Fredric Wertham | |
|---|---|
 Wertham at his Gramercy Park office. Photo byGordon Parks. | |
| Born | Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer March 20, 1895 (1895-03-20) |
| Died | November 18, 1981 (1981-11-19) (aged 86) Kempton, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Education | King's College London University of Munich University of Erlangen University of Würzburg(M.D., 1921) |
| Occupation | Psychiatry |
| Spouse | Florence Hesketh (1902–1987) |
| Signature | |
 | |
Fredric Wertham (/ˈwɜːrðəm/;[1] bornFriedrich Ignatz Wertheimer, March 20, 1895 – November 18, 1981) was a German–Americanpsychiatrist and author. Wertham had an early reputation as a progressive psychiatrist who treated poor black patients at hisLafargue Clinic at a time of heightened discrimination in urban mental health practice. Wertham also authored a definitive textbook on the brain, and his institutional stressor findings were cited when courts overturned multiple segregation statutes, most notably inBrown v. Board of Education.
Despite this, Wertham remains best known for his concerns about the effects of violent imagery in mass media and the effects of comic books on the development of children.[2][3] His best-known book isSeduction of the Innocent (1954), which asserted that comic books caused youth to become delinquents. BesidesSeduction of the Innocent, Wertham also wrote articles and testified before government inquiries into comic books, most notably as part of aU.S. Congressional inquiry into the comic book industry. Wertham's work, in addition to the 1954 comic book hearings, led to the creation of theComics Code Authority, although later scholars cast doubt on his observations.
Wertham was born Friedrich IgnatzWertheimer on March 20, 1895, in Nuremberg[4] to the middle-class Jewish family of Sigmund and Mathilde Wertheimer.[5]Ella Winter (originally Wertheimer) was a relative. He did not change his name legally to Fredric Wertham until 1927. He studied atKing's College London, at the Universities ofMunich andErlangen, and graduated with an M.D. degree from theUniversity of Würzburg in 1921. He was very much influenced by Dr.Emil Kraepelin, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Munich, and worked briefly at the Kraepelin Clinic in Munich in 1922. Kraepelin emphasized the effects of environment and social background on psychological development. Around this time Wertham corresponded and visited withSigmund Freud, who influenced him in his choice ofpsychiatry as his specialty.
In 1922, he accepted an invitation to come to the United States and work underAdolf Meyer at thePhipps Psychiatric Clinic atJohns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.[6] He became a United States citizen and married the sculptor Florence Hesketh in 1927.[2] He moved to New York City in 1932 to accept a senior staff position at the Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic, the psychiatric clinic connected with the New York Court of General Sessions in which all convicted felons received a psychiatric examination that was used in court.[2] In 1935 he testified for the defense in the trial ofcannibalistic child rapist andserial killerAlbert Fish, declaring him insane.[7] In 1946, Wertham opened theLafargue Clinic in the basement ofSt. Philip's Church inHarlem, a low-cost psychiatric clinic specializing in the treatment of Black teenagers. The clinic was financed by voluntary contributions.[8]
Seduction of the Innocent described overt or covert depictions of violence, sex, drug use, and other adult fare within "crime comics"—a term Wertham used to describe not only the popular gangster/murder-oriented titles of the time but alsosuperhero and horror comics as well—and asserted, based largely on undocumented anecdotes, that reading this material encouraged similar behavior in children.
Comics, especially the crime/horror titles pioneered byEC Comics, were not lacking in gruesome images; Wertham reproduced these extensively, pointing out what he saw as recurring morbid themes such as "injury to the eye" (as depicted inPlastic Man creatorJack Cole's "Murder, Morphine and Me", which he illustrated and probably wrote for publisher Magazine Village'sTrue Crime Comics No. 2 (May 1947); it involved drug dealing protagonist Mary Kennedy nearly getting stabbed in the eye "by a junkie with a hypodermic needle" in her dream sequence[9]).
Many of his other conjectures, particularly about hidden sexual themes (e.g. images of female nudity concealed in drawings of muscles and tree bark, orBatman andRobin as gay lovers), were met with skepticism from his fellow mental health professionals, but found an audience in those concerned with "public morals", such as SenatorEstes Kefauver, who had Wertham testify before theSenate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which he led.[10][11]
In extensive testimony before the committee, Wertham restated arguments from his book and pointed to comics as a major cause of juvenile crime. Beaty notes "Wertham repeated his call ... [for] national legislation based on the public health ideal that would prohibit the circulation and display of comic books to children under the age of fifteen."[6]: 157 The committee's questioning of their next witness, EC publisherWilliam Gaines, focused on violent scenes of the type Wertham had decried. Though the committee's final report did not blame comics for crime, it recommended that the comics industry tone down its content voluntarily; possibly taking this as a veiled threat of potential censorship, publishers developed theComics Code Authority to censor their own content. The Code banned not only violent images but also entire words and concepts (e.g. "terror" and "zombies") and dictated that criminals must always be punished—thus destroying most EC-style titles, and leaving a sanitized subset ofsuperhero comics as the chief remaining genre.
