Possumblog

Fascinating

Yesterday I found a little gem via Cox and Forkum, namely a collection of World War II era political cartoons by none other than Dr. Seuss.

I'm still looking through them all, but a few things jump out as recurring themes of his work--the dangers of American isolationism, the craven nature and not so latent anti-Semitism of the America Firsters (and especially that of Charles Lindbergh), the damage caused to morale by constant fault-finding and nit-picking, the ineptitude of Congress, and contempt for both the weeping naysayers who said all was lost and we should surrender, AND the overconfident arrogance of those who thought our enemies were weak or disinterested and victory would be as simple as declaring it so. (Oh, and as for the ink-stained wretch crowd, this.)

One thing quite obvious from the cartoons is that Dr. Seuss was much more concerned (not without good reason, obviously) about the rise of Hitler, while discounting Japan as a power. At least in the early cartoons, you get the sense he believed that the Japanese were a reluctant ally of Hitler, and not nearly so weasely as even Mussolini. The same artistic arguments he made for reasons to fear Hitler, especially his rapacious appetite for invading neighboring countries, don't seem to have registered when it came to Japan and their brutal subjugation of China and the countries of Southeast Asia throughout the later 1930s. His attitude did shift somewhat after the US entered the war, and in one particularly graphic "war memorial" cartoon , he excoriates a man whose name I've never come across--John Haynes Holmes. Seuss, who is seen by many today as pacifistic himself based on The Butter Battle Book, was none too pleased with the pacifism of men such as Holmes, and even Gandhi.

In any case, it's a good way to spend several hours. Even though it's inadvisable to try to draw too many parallels between past events and those current, they are instructive if nothing else because they point out the nature of man has always seemed to either ignore evil or accomodate it, with the inevitable result.

My goodness--you think all our modern lefty cartoonists are bold and transgressive, let's see one of them try this gag in today's environment. It's not racist, although it uses the language of the racist as a dig against him, but I don't think you'd see anyone be able to accept that explanation today. If you look back through his cartoons, Giesel was very put out with prejudiced industrialists who ignored the large number of black workers to fill vacancies in war production factories, but I have a feeling that his actual views would have been ignored in today's upside down logicworld in light of his choice of wording.