This panel offers new insights into the role of popular culture in the twentieth century. It will address the embeddedness of fictional characters in American culture and society by examining how they inform the complex issues of race, identity, and political discourse. Although perceived as superficial children’s fare, fantastic figures reflect the values of their adult overseers and the climate in which they were cast. The deeper discourse often slips under the radar because make-believe is widely dismissed as being unworthy of serious historical scrutiny. Breaking away from such a narrow outlook, this panel intends to investigate the uncomfortable realities behind the production and reception of Zorro, Superman, and Batman and provide a foundation for future scholarship on the everyday culture that the public consumes. Intellectual historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shares our view on the importance of exploring the interaction between fictional characters and the human world. In her pathbreaking essay “The Real Lives of Fake People,” she explains that make-believe characters have historical lives and “haunt our world.” As Ratner-Rosenhagen perceptively writes, “Some of them are more real than the ‘real’ people we know.” Besides blurring the line between fantasy and reality and what constitutes a historical actor, these “living beings” speak to the human condition and reveal a great deal about us.

Anthony investigates the construction and marketing of Zorro in the early twentieth century. Questions about how to understand the character’s racial identity have existed since his creation. Should we think of Zorro as “Spanish” or “Mexican” (or both)? He emerged during a moment when California’s boosters and scholars sought to reconcile the greater Southwest’s racial heterogeneity with the United States’ imagination of a white nation. Zorro’s creator participated in these efforts by fashioning a hero who acknowledged the region’s colonial Spanish and Mexican past but even the whitest Mexicans in his fantasy world were not white enough to be Euro-American equals.

Andrew explores the influence of notions of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant superiority in the formation of the superhero. The circulation of pseudoscientific ideas of body as destiny by constitutional psychologist William H. Sheldon and parallel imagery displayed in newspaper comic strips and comic books encapsulate skewed notions of citizenship and manhood that focused on jaw shape in the first half of the twentieth century. Untamed, square-jawed heroes like Superman epitomized a frontier type masculinity while domesticated husbands with recessed chins like Caspar Milquetoast characterized effeminacy.

Blake examines the political makeup of Batman and his influence over the American psyche. From the beginning, the Dark Knight articulated the American conservative viewpoint. The crusader’s early twentieth-century stories in comic books, comic strips, and movie serials reflect upper-class anxieties about economic destabilization, urban corruption, and the infiltration of ethnic “others.” These tales depict a righteous defender of the American social and economic order against disruption from dangerous newcomers. Contrary to popular memory and modern reframing, Batman was not originally a simple street-level crimefighter but a guardian of the wealthy.