Werthless

Frederic Wertham led a crusade against comics in the 1950s, which he believed were destroying the youth of America. He's properly remembered in the comic book world as a monster. David Hadju's latest book, Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, discusses this ugly tale.

But over at Slate, Jeet Heer makes a case for Wertham, saying he wasn't that bad. For instance:

Wertham [as defender Bart] Beaty notes, is often libeled as a pop-culture McCarthyite, when he was in fact a progressive scholar who ran a clinic in Harlem, and his research on black children was used in the legal challenges to segregation.

I don't care if he was a progressive or a reactionary, it's his actions I oppose. Labeling them "progressive" doesn't make them any better. (I'm also not impressed with his research on black children, but that's a separate (though not equal) story.)

Also:

The comic-book crackdown, according to Beaty, was caused by unscrupulous publishers who were unwilling to regulate themselves until forced to by a huge public backlash. Wertham, by his account, was the most reasonable voice during this sordid debate.

So comic publishers actually had the nerve to demand freedom of speech, and then deserved to get caught by the sensible Wertham--the very man who helped whip up the moral panic that created the backlash. (Actually, there's an argument that the publishers did respond with a code, but the firebreathing Wertham would have none of it--a purge or nothing, even as he stated, as so many censors do, that he wasn't in favor of censorship.)