For decades, he’s been America’s steadfast superhero, a shield-wielding symbol of justice and freedom. But how did Captain America come to be? Join us on Our American Stories as we explore the incredible origin story of this iconic hero, born from the urgent need for hope during a dark time. Created by legendary comic book artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Captain America wasn’t just a character; he was a timely response to the looming threat of World War II and the real-world villainy of Hitler and the Nazis.
In a nation hungry for heroes, Simon and Kirby imagined a champion who would stand for the very best of American ideals. From his very first comic book appearance, Captain America was ready for action, famously punching Hitler right in the face before Pearl Harbor. This wasn’t just about a scrawny young man named Steve Rogers becoming a powerful super-soldier through a secret experiment; it was about embodying democracy, freedom, and an unwavering spirit against fascism. He became a symbol, a beacon of hope for a country preparing to fight for what’s right.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we returned to Our American Stories. Up next, the origin story of America’s superhero, Captain America. You to tell the story of how he came to be is our Joseph Parrot. But first, a clip from a rare interview given by Jack Kirby, one of Captain America’s creators. Let’s take a listen.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: I’ve always tried to do the timely thing. The timely thing, I think, is what people understand. Captain America is a product of his time.
00:00:43
Speaker 3: If you’re talking about Captain America, I mean, the first place you have to start is with that origin story.
00:00:51
Speaker 4: It’s a plane’s Superman.
00:00:57
Speaker 3: You had an explosion after the appearance of Super in the latening from thirties of these.
00:01:02
Speaker 4: Superheroes who were selling really well, and so you had a…
00:01:05
Speaker 3: Lot of new heroes popping up, and you had a number of mostly young guys concentrated in New York trying to create these new heroes.
00:01:14
Speaker 4: And one of these guys was somebody named Joe Simon. And Joe Simon was working with another guy named Jack Kirby. His name was Jacob Kurtzberg at the time.
00:01:22
Speaker 3: But Joe Simon’s trying to come up with one of these heroes, and the first thing he kind of thinks…
00:01:26
Speaker 4: To himself one day.
00:01:27
Speaker 3: I mean, there are a bunch of stories about this, but if we listened to Joe Simon’s version, which I think is pretty good. Here’s Captain America’s co-creator Joe Simon in the 2011 documentary Captain America: The First Avenger.
00:01:38
Speaker 5: That was 24 when we first created Captain America. Jack Kirby was 22. At the beginning there, Ben Man was doing very well, basically on the use of his films. So I said, “Maybe that’s the answer,” you know, “get get yourself a good villain, and then get up well for the villain.” Said it other way around.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: Joe Simon asked himself, essentially, “All right, how do we get the best heroes?” I mean, he said that essentially the best heroes, the ones who sold the best, were the…
00:02:13
Speaker 4: Ones who fought the best villains.
00:02:15
Speaker 3: So if you’re trying to think of the kind of best villain of the era, why create a new villain when you have the best villain possible?
00:02:24
Speaker 5: Alf Hitler. Okay, well, he’s alive one on his own, brutal way. He’ll be the villain.
00:02:33
Speaker 3: And who do we get to fight against the Nazis? Who better than Captain America? Here’s Jack Kirby, the creator of Captain America, explaining more about that.
00:02:43
Speaker 6: In 1988, this…
00:02:45
Speaker 2: Was at a time when everybody was patriotic. There wasn’t a day passed on that, you know, we didn’t get news from Europe and the newspapers, and it was ridiculous not to, in America. There was an idea that would have been bought by everybody.
00:03:04
Speaker 7: So Joe and I did that.
00:03:06
Speaker 2: Our job was to sell common books.
00:03:09
Speaker 4: So they essentially create Captain America, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.
00:03:13
Speaker 3: Do as this kind of antithesis to Hitler and this Nazi regime, and so he has to stand for kind of all the best parts of the United States. Stanford Democracy, stand for freedom, stand for a certain level of ideal equality, right, which contrasts against Hitler in Nazi Germany, which is fascist, targeting Jews and Gypsies and all these other folks, and also invading much of Europe, invading Poland, invading France by 1940, isolating Great Britain.
00:03:43
Speaker 4: And bombing London over and over and over again.
00:03:46
Speaker 3: Captain America essentially stands for everything that Hitler doesn’t, and…
00:03:49
Speaker 4: That’s how we get in December of 19…
00:03:52
Speaker 3: 40, a full year before Pearl Harbor, this first issue of Captain America, where he’s jumping…
00:03:58
Speaker 4: Through the window and beating up on Hitler, punching Hitler in the face, and…
00:04:03
Speaker 2: Captain America breaking into Nazi strongholds.
00:04:07
Speaker 3: That’s the introduction to Captain America and the introduction to this kind of superhero that stands not just for a kind of might and taking care of the little person, but for all these values that the United States is going to become associated with.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Captain America became a symbol of everything that was happening.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: Its first release, just after the Peacetime Draft started. Captain America is this little, scrawny 4-F guy we later get to know.
00:04:37
Speaker 4: His name is Steve Rogers.
00:04:39
Speaker 5: Want to be a soldier, but he was skinny and not very musculine and so forth.
00:04:44
Speaker 3: But because he’s so patriotic, he’s selected essentially for this experiment to create American super soldiers to in many ways fight this kind of ideal of the German super soldier.
