Yes, this Superman was a socialist! That's not terribly surprising, given the attitude of the country and the ethnicity of his creators. He fought very few super-villains, however, and spent most of his time battling corrupt politicians in favor of labor unions. Is this the Superman that people cling to? Possibly. Batman was a self-made hero, and we responded to both of them. Superman was powerful because he was an alien, but the point was that he was unique. The fact that they were both orphans made them attractive to Americans, too, reflecting the American soul, which rejects ancestry in favor of individuality. Superman was Zeus, lording over us all and dispensing lightning justice, while Batman ruled the underworld, dragging souls down with him. When Batman appeared, as he had to,a year later, the pantheon had its opposing poles. This was a wholly American deity, and Americans embraced him. I've mentioned before the pairing of Superman and Batman as the Zeus and Hades of our American mythology, and the Christological aspects of Superman, even in the beginning, cannot be ignored. But Americans were looking for someone to worship, and Siegel and Shuster gave them a purely American god. The pulp heroes of the 1920s reflected Americans' fascination with organized crime and the men who fought it, and this continued into the 1930s. no longer looked like the Paradise it had seemed only a decade earlier. FDR's big social programs had failed to pull the country out of the Depression, which was actually worse in 1937-1939 than it had been under Hoover.

Paradigm shift comic