fredric-wertham:

J. Edgar Hoover collected letters of alarm from parents for the FBI files testifying to MAD magazine’s subversive threat to society and national security.  Robert C. Harvey would appear to confirm that concern when he wrote:

Through all the years of Mad, Kurtzman’s influence on the American public was incalculable… . Reading Mad breeds a certain cynicism about the icons of American popular culture as well as the functioning of its institutions.  Who can say but what the Vietnam War protest among American youth was not in some way inspired by the satire in Mad?  In the closing years of the twentieth century, it would be difficult to imagine an American under the age of fifty-five who does not look at the world a little askance, thanks in large measure to Harvey Kurtzman and his Mad legacy.  (TCJ #157)