Disney and John Henry – by Kelsey Miranda

Walt Disney Pictures created an animated short depicting the life of American jh1legend John Henry.  The cartoon tells a story of two freed slaves John Henry and his wife Polly Ann on the search for work and a new home during Reconstruction. John Henry finds a crew of exhausted workers who are having trouble completing the railroad’s deadline.  The railroad company has a contract with the workers; if they complete their deadline on time the workers are entitled to 50 acres of land.  John Henry gets right to work but workers become fearful when a steam-powered drill comes to finish the job. The laborers contracts will be broken if the steam-powered drill proves to be more efficient. This part of the film dealt with the anxiety workers had during this time that industries would replace manpower with machines. In Nelson’s reading this anxiety propelled labor unions and the communist party to use pictures of John Henry to represent Black laborers.

In the film American hero John Henry will not let his crew lose their land due to the machine, which results in a competition between John Henry and the steam-powered drill.  Whoever gets the most work done by sundown wins the competition. John Henry with two hammers beats the machine; the workers and his wife Polly Ann were given the land that they were promised in their contract. Unfortunately, John Henry loses his life due to exhaustion and the movie ends with Polly Ann telling this story to her and John’s son. In the film, Disney recreated versions of the worker songs about John Henry, which showed the icon’s lasting power in American Folk music.

In the readingJH2s by Scott Reynolds Nelson stated music teachers taught rhythm using John Henry folk songs during the 1950’s and later. He was also written about in many children books but was not discussed in other disciplines due to the association with the communist party.  This Disney short was a part of a compilation called American Legends and the addition of the John Henry short was only released recently compared to the other shorts that were released in the 1950s. This displayed the controversy that surrounded the icon but his popularity continued through children stories, music, and movies.  John Henry has had a strong lasting power in American society and is one of the greatest African American heroes.

John Henry and The Walking Dead – by Alexander Matthew Cabrey

I’m a fan of the show and graphic novel The Walking Dead, and there is a walking-dead-comic-con-2013-banner-tyreese-hammercharacter who appears in the both who harkens back to some ideas of John Henry. The character is Tyreese, a burly African American man who brandishes his weapon of choice: the hammer.

His character in the comic and show are somewhat different but have very similar characteristics. He is a strong and reliable in moments of danger. I’ve inclhan image of Tyreese from the show (played by Chad Coleman, who I think looks a bit like a John Henry figure).

I’ve also included an image of the Tyreese character portrayed in the comic, who I find to be very similar to some of the John Henry images we viewed in class. I would compare him to some of the images created by the Gellert brothers during the 1930s for posters.

Within both forms of The Walking Dead (TWD), Walking_Dead_Tyreese_SpecialTyreese has a moment where the audience/readers expect him to perish. John Henry’s death at the end of his legend is unexpected.  In TWD the audience is led to believe Tyreese has died while saving the rest of the group.  But eventually we learn of his survival.  Looking at Tyreese, I find he has some connections to John Henry and the legend then I had noticed before.

Shifting gears to the Nelson piece, I think they connect well to Tyreese’s image. Nelson points out how the John Henry image is used, almost repurposed, to fit a group’s agenda or position. American Communist Party used him as a way to bring in African American members into the Party in the 1930s.  And since then  his image has changed more and more.  Nelson even attempts to make a connection to some of the original superheroes.

I feel the John Henry image and idea has created a basis for many African American protagonists that you might find in any media. The John Henry image is a strong, hard-working individual who may not choose to be in his current situation but proves his effort by persevering through impossible odds—only to die later. Perhaps we’ll find that Tyreese fits the John Henry story even more closely once we learn his fate.

John Henry Irons and the LA Riots – by Alison M. McCarron

John Henry Irons is the full name of the DC Comics superhero Steel. In this illustration, Steel is depicted in his iron suit of armor carrying the iconic sledgehammer. On his right arm is a weapon that shoots out large metal spikes, similar to the ones John Henry laid as railroad tracks. Just as in the Benton illustration found in Scott Nelson’s book, Steel is depicted as larger-than-life, with exaggerated musculature that still fits proportionally with the rest of his body. The red cape is reminiscent of Superman and Captain America, the first superheroes designed overtly with the John Henry in mind.

steelIn searching for my image, I learned a bit about the character of John Henry Irons from the DC Comics. In the DC Comics world, there are many multiverses in which the characters exist. In the universe I have researched, Steel replaces Superman upon his death. Steel has no true superhuman skills, like the ability to fly or regenerate after being injured; he is simply an extremely large, strong, man with amazing athletic ability, much like the man upon which he is based. Steel is a skilled craftsman, and he crafted his steel uniform and weaponry himself. According to his backstory, his great-grandfather had worked with the original steel-driving John Henry, and he was likely named after the hero.[1]  While the superhero is not outright political, his backstory does liken him to Henry.  Irons was raised by his grandparents, two prominent members of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s. This speaks to the how the image of John Henry was used by union organizers and the Black Power movement as a tool to illustrate problems in the South during this period and with race relations throughout the country.

