But the real reason I had to chime in was that Steve Rogers is my favorite superhero. Why? Because unlike other patriotism-themed characters, Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930’s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding about the 4th of July) to a working-class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side.[1] This biographical detail has political meaning: given the era he was born in and his class and religious/ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that, complete with a picture of FDR on the wall.
Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother who insisted he stayed in school despite the trend of the time (his father died when he was a child; in some versions, his father is a brave WWI veteran, in others an alcoholic, either or both of which would be appropriate given what happened to WWI veterans in the Great Depression) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother died of TB.[2] And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and a militant anti-racist movement was growing that equated segregation at home with Nazism abroad that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.
Then he became a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, and so on. You couldn’t really be an artist and have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.
Actually, according to the 1923 Supreme Court interpretation of the Naturalization Act, you could also become a naturalized citizen if you were of African descent. 1924 was when Native Americans were included. Gotta exclude those Asiatics, though. But this is too complicated to put in that one line so… yeah.
I wanted Steve and Bucky to be in more worker strikes, but apparently the biggest ones in NYC were either immediately post-WWII, or in 1911 following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and most of the protestors were Jewish women who worked in the garment industry. (And lbr, they totally missed the Civil Rights movement.)
Here’s the quick Wikipedia link to the child labor thing. 🙂 I learned so much making this comic!
Happy Birthday, Steve. The world is not that great right now, both here and in Marvel-verse, but let’s keep on trucking.
Chelsea Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to Wikileaks, has filed to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, according to federal election filings.
Manning, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, would be challenging Democrat Ben Cardin, who has served two terms in the Senate and is up for re-election in November. Cardin is Maryland’s senior senator and is an overwhelming favorite to win a third term.
Manning, 30, was convicted in 2013 of the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Last year, then President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to time served and she was released from a military prison in Kansas.
Manning moved to Maryland after her release and friends and family raised more than $175,000 to support her through an online campaign. Since then, she has written for The Guardian and Medium on issues of transparency, free speech and civil liberties, according to her web site.
knitting in the dark 