If the sociocultural circumstances surrounding Superman’s birth and early years stacked the deck in favor of New Deal liberalism, Americanism, isolationism, and policing the fifth column, the forms in which he was represented were notably in line with the 1930s and early 1940s culture. Playing an increasingly larger role in Americans’ lives, radio, which Roosevelt realized early was a potent tool for public opinion-making, “became the electronic equivalent of the New Deal,” easing people’s minds and shaping the national spirit. 1 The advent of the radio in the 1920s signaled a shift in American society; the medium became “an electronic floodgate through which flowed a one-way tide that began to swamp the values and manners and tastes of once-isolated localities. […] [It] assaulted the insularity of local communities.” 2 Jewish organizations also used the medium to highlight the symmetry between Judaism and American values, in ways that often accommodated “their particularist ethnic agenda to larger currents in American political culture.” 3 This effect, of partially supplanting subaltern cultures with a national mass culture, was a feature common to the emerging mass media and mass forms of entertainment and communication, cinema in particular but all others to some degree, from spectator sports to advertising. 4 Even before this effect could be felt, pop culture socialized immigrants and minorities into race consciousness, often representing nonwhites in denigrating ways. 5

Jonathan Sarna has remarked that “Jews sometimes like to claim that they created contemporary culture.” He cites several such claims before problematizing them:

Disproportionate as these contributions may be, for years the array of arts in which Jews participated actually bore little relationship to Judaism, and were, in many cases, an effective means of escaping it. Fearing that if their work were “too Jewish” it would remain provincial, the most creative Jews in America hid or sublimated their faith. They changed their names and universalized the products of their creative genius in a bid to attract a wide audience. 6

In a similar vein, historian Eric A. Goldstein writes that “[f]ew immigrant groups embraced popular music, film, sports, and other forms of mass entertainment as enthusiastically as the Jews, who saw them as major vehicles for claiming their status as white Americans.” 7 American Jewry’s production and consumption of popular culture, then, seems to have tended largely toward attaining or displaying an American middle-class identity and the whiteness it conferred. 8 As this chapter will argue, this was also the case with Superman.

Superman’s Genealogy

Jerry Siegel liked to give an account of Superman’s genesis that has the air of “the kind of apocryphal story you find in juvenile biographies of famous men,” a story that seems like a bid on Siegel’s part to claim auteur status. 9 In Siegel ’s narrative, he lay awake one hot summer night somewhere between 1931 and 1934 when the ideas started coming: “I hop out of bed and write this down, and then I go back and think some more for about two hours and get up again and write that down. This goes on all night at two hour intervals.” Thus, Siegel claimed, in “a simple story of inspiration and belief,” Superman was born. 10 The actual story of Superman’s creation is far more complex. It has many twists and turns, and new details continue to be uncovered. What can be said with certainty is that Superman was the product of a long process, not a flash of inspiration. Siegel and Shuster had conceived at least two other Supermen, and Siegel created at least one more version with another artist. 11

Few critics today believe Siegel’s story. It is commonly acknowledged that Superman was a hodgepodge of influences and borrowings. What is not agreed upon is what significance this has or, more importantly, which intertexts should be emphasized. We have already discussed the connections drawn to Moses and the golem of Prague and pointed out how tenuous they are. Further, Weinstein also adds Samson to the mix, and comments upon both characters having only one weakness each: Samson has his hair, Superman has Kryptonite. 12 Again, however, metatextual projection creeps in: Kryptonite was another addition to the Superman mythos introduced in the radio show. Siegel did write a story about an alien metal that sapped Superman’s strength in 1940, introducing the radioactive alien “K-metal.” Had the story been published it would, in Tye’s suggestive wording, “have become the once-unstoppable superhero’s Achilles heel,” but nothing came of it. 13

However, neither Samson nor Achilles can make a definitive claim to inspiration here: neither is the only hero with a single weakness conceived before Superman and, speaking against their ancestor status, both of their weaknesses are part of their own anatomy rather than external. Nonetheless, Weinstein’s reference to Samson is worth dwelling upon. The biblical figure is indeed sometimes explicitly mentioned in the earliest comics. 14 In the aforementioned “Superman Champions Universal Peace!,” the hero tears down a pair of pillars to collapse a room in order to speed up peace negotiations, screaming while he does so that “[a] guy named Samson once had the same idea!” 15

