In Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, Bart Beaty argues, “The conscious and systematic exclusion of Fredric Wertham’s conception of media effects as part of deliberate strategies to codify research into a coherent field of mass culture studies… Rather, structural biases can be located in the specific social processes through which mass media research was brought into professional and academic realms by scholars working in concert with funding agencies, the broadcasting industry, and governmental committees investigating the effects of the mass media” (pg. 7). He continues, “By addressing Wertham’s specific objections to American crime comic books in the postwar period, it is possible to come to terms with the particular reasons why his work would later be dismissed” (pg. 12). Beaty bases his interpretation of Wertham on the doctor’s own writing and activism both before and following the moral panic surrounding comic books, drawing extensively on unpublished work. For his comic book historiography, he uses the work of Bradford Wright and Amy Kiste Nyberg.
Examining studies of mass culture, Beaty writes, “The argument that seeks to displace the origins of the mass culture debate far away from the traditions of American pluralism and democracy continues to find safe havens. The historiography of comic books, for instance, tends to dismiss Wertham’s critique of that industry as foreign to American ways of conceptualizing the mass media. Wertham’s view is dismissed as alien – specifically European or Germanic – critique at odds with American postwar sensibilities” (pg. 51). Discussing violence, Beaty writes, “For Wertham, good literature and art obviously did not need to contain violence, and when it did contain violence, it should be circumspect” (pg. 71). This led Wertham to praise American folk art above other forms. Wertham’s concern with violence and its impact led him to act as a witness on behalf of Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 and to contribute to a Delaware case that was combined with Brown v. Board of Education, in which he argued that segregation caused psychological damage to African American children and thus was not separate but equal (pg. 82).
Discussing comics, Beaty situates Wertham within a trend of anti-comic book publication in the 1950s, rather than singling him out as driving it. Of the doctor himself, Beaty writes, “Wertham wished to equate the fight to end segregation with the fight to clean up the comic book industry…Wertham saw both of these social crises as problems for social psychiatry that could be dealt with through principles imported from mental hygiene intended to secure the public health by preventing future harm. Both segregation and comic books, Wertham believed, were part of a larger mosaic that contributed to social inequalities” (pg. 129). Unlike others who linked fears of juvenile delinquency with a belief that aggression was a natural trait, Wertham believed it developed from external stimuli. According to Beaty, “Wertham’s conclusions about the effects of comic books, conversely, need to be understood as relating to his politically motivated and progressive ideas about the social uses of psychiatry and the possibilities of postwar liberalism in the face of an overwhelming insistence on individualistic explanations of human behavior” (pg. 143). Following the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings and the creation of the Comic Book Code, the public shifted its attention to television. Beaty writes, “As early as 1950, critics had compared comic books and television as the mutually destructive twins of juvenile-targeted mass culture” (pg. 165). Further, “The rise of television in the late 1950s and 1960s clearly displaced comic books, not only as a form of entertainment for children but also as a source for concern among parents and cultural commentators” (pg. 165).
Turning to media studies, Beaty writes, “The field of mass communication research initially established itself as a unique tradition in the postwar period by narrowing its methodological scope and excluding competing and contradictory voices and approaches from the field. Wertham and the clinical method were one such exclusion” (pg. 171). Wertham turned his attention to fanzines, where, according to Beaty, he “saw the study of fanzines as an extension of his lifelong work, which was concerned with listening carefully to what children had to say about the world in which they lived” (pg. 189). In this way, “Wertham concluded that fanzines occupied a space in the history of American culture that had been unfairly overlooked by historians, psychologists, and communications scholars” (pg. 190). Beaty concludes, “Comic fans, still caught up in the desire to earn respect for the medium, have cast Wertham as the villain who doomed comic books to a permanently lower status. If comics were not respected before Wertham, they were at least popular. After Wertham, they were neither” (pg. 207). Finally, Beaty argues, “By returning Wertham to the historiography of the media-effects paradigm and critically assessing the unique foundation of his arguments against comic books, the man and the medium gain much deserved recognition for their importance in the codification of new forms of mass culture in the postwar era” (pg. 208). ( )