The Seduction of Two Innocents: Comic Book Readers and Policy Makers

Heather Cox Richardson

In 1938 Superman sped into this galaxy from the planet Krypton to save humanity.  He and his superhero friends oversaw the chaos of the late 1940s, as America first fought World War II and then struggled to adjust to demobilization. Superman and his friends then swept through the skies as the U.S. armed for the Cold War. While Superman matured, the late 1940s and early 1950s brought chilling fear to Americans that the nation was slipping, losing ground to the Russians, falling apart.

So many children—and adults—were reading comics that critics carped that comics themselves were part of America’s moral decline. In 1953, 6.5 comics were sold for every one person in the country. More than 90% of children admitted to reading them.

In 1954 the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published The Seduction of the Innocent, detailing how comic books dragged impressionable youths into crime, violence, and homosexuality. The book used anecdotes to prove that Batman, for example, promoted a gay lifestyle. The Seduction of the Innocent was such a sensation that Wertham became the go-to man for information about the danger of comics, and the industry itself, which scorned Wertham, felt obliged to bow to pressure from his acolytes. To preempt government censorship, the Comics Magazine Association of America developed the Comics Code Authority, which banned violence, sex, and disrespect for authority in comic books. Under the Comics Code, good must always triumph over evil, and any treatment of sexuality had to emphasize the sanctity of marriage.

Wertham died in 1981, and his archives opened to researchers in 2010. Carol Tilley, a scholar of library science at the University of Illinois, dug immediately into Wertham’s files on The Seduction of the Innocent. She found that Wertham had comprehensively fudged his data.

Wertham used no citations, and excised from his notes the full portraits of the children he claimed were victimized by comics. His 13-year-old “Dorothy” refused to go regularly to school because she admired Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and crime comics. In fact, Dorothy had other attributes that undoubtedly affected her school attendance: she was a sexually active runaway with a reading disability who belonged to a gang. Another 13-year-old—a boy this time—admired Batman for what he and Robin might be doing in their spare time; in fact, the boy had been sexually assaulted and preferred Superman and war comics to Batman. The list goes on and on.

The seduction of the innocent, indeed.

A Research Exercise with the Watergate Tapes

James O’Toole*

Richard Nixon press conference, November 17, 1973

The recent announcement that the famous 18-minute gap on the Watergate tape recordings may in fact be recoverable gives me the chance to share some experience I’ve had with using the tapes in teaching. Several times over the years, I have put together an exercise in the criticism and use of sources that asks students to assess three distinct sources, each of which purports to tell exactly what happened at a specific historical moment. (I have used this mostly in graduate research seminars, but it also works with undergraduates if you give them a little more guidance and background.)

Unsafe in Candy Land

Eric Schultz

Recently, while researching material on an entrepreneur who launched her candy business at the turn of the twentieth century, I bumped into a series of newspapers articles that reminded me that the past really is a foreign (and often dangerous) land.

In 1900, America’s candy manufacturers boasted $100 million in invested capital and an annual business in candies and sweets that exceeded that of beer, wine and liquor combined.   A British newspaper declared that Americans “make their sweets as we make our bread, practically for a day’s consumption.”  In the days before the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, this extraordinary demand for all things sweet attracted swindlers, quacks and crooks.

The damage done was fathomless.  I uncovered article after article about children sickened and killed by adulterated candies throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.  Techniques used by manufacturers were often beyond the pale. Some candy was found to contain fusel oil (an ingredient used at the time in lacquer solvents). Other manufacturers cut their honey with glucose, brightened candies with the use of aniline colors (used in the manufacture of the precursors to polyurethane), and added terra cotta (a clay more often used to make bricks) for bulk and color.  In 1900, the Committee on Manufactures of the U.S. Senate found that condensed milk was among the most commonly adulterated products--except for perhaps extracts of fruit and vanilla, so suspect that only one manufacturer was even willing to allow a factory inspection.