The reference is fleeting, however, and it is the only element that really connects with the biblical judge’s narrative. Siegel most likely first encountered Samson in a Jewish setting, but the importance of Samson’s inclusion can easily be overstated: Samson , like Moses, would have been “safe” for even the most assimilationist of writers, due to the importance and familiarity with the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, and its personalities in Christianity and Western culture. For example, non-Jewish writer Lester Dent identified his pulp character (Clark) “Doc” Savage —also known as the “Man of Bronze” and a commonly claimed inspiration for Superman—with Samson as early as 1934. 16 That Samson was a more action-oriented character than Moses might in itself have meant that he was more interesting to Siegel, given the writer’s generic tastes, and therefore worthy of explicit mention. Siegel once remarked that the first superman he and Shuster created was a product of reading, locating the biblical figure in a broader and, significantly, popular tradition: “[A]s a science fiction fan, I knew of the various themes in the field. The superman theme has been one of those themes ever since Samson and Hercules ; I just sat down and wrote a story of that type.” 17 In a 1946 article, Mort Weisinger quotes Siegel characterizing Superman as a “combination of Samson, Hercules, and Atlas plus the moral of Sir Galahad whose mission in life was to smack down the bullies of the world.” 18 The mention of Samson here alone makes Superman no more a Jewish character than the other mentions make him a Greek or Arthurian one.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the early Superman comics made biblical references. Although arguably both a stretch of the imagination and a venture into overinterpretation , one could, by way of a thought experiment, connect one of the stories in Superman #11 (July–August 1941) with scripture. In the story, Lois and Clark travel to South America in an attempt to find a cure for an epidemic plaguing Metropolis. Forced to travel on foot through forbidding terrain, their party is without water, so Superman burrows deep underground. When the others wake up the next morning to find that their needs have been taken care of, Lois proclaims it a “miracle!” Immediately, however, they are set upon by natives and taken prisoner. Sent to “the Cave of a Thousand Horrors,” the prisoners are left to fend for themselves amidst a horde of rattlesnakes and scorpions. Here too, Superman steps in and clears the way. 19 Siegel could have borrowed these elements from the Exodus narrative or even from the admonition against letting one’s “heart grow haughty and […] forget the LORD your God – who freed you [the people of Israel] from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water from the flinty rock” (Deut. 8:14–15). It is, after all, an interesting story with exciting imagery. None of this is to suggest an intentional Superman–Moses, or, for that matter, Superman–God connection on Siegel’s behalf, but merely to point out that an intertextual relationship with scripture should not be discounted. If such a relationship exists, however, biblical sources appear in a highly transformed and unmarked way.

To some degree, Kaplan , Fingeroth , and Weinstein all acknowledge that other writers on Superman’s efforts have been directed at finding intertextual connections outside of Jewish tradition, but neither of the three includes the arguments of others in their own thinking. 20 But the connections are many: actors Harold Lloyd, Kent Taylor, Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, and Johnny Weissmuller have been regarded as models for Superman’s behavior and appearance; pulp and film characters like Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Zorro, the Shadow, and the Scarlet Pimpernel have been claimed as sources; cartoon characters like Popeye are said to have inspired Superman’s cartoony take on violence; and comic strip characters like Flash Gordon, whose costume had a similar red, blue, and yellow color scheme and prominent chest insignia, are identified as a further source. Even bodybuilder Bernarr MacFadden is believed to have made his way into the new hero. 21 It is also possible that Superman’s designation as a “champion of the oppressed” was lifted from The Mark of Zorro, where the titular hero was so described, and that his identity as the “Man of Tomorrow” was swiped from the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair “Democracity” diorama, where that term was used and which Siegel and Shuster had visited. 22 Hugo Danner, the invincible protagonist in Philip Wylie ’s Gladiator, who in adolescence notes that he “can jump higher’n a house […] run fastern’s a train […] pull up big trees an’ push ‘em over,” has been very plausibly credited as a source for the young Superman’s finding out that he was able to “leap 1/5 of a mile; hurdle a twenty-story building…raise tremendous weights…run faster than an express train.” 23

All of these connections, and many more, have in common that they are supported by an evidentiary base, and are rooted in specifically identifiable and situational sources; they are identified as likely intertexts by critics who take pains to note when and where they appeared, put them in relation to Siegel and Shuster’s known cultural tastes and habits, and make an argument for when the creators might have encountered the text. Indeed, whether or not Siegel and Shuster consciously embraced the homogenizing and whitening tendencies of popular culture, they were undoubtedly voracious consumers of its offerings.

