Of comic books and halls of fame
by Jack Neely
My column about poor Estes Kefauver, nearly forgotten in his home region 40 years after his tenure as one of the most influential U.S. senators of the 20th century, brought out a few ironies.
I had gathered that hardly anybody under 45 had ever heard of Estes Kefauver, but I've learned in the last two weeks that that's not exactly true. It seems that some younger folks do know the name Kefauver, but not for his civil-rights record, his investigations of the mob, his battle against McCarthyism, or his defense of TVA against Republican charges that the agency was a socialist plot.
They know him for a brief chapter of his career hardly mentioned in most biographies. During his first term in the senate, Kefauver was a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. It was 1954, and many parents, teachers, and ministers, spurred on by a renowned New York psychiatrist, charged that much of the rising tide of teenage violence could be blamed on the new violence and sexuality they saw in the media.
Most mainstream media had, by tradition and sometimes law, steered clear of graphic sexual or violent content. The one sometimes-startling exception was the one that was ostensibly aimed at kids: comic books. By the early 1950s, comics were showing hyperbuxom women, graphic shootings and stabbings, dead and dismembered bodies, sometimes right there in garish colors on the covers.
Kefauver and his committee looked into it, listening to both sides, calling in psychologists who were certain of a connection, and calling in the publishers to offer an account of themselves. In one memorable exchange, Kefauver was grilling EC (for "Educational Comics") publisher William Gaines, who had claimed that "good taste" should be the only criterion of what should be publishable in a comic book.
Kefauver picked up a copy of a recent EC comic depicting a severed woman's head. "Is that good taste?"
"Yes!" Gaines responded. The exchange made headlines.
To people for whom Gaines was a hero, such confrontations, made Kefauver the stodgy enemy, a government meddler in the realm of free expression.
Kefauver's subcommittee concluded that there was no proven connection between comics and violence. However, the subcommittee suggested that the comic-book industry should find some way to clean up its own act.
It was a kid-glove sort of gesture, without any sort of enforcement, similar to token gestures Congress has recently made at the movie and music industries. Angry parents demanding results criticized Kefauver's committee for spending a lot of time on the issue without producing anything at all.
However, the industry, embarrassed and chastened by the publicity, got together and founded the Comics Code Authority, which banned specific sorts of stories and scenes from magazines published as "comic books." The new rules were known as the Comic Book Code. Wholesalers, responding to popular pressure, refused to carry comics that weren't certified by the CCA. (Gaines was able to keep publishing by calling one of his comic books a "magazine": Mad.)
To some adult comic-book enthusiasts, it's the equivalent of the Intolerable Acts, and Kefauver is something like a meddling demagogue who was somehow behind it all.
Joseph Gorman's 400-page biography barely mentions the episode, but does imply that maybe Kefauver, under fire for his progressive views, was indulging in a little election-year grandstanding, to prove that this he was a regular guy with some standards of decency.
* In that column I mentioned that Kefauver is not in the UT alumni Hall of Fame. The "Hall" is mounted on the mezzanine level of the Hodges Library, near the case containing the rare skeleton of the minotaur. My old professor Dr. Milton Klein, who kept me on my toes in many hours of colonial history a couple of decades ago, straightened me out about that quick. He noted that the actual name of the shrine is the Alumni Academic Hall of Fame. The folks there memorialized are mainly academics. He said they specifically made no room for politicians.
I looked at it again, and he's right about the word Academic being in there; I omitted the word in my column. However, in the existing hall, there are at least a couple of exceptions to the all-academics rule: filmmaker Clarence Brown and novelist Cormac McCarthy, for two. And the hall's 1995 mission statement states that the place "honors UT alumni who have achieved national or international distinction in the arts, letters, sciences, or professions."
It would be nice to think that the U.S. Senate counts as a "profession," though I can see why some people might not want to exalt a political career with that title. It seems to me that if there's some way to get McCarthy and Brown through the academic red tape, they should carve out a back-door entrance for Kefauver, too. He was a mere senator, but he did occasionally give a lecture on foreign policy or TVA at UT.
August 7, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 32
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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