Excerpts from Amanda Waver, The Birth of Columbia, (New York: Prole Posts, 2014)
Despite a legacy stretching nearly eighty years, arguably the most frequently analysed portion of what many would call my great-grandmother’s most important contribution to revolutionary America was her wartime work. Militantly anti-fascist and constantly trying to push the envelope of animation, many would call the series the animated companion of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight”, even though the series started work years before the war actually began.
Created to be a “Revolutionary mythology for a new America”, Commander Columbia would break from her contemporaries on the pages of comic books by drawing not from the pages of pulp science fiction like Captain America or Superman but from ancient legends and folklore to create a “pantheon of gods and demons, and heroes and monsters.”
Even this day, Samantha insists that “Columbia is a goddess, an American Jupiter, not a superhero” when asked. So for her characters, the battle against Nazism was more than just a political struggle, but a red Titanomachy waged against the sternguard of the reaction by the vanguard of the revolution.
But it would be hardly fitting to speak of Columbia without first talking about her creator. Samantha Moriah Waver was born to second generation Jewish and first generation Irish Immigrant parents in New York City in the year of 1903 and showed an early interest in art and mythology.
She devoured whatever books on myths and legends could find, and was also noted for a deep appreciation of science fiction literature. However she one day came to ask her mother what the American Gods were, only to be told that America didn’t have any. This set her on a long path of trying to create her own deities for the modern world if nobody worshipped any of the old ones anymore.
When she saw her first animated films in 1908 she was immediately transfixed and would spend all of her free time practising her craft, trying to break down the process of animation and create her own little flip books.
But had her parents not been buoyed by her father’s medical practise, it’s unlikely that she would have had the time to hone her artistic abilities to the point that she had become a locally famous artist in her own neighbourhood, often taking commissions or selling drawings to buy more paper, pencils, and other art supplies.
With the start of the Great War came hard times for Samantha however. Her oldest brother Seamus and her uncle Tobiah would both be drafted into the war despite their protestations, while her aunt Mary and her oldest sister Hannah would go off to serve as a nurse, with her father soon being made to serve as a wartime doctor.
Adults in her neighborhood suddenly came in quite short supply, and in her own words “none of the reasons the grown ups gave me for why everyone left made any sense.” She would frequently write to her relatives serving in the war, and often mailed them drawings and stories (most of which are still preserved today.) But while her relatives were in the trenches, conditions back home were hardly pleasant either.
Rationing soon set in and imposed a great deal more austerity on her family. Her diet worsened considerably and the sweets she’d often enjoyed at least once a week were far scarcer to provide milk and sugar for soldiers overseas.
“Meat just about disappeared from the table”, she recalls, and she grew visibly thinner throughout the war. But more than just affecting her body, the war helped affect her politics. The conflict was deeply unpopular for new yorkers, and her teacher was a “fired up IWW radical who made sure we knew the papers were pushing lies about the war.”
Her mother, already a Socialist Labor Party voter, increasingly began to talk politics with her remaining children, telling her about how the “owners and landlords are getting fat while we starve and fight.” A hand painted sign she made in support of Reimer’s presidential campaign remains in permanent exhibition in the Manhattan museum of labour alongside the poster she painted for Morris Hillquit which even came to be used in a small run in his mayoral election campaign.
Eventually even her art habits would be affected as increasingly frequent strikes cut into the supply of lumber and reduced the availability of pencils and paper, causing her output of drawings and flip animations to plummet, with the worst being in 1918. However the news of her older brother having been killed in Italy during the Battle of the Piave, after having been listed as missing in action the previous year, was to send shockwaves through her world.
Her mother became inconsolable with grief and rage at the people who sent her son to die “spitting curses at everyone from Cadorna to Wilson”. And the death of her sister from poison gas in France only further soured the mood at home. Angry and despairing, she joined the mass strikes that would rock New York City in 1918.
In the cold months of January, she joined the picket lines of dock and factory workers, intellectuals, artists, housewives, and children gathered to protest low wages, unfair and uneven rationing that left the rich and well connected still quaffing down “ice cream and steaks like nothing had happened”, long and gruelling working hours, and unfair treatment of non-white and female workers.
Though the crowds signing “Bread and Roses” were hardly calling for revolutionary action, the response against them was brutal. With the Pinkertons too afraid of the public fallout if they attacked a crowd of women and children and the police similarly hesitant to act, the National Guard was dispatched to break the strike.
Tear gas, firehoses, batons, rubber bullets, and charging horses were used on the crowds. Her baby brother Sean would end up severely injured by the hooves of a panicked horse as the army cavalryman on top lost control, while she herself was struck with a baton by Corporal Lance Jackson across the head and sent crumpling to the ground.
Though she survived without lasting injury, the experience introduced her to a new level of anger. Every day she could, she would be off joining a strike of some sort, and the drawings and flip books she produced had grown outright revolutionary in character.
Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin, and Peter Kropotkin became her idols, and when the German Revolution began and brought about an end to the Hohenzollern monarchy she came to be introduced to the names of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht[1] and soon idolised them as well, organising a commemoration event for Karl when he was killed[1].
Despite a spell of Spanish Flu that she survived due in large part to her less than ideal health[2] after years of rationing, she remained active in wildcat strikes and agitative movements throughout the remainder of 1918 and 1919. With the return of her father and uncle from war however, the revolutionary mood had yet to dissipate.
And with masses of veterans angry about the difficulty of finding work after suffering through years of the trenches in western Asia and Europe she would find herself joined by many faces she hadn’t seen in years on the picket lines.
Throughout the summer of 1919, now freed from the duties of school, she’d produce some of her “angriest work yet”; her uncle couldn’t find work and despite the war being over living conditions were slow to improve. The cack-handedness of the government’s response to the Spanish Influenza pandemic[3] had only hardened the anger many felt to those who survived by hiding themselves away from the proles who gave them their luxuries, and many had found themselves bankrupted by medical expenses.
She’d accompany her father as he offered free medical assistance to his fellow union members, and would come to meet her future husband Spartak Leonovych Kolisnyk, born to Russo-Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution[4], when her father helped treat him for a case of strep throat.
Author’s notes:
[1] TTL, Rosa manages to survive Wiemar’s Thermidor moment, Karl does not.
[2] It’s worth noting that the Spanish Flu is deadlier to people in good health due to just how the pathogen affects the body. A Cytokine Storm is survivable by the malnourished or the old or young, but is devastating to well fed adults. Samantha Waver is someone who in our timeline, probably died in the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak despite seeming to be in good health.
[3] Continuing from my earlier point, the Pandemic is not quite as severe in America because living conditions are harsher. It is still the most devastating outbreak of disease in the history of the United States (the native genocides not included), but many who would have otherwise died survive. However when the scale of the tragedy becomes apparent it becomes a major sticking point for the SLP because so many people dying of plague in the 20th century is utterly abhorrent.
[4] More specifically from the post-Russo-Japanese war pogroms where the Russian Empire felt its most intense yet wave of paranoia about the Jews in part due to the aid the likes of Jacob Schiff gave to the Japanese war effort to keep them in the financial black.
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