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| The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America | 
 enlarge | Author: David Hajdu
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $13.49
You Save: $12.51 (48%)
New (46) Used (24) Collectible (2) from $10.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 3937
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 0374187673
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.232
EAN: 9780374187675
ASIN: 0374187673
Publication Date: March 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 We are creatures of habit... June 25, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Highly informative, slightly esoteric, and entirely relevant, Hajdu's case study on the hysteria surrounding crime comic-books at the dawn of the Cold War left me with far more questions than answers. While this generally is a sign that an author has breached the innermost walls of my cerebrum and forced me to question my previous held assumptions regarding a given topic, Hajdu's impeccable research and wealth of knowledge was simply too much to handle. When I first purchased the book, I was under the assumption that I would be getting a comprehensive look at the hysteria surrounding the comic-book industry as a whole. Not so. Hajdu's research is extraordinarily focused (essentially the decade following WWII), yet highly effective. Those looking for a bit of easy reading need not apply. But I digress...
As a twenty-three-year-old, it makes perfect sense that I would find Hajdu's book rather esoteric. Simply put, I never experienced any of the comic-book burnings or public hysteria cited by Hajdu. But, that does not leave me ignorant of the reactionary elements central to the hysteria surrounding potentially "damaging" aspects of youth culture. As I read this book, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "parental advisory" stickers gracing my generation's compact discs, or the on-going debate surrounding the influence of violent video games on the minds of our nation's "impressionable" youth. Let's not forget the censorship imposed by retail outlets like Target or Wal-Mart, who have effectively banned CD's containing "objectionable" lyrical content from their shelves. So what's the bottom line? I think there's fertile ground for a sequel...
 As engrossing as any four-star comic-book September 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
David Hajdu's "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" begins with the sad story of Janice Valleau Winkleman, who retired to Florida after losing the comic-book-artist job she had begun at age 19 and worked for over a decade.
Winkleman was among hundreds of such artists -- mostly social misfits who found a common bond in a new art form, toiled for millions of enthralled readers, and then were hounded out of their jobs by high-minded hypocrites.
"The Ten-Cent Plague" tells how the full-color comic strips of early Sunday newspapers gave way to the more elaborate drawings of 1940's comic books. Among the early practitioners were Bill Gaines, who created MAD Magazine (which began as a satirical comic); and a gag writer named Bob Kahn, who became famous after he changed his name to Bob Kane and created Batman.
The book details how American kids delighted in the comics' anything-goes mission statement, only to be crushed by the adult sentiment of "Father knows best." Readers' parents, who merely sniffed at early comics as kiddie pablum, eventually felt threatened by their anti-authority attitude.
Chief among the book's villains is Frederic Wertham. He was a psychiatrist frequently called upon to testify -- with no documented evidence -- that all comic books led to juvenile delinquency and violent crimes.
Yet the book's most memorably violent imagery is that of American adults' public bonfires of comic books -- an irony that only the victimized young readers seem to appreciate.
The story's climax -- as juicy as any comic-book twist -- comes at the nationwide broadcast of a Congressional hearing about comics. On one side sits a desperate Bill Gaines, trying to defend his life's work while hyped up on diet pills. On the other side, Senator Estes Kefauver, who ends up laying waste to the benign comic-book industry with the same intensity that he ended Joe McCarthy's Red-baiting career.
Just as comic books transcended their pulp origins to become pop art, so author Hajdu takes a seemingly trivial story and imbues it with passion and indignation. The book's pace is as feverish as its subject's. And it shows how the dismantling of the comic-book industry was, in the end, a ham-fisted reaction to some kids questioning the status quo.
When it comes to a First Amendment defense from an unlikely source, "The Ten-Cent Plague" ranks with the movie "The People vs. Larry Flynt." It's a bracing read.
A real-life horror story October 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The history of scapegoating in the 20th-century United States is a long one, with public fears about menaces real or imagined directed at alleged causes ranging from drugs to TV to rock and rap music, accompanied by reams of pontificating and propaganda that tend to seem pretty silly in hindsight (Reefer Madness, anyone?). In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu tells the story of one particularly dumbfounding example of mass hysteria that gripped the country in the late 1940's and early 1950's in the form of the campaign against comic books. Starting with the rise of the medium in the early 20th century as a mode of expression for minorities, tenement dwellers, and other outsiders, the book moves into an extensive retelling of the way the forces of reaction mobilized to turn comics into symbols of all that ailed society and their creators into pariahs. In a struggle about as even as a fight between Batman and a dimwitted petty thief, reason and moderation were swamped by a small army of their traditional enemies--conjecture, grandstanding, prejudice, moralism, and fearmongering. Supporting his claims with a wealth of direct quotations from those on all sides of the issue, from creators to consumers to persecutors, Hajdu details how occasionally legitimate concerns about excessively lurid comic-book content led to an all-out witch hunt and an example of the mob mentality at its most frightening.
