Superman’s bygone battle with hate group provides strategy for thwarting modern conspiracy theories

LAWRENCE — When Superman became popular in the 1940s, he originally fought more conventional villains of the era such as gangsters, pirates and Nazis. But one of his foes led to a legendary encounter that may provide strategies for dealing with troubling concerns affecting the society of today.

Colin McRoberts, associate teaching professor of business at the University of Kansas, has written a chapter detailing the 1946 radio serial “The Adventures of Superman” in which the Man of Steel challenged a group known as “The Clan of the Fiery Cross” … aka the Ku Klux Klan.

His chapter titled “A Symbol for Hope: Superman’s Battle with the KKK as a Model for Effective Cultural Engagement with Conspiracy Theories” appears in “The Lizard People Don’t Want You to Read This: Essays on Conspiracy Theory in Popular Culture.” The new book is published by McFarland & Company.

“In this serial, Superman revealed what motivated the Klan: the xenophobia, the hate, the know-nothingism. My chapter is trying to convince the writers of modern mass media to consider doing the same thing and use their stories to tell what conspiracy theories actually do in the real world,” McRoberts said.

“Here, I’m not talking about the rare ones that turn out to be true, but the ones that are much more dangerous, like anti-vaccine, antisemitic, January 6 types of things. Instead of lionizing and valorizing the conspiracy theorists because they’re interesting characters, focus on the victims and the damage those conspiracy theories do — just as the writers of Superman did, because they understood the power their stories had to change public opinion.”

Interestingly, the serial itself generated its own conspiracy. For years, the apocryphal story was repeated that Superman had given away the Klan’s secret passwords on the air.

“That just wasn’t true. What the show did instead was reveal the business model of the Klan and the hypocrisy and shallowness of the Klan,” McRoberts said.

The chapter noted, “If these episodes lacked genuine secret passwords, they revealed something just as real and even more devastating: The Klan wasn’t just hateful and un-American, it was a scam. Despite its pomp and circumstance, it wasn’t an ancient and impressive organization — it was just a club that milked its thuggish members to make money.”

McRoberts added, “They made the Klan look silly, and the silliness of the Klan was what undermined its image.”

The professor emphasized conspiracy theories may often seem silly, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less threatening.

“What’s usually at the heart of a conspiracy theory is a powerful group we can’t see and access that is out to get us,” McRoberts said.

Muddying the concept even further, he said, is that people are often confused by how to apply the term conspiracy theory.

“I don’t think of things like the Tuskegee Airmen as a conspiracy theory; I think of it as a conspiracy fact. The classic example is 9/11. Yes, it was a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy of hijackers and terrorists. But it wasn’t a conspiracy of Jews. And that’s the difference between the conspiracy theory as we normally use the term and a real-world conspiracy,” he said.

The “Lizard People” book of which his chapter is a part of delivers a collection of essays examining topics ranging from clandestine societies to dog whistles to pop culture media such as “The X-Files” and “The Da Vinci Code.”

McRoberts said, “It’s a fantastic analysis of how conspiracy theories ripple through mass media and what mass media can do about it. I appreciate how they picked a bunch of different experts in different fields to reflect their facet problem, which is really difficult for the world to get its head around.”

As for his focus on Superman, McRoberts said he was more of an X-Men fan growing up.

“And when I became a lawyer, Daredevil became more my thing,” he said.

A faculty member at KU since 2019, McRoberts was a litigator and a consultant with his own firm, Vasher McRoberts, and with the SAB Group prior to his career in academia.

McRoberts said he hopes the tactic used by Superman’s bygone show might work against other groups whose lives revolve around harmful conspiracy theories. 

Unfortunately, the cultural landscape has changed quite a bit in the ensuing decades, he said.

“The biggest problem now is the fragmentation of the media market, which I generally think is a good thing. I love the fact that you’ve got comic book fans and Jane Austen fans and documentary fans, and everybody’s got a healthy media market for whatever floats their boat,” he said.

“But such fragmentation is not great for the power of fiction to actually change public opinion. That is a power Superman had. I don’t know if mass media now has one singular show that makes the same impact.”