Gorgeous Hussies and Parlor Politics

Joseph Yannielli*

One of the advantages of digital history is that it allows its practitioners to comment on public events in real time and achieve a potentially broader and more immediate impact. And what event could be more gripping than a big old scandal? Scandals tap into a seemingly universal appetite for tawdry drama. In times of great crisis or division, they serve an important cultural function. Brimming with prurient details, amplified by politicians and the media, public scandals are manufactured distractions. Really good scandals also have the capacity to shake revered institutions to their core—to disturb and expose powerful elements that are normally obscure or hidden.

Of all the endless varieties of public embarrassment, the sex scandal holds a special place for its ability to shed light on subterranean social anxieties. The latest example offers up a juicy blend of the military, politicians, the CIA, and the FBI (and the East Tuscaloosa Junior Marching Band, and Kevin Bacon, and your mom, and who knows how many others by the time the investigation is concluded). But the story is as old as America . . . or at least as old as Old Hickory.

The Petticoat Affair that almost derailed Andrew Jackson's first term as President was perhaps the first major American sex scandal. And like the still-unraveling Petraeus Affair, it disgorged fascinating information about the inner workings of power in what would become the world's mightiest military machine.

Historians in the News Roundup

.
Melody Burri, "Historian Nancy Hewitt to present new work on Quaker Amy Post," MPNnow, August 22, 2012

Farmington, N.Y. - Nancy A. Hewitt, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Rutgers University, will give the fourth talk in the summer series for the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum.>>>

Professor Hewitt will present "Faith and Politics: The Spiritual Journeys of Amy Post."

Edward Helmore, "UK Harvard star Niall Ferguson accused of intellectual fraud," The Week, August 22, 2012

 THE British-born journalist and Harvard-tenured historian Niall Ferguson has landed himself in a nasty spat with some of America's most distinguished economists, among them Princeton's Nobel Prize-winner - and venerable New York Times columnist - Paul Krugman.

Ferguson is a promoter of Chancellor George Osborne's cut-to-growth economic philosophy. Krugman is a spend-to-grow man, as is President Obama.>>>

An interview with Victor Davis Hanson on his essay "There is No One California," Forum, KQED, August 20, 2012

California has become a target of mockery in the presidential campaign, with GOP challenger Mitt Romney holding the troubled state up as an example of where the country is headed under Barack Obama. Historian and conservative columnist Victor Davis Hanson also slams the state in a recent article entitled, "There is No One California." He joins us to talk about the piece, and to give us his take on the presidential campaign.>>>

Rebekah Higgitt, "(Pseudo)scientific history?" Guardian blog, August 16, 2012

There have been many writers who have claimed that history can be, or should be, scientific. Different things are meant by this, of course, and such statements are provoked by different motivations, although generally they trade on the perceived successes, rewards, professionalism and certainty of the sciences.>>>

"Historian Taylor Branch Critiques College Sports," Only a Game, WBUR (rebroadcast), August 25, 2012

The NCAA is facing growing scrutiny from college athletes, coaches and the people who follow college sports. The September 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly featured an article by Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch — author of Parting the Waters, The Clinton Tapes, and others — entitled “The Shame of College Sports,” which criticizes the corruption within the NCAA.>>>

Roundup: The Trials and Tribulations of David Barton

.
Elise Hu, "Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book, Citing Loss Of Confidence," NPR, August 9, 2012

Citing a loss of confidence in the book's details, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson is ending the publication and distribution of the bestseller, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.>>>

Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens, "Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over," Atlantic blog, July 24, 2012

Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. But just nine votes behind was the late Howard Zinn's left-wing epic, A People's History of the United States. Bad history, it turns out, transcends political divides.>>>

John Fea, "What Can We Learn From the David Barton Controversy?" Patheos, Anxious Bench, August 15, 2012

In case you have not heard, last week Thomas Nelson, a Christian publisher based in Nashville, ceased publication of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, saying it has “lost confidence in the book’s details.”>>>

