The Holocaust pretty much discredited that approach–the Nazis openly adapted its principles and practices, thereby creating a Bizarro world version of charity and social programs in the U.S. What comes after the war is a series of social critiques that can be seen as a displacement of genetics with degenerate consumption.

That’s one reason why Wertham’s involvement in civil rights reform is not really an outlier in my eyes. He was part of a broader generational reaction against racial and ethnic disparagement in social institutions. Nonetheless, Wertham also used the same tools as his predecessors–arguments from science and psychology–to brand people as problems based on what they wrote or read.

There’s other stuff going on here too, most notably a virulent reaction of a text-based culture against image-based communication, which the literate assumed to be irrational and dangerous. Beyond all the root causes, the result was the same: a society at war with itself.