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The following excerpt, from Tom Engelhardt’s book, The End of Victory Culture, is posted with permission from the University of Massachusetts Press. It first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
1. The First Coming of G.I. Joe
It was 1964, and in Vietnam thousands of American “advisers” were already offering up their know-how from helicopter seats or gun sights. The United States was just a year short of sending its first large contingent of ground troops there, adolescents who would enter the battle zone dreaming of John Wayne and thinking of enemy-controlled territory as “Indian country.” Meanwhile, in that inaugural year of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a new generation of children began to experience the American war story via the most popular toy warrior ever created.
His name, G.I.—for “Government Issue”—Joe was redolent of America’s last victorious war and utterly generic. There was no specific figure named Joe, nor did any of the “Joes” have names. “He” came in four types, one for each service, including the Marines. Yet every Joe was, in essence, the same. Since he was a toy of the Great Society with its dreams of inclusion, it only took a year for his manufacturer, Hasbro, to produce a “Negro Joe,” and two more to add a she-Joe (a nurse, naturally). Joe initially came with no story, no instructions, and no enemy, because it had not yet occurred to adults (or toy makers) not to trust the child to choose the right enemy to pit against Joe.
In TV ads of the time, Joe was depicted as the most traditional of war toys. Little boys in World War II-style helmets were shown entering battle with a G.I. Joe tank, or fiercely displaying their Joe equipment while a chorus of deep, male voices sang (to the tune of “The Halls of Montezuma”), “G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe, Fighting man from head to toe on the land, on the sea, in the air.” He was “authentic” with his “ten-inch bazooka that really works,” his “beachhead flame thrower,” and his “authentically detailed replica” of a US Army Jeep with its own “tripod mounted recoilless rifle” and four “rocket projectiles.”
He could take any beach or landing site in style, dressed in “the real thing,” ranging from an “Ike” jacket with red scarf to a “beachhead assault fatigue shirt,” pants, and field pack. He could chow down with his own mess kit, or bed down in his own “bivouac-pup tent set.” And he was a toy giant, too, nearly a foot tall. From the telltale pink scar on his cheek to the testosterone rush of fierce-faced ad boys shouting, “G.I. Joe, take the hill!” he seemed the picture of a manly fighting toy.
Yet Joe, like much else in his era, was hardly what he seemed. Launched the year Lyndon Johnson ran for president as a peace candidate against Barry Goldwater while his administration was secretly planning the large-scale bombing of North Vietnam, Joe, too, was involved in a cover-up. For if Joe was a behemoth of a toy soldier, he was also, though the word was unmentionable, a doll. War play Joe-style was, in fact, largely patterned on and due to a “girl”—Mattel’s Barbie.
The Secret History of Joe
Barbie had arrived on the toy scene in 1958 with a hard expression on her face and her nippleless breasts outthrust, a reminder that she, too, had a secret past. She was a breakthrough, the first “teenage” doll with a “teenage” figure. However, her creator, Ruth Handler, had modeled her not on a teenager but on a German tabloid comic strip “playgirl” named Lili, who, in doll form, was sold not to children but to men “in tobacconists and bars… as an adult male’s pet.” As Joe was later to hit the beaches, so Barbie took the fashion salons, malt shops, boudoirs, and bedrooms, fully accessorized, and with the same undercurrent of exaggeration. (The bigger the breasts, after all, the better to hang that Barbie Wedding Gown on.)
Joe was the brainstorm of a toy developer named Stanley Weston, who was convinced that boys secretly played with Barbie and deserved their own doll. Having loved toy soldiers as a child, he chose a military theme as the most acceptable for a boy’s doll and took his idea to Hassenfeld Brothers (later renamed Hasbro), a toy company then best known for producing Mr. Potato Head.
In those days, everyone in the toy business knew that toy soldiers were three-inch-high, immobile, plastic or lead figures, and the initial response to Joe ranged from doubt to scorn to laughter; but Merrill Hassenfeld, one of the two brothers running the company, called on an old friend, Major General Leonard Holland, head of the Rhode Island National Guard, who offered access to weaponry, uniforms, and gear in order to design a thoroughly accurate military figure. Joe was also given a special “grip,” an opposable thumb and forefinger, all the better to grasp those realistic machine guns and bazookas, and he was built with 21 movable parts so that boys could finally put war into motion.
Hassenfeld Brothers confounded the givens of the toy business by selling $16.9 million worth of Joes and equipment in Joe’s first year on the market, and after that things only got better. In this way was a warrior Adam created from Eve’s plastic rib, a tough guy with his own outfits and accessories, whom you could dress, undress, and take to bed—or tent down with, anyway. But none of this could be said. It was taboo at Hasbro to call Joe a doll. Instead, the company dubbed him a “poseable action figure for boys,” and the name “action figure” stuck to every war-fighting toy to follow. So Barbie and Joe, hard breasts and soft bullets, the exaggerated bombshell and the touchy-feely scar-faced warrior, came to represent the shaky gender stories of America at decade’s end, where a secret history of events was slowly sinking to the level of childhood.
For a while, all remained as it seemed. But Joe underwent a slow transformation that Barbie largely escaped (though in the early 1970s, facing the new feminism, her sales did decline). As the Vietnam years wore on, Joe became less and less a soldier. Protest was in the air. As early as 1966, a group of mothers dressed in Mary Poppins outfits picketed the toy industry’s yearly trade convention in New York, their umbrellas displaying the slogan, “Toy Fair or Warfare?” Indeed, Sears dropped all military toys from its catalog. According to Tomart’s Guide to Action Figure Collectibles, “In the late ‘60s… fearing a possible boycott of their ‘war-oriented toy,’ Hasbro changed Joe’s facial appearance and wardrobe. Flocked hair and a beard were added to the figures. Hasbro liquidated strictly military-looking pieces in special sets, and by 1970 the G.I. Joe Adventure Team was created.”
