racefortheironthrone:

thewaroffivequeens:

so over on tv tropes one of the articles talks about how modern approaches to writing steve rogers are politically correct revisionist history bc people write steve now as being super accepting of all races and sexualities and genders etc.

which

is not an argument i particularly understand bc it assumes all people in the past by default held the prejudices associated with their time period

and anyway like you do know the whole point to steve rogers becoming captain america is that he’s an exceptionally decent human being which is what makes him a great super soldier

Ok, I have to chime in on this. There is a mistaken belief that cultural attitudes in the past were monolithic, that everyone and everywhere was “of their time.” This is not true; even in the past, there were people and places who saw past conventional wisdom and social pressure and looked to a better future. 

This is especially true for Steve Rogers, because unlike other patriotism-themed characters, Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding) to a working class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side (the digital comic book First Vengeance changes this slightly, shifting his birth to 1918 and moving the family to Brooklyn, but the details are the same). This has political meaning: given his class and ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that. Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother (his father died when he was a child) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother dies of TB. And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and there was a growing and militant anti-racist movement that equated segregation and Nazism that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.  

Then he becomes a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, you couldn’t have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels. 

And this Steve Rogers becomes an anti-fascist. In the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, he volunteers to join the army to fight the Nazis. This isn’t an apolitical patriotism forged out of a sense that the U.S has been attacked; rather, Steve Rogers had come to believe that Nazism posed an existential threat to the America he believed in. New Deal America.