A DEEPER SCIENCE: RICHARD WRIGHT, DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM, AND THE FIGHT FOR MENTAL HEALTHCARE IN HARLEM, NY, 1940-1960 BY GABRIEL N. MENDES B.A., HOBART COLLEGE, 1994 M.T.S, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1997 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2003 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Gabriel N. Mendes This dissertation by Gabriel N. Mendes is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date__________ ______________________________ James T. Campbell, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________ ______________________________ Mari Jo Buhle, Reader Date__________ ______________________________ B. Anthony Bogues, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________ ______________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Gabriel Nathaniel Mendes was born in Truchas, New Mexico on October 7, 1972. He received his B.A. in Africana Studies and Religious Studies at Hobart College in 1994, his M.T.S. in Christianity and Culture at Harvard University in 1997, and his A.M. in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University in 2003. Mendes has taught courses in the First Year Seminar Program and the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, the Department of American Civilization at Brown University, and the Department of History at Emmanuel College. He currently resides in San Diego, California, where he is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. iv DEDICATION For my father Maxwell Mendes, whose love and support has carried me along at every moment of my life. v PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study emerges from a deep concern about the role of the human sciences in the lived experience of racialized peoples in the United States, black Americans in particular. I have also been interested for some time in the questions of normality and pathology, particularly how these concepts emerged and how they have been deployed to structure the institutional and discursive parameters of acceptable or legitimate human thought and behavior in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While in my first year of graduate school I read this sentence from psychiatrist and liberation thinker Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and have been wrestling with it ever since: “A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.” Fanon was of course contrasting the black child’s experience with that of the white child who typically experienced the symmetry of growing up in a normal family and becoming a normal person, because for the white child, “There is no disproportion between the life of the family and the life of the nation.” But leaving aside for now the specific contours of Fanon’s argument, I remain interested in puzzling out both the subjective and objective, or rather the psychological and sociohistorical, dimensions of normality and abnormality as lived by black people in the United States.1 1 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Translated by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]), 142-43. vi ***** This dissertation is the result a group effort. Though I am of course solely responsible for its contents, none of what follows in these pages would be here were it not for the many people who had my back all along the way. I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to my dissertation committee, James T. Campbell, Mari Jo Buhle, and B. Anthony Bogues. Not only have they been a wonderful committee of readers, but also while I was a teaching assistant for each of them, they modeled for me all that I aspire to be as a mentor and guide to students. I am especially grateful to Jim Campbell for his investment in the development of this project and for his close and illuminating readings of my chapter drafts. Most of all I appreciate his contagious enthusiasm for the art of historical narrative. Many a time I walked away from meeting with Jim enlightened and enlivened, re-dedicated to the task at hand. While in Providence I was blessed to find an intellectual community both inside and outside the walls of Brown University. I would like to thank Doug Brown, Marcia Chatelain, Tom Chen, Themis Chronopoulos, Joe Clark, Moritz Ege, Gill Frank, Jim Gatewood, C. Morgan Grefe, Jonathan Hagel, Anas Hamimech, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Sheyda Jahanbani, Hazel Yvette Koch, Katie C. Miller, S. Ani Mukherji, Jason Pontius, Kate Schapira, Kate Schatz, Kerry Lynn Thompson, and Sarah Wald. I would especially like to thank Ani, Jonathan, and Sheyda, who have each been my closest intellectual companions on this journey. Thank you Katie for allowing me to kvetch to you over the last couple of years and for letting me bombard you with crudely written paragraphs masquerading as correspondence. vii I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues in the Departments of American Civilization and Africana Studies. Professors Lewis R. Gordon and Paget Henry were invaluable mentors in my first years at Brown. And a very special thank you goes to Jean Wood, Carole Costello, and Sheila Grant, the best department managers a graduate student could ask for. This dissertation would not have been possible were it not for the support of librarians and archivists at Brown University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale University, and Columbia University. Nor would it have been possible without fellowships from the Brown Graduate School and Emmanuel College. I would especially like to thank Emmanuel College’s Nancy Northrup, Bill Leonard, and Javier Marion for their hospitality and guidance during my year at Emmanuel as a Diversity Dissertation Fellow. I want to thank Samuel K. Roberts for his early encouragement of my project and for providing me with an invaluable forum in which to share my research. I could not think of better place to begin my life as a professional scholar and teacher than the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. I would like to thank the chairs of Ethnic Studies and Urban Studies and Planning, Yen Le Espiritu and Steve Erie, respectively, for their support and encouragement as I was completing the dissertation. My colleagues, Ross Frank and Natalia Molina, deserve special thanks for reading and commenting on chapter three at a very important point in the drafting process. viii As if by divine intervention, one of my oldest and closest friends, Michael Guilbert delivered me a road map for finishing the dissertation at the very moment I needed it most. Thank you so much, Mike. It is impossible to reflect in words the gratitude I have for the love and support my brother Isak and my sisters Key, Ahnya, and Cybele have shown me over the years. Each of them contributed in ways tangible and intangible to my dedication to the life of the mind, the driving force of my own way of being in the world. I wish to thank my mother, Yvonne Marie Clark for her unconditional love and for her enthusiasm about all I say and do—just what I always need when the going is rough. I would also like to thank my uncle, Howard Mendes, for his generous and timely support. Lastly, I want to thank Elizabeth Thompson for suffering through my writing this dissertation. Her sticky notes reminding me I was smart and could write this thing meant the world to me. I treasure the time we have had together. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page iii Curriculum Vitae iv Dedication v Preface and Acknowledgments vi Epigraphs xii Introduction “An Experiment in the Social Basis of Psychotherapy” 1 Chapter 1 “This Burden of Consciousness”: Richard Wright and the Psychology of Race Relations, 1927-1947 9 Chapter 2 “Intangible Difficulties”: Dr. Fredric Wertham and the Politics of Psychiatry in the Interwar Years 59 Chapter 3 “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem”: The Emergence of the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic 111 Chapter 4 Racism and the Psychology of Children: The Lafargue Clinic, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Anti-Comics Crusade of the 1950s 153 Bibliography 204 x xi In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture. Gunnar Myrdal, An America Dilemma (1944) It does not occur to Myrdal that many of the Negro cultural manifestations which he considers merely reflective might also embody a rejection of what he considers “higher values”…It is only partially true that Negroes turn away from white patterns because they are refused participation. There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values…It will take a deeper science than Myrdal’s—deep as that might be—to analyze what is happening among the masses of Negroes. Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review” (1944) xii xiii INTRODUCTION “An Experiment in the Social Basis of Psychotherapy” On October 11th, 1941, the New York Amsterdam News ran a headline: “Dick Wright’s Bigger Thomas Comes to Life in Clinton Brewer.” Brewer was a black man who had been convicted in 1923, at the age of eighteen, for stabbing his teenage wife to death. While at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, he had read Native Son, Wright’s controversial novel which recounted the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black Chicagoan who murders two women, one white and one black, and is later executed.