WASP by Design: Superman, Race, and Pseudoscientific Ideas of Jaw Shape

There is a prevailing notion in popular and scholarly literature that superheroes are secretly Jewish. These two-fisted guardians that first-generation American Jewish cartoonists created in the late 1930s and early 1940s are, nonetheless, distinctly fantasies of Anglo-Saxonness. Using documentaries, memoirs, archival records, popular journalism and literature, fanzines, movie reviews, novels, a master’s thesis, photographs, comic art, auctioned correspondence, and pseudoscientific discourse of the male body, this paper illustrates that the Jewish inventors repositioned the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant frontier hero to the city and rendered superheroes as this vaunted religioracial identity, which is apparent in their names, backgrounds, and bodies. Its larger scholarly contribution is that “Anglo-conformity,” the sociological term to explain assimilation in America, alongside the circulation of racist, pseudoscientific ideas of body as destiny by constitutional psychologist William H. Sheldon and parallel imagery displayed in comic art encapsulate skewed notions of citizenship and manhood that focused on jaw shape. Although Superman espoused New Deal values of economic and social justice, which cocreator Jerry Siegel acknowledged later in life and even cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats as inspiration, this champion of the people reinforced transatlantic ideas of eugenics and Anglo-American racial superiority. In sum, the superhero creators projected the prototypical image of a square-jawed “all-American” hero that reflected their socioeconomic aspirations, their discomfort with their own Jewish and immigrant backgrounds, and the pressure to conform to the literary, social, and racial standards of society. Trying to find a hidden Jewishness obscures the cartoonists predicament: to sell their product and carve out a good living they were complicit in reinforcing a racial hierarchy that marginalized themselves.