However, DC Comics includes women in their version of John Henry legend, while Nelson explains the difficulties the Communist Party had in including women in their work, and points out that the Party seemed to devalue the contributions of women to the worker’s movement (Nelson 159). However, within the story of Steel, women are an important part of the story. Irons’ niece, Natasha, is prominently featured in the plot, as an intelligent student who worked at one point for a U.S. Senator. The role of Steel is even passed on to Natasha when he becomes injured.

During WWII, John Henry was used as an American icon to combat the racialization of America and find “a common nationalism that transcended race,” distancing the country from German Nazis and the Japanese (Nelson 163). Interestingly, the character of John Henry Steel was introduced in The Adventures of Superman #500 in June 1993. This was similarly a time of extreme racial tension in the United States. The Los Angeles Riots following the Rodney King verdict occurred in late April and early May of 1992, and the federal grand jury trial of the officers ended in April of 1993. Perhaps the introduction of this ingenious, powerful, black superhero, was an attempt by artists and writers to do, in the name of nationalism, as the generation before them did, to quell or simply obscure racial unrest.

[1] Andrivet, Sébastien Alexandre. “Steel – Man of Steel – DC Comics – John Henry Irons.” Write Ups. Ed. Joshua D. Marqua. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2015. <http://www.writeups.org/fiche.php?id=4489#>.

A Darker John Henry – by Alisha Evelissa Rivera

The John Henry I found appears in issues 3 and 4 of “DC: The New Frontier” John_Henry_New_Frontiercreated by Darwyn Cooke. When I first looked at the picture, I noticed that like the other forms of art observed in the Nelson readings, the John Henry depicted in this picture carries with him the strength and hammer that is synonymous with in his name and story. Also, like many superheroes drawn for comic books, John Henry is imaged as “a balloon-muscled strongman” to emphasis his power and strength (Nelson 161).

However, unlike the many other recreations of John Henry, Cook’s Henry is created to look like a menacing character. The combination of the black mask on his head, with a rope around his neck, and the lyrics to those specific lyrics to his ballad, is unsettling. This picture looks like the opposite of the Communist/Black Power/American hero that Nelson talks about in his book. In fact, he looks like the villain of this piece. In order to understand this intensity, the picture forced me to read more on the comic book character version of John Henry.

I found out that in “The New Frontier” he isn’t introduced as John Henry at first. Actually, his name was initially John Wilson. In this version of the John Henry tale, John Wilson is a respectable man and a veteran of the Korean War. After returning home, he became a steel worker. Things changed when the Ku Klux Klan murdered his entire family while also lynching him.

Having survived his lynching, John Wilson avenges his family by using his signature hammer and by changing his name to John Henry. The only words that fill the page of the comic come from the song, and provide the background while he terrorizes the Klan.  He does this for three months before falling over and dying himself. There are two ways of reading this: either John Wilson is the reimagining of the John Henry story or John Wilson, having been presumably brought up on the John Henry story took up his identity, much like V took Guy Fawkes’s identity in V for Vendetta. I believe that legend of John Henry exists and is known within the DC Universe, and so the legend that a man strong enough to drill further and faster than a steam drill would be known. Much like the Communist Party used Henry as the poster child for hard work of a human verses the work done by machine (Nelson 152), Wilson is using the “strong, determined” version of Henry to strike fear into Klan.

Whichever way you view it, this John Henry leans closer towards the image of John Henry that was used to entice a “new kind of multiracial America” (Nelson 164).  By snuffing out the Klan with his hammer, he is simultaneously striking down the injustices created by racism.

Welcome to American Icons

Welcome to American Icons.  In this class, we’ll be writing every week about the icons we examine.  Here, I will share the best blog entries from class, the articles, and web mentions of these icons that we come across, and we’ll start a discussion about the work and meaning of Icons in the United States and beyond.