TESTIMONY OF DR. FREDERIC WERTHAM, PSYCHIATRIST, DIRECTOR, LAFARGUE CLINIC, NEW YORK, N.Y.

The CHAIRMAN. Doctor, do you have a prepared statement?

Dr. WERTHAM. I have a statement of about 20 or 25 minutes.

The CHAIRMAN. All right, Doctor, you proceed in your own manner. . . .

FREDERIC WERTHAM, M.D., NEW YORK, N.Y.

Specializing in neurology and psychiatry since 1922.

Certified as specialist in both neurology and psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Have also served as examiner on the board in brain anatomy and psychiatry.

Director, Lafargue Clinic*, New York City. (*The first outpatient psychiatric clinic in the community of Harlem)

Consulting psychiatrist, department of hospitals, Queens Medical Center, New York City.

Psychiatric consultant and lecturer, Juvenile Aid Bureau of the New York City Police Department. . . .

Director, Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center (functioning under the magistrates court), 1948–51.

Senior psychiatrist, New York City Department of Hospitals, 1932–52. . . .

Taught psychiatry, psychotherapy, and brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Postgraduate studies in London, Vienna, Paris, and Munich. Invited to read scientific papers at the Medical-Psychological Society of Paris and the Research Institute of Psychiatry in Munich.

President of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, 1943–51; coeditor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy. . . .

PUBLICATIONS

The Brain as an Organ (Macmillan, 1934), used in medical schools throughout the world, a textbook of brain pathology.

Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (New York, 1941, and London, 1948).

The Show of Violence (Doubleday, 1949).

The Catathymic Crisis (1937), description of a new mental disorder now included in the leading textbooks of psychiatry.

Seduction of the Innocent (Rinehart, 1954). . . .

Dr. WERTHAM. . . . In 1936 I was appointed director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic in Bellevue.

In 1939 I was appointed director of psychiatric services at the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Queens General Hospital.

In 1946 I organized and started the first psychiatric clinic in Harlem, a volunteer staff. A few years later I organized the Quaker Emergency Mental Hygiene Clinic, which functioned as a clinic for the treatment of sex offenders under the magistrates court of New York.

These are my main qualifications. I have taught psychiatry in [Johns] Hopkins [University] and New York University. . . .

I am a fellow of the New York Academy and a member of the three national neuropsychiatric associations, the American Psychiatric Association and American Neurological Association and American Association of Neuropathologists. . . .

My testimony will be in four parts. First, what is in comic books? How can one classify them clinically?

Secondly, are there any bad effects of comic books?

I may say here on this subject there is practically no controversy.

Anybody who has studied them and seen them knows that some of them have bad effects.

The third problem is how far reaching are these bad effects? There is a good deal of controversy about that.

A fourth part is: Is there any remedy? . . .

My opinion is based on clinical investigations which I started in the winter of 1945 and 1946. They were carried out not by me alone, but with the help of a group of associates, psychiatrists, child psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, social workers, psychiatric social workers, remedial reading teachers, probation officers, and others. . . .

We have come to the conclusion that crime comic books are comic books that depict crime and we have found that it makes no difference whether the locale is western, or Superman or space ship or horror, if a girl is raped she is raped whether it is in a space ship or on the prairie. . . .

Now, nobody versed in any of this type of clinical research would claim that comic books alone are the cause of juvenile delinquency. It is my opinion, without any reasonable doubt, and without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency. . . .

Now, the question arises, and we have debated it in our group very often and very long, why does the normal child spend so much time with this smut and trash. We have this baseball game which I would like you to scrutinize in detail. (Wertham submits a comic book as evidence.)

They play baseball with a dead man’s head. Why do they do that? . . .

It is a baseball game where they play baseball with a man’s head; where the man’s intestines are the baselines. All his organs have some part to play.

The torso of this man is the chest protector of one of the players. There is nothing left to anybody’s morbid imagination. . . .

Now, we ask the question: Why does the normal child do that? I would say that psychology knows the answer to that.

If you consult, as we have done, the first modern scientific psychologist who lived a long time ago, you will find the answer. That psychologist was St. Augustine. This was long before the comic book era, of course, but he describes in detail how when he was a very, very young man he was in Rome and he saw these very bloody, sadistic spectacles all around him, where the gladiators fought each other with swords and daggers, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t want any part of it.

But there was so much going on and his friends went and finally he went and he noticed, as he expresses it, that he became unconsciously delighted with it and he kept on going.

In other words, he was tempted, he was seduced by this mass appeal, and he went.

