Actually, according to the 1923 Supreme Court interpretation of the Naturalization Act, you could also become a naturalized citizen if you were of African descent. 1924 was when Native Americans were included. Gotta exclude those Asiatics, though. But this is too complicated to put in that one line so… yeah.
I wanted Steve and Bucky to be in more worker strikes, but apparently the biggest ones in NYC were either immediately post-WWII, or in 1911 following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and most of the protestors were Jewish women who worked in the garment industry. (And lbr, they totally missed the Civil Rights movement.)
Here’s the quick Wikipedia link to the child labor thing. 🙂 I learned so much making this comic!
Happy Birthday, Steve. The world is not that great right now, both here and in Marvel-verse, but let’s keep on trucking.
I don’t get how some people in the MCU Fandom claim that Steve must have a crap ton of money
I think the logic is “military back pay + 70 years interes + licensing his image for film/television/merch, as arranged by Howard Stark and Margaret Carter, way back when they founded S.H.I.E.L.D.”?
But I don’t get it because I’m pretty sure that Cap was officially declared dead? I don’t think that dead people still get backpay? Unless they decided to give him backpay when he turned out to be alive, although I don’t see the US government being that generous.
People writing Steve having a lot of money, I presume, are working on the assumption that he was declared MIA, and then treated like a returned MIA/POW when he was found alive. Returned POWs – regardless of whether they were declared dead while missing – are entitled to all their back pay, including extra hazardous duty pay and living allowances.
It’s possible Cap wouldn’t even have been declared dead; the military is very hesitant to declare MIAs – which is pretty much any active duty soldier whose body was never recovered – dead without proof, unless there’s pressure from the family, and Cap doesn’t have any family left. So whether he was declared dead or still officially MIA is a probably a balancing act between political forces who wanted closure for mythmaking purposes, and Howard Stark who’s still searching for him.
(This is mildly iffy, given that the US military doesn’t have procedures in place for “MIA, later found in suspended animation in the Arctic ice”, but given that it’s Captain America, I don’t think they would fight too hard over treating him as a returned POW. And Bucky had *better* count as a POW, so he’d get his accumulated back pay too, although it would be somewhat less, since he was a noncom rather than a captain.)
I went through historical military pay tables, and using this list of POW/MIA entitlements calculated that he would have something around $2,000,000 in back pay waiting for him (probably more – I assumed he hadn’t been promoted beyond Captain, which is fairly unlikely since MIAs are eligible for promotion and it’s Captain America, and whenever I was unsure how to calculate something, I went for the lesser value. Also it’s entirely likely the Commandos were getting some kind of extra special duty pay, which I didn’t factor in beyond standard hazardous duty/hostile fire pay.)
I didn’t look up Bucky’s in any detail, but as a Sergeant he’d be making about half what a Captain made, so he probably has at least $1,000,000. (He would likely have been MIA as well, since no body was recovered, unless his surviving family pushed for him to be declared dead – the US Military is *really passionate* about recovering all the bodies, and leaving people MIA until they find them.)
That’s assuming they were given just base pay, without interest. I am not sure how the interest is handled for returned POWs who were declared dead, but a POW-not-declared-dead has his pay either go to his dependents/power-of-attorney, or put in an interest-bearing account handled by the Secretary of the Treasury. Steve has no dependents, so it would likely either have been handled by the Secretary of the Treasury or Howard Stark would have managed to get it put in a privately-managed trust (because let’s face it, Howard Stark can do anything he wants.)
Interest could be tricky, but since it was relatively simple to calculate and it’s probably what he would have done if he was alive, I assumed it was all invested in $1,000 US savings bonds (and then not reinvested after maturity.) Which, again, is pretty much a minimum – any actively-managed investment account would probably have made substantially more than that, and Howard Stark would facepalm forever at the idea of investing solely in US Savings Bonds – if it was all put in, say, Stark Industries stock it could be arbitrarily higher.
But assuming U.S. Savings Bonds interest rates, his $2,000,000 *minimum* back pay would have increased to about $7,500,000 by 2011. (Bucky’s, again, would probably be something like half that – say $4,000,000.) I wouldn’t be surprised if a less conservative and more accurate accounting put him well into eight digits.
