Face front, true believers!

As I mentioned in Week 3, Marvel had a lot of work to do to
update Captain America for the 1960s. That was true enough for the early 60s,
when the U.S Army was the undisputed good guy in the comics, when Professor X
worked with the FBI to track down mutants (more on that in a future issue), and
when beatniks were an easy comedy bit. By 1968, when Captain America graduated
from Tales of Suspense (where he double-billed with Iron Man) and got his own
book, things had changed even more so. The comics industry had to deal with the
counter-culture’s influence on visual media (both through hiring a new
generation of writers and artists influenced by the counter-culture, but also
as older creators like Jack Kirby got interested in surrealism, mixed-media,
and other trends), and at the same time the counter-culture started to show an
interest in comics.

 And what was true for the industry
and Marvel as a whole was even more so for Captain America; as the
super-soldierly representation of all that’s best in
the U.S, Cap had
to respond to changes in America’s political culture. So how did Cap face the
60s?

To begin with, by experimenting
artistically so that Cap’s image kept pace with the times. Jack Kirby continued
to draw giant robots and intricate machines, but he also pushed his art to
become ever more elaborate and strange – the Cosmic Cube allowed him to bring
in some of the cosmic weirdness that we associate more with his run on
Fantastic Four and MODOK (more on that in a future issue as well) continued his
interest in giant Olmec heads. In addition, Jim Steranko was brought in as a
regular artist and brought with him a new interest in psychedelic art and
surrealism, an emphasis on flowing and contorting movement, and experimental
paneling:

Counter-cultural art can only get
you so far when that art is depicting a man literally dressed as the American
flag in the midst of the Vietnam war (more on which in future installments). So
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (and Jim Steranko, and so on) had to deal directly with
how Captain America was viewed by the new generation:

Between Captain America #120 and
#130, Steve Rogers is suddenly made aware of the generation gap, the
counter-culture, and that he himself is viewed as a giant square. But where
most people opining on Captain America go wrong is that Marvel didn’t have Cap
respond to this by becoming a reactionary, lashing out at the damned hippies.
Rather, Lee et al. leaned into their already-established trope as Cap as a man out of time in a different way, as Steve Rogers
takes the critique seriously:

This is how Captain America engages
in political analysis. Rather than writing off the baby boom generation, he
draws a direct link between the “injustice, greed, and endless war” that he has
observed in this new world and the rise of the “rebel and the dissenter,”
taking their complaints seriously. Moreover, as a good ally should, Steve
Rogers doesn’t stop at the structural level but also absorbs the
counter-cultural critique on a personal level, asking himself why he hasn’t
been more of an individualist and a dissenter rather than just a soldier.  

 On a meta-level, I think we can also
see this as a kind of generational reckoning as well, with Steve Rogers
standing in for the Marvel staff in their 40s who had spent their youth in the
U.S Army in WWII, confronting a new culture that valorized the “anti-hero”
rather than Marvel’s more straightforwardly earnest style of protagonist. Without
backing down on his insistence that the values he believes in are timeless and
that there is important things that his generation has to offer the youth – in
#122, Rogers will namedrop Martin Luther King Jr., JRR Tolkien, the Kennedy
brothers, and Marshall McLuhan as examples of “establishment” types who have
influenced the youth movement – Cap nonetheless starts to experiment with a
more counter-cultural way of life, suggesting that the counter-culture might be
right about his generation.

Not only will Captain America begin
questioning authority (usually in the form of Nick Fury of SHIELD) more, but
he’ll also take to the road on a motorcycle to carve out an identity as Steve
Rogers apart from the mantle of Captain America, setting up a big part of his
Easy Rider-inspired Nomad persona in the 1970s:

When Steve Rogers rides off into his
bike, looking for the Real America, he finds not just open road and existential
quandary but the radical student movement of the 1960s. And both Rogers himself
and his creators interact with the student movement much in the way that
mainstream liberals at the time did, sympathizing with student demands but
viewing radical direct action as dangerous and illiberal:

Thus, Steve Rogers in his civilian
guise goes into action to protect a professor from being kidnapped by dangerous
radicals, but also takes the campus administration to task for not listening to
their students. Meanwhile, Stan Lee and Gene Colan depict student radicals as
unrepresentative of their peers and threatening the destruction of the larger
institution. At the same time, however, when it comes down to a clash between
campus protestors and the police, we know which side Captain America will come
down on, and it’s not the police:

While this might not rise to the
level of Denny O’Neill on Green Lantern and Green Arrow, it’s still an
important symbolic statement. Despite how wildly unpopular the New Left had
made itself by the late 1960s (71% of Americans believed that the “country
would be better off if there was less protest and dissatisfaction coming from
college campuses” in 1968) here’s Captain America siding with the kids against
the cops – as we’ll see, an association that will be enduring across issues.

At the same time though, Marvel also finessed this potential controversy with
some rather strange symbolic politics. That long-haired, pink-panted gentleman
standing next to Mart Baker and the megaphone isn’t actually a bona-fide
student…he’s an undercover agent of AIM. AIM is secretly infiltrating the
student movement and deliberately intensifying conflict in order both to weaken
American society, but also as a cover for the abduction of various professors
in the sciences whose research AIM wants to steal:

If you strip out the inherent Marvel
wackiness of MODOK’s giant baby head and AIM’s beekeeper helmets, this isn’t
too different from contemporary conservative arguments that the student
movement had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. At the same time, though, Lee
and Colan frame the situation as AIM having seized upon “legitimate grievances”
and show the students as unwitting tools rather than actively disloyal, and
when AIM’s involvement is unmasked, Cap and student radicals team up to take
them down:

It’s hard to look at this particular
storyline and not see the whole thing as condescending at best, but Marvel
Comics didn’t leave it at that. Hot off the heels of his intervention in campus
politics, Steve Rogers gets approached to become the TV pitchman for a “law and
order” backlash against the New Left that’s hiding sinister motives:

And because he’s Captain America,
and Captain America’s secret super-power is weaponized morality, Cap sees right
through the slogans of “law and order” to the sinister plot of men wearing
white hoods over their faces (not hugely subtle symbolism there, but some anvils needed to be dropped in 1968):

This is what I mean when I say that
Captain America is a progressive: he’s reframing patriotism and American
national traditions as inherently radical and de-linking the defense of the
status quo from the defense of the values that the status quo supposedly
embodies, while taking a strong pro-non-violence line with regards to protest. It’s also Marvel re-defining Captain America as a dissident, as
someone who will fight for America’s ideals rather than America’s establishment
(which will eventually lead Captain America to go into the belly of the beast
and confront Richard Nixon directly, a topic for a future issue).

So in the 1960s, Captain America
becomes the defender of youth (in a future issue, I’ll discuss how Captain
America saved rock music by fighting the Hells Angels at Altamont). And it’s
just in the nick of time too, because as it turns out, the man in the white
hood pushing for “law and order” backlash politics is none other than actual,
factual Nazi, Baron Strucker of HYDRA:

So there you have it, folks. The
political movement behind Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is secretly being run
by a Nazi cabal, MODOK is heightening the contradictions, and Cap says the kids
are all right. However, we really can’t talk about Ca in the 1960s without
talking about one Sam Wilson, better known as the Falcon, which we will tackle
the next time A People’s History of the Marvel Universe covers Captain America…