"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.'"
In the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher reviews David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.
As does Laura Miller in Salon.
As does Louis Menand in The New Yorker.
In Slate, Jeet Heer defends anti-comics psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
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