In a rare interview where much space was given to Siegel and Shuster ’s tastes and inspirations, many of which are mentioned above, Siegel said that “I read tremendous amounts of pulps; and Joe and I, we practically lived in movie theaters.” 24 As one of the first self-identified fans and creator of the first known “fanzine,” Siegel percei ved himself as part of the cultural vanguard, and possibly even as being of “a superior order of human.” 25 He spent his teens in his bedroom, reading pulp stories or trying to write his own, or at the movies consuming Hollywood’s vision of America, although he also found inspiration in a Cleveland newspaper, The Plain Dealer, which published little of particular Jewish interest. 26 When success allowed him to buy a house of his own, a fixture in every room was a radio set. 27 Shuster, too, embraced popular culture. According to one biographer, he was “astounded by the comics page” from an early age. 28 The fad of physical culture turned Shuster onto bodybuilding and his physical fitness manuals served as an ersatz portfolio of human anatomy reference material. 29 Some early Superman stories even included tips on how to “Acquire Super-Strength!” 30 Shuster internalized pulp magazine illustrations and learned to draw by tracing newspaper comic strips (some of which he kept throughout his entire life 31 ).

Thus, given Siegel and Shuster’s well-documented tastes, it is unsurprising that in broad terms, their Superman differs little from contemporary US pop-culture heroes like Tarzan, the Shadow, Buck Rogers, the Phantom, Dick Tracy, Doc Savage, or the Lone Ranger. These and other characters were so similar in recurring basic narrative elements and characters traits in those days that philosopher John Shelton Lawrence and bible scholar Robert Jewett speak of their period of greatest popularity, from 1929 until the proliferation of superheroes in the wake of Superman, as the “axial decade” in the development of the collection of tropes and conventions they name, somewhat grandiosely, “the American Monomyth.” This myth, in simplified terms, tells about a harmonious community threatened by an evil which normal authorities fail to contend with, and of a selfless hero who emerges to renounce temptation and carry out the redemptive task before receding back into obscurity. 32 For all the problems with the “Monomyth” thesis, this description fits most of the early Superman stories.

The list of elements in Superman’s acknowledged and proposed intertextual mixture could go on. Whatever went into the mix, however, Superman was in the end more than the sum of his separate parts, a specific blend of a variety of figures that were indelibly melded. It is therefore here more rewarding to continue by attempting to see how Superman’s characterization employed common representational conventions, tropes, structures, and practices. Proceeding in that direction provides a new angle to Superman’s genealogy that can complement previous searches. When Superman is situated in his historical moment, what emerges is very much a typical cultural product of its kind.

Popular Culture Between Rhetoric and Reality

Superman’s creators knew well how hard the times truly were: dire economic straits had been evident in Cleveland since 1927; money was tight after Siegel’s father died from heart failure after a robbery in 1932; and in the winter months, Shuster had to draw with gloves on scraps of tissue and wrapping paper on the same bread board that his mother used to bake the Sabbath challah, because his family could not afford to buy paper or to heat the apartment. 33 Siegel and Shuster ’s 1933 “Reign of the Super-Man,” a short story about a superhuman villain, begins in a dramatic way, possibly in reference to the inhabitants of the shantytown that existed in Cleveland until 1938: “The breadline! Its row of downcast, disillusioned men; unlucky creatures who have found that life holds nothing but bitterness for them. The breadline! Last resort of the starving vagrant.” 34

Arguably, as Chap. 5 has shown, Siegel and Shuster’s later, more lasting and popular superhero also spoke to the uncertain situation of the middle class, t he destitute masses of urban working-class unemployed, and the stricken farmers, all of whom were hoping for improvement. He touched upon the lives of those who had suffered through the winter of 1932–1933, the worst in recent memory, who had known hunger intimately, who had experienced recovery only to have it taken away again in the recession of 1937, and who had, through it all, heard promises that things would soon improve. But this Superman was more concerned with the perceived causes of the Depression than he was with its effects; there were many representatives of the uncaring rich, but nary a breadline or “Hooverville” in sight.

