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CounterPunch
September
16, 2002
Mad,
Mad World
The FBI's Obsession with Mad
Magazine
by
Dave Randall
The Independent
The congressional hearings of the House Un-American
Activities Committee are in progress. Senator Joe McCarthy from
Wisconsin straightens his papers and looks up, licking his lips
at the prospect of the next witness: a slight, boyish figure
crossing the room. As he settles into the chair behind the microphone
we recognise the tousled hair, prominent ears and freckles, and
that lop-sided grin. "Alfred E Neuman," the Senator
barks, "are you now, or have you ever been, a member of
the Communist Party?"
All eyes turn to the witness, and, slowly,
he grins, exposing a gap between his two front teeth.
But for the fact that Alfred existed
only on paper, in the pages of Mad magazine, this scene could
have happened. For, according to newly released files, the fearsome
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover,
was watching Alfred. He was not alone: much of Middle America
believed the lad was a Communist, local watch committees thought
him a menace, and law enforcement agencies were on his case.
For 20 years from the mid-Fifties, Mad's cartoonists and spoof
writers sent up everything from politics and television to church
and big business. It was the must-read for bolshie baby-boomers,
the magazine your parents and teachers did not want you to read;
and, at its height in the early Seventies, it sold 2.8m copies.
It is only now, however, that we are
able to present - courtesy of documents publicised under the
US Freedom of Information Acts - the full story of Mad Meets
the FBI.
The bureau's documents on the magazine
cover the years 1957-1971, and consist of 36 separate files.
How many hours in the working lives of trench-coated investigators
these yellowing documents represent we cannot say - but we do
know, because the files tell us, the hilarious upshot of Hoover's
sledgehammer being applied to the Mad nuts.
Take the Case of the Draft Dodgers, or,
as it is known to FBI librarians, Bufiles 62-106572-X3 to X9.
In 1957 Mad published a test of military unsuitability which
recommended that high-scorers write off for a Draft Dodger's
Card. The address given was J Edgar Hoover c/o Washington, and,
sure enough, a number of fun-loving readers duly wrote in. Soon
memos were flying around the FBI including one, which, while
accepting that Mad was not actually guilty of sedition, let slip
that files were kept on its publisher, and asked federal agents
in New York to visit the Mad offices and "advise them of
our displeasure and insist that there be no repetition of such
misuse of the Director's name". Two FBI heavies duly turned
up and "advised" a startled art editor whose eccentric
publisher William M Gaines, who then wrote a letter of apology
to Hoover, not forgetting to wish him a Happy New 1958.
Then there was the Case of Hoover's Tonic.
Editor Al Feldstein and his merry men had concocted a spoof ad
for a pick-me-up whose copyline ran: "Try J Edgar Hoover
Tonic. Special agents go to work in seconds, cleaning out your
system and getting rid of all those harmful foreign elements
... and you'll be pleased with what it does to your red cells!".
The G-Men duly rose to the bait. One
M A Jones wrote to his fellow agent Mr DeLoach about "an
allegedly humorous advertisement" in "this magazine
which at one time presented the horror of a war to readers".
It ended with an instruction to contact Mad "once again
... and firmly and severely admonish them concerning our displeasure
at the tasteless misuse of the Director's name".
Not long after this, another FBI file
was started. The trigger was a feature entitled "Mad's Modernised
Elementary School Textbooks" which included a specimen letter
for would-be blackmailers. It read in part: "Dear Friend,
I am fine. How are you? Put $25,000 in small unmarked bills in
a paper sack and leave it behind the B & O freight shed or
you will never see your kid again! Your friend, Desperate."
Inevitably, two lads in Seattle just had to try it out. So seriously
did the FBI regard this attempt to coach the nation's youth in
the ways of blackmail that they involved the office of Robert
Kennedy, then attorney general. Once again agents trooped down
to the Mad offices to put the frighteners on those responsible.
"The whole stupid, unreal situation demanded a stupid, unreal
response," recalled Feldstein. "And I gave it to them."
The FBI's suspicions of Mad were fed
by a steady drip of letters from Middle America, which make up
most of the files. "I feel that this magazine is a diabolical
form of Red Propaganda used to infiltrate the minds of our Teenagers
to destroy the American way of life," wrote Greater Knoxville
Youth for Christ. "This magazine constantly rebukes George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln," wrote another who detected
the influence of Moscow in the editorial office. "Satire
is one thing; but to disrespect our American heritage and our
way of life ... is startling to see. The leaders of our country
are made to look like fools. In the October issue, you are ridiculed!"
Thin-lipped busybodies in the 'burbs
were not the only ticks on Mad's fur. Members of the Cincinnati
Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books deemed the magazine
"objectionable" after it failed no fewer than eight
of their tests for wholesomeness. Even Irving Berlin had a go,
suing the magazine after it had used one of his songs for a skit
on hypochondria. He lost - as did the general who so vehemently
insisted the magazine was Communist propaganda that he was sued
by "the usual gang of idiots", as the staff styled
themselves. Little did the paranoids know that the "subversives"
who ran Mad included several Second World War veterans, and Antonio
Prohias, inventor of the classic cartoon strip Spy vs Spy so
who had fled his native Cuba after upsetting the Castro regime.
Perhaps the strangest of Mad's encounters
was after it published a cartoon of a three-dollar bill bearing
Alfred's grinning face. Some enterprising readers cut out the
notes and used them, despite their having text on the back, in
the rather primitive change machines of the time. Enter, at Mad's
offices a few days later, two agents of the US Treasury, who
not only confiscated the original artwork, but also, lest readers
wreck the entire economy dime by dime, demanded the original
printing plates. They left clutching the address of the printer.
The last entry in the files is a complaint
from 1971, about Mad's use of the US flag, by the American Federation
of Police, which tried to halt distribution. But, with anti-Vietnam
war protests in full swing, the FBI had bigger fish to fry. Hoover
was fading (he died a year later), and civil-liberties legislation
had begun to cramp the bureau's style. It has since considerably
cleaned up its act.
Mad has changed, too. It now carries
advertisements, is owned by the media giant Time-Warner, and
sales are well down from the peak. Alfred E Neuman has also undergone
a transformation. His face has been used to promote such products
as Lands' End clothing, breakfast drinks and Lucky jeans, and
he has even had cosmetic dentistry to appear in an ad for the
molar-enhancing properties of milk. (A condom bearing his features
was, however, vetoed.)
He presides now over a magazine that
is a little sexier, a touch more scatological, and less threatening
than it seemed to Hoover's men. But who's to say, given the US's
current illiberal mood, that Alfred E Neuman and his ilk won't
be brought in for questioning again one day?
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September
14 / 15, 2002
Ben Tripp
Notes for
Future Historians:
The Bush Administration Explained
Tom Crumpacker
Democracy & US Policy on Cuba
David Vest
Neither-Handed
Behzad Yaghmaian
A Letter
from Istanbul
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fire Next Time:
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Uri Avnery
A Witness from the Past
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