HAPPY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY TO ALFRED E. NEUMAN — and a lesson for those who claim that they’re being “suppressed” today:

The era was the 1950s, the gray flannel fifties, and Mad magazine, which began publishing early in the decade, was so subversive that the FBI actually investigated it, sometimes sending agents to visit the editors and, in the words of an FBI document, “firmly and severely admonish them.”

Mad’s reaction was to draw funny cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover.

Note to Ted Rall: they were funny cartoons.