Pop Culture Panics by Karen Sternheimer

Author:Karen Sternheimer [Sternheimer, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415748063
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Moral Crusaders: Teachers, Law Enforcement, Clergy

Around the same time as these shocking murders, educators, law enforcement officers, and other leaders claimed that comic books were an important cause of delinquency, and that delinquency was a new and growing problem. In a 1947 Christian Science Monitor article titled “Delinquency Traced to Four Potent Causes,” the superintendent of the National Civic League named movies, comics, alcohol, and cigarettes as important causes of juvenile crime.38 Rather than a new movement, crusaders against comic books were likely the same people who had already mobilized during crusades against movies and pinball. Sociologist Paul Lopes argues that the “general movement of censorship around obscenity and anti-Americanism” was in place at the time, ready to respond to comics having already focused on censoring books in the 1940s.39

Outraged by content, the national PTA called comic books a “menace to our children,” and that their creators had “abused the public trust,” and in 1948 created a resolution calling for further studies and reviewing committees.40 The dean of Fordham University’s school of education called comic books a “cancerous growth” that “ruined eyesight … and bred juvenile delinquency.”41

A Baltimore bishop railed against comic books, citing examples of recent youth crimes allegedly inspired by comic books:

Many of these new publications are most objectionable and most harmful. Teachers, psychiatrists, juvenile court officials and others dealing with the problems of the young are most positive in their statements concerning the baneful effects of many of these publications; to their influence they ascribe a considerable part of the present-day juvenile delinquency.42

Some law enforcement officers agreed; a resolution at the 1947 annual convention of the Fraternal Order of Police declared that comic books are “one of the contributing factors to the cause of juvenile delinquency,” and that the books were “detrimental to the youth of this nation” and “the nation’s mothers were helpless to protect their children from the ‘lurid’ booklets.”43

Earlier that year the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association drafted a resolution condemning comics, claiming “murder and assault are condoned” within their pages.44 PTA groups across the country also rallied against comics; a Chicago PTA member called them “evil forces” that “contribute to juvenile delinquency.”45 Educators told the Christian Science Monitor in 1948 that comics were a “menace to the morals of the nation’s youth.”46 Schools in New York City hosted debates where students could argue for or against the comics.47 A group of students at a Catholic school in upstate New York burned comic books at a highly-publicized bonfire in 1948.48 That same year, the Canadian Parliament banned all crime comic books.49

Everyday citizens voiced their concerns about comic books as well. “Bad reading … drives out good reading,” a parent wrote in a letter to the Hartford Courant, complaining that children “are doping over the comics.”50 “It is not by happenstance that so many juveniles get in trouble with the law,” another reader wrote in the Courant, explaining that “the younger generation has yet to learn self-control.”51 Another letter writer called comics “time wasters” and “breeders of juvenile delinquency.

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