Beginning with exaggerated accusations that comics were fueling a wave of juvenile delinquency that was itself arguably illusory, the anti-comics crusade quickly acquired a creepily totalitarian air as it sought to eliminate any content that constituted even the remotest threat to the ruling authorities or the values of the self-appointed guardians of morality and good taste. As recounted by Hajdu, the pattern was depressingly predictable: the most objectionable comics were presented as indicative of the medium as a whole; the most wild accusations became articles of faith through sheer repetition; state legislatures and civic groups sought to preserve the American way through such seemingly un-American measures as governmental bans and book burnings; and, of course, congressional hearings were held. The hysteria reached its culmination with the now infamous Comics Code, a self-imposed set of laughably puritanical restrictions placed on comic book publishing and enforced in an arbitrary and punitive manner by a collection of some of the least fun people on Earth, which essentially destroyed the comic-book industry from the mid-'50's until its rebirth in the '60's.
The Ten-Cent Plague raises an enormous number of issues that remain relevant to this day, not all of which the book has space to fully address. In spite of its subtitle, there's little here about how the comic-book scare changed American society. Hajdu is largely content to tell a straightforward story about the rise of a distinctly American art form and its persecution by the forces of puritanism and repression. Some of the more intriguing issues that the book raises--the creation of a youth culture and the accompanying threat to the established order; the infantilization of young people's minds by adults; the role of brainwashing and manipulation in maintaining the conformity of postwar American society--are touched upon but not explored in much depth. Still, The Ten-Cent Plague tells a gripping, fascinating, and above all thought-provoking story that raises questions that will remain troubling long after you're done reading. As always, the book reminds us, we should be less fearful of comic books or any other media creation than of those who find threats in everything and humor in nothing.
Absorbing April 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Very readable, well written book. Anybody who read and enjoyed "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" should pick this up. My only criticism would be that the epilogue seemed a little short and forced.
A Dimly Remembered Pop Cultural Watershed April 13, 2008
This is a great and entertaining work of pop culture journalism and sociology. I started reading this book out of a love for the history of comic books, and soon found that it was more a rigorous journalistic exploration of the Kefauver/Wortham hearings in 1954 in NYC that resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority. A whole book?? But as I read this well written account I was drawn into a story of censorship that gradually built to a crescendo of unease as Hajdu portrayed the political and personal agendas that resulted in the virtual demise of the comic book industry. The clinical depiction of a movement that resulted in mass comic book burnings by high school students and girl scout troops is creepy and hair raising, almost akin to reading about a country behind the Iron Curtain. But this was Eisenhower America !! Hajdu interviews some of these people as adults and you can hear how disturbed they were even at the time but felt swept along in the conformity movement by their parents and teachers.
From a comics history standpoint this book really highlights how devastating the climate was to the comicbook industry and explains why so many of the exotic companies and "brands "went out of business because of the enormous ill will and bad publicity that lingered even after the comics code was initiated. A huge number of creators left the industry never to return and the ones that stayed were afraid to reveal to anyone what they did as being in the comics industry was viewed as close to an admission of child molestation. The Hearings had an effect for many more years than I ever imagined. It is almost hard to believe that the industry survived and eventually grew to its current prominent influence in pop culture. The last chapter of this book is chilling to read in its depiction of the state of the industry after the years long witch hunts that were essentially victorious.
Comic books were not blameless in this story as many of the EC examples of horror and weird tales readily show. But the political and moral reaction of the 1950s to me was much more disturbing than the dilemma that it was addressing (juvenile delinquency ) thru attacking a simple and probably insignificant contributor ( comics ) to a much more complicated situation. The totalitarian tactics leveraged against comics by well meaning but simpleminded people including politicos and ministers and educators mirror the McCarthy Communist witch hunts of the times. This is a cautionary tale that deserved the spotlight given to it by David Hajdu's wonderful and disturbing book. A great and compelling read !
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