Captain America’s narrative owes a lot to the legend of King Arthur: a national hero who appears in his country’s greatest time of need. While it might seem that this is simply a narrative beat that has been echoed in a genre that owes a lot to folklore and mythology, it might be the case that the Star Spangled Man with a Plan was not in on it completely.
A theory has surfaced on Reddit, positing that Captain America’s accidental cryogenic sleep might not have been accidental at all. The theory goes on to suggest that Cap might have had more in common with The Winter Soldier, except S.H.I.E.L.D. and the American Government was more adept at hiding it from the general public, even Steve Rogers and his allies.
Captain America was put on ice, on purpose
When looking for the Tesseract, Howard Stark made it a point to keep looking after he had found it. While this might be the Stark patriarch refusing to give up on a friend, it is also possible that he indeed found the man, but kept it a secret from the larger group of friends as a favour to the US government, which no doubt, might have held his business interests hostage to buy his silence. Peggy and the others were kept in the dark as the government worked on assembling more superweapons for itself.
The government could also have realised that you can’t control a man with propaganda whose literal job was fighting fascists, so it became important that Rogers was only part of the picture when the threat that the United States was facing was beyond human capabilities.
Captain America might have been a liability for Post War America
The United States of America profited off of the spoils of the Second World War, recruiting a host of scientists who ran the government’s scientific decisions. It is safe to assume that Captain America would be skeptical of this, given that Hydra was not completely dead. It must have been easy for the organisation to push policies towards putting Captain America on ice.
However, while Hydra was exercising the illusion of control, the US government could still have had the upper hand, deciding to unleash Captain America, right when Hydra was deciding to incorporate its grand plan to take over the world. The organisation rightly counted on Cap’s hatred for totalitarianism, using him to take down Hydra. However, for the majority of its history, it was important that Cap stayed out of politics and world events so as to allow progress on American soil, no matter the cost.
