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This chapter shows Wertham’s contribution to psychiatric knowledge and therapeutic techniques. In particular, it describes the three major phases of Wertham’s life that led him to cofound the Lafargue Clinic. The first phase centers on his youth and education in Germany and England, before and after the Great War; the second encompasses his experiences in Adolf Meyer’s Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore and his sojourn back to Germany in 1930–32, the very moment of the Nazi Party’s ascendance; and the third phase revolves around Wertham’s time in New York City, as he entered the fields of criminal psychopathology and forensic psychiatry, and developed his own brandof social psychiatry while working in the psychiatric clinic of the Court of General Sessions.

This chapter examines the crucial role of Lafargue Clinic in the school desegregation cases that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. It discusses Wertham’s October 1951 testimony to the Delaware Court of Chancery in two similar cases, in conjunction with his infamous 1954 anti-comic book treatise, Seduction of the Innocent. Both his testimony as well as his Seduction of the Innocent were based on clinical psychiatric examinations of interracial groups of children conducted at Lafargue Clinic. The two cases reveal a provocative, singularly original set of arguments about racism as a public health threat to children of all races.

This introductory chapter recounts how Richard Wright and Dr. Fredric Wertham met black convicted murderer, Clinton Brewer, and discusses how Wright and Wertham succeeded in asking the New Jersey governor to remove Brewer’s death sentence. Upon reading Richard Wright’s Native Son— a novel that told the story of murderer Bigger Thomas—Brewer wrote to Wright and asked for his help to be paroled. Wright then requested Wertham to determine whether Brewer was psychotic, which was later confirmed upon examination. Presenting Brewer’s condition, Wright and Wertham succeeded in requesting the New Jersey governor to spare Brewer from death penalty. This book tells the story of how Richard Wright and Fredric Wertham established a progressive model of mental health care as an integral part of the struggle for racial equality.

After his break with Kinsey, Legman aimed to make a place for himself among New York City intellectuals as a full-time writer and editor on topics of sex. Between 1946 and 1948, he was at work drafting Love & Death, a series of essays on the effects of censorship and repression on American culture. Love & Death was an early foray into the criticism of mass culture and an early content analysis of comic books, detective fiction, and stereotypes of women in mass culture. In it Legman argued that the repression of sex in mass culture inevitably led to a sick and violent society. This chapter shows Legman developing and circulating his essays among New York’s writers and editors, unpacks his negative critique of mass culture, and presents the responses of some of his prominent readers. Although the book was rejected by several dozen publishers, Legman got attention for his views. Through Fredric Wertham, one of the principal psychiatrists in New York City, Legman gave a public lecture on psychoanalytic approaches to comic books. Also discussed is Legman’s marriage to his first wife, Beverley Keith, and the salons they held at their tiny house in the Bronx.

This presents the intellectual, social, and political context from which the Lafargue Clinic emerged: black Americans’ struggles to live a human life in an antiblack social world. Black people often had difficulty gaining access to welfare relief and the social agencies that administered New Deal programs and services. This situation as well as changes in work, family, and recreation during the Great Depression produced a destabilizing effect on the psyches of some African Americans. Hence, Wertham, Wright, as well as Elizabeth Bishop founded the Lafargue Clinic that offered therapeutic services which focused on the social bases of psychic trauma.

This chapter examines the censorship of comic books in America. It begins by looking at the hysteria of 1948–1950, which focused on crime comics and the ordinances aimed at curbing their dissemination. It then turns to the campaign of the period 1952–1954, this time against war comics and horror comics, and the hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on juvenile delinquency chaired by Senator Robert Hendrickson. It also considers the main arguments advanced by the intellectuals in the debate regarding comic book censorship by analyzing three books published between 1949 and 1954: Gershon Legman’s Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, and Geoffrey Wagner’s Parade of Pleasure: A Study of Popular Iconography in the USA. In addition, the chapter analyzes Frank Tashlin’s 1955 film Artists and Models, which tackles the comic book controversy, and concludes with a discussion of contemporary arguments against comic books, along with the identity-building function of freedom of speech.

This chapter examines the history of race within American psychotherapy, through the prism of a largely-forgotten institution dedicated to psychiatric treatment founded on antiracist principles. Founded soon after World War II by writer Richard Wright and psychiatrist and social critic Fredric Wertham, Harlem, New York’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic linked black psychic well-being to social transformation and sought to redirect the fundamental orientation of psychotherapy towards the social bases of mental illness and health. Both a precursor and challenge to recent models of combating health disparities through cultural competence in mental healthcare, Lafargue represents a landmark in African American encounters with psychiatry and the behavioral sciences.

This chapter offers a gay reading of Batman. It presents three reasons why Batman is especially interesting to gay audiences. Firstly, he was one of the first fictional characters to be attacked on the grounds of presumed homosexuality, by Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. Secondly, the TV series from the 1960s was and remains a touchstone of camp. Thirdly, as a recurring hero figure for the last fifty years, Batman merits analysis as a notably successful construction of masculinity.

Chapter Five explores the rich and interesting but critically neglected Li'l Tomboy comic book series.Released by Charlton Comics from 1956 through 1960, the series did far more than simply challenge traditional female gender roles in the 1950s; it also challenged the newly established Comics Code.In numerous issues, the title character engages in behaviors that could easily be regarded as delinquent:she commits petty theft, intentionally destroys private property, and sasses adult authority figures, including police officers.Moreover, Li'l Tomboy engages in these activities not simply under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority, but, astoundingly, with their official seal of approval.During a time when the censors employed by the Authority office were at their most powerful and restrictive, Li'l Tomboy engaged in antics that far exceeded those that had been forbidden in other publications.Accordingly, this chapter tells the story of how, with the creation of Li'l Tomboy, Charlton Publications demonstrated that postwar gender conformity could be resisted and, even more significantly, so too could the Comics Code.

This epilogue argues that Wertham and his colleagues at Lafargue Clinic not only fashioned a conceptual framework for addressing the social basis of mental illness among oppressed people, but also institutionalized that framework to influence the lives of thousands of people. The book shows how this intervention distinguished the Lafargue Clinic in the history of American psychiatry. Lafargue Clinic contributed more than any other therapeutic institution by linking race and class oppression as a source of mental disorder and personality problems. Moreover, the clinic’s founders and supporters argued that mental health care for African Americans was an extension of democracy into the fundamental institutional life of the nation.

The last two decades have witnessed a significant transformation of comic books as far as types and content available are concerned, not to mention their critical reception. This shift can be traced to certain events in the production and distribution of comics, particularly superhero comics. However, the singularly most important phenomenon in the reevaluation of comic books was the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (collected in 1986 and 1991) and the critical response it generated. This chapter examines public and academic discourses on the status and nature of comic books in the wake of Maus. After providing an overview of the development of comics that led to the creation of Maus, it assesses its impact, the changing view of comics in the press, and the burgeoning of academic work on comics art. The chapter then considers the scholarly debate over the periodization of graphic novels such as Maus and comments on the campaign by Fredric Wertham and others in the 1950s against comic books, which they accused of causing juvenile delinquency. Finally, it looks at two museum exhibitions showcasing Maus.

This essay reprints the Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America (1954), otherwise known as the “Comics Code,” because it directly impacts the characterization of villains in comics for generations. Fredric Wertham and his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocentvilified comics as being the cause of juvenile delinquency. As a result of outcry from parents and other civic groups, congressional hearings were held to talk about the content in horror and crime comics. Rather than wait for government intervention, the comics’ industry created the Comics Code to make sure that comics were published with non-offensive content.