steve's war journals / when were they published and who discovered them? what details were gleamed over and forgotten and which were bolstered to be more than he wanted? how did he feel when he heard about it and did he ever go back and read the re-printed versions to see what they did?
world-building time! feel free to send in any questions you have about my muse’s past / people from their past and I’ll answer them for you!
steve was always an avid journal keeper. since childhood, he had a combination sketchbook and diary he kept by his bedside. this didn’t change when he went to war though the subject matter did.
after the war, the army took possession of his personal items – in part because there was no one else to claim them but also because of the confidential information steve wrote about in those journals. he was never explicit – he knew the danger of being too specific and it falling into the wrong hands. but with the benefit of hindsight, the army feared people could put two-and-two together if they came under public scrutiny.
but it wasn’t just the military content which made them lock them away. steve had a great deal of personal writings. on everything from his political opinions, his self doubts and reflections on his role as captain america, and a decent amount of homoerotic subtext (he may not have been super direct but he’s also not a subtle person either).
but all of these things were kept out of public consumption and, at the same time, captain america took on a life of its own. captain america comics continued to be published but the character became an icon for mccarthyism with cap fighting communists (and carrying a huge, ridiculous gun). everything about steve was washed out of cap.
it wasn’t until the eighties the army released his personal items from the archives. however, information was redacted from the journals. a curator was allowed to publish aspects of the journals and these were used to add some context to the war legends. a few contemporaries of steve’s were allowed access to the journals when writing their own memoirs.
one such memoir was more notorious than the rest. it was published by a former chorus girl on the uso tour who was the first, academically speaking, to apply any kind of queer theory to steve and his writing. she contextualized much of his writing with her own experiences, though the memoir was still very much about her life, not steve’s. but it was the 80′s and captain america was still very much a propaganda tool so her memoir was mostly discredited by the academic community.
steve’s personal items were later sold out of the archives to the stark family trust in the early 90′s. the trust financed the items being properly maintained and gave some of them to the smithsonian and some were kept in a private collection. the journals made it to the smithsonian which is where the pages were finally scanned in their original context, without the military edits. still, the journals weren’t properly published until the early 2000′s.
they were published with some added commentary for context which was provided by a historian who had collected other primary information on steve’s life as well as the other howling commandos. the book didn’t shy away from showing steve for who he was — including detailing his sexuality, as much as they could.
but more so the book focused on steve’s deep, existential view of himself and for captain america as a figurehead:
“i’m having trouble keeping food down. this isn’t as when i would get sick before though. i can’t get the smell of death off of me. i fear other soldiers may see me sneaking off into the treeline to vomit. what faith would they have in me as a leader if i can’t stomach what i’m seeing? i can’t help but think of that kid back home who would’ve given anything to be here. even though i knew i would die, i was confident in myself then. but i had no idea. (april, 1944 - bavaria).” the war journals of captain america, 2002.
