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2009 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News Archives

December 31, 2009: Superman's Promotion of the "American Way"

Wendy L. Wall, Assistant Professor of History at Queen's University, has a new book available titled, Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus From the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement, which traces the competing efforts of business groups, politicians, leftist intellectuals, interfaith proponents, civil rights activists, and many others over nearly three decades to shape public understandings of the "American Way." In the excerpt below we learn how Superman promoted the "American Way."

    On April 16, 1946, millions of children across America sat down before dinner to listen to their favorite nightly radio drama, The Adventures of Superman. For more than six years, the "Man of Steel" had appeared regularly on stations affiliated with the Mutual Broadcasting System and battled mad Nazi scientists, sinister and disloyal Japanese Americans, and radioactive monsters. The story line that began that night, however, was different. Entitled "The Hate Mongers Association," it pitted Clark Kent/ Superman and his sidekick Jimmy Olsen against a secretive group called the Guardians of America. The Guardians were trying to prevent an interfaith council in Metropolis from constructing a community clubhouse and gymnasium "for the use of all boys and girls in the neighborhood, regardless of race, creed or color." They first set fire to the store of a druggist named David Hoffman, then badly beat a boy named Danny O'Neill who had seen them set the fire. "It isn't just the Catholics, or the Jews, or the Protestants they're after," Kent told Jimmy. "Their game is to stir up hatred among all of us - to get the Catholic to hate the Jew and the Jew to hate the Protestant, and the Protestant to hate the Catholic. It's a dirty, vicious circle, and like Hitler and his Nazi killers, they plan to step in and pick up the marbles while we're busy hating one another and cutting each other's throats. It's an old trick but or some reason a lot of us still fall for it." For the next five weeks, Superman battled no the Scarlet Widow, der Teufel ("the Devil") or the Atom Man - but bigoted Americans.

Read the complete excerpt at the Oxford University Press blog.


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