call up the rock music
lyrics hearings and Tipper Gore but I don't think that analogy is very apt,
particularly since it recieved far greater news coverage than did the
comics hearings. To me the best current analogy lies with TV daytime
talk-shows. Let's consider:

- -William Bennett is Estes Kefauver. Bennett is regarded as a possible
aspirant for the Presidency, as was Kefauver at the time. He has a national
reputation similar to the one which Kefauver had, namely he is well-known
inside the beltway but only vaguely known outside it. Interestingly both
worked on organized crime at one point :)

- -Caroline Kennedy is Frederic Wertham. Yes, from that Kennedy clan.
Kennedy's book on privacy and talk-shows got similar press to Wertham's.
Reader's Digest is no longer the force it once was for disseminating ideas.
Instead Kennedy has appeared on Oprah (twice), a show with a similar
demographic to what RD once had and similar reach. She has been quoted in
TV Guide (the magazine that displaced RD as the best-selling periodical in
the US in 1980), and a vast number of more 'respectable' news sources.

- -Talk shows are comic books. Anti-talk show sentiment is not new, it has
been around as long as Donahue has, just as anti-comics sentiment predated
Wertham by decades. Both are widely regarded as essentially junky,
mass-produced crap for people who know no better. Both are (were) accused
of corrupting America's value system and appealing to the lowest common
denominator.

- -There has been a similar level of coverage: some national reporting, none
of it front-page worthy, various local op-ed pieces and feature stories.

- -Public activism on the issues are similar. The comic-book burnings of the
early 50s seem to have been as frequent as the picketing of the Jerry
Springer show is today.

- -The outcomes are similar: Comics publishers adopted a code, talk-show
producers got together in New York and decided to clean up their collective
act.

- -In forty years it is likely that few people will remember this little
dust-up, Caroline Kennedy or William Bennett, just as few Americans alive
in 1954 recall Kefauver and Wertham. The stories are just not significant
enough to warrant sustained public interest.

Now, ask yourself: Have William Bennett and Caroline Kennedy changed your
opinion of Geraldo Rivera? People who don't watch those shows at all have,
in all likelihood, continued to not watch those shows. People who do watch
them have, according to the Nielsen ratings, not stopped watching them. The
only discernible change in relation to talk-shows is that Oprah has pledged
the high road (as did Gilberton in 1954), and the rest have promised to "do
better", which is what comics publishers did in 1954.

If you feel, as I do, that the Bennett/Kennedy attack on talk-shows has had
little impact on the public perception of talk-shows (except bringing it
temporarily more forward and calcifying the positions slightly) then I
think it's difficult to believe that the Kefauver/Wertham critique of
comics in the 1950s did significantly more.

I think SotI solidified some anti-comics feelings that were already present
and floating about, just as Caroline Kennedy solidified the anti-talk-show
rhetoric, but I doubt that he won over a slew of new converts to his cause.

bart