David Hajdu > Quotes

“It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth. It was just incredible." Forsaking public prominence, Strayhorn found personal freedom in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Now there might not be a Billy Strayhorn Orchestra. But there was a Billy Strayhorn.”
― David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn

“[Bob] Dylan said, "I don't have to B.S. anybody like those guys up on Broadway that're always writin' about 'I'm hot for you and you're hot for me--ooka dooka dicka dee.' There's other things in the world besides love and sex that're important too. People shouldn't turn their backs on 'em just because they ain't pretty to look at. How is the world ever gonna get any better if we're afraid to look at these things.”
― David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina

“Other magazines, including The Nation and Good Housekeeping, found the Sunday supplements most offensive because they were published on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. When Hearst introduced the color section of the Journal, he promoted it as “eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe!” How could Sunday school compete with the thing that topped the rainbow? The supplements transformed Sunday in millions of American homes, Christian and otherwise, and not only for children.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“Page-one news as it occurred, the story of the comics controversy is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars and one that defies now-common notions about the evolution of twentieth-century popular culture, including the conception of the postwar sensibility—a raucous and cynical one, inured to violence and absorbed with sex, skeptical of authority, and frozen in young adulthood—as something spawned by rock and roll. The truth is more complex. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“The history of censorship in twentieth-century America is largely a story of self-regulation in the name of self-preservation—voluntary restraint enacted on the assumption that governmental restriction would be worse.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“Strangely, “Horror in the Nursery” never mentioned that the location of Wertham’s research site was Harlem. The first sentence of the piece set the scene: “In the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church parish house in uptown New York … ,” evoking associations with WASPy Anglicanism without a hint of how far uptown the Lafargue Clinic was. The text never mentioned Negro culture or, for that matter, race or ethnicity in any context; and all the children in the photographs, which were staged, were white. Wertham, interviewed for the article prior to the Supreme Court ruling on Winters v. New York, anticipated objections to his criticism of comics on First Amendment grounds. Still, he called for legislative action. “The publishers will raise a howl about freedom of speech and of the press,” he told Crist: Nonsense. We are dealing with the mental health of a generation—the care of which we have left too long in the hands of unscrupulous persons whose only interest is greed and financial gain … If those responsible refuse to clean up the comic-book market—and to all appearances most of them do, the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“It is poppycock to think that it is necessary to resort to laws to make America greater by banning comic books... This is a matter for the home, the school, the church, and other family influences - not the legislatures.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“When the Associated Press picked up the story from local accounts, readers of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other papers around the country learned how, just three years after the Second World War, American citizens were burning books.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“All of our testimony from psychiatrists and children themselves show that it's very upsetting, that it has a bad moral effect, and that it is directly responsible for a substantial amount of juvenile delinquency and child crime." In fact, both the expert testimony and the documentary evidence submitted at the hearings varied significantly in their judgments, and the committee spoke with no children; it had set a policy of precluding the testimony of minors.

The writer of the program, A. J. Fenady, had not seen a transcript of the hearings before preparing Coates's questions and "basically threw the guy some softballs," he said, because "[Kefauver] wanted to use this soapbox to run for president" in the 1956 election. "The comic-book scare was the big thing he had going for him," Fenady recalled, "and he knew how to use it.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“The line dividing the comics' advocates and opponents was generational, rather than geographic. While many of the actions to curtail comics were attempts to protect the young, they were also efforts to protect the culture at large from the young. Encoded in much of the ranting about comic books and juvenile delinquency were fears not only of what comic readers might become, but of what they already were--that is, a generation of people developing their own interests and tastes, along with a determination to indulge them.”
― David Hajdu, Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book-Scare and How It Changed America

“In its conclusion, the report argued, "The wholesale condemnation of all comics magazines is one of the worst mistakes of some of the critics. The fact is both sides are right. The books are not all bad, as the more extreme critics say; nor are all good, as some of their publishers and defenders content. Like all other creative products, they must be judged individually. And that is what most critics, parents, and public officials have failed to do."
Still, the city council found a third of published comics to be "offensive, objectionable, and undesirable," and, on February 2, 1949, it appointed a board to monitor news dealers' compliance with a blacklist of titles.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

“It was the strangest thing to me that Charlie Gaines was publishing all these Bible stories about love and kindness,” said Klapper, “and he was the nastiest son of a bitch on the face of the earth.”
― David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America