A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence

by Fredric Wertham

This 375 page paperback explores the nature of human violence. The book is divided into 15 chapters that cover topics such as "Can Violence be studied Scientifically?" "Fostering Factors," "Climates for Violence," and "Blood & the Role of Art & Literature." Even though this paperback was published in 1969, the challenges it presents are relevant to contemporary society.

Mass Market Paperback

First published March 12, 1973

Reviews

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, it’s that Fredric Wertham, the villain of David Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague. For posterity, his name seems destined to be associated with the crime and horror comics he was instrumental in suppressing in the 1950s. Finding this book at a used book sale last week, I was curious enough about the man and his ideas to pick it up and read it. In this book on the problem of violence in human society, Dr. Wertham shows himself a believer in a version what Anthony Burgess called the “Pelagian heresy”: denying that humans are violent by nature or inheritance and believing that man is capable of creating a society free of violence.

1. Wertham on Violence

Wertham describes the creation of a society in which violence is prevalent by the devaluing of human life and the presentation of violence as an acceptable means of dealing with problems. The doctor points to racism, Malthusianism, strategists of nuclear war, and cigarette and alcohol advertisements as factors in devaluing individual life. His culprits for making violence seem an acceptable means of resolving problems include toy guns and games with violent themes, television of almost every sort, including news reports from the combat zones of Viet Nam, and, of course, comic books. He also believes that violence is perpetuated by inappropriate and inconsistent punishment in the justice system. A chapter titled Don’t We Need Violence? gives a critique of the death penalty and a brief history of nonviolent resistance, from La Boétie through Thoreau, Tolstoi, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Interestingly, even in the 1968 introduction, he does not mention draft resistors when listing forces working against a violent society.

This book is very well written and I was surprised to find myself absorbed in it once I started reading. Wertham reinforces his points with numerous anecdotes and descriptions of criminal cases which help to keep the reader’s interest and ground his discussions in the real world. However, because of the lack of footnotes and Wertham’s carelessness about dating or attributing his sources, I was often left wondering whether some of the stories which very conveniently fit his theses were entirely factual. For example, in the section about the deleterious effects of toy weapons he says,

In an extreme case, a four-year-old boy who loved to play with [toy guns] had a whole collection. Once when he was in a grocery store with his mother, he spotted an old revolver which the woman who owned the store kept on a shelf. He did some more playing. He took the revolver, pointed it at the woman, and pulled the trigger. She died from a bullet wound in the stomach.

This may well represent an actual case, but the neatness of the story and lack of specific references leaves room for doubt.
Wertham writes in an authoritative style even when I suspect he’s talking through his hat, but his chapter on the Nazi murder of the handicapped and mentally ill carried a conviction that stood out from the rest of the book. Here the killers are Wertham’s peers and the milieu of the murders one with which he is intimately familiar, that of institutional psychiatry. His description of the theoretical groundwork laid well before the Nazis came to power, the bureaucratic process of classification, and the murders themselves, as well as his shredding of the various legal and professional justifications for the actions was completely convincing to me.

I found his chapter on the Holocaust surprising in its emphasis. He rejects psychological explanations as inadequate for extermination carried out on such a massive scale. Rather than seeing the Nazi mass murder as the product of virulent prejudice and sadism, he portrays it as an extreme form of economic exploitation. At every point, the victims were used for the economic benefit of their victimizers: the confiscation of their goods on their arrest, the labor forced from them in camps and factories, the hair and gold teeth from their dead bodies, and the chemicals from their processed corpses, used to make soap and fertilizer. Wertham’s view is that once human life was devalued in the culture, the victims themselves portrayed as subhuman or superfluous, and with the use of deadly force legitimized by the state, economic incentives became sufficient cause to initiate the process of mass extermination and to keep supplying new victims to keep it running.

In a final chapter, Wertham reviews the centuries-spanning trend toward a less violent world, briefly describes trends he is hopeful may reduce violence in the coming years, and offers counter-arguments to theorists who see violence as inextricable from society or human nature.

2. Wertham on Comic Books

In his discussion of comic books in this volume, Wertham makes explicit that this does not include newspaper comic strips, “which are very different”, but offers no elaboration on what the differences are. He seems to acknowledge the Comics Code Authority, but then rather dubiously justifies the reiteration of examples which I suspect are lifted wholesale from Seduction of the Innocent (1954):

The wildest scenes are not being published anymore, although violence still abounds. But the older comic books are still around in large numbers – and in the hands of children – being sold and traded.

