A world made of glass : crime, culture and community in an age of hyper-media

In 1954 Senator Estes Kefauver presided, if not literally, over a second Senate Sub-Committee inquiring into the sources of the moral rot at the core of an otherwise flourishing postwar America. The Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency had a different object than the 1950 committee headed by Kefauver. Kefauver 1950 was briefed to expose organized crime, while Kefauver 1954 concerned itself with the comic book industry and another more recently expansionist empire of popular culture -- television. The 1950 and 1954 subcommittees should not have had a great deal in common, and neither could be expected to have much in common with current investigations into, say, internet porn, the efficacy of the V-Chip, or violence in schools. But when expert adviser to the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Frederic Wertham, criticized Superman comics for encouraging in children "phantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune," he was registering an anxiety -- still familiar to us today -- about the social and cultural penalties for the vicarious enjoyment of violence.