From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was convened during the early 1950s to investigate the influence on youth by violence and sex

in mass media and, in particular, comic books.

Senator Robert Hendrickson was chair of the committee during part of its investigatory period and was subsequently replaced by Senator Estes Kefauver. Public hearings focused on particularly graphic "crime and horror" comic books of the day, as described in Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. When one publisher contended that he sold only comic books in good taste, Kefauver entered into evidence one of the publisher's comics which showed a dismembered woman's head on its cover. This exchange became a front-page story in The New York Times the following day. Because of the unfavorable press coverage resulting from the hearings, the comic book industry adopted the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulatory ratings code which is still used today in a modified form.