Drawn and quartered

"The Ten-Cent Plague" traces the shrill sound of alarm all the way back to 1906, when Ralph Bergengren harrumphed in the Atlantic Monthly that the comic strip "Katzenjammer Kids" and its four-color ilk were committing multiple crimes against society. "Respect for property," he wrote, "respect for parents, for law, for decency, for truth, for beauty, for kindliness, for dignity, or for honor are killed, without mercy." That was almost half a century before Gaines and his gleeful crew sharpened up their axes.

The most memorable crusades against comics, though, took place in the 1940s and 1950s as part of a response to surging "juvenile delinquency," a term Hajdu smartly deconstructs. In his view, it's an umbrella label, "a way to define a range of phenomena involving young people that, to the prevailing adult authorities, seemed to represent a falling short, a delinquency, in youthful behavior. It defined by negation: Like most criticism of the comics, the words 'juvenile delinquency' characterized their subject by its failure to meet expectations -- not by what it was, but by what a disappointment it was."

The establishment response to delinquency was perhaps most vividly expressed in the pages of this very newspaper, which in June 1943 published a breathless opinion piece by none other than FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who warned that the war raging overseas wasn't the only threat to America's future.

"This country is in deadly peril," the iconic G-man (or his ghostwriter) declared. "For a creeping rot of disintegration is eating into our nation. I am not easily shocked nor easily alarmed. But today, like thousands of others, I am both shocked and alarmed. The arrests of 'teen-age' boys and girls, all over the country are staggering." The piece went on to tell of boys shoplifting, stealing cars and robbing filling stations, as well as girls who drank in taverns, got "coarse and vulgar" and ended up in "houses of ill fame."

It's hard now not to chuckle at that language, at both the message and the messenger. "We are fighting a war to establish the Four Freedoms for the generation now coming to maturity," Hoover concluded. "We had better make sure that they have the self-discipline to live in a free world."