How the Golden Age Superman Forced FDR’s Hand

When Action Comics #8 hit the stands in January 1939, the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. All across America, the combination of poor construction standards, substandard work due to penny-pinching owners, and corrupt inspectors had led to the spread of tenements, like rust on the steel girders of the country.

These sprawls of cheap housing had grown up around wartime production factories from World War I, and the burgeoning automotive industry, which comprised much of the industrial capacity of the central United States.

As author Gail Radford told The Jacobin, “The crowding and lack of any facilities around a lot of the war plants were incredible. The manufacturers couldn’t get a workforce because there was no place for workers to live. And so, it was a crisis situation in terms of running an industrial war.”

FDR’s government, which believed American entry into the war in Europe was inevitable, had already begun to place the nation on a war footing when Superman first graced the pages of Action Comics.

Young creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, whose new character was taking the nation by storm, had grown up with the Depression as a constant presence in their lives. Cleveland, as one of America’s great industrial cities, saw its workers toiling in the steel and car plants by day, and returning to their families in decaying slums at night.

As a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress allocated nearly $150 million to the creation of new public housing in the city of Cleveland. In 1937, Congress passed the Housing Act (also known as the Wagner-Steagall Act), which created the United States Housing Authority and allocated Federal funds for the removal of slums and tenements and replacing them with new, modern public housing.

Siegel and Schuster, who’d seen firsthand the progress the government was making, were also keenly aware of the right-wing pushback against the expansion of public housing. Residents of public housing were characterized by a new generation of radio-savvy demagogues as dirty, their homes were described as ramshackle, and their streets were deemed unsafe for decent people. Much of this was coded racism as a response by white southern Democrats to the election of FDR, as African Americans were seen (inaccurately) as the principal beneficiaries of public housing.

It was against this backdrop that the teenage writer-artist team would choose to make tenements and public housing the central plot in their breakout hero’s eighth issue.

Superman chooses not to wait for the natural forces to destroy people’s homes before the government can be compelled to come in and replace them, but to be that force himself while keeping the people safe.

When the government sends troops and planes to stop him, he leverages their destructive capacity to ensure that his real mission is a success.

Today, with the nation’s affordable housing crisis worsening by the day, the debate over how to help the tens of millions affected is a vitally important one. Gone are the days of direct federal investment in public housing construction. During FDR and Superman’s heyday, the Public Works Administration constructed over 29,000 units of public housing in more than fifty projects nationwide. The PWA was shuttered in 1943 due to increased demands of war production, and was never reopened. Today, the landscape is comprised of developers who work in tandem with city and state authorities, and projects often take years to break ground, much less deliver on their affordable housing goals.

In Chicago, one of the first and most significant PWA housing projects was the Julia Lathrop Homes. Constructed as public housing for World War I veterans, it was allowed to slip into decay in the decades after the war. In 2012, the city entered into an agreement with private developer Related Companies to rehabilitate the development. The new plan completely eliminated public veteran housing, reduced the number of affordable units by almost 80%, and the developer has so far failed to complete work on the final phase of the project. As a result, the dormant portion of the development has fallen into ruin and become a hub of local criminal activity.

Siegel and Schuster’s Superman would have had a solution for this problem, but he had the superpower of a Federal government that was committed to ending homelessness.