Citing one of Wertham's arguments, that 95% of children in reform school read comics proves that comics cause juvenile delinquency (an example of the well-knownlogical fallacycorrelation implies causation),Stan Lee recounted that Wertham "said things that impressed the public, and it was likeshouting fire in a theater, but there was little scientific validity to it. And yet because he had the name doctor people took what he said seriously, and it started a whole crusade against comics."[12]
Seduction of the Innocent also analyzed the advertisements that appeared in 1950s comic books and the commercial context in which these publications existed. Wertham objected to not only the violence in the stories but also the fact that air rifles and knives were advertised alongside them. Wertham claimed that retailers who did not want to sell material with which they were uncomfortable, such ashorror comics, were essentially held to ransom by the distributors. According to Wertham, news vendors were told by the distributors that if they did not sell the objectionable comic books, they would not be allowed to sell any of the other publications being distributed.[citation needed] Also in 1954, Wertham was the Court's appointed psychiatric expert in the trial of theBrooklyn Thrill Killers. When the gang's 18-year-old leader admitted that he had read simply comic books, Wertham concluded that the books were to blame for his crimes.[13]
Wertham's views on mass media have largely overshadowed his broader concerns with violence and with overprotecting children from psychological harm. His writings about the effects ofracial segregation were used as evidence in the landmark Supreme Court caseBrown v. Board of Education, and part of his 1966 bookA Sign for Cain dealt with the involvement of medical professionals inthe Holocaust. To promote this book, Wertham made two memorable appearances on theMike Douglas Show where he ended up debating his theories with the co-hosts,Barbara Feldon (April 10, 1967) andVincent Price (June 19, 1967). Excerpts were shown at the 2003San Diego Comic-Con.[14]
University of Calgary professor Bart Beaty, the only person allowed access to Wertham's personal papers before they were unsealed in 2010, reveals that Wertham tried in 1959 to sell a follow-up toSeduction of the Innocent concerning the effects of television on children, to be titledThe War on Children.[15] Much to Wertham's frustration, no publishers were interested in publishing it.[16]
Wertham always denied that he favored censorship or had anything against comic books in principle, and in the 1970s he focused his interest on the benign aspects of the comic fandom subculture; in his last book,The World of Fanzines (1974), he concluded thatfanzines were "a constructive and healthy exercise of creative drives". This led to an invitation for Wertham to address theNew York Comic Art Convention. Still infamous to most comics fans of the time, Wertham encountered suspicion and heckling at the convention, and stopped writing about comics thereafter.[17]
Before retirement he became a professor of psychiatry atNew York University, a senior psychiatrist in theNew York City Department of Hospitals, and a psychiatrist and the director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at theBellevue Hospital Center.[2]
Wertham died on November 18, 1981, at hisretirement home inKempton, Pennsylvania, at age 86.[2][18]
After Wertham's manuscript collection at theLibrary of Congress was unsealed in 2010, Carol Tilley, aUniversity of Illinois librarian and information science professor, investigated his research and found his conclusions to be largely baseless. In a 2012 study, Tilley wrote "Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain."[19]
Among the criticisms leveled atSeduction of the Innocent are that Wertham used a non-representative sample of young people who were already mentally troubled, that he misrepresented stories from colleagues as being his own, and that Wertham manipulated statements from adolescents by deliberately neglecting some passages while rephrasing others such that they better suited his thesis.[10]
Wertham's papers (including the manuscript to the unpublishedThe War on Children) were donated to theLibrary of Congress and are held by the Manuscript Division. They were made available for use by scholars for research on May 20, 2010.[20] A register of the papers has been prepared that displays the eclectic reach of Wertham's interests.[21]
In 2014, documentary filmmaker Robert A. Emmons Jr. produced the documentaryDiagram for Delinquents, which details the complicated and controversial history of Fredric Wertham and comic books in the 1940s and 1950s.[22][better source needed] The film's goal was to create a more complex picture of Wertham than what had previously been depicted in comic book documentaries.[citation needed]
His activism was cited in the 2011US supreme court decisionBrown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.[citation needed]
Wertham was satirized as a Dr. Bertham who was kidnapped and turned into a monster by a mad scientist inSeaboard'sBrute No. 2 (April 1975).[23]
Issue No. 1 of Bongo Comics'Radioactive Man shows comics from a young boy's collection that satirize Wertham's negative view of comic books. These includeCrime Does Pay (violence and gore);Headlights (women with ludicrously pointed breasts);Stab (pathological fixation on eye injuries); andTales of Revolting Filth (pretty much subsuming every other category). Wertham himself is also parodied in the issue.[citation needed]
According to the supplementary material of theHBO seriesWatchmen, within that fictional universe Fredric Wertham created a system for cataloging the mental states of costumed adventurers.[citation needed]
The character of Doctor Fredreich "Werthers" on the last season of theCW showRiverdale is based on Wertham.[24]
Wertham makes an appearance in the fifth book ofDav Pilkey'sCat Kid Comic Club series in the short comic bookI Am Dr. Fredric Wertham written by the character Melvin.[25]