Paul Harvey, "David Barton: Falling from Grace?" Religion Dispatches, August 10, 2012

This has been the summer of discontent with David Barton. First, in a poll taken by History News Network, Barton’s newest work, The Jefferson Lies, topped the list of “least credible history works in print.” The same work met a unanimous chorus of refutations from Jefferson public humanities scholar and radio personality Clay Jenkinson, from religious historians ranging from Martin Marty to John Fea, and (in the full length work Getting Jefferson Right) from Grove City College professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter.>>>

Jennifer Schuessler, "Hard Truth for Author: Publisher Pulls ‘The Jefferson Lies’" NYT, August 14, 2012

Last month the History News Network voted David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” the “least credible history book in print.” Now the book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson, has decided to stop publishing and distributing it.

The book, which argues that Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic orthodox Christian who saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state, has attracted plenty of criticism since it appeared in April, with an introduction by Glenn Beck. But the death knell came after Jay W. Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author, with James Robison, of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It’s Too Late,” began to have doubts and started an investigation.>>>

Rewriting History? The Case of Joe Paterno

Alan Bliss

As part of its sanctions against Penn State University, the NCAA last week "vacated" 111 of the Nittany Lions' football victories under their late coach, Joe Paterno. The order changes the official record of Penn State's teams from 1998 to 2011. Technically, then, Coach Paterno no longer holds the NCAA record as the winningest coach in Division I college football.

A non-academic friend, a lawyer by profession, complains that the NCAA is rewriting history. Professional historians like me, my friend argues, should be outraged. Surprisingly, my friend is hardly alone in reading this news as an intolerable assault on historical truth. In the July 24 New York Times, Northwestern University sociologist Gary Alan Fine published an op-ed ("George Orwell and the N.C.A.A.") objecting to the NCAA's records sanction against Penn State:

Professor Fine sees this as a disturbing attempt to re-write the past, or to create a false, "fantasized," history. "George Orwell would be amused," Fine believes. But neither Fine nor others who make this argument seem to be historians, who, as far as I know, are unconcerned by the NCAA's periodic fiddling with its own record books. One reason is that retroactive bookkeeping does little to alter any "history" other than the records of the institution doing the counting. And mind, we are talking here about Division I collegiate football, where even indisputable facts are disputed endlessly. Even if that weren't so, sports historians take pains to explicate the circumstances of athletic records. Future researchers looking up the Lions' football stats will be obliged to learn all about the University's miserable scandal. The NCAA's purpose in sanctioning Penn State will be lastingly served.

As I teach my students, the past is what happened, while history is how we explain and interpret the past. Denying or obscuring inconvenient facts throws historians off at times, and can indeed rise to the level of the Orwellian. But in the long run the practice often fails. For example, we now know that Woods Hole Oceanographer Bob Ballard was not really engaged in a pure-science project to locate the wreck of the RMS Titanic. His 1985 expedition was financed by the U.S. Defense Dept., which sought his technology to examine the deep-sea wrecks of its two lost Cold-war era nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. After obliging the Navy, Dr. Ballard carried out his "cover" mission of locating the Titanic. The success of that side-trip made Ballard an inspirational hero on the order of a winning college football coach. Among his many admirers, the new facts haven't seriously knocked him off his pedestal - they just complicate his story and that of the Titanic's rediscovery.

Historians understand better than most how little we sometimes know. We are alert to the risks that go with formulating historical understanding from data. Numbers can lie, whether they involve college football or voting. I teach students to be skeptical, critical, and open to new ideas, new sources, new data, and new interpretations of the evidence of the past. Some ideologues disdain that as "historical revisionism." But history is endlessly under revision, and we shouldn't want it any other way.

Joe Paterno was a hero. He will always hold a place in history, though the context is different now. The truth about his and Penn State's football program has badly dented his legacy. The NCAA's action on his win-loss record can't hurt the late Coach, whose troubles are over. No doubt, his family and partisans will grieve about this poisonous affair for the rest of their lives. Mainly, Penn State's vacated wins are a message to other coaches, players, administrators, fans, boosters, and just regular onlookers. The sanctions also help show that history has an annoying habit, which historians encourage, of outting lies.

