You wouldn’t know from its recent failure to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, but there was a time when Congress was quick to act on perceived perils to the public good. In 1954, for example, the Senate convened a subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, worried about a widespread outbreak of gum snapping and pomade dipping, and traced the problem to a newfangled invention: the comic book.

Anticipating a ban, the comic book industry censored itself with a code containing provisions such as this: “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.” And this: “Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.”

Fortunately, when I was a kid, the good souls at Mad Magazine were battling the Code of the Comic Books Asssociation of America, continuing the necessary work of creating delinquents. A generation earlier, when my mom was a kid, the Senate was busily denouncing “series books for children,” taking aim squarely at an empire founded by a shrewd publisher named Edward Stratemeyer, the creator of Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and other characters that captured the hearts and minds of innocent children across the land.

In 1929, Stratemeyer dreamed up a character who variously bore the names Diana Dare, Stella Strong, and Nell Cody. He put an advertisement in a writer’s magazine inviting applications to join the “Stratemeyer Syndicate.” By the time a young journalist named Mildred Wirt (later Mildred Wirt Benson) sent in her resume, the character was called Nan Drew, then, finally, Nancy Drew.

Wirt’s application was successful, and Stratemeyer sent her a carefully constructed outline and a work-for-hire contract that paid her a flat $100 per book. When Stratemeyer died the following year, he was paying her $125, and the first four books in the series had been published. Wirt set to work on the fifth, The Secret of Shadow Ranch, working now from a bare-bones description of three sentences, the first of which read, unhelpfully, “A thrilling tale of mysterious doings at various places in the valley.”

The valley in question was Phoenix, and the yarn Wirt concocted was both implausible and captivating, full of lost treasure, ghost stallions, and shadowy outlaws. Published 90 years ago, in 1931, Secret was a smash hit, far outselling other Stratemeyer series novels. Left to her own devices but still bound to the Syndicate (its first rule: don’t talk about the Syndicate), Wirt began to shape Nancy from a somewhat obnoxious ingénue with a rich dad, a new car, and a wardrobe big enough to fill a boxcar into a self-reliant, intelligent young woman. Far from being a threat to the commonwealth of kids, she was a role model for girls.

During the Depression, Wirt’s fee fell to $85 a book until she was briefly replaced by a middle-aged man who worked for even less. It didn’t work out. Wirt returned, and Nancy Drew went on to solve mystery after mystery and enrich the lives of her readers. Her creators are long gone, but she does so to this very day, Congress notwithstanding.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.