Now, Joe was teamed with his first real enemies, but they weren’t human. There was the tiger of the “White Tiger Hunt,” the “hammerhead stingray” of “Devil of the Deep,” the mummy of “Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb,” and the “black shark” of “Revenge of the Spy Shark,” as well as assorted polar bears, octopi, vultures, and a host of natural enemies in toy sets like “Sandstorm Survival.” For the first time, in those years of adult confusion, some indication of plot, of what exactly a child should do with these toys, began to be incorporated into titles like “The Search for the Stolen Idol” or “The Capture of the Pygmy Gorilla.” Not only was Joe now an adventurer, but his adventure was being crudely outlined on the packaging that accompanied him; and few of these new adventures bore any relationship to the war story into which he had been born.
This hipper, new Joe was, if not exactly gaining a personality, then undergoing a personalizing process. He no longer appeared so military with his new hairstyles and his “A” (for adventure) insignia, which, as Katharine Whittemore has pointed out, “looked just a bit like a peace sign.” In fact, he was beginning to look suspiciously like the opposition, fading as a warrior just as he was becoming a less generic doll. By 1974, he had even gained a bit of an oriental touch with a new “kung-fu grip.” In 1976, under the pressure of the increased cost of plastic, he shrank almost four inches; and soon after, he vanished from the scene. He was, according to Hasbro, “furloughed,” and as far as anyone then knew, consigned to toy oblivion.
Stripping War Out of the Child’s World
In this he was typical of the rest of the war story in child culture in those years. It was as if Vietnamese sappers had reached into the American homeland and blasted the war story free of its ritualistic content, as if the “Indians” of that moment had sent the cavalry into flight and unsettled the West. So many years of Vietnamese resistance had transformed the pleasures of war-play culture into atrocities, embarrassments to look at. By the 1970s, America’s cultural products seemed intent either on critiquing their own mechanics and myths or on staking out ever newer frontiers of defensiveness.
Take Sgt. Rock, that heroic World War II noncom of DC Comics’ Our Army at War series. Each issue of his adventures now sported a new seal that proclaimed, “make WAR no more,” while his resolutely World War II-bound adventures were being undermined by a new enemy-like consciousness. The cover of a June 1971 issue, for instance, showed the intrepid but shaken sergeant stuttering “B-but they were civilians!” and pointing at the bodies of five men, none in uniform, who seemed to have been lined up against a wall and executed. Next to him, a GI, his submachine gun still smoking, exclaims, “I stopped the enemy, Rock! None of ‘em got away!”
Inside, an episode, “Headcount,” told the “underside” of the story of one Johnny Doe, a posthumously decorated private, who shoots first and asks later. “Hold it, Johnny!” yells Rock as Private Doe is about to do in a whole room of French hostages with their Nazi captors, claiming they’re all phonies, “if you’re wrong… we’re no better’n the nazi butchers we’re fightin’ against!” Of Doe, killed by Rock before he can murder the hostages, the story asked a final question that in 1971 would have been familiar to Americans of any age: “Was Johnny Doe a murderer—or a hero? That’s one question each of you will have to decide for yourselves!”
Two months later, in the August issue of Our Army at War, a reader could enter the mind of Tatsuno Sakigawa in “Kamikaze.” Sakigawa, about to plunge his plane into the USS Stevens, recalls “when his mother held him close and warm! He remembered the fishing junk on which they lived… the pungent smell of sea and wind… he was at another place… in a happier time.” As his plane is hit by antiaircraft fire and explodes, you see his agonized face. “FATHER… MOTHER … WHERE ARE YOU?” he screams.
The scene cuts briefly to his parents on their burning junk (“H-help us… my son… help…”), and then to a final image of “the flames rising from Japan’s burning cities! Houses of wood and paper… his own home.” Tatsuno Sakigawa, the episode concludes, “died for the emperor… for country… for honor! But mostly… to avenge the death of his parents! The destruction of his home! The loss of his own life!” At page bottom, below DC’s pacifist seal of approval, was a “historical note: 250,000 Japanese died in the fire raids… 80,000 died in the Hiroshima A-bombing.”
Even in that most guarded of sanctuaries, the school textbook, the American story began to disassemble. First in its interstices, and then in its place emerged a series of previously hidden stories. In the late 1960s, textbooks rediscovered “the poor,” a group in absentia since the 1930s. By the early 1970s, the black story, the story of women, the Chicano story, the Native American story—all those previously “invisible” narratives—were emerging from under the monolithic story of America that had previously been imposed on a nation of children. Similarly, at the college level, histories of the non-European world emerged from under the monolithic “world” story that had once taken the student from Egypt to twentieth-century America via Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and the Renaissance.
These new “celebratory” tales of the travails and triumphs of various “minorities” arose mainly as implicit critiques of the One American Story that had preceded them or as self-encapsulated and largely self-referential ministories like that new TV form, the miniseries. In either case, they proved linkable to no larger narrative, though in the 1980s they would all be gathered up willy-nilly under the umbrella of “multi-culturalism.”
Being celebratory, they needed no actual enemy, but implicitly the enemy was the very story that had until recently made them invisible. They were something like interest groups competing for a limited amount of just emptied space. The national story, which was supposed to be inclusive enough to gather in all those “huddled masses,” which had only a few years earlier allowed textbook writers to craft sentences like, “We are too little astonished at the unprecedented virtuous-ness of US foreign policy, and at its good sense,” had now been cracked open.
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How GI Joe, Barbie, and Darth Vader Taught Children About War
