|
Although now appreciated for their value as collectors’ items, many people forget the hysteria that surrounded the comic book industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Author David Hajdu, in his recent book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America explores how comic books were once considered the root cause of juvenile delinquency because of their glorification of sex, violence, and drugs. Mr. Hajdu will kick off the ACLU of Connecticut’s events for Banned Books Week on Wednesday, October 1 at 7:00 p.m. at R.J. Julia’s Bookstore, 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, Connecticut where he will give a talk and answer questions about this little known period of American history. A reception and book signing will follow his talk and the event is free and open to the public.
In his book he details how Communities such as Binghamton, New York held public mass burnings of comic books where residents went house to house to collect and burn all comic books found. The absurdity didn’t end there. There were accusations that Batman and Robin promoted homosexuality, that children would get the wrong idea about the laws of physics since Superman could fly, and that any comic with the words, ‘crime,’ ‘horror,’ or ‘terror’ in the title would corrupt the youth of America. These fears spurred a full Senate investigation as well as the arbitrary ban in Chicago of comic books involving crime.
Mr. Hajdu is a music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for numerous magazines including The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, BookForum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair among many others. His first two books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. TheTen-Cent Plague is his third book.
Banned Books Week – this year falling on the week of September 27 to October 4 - was founded by the American Library Association 27 years ago to shine a light on the fact that despite the First Amendment’s sweeping protection of free speech and expression, censorship has been a constant presence throughout our nation. This year the ACLU of Connecticut and the Connecticut Library Association have teamed up to bring you several events to foster awareness about the misguided fear responsible for censorship. Almost immediately after our country’s founding, the Alien and Sedition Acts made it illegal to publish anything that spoke out against our government; more recently, books such as Harry Potter and Webster’s Dictionary have been banned from school libraries. In fact, nearly half of the Radcliffe Publishing course’s 100 Top Novels of the 20th Century have been banned at one point or another.
|
