The FReeper Foxhole - Dr. Seuss Went to War - September 26th, 2004

see educational sources

[snippy_about_it]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.


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Dr. Seuss Goes To War



Despite his international reputation as one of the most famous children’s authors of the twentieth century, Theodor Seuss Geisel, was known to millions of readers simply as ‘Dr Seuss’. However it is a little known fact that before he created some of his most memorable characters, such as the Cat in the Hat and the Grinch, Dr. Seuss executed a series of political cartoons during the Second World War for a short lived daily newspaper entitled ‘PM’. Short-lived, because the editor of New York based publication Ralph Ingersoll was determined that the paper have a truly independent voice and therefore did not feature advertising material of any kind.

Dr. Seuss began drawing for the paper from the beginning of 1941, several months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor (on December 7th of that year). Like Ingersoll, Dr. Seuss was concerned by the activities of the ‘America First’ movement, who entreated that America not become involved with the European conflict, in particular their high-profile spokesman, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Just as Dr. Seuss employed a menagerie of animals in his picture books, so Seuss depicted the ‘America First' movement as an ostrich, burying its head in the sand. Snails carry American war-aid to Britain and Japanese alley cats attack an Uncle Sam eagle.

Despite the fact that Dr. Seuss later remarked that he thought his cartoons to be “rather shoddy” art, they demonstrate his sense of fair play and his abhorrence of Fascism and bigotry, themes which he redressed in subtle ways when illustrating his famous stories published in the 1950s.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) was a life-long cartoonist: in high school in Springfield, Massachusetts; in college at Dartmouth (Class of 1925); as an adman in New York City before World War II; in his many children's books, beginning with To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937). Because of the fame of his children's books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.





The Dr. Seuss Collection in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, contains the original drawings and/or newspaper clippings of all of these cartoons. This website makes these cartoons available to all internet users. The cartoons have been scanned from the original newspaper clippings in the UCSD collection.





Dr. Seuss Goes to War by historian Richard H. Minear (The New Press, 1999) reproduced some two hundred of the PM cartoons. That means that two hundred of the cartoons available here have received no airing or study since their original appearance in PM. The cartoons Dr. Seuss published in other journals are even less known; there is no mention of them in Dr. Seuss Goes to War. Dr. Seuss also drew a set of war bonds "cartoons" which appeared in many newspapers as well as in PM. They are the following:





















In Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography (Random House, 1995; p 100), Judith and Neil Morgan recount the story of how Dr. Seuss and PM joined forces in 1941:

Ted [Dr. Seuss] was haunted by the war in Europe, and one evening in Manhattan he showed an editorial cartoon he had drawn to his friend Zinny Vanderlip Schoales, the brilliant, hard-drinking intellectual.... She had joined the patrician liberal Ralph Ingersoll when he launched the tabloid newspaper PM in New York with the backing of Marshall Field III. Zinny took Ted's cartoon to Ingersoll and PM published it on January 30, 1941...

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FReeper Foxhole Armed Services Links

[snippy_about_it]

Theodor Seuss Geisel









During WW II, Geisel joined the army and was sent to Hollywood. Captain Geisel would write for Frank Capra's Signal Corps Unit (for which he won the Legion of Merit) and do documentaries (he won Oscar's for Hitler Lives and Design for Death). He also created a cartoon called Gerald McBoing-Boing which also won him an Oscar.



In May of 1954, Life published a report concerning illiteracy among school children. The report said, among other things, that children were having trouble to read because their books were boring. This inspired Geisel's publisher, and prompted him to send Geisel a list of 400 words he felt were important, asked him to cut the list to 250 words (the publishers idea of how many words at one time a first grader could absorb), and write a book. Nine months later, Geisel, using 220 of the words given to him published The Cat in the Hat, which went on to instant success.

In 1960 Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write an entire book using only fifty words. The result was Green Eggs and Ham. Cerf never paid the $50, btw...

Helen Palmer Geisel died in 1967. Theodor Geisel married Audrey Stone Diamond in 1968. Theodor Seuss Geisel died 24 September 1991.

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Today's Educational Sources and suggestions for further reading:

http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/
www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1093523.htm

[snippy_about_it]

Before Dr. Seuss was Dr. Seuss, he was Theodor Giesel, and before he achieved tremendous fame for his unconventional children's books, he drew unconventional political cartoons for PM, a left-wing daily newspaper in New York. Minear's book, Dr. Seuss Goes to War, returns these cartoons, representing a little-known period in the creative life of Dr. Seuss, to the attention of an American public who knows him only for the Cat in the Hat and the Whos of Who-ville.

Like most of Dr. Seuss's later works, these cartoons educate as they entertain. They also exhibit his characteristic style and talent, with people, animals, and imaginary creatures that will look quite at home on the pages of Horton Hears a Who nearly twenty years later.

