Everyone loves a bonfire.

Some people really love a bonfire when it's burning something -- or someone -- they don't approve of.

Who would think that, within a decade of the Nazis giving book burning a bad name, mobs of gleeful American children, lead by nuns, ministers, and other do-gooders would be burning books in American village squares?

Of course they were only burning comic books …

David Hajdu's splendid new volume, The Ten-Cent Plague: the Great Comic Book Scare and how it Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 334 pages, with another 100 pages of notes, $26), chronicles the hysteria that swirled around "crime comics" in the late 40s and early 50s. His book is fascinating, a little scary, and stunningly well-researched. Besides going back to the original source material -- Congressional records, local papers, hysterical articles and books -- Hajdu has tracked down some of the grown ups who were once book burning zealots as well as some of the comic book artists and writers whose careers were ruined by the madness.

The story he tells, in short, is one of a generational shift and the opening salvos of a war that raged for at least the next couple of decades. He draws a line between the persecution of kid culture and the radicalization of a generation, stopping well short of claiming that comics and their censorship were causes of the change, proclaiming them more of a symptom or a preview.

It's a fair claim, I think.

The hysteria over comics was somewhat understandable. They were vulgar, sexy, insanely violent, and many of them featured unsavory characters living criminal lives (though they nearly always suffered in the end). But the child psychologists (the leader of the pack was a doctor named Fredric Wertham, who is quite a fascinating character in his own right) and frothing editorial writers were fundamentally disturbed by most comics -- not just the overtly unpleasant ones. The suspiciously Aryan Superman encouraged vigilantism. Batman recruited young boys into homosexuality. Romance comics taught girls to be rebellious against their moms and dads.
 
At least two people were arrested for selling a comic that made fun of Santa Claus.

Although Hajdu makes his case, someone more sympathetic with the book burners might tell you that this story truly does represent the end of America's age of innocence, that the crusade to stop evil comics was a futile effort to dam the wave of filth that would soon engulf the nation's young -- rock and roll, surf movies, Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse, Ice T, Grand Theft Auto … the list is ever-growing.

Still, one would think the book burners would have learned by the 1950s. You can't stop culture with bonfires.

The best culture feeds on heat.