One way of looking at the history of American popular culture is to see it as episodic eruptions of condemnation of what young people, and others of limited sophistication, like to see, hear, read and do.

Such a moment is described in David Hajdu's splendid account of America's "comic-book scare" of the early 1950s.

		THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE: THE GREAT COMIC-BOOK SCARE AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA By David Hajdu Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($26)

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Hajdu is the author of "Lush Life," the biography of Billy Strayhorn, and "Positively 4th Street," his take on the pop music of the 1960s.

Here, he has mined a wide range of documentation to illuminate the subject and the era, from the comics themselves to studies about them to interviews with surviving comics creators, and much more.

The pulp books grew in the 1930s out of comic strips, which had grown out of the turn-of-the-century color Sunday supplements (the "Yellow Kid"), which were themselves condemned by those in cultural and legal authority. They in turn had been successors of dime novels -- likewise condemned in their time.

In the mid-1940s, between 80 million and 100 million copies were being issued each week. Consumed primarily by kids, comics were looked down upon or overlooked altogether.

Hajdu's account of the creations and their creators -- notably such great cartoonists as Will Elder, Will Eisner, Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman -- is particularly engrossing. Equally so is his discussion of the successive waves of themes in comics:

First, crime and violence, then sex and romance, then horror and the macabre (at which Bill Gaines' EC Comics excelled).

The "scare" began around 1948 when accusations began to pile up that reading comics led to juvenile delinquency. There were church and community campaigns against them, replete with book burnings and more than 100 acts of legislation by state and local governments.

The self-appointed leader of this moralistic crusade was psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, whom Hajdu effectively discredits. He shows that as a work of scholarly research, Wertham's anti-comics tome, "Seduction of the Innocent," is a failure. Yet many reviewers hailed it.

Unfortunately, "[c]omics were getting worse at the worst possible time," as the McCarthyism era began with congressional inquiries into juvenile delinquency and organized crime.

Hajdu has discerned a crucial difference. While McCarthyism was a kind of anti-elitism (against the Eastern intelligentsia and the New Deal), the comics crusade was an anti-anti-elitism, a drive by defenders of conventional ideals of literacy and sophistication against "a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American expression."

It was, then, always about something other than cartoons, or, indeed, crime and immorality. It was about class, money and taste; about traditions, religion and biases. It was one of the first battles between young people and parents.

And it was pretty much over by 1956; the comics industry had all but collapsed under various pressures and hundreds of creative people had lost their jobs.

Funny thing is, the campaign failed to affect delinquency rates or public taste.

Hajdu's subtitle may overstate the case, but if the comic-book scare did in fact change America, it was an instance of fixing something that wasn't broken.