Alan Bliss is a historian of the modern U.S. His research is on metropolitan political economy, especially in Sunbelt cities. He is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Florida.

College football has changed over time. And it hasn’t.

Chris Beneke
.

With Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno’s dismissal amid the sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed Happy Valley, college football is under scrutiny again. So too are the huge sums of money that sustain this monumental sports and media enterprise. Paterno will be paid a little over $1 million from Penn State this year. That is actually modest by comparison with his peers; in 2010, University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban received over $6 million in compensation. Paterno’s salary and celebrity stand out only in contrast with everyone else—his players for instance, as well the faculty who teach them. For good reason then, the head football coach’s salary is often treated as an index of the distance a college has departed from its core academic commitments (we’re still awaiting the first news van to be overturned in ousted PSU President Graham Spanier’s name), not to mention its ethical standards.

What is the history that got us here?

In his book Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era, historian Michael Oriard contends that the big change in college football occurred in the early 1970s. Until then, head coaches were paid much like deans or upper-tier professors. Moreover, many held tenured faculty positions. They were themselves part of the faculty. But with “the NCAA’s transformation of student-athletes into athlete-students in 1972 and 1973—making freshman eligible, dropping the 1.6 rule [which stipulated that a college could only offer you a scholarship if you were projected to receive at least a 1.6 GPA], and instituting the one-year scholarship” big-time college began to serve its own interests rather than the universities or their student-athletes (192). “When universities and conferences won the right to negotiate their own television contracts in 1984, and the competition for market share intensified, coaches were in a position to cash in.”* Huge, president-humbling salaries (PSU’s Spanier earned a mere $800K this year) followed.

But the exorbitant pay awarded to college coaches isn’t the only blemish on the system. While it has shot up shamelessly since the early 1970s, the compensation (essentially tuition, room, and board) at schools with big-time athletic programs has barely budged. “It’s socialism for athletes,” sociologist Allen Sack told New York Magazine, and “free enterprise for everyone else.” Agreeing that student athletes should be paid, Taylor Branch offered a devastating critique of the current system in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “[T]he real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited,” Branch writes, “it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

Since its improbable emergence on the most cerebral of campuses in the late 19^th century, college football has represented something of an anomaly—a consistently irresistible anomaly, it should be noted. Male-dominated and devastatingly brutal, it plays out its gridiron dramas nearly every Saturday at institutions which aim at very different ends during the week. Such tensions date at least to 1892, the year, Oriard notes, when the newly established University of Chicago hired Amos Alonzo Stagg, “a former Yale All-American, two years out of college, to start a football program [and agreed] to pay him as much as the school’s top professors in order to lure him from the East Coast.”^ In Stagg’s day, football deaths were common and corruption was rampant.

But don’t count on college football’s extinction, or even its radical reform, any time soon. Though the decimal points have moved to the right, the often indefinable allure of this sport—along with the celebrity it generates, the money it attracts, the ethical corruption and moral deprivation it sometimes invites—endures as ever. More on that, maybe, some other time.

---

*Michael Oriard, Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 192, 193.

^Oriard, Bowled Over, 191

A Quirky Political Dynasty

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day on which Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederate States of America, and I had every intention of writing about that epic event for today’s post. But when I started digging around in the history of that date, another event jumped out at me. November 6, 1841 was the birth date of Nelson W. Aldrich.

It’s a little astonishing that few people nowadays have heard of Nelson Aldrich, for in the late nineteenth century, he ran the Senate. And he ran it, unabashedly, in the service of corporations.