Thus, in contrast to their older creation and to more recent popular culture that explicitly addressed the harshness of the times, Siegel and Shuster did not reproduce the proverbial view from out their window when they first created their superheroic Superman. Instead, the comics Superman resembled the press, which for a long time underreported the severity of the Depression, and Hollywood, where “very few feature films depicted the ‘hard times’ in realistic or penetrating fashion.” 35 Superman thus lived in a world both familiar and strange in its own time, connecting with people’s fears, channeling and, at least for a moment, neutralizing them, marking a refusal to give in to resignation. 36

Superman comic books also made frequent use of symbols circulating widely in Depression culture. Siegel had been interested in journalism since high school, he and Shuster had included journalists in a few earlier works, and press movies were in vogue in the late 1920s through the early 1930s; together, these interests likely inspired the decision to make Clark Kent a journalist , a class of people which “Hollywood depicted […] as defenders of society’s right to know, civic virtue and the underdog.” 37 Similarly, the recurring critique of tabloids’ and sensationalist papers’ “yellow journalism” in these stories can be viewed as a response to papers like Robert R. McCormick’s “militantly anti-New Deal and obstreperously isolationist” Chicago Tribune which, along with his radio station, “trumpeted his trademark prejudices across what he called ‘Chicagoland’ – the five-state region that stretched from Iowa to Ohio, the very heartland of American isolationism.” 38

In stories and on covers, Superman saves dams, one of the era’s most potent social symbols, from destruction. 39 He repeatedly combats gambling and smashes numerous gaming tables which, according to literary critic Sean McCann, were “another central image of Depression literature.” 40 Another recurring story structure has Superman caring for underprivileged children, a visible problem during the Depression. Through this care, Superman expresses the then-common belief that providing better environments for what was called “predelinquents” and even institutionalizing runaways could keep them from turning to crime. 41 Further, several stories respond to concerns about organized crime’s labor racketeering in connection with “protection” scams and strikes. 42 Superman even worked for better prison conditions in a story criticizing an unjust criminal justice system, recalling for example the 1932 film I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. 43

Similar to many pulp heroes, brains and brawn are often inseparable for Superman, as is evident in Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams stories in particular, where “gunfire and rhetorical power are virtually identical forces. (‘Yep, it’s my gun what speaks,’ Race likes to point out).” 44 One introduction in Superman #10 trumpets that in the story, “the amazing Man of Tomorrow meets fiendish cunning with super-intelligence and offsets scientific destruction with the irresistible force of his superhuman strength!” 45 Later in the same issue, the pretense of wits being divorced from fists vanishes completely: “Superman loses no time in going into action when he encounters a menace to American democracy, super-strength clashes with evil super-cunning in another thrilling, dramatic adventure.” 46 The struggle between the two types of strength even became the premise of a story, in Superman #4 (Spring 1940), when Luthor challenges Superman to a competition of mind versus muscle. To no one’s surprise, Superman smashes every device the villain has concocted. 47

In fighting “evil” and “injustice” and advocating the virtues espoused by New Deal rhetoric, Superman appears almost as a “cartoonified” Roosevelt in a cape: both were patrician saviors displaying a proletarian sense of social justice along with an air of aloofness, heroes who not only offered comforting words but, importantly, transformed them into deeds. 48 By championing isolationism at first and then fighting for democracy’s survival against “un-American” ideals and activities feared to be insidiously poisoning the country through the fifth column, Superman patriotically mirrored national sentiment as it shifted toward intervention. In short, Superman was an American. Being American, however, had a cost.

Superman, Americanization, and Popular Culture

de Crèvecœ ur’s oft-quoted (and aforementioned) characterization of the American , “this new man,” is telling: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” Having done so, “[h]e becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great alma mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” 49 Just as immigrants were expected to “melt” into de Crèvecœur’s America, so too were they admitted into the Great American Melting Pot well into the twentieth century on the condition that they accepted the nation’s mores and ideals. Alien cultures and ideas were to be checked at Ellis Island, as it were, and people coming from all over the world were supposed to become a homogeneous whole, a nation of Americans in race, creed, and culture. 50 By conforming to this standard, (some) immigrants could become white . However, by the end of the nineteenth century, as non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans became racialized, the margin for inclusion in the American polity narrowed significantly and the pressure to Americanize increased. 51

The force of Americanism, even before being revitalized in the New Deal era, “was felt across the entire Jewish ideological, religious, and political spectrum in the United States. It was a campaign waged at the grassroots level, in kitchens and living rooms, in synagogues, public schools, public libraries, and evening classes for adults.” 52 Eric Goldstein rightly points out that the Melting Pot proposition was far from an easy one, its acceptance far from complete among American Jews. 53 Even among those who did not buy into the ideal, however, few were comfortable with displaying parochial sentiments at times when the discourse on matters of race and identity became more restrictive.

