MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

One dominant narrative of the United States’ involvement in World War II casts that global conflict as “the Good War,” and it is not hard to imagine why Americans have decided to remember the fighting in this way. The war, after all, helped Americans finally conquer the Great Depression and pushed their country to unprecedented heights as a global hegemon. Such memories, however, obscure a more complicated story that also generated real anxieties among Americans. Indeed, the substantial changes wrought by WWII inevitably raised questions about a nation and a world that seemed almost totally transformed: What did global leadership mean for Americans? What new roles would they have to take on? What did the frightening new technologies introduced by the conflict mean for the post-war world? At home, how might this new global position affect race relations or gender roles? What other traditional hierarchies might be challenged or even destroyed? If such questions came easily, answers did not, and Americans thus cast about for some kind of reassurance in response to the anxieties created by what some (perhaps too hopefully) called the coming “American Century.” As they sought out answers, Americans looked to any number of sources, including Superman, who had taken America by storm upon his comic-book debut in 1938. Quickly a national phenomenon and, with the war, a rising symbol of “truth, justice, and the American Way,” the Man of Steel’s cartoon adventures on the silver screen helped Americans cope with a rapidly changing world. Studying Superman’s adventures on the big screen in this way promises to push scholars to think in new ways about the relationship between culture and national securing while also providing new insights into the wartime experiences and anxieties of Americans.