JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
(Comic Books)
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 1954
United States Senate,
Subcommittee of the Committee on
the Judiciary, To Investigate Juvenile Delinquency,
The subcommittee met at 10 a. m., pursuant to call, in room 110, United States Courthouse, New York, N. Y., Senator Robert C. Hendrickson (chairman of the subcommittee), presiding.
Present: Senators Hendrickson, Kefauver, and Hennings.
Also present: Herbert J. Hannoch, chief counsel; Herbert Wilson Beaser, associate chief counsel; and Richard Clendenen, executive director.
The Chairman. This meeting of the Senate Subcomittee on Juvenile Delinquency will now be in order.
Today and tomorrow the United States Senate Subcommittee Investigating Juvenile Delinquency, of which I am the chairman, is going into the problem of horror and crime comic books. By comic books, we mean pamphlets illustrating stories depicting crimes or dealing with horror and sadism. We shall not be talking about the comic strips that appear daily in most of our newspapers.
And we shall be limiting our investigation to those comic books dealing with crime and horror, Thus, while there are more than a billion comic books sold in the United States each year, our subcommittee's interest lies in only a fraction of this publishing field.
Authorities agree that the majority of comic books are as harmless as soda pop. But hundreds of thousands of horror and crime comic books are peddled to our young people of impressionable age.
You will learn during the course of these hearings that we shall also not be speaking of all crime comic books. Some of the types of crime and horror comic books with which we are concerned have been brought into the hearing room for your attention.
I wish to state emphatically that freedom of the press is not at issue in this investigation. The members of this Senate subcomittee—Senator Kefauver, Senator Hennings, and Senator Langer—as well as myself as chairman, are fully aware of the long, hard, bitter fight that has been waged to achieve and preserve the freedom of the press, as well as the other freedoms in our Bill of Rights which we cherish in America.
We are not a subcommittee of blue-nosed censors. We have no preconceived notions as to the possible need for new legislation. We want to find out what damage, if any, is being done to our children's minds by certain types of publications which contain a substantial