The years 1941-1942, when Dr. Seuss was drawing for PM, fell right in the heart of World War II and provided more than enough fodder for his political cartooning. Though Hitler found his way into the largest number of Dr. Seuss cartoons, the artist also found room over the coals for Stalin, Mussolini, "Japan," and French premier Laval. One cartoon in particular even suggests the fate of Jews under Hitler. Hitler and Laval stand together in a grove of trees from which hang the bodies of ten Jews. With their lynching done, Hitler and Laval sing together from a piece of sheet music, "Only God can make a tree/To furnish sport for you and me!" (p.101) Though according to Minear, "this is Dr. Seuss's only cartoon dealing with Jewish deaths in Europe" (p.77), a number of his cartoons address the "racial hatred" Hitler was fomenting in Europe, and the anti-Semitism and anti-black racism prevalent in the United States.

In fact, Dr. Seuss shows no mercy for any of America's internal enemies, drawing into the fray anyone against the war effort. From the anti-Semitism and racism exhibited by the common American to the vitriol hurled by Father Coughlin, Dr. Seuss exposes the damage and divisiveness such ideas can bring. He even wielded his pen against Charles A. Lindbergh, once a hero for the first trans-Atlantic flight but here vilified for his anti-interventionist and anti-Semitic ideas. Shockingly, however, Dr. Seuss's racial openness did not extend to Japanese-Americans, whom he unjustifiably portrayed as just another of America's internal enemies, showing them in one cartoon lined up from Washington State to California to get TNT while "waiting for the signal from home" (p.65).

Minear begins each chapter of this book with an essay placing Dr. Seuss's editorial cartoons in context. Portions of these essays explore Dr. Seuss's political vision over the course of his two years at PM and also how his drawings reflect the American response to the War. In the course of these essays, Minear often refers to specific cartoons within the book's collection, analyzing the imagery and fixing these drawings among the others, deftly illuminating the details for those who want to do more than just browse the collection. The cartoons themselves are sequenced in a way that supports these essays, but Minear also includes a chronological list of the cartoons, providing a way to track a bit of the history of the War through the eyes of Dr. Seuss. With 200 cartoons reproduced in Minear's work, it is certainly an interesting and insightful view.

240 pages
200 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 1-56584-565-X
Call no: D745.2 M56 1999

[snippy_about_it]

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UPDATED THROUGH APRIL 2004



The FReeper Foxhole. America's History. America's Soul

Click on Hagar for
"The FReeper Foxhole Compiled List of Daily Threads"

[SAMWolf]

Morning Snippy.

Interesting thread.

[snippy_about_it]

Thanks Sam.

It's good to be home isn't it.

Good night.

[SAMWolf]

Yep, but I keep thinking of all the things we need to get done.

Good Night.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Great, Thanks
I had no idea, I thought he was just a children's cartoonist.
Many of his wartime cartoons could be used now.
Brass knuckles and Big Bertha are great.

[GailA]

Good morning, going to be another lazy hazy fall day here in Memphis it looks like.

[Aeronaut]

Good morning Snippy.

[Soaring Feather]

Good Sunday morning everyone!
Welcome home Sam and snippy!

[SAMWolf]

Morning HuntsvilleTxVeteran.

When Snippy told me she was working on this thread is the first time I heard that Dr. Seuss was a wartime/political cartoonist. He definately blasted the isolationists.

[alfa6]

Ted Geisel was in adverising prior to his childrens books. There was a story about him in Readers Digest a few years back about how he had won an award for an ad campaign for Flit, a bug powder. As part of the campaign they devised a sprayer that sort of looked like a gun. The award was a "Flit" gun that had been mounted on a plaque. So he going to get on his plane for the trip home and the young security guard won't let him on the plane with his "gun". Geisel explains to the young'un about the "Flit" gun but nope it's a gun and he cam't get on the plane. Finally Ted Geisel asks the young'ub if he has an old timer secuity guard and could he come over. The old timer shows up a few minutes later, takes one look at the plague, starts laughing and says basically,"Hey I haven't seen a Flit gun in years" Mr Geisel got on the plane. Here are a couple of Dr Suess's cartoons about Flit



Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[SAMWolf]

Morning GailA. Fall looks like it's starting to show up here too, at least the early morings.

[SAMWolf]

Morning aeronaut.

[SAMWolf]

AWWWW, Thanks Feather. It's feels good to be back.

[E.G.C.]

Good morning, snippy and everyone at the Freeper foxhole.

[Aeronaut]

Hi Sam.

[SAMWolf]

Morning alfa6

Thanks for the background on "Flit". Turns out Dr. Seuss was more interesting than I ever knew.

[SAMWolf]

Morning E.G.C.