From around the turn of the century until WWII, when the three major branches of religious American Judaism —Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox—were beginning to formulate themselves ideologically and theologically, most American Jews were more interested in making a life for themselves than in deciding what level of halakhic observance worked for them. According to historian of Judaism Michael Satlow, “[s]truggling to survive financially and to integrate culturally into the melting pot of America, most Jews simply abandoned Jewish affiliations and customs, a fact widely noted at the time by leaders of the nascent movements.” 54 About the 1925–1935 “religious depression” in America, which “[s]tatistics suggest […] affected Judaism more profoundly than other faiths,” Jonathan Sarna writes in terms applicable to Siegel and Shuster and their Jewish co-fans all over the country:

The fear, in Jewish religious circles, was that children like [actor] Al Jolson and [Jolson’s character in The Jazz Singer (1927)] “Jack Robin” had abandoned God and the synagogue for one of the many “false gods” that preyed upon impressionable young minds: popular culture, atheistic materialism, socialism, communism, and more, each splintered into warring bands of devout followers. 55

In 1935, three quarters of young Jews surveyed in New York, among whom at least a few of the American comic book pioneers can likely be counted, had not attended religious services at all in the previous year. Although living in Cleveland and raised in an Orthodox home, Siegel was apparently as lax in his religious observance; while probably less accurate in fact than in spirit, his cousin would later claim that “I don’t think he ever went to the synagogue in his life.” 56 Much to his parents’ dismay, Shuster was untraditional enough to develop a liking of non-Jewish women when he started dating. 57 The duo could easily have lived an active Jewish social life if they wanted to. In Cleveland , the mid- to late 1930s provided ample opportunities for Jewish youth activities outside of religious communal life, ranging from Zionism and cultural activities to the Jewish Young Adult Bureau, which offered a comprehensive range of recreational alternatives. By 1940, the Jewish Center in Glenville was the country’s largest Conservative congregation, offering sports facilities, Zionist club meetings, Americanization lectures, and more. 58 Siegel and Shuster, however, chose not to take advantage of these opportunities and communities, focusing instead on their creative work.

As quoted earlier, Fingeroth regards Superman as the “embodiment of all those lone immigrants” who came to America from an Old World, to which they could not return, seeking safety and success. 59 There does, however, not appear to have been any desire for Siegel to go back to the place his father had left and from which he had quickly brought over Jerry’s mother and two eldest siblings. 60 Instead, Superman reads like an immigrant success story in a strong Americanizing vein, similar to those Melting Pot stories of immigrants arriving and rapidly assimilating into US society that had dominated American letters for centuries. This in itself was common in comics, and not restricted to comics characters created by Jews. Marston’s Wonder Woman , when she first appeared in 1941, similarly came to the USA as a “ready-made patriot.” 61 But, although Superman’s story was not told as a prolonged immigrant narrative, it may still have betrayed the experience of second-generation immigrants; Jerry’s father had rapidly succeeded upon his arrival to the country and quickly been able to afford both to bring over his and his wife’s families and to buy a house, an important symbol of achievement, wealth, security, and belonging for immigrants. 62

If Superman is the “ultimate” expression of the Jewish experience, as Kaplan suggests, 63 coming as he does from another planet, he is also the “ultimate” proof of the USA’s equality of opportunity and of successful integration. Tapping into Americans’ perception of the nation’s past (the idea that “immigrants built this country”), Superman showed that immigrants could not only still fit in but that they could also benefit the country, perhaps more importantly than ever in the Depression. Thus, Fingeroth’s identification of Superman as the embodiment of the “Good Immigrant” is in part correct, despite a metatextual projection of the Kents to support the claim. 64 But it misses one of the “Good Immigrant’s” qualities: Americanization . As early as 1936, Roosevelt had commended immigrants in no uncertain terms, while also expressing confidence in the success of Ame ricanization :

They [immigrants] have never been—they are not now—half-hearted Americans. In Americanization classes and at night schools they have burned the midnight oil in order to be worthy of their new allegiance.

