Night Hawk - by Matthew Warner Osborn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Unmasks the long-forgotten story of how a flying, superhuman vigilante played a pivotal role in the founding of the American labor movement.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia's night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title "The Night-Hawk, No. 1" with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: "I'll be a candleholder and look on." Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Matthew Warner Osborn reveals, this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics' Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.

The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia's Working Men's movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk's nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage.

A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.

Review Quotes

Matthew Warner Osborn has made the most important superhero discovery in a generation. Night Hawk perfectly fits the definition of the superhero--mission, powers, identity (codename and costume)--and inaugurated the superhero genre through imitation and repetition. Osborn has reunited the origin of the superhero and the superhero genre, pushed back the origin to 1828, and reclaimed the superhero figure for America, an astounding feat of historical scholarship.

--Peter Coogan, cofounder and cochair of the Comics Arts Conference

'"What a fascinating, revealing episode in the history of the US this book uncovers! More than a century before the appearance of Superman, the solitary Night Hawk fought heroic battles on the nocturnal streets of Philadelphia in the interests of the oppressed. In a book that speaks to the politics as well as the popular culture of our own troubled times, Matthew Warner Osborn has reconstructed the career of this fantastical character with both forensic care and an infectious sense of intellectual excitement. If each epoch dreams up the superhero for which it is secretly desperate, perhaps the radically egalitarian Night Hawk's time has come again." --Matthew Beaumont, author of 'Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London'

About the Author

Matthew Warner Osborn is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. He is the author of Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic, also published by the University of Chicago Press.