Mad social scientists: how anti-comic-book crusaders paved the way for William Bennett.

• Author: Singal, Jesse
• Position: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America - Book review

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

by David Hajdu

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pp.

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In the fall of 1948, in the remote coal mining town of Spencer, West Virginia, an eighth grader named David Mace led a book burning behind his school. "We are met here today to take a step which we believe will benefit ourselves, our community, and our country," Mace explained to a crowd of more than six hundred students and adults, in a speech that his teacher had helped him write. He drew a matchbook from the pocket of his best pants and set the pile ablaze. Flames leapt twenty-five feet in the crisp autumn air. The crowd watched the immolation for more than an hour; some of the children began to cry.

The books Mace was burning weren't communist tracts or evolution textbooks. They were comic books. Urged on by a teacher, Mace had spent almost a month leading students in a door-to-door campaign, collecting more than two thousand comics, which they then piled six feet high and reduced to smoldering ash. Though this wasn't the first time there had been a comic-book burning in the United States, it was the first to gain national attention. Soon, comic-book burnings had become commonplace, mostly in small towns like Spencer. As David Hajdu puts it in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, the "panic over comic books fell somewhere between the Red Scare and the frenzy over UFOs in the pathologies of postwar America."

What caused this strange obsession? Hajdu's informative book is an attempt to answer that question. As the first full-blown cultural hysteria of the mass-media age, the comic-book scare paved the way for others that would quickly follow, like the banning and burning of Beatles records during the 1960s. And the comic-book scare also provided an enduring blueprint for a favored tactic of politicians and self-appointed moral watchdogs: whipping up public panic over the dangerous predilections of America's youth. This book is the history of both a creative art form and a political one.

The best part of The Ten-Cent Plague is Hajdu's history of the medium, which is impressively researched and very engaging. The modern comic was born at around the turn of the century, when the publisher Joseph Pulitzer added a color supplement to the New York World. These first comics proved a subversive form of entertainment for New York City's burgeoning community of immigrants, many of whom couldn't read English. Before long, comics made the leap to mainstream America, and kids couldn't get enough of them.

With a wonderful eye for detail, Hajdu takes us inside the vibrant, bizarre subculture of writers and illustrators that sprang up in New York...