A Mad Proposition in Postwar America

Comic art scholars and aficionados long have recognized the significance of Mad Magazine's cultural criticism and social satire.1 Begun as a four-color comic in 1952, Mad converted to magazine format in 1955 and watched its sales steadily grow from 325,000 issues in 1955 (Reidelbach 40), to 1.3 million in 1958 ("Maddiction" 63), to just under 2 million in 1968-72 (Reeves 95). As Maria Reidelbach has noted in her landmark study Completely Mad (1991), by the 1960s, Mad "was read by 58 percent of all college students and 43 percent of all high school students, perhaps the only 'cult' magazine to be read by a majority" (188). Publisher William Gaines and his staff of "madmen" writers and artists reveled in postwar America's foibles, providing both social commentary and belly laughs as they spoofed advertising and consumer culture, parodied popular films and songs, and lampooned political figures and events. Gaines repeatedly attempted to deflate claims that either he or his magazine was political, educational, or even useful, claiming "we reject the insinuation that anything we print is moral, theological, nutritious, or good for you in any way, shape, or form. We live in the midst of a corrupt society and intend to keep making the best of it" (Gaines & Feldstein 3); yet, he never could abandon completely his inner-educator who held "almost a straight A average while studying to be a teacher at New York University" (Jacobs 60). While avoiding overt didacticism, Mad's satire drew its readers' attention to America's sociopolitical problems, demanded they acknowledge them, and did so with a big-toothed grin. A quick survey of Mad's issues of the 1950s and 1960s reveals many articles on paperbacks, primers, book clubs, and reading programs, therein signaling the magazine's engagement in the highly charged debate over mass culture and literacy. On the one hand, Mad echoed the critique offered by academics, intellectuals, and social critics charging book clubs, mass marketed paperbacks, and "how-to" books with diluting America's literature and transforming readers into "a single slushy compost" (Rosenberg 5). On the other hand, Mad mocked the very critics and intellectuals who decried the destruction of American culture at the hand of mass culture for merely replacing one prescriptive reading system with another.2 Haunting these criticisms was a fear that relinquishing one's interpretive authority to others would lead to depersonalization, alienation, and complacent acceptance of the party line, and therein would pave the way for totalitarian ideologies to take hold. Thus, contrary to Norbert Muhlen's infamous 1949 Commentary article that claimed comic books prime American youth for totalitarianism, Mad used the comic magazine medium to challenge totalizing rhetoric within the American cultural, intellectual, and political establishment, and to call for readerly autonomy. Reading the Masses To best understand the place and politics of Afad's musings on readership, one must revisit postwar America's literacy debates. The change in America's position from isolationist to global power following World War II necessitated a shift in how America defined itself at home and abroad. Driven by the assumption that, as Time editor Carl Solberg put it, "a good citizen is a good reader" (125), educators and politicians alike examined postwar America's cultural and political literacy hoping to find and subsequently advertise an image of enlightened democracy to allies, foes, and those "choosing" between Democracy and Communism. What groups like the American Library Association, American Book Publishers Council, National Book Committee, and the Department of Education found was that Americans were not reading, reporting that 13.5% of Americans were functionally illiterate and "there is no estimate as to how many are considered semiliterate" (Books for Adult Beginners 4); that "the United States has the lowest proportion of book readers of any major democracy, judging by the results of an international survey in six nations" (Dutscher 126); and that only 25% of Americans read as much as one book per month (Grambs iv). …