Comic Books and America, 1945-1954. by William W. Savage,Review by: Michele HilmesThe Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Dec., 1991), pp. 1146-1147Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2078941 .

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1146 The Journal of American History December 1991

vive "the Congress must be a coequal intelli- gence partner rather than a body to be avoided and denigrated." A partner in what? Secrecy and private wars?

Given the way the debate is framed and the focus on the process of oversight rather than the things the intelligence community was do- ing and as often as not lying about, Smist's cheery conclusion comes as no surprise. "The system of representative democracy devised by the Founders and characterized by separation of powers and checks and balances has creaked and groaned at times but, despite its imperfec- tions, it still works. The dream of the Founders and of individuals like Churchill endures." Churchill?

Spy Saga is less assuring. Melanson sees a bit of truth in the pop interpretations of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged pawn of the radical right. Or the Russians. Or Castro. Or the mob. Or the CIA. "Oswald actually lends himself to all of these divergent portraits," Melanson writes in this proclaimed "dossier on Oswald the spy." But the real meat is to be found in links with the United States intelligence com- munity, where "Lee Harvey Oswald spent near- ly all of his adult life working . . . most likely for the CIA- as an agent-provocateur . . . in both the domestic and international arenas, right up to his involvement in the assassi- nation."

Melanson never quite descends to the wacky level of the devout conspiracist; he closes his dossier with a qualification - "If some cabal successfully conspired to subvert the demo- cratic process by disenfranchising citizens' bal- lots and bullets." The Warren Commission view of the lone nut with a cheap rifle is not laid to rest. Nor has "Lee Harvey Oswald: U.S. intelligence agent-provocateur" been trans- formed into what the author calls "by far the most fascinating and complex assassin (alleged or actual) in U.S. history." The value of Spy Sa- ga lies in its illuminating the degree to which faceless and tireless CIA officials have denied information not only to Congress, the courts, and the public but even to their fellow bureau- crats in their Langley cubbies and to the presi- dent himself.

Kenneth O'Reilly University of Alaska Anchorage

Comic Books and America, 1945-1954. By William W. Savage, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. xiv + 151 pp. $16.95.)

In Comic Books and America, William W. Savage, Jr., takes on a project whose validity he is quite right in assuming and defending: namely, that analysis of a popular art form such as comic books can provide us with a kind of "intellectual history" more true to prevalent cultural values than "the 'isms' by which the academy measures the convolutions of the American mind." Savage's book joins a grow- ing body of analysis of the comic book as art, narrative, and social phenomenon.

After a brief overview of the history of com- ic books from 1929 to 1945, Savage looks at several recurring themes from comics of the period: "the Bomb," the "Red Menace," Korea, the figure of the cowboy. A chapter on "jungle comics" introduces the representation of wom- en and blacks, followed by a discussion of the impact of publication of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent in 1954. Each brief chapter is illustrated by a black-and-white reproduction of a representative comic.

Comic Books andAmerica provides a lively and highly readable interpretation of a few specific types of comics popular during the period, but it also has some problems that make the book, overall, less useful than it could be. Savage tells us in his introduction that his themes reflect "topics of concern dur- ing the decade," based on their prevalence in other media, which he gives "the relative weight that they seemed to possess at the time." If the body of comics themselves shows many different thematic strands, however, is an emphasis that is limited to these particular themes in fact a misrepresentation of the con- cerns of comics of the time, no matter what the presumed dominant social concerns? Accord- ing to Mike Benton's The Comic Book in America (1989), almost one-third of the comics published during this period fell into the romance genre -which presumably would deal with a very different but equally relevant set of concerns.

Another question concerns audience: Who read these comics? Savage concentrates almost exclusively on those that catered to an adoles- cent white male audience, a bias acknowl-

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Book Reviews 1147

edged at various points in the book. But since his study is set up as an examination of "the cultural context of a postwar generation of young readers," the fact that this generation in- cluded other than white males ought to have been taken into account in selecting "represen- tative" themes and venues. (According to Ben- ton, 48 percent of the comic book audience in 1950 was female.) Finally, though Savage does state from the outset that he is concerned with "content rather than style," this seems a some- what naive and ultimately self-defeating limi- tation. Even in the summaries given within the book, some elements of satire and visual irony can be detected that Savage describes but does not factor into his analysis.

Savage is an enthusiast as well as a scholar; this is a combination that can produce some of the best and most illuminating readings of any cultural phenomenon. It can also lead to a lack of analytical and historical rigor. Sophisticated tools are at our disposal; it does our field a disservice not to use them.

Michele Hilmes Spring Hill College

Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America. By Neil Jumonville. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. xx + 291 pp. $24.95.)

This study of the New York intellectuals- writers for Partisan Review, Commentary, the Public Interest, and other journals-starts with the protests Sidney Hook led against the pro-Soviet bias of the 1949 Waldorf world peace conference. It ends with the 1983 neo- conservative conference at the Plaza Hotel defending American culture against its detrac- tors. Though Neil Jumonville's short biogra- phies of Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Daniel Bell look back to the group's formation in the left-wing, anti-Stalinist circles of the 1930s, this book highlights the group's postwar bat- tles against Communism, mass culture, bohe- mianism, and the New Left. All these, the New York group believed, rested on romantic or ab- solutist tenets at odds with skeptical, rational thought and hostile to free inquiry. Defining

and defending the intellectual vocation be- came the group's collective project, Jumonville writes, and instead of placing these writers at the crossroads of twentieth-century politics, he links them with a tradition of general cultural criticism stretching back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thus their midcentury political shift from Left to Right loses salience, and their postwar work appears "the natural outcome of their early outlook" aimed, Jumonville says, at preserving elite culture against the masses.

Despite Jumonville's attempt to privilege intellectualism as such, he provides evidence of the group's persistent political impulses. Nathan Glazer, for instance, has claimed his academic work "could be seen as the pursuit of politics through other means." Lionel Trill- ing too strove to maintain the political rele- vance of his work, while trying to balance it against nonpolitical concerns such as moral judgment, scholarly responsibility, and aes- thetic valuation. Indeed, the anxiety Jumon- ville finds widespread among the group to find balance, poise, or a "sense of proportion" in all things grew in part from the dilemma con- fronting a style of "criticism" bound by Cold War loyalties to "affirm" prevailing norms. Un- derlying that dilemma was a decisive political choice - for the status quo -which character- ized the postwar experience for most of these writers.

Jumonville treats the group's preoccupa- tion with the status of the intellectual vocation as a high-toned moral exercise. They were trou- bled, he says, over such questions as "What is sufficient intellectual integrity?" Just as Na- than Glazer recalled his parents' politics as "Socialist, but not too socialist," one wonders whether intellectuals should have integrity, but not too much integrity. The New York in- tellectuals will be judged, however, not by what they said about being an intellectual, but by what they said (or failed to say) about the world that stretches beyond the Waldorf and the Plaza.

Howard Brick University of Oregon

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