Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture by Bart Beaty

Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture Bart Beaty. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Anyone speculating about the most influential psychiatrist of twentieth-century America must consider Dr. Fredric Wertham (1895-1981). To those whose knowledge is limited to his anti-comics crusade against comic books, such a judgment would be startling. This book-length intellectual biography, a first, aims to rescue Wertham's reputation by recollecting his intellectual and social achievements while ascribing to him some sophistication in methodology-qualities missed when one focuses solely on the comics campaign. Bart Beaty also reminds us that Wertham was a pioneer in effectively pursuing several cultural goals -the elimination of demeaning gender and ethnic stereotypes in popular media, for example -that later became mainstream. Yet Wertham has been excluded from history by those who have failed to read him in detail. Beaty argues that research shaped to please corporate media interests has rigged the definition of cultural knowledge so that clinical insights and cases are typically dismissed as anecdotal. The only things that count, literally speaking, are survey questionnaires and reproducible behavioral experiments of limited duration. Beaty, an associate professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary, sets a high standard through comprehensive reading of Wertham's numerous books as well as the hundreds of articles written for popular and elite periodicals. He also reviewed the voluminous Wertham Papers at the Library of Congress. Beaty's study thus goes far beyond the partly sympathetic, but largely comics-focused expositions of Amy Kiste Nyburg's chapter in Seal of Approval (1998), and those of Martin Barker and James E. Reibman in Pulp Demons (1999). Although a comics historian himself, Beaty is also widely read in communications theory and this adds to his credibility when he rescues Wertham from the degrading, single-factor/magic-bullet renditions of his stance so widely accepted. Beaty is convincing on this point, showing us that Wertham was clearly aware of the accusation, providing numerous rebuttals. Unlike those who take the fan perspective for their history of horror and crime comics-two trophies bagged by Wertham through the 1954 Kefauver hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquency-Beaty does not bear from that particular death the aptly described "group wound that will never heal" (197). And poking his thumb in the eyes of those who have chosen that trauma as their badge of commitment to liberty, he alleges that "the comics industry has perpetually wallowed in its immaturity and has sought approval for doing so" (198). Beaty's book will generate some lively debate! Beaty's treatment is principally chronological, organized into chapters with these titles: "From Freud to Social Psychiatry," "Mass Culture in the Twentieth Century," "American Concerns about a Mass Society," "The Critique of Comic Books," and "Television and Media Effects." The sweep of these topics indicates a strategy of moving Wertham out of the village where Anthony Comstock is mayor into more respectable quarters with neighbors like sociologist David Riesman and the African American psychiatrist Kenneth B. Clark. The biographical facts enumerated in Beaty's book would ordinarily inspire envy. Dr. Fredric Wertham was German-born as Frederic (sic) Wertheimer in 1895 and studied medicine at King's College in London before receiving an MD from the University of Wurzburg in 1921. Thereafter he briefly studied psychiatry in Paris, London, Vienna, and Munich, eventually moving to the United States, where he joined the staff at the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University to teach and practice clinical psychiatry. Adopting a more American identity, he took an American wife and changed his name to Fredric Wertham. While in Baltimore he befriended H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow, for whom he volunteered court testimony on behalf of black defendants. …