By 1881, when Aldrich entered the upper chamber of Congress, tariffs were crucial to the protection of American big business. High tariffs of around 50% of an item’s value guaranteed that foreign products could not compete with American-made products. The original intent of the Republicans who began the nation’s system of protective tariffs was to give domestic industry breathing space to develop. But by the 1880s, those industries were some of the most powerful in the world, and consumers charged that protection had become a tool to enable American industrialists to raise prices. As the newly rich industrialists—and their wives and daughters—spent their vast fortunes on Fifth Avenue mansions, racehorses, jewels, and lavish parties while workers eked by on pennies and farmers fell into debt, more and more voices started to call for “tariff reform” to lower the tariffs.

Against these voices, Senator Aldrich stood unbowed, marshaling his forces. He believed that society was based on an economic hierarchy, and that those at the top of that hierarchy—the wealthy industrialists—should run the nation. He had little respect for the average man who was, in his opinion, easy to mislead. The role of government was to promote industry, Aldrich thought, and he worked hard to protect steel manufacturers, railroad barons, wool interests, and so on, against what he saw as the delusions of the crowd. As the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Aldrich wielded great power. As the man who determined how the Republican Party’s campaign money was spent, he wielded even more. The tariff fight consumed the country in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth; during those thirty years it was Senator Aldrich who held the Republican Party to the service of industrialists.

I’ve been spending time lately with Senator Aldrich and, while he undoubtedly makes it onto my list of unsavory companions, there is a funny quirk about his family that makes me unwilling to focus solely on his rather reactionary contribution to American history.

In 1901, Senator Aldrich’s daughter Abby* married J. D. Rockefeller’s son. Their third child was Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, who became vice-president under Gerald Ford. In contrast to his grandfather, Nelson Rockefeller gave his name to the moderates of his day, who are still known as “Rockefeller Republicans.”

His grandfather—who died when the boy was seven—would not have been pleased.
_________

* Abby was important in her own right. She was instrumental in establishing both the Museum of Modern Art and Colonial Williamsburg.

Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Lies

Heather Cox Richardson

Why is so much press coverage going to the news that an amateur researcher altered the date on a pardon issued by President Lincoln? Retired psychiatrist Thomas Lowry, who, together with his wife, has spent his retirement studying Civil War materials in the National Archives, apparently changed the date on the original piece of paper from April 14, 1864, to April 14, 1865. If the latter date had been true, the pardon of a soldier would have been one of Lincoln’s last acts before his assassination.

Defacing a historic document is certainly appalling. But this particular change has had very little effect on our understanding of either the president or the war. The true date has always been in Roy P. Basler’s The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which remains the standard book of Lincoln documents for scholars. And, really, how important is this one scribbled note, anyway, in the scheme of Lincoln’s life or the Civil War?

I can’t help but contrast the flurry over this story with the relative silence over the truly astounding news that Stephen Ambrose had made up—MADE UP!—his famous interviews with Dwight Eisenhower. Ambrose’s biography was considered definitive, and held the field for decades, because no other historian could compete with his apparent deep knowledge of the man, gleaned through numerous private interviews he claimed he had had with President Eisenhower. Those interviews, it turns out, almost certainly never happened. Our entire understanding of the Eisenhower years—relatively important years, one might argue, since they cover 1890 to 1969—has been warped through Ambrose’s imaginings. This seems to me the biggest news story involving history in the past year.

So why did the press largely ignore it? And why are newspapers picking up the Lincoln story, when such a huge story went untouched?

Is it that Lincoln himself is always a draw for readers? (Although Eisenhower is getting far more news coverage this year than he has in the past three decades.)

Is it that the unknown Dr. Lowry is an easier target than the well-known Ambrose family?

Is it, perhaps, that the Eisenhower lie was just too big, and too embarrassing, for anyone to take on?

My fear is that, while all of these might be true, the latter is the most important reason. And what does that say about the parameters of public debate? The little things—the numeral changed by an unimportant figure on a relatively unimportant document—can be attacked. But the really, really big things—a fabricated life of a major figure by a famous historian—must be ignored.

Not a great way to conduct business.