{"id":1334,"date":"2008-04-04T21:36:44","date_gmt":"2008-04-05T02:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2008\/04\/04\/werthams-crusade\/"},"modified":"2008-06-15T21:30:39","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T02:30:39","slug":"werthams-crusade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2008\/04\/04\/werthams-crusade\/","title":{"rendered":"Wertham’s Crusade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeet Heer in Slate revisits the story of Fredric Wertham<\/a>, an American psychiatrist who started a campaign against comic books in the 1940’s and 50’s, arguing that they promote juvenile delinquency and homosexuality. The campaign was a great success, culminating in mass book burnings and Congressional hearings. Many publishers went out of business and the rest were forced to accept a draconian censorship regime.
\n
\nThe comic book industry was devastated and never fully recovered. At the same time, perhaps by coincidence (though I think not) the American animation industry began a slow decline that was never reversed; by now it has almost disappeared.<\/p>\n

At the same time, probably by coincidence, the manga<\/a> industry was taking off in Japan. That in turn led to the anime<\/a> industry. Today both art forms, originally pioneered by Americans, are dominated by the Japanese. Perhaps this says something about the power of mass hysteria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeet Heer in Slate revisits the story of Fredric Wertham, an American psychiatrist who started a campaign against comic books in the 1940’s and 50’s, arguing that they promote juvenile… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[87,86],"class_list":["post-1334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","tag-comic-books","tag-fredric-wertham"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}