So he’s not going to be competing with Tony Stark in the big bucks competition, but he can easily do stuff like buy people new SUVs or take a couple years off to travel the world searching for Bucky just on his MIA back pay, without having to look at other income sources.
Canonically Steve would in fact actually be a multimillionaire! The question of army back pay came up on Reddit and a user posited that, adjusted for inflation, Steve would be owed $3,154,619.52 in back pay. This amount included living allowances and pay received for specialized training (such as parachuting and Special Operations). The US Army actually responded and confirmed that Steve would in fact be entitled to back pay but he would actually be owed a lot more than that.
Hall then went on to further clarify some details in the original theory, saying that “It is correct that the O-3 (Army captain) pay grade in 1945 was $313.50; however it was a monthly pay rate vs. quarterly as the original poster indicated.”
Hall said the fan theory “misinterpreted military pay scales” when calculating the biannual increase of pay and failed to take into account “any potential promotions that may have been bestowed upon Rogers while he was listed in a ‘Missing’ status.” (x)
So in reality the bare minimum Steve would have received in back pay is already at least 8 figures. And that is all not factoring in hazardous pay, any possible special duty pay the Howlies may have received, or possible interest (with the potentiality of it being invested in US Savings bonds). In addition since Steve can speak English, German, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, French and Italian he most likely would have received foreign language proficiency pay. Also depending on when they went into effect there are other incentive/special pays he might have received while active duty.
There’s also the theory that because Howard collected things that were Steve’s, it’s completely possible that he could have taken control of whatever money Steve had (you can’t tell me he had many expenses while on the USO tour, so that money likely was sitting in a bank somewhere) and invested it in Stark Industries, meaning Steve would have made a profit based on the growth of the company. If that happened, he’d like have as much money as Tony himself. Not to mention his SHIELD pay and that would likely include hazard pay for dangerous missions.
editing to add: His accounts would likely be frozen when he became a fugitive from the law, however.
His accounts would be frozen IF they were American based. As a guy who traveled the world, I would think it likely that he had multiple accounts for easier access. AND if you take into account that SHIELD handled all the legal/monetary stuff when he was found and woke up, and then years later Steve takes the whole org down because Hydra, it makes sense to me that he would move his money. Because think about it, he wasn’t working within SHIELD anymore, and he was still traveling a lot in the search for Bucky, so we can assume all his and Sam’s expenses were out-of-pocket. Plus, having accounts within the countries he’s in would help him blend in and make it harder for people (Hydra) to track him. He can speak a bunch of languages, it’d be easy for him to blend with that skill and local accounts – people might assume he’s an expat or something instead of the “American with unfamiliar bank/lots of bills”, a person who clearly doesn’t belong.
Also, Steve and Natasha work closely with each other and are shown to trust one another by the end of CATWS, and dumping Steve’s assets into untouchable foreign accounts seems like something she’d do. ESPECIALLY as we see she is ready to tell the government to fuck off in that movie, and at the beginning of CACW, it’s heavily implied that Natasha knows something like the Accords would happen. So we know she’s not going to let her assets get caught up in that bullshit, and I think that if Steve hadn’t already moved his assets by that point, she’d tell him to.
I like this theory. I agree that Natasha would encourage her friends to be savvy in all ways of survival. I’m not sure how it blends with Sam’s line in IW about them not staying in 5-star hotels, though I also disagree with Rhodey’s assessment that they looked like crap 😉
I don’t mean to underestimate Steve’s intelligence. I think I do that sometimes. Puts me in mind of this:
for that matter- while Chris Evans may not be an academic, his intelligence (erudition) surprises me sometimes, too:
I just love when Steve hangs out with people his age and it’s this young hot guy hanging out with a bunch of 90 year olds and they’re all laughing and joking about old times and it’s hilarious
and Sam’s thinking “wow here I am chilling with a bunch of old guys” and he realizes how out of place he feels because he doesn’t have a lot of shared life experience with them
wrennette 