The Invasion Is Coming from Inside the (White) House

Englehart’s Captain America is an ongoing argument against fixed identity.  Again, this would seem to be paradoxical: in costume, Captain America is literally iconic, and his Silver Age backstory sets him up as a relic of simpler times.  But by the same token, his underdeveloped personality and nearly non-existent secret identity make him a blank slate.  What looked like a one-dimensional character actually granted Englehart a great deal of latitude.

By starting his run with a fight against Fifties Cap, Englehart showed what the real Captain America was not: narrow-minded, set in his ways, and anchored to a bygone era. Both Fifties Cap and Steve Rogers had been in suspended animation, but it is Rogers who unconsciously resolves never to be frozen again. 

As the comic gears up for its classic “Secret Empire” storyline (169-175, January-July 1974), Captain America struggles against external forces that would define him against his will, from an accusation of murder to a PR campaign to have him replaced as America’s hero by the secretly villainous Moonstone.  Meanwhile, he must also determine the identity and plans of his adversaries, the mysterious Secret Empire (which had been lurking around the Marvel universe in various forms for several years already).  The storyline is quintessentially Seventies, a real-time reflection of the scandals and constitutional crisis of Watergate.  

The Secret Empire worked to discredit Captain America behind a front whose name was an obvious reference to Nixon:  The Committee to Regain America’s Principles had the never-mentioned acronym “CRAP,” only a vowel or two off from Nixon’s infelicitously named “Committee to Re-Elect the President” (officially the CRP, but often mocked as CREEP).  Yet “CRAP” also emphasized what would turn out to be the main theme of the storyline.  What, exactly, are (Captain) America’s principles, and how can they be regained?  

Captain America was designed, in-universe, by concerned mad scientists, and in real life, by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, to rally Americans against external enemies (the Nazis and Japan).  The false Captain America of the 1950s spent his brief career ferreting out both internal enemies (traitors) and the evil communists for whom they worked (the Soviets, the Chinese, and a strangely communist version of the Red Skull). The Secret Empire combines all these tropes into a mystifying plot that comes close to succeeding.  An American cabal determined to seize power, they ruin Cap’s reputation and install Moonstone as a trusted American hero and agent of influence.  Their machinations culminate in the landing of a flying saucer on the White House lawn, as though launching an invasion from outer space.  But from within the spacecraft, the Secret Empire's leader, Number 1, announces his organization’s existence, stages a fight that Moonstone loses, and has Moonstone tell the American people that resistance is futile 

When Captain America defeats Moonstone and gets him to reveal the Secret Empire’s real plans on national television, Number 1 escapes into the White House.  Captain America follows him, and unmasks him in the Oval Office. We never see his face, but Cap’s shock, and Number 1’s own words, provide enough clues for the contemporary reader: Number 1 is Nixon himself.  The disgraced president, who could not stand the fact that “my power was still constrained by legalities,” pulls out a gun and kills himself before Captain America’s eyes. 

As in World War II, an evil adversary threatens the country; as in the paranoid fantasies of the 1950s Captain America, the United States is vulnerable to internal enemies plotting against it; but now, these enemies are the country’s own leaders.  When Captain America exits the White House, leaving Number 1’s body behind, the narrator gets the last word:

“A man can change in a flicker of time.

“This man trusted the country of his birth…he saw its flaws…

“…but trusted in the basic framework…its stated goals…it’s long-term virtue.

“This man now is crushed inside. Like millions of other Americans, each in his own way, he has seen his trust mocked!

“And this man is Captain America!"

This is the point when everything converges: Steve Rogers’ character arc, the problem of Captain America as a symbol, Watergate-era disenchantment, and the challenge of making a character like Captain America relevant again.  It is the moment that confirms that Captain America really is not frozen in time, or at least, that he (and his writer) is fighting against the forces that would prefer his politics remain in the past. The country has changed drastically, and so he must change as well 

The following issue bears the far from understated title “Captain America Must Die!”, echoing the typical language of superhero melodrama.  But the title is uttered not by a cackling supervillain; Captain America himself bellows the words on the splash page.  Almost entirely action-free, this issue takes the opportunity to retell the hero’s origin, something comics used to do fairly regularly in order to bring new readers up to speed.  The retelling also has a thematic purpose. We see that young Steve Rogers was moved to enlist by watching the Nazis on newsreels (“They were suppressing—then murdering—the people of Europe, weren’t they?”), and Captain America cannot help but find parallels with 1974 America (“I’ve seen America rocked with scandal—seen it manipulated by demagogues with sweet, empty words—/ —seen all the things I hated when I saw those newsreels—).  

Thor tries to comfort his comrade, reminding him that the fight against evil is “glorious.”  The problem, though, is that Steve Rogers’ fight cannot be a generic battle against evil (“I’m Captain America, after all—not Captain Asgard!”).  Peggy Carter, by contrast, doubles down on the patriotism inherent in his mission: “Lots of people fight crime, or provide inspiration—but only you do it for the United States of America!”   But Cap argues that America is no longer “the single entity” to which Peggy refers.  The country was unified against the Nazis, but now there are “a great many different versions of what America is.”  

Such a realization is a serious obstacle to Captain America’s continuous existence.  The confrontation with the Secret Empire caused a disenchantment about content (America and its leaders are not what he thought them to be); theoretically, this is not an insurmountable problem.  If America changed for the worse, it can also change for the better. But now Steve doubts the very form and structure of his superheroic identity.  If America is truly plural, how can one man represent it?

The inertia of comic book history makes the resolution to this storyline a foregone conclusion: of course Steve will eventually become Captain America again.  But the process that leads him there seems to take this representational problem seriously.  Not only does Englehart start his run with a fanatical Captain America doppelgänger, now he has Steve replaced by two different Captain America wannabes before he resumes the role:  an athlete named Bob Russo, who appears for exactly one page in Issue 178 and breaks his arm during his big debut (“So much for this Captain America,” concludes the narrator). The second one, a young man named Roscoe, is tortured to death by the Red Skull in the incident that spurs Steve into resuming his established costumed identity. 

Thus while Englehart cannot replace Steve with an entire team of Captains America who will represent the broad spectrum of American-ness, his run on the book does actually feature different Caps who stand for different things. In refusing to be Captain America, Steve inadvertently prompts more iterations of the identity he has abandoned (the athlete; Roscoe), but none of them can fill his shoes. This was all several years before “the new guy takes over the mantle” became an overused trope, but it is consistent with one of Englehart’s own recurring motifs: the contrast between personal growth (leading to transcendence) and mere iteration (leading to stagnation).  It is only a minor motif for Captain America, but will be key to Englehart’s Avengers stories. [1]

In his new costumed identity as Nomad: The Man Without A Country, Steve assumes that he can cast off the burden of symbolism and leave politics behind:

“Captain America lies behind him, buried in the rubble that is politics, 1974…

…but a life as a new breed of hero—a hero free to be his own man—ah, that lies ahead…”

This turns out to be a pipe dream: the Nomad sequence shows that there is no escape from politics.  His primary adversary, modeled on the Symbionese Liberation Army (Patty Hearst’s kidnappers), is a fanatical group of snake-themed villains called the Serpent Squad.  They are led by the new Viper, a woman who had previously been Madame Hydra.  Her transformation, the reverse of Steve’s, is indicative; as a leader of Hydra, she ran a criminal organization whose implicitly fascist politics rarely contributed much to the stories.  Now she is a militant anti-capitalist fanatic with an apparent death wish.

Nomad defeats Viper and her Serpent Squad, of course; in Issue 182, Viper even fulfills the dream of many a fanatic as she appears to die a martyr’s death. [2]  But the new issue, which has Nomad searching all over New York to find the Falcon, shows that Steve Rogers has little cause for rejoicing. The real lesson he has to learn from the 1970s is not that politicians are corrupt, but that there is no escape from politics.  It is his fantasy of an apolitical existence that truly made Captain America a relic.  In the course of a few pages, Nomad is confronted by the Falcon’s bitter, militant girlfriend Leila, is attacked by a crowd of protesters who vow to carry on and “crush the corporate insect” in Viper’s memory,  stumbles upon a bank panic, and is harangued by a passer-by who laments the downfall of the Committee to Regain America’s Principles (“Mark my words: Captain America was the biggest crook of them all!”). Finally, he discovers the Falcon, tied up and beaten, along with the crucified body of Roscoe, the fake Captain America tortured to death by the Red Skull. 

When Steve does reclaim the mantle of Captain America, it is after a two-page spread in which he realizes that he misunderstood the lessons of his battle with the Secret Empire.  If he neglected to see that there were people leading his country who were “every bit as bad as the Red Skull,” the problem was his own need for simplistic binaries: “I didn’t want to know about those people.  The skull was okay to oppose and still is…/ but Number One wasn’t, because he was supposed to be on our side.”  The White House suicide led him to think that “the things I believe in were thirty years out of date,” but the real problem was Captain America himself:  “If I’d paid more attention to the way American reality differed from the American dream…”

And with that, Englehart resolves several problems at once.  He reaffirms the value of Captain America as an icon, while redefining the relationship between the symbol and the entity it symbolizes.  To pretend to be entirely removed from politics is to pretend that the value system he represents need not be connected with anything that is changing in the surrounding world.  In forcing Steve Rogers to confront the politics of his day, Englehart gives Captain America a personal arc that, for once, has nothing to do with dead Bucky or World War II. He has also, over the course of his time on the book, shown precisely how a liberal conscientious objector can write Captain America without any objections from his conscience. Fifties Cap defined Steve Rogers in the negative: the real Captain America will not be a jingoistic, knee-jerk patriot who is blind to American injustice. Now Englehart has defined Captain America positively, as someone who has faced the challenges of his times and emerged all the stronger.

So much stronger, in fact, that Englehart can now finally have Captain America fight his Nazi archenemy, the Red Skull. This could have been a step backwards (“enough with the attempts at being relevant; let’s beat up a 60-year-old Nazi”).  But the return to form is actually earned.  Just as Doctor Strange managed to go through several quests leading to new forms of enlightenment, but still return to his Greenwich Village home, Captain America has returned to the iterative adventures of the modern superhero.  Englehart was off the book before the Red Skull storyline could be resolved, but it seems likely that, had the writer stayed, the repercussion of Steve Rogers’ personal and political development would have continued to be felt.  

Notes

[1] The iteration motif also plays a roll in issues 177 and 178, when the Falcon faces the former X-Men Foe Lucifer.  Thanks to a complicated chain of events, Lucifer, who is trapped in another dimension bonds with two different men in our world, resulting in two different Lucifers. In Issue 179, Hawkeye briefly assumes the identity of the Golden Archer, an adversary from a parallel earth, himself a transparent stand-in for DC’s Green Arrow.  In appropriating this identity, Hawkeye tacitly acknowledges that he is one of a series of heroic archer figures in the world of superheroes, at the same time that he reminds Steve Rogers that he doesn’t have to stick to one costumed identity to be a hero. 

[2] Eventually, she gets better.  These are superhero comics, after all.