American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason

By Brett Dakin

MEET LEV GLEASON, 

A REAL-LIFE COMICS 

SUPERHERO!

Gleason was a titan among Golden Age 

comics publishers who fought back 

against the censorship campaigns and 

paranoia of the Red Scare. After 

dropping out of Harvard to fight in 

France, Gleason move

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chapterhouse Archives
• Release date: Aug 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988247519

Book preview

Lev_Gleason_-_An_American_Daredevil_Cover_FRONT.jpg

Copyright © 2020 by Brett Dakin

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or

used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

Printed in Canada

First Edition, 2020

ISBN 978-1-988247-51-9

Chapterhouse Publishing Inc.

Toronto, ON

www.chapterhouse.ca

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

TAKING OFF

AMERICAN DAREDEVIL

A LIFE OF CRIME

CHAPPAQUA

TROUBLEMAKER

ANTI-FASCIST

A TALE OF TWO COMMITTEES

CONTEMPT

UNWINDING

DELINQUENT

FIGHTING BACK

UN-AMERICAN

ALEXANDER

RETREAT

SEDUCER OF THE INNOCENT

DISAPPEARING

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

INFORMANT

THE FRIENDLY BROKER

UNRAVELING

WATCHING THE WORLD GO BY

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LEV GLEASON’S PHOTOGRAPHS

LEV GLEASON’S PUBLICATIONS

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

July 1941. Adolf Hitler’s bunker, location undisclosed. The Fuehrer and his henchmen, gathered around a conference table covered with maps, are finalizing their plans for world domination. A grim-faced Hitler peers into a crystal ball. The crystal says blitzkrieg, he proclaims, so blitzkrieg it is! Heil, Hitler! his lackeys bark out. London is about to be leveled. It seems there is no hope.

But, wait—who is that, crouching on the other side of the wall? Could it be? Yes it is! It’s Daredevil; here to infiltrate the Nazis’ inner sanctum and find out what they have in store. A red-and-blue bodysuit reveals his svelte physique. At the waist, he wears a spiked golden belt. Just before he is about to be discovered, Daredevil bursts through the door. I’ve a message for the Fuehrer! he cries as he lands his first punch. The Germans don’t know what’s hit ’em. Daredevil makes a quick getaway, leaving Hitler and his cronies scratching their heads and nursing their wounds. Just in time to fly to London, warn Churchill, and help beat back the Germans. All in a day’s work.

Daredevil Battles Hitler, a bold call for U.S. intervention in World War II at a time when many Americans wanted to stay out of Europe, was a rare comic book with an overtly political message. The man responsible for the Daredevil series was Leverett Stone Gleason, among America’s first and most successful comic book publishers.

He was also my great-uncle.

I never met Uncle Lev; he died five years before I was born. When I was growing up, my mother would tell me about her flamboyant, free-spending uncle from New York City. The only tale I remembered was the one about Uncle Lev’s Day: the day, once a year, when Lev and his wife, Aunt Peggy, would drive to my mother’s house near Boston, pile her and as many of her young friends as possible into his gleaming aqua Packard, and head for the shops on main street, where each kid was free to buy whatever her heart desired—courtesy of Uncle Lev.

Over the years, I picked up a few facts about Lev’s life: a privileged upbringing in the suburbs of Boston, high school at Andover, a year at Harvard in the Class of 1920 before dropping out to fight in France in World War I, another military tour during World War II.

I knew his politics were progressive; he would preach endlessly to his younger brother, my grandfather, about the power of government to do good. He was keenly aware of his family’s progressive roots: on his midwestern mother’s side, he was named for his grandfather, Leverett G. E. Stone, who had funded the abolitionist movement in the border states Kentucky and Ohio. On his father’s side, his grandfather Dr. Aaron Gleason, had been a surgeon in the United States Army during the Civil War and had retired to New Hampshire, where he devoted much of his practice to the free treatment of African-American veterans.

I also knew that he had made a fortune in comic books—and lost it all when his business collapsed spectacularly in the 1950s.

