Subversion in the Swamp: Pogo and the Folk in the McCarthy Era

In the early 1950s, during the era of the McCarthy purges, the public concern over the morality of comic books, which had been simmering since the medium's birth, began to receive official scrutiny. In 1954, a group of comic book artists was even brought in to testify before the Congressional Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, headed by Senator Estes Kefauver. The president of the National Cartoonists Society at this time was Walt Kelly, creator of the popular Pogo comic strip; his response is related by fellow-cartoonist Milton Caniff: Senator Kefauver and a well-meaning committee of Congressmen were holding hearings related to the evils of the comic books of the day. This was not directed toward newspaper cartoons, but the publicity was touching us and rubbing off.... Kelly organized a counter-move against the negative press all cartoons were getting. In the U.S. Court House on Foley Square in New York a group of cartoonists and illustrators came early and occupied the front seats. As the hearings went on, the Congressmen became aware that we were drawing their portraits ....Before it ended, the jury was hardly listening to the unhappy book artists. After the session, we went from one legislator to another delivering the art. Each Congressman new home with a half dozen drawings of himself - and a dim recall of the testimony, (qtd. in O'Sullivan 94) However seriously we want to take Caniff's claims for the actual effect of the cartoonists on the hearing, this story demonstrates the complex and contested relation of comics - and Pogo in particular - to the social and political world. Kelly's use of the newspaper cartoonist's tools-caricature, parody, attention to the daily affairs of the nation - to intervene in the political process mirrors the technique of his own comic strip. At the very moment that the government was striving to "contain" subversive and immoral strains in art, comics, and popular culture in general, Kelly was engaging in a series of relentless parodies of these efforts by playing them out - in a style to which the word "allegory" does not really do justice - in the community of animals inhabiting Pogo's Okeefenokee swamp. At a time when so many activities were construed as un-American, how did Pogo Pos- sum, Howland Owl, Albert Alligator, and Chur- chy LaFemme (the natural-born turtle) manage to stay afloat, navigating their odd little boats through murky political waters? This article tries to answer that question by examining the place of Pogo, and of funny papers and funny books in general, in the culture of the fifties and beyond. The McCarthy era was a crucible, a moment when our concerns about art and politics in relation to the popular culture were played out, publicly and dramatically, on the national stage. Indeed, the national stage, the ongoing discussion of what it means to be American, is precisely the site on which Kelly chose to create his comic strip. Specifically, I argue that Kelly's subversive activities were made possible through his invocation of peculiarly American mythologies about "the folk," through a representation of leftist politics as good old American common sense. While comic strips have generally had the reputation of being genial and harmless, comic books have long been the subject of attacks from individuals and institutions concerned about the corruption of the American youth. The effort to regulate the content of comics began in earnest with Fredric Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which laid the blame for societal evils and juvenile delinquency on the violence and sexual content of comic books. Wertham's book is a fascinating document in its own right; although designed as a study of the comics' impact on the adolescent psyche by an acclaimed clinical psychologist, its close readings of comic book texts and attention to the social relations implied by those texts make it a sort of bizarro-world version of contemporary cultural studies. …