They were not satisfied merely to find here the realization of the material hopes which had guided them from their native land. They were not satisfied merely to build a material home for themselves and their families.

They were intent also upon building a place for themselves in the ideals of America. They sought an assurance of permanency in the new land for themselves and their children based upon active participation in its civilization and culture. 65

As noted above, where Superman came from did not play into his early characterization in any significant way; what he did and who his actions made him are thus a testament in the extreme to the country’s “regenerative” power. 66 Siegel and Shuster’s superhero then appears as an expression of a desire to become more American than Americans, and, with Americanism having by this time been reified “into a fixed pattern of cultural, racial, and other characteristics that were clearly distinguishable from ‘alien’ ones,” to live up to an impossible ideal. 67 In this light, if Superman is an immigrant , he is an immigrant who proves that he, and by extension his creators and those like them, could leave the Old World behind and receive de Crèvecœur’s new “prejudices and manners” from the “mode of life” they embraced, “the government they obeyed,” and the “rank they held.”

Notes

  1. 1.

    Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 7–8.

  2. 2.

    Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 227–30; cf. McLuhan, Understanding Media, chap. 30.

  3. 3.

    Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion, 67–68.

  4. 4.

    Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal, 4–11, 21–23, 68–71, 74; Miller, New World Coming, 63–64, 333–34; Smith, Hard-Boiled, chap. 2; Halter, Shopping for Identity, 29–40.

  5. 5.

    Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 180–84.

  6. 6.

    Sarna, American Judaism, 330–31.

  7. 7.

    Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 153.

  8. 8.

    Cf. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance; Prell, Fighting to Become Americans, 92–94.

  9. 9.

    De Haven, Our Hero, 62.

  10. 10.

    Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 109.

  11. 11.

    Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 109–15; De Haven, Our Hero, 62–69; Ricca, Super Boys, 65–79, 90–102; cf. Fine and Siegel, “Reign of the Super-Man”; Trexler, “Hidden History.”

  12. 12.

    Weinstein, Up, Up, and Oy Vey!, 26. See also Bowers, Superman vs. KKK, 45, in which the writer calls a Samson-reference an example of Siegel letting his “Jewish roots slip out.”

  13. 13.

    Tye, Superman, 49–50; Ricca, Super Boys, 190–92.

  14. 14.

    Cf. SC1, 84, 168, 181; SC2, 32, 82; SC3, 113.

  15. 15.

    SC2, 82.

  16. 16.

    Chambliss and Svitavsky, “Pulp to Superhero,” 15.

  17. 17.

    Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Supermen and Kids,” 9.

  18. 18.

    Weisinger’s article, “Here Comes Superman!,” was published in the July 1946 issue of Coronet magazine. Reprinted in Gilbert, “Comic Crypt,” 45–46.

  19. 19.

    SC6, 123–35.

  20. 20.

    Kaplan, From Krakow to Krypton; Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, 41; Weinstein, Up, Up, and Oy Vey!, 26.

  21. 21.

    For discussions about the myriad possible contributions to Superman’s intertextual mix, see De Haven, Our Hero; Ricca, Super Boys, esp. chap. 12; Jones, Men of Tomorrow; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Supermen and Kids”; Tye, Superman, 7–11, 32–35.

  22. 22.

    Conn, Against the City, 111; Gavaler, Origin of Superheroes, 52; Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 179.

  23. 23.

    E.g. Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 78–82; De Haven, Our Hero, 35; and even Tye, Superman, 32–33. Quotes from Wylie, Gladiator, 48–49; SC1, 4.

  24. 24.

    Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Supermen and Kids,” 10.

  25. 25.

    Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 23–28; Ashley, Time Machines, 8; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Supermen and Kids,” 7.

  26. 26.

    Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 77, passim.; De Haven, Our Hero, 69; Rubinstein, Merging Traditions, 99.

  27. 27.

    Ricca, Super Boys, 169.

  28. 28.

    Ricca, Super Boys, 12, 15.

  29. 29.

    Ricca, Super Boys, chap. 11; p. 129.

  30. 30.

    SC1, 58, 82, 110.

  31. 31.

    Ricca, Super Boys, 84.

  32. 32.

    Lawrence and Jewett, American Superhero, 36–43, 6.

  33. 33.

    Cf. Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 39, 67–68, 71; De Haven, Our Hero, 36–37; Daniels, Superman, 11, 35; Gartner, Jews of Cleveland, 290–91; Ricca, Super Boys, 65, 300–306; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Supermen and Kids,” 15.

  34. 34.

    Fine and Siegel, “Reign of the Super-Man”; cf. Ricca, Super Boys, 67–72; Daniels, Superman, 14; Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 82–83.

  35. 35.

    Edsforth, The New Deal, 39–40, 76–77, 93–94; Jewell, Golden Age Cinema, 30; Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 232.n†.

  36. 36.

    Cf. Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 8.

  37. 37.

    Most of these films had less-than-savory protagonists, but during the Depression and war years, cinematic journalists became increasingly wholesome. Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 374; Vaughn and Evensen, “Democracy’s Guardians”; cf. Ricca, Super Boys, 30–31, 86, 92; Fine and Siegel, “Reign of the Super-Man.”

  38. 38.

    While there are scattered critiques of tabloid journalism throughout, SC3, 140–152, is the most focused statement on the issue; cf. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 404.

  39. 39.

    E.g. SC1, 65–67; SC5, 85; McCann, Gumshoe America, 142; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 99, 128, 147–49.

  40. 40.

    E.g. SC2, 42; SC5, 14; SC6, 166–68; McCann, Gumshoe America, 132.

  41. 41.

    E.g. SC1, 89–110; SC2, 147–70; SC4, 19–31; Appier, “Path to Crime,” esp. pp. 197–198.

  42. 42.

    E.g. SC1, 181–93; SC3, 85–97; cf. Jacobs and Peters, “Labor Racketeering,” 229–34; Witwer, “Scandal of Scalise,” esp. p. 935.n5; Gabler, Winchell, 274–80.

  43. 43.

    SC4, 126–38; Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 57–60.

  44. 44.

    McCann, Gumshoe America, 58.

  45. 45.

    SC6, 4.

  46. 46.

    SC6, 43.

  47. 47.

    SC3, 46–58. The challenge is a diversion, which Luthor knows he will lose. The villain has orchestrated the ruse to fool Superman, while he steals an important device, giving the impression that mind has triumphed over matter; this is not the case, and Superman soon smashes his way to ultimate victory.

  48. 48.

    Roosevelt, too, had a dual identity: on the one hand, there was his disabled physical, private body, and, on the other, his dynamic body politic. Cf. Jarvis, Male Body at War, 28–35; Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal.

  49. 49.

    Crèvecoeur, Letters, 43–44.

  50. 50.

    Cf. Lederhendler, Jewish Responses, 121–22.

  51. 51.

    Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; Brodkin, How Jews Became White, 27–34.

  52. 52.

    Lederhendler, Jewish Responses, 113; cf. Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal, 2; Wenger, History Lessons.

  53. 53.

    Goldstein, Price of Whiteness; cf. Lederhendler, Jewish Responses, 117–19, 124–26.

  54. 54.

    Satlow, Creating Judaism, 37.

  55. 55.

    Sarna, American Judaism, 226–27; Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 178–79.

  56. 56.

    Sarna, American Judaism, 226–27; Siegel’s cousin in Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 84–85.

  57. 57.

    Ricca, Super Boys, 140–42, 170–71; Tye, Superman, 53.

  58. 58.

    Rubinstein, Merging Traditions, 112; Gartner, Jews of Cleveland, 304.

  59. 59.

    Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, 44–45.

  60. 60.

    Ricca, Super Boys, 298–99.

  61. 61.

    Smith, “Tyranny of the Melting Pot”; cf. Lepore, Wonder Woman, 199–200.

  62. 62.

    Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 23–24; Ricca, Super Boys, 299–300; Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 158–62.

  63. 63.

    Kaplan, From Krakow to Krypton, 14.

  64. 64.

    Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, 46–47.

  65. 65.

    Roosevelt, “Roosevelt Park Address.”

  66. 66.

    Lederhendler, Jewish Responses, 110–11; cf. Wenger, History Lessons, 30–32.

  67. 67.

    Lederhendler, Jewish Responses, 109.