I think it is exactly the same thing, if the children see these kinds of things over and over again, they can’t go to a dentist, they can’t go to a clinic, they can’t go to a ward in a hospital, everywhere they see this where women are beaten up, where people are shot and killed, and finally they become, as St. Augustine said, unconsciously delighted. . . .

Mr. Chairman, as long as the crime comic books industry exists in its present forms there are no secure homes. . . . I think that comic books primarily, and that is the greatest harm they do, cause a great deal of ethical confusion. . . .

I would like to point out to you one other crime comic book which we have found to be particularly injurious to the ethical development of children and those are the Superman comic books. They arouse in children phantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune. We have called it the Superman complex.

In these comic books the crime is always real and the Superman’s triumph over good is unreal. Moreover, these books like any other, teach complete contempt of the police.

For instance, they show you pictures where some preacher takes two policemen and bangs their heads together or to quote from all these comic books you know, you can call a policeman cop and he won’t mind, but if you call him copper that is a derogatory term and these boys we teach them to call policemen coppers. . . .

In many comic books the whole point is—that evil triumphs; that you can commit a perfect crime. . . .

There are stories where the police captain kills his wife and has an innocent man tortured into confessing in a police station and again is triumphant in the end.

I want to make it particularly clear that there are whole comic books in which every single story ends with the triumph of evil, with a perfect crime unpunished and actually glorified. . . .

Formerly to impair the morals was a minor was a punishable offense. It has now become a mass industry. I will say that every crime of delinquency is described in detail and that if you teach somebody the technique of something you, of course, seduce him into it. . . .

Nobody would believe that you teach a boy homosexuality without introducing him to it. The same thing with crime. . . .

It is my conviction that if these comic books go to as many millions of children as they go to, that among all these people who have these fantasies, there are some of them who carry that out in action. . . .

(In response to a question about the circulation of comic books) . . .

The minimum is 300,000.

Senator KEFAUVER. Is that a month?

Dr. WERTHAM. This is only one comic book. In order to make any kind of profit the publisher must print about 300,000 copies.

In other words, when you see a comic book you can always assume that more than 300,000 copies of this particular comic book have been printed.

In other words, you would not go far wrong if you assumed that this comic book is read by half a million children, for this reason, that when they are through with it and have read it, they sell it for 6 cents and 5 cents and then sell it for 4 cents and 2 cents.

Then you can still trade it.

So these comic books have a long, long life. We have studied this market. We know there is a great deal of this trading going on all over. . . .

Now, this leads me to the third avenue where they do harm. That is, they do harm by discouraging children. Mr. Chairman, many of these comic books, crime-comic books, and many of the other ones have ads which discourage children and give them all kinds of inferiority feelings. They are threatened with pimples. They worry the preadolescent kids about their breaths. They sell them all kinds of medicines and gadgets and even comic books like this one, and I am very conscious of my oath, even comic books like this have fraudulent advertisements and I am speaking now as a medical physician. The children spend a lot of money and they get very discouraged, they think they are too big, too little, or too heavy. . . .

These discouraged children are very apt to commit delinquency as we know and have known for a long time.

Now, the fourth avenue . . .

We have found . . . all comic books have a very bad effect on teaching the youngest children the proper reading technique, to learn to read from left to right. This balloon print pattern prevents that. So many children, we say they read comic books, they don’t read comic books at all. . . .

Now, what about the remedy? Mr. Chairman, I am just a doctor. I can’t tell what the remedy is. I can only say that in my opinion this is a public-health problem. I think it ought to be possible to determine once and for all what is in these comic books and I think it ought to be possible to keep the children under 15 from seeing them displayed to them and preventing these being sold directly to children. . . .

Senator KEFAUVER. . . . I noticed here this thing (he is referring to an editorial in a comic book), that anyone who opposes comic books are Communists. “The group most anxious to destroy comics are the Communists.” . . .

This seems to be an effort to tie you up in some way as Red or Communist. Is that part of a smear?

Dr. WERTHAM. This is from comic books. I have really paid no attention to this. . . .

Senator KEFAUVER. Would you liken this situation you talk about, showing the same thing over and over again until they finally believed it, to what we heard about during the last war of Hitler’s theory [of telling] the story over and over again?

The CHAIRMAN. The “big lie” technique?

Dr. WERTHAM. Well, I hate to say that, Senator, but I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of 4 before they can read. . . .

[T]he problem right now [is] that the industry itself is preventing the mothers of this country from having not only me, but anybody else make any criticism.

This tremendous power is exercised by this group which consists of three parts, the comic book publishers, the printers, and last and not least, the big distributors who force these little vendors to sell these comic books. They force them because if they don’t do that they don’t get the other things. . . .

Source: Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S., 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess, April 21, 1954.