The Ten-Cent Plague

This column was originally published in 2009. 

In 1954, Operation Book Swap was in full swing in Canton, Ohio.

A project of a committee formed by Mayor Carl F. Wise, the program encouraged Canton-area kids to trade comic books for books. Nearly 30,000 comics were collected, exchanged for hardcover copies of novels like “Heidi” and “Swiss Family Robinson.” City leaders unceremoniously hauled the brightly colored comics to the dump.

Operation Book Swap was northeast Ohio’s response to a national mania, the alleged filth being poured into kids’ minds by supposedly unscrupulous comic-book publishers, one chronicled in David Hajdu’s new book, “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.”

Hajdu believes the comic-book purge of the early 1950s – in many communities, comics weren’t taken to the dump, they were burned publicly – was a forerunner of the generation gap popularized years later by parental dismay over rock and roll. The precursor of Elvis’s shaking pelvis was a four-color world held together by two staples, with an admission price of one dime.

In the 1950s, superhero comics were on the decline and crime and horror comics were coming into their own. Publisher Lev Gleason was selling around a million copies a month of a comic book that introduced wide-eyed youngsters to violent bad guys plying their trade against the innocent, supposedly to reinforce the title of the comic, “Crime Does Not Pay.”

But as John Milton learned while writing “Paradise Lost” a few centuries earlier, it’s a lot easier to dramatize evil than goodness. Hajdu notes that the word “Crime” on the magazine’s cover was much larger than the rest of the title, an accurate representation of the emphasis inside between crime and punishment.

Similarly, the EC Comics company struck it rich by selling revenge stories with O. Henry-style twists in magazines like “Crime SuspenStories” and “Tales from the Crypt.” At a Senate hearing on comic books (the very existence of which proves government always has found topics besides the important ones to occupy its time), publisher Bill Gaines defended an EC cover that showed a woman’s severed head held aloft by her killer. He said it would be in bad taste only if the killer were “holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood.”

Psychologist Frederic Wertham spearheaded the jihad against comics. His 1954 book “Seduction of the Innocent” branded Batman and Robin as homosexuals, Superman a fascist, and Wonder Woman a sadomasochist. He claimed that comic books caused juvenile delinquency because all the juvenile delinquents he had worked with read comic books. His findings ignored that almost (ital.) all (end ital.) kids read comics, and that many grew up to be perfectly normal and well adjusted.

By reaching back to the early years of the twentieth century, Hajdu shows how disapproval over comics was cyclical. As early as 1909, Ladies’ Home Journal was concerned about the content of the Sunday newspaper funnies, calling them “inane and vulgar” and “nothing short of a national crime against our children.” Similar concern was voiced decades later with the introduction of the comic book, a reaction that reached full flowering in the 1950s with the passage of laws in many communities that made it illegal to sell certain “prohibited” comics titles to minors.

Ultimately, the comic-book industry formed a self-censorship agency, the Comics Magazine Association of America, and created a code banning almost everything that had made comics so appealing to kids. Readership declined (the rise of television was also responsible) and comic books were never again the cultural force they had been.

The final pages of “The Ten-Cent Plague” are a roll call of writers and artists who never worked in comics again after the mid-’50s purge, creators whose stories were burned by over-zealous parents and politicians who, only a decade earlier, had successfully won a war against a regime that also found it necessary to incinerate books.

It is an irony that does not go unnoticed by Hajdu, who has written the definitive account of the mass-market censorship of an art form that nobody cared too much about because it was the exclusive province of the young.

All the sins of literature

There’s child abuse in "Huckleberry Finn."

Regicide in "Macbeth."

Profanity in "The Catcher in the Rye."

Suicide in "Things Fall Apart."

Domestic violence in "The Color Purple."

Rape in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Gang violence in "A Most Beautiful Thing."

Adultery in "The Awakening."

Grave robbing in "Frankenstein."

Incest in Greek mythology.

Drag racing in "The Outsiders."

Witchcraft in "The Wizard of Oz."

I’ve taught using every one one of these works in the last 20-plus years, and never have I suggested that students partake in any of the above activities. Nor has any student, to my knowledge, ever murdered a king, joined a gang, or taken part in any of the other behaviors just because they’ve read about them.

Addressing tough topics in school isn’t the same as advocating them. Most kids understand this. Some adults, apparently, do not.

Case in point: In Tennessee recently, the McMinn County school board voted 10-0 to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, from an eighth-grade unit on the Holocaust because it has a few cartoon depictions of naked animals and a handful of swear words.

Spiegelman’s book recounts the story of his interviews with his father, who in turn tells his harrowing story of survival in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s not a pleasant read, and it’s not supposed to be. We are talking about the Holocaust, when more than 6 million Jews were murdered.

The author depicts all the people in the book as animals. The Jews are mice; the Germans, cats. It’s a brilliant metaphor and a powerful testimony, worthy to stand alongside other essential works of Holocaust literature, including Elie Wiesel’s “Night.”

A story by David Corn in Mother Jones explains how the board decided to ban Spiegelman’s book. According to Corn’s recap of the meeting, one member admits he hasn’t read “Maus,” and suggests that the volume is “only the tip of the iceberg” in terms of allegedly inappropriate material.

Another board member suggests works like “Maus” could be part of an attempt to “normalize sexuality, normalize nudity, and normalize vulgar language.” He also hints that such books are a way “to indoctrinate somebody’s kids,” as though teachers in Tennessee are chortling at their desks as they hatch a subversive plot to destroy America’s youth by teaching the truth about the Holocaust.

And children need to learn that truth. The U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey in 2020 revealed that “11% of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust” and some 59% believe something similar to the Holocaust could happen again.

(Conspiracy proponents ready to pounce on mask and vaccine mandates as contemporary examples should sit right back down. No valid comparison can be made between curbing a pandemic and killing millions.)

Focusing on only nekkid mice and a few swear words misses the point of “Maus,” in the same way that focusing on only the bloody daggers in “Macbeth” misses the larger themes of unchecked ambition and crushing guilt in the rest of the play.

Far from normalizing negative behaviors, works that deal with challenging subjects provide teachable moments. After my class read “A Streetcar Named Desire,” I invited the director of the local domestic violence shelter to speak. She demonstrated how Stanley Kowalski, the male protagonist, met most of the characteristics of an abuser. At least one student recognized behaviors in a current relationship that met the criteria for emotional abuse. It was a realization that happened because of the intersection between literature and real life.

I doubt McMinn County teachers are drilling down on the nudity and swearing in “Maus,” and I doubt their students are titillated by cartoon drawings, situated as they are within a non-fiction horror story and guided to an understanding by professional educators.

Take any passage of almost any book, story or play out of context and you could question its suitability. Stitch all those passages together and you could reach the troubling – and erroneous – conclusion that U.S. schools are awash in blood, gore and smut.

The Tennessee board reached a similar mistaken conclusion about “Maus.” Let this be a lesson to all voters to elect sensible people to boards of education, candidates who support high-quality literature and don’t just go looking for dirty pictures and words.

Or, at the very least, board members who will read an entire book before deciding to ban it.