He does take credit for putting “twenty-four out of twenty-nine crime-comic-book publishers…out of business”, but is still not satisfied:

an experienced magazine editor, Jerome Ellison, wrote that on examining comic books in a country general store, he found “a grisly display of blood-letting, mass killing … rampant sadism, and all piously labeled ‘Approved by the Comics Code Authority.’”
(ellipsis in the original)

Though Wertham holds comic books in special contempt (“cheap, shoddy, anonymous… bad paper, bad English, and, more often than not bad drawings”), television comes in for an equal amount of criticism. Westerns, spies, policemen, science fiction, monsters, it’s all bad medicine to the doctor. He blames spy programs for this case:

A little boy, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, answered, “I want to be a security risk!”

Superman, who serves as a double threat, being both a comic book and TV character, is a particular bête noir of the author. He both stands in for superheroes in general and is, for Wertham, a pulp incarnation of the Übermenschen variously described by Nietzsche and Nazi propaganda. He says,

Among delinquency- and trouble-prone youngsters, an inordinate number of Superman devotees is to be found.

Now, as I remember my childhood, I did not know one child in my circle of friends, male or female, who did not enjoy watching Superman on TV; the more literate and introspective among us were also readers of the comic books. None of us ever darkened the door of Juvenile Hall, and I cannot imagine that those kids who did end up on the wrong side of the law could have been greater fans of the Man of Steel than we were. That those halcyon afternoons in front of the TV also included The Three Stooges and 1930s Popeye cartoons would no doubt make my childhood an orgy of depravity in the eyes of the doctor. Wertham anticipated this skeptical reaction, for in his chapter on juvenile delinquency he says

Sometimes a very self-righteous person will proclaim that he too was exposed in childhood to all kinds of bad, aggression-promoting influences, but that on him they had no negative effects whatever. When we look at him more closely, we often find a typical ruthlessly aggressive individual making his way to success by stepping on those who are in his way.

Wertham is unable to admit that there is any possibility that exposure to media violence can be without a negative influence of some sort .

This book did give me some idea of the thought process that led to Wertham’s ideas about comic books: for someone looking for societal messages which normalize violence as a means of problem solving, seeing a succession of superheroes, popular with children, who end almost every adventure by using their fists or the equivalent makes them a likely suspect. But even after reading this book it is still difficult for me to believe that the author seriously considers them part of a continuum that includes Kristallnacht. Given the opprobrium with which he discusses the medium itself, I suspect that a large part of his distaste is actually aesthetic although he obviously feels the need to express it in moral terms. In my own experience I have found individuals straining to find objective “scientific” criteria why modern art or music is “bad”, feeling that their personal dislike of the works was of a nature that went deeper than individual taste. My opinion was reinforced by the single instance in which he offers an alternative to comic books for juvenile entertainment:

Superman is also above the laws of physics. For a former generation, Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which predicted the submarine, represented the invincible spirit of science which overcomes all obstacles. He is replaced now by Superman who represents superstition and has caused children to “fly” from high places to injury and death.

I would never argue that Superman comics are a comparable achievement to Verne’s book, but my opinion is based on artistic criteria such as characterization and narrative structure. If one looks at the works’ presentation of violence, Captain Nemo seems a far less admirable character than Superman in his methods and his willingness to sacrifice the innocent.

Wertham does have a chapter on violence and the arts which offers some broad descriptions and a few examples of anti- and pro-violence tendencies in the arts. Though he doesn’t directly say so, I suspect that the doctor would consider almost all the great works of art from past centuries which have entered the canon to be anti-violent in tendency; his explicit examples include The Iliad, Shakespeare, Kafka, and Native Son. No, there is no mention of Titus Andronicus among the Bard’s works. His list of pro-violence works are more contemporary, the earliest being the writings of Nietzsche , and including John Hershey’s Hiroshima, The Last Exit to Brooklyn, and In Cold Blood. In his discussion of pro-violence works he also discuses a stage adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon and the film of John Fowles’ The Collector, though he offers no judgment as to whether books that are the sources of these works are pro-violent. In distinction to his opinions of comic books and television shows, here Wertham does concede artistic merits to the pro-violence works he mentions, though condemning their moral influence.