00:04:56
Speaker 1: The chemical is perfected, gentlemen.
00:04:58
Speaker 7: Then the time has come a last, there’s nothing more to be said. Then I wish you Godspeed, and…
00:05:09
Speaker 4: He becomes this singular Captain America because…
00:05:11
Speaker 3: As this experiment is happening, it’s shown that there’s actually a German agent who’s infiltrated the experiment. You and your…
00:05:19
Speaker 5: Person experiment shall thine within this room.
00:05:22
Speaker 7: Down with democracy! Down with freedom!
00:05:26
Speaker 2: Doctor Riskin! Hey! Got a Rodgers! I’ll stop that murderer!
00:05:32
Speaker 6: No, it’s my job. It’s what I was…
00:05:35
Speaker 7: Created to do. You know.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: He kills the scientist who’s in charge of this. He destroys a formula before Captain America is able to take him out, and by the end of that story it’s revealed that he’s actually Private Steve Rogers. So he’s Captain America, the superhero, but in real life he’s this relatively low ranking guy. So if Hitler is the number one villain, we also get this creation of this kind of ultimate comic book…
00:06:00
Speaker 6: Nazis!
00:06:01
Speaker 5: I used to go to a place called Trash and I had my lunch share usually wind up with a hot fudge sundae. I sipped there, look at the hot fudge sundae thinking of a villain, and I shee this brown fudge chemicals coming on. I said, “Whoa, that’s a very weird-looking creature.” A lion looks so much that we’ll call him Hot Fudge. And then I kept looking at it, kept looking at it, and then I saw the big cherry on top of it, and I said, “That’s it.”
00:06:37
Speaker 6: The Rich Skull! It was a cherry.
00:06:40
Speaker 4: He’s originally kind of an American fifth Calmness.
00:06:43
Speaker 3: He’s actually killed, but he’s such a good villain, the Rich Skull, he’s so memorable.
00:06:47
Speaker 4: He becomes so associated with Nazis, and he…
00:06:49
Speaker 3: Gets trotted back out a number of times in the 1940s. He tends to get killed and then he kind of magically appears, but he kind of captures that threat of Nazis being one kind of, you know, just constantly there, constantly fighting, constantly reappearing, but also that kind of almost visage death.
00:07:08
Speaker 2: America!
00:07:09
Speaker 1: But you will not interfere with my friends! Nothing! And top Veteran Cow!
00:07:20
Speaker 3: One of the things I think is really important is really to emphasize when…
00:07:23
Speaker 4: Captain America came out, it is.
00:07:26
Speaker 3: A full year before Pearl Harbor. I can’t stress that enough. And we’re coming out of this period where the United States was extremely isolation is. Even though Britain looks like they’re kind of the last great democracy of Europe against this fascist threat, there’s still a real sense of hesitance, of fear of this isn’t our fight.
00:07:44
Speaker 4: That we have this free security provided by oceans. Joe Simon. Jack…
00:07:49
Speaker 3: Kirby, a first-generation Polish-Jewish American from Manhattan. These two kind of New York Jews, they understand exactly what this threat from Hitler is, partially because the Jewish, and then the part because they’re in New York.
00:08:03
Speaker 7: I once had six Nazis call me up, and they said, “Well, we’re waiting for you downstairs. We’re going to beat the daylights out of you,” you know, “for writing these stories about Hitler.” These were New York Nazis, and they had a camp on Long Island, and so I said, “Hold on, guys, I’ll be right down.” Of course, I take the elevator down, but there was nobody there. I looked the street, and of course they wouldn’t be there. And I didn’t feel disappointed. And I felt disappointed. Didn’t matter to me one way or the other, you know. If they wanted to fight, well, what the heck?
00:08:43
Speaker 3: In New York, there’s this kind of sense the United States students to get involved in this fighting. This is especially strongly felt in the Jewish community, among others. And so when they have Captain America jumping through this window punching Hitler in the face, this is essentially a call to action.
00:08:58
Speaker 2: All on this. All our legends reflect our addiction to create legends, and I feel that’s a human quality. I felt that it was time to create a new kind of legend. He did those daring things which Americans dreamt of doing, and we’re on the brink of doing, but where he was still binding out time.
00:09:26
Speaker 3: And then once the United States is actually into the war, he’s actually going to the front line, whereas Superman and Batman…
00:09:32
Speaker 4: Actually tend to hang back.
00:09:34
Speaker 3: So this really legitimizes Captain America, becomes central to his identity as a hero, that he’s out there fighting that good fight for democracy. And it seems just kind of fun, fanciful comic stuff, to, you know, grab kids’ and adults’ attention. But it’s more than that. In many ways, it taps into some of the real anxieties that existed in the United States about this potential for Nazi invasion and Captain America superheroes are kind of the American psychological answer, right? Let’s kind of trop these guys out. They are our own super soldiers; they represent our own, you know, best ideals for how we’d like to fight these things; and then offering, you know, a fun message that, “Hey, you know, we’re gonna beat these guys. We’re gonna win!”
00:10:14
Speaker 6: This is gonna be great!
00:10:24
Speaker 1: The story of Captain America. Here on Our American Stories.
Discover more real American voices.
