2
" In its conclusion, the report argued, "The wholesale condemnation of all comics magazines is one of the worst mistakes of some of the critics. The fact is both sides are right. The books are not all bad, as the more extreme critics say; nor are all good, as some of their publishers and defenders content. Like all other creative products, they must be judged individually. And that is what most critics, parents, and public officials have failed to do."
Still, the city council found a third of published comics to be "offensive, objectionable, and undesirable," and, on February 2, 1949, it appointed a board to monitor news dealers' compliance with a blacklist of titles. "
― David Hajdu , The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
4
" All of our testimony from psychiatrists and children themselves show that it's very upsetting, that it has a bad moral effect, and that it is directly responsible for a substantial amount of juvenile delinquency and child crime." In fact, both the expert testimony and the documentary evidence submitted at the hearings varied significantly in their judgments, and the committee spoke with no children; it had set a policy of precluding the testimony of minors.
The writer of the program, A. J. Fenady, had not seen a transcript of the hearings before preparing Coates's questions and "basically threw the guy some softballs," he said, because "[Kefauver] wanted to use this soapbox to run for president" in the 1956 election. "The comic-book scare was the big thing he had going for him," Fenady recalled, "and he knew how to use it. "
― David Hajdu , The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
7
" Strangely, “Horror in the Nursery” never mentioned that the location of Wertham’s research site was Harlem. The first sentence of the piece set the scene: “In the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church parish house in uptown New York … ,” evoking associations with WASPy Anglicanism without a hint of how far uptown the Lafargue Clinic was. The text never mentioned Negro culture or, for that matter, race or ethnicity in any context; and all the children in the photographs, which were staged, were white. Wertham, interviewed for the article prior to the Supreme Court ruling on Winters v. New York, anticipated objections to his criticism of comics on First Amendment grounds. Still, he called for legislative action. “The publishers will raise a howl about freedom of speech and of the press,” he told Crist: Nonsense. We are dealing with the mental health of a generation—the care of which we have left too long in the hands of unscrupulous persons whose only interest is greed and financial gain … If those responsible refuse to clean up the comic-book market—and to all appearances most of them do, the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores. "
― David Hajdu , The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America