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Dr. Seuss and World War II:
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