Captain America vs. Hitler

by Nicholas Jahr

So this weekend I caught the latest addition to Marvel Comics’/Disney’s $650-million-and-counting franchise, Captain America. If one can ignore the fact that the film proceeds at the level of a video game -- and let me be clear, I can -- it’s entertaining enough, as long as you don’t actually want to see the whole fight between Cap and the Big Tank Boss at the end of level 3. A direct shot of nostalgia to the medulla oblongata, the flick looks back reverentially at a Golden Age that never existed and the four-color glories of comics in their (and my) youth. But along the way it surrenders what’s probably the only genuine triumph to which the character can lay claim.

By all accounts, Jacob Kurtzberg was a scrapper who never passed up an opportunity to throw down. He’d hoped studying art at Pratt would be his ticket out of the Lower East Side, but his father lost his job in the Great Depression; the money that was to pay for tuition went to rent and Jacob went to work. For Jacob, that meant drawing. Cartoons, comics, whatever paid. He passed through Will Eisner’s shop and eventually teamed up with another young cartoonist, Joe Simon. By 1940 he’d changed his name to Jack Kirby, but he wasn’t ‘The King’ yet. That would be later.

Comics were booming. Superman and Batman had just blown up and everyone was looking for the next big thing. Both were published by Harry Donenfeld, but it was Donenfeld’s accountant Jack Liebowitz who managed the properties, and Liebowitz was worried the censors would come for their newfound cash cows (he’d already seen Donenfeld titles like LaParee and Spicy Detective Stories, and the profits they raked in, killed by censorship a few years prior). So Liebowitz and one of his editors hammered out a code of conduct. In the words of Gerard Jones -- whose Men of Tomorrow is a rich, vibrant history of the era -- they “decreed that no DC hero would ever knowingly kill anyone again.”

That code didn’t just cover killing:

Liebowitz also kept Superman out of the war in Europe. Smaller companies were sending patriotic heroes out against Hitler look-alikes by early 1940, and plenty of writers and artists, Siegel and Shuster [Superman’s creators] among them, were eager to pit DC’s heroes against Germanic madmen.... Liebowitz, however, didn’t allow Superman to take even an implicit stance on the subjects of war and fascism. Too many isolationists out there had the power to keep their kids from buying comics. So Jack Liebowitz found himself in the same straitened position as the Hollywood moguls who had ignored their writers’ and directors’ pleas to make anti-Nazi movies out of fear it would loose them the German and Italian markets. Accountancy breeds complicity.

Those isolationists also had the power to keep America out of the war, and they were doing a damn good job of it. Whether it was the America First crowd or the 181 representatives who voted against selling arms to Britain as the Nazis swept through Poland, they were a force to be reckoned with; Roosevelt spent the 1940 campaign promising “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Even as late as March 1941 there would still be 165 votes against lend-lease.

This was the context in which Captain America was incubated. Joe Simon, Kirby’s partner, had been brought in by publisher Martin Goodman to supply him with a steady stream of new characters. Wary of Superman and Batman’s lawyers, Goodman and Simon looked elsewhere for inspiration. As Jones recounts, Goodman’s former boss had a hit on his hands with a hero called The Shield. Simon & Kirby went to work.

Their new hero would be “a frail young man” injected with a “strange seething liquid” by Professor Reinstein (no, really) as part of a government experiment to create “a corps of super-agents”. Even if Steve Rogers couldn’t have looked like more of a goy, it was hard not to see him as the General Issue Jew transformed by American technological know-how, a template for the adolescence of the audience and America as a whole. For the debut of their new creation, Simon & Kirby didn’t settle for any look-alike: they picked a fight with the man himself. All the simmering frustration of a Jew with no choice but to watch Nazi persecution from afar, of those following the advance of fascism from the sidelines, of Kirby’s pugnacious nature was channeled into a single image.

This one deserves to be seen in all its glory:

“No one could put quite as much anatomy into a hero as Simon and Kirby,” wrote Jules Feiffer in The Great Comic Book Heroes:

Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened shockingly. Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown. Every panel was a population explosion--casts of thousands: all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling. Not any of Eisner’s brooding violence for Simon and Kirby... speed was the thing: rocking, uproarious speed.

It’s all there: Cap impossibly dodging bullets from all sides, all his imaginary weight thrown into that semi-famous punch, almost tumbling into it, rushing out in front of the country, in front of FDR and the Congress, in front of history. Kirby & Simon’s image was an act of moral courage that defied both the political status quo and the standards of the nascent industry (it was also the first sign of a persistent split, between DC’s more mythic, archetypal pantheon and Marvel’s relatively more psychological heroes, grounded in history).

The gamble paid off. Captain America #1 hit the stands some time in the winter of 1940/41 -- the better part of a year before the U.S. entered the war -- and by the second issue they were selling a million copies each month. Only Superman and Batman did those kinds of numbers -- the industry as a whole was moving about 15 million copies a month.* According to Marvel’s lavish promotional tome Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, “the weekly circulation of Time magazine during the same period was 700,000.” Safe to assume they weren’t quite catering to the same readers, but Simon & Kirby’s visceral pop punch was some of the best propaganda for the cause short of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In Tales to Astonish, Ronin Ro describes the backlash:

The German American Bund objected to Simon and Kirby depicting their Fuhrer and their own group as punching bags (in Captain America No. 5’s story, ‘Killers of the Bund’). They inundated Timely’s mostly Jewish staff with hate mail and telephoned death threats. Initially the staff didn’t take the anti-Semitic threats seriously. This changed when some employees returned to the office with tales of seeing strange men outside of the building on Forty-second Street. Soon, some workers were afraid to leave the office for lunch, and the police were called. Just as police guards arrived to patrol the hallways and office, the receptionist summoned Joe Simon over to the telephone switchboard. She said Mayor La Guardia was on the line, asking to speak with the editor of Captain America. Joe took the call, and the mayor said, ‘You boys over there are doing a good job. The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.’

Which finally brings us back to the movie. Someone actually managed to work the cover in, if only for a moment -- we get a brief glimpse of a stack of the issue. The catch is that in this telling of the story, it doesn’t appear until some time after the U.S. has entered the war. This is hardly the most glaring liberty the movie takes with history -- Cap ends up fighting Marvel’s Nazi stand-ins Hydra, not Hitler (prep for the sequel, to be sure) -- but it is the most telling one. We’d rather not think about the isolationists, about the anti-Semites, about the fascist sympathizers, if not outright fascists, about the schisms at home that kept the U.S. on the sidelines in the early years of the war. After all, we were never not in the war. We were the champions of democracy. Instead we focus on burnishing the sheen of the greatest generation, on the tawny glow of the recruiting stations. The complexities and contradictions of history are evacuated in a single, neat tweak. The past takes place entirely in the corporate imaginary, a Manichean, simpler time.

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* Simon cut a deal for a healthy piece of the back end, one Goodman refused to honor. Last Friday, a District Court judge ruled in favor of Marvel in their long-running dispute with Kirby’s estate over his creations, though Cap wasn’t included in this particular battle in that war.

Covers for The Shield & Captain America No. 1 via.