Until recently, I had never thought to find out why.

___

People are often not good at remembering. The relentless forward momentum that comes along with growing up, forging an identity, falling in and out of love, then, with any luck, in love again, cobbling together a career, keeping up with the demands of daily life—it makes it challenging to engage with the past. Our families, so familiar to us, seem humdrum. When it comes to the living, we take for granted that they will always be around to answer our questions. How often do we hear the regret expressed: if only I had asked, when I had the chance? As for those who left before we came along, their lives exist on another plane entirely—further away, even, than a distant memory.

In my case, it was not until my last semester at law school that I really bothered to ask any serious questions about Uncle Lev. I was about to graduate from Harvard, and, in truth, I was ready to be done with school; ready to leave Cambridge behind and get on with the rest of my life. When I should have been studying for my last set of exams, I found myself distracted, and restless. I roamed the campus, then the town beyond. Rather than sit for lectures, I walked to adjacent villages, exploring architectural wonders like the St. Auburn Cemetery and culinary gems like the Deluxe Town Diner. (The chocolate chip pancakes are a must.)

And, instead of case law, I read novels—including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon’s story of two cousins who become major players in the earliest days of the comics industry in New York. Chabon managed to powerfully evoke the world in which Uncle Lev had come to prominence and made his fortune. The anti-fascist superhero at its heart, The Escapist, sounded awfully familiar. Reading Chabon’s fictionalized account of how works like Daredevil Battles Hitler were created triggered in me a yearning to know more about that world and Uncle Lev’s place in it. So, as my classmates focused on the bar exam and dreamed of their prosperous futures, I found myself looking backward, into the mysterious life of a man I’d never known.

One day, I stopped in at the University Archives, just across Harvard Yard from the law school, where the staff was friendly but had little to offer. After all, Uncle Lev had attended Harvard for a just year before enlisting. The only references to him I could find were in the occasional Class of 1920 alumni updates. In one volume, Lev’s classmate, one George Crompton, wrote of himself, Through his mother, he is the lineal descendant of Emperor Charlemagne 814; William I 1081, Henry I 1135, Henry II 1189, Kings of England; Empress Matilda 1167, Empress of Germany; Malcolm III 1093, King of Scotland, and his Queen, Saint Margaret; Alfred the Great 900, Saxon King of England; Diarmait 1171, King of Leinster, Ireland; six Kings of France; four Grand Princes of Russia and other royalty. And that was only George’s first sentence.

Despite my wanderings, I did manage to graduate, pass the bar, and get a job at a law firm in New York. Before moving to the City, I spent some time at home in Washington, D.C. with my parents. After dinner one night, I pressed my mother for anything she might remember about Uncle Lev, her father’s elder brother and only sibling. There was no trace of Lev on display in the house, and memories of him were not at her fingertips. But I persisted. After sifting through a pile of old family photographs in the bottom drawer of an antique dresser, my mother picked out a black-and-white studio portrait of Lev. It looked to be from the late 1940s or early 1950s. It was possible I had seen it before; for the first time, I took a good look.

Peering back at me, Lev exuded confidence. He was dressed elegantly in a light summer suit, dark necktie, and matching pocket square. He had the face of an intellectual, a gentleman’s demeanor. His expression was serious, softened by a slight smile, and a hint of mischief as well. A wisp of a mustache echoed his thinning hair. And he wore dark, horn-rimmed glasses.

He always wore glasses, my mother remembered. And I don’t remember him ever out of a suit! Or at least a sports jacket. There was no ‘casual’—he was always dressed up. He had a little finger ring that was a star sapphire, very popular in those days. It was blue, it was rounded, and you could see a star when you looked into it. It was very attractive. Prompted by Lev’s portrait, my mother began to recall other images of her uncle. He would always be smoking a cigarette, or a pipe. And reading a book. He was always reading—a book a day, when he was older. He’d say he only needed four hours of sleep a night!

Before long, my mother was transported back to the time of this portrait, when she was a young girl and Lev was experiencing the height of his commercial success. I could feel the sense of wonder she had felt decades before whenever her parents let her leave their hometown in the suburbs of Boston and visit her uncle in New York. She was an only child and Lev and Peggy had no children of their own, so my mother received a lot of attention. I remember what they gave me for my graduation from eighth grade: a chain necklace with a gold heart, and a gold scarab bracelet. For high school, an ankle bracelet with my name engraved—I loved it.

She could still picture Peggy’s carefully applied mascara, smell her perfume, feel the white fur stole her aunt wore as she cuddled up next to her in the back of Lev’s Packard—or perhaps the Jaguar convertible, or the Austin—on their way to a fancy dinner out in the City. She could see the maître d’ carve a beautiful little basket out of a real lemon for each of them. He couldn’t stand it when people shared food. That was something that you couldn’t do. If you wanted it, you ordered it. If you wanted to try a little bit, you ordered five different things. You just didn’t share other people’s food. No picking or even offering. You just ordered it! She could remember gasping as Lev paid for dinner with a one hundred-dollar bill. In those days, that was very, very flashy, she recalled. And she remembered being welcomed home by a butler and maid—a Chinese couple, she thought.

Of course, whenever her glamorous uncle and aunt came to visit her family in Boston, there was Uncle Lev’s Day to look forward to. Was it just for her?

No, all my friends in the neighborhood! There weren’t malls in those days, we just went to the main street. I can’t remember which stores we went to, but we would buy toys—you could buy whatever you wanted. It was amazing. My father, of course, thought it was outrageous that anyone would have the gall, the audacity to name a day after himself—why would he do something like that? He just felt that Uncle Lev had a terrible need to show off, which he probably did.

To my grandfather, a stockbroker and always very practical, Uncle Lev was the older brother who needed to prove how successful he was. But to my mother, Lev was magical, a visitor from another world, one filled with big ideas and great, sensual pleasures—he was her Emperor of Ice Cream. And she vividly remembered this period in their lives.

___

As for what came before, or after, my mother did not know much. She kept in touch with Lev and Peggy until they passed away, but didn’t see them all that often. She went to college and graduate school; she married, had children, moved overseas, pursued a career.

I wish I remembered more, she lamented to me and, before turning in for the night, directed me to a single box, buried at the back of a bedroom closet. Frayed at the edges, held together in places by masking tape, it was in rough shape. According to my mother, it was all we had Uncle Lev’s life—73 years, two World Wars—reduced to a single box.

After Lev and Peggy had both passed away, a family friend had come around to their home, by then a modest cottage on Cape Cod, to collect his things. Anything related to the Gleasons, she had placed in the box and mailed to my mother. The faded address label, now many houses out of date, was still affixed to the top. When I came upon the box, it seemed as if it had not been opened since.

Inside were the remnants of little Leverett’s childhood, lovingly preserved by his mother, my great-grandmother, Josephine Stone. A flowery album detailed the key events following his birth in Winchendon, Massachusetts on February 25, 1898. A lock of his first strands of blonde hair. Studio portraits of him in frilly clothes in Newton, where his father practiced as a family doctor. His first outing on April 9, 1898: The little boy, dressed in the white cashmere cloak worn by his mother when a baby, was wheeled by his mamma, in his white and gold carriage, as far as Mrs. Weston’s home, where he stopped for a moment for his friends to see him. Then back home. His first laugh, on April 19, 1898. His first boy’s haircut, on March 30, 1904. The tragic events of December 31, 1909: Charles McCullough threw a stone which hit Leverett on the tooth breaking it off, and not even hitting his lips or gums.

Other items in the box revealed Lev’s privileged youth, and the violence with which world events quickly intruded upon it. The 1915 edition of the Newtonian high school yearbook. The June 1916 Phillips Academy Class Day Programme. A September 1916 clipping from the Boston Herald, showing a group of freshman classmates lounging in Harvard Yard. An editorial in Life on April 19, 1917 about mobilization for war, accompanied by a cartoon of Uncle Sam comforting an American mother. She says, Here he is, sir, while still clasping the hand of her young son. Finally, there was a brief record, in Josephine’s handwriting, of his first marriage, at twenty-two years; the birth of a son, Ralph, in 1921; a second marriage at twenty-five; and finally, his marriage to Aunt Peggy in 1941, the year my mother was born.

No diary. Not one letter. Not even a comic book. That was all?

I realized that if I wanted to discover the truth about Uncle Lev, my family was not going to be much help. After 20 years of school, I was in a hurry to be done with studying. But I felt I owed it to myself to take at least one trip to the public library, just to see: was there anything out there? What was the public record of Lev’s existence? Recalling a required class in research methods back in high school, I went straight to the Paper of Record and consulted the official index of the New York Times. Why beat around the bush? If he was there, I thought, he would certainly be elsewhere as well. I pulled an old volume from the shelf, dusted off the cover, sneezed, and thumbed my way to the Gs. There was indeed an entry under Gleason, Leverett S. In fact, there wasn’t just one—there was a whole list.

The very first entry turned out to be a notice in the Apartment Rentals section on August 24, 1932. Included in a list of recent transactions handled by E.R. Munn & Co., brokers, was the following: Leverett S. Gleason, in the Gilford, 140 E. 46th St. The announcement was buried deep inside the paper, on page 33, and the name of the building was misspelled. Nevertheless, New York City had been put on notice: Uncle Lev had arrived.

Lev was breaking free of his New England roots, his stuffy Andover and Harvard classmates and their prominent parents, and beginning anew in a very different city. His life was about to take off. More than a half-century later, as I made my own move from Boston to New York, my search for Lev Gleason was about to take off, too.

I was pleased to find so many references to Uncle Lev in the Times index. But I was shocked to find how many of them were filed under the following heading:

U.S.—Espionage—Treason.

I decided to call the law firm and put off my start date. Yes, I was moving to New York to launch my future—but first I would need to take a journey into the past.

TAKING OFF

When Lev decided to rent an apartment in the Guilford—which sits, even today, near the corner of Lexington Avenue and 46th Street in Manhattan—he had spent nearly all of his 34 years of life in Boston. After his discharge from the Army in September 1919, and his return from France following a stay of several months in Paris, Lev had moved right back to his hometown of Newton and tried his hand at being a stockbroker. He quickly moved to the communications side of the business, editing a stock exchange firm’s monthly client newsletter, but it did not hold his interest. Neither did marriage, it seemed: he was twice-divorced, already sending regular payments to support at least one ex-wife and their son. Lev and a colleague at the stock exchange firm, an aspiring actor named Walter, decided to quit. For Walter Pidgeon, destined for great success on the stage and screen, it was Broadway or bust, but it took Lev a few more years to make it to New York. He had no college degree, but more studying was not an option; he needed an income. Fortunately, Lev found magazines.

Based in downtown Boston, The Open Road for Boys was a monthly that sought to tap into the thirst among young boys for adventure and the great outdoors. When Lev was hired to sell advertising for it in 1925, Open Road seemed to be speaking to parents. Take this March 1921 ad for Camp Sokokis in Bridgton, Maine: For boys of particular parents. The camp with ideals such as a select clientele appreciates. Screened dining porch. To reach kids and sell more copies, the magazine would need to do more; it would need to sell a way of life.

Lev helped develop innovative ways for Open Road to do just that—including a club called the Open Road Pioneers, complete with an official pin featuring a coonskin cap-wearing, rifle-toting adventurer. To engage readers, he sponsored features like a cartoon contest. Each issue included an illustration of a sticky situation and asked readers to send in a drawing that resolved the problem posed. Lev worked his way up at Open Road, and by the time he left Boston, he was Advertising Manager.

But Lev was not interested in selling ads forever; he wanted to run his own operation. His old friend Walter Pidgeon had not only made his Broadway debut, he had also starred in several silent films. Ultimately, Lev wanted control over his business, and influence beyond it. He had seen his name on a masthead. Now he wanted to see it at the top.

___

In August 1932, that rental notice in the Times would have to do.

President Herbert Hoover was up for re-election in November, and Lev was searching for signs that he would be defeated. Prohibition was still in effect. Within a year the booze ban would end, but that summer it was still a thorny issue for the Republicans. Hoover needed to broaden his appeal if he was going to win, but he could not afford to alienate the morality forces inside his party. Anything that forced Hoover to struggle was fine by Lev. A letter to the editor in the Times that day, railing against republican mercantilism and calling for the removal of unnecessary privileges for big business, hinted at the discontent with Hoover’s management of the economy.

The Depression had hit the Big Apple hard. A third of the city’s manufacturing plants had closed; a third of the workforce was unemployed; almost a million were on the welfare rolls. The city was approaching bankruptcy, and even with the aid of private charities the government could not provide relief to all.

Entire sections of Central Park, not far from Lev’s apartment, had been taken over by the unemployed. Unable to find work, evicted from their homes, these folks had built colonies of poverty: Hoovervilles. Even as the fabric of his city crumbled around him, Mayor Jimmy Walker had ignored the Depression. Originally a vaudeville performer, the night mayor favored expensive meals and tailored suits, and had taken 149 vacation days in his first 30 months in office.

Governor Franklin Roosevelt had launched an investigation into City Hall corruption, and public hearings had revealed just how saturated with corruption city politics had become. New Yorkers were discovering the truth about how their city was run. Within a week, on September 1, 1932, Walker would resign.

Lev had arrived at a time when New Yorkers were being destroyed by the downturn and enraged by their leaders’ misdeeds. But the fall of 1932 also turned out to be a hopeful time for the city: with the departure of Mayor Walker, the possibility for political reform and economic recovery suddenly seemed real. It marked the beginning of New York’s rebirth—and Lev’s life-long love affair with FDR.

When I imagine the city Lev saw through his wire-rimmed glasses, I see it in black-and-white. Pedestrians are frozen in mid-stride, American flags are limp and still. Of course, for Lev it was vivid, and bursting with color. In his 1932 book, New York: The Wonder City, W. Parker Chase wrote, NEW YORK - home of the world’s … most stupendous structures … veritable center of our country’s wealth, culture, and achievement! NEW YORK -- !!! What visions of magnitude, variety and power the name New York conjures up for human comprehension. Several major projects had just been completed: the Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge, the Holland Tunnel. On May 1, 1931, the towering Empire State Building had officially opened. New York’s cultural life throbbed: artists like Diego Rivera, Edward Hopper, Hugo Gellert, Ben Shahn, and Thomas Hart Benton were all there. Among the national best-selling albums of 1932 was the original cast recording of the Broadway musical Show Boat.

The New York Daily Mirror’s star writer was Walter Winchell, who had begun writing Things I Never Knew Till Now just three years before. Winchell had become a sensation in New York by exposing the personal lives of celebrities in his columns. Now he even had his own radio broadcast.

In his 1933 book The Night Club Era, Stanley Walker wrote that Winchell caught the tempo of the New York of the twenties and the early thirties. That tempo was brittle, cheap, garish, loud, and full of wild dissonances. It was precisely these dissonances that Lev wanted to explore. He intended to embrace the full diversity of New York, to plunge himself into the city’s depths and hopefully soar to its heights as well. He was interested in the rich and the poor, the high-minded and low-down. As he settled into his new life in New York City, Lev could not have known that his name would one day make it into Walter Winchell’s column.

But I’ll bet he had an idea it might.

___

Lev had been lucky to find a career in magazines, but the Depression delivered a severe blow to publishers and distributors alike. By 1932, most sellers only accepted material on consignment: a dealer would pay for the magazines he managed to sell, returning all unsold copies to the publisher. Prohibition had allowed many industry players to keep afloat by manipulating the nation’s loose rules against alcohol and pornography.

One publisher, Harry Donenfeld, regularly smuggled whiskey into the country along with the pulp paper he purchased from Canada—with an adequate tip, a customs agent at the border happily looked the other way. Magazines were distributed along with banned products (like condoms) to