Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate. Richard Bowers
Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate
come to America from a foreign world. Like them, he longed to fit in to his strange new surroundings. Superman also seemed to embody the Jewish principle of tzedakah—a command to serve the less fortunate and to stand up for the weak and exploited—and the concept of tikkun olam, the mandate to do good works (literally, to “repair a broken world”). Even the language of Superman had Jewish origins. Before Superman is blasted off the dying planet of Krypton, Superman’s father, Jor-El, names his son Kal-El. In ancient Hebrew the suffix El means “all that is God.”
Then there is the Moses connection. Just before Krypton explodes, Superman’s parents place him in a crib-size rocket and launch him toward Earth to be raised by loving strangers. In the Old Testament, after Pharaoh decrees that all newborn Jewish males be killed, Moses’s mother places him in a crib-size basket and launches him down the Nile River to be raised by others. Just as Pharaoh’s daughter rescues the infant Moses from the bulrushes and nurtures him as her own, the Kents find and raise Superman on Earth. The Superman story also resembles the tale of Rabbi Maharal of Prague, who created his own superman, called the Golem, to protect the people of the Jewish ghetto from hostile Christians.
While Superman was a complex conglomeration of influences, Jerry and Joe left plenty to readers’ imaginations. What Superman wasn’t was just as important as what he was. The character had no clear ethnic background, no hint of an accent or dialect, no stated religious preference, and no political affiliation. The Superman character offered a little bit to everyone. Coming from a distant planet, he was the ultimate foreigner. Raised in the midwestern heartland, he was the quintessential American. Growing up in a small town, he was rural at heart. Moving to a big city, he became more sophisticated and worldly. He was both weak and strong. His meek, mild alter ego, Clark Kent, was a sheepish bumbler, but he was always ready to transform himself into the all-powerful superhero. So Superman was relevant to the prairie farmer, the urban factory worker, the white-collar insurance salesman, the hardworking waitress, and the struggling immigrant. Millions of ordinary people struggling through the Depression could imagine themselves shedding their plain, run-of-the-mill exteriors to reveal their real power within. True, Superman had descended from the heavens with the power of a god. His intention was godly too—to protect humanity from its own worst instincts. But Superman had characteristics the masses could relate to. He could beam with a smile, burst into anger, and form lasting friendships. Beneath it all Superman seemed like a regular guy.
Superman was also a creation of his times. To keep up with those times, Jerry and Joe often spent Saturdays flipping through out-of-town newspapers and national newsmagazines for ideas at the Cleveland Public Library. The headlines described crisis after crisis. The New York Stock Exchange had lost 90 percent of its value. Millions of Americans were out of work. A midwestern drought had engulfed prairie farms in the Dust Bowl, and desperate farmers had to pack up their starving families and head to California to start anew. The international news was no more comforting. Headlines warned of economic collapse in global markets, the rise of fascist regimes in Europe, and the new communist experiment in the Soviet Union. The whole world seemed to be heading toward an explosion.
Despite the challenges, Jerry and Joe found hope in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had declared in his 1932 inaugural address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The two teenagers liked the sound of Roosevelt’s promise of “a new deal for America.” FDR proposed a series of government programs designed to create jobs, to restore the economy, and to address a range of social ills. In his popular fireside chats, broadcast on all the major radio networks in an era before the invention of television, Roosevelt spoke in plain language that resonated with common men and women. As children of the Depression, Jerry and Joe saw hope in FDR’s pledge to help the average person cope with the “hazards and vicissitudes of life,” to provide some measure of protection “to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.” Superman could get behind goals like that.
While FDR had broad public support, fierce critics charged him with either ignoring the national crisis or overreacting to it. Conservative opponents called him a socialist and formed the American Liberty League to derail his welfare programs. Radical opponents wrote off FDR’s relief initiatives as “mere crumbs” and demanded sweeping “share the wealth” programs that involved confiscating the money and property of the rich and redistributing it to the poor. Answering the critics, Roosevelt declared:
A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it “fascism,” sometimes “communism,” sometimes “regimentation,” sometimes “socialism …” I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing—a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals.
So Jerry and Joe plucked elements from the world around them to stir into their Superman stew. For the most part, however, Superman’s millions of fans would ignore his origins. For them the Man of Steel would simply be the defender of the little man and woman—and a big problem for the forces of evil in the world.
* CHAPTER 4 *
BOOTLEG WHISKEY & PRINTER’S INK
SUPERMAN WAS FASTER than a speeding bullet. His rise to fame was not. The right people would have to come along, and the right circumstances would have to present themselves, before the world could meet Jerry and Joe’s new character. Some 500 miles from Glenville was a place where the optimal conditions for the launch of this new kind of superhero had been brewing—the high-energy world of New York City publishing.
In the early 20th century the Big Apple had changed rapidly from a crass and overpopulated commercial center to the self-proclaimed “greatest city in the world,” and the printed word, photo, and hand-drawn illustration were among its most important commodities. Amid the grit and glamour, clamor and chaos of the bustling sidewalks stood a loosely organized network of newsstands—thousands of gathering places where customers looked through rack after rack of magazines and pulp books covering an ever-expanding range of passions and pursuits. From the offices of the great skyscrapers, visionary publishers launched entire companies dedicated to serving specific slices of readers’ expanding interests and hobbies. From the bowels of the city’s grimy manufacturing hubs, printing presses rolled out a steady stream of books, magazines, and newspapers in currents as strong as those of the nearby Hudson River. For the professional types among the waves of immigrants entering the United States through the halls of Ellis Island, and for their children, the publishing industry represented a chance at getting a thinking man’s job.
The advent of cheap and efficient color printing technology, coupled with car and truck delivery to newsstands and stores, pushed the growth of the publishing business. By the freewheeling 1920s printing presses rolled out vast quantities of titles such as Indolent Kisses and Heart Throbs to True Detective and Time. Ambitious publishers, persnickety editors, creative writers, talented illustrators, and hardworking pressmen served a market of seemingly insatiable readers.
While the disheartening effect of the Great Depression put a damper on the New York publishing trade, the great newspapers, newsmagazines, and popular magazines survived even as their weaker competitors vanished. And even as the quest for profits grew more brutal and the scramble for jobs intensified, New York remained the center of the publishing industry in America. It offered the enterprising entrepreneur an opportunity to run with an idea, to forge a market, and to make a living. The keys to success were twofold: a good idea and a fighting spirit.
In 1933 an out-of-work, would-be publisher and newspaper comic strip aficionado named Max Gaines (he had changed his name from Maxwell Ginzburg to sound less Jewish) came up with one of those good ideas: to take daily and weekly comic strips from newspapers; to arrange them on pages of cheap newsprint; to staple the pages between glossy, four-color cardboard covers; and to market the books to kids. The Eastern Color Printing Company agreed to test Gaines’s concept and produced 35,000