American Daredevil

 Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason

By John Adcock

“The (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) Constitution also guarantees by law freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of street processions and demonstrations, as well, of course, as freedom of religious worship.” – Lev Gleason, FBI File, July 21, 1943

“We shall never now be able to arrive at any judgment of the full scale of what took place, of the number who perished, or of the standard they might have attained. No one will ever tell us about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear; they can be remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with paper, to pass through the vicissitudes of the Archipelago.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

American Daredevil is a book that left me more confused than enlightened. I can never take serious as history any biography that makes ample use of “creative license” to fill six pages with an imagined visit to Lev Gleason’s office by an FBI agent “in a plain gray suit and matching fedora… something of a caricature, he knew, but this was what he had always worn, and it felt comfortable.” Or putting imaginary words in Lev Gleason’s mouth as he barges unwittingly into his reception room, head buried in a newspaper: “Can you believe this news about McCarthy? He’s getting married in Washington next week, for God’s sake! That no good Roy Cohn is going to be an usher…” I’m also suspicious when I see that one of the author’s main sources is Marxist Howard Zinn’s thoroughly discredited anti-American screed A People’s History of the United States.

The author cannot quite face up to the fact that his “heroic” relative was a Communist at a time when all American communists were Stalinists, despite all the red flags that pop up in his sloppy narrative. In his view Gleason is a “New-Dealer,” a “progressive,” and an “anti-fascist.” Gleason claims outright at one point “I am not a communist.” Later he admits to the wily imaginary FBI agent that he was a communist from about 1936 to 1939, when he dropped out over the Stalin/Hitler pact. Yet in 1943 he was praising Soviet “freedoms” in his newspaper, a view that most Americans at the time knew was a lie (see opening quote above).

Anti-fascist is a neat obfuscation ― after all who wasn’t an anti-fascist in the west during World War II? I quit counting the author’s tiresome abuse of the term after 50 mentions. Gleason and the party would have defined an anti-fascist as someone who had fought in Spain against Franco under communist leadership. Where the term originated. To the American, British, and Canadian governments it was a war between two totalitarian governments which was why they stayed out of it. CPUSA on the other hand counted American Democrats and Republicans alike as fascists. That list of fascists included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at least until his inexplicable formal recognition of the Soviet dictatorship on Nov 16, 1933.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression pact followed by a joint invasion of  Poland (starting WWII) and Stalin’s invasion of Finland and occupation of the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and parts of Romania. The American anti-fascists of the CPUSA and The Daily Worker either quit the party or did an embarrassing about face, supporting Hitler until the Stalin/Hitler pact was dust. They betrayed their comrades who shed their blood on Spanish soil which revealed their progressive anti-fascism as a lie. In 1945 Gleason, faced with jail-time for contempt, betrayed his own comrades on the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. He tossed them all under the bus for his own well-being.

The author covers this period, which is critical to understanding Gleason’s political worldview, in two short, confused sections between pages 8 to 40. The rest of the book is a scattershot affair, some worthwhile, most already told in detail in several better books.

The Epilogue is an awkward segue into the future which has no bearing on the life of Leverett Gleason and occasionally reads like Charles Biro’s forties comic book dialogue. indeed, much of the book wanders from concise writing into a breathless melodramatic comic book style, all that is missing is all-caps and the exclamation points. By 2018 “the forces Lev Gleason fought against… had reawakened with a vengeance… Once again it was becoming Un-American to be anti-fascist.” Really? I anticipated at this point super publisher Lev Gleason would rise from his grave, don red tights and a flowing cape and fly to Washington to clean out the White House.

Unfortunately, the comic book publisher was not – as the back-cover blurb proclaims) - A REAL LIFE COMICS SUPERHERO! The FBI would confirm that he was not even a significant figure in the Communist movement and remove his name from their security risk files in 1954. He kept a low profile for the rest of his life.

Brett Dakin has assembled some great material and with stronger editorial control I think he could have produced a quality biography, but the resulting book bounces recklessly from real history, to personal memory, to speculative fiction. The finished work lacks focus, the chronology is confusing, and historical objectivity is nowhere to be found. American Daredevil is a flawed work, made up of unrelated and cobbled together sections, but it is still stimulating and informative enough, in several parts, to be worth reading.

Leverett Gleason played an important part in comic book history and he deserves to be remembered not for his insignificant political life but for his accomplishments in that field... Daredevil, Crime Does Not Pay, Crime & Punishment, Captain Battle, and the wonderful kid gang feature Little Wise Guys.

American Daredevil is available on Amazon

Gershon Legman vs. the Crime Comic Books – 1948

      

[1] Crimes by Women — No. 3, Oct 1948, Fox Features Syndicate, Inc.

“I have met many recent publishers of erotica (including Wood), and I believe almost all of the erotic publishers in America during the 1930s and ’40s and of the 1950s and ’60s in France. And I can testify that every single one of them who also or mainly wrote or published sado-masochistic literature was an open, and usually admitted freak on the subject.” — Gershon Legman, 1981

“That’s how I got to be a moron.” — Jerry Lewis on reading crime and horror comic books, 1955

“Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!” — Allen Ginsberg, Howl, 1955

         

by John Adcock  

IN JULY 1971 fanzine contributor Bill Blackbeard (45) replied to CAPA-alpha, an amateur press association he had contributed articles to, explaining why he did not discuss “non-reprint comic books, an area toward which its members are ‘strongly biased.’” One of Blackbeard’s remarks as “a critic whose responses on all media are based on early acquired tastes…” 

“What I didn’t realize then was that through the garish pages of the super hero comics an angry, mocking, asocial and suppressed community of depression-racked, half-talented, and no-talented jobless hacks of the bleak ’30s had been laid open like a gangrened wound. These men had been told over and over again by art instructors, honest artist and writer friends, and syndicate heads and magazine editors that their stuff was, in some cases, worthless; in others mediocre at best; in a few more, promising but lacking sensible integration.

They of course didn’t see it that way, and when a number of quick-buck magazine publishers and editors began buying up their stuff as fast as they could turn it out, obviously making good money out of it but callously paying them as little as possible, their accumulated venom and fury against prevailing standards of taste, against established comic narrative, against society as a whole, bubbled out in every panel they drew, every face they limned, every story they told.” — Bill Blackbeard, in Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, July 1971

WOW. Such was fandom. There is some truth to what Blackbeard says, a lot of publishers sold sleaze while disguising it as a public service, many young Depression-tired cartoonists served apprenticeships under unscrupulous publishers, and it was said that Victor S. Fox hired students to churn out comic books and laughed at them when they tried to collect their pay. Many of these young apprentice cartoonists would grow into professionals as the decades wore on. Cartoonist Don Rico recalled the page rates at Fox (if he could be cornered into payment) as $7.50 per page for a complete penciling, inking and lettering.

[2] Politix Komix. “… I feel that a splendid addition to our line would be ‘politics comics’!…” — George Lichty Grin and Bear It cartoon, July 17, 1954.

BILL BLACKBEARD (28 April 1926 - 10 March 2011) was not a postwar boomer; he was from the World War II generation, a generation of kids which absorbed popular culture via film, radio, phonograph, pulps and comic strips. Bill had just turned twelve when Superman entered the picture in Action Comics, June 1938, soon followed by Pocket Books in 1939:

“The superhero comic concept was the sick reverse of this: the invulnerable hero became society, became authority, and as such beyond criticism and cavil, and wreaked havoc against all those who opposed him, or plotted to destroy him. That this is fundamentally a fascistic attitude hardly needs to be pointed out, or that the Germans, with their support of Hitler as a superhero smiting anvil against a background of brightly uniformed pageantry, did in actuality what the superhero creators and readers could only do in vicarious fantasy.” — Bill Blackbeard, in Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, July 1971

[3] A reader of Apache Kid — Oct 17, 1954.

BLACKBEARD may have formed these opinions very early in life, he mentions that comic book discussions “had to be an exchange of enthusiasms — you could prefer Superman to Batman, or Submariner to the Human Torch (a little like preferring Dillinger to Baby Face Nelson, that last) … but you didn’t dare deny the excitement and wonder of the magazine comic heroes as a whole.”

“And of course the army, the navy, the police and the FBI, and all the resources of civilization are powerless. Only the Nazi-Nietzschean Übermensch, in his provincial apotheosis as Superman can save us.” — Gershon Legman, Love & Death, 1949 

On the other hand he may have formed these ideas through reading Gershon Legman’s Love & Death, published in 1949. Although superheroes were not Legman’s main concern, that being sadism in literature, lurid paperbacks, crime and jungle comics as a substitute for normal sex.

[4] Justice Traps the Guilty — No. 1, Oct-Nov 1947, American Boys’ Comics, Inc.

A SYMPOSIUM was held on March 19, 1948, by the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy on ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’ with Frederick Wertham, M.D., introducing the speakers. First up to speak was a wild-haired, walrus-mustachioed literary tramp and eccentric named George Alexander (called Gershon) Legman (1917-99), a social and cultural critic with a Freudian viewpoint who was of Bill Blackbeard’s generation. He spoke on ‘The Comic Books and the Public,’ excerpted from “a monograph on sex and censorship, Love & Death, already rejected by thirty publishers.”

New York publishers Ziff-Davis and New Directions rejected the Love & Death manuscript. The reason publishers refused Love & Death was that according to the laws of the time it was obscene and libelous. Legman refused to remove the offensive bits. The book was then self-published by Legman in 1949. The Post Office took offense and cut off all service to his home address. A frustrated Legman moved to France in 1953 where he eventually settled in the mountain village of Valbonne, on the Riviera.

‘Comic Books and the Public’ — see it HERE — was an edited and toned down excerpt from Legman’s in progress Love & Death and was published in print (minus libels and obscenities) in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, No. 2, April 1948. Frederick Wertham, M.D. then wrote an article titled ‘The Comics… Very Funny!’ for the May 29, 1948, issue of the Saturday Review of Literature — HERE.

[5] Crime Does Not Pay — No. 52, June 1947, Lev Gleason.

JOHN CLELLON HOLMES, just beginning his literary career, met four different men on the “long, muggy July 4th weekend in 1948” who would profoundly affect his writing for the rest of his life. They were Jay Landesman, Gershon Legman, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The descriptive ‘Beat’ was not yet formed. Holmes recalled (in Nothing More To Declare, 1967) that Legman’s three room cottage in the Bronx, allegedly once inhabited by Charles Fort, author of Book of the Damned (1919), was filled with wooden packing crates overflowing with comic books, bought from the neighborhood children and “arranged according to degree of atrocity.”

“Now, what is it that is supposed to be attractive to 12 and 14 year old boys about torturing women to death, with or without their clothes, about tying them up with ropes and chains, whipping them, branding them on the modestly un-nippled breast, skewering their throats with javelins, pumping their veins empty (or full of unheard-of viruses), throwing them to wild animals, shooting them in the belly with hot lead? What is it that makes adolescents buy eight million dollars’ worth of comic books yearly in which those are the principle themes both outside and in? That the publishers, editors, artists and writers of comic-books are degenerates and belong in jail, goes without saying; but what makes millions of adolescents willing to accept degeneracy too?” — Gershon Legman, The Psychopathology of the Comics, 1948

IN UNEXPURGATED form Legman’s ‘Comic Books and the Public’ was issued as ‘The Psychopathology of the Comics’ in Jay Landesman’s Neurotica, No. 3, Nov 1948. Neurotica, a journal meant to “psychoanalyze the culture,” ran for 9 issues from 1948 to 1952. John Clellon Holmes edited No. 3; eventually he was replaced by Gershon Legman. ‘The Psychopathology of the Comics’ was later published  in France as ‘La psychopathologie des bandes dessineés’ in Les Temps Modernes, No. 31, in May 1949.

[6] Love & Death — cover, 1949.

WITH FUNDING from Osmond Beckwith, in 1949, Gershon Legman published four essays in book form. The essays, originally published in Neurotica, comprised ‘Love & Death, a Study in Censorship by G. Legman.’ The four jeremiads were ‘Institutionalized Lynch,’ ‘Not for Children’ (formerly ‘The Psychopathology of the Comics’), ‘Avatars of the Bitch,’ and ‘Open Season on Women.’

Legman’s main contention, and one that he repeated in other articles later in life, was that violence, not sex, was the real pornography.

“Murder having replaced sex in the popular arts, the glorification of one requires the degradation of the other … so that we are faced in our culture by the insurmountable schizophrenic contradiction that sex, which is legal in fact, is a crime on paper, while murder — a crime in fact — is, on paper, the best-seller of all time…

…Civilisation is not yet ready to let love and death fight it out in the market place with free speech and four-color printing on both sides.” — Gershon Legman, The Psychopathology of the Comics, 1948

[7] Crime Comics, 1937-1947 — Legman’s list in Neurotica, 1948.

GERSHON LEGMAN was no crusader like Wertham, although we imagine that he would have been happy to see all comic books banished from the newsstand, and all comic book producers and readers obliterated from the earth. Legman’s condemnatory notice was that in our culture “the average mental age is fourteen.”

“The public can hardly be told what is being done to it.” — Gershon Legman, The Psychopathology of the Comics, 1948

[8] Crime and Punishment — No. 1, April 1948, Lev Gleason.

JUDGED by his own words Legman was no saint. He was intemperate, misanthropic, homophobic and sometimes misogynous. He wrote with a chip on his shoulder, considering everything and everyone in his immediate environment as a personal slight. He wrote in the finger-pointing style of a Drury Lane pamphleteer, answering no questions and brooking no arguments. He was a drop out, self-taught, with a sneering view of the academia that rejected him. 

[9] True Crime — No. 2, Magazine Village, May 1948, art by Jack Cole. 

BY THE TIME Legman came to write ‘The Fake Revolt’ (in Breaking Point, 1967) his inner steam-boiler finally did explode. His humor was still intact: he tells a personal story how the 1930s Communist party refused his advances “owing to the excessive timorousness of my prose style.” The Sexual Revolution was to his mind an acceptance of sadism and deviancy as a normal, rather than the healthy outcome he had hoped for in 1948.

TODAY most people, if they think of him at all, would describe Legman as a crank or a nut. His “timorous” prose style worked against his being taken seriously. Contrarily, when he issued ‘Psychopathology of the Comics’ he was taken very seriously, by authors Jay Landesman, John Clellon Holmes, Marshal McLuhan and many others among the new generation of writers forming in New York. He was widely quoted even in Europe. Landesman thought that in Legman he had finally found an “honest man.”

[10] Crime Does Not Pay — No. 63, May 1948, ‘A Message from Bob Wood, Lev Gleason, Charles Biro.’

TAKE AWAY all the hysteria in Legman’s writing on comic books and we are left with some uncomfortable truths. Comic books are for children, Legman asserted, and he was absolutely right (today the average reader of comic books is 35). The idea that the mass of readers of crime comic books were adult G.I.’s returning from the war was exaggerated. One only has to look through the voluminous fake letter pages in Crime Does not Pay and Crime and Punishment to see that publisher Lev Gleason and editor/scripter/cartoonist Charles Biro were fully aware the bulk of readers ranged in age from 6 to 16 years of age.

[11] Crime and Punishment — No. 2, May 1948, Lev Gleason.

WE ARE LED to believe that Mothers, fathers, police officers, teachers, lawyers, camp counselors, ministers, priests and nuns recommended Gleason’s magazines as a deterrent to crime. We are led to believe that hardened career criminals and reform school boys were miraculously put on the right path by the warden’s gifts of copies of Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment. We are led to believe that $2 was paid for each letter published — this at a time when a comic book cost a dime!

[12] Crime and Punishment — No. 17, August 1949, Lev Gleason. 

IN LEGMAN’S VIEW the manufacturers hired child-psychiatrists and other respectable personages to sell the idea that comic book sex and violence was cathartic and good for children. In spring of 1948 the US Supreme Court Winters decision struck down all state laws against printed “bloodlust, lust or crime (Legman).”

[13] Crime and Punishment — No. 1, April 1948, Lev Gleason.

J. EDGAR HOOVER, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, commented specifically on crime comics in November 1950, saying a sharp distinction must be made between those glorifying the criminal and those “written with good taste and authenticity which teach that crime does not pay.” Hoover went on to say “it is doubtful that an appreciable decrease in juvenile delinquency would result if crime comic books of all types were not readily available to children.”

[14] Crime Does Not Pay — Jan 1948, Lev Gleason.

 
ON THE CONTRARY, in November 1959, Hoover said of pornography that “We know that sex criminals read it, are clearly influenced by it. I believe pornography is a major cause of sex violence. I believe that if we can eliminate the distribution of such items among impressionable school-age children, we shall greatly reduce our frightening crime rate (quote from The Smut Peddlers, 1960).” 

“To the contrary, where institutionalized violence appears in history, it is as the last resort of bankrupt nations, sick and reeling into death.” — Gershon Legman, The Psychopathology of the Comics, 1948

Gershon Legman was more influential than has been acknowledged. In 1948 John Clellon Holmes was passing copies of Love & Death along to every writer he knew. The leading members of the Beat generation were impressed and borrowed much from his style of writing. His prophet screaming from the rooftops vocal style was a foreshadowing of Allen Ginsberg’s nascent Howl, all capitals sloganeering, slang, made-up words and (some said) bad grammar.

[15] Jo-Jo Congo King — No. 20, Oct 1948, Fox Features Syndicate, Inc.

SUBCONSCIOUSLY, or intentionally, the image of Slim Pickens joyously riding the phallic atom bomb to its target in Dr. Strangelove (1964) was a perfect metaphor for Legman’s lifelong message — in our shared popular culture the repression of normal sexual impulses is redirected into sexual perversion and physical violence. Popular culture breaks the spirits of children and adults and distorts the social environment.

In 1963 Legman returned to the United States for a series of lectures at the University of Ohio then took on an assignment teaching folklore as a scholar-in-residence at the University of California at La Jolla. He made himself so offensive with staff and students that he was soon banned from teaching. He was under contract and spent the rest of the year being as disagreeable as possible, then returned to his family in France.

“It is necessary to be realistic. Violence in America is a business — big business — and everybody is in it, either as a peddler or customer.” — Gershon Legman, The Psychopathology of the Comics, 1948

[15] G. Legman in 1968.

AUTHOR Gershon Legman died on February 23, 1999, in the south of France. It’s not hard to imagine that were he alive now he would be angrily dissecting the sex as sadism/violence of video games, internet porn and the militaristic and political violence that feeds 24/7 off the popular culture of today. Gershon Legman with all his faults was a prophet of love. His message was rejected but his ideas still contain truths about who we were and who we are now; how we lived then and how we live now.

❤❤❤

MOST of G. Legman’s work, including an unpublished autobiography, Peregrine Penis, is out of print. | The Fake Revolt is available HERE. | His introduction to The Private Case is HERE. | Comic books on Gershon Legman’s list can be browsed HERE.

See ‘From a Corner Table at Roughhouse’s,’ by Bill Blackbeard in Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 5 No. 1, July 1971 | Nothing More to Declare, by John Clellon Holmes, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1967; the author of ‘Go,’ ‘The Horn,’ and ‘Get Home Free’ | Brother-Souls, John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, University Press of Mississippi/Jackson, 2010 | Funny Peculiar; Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, by Mikita Brottman, The Analytic Press, 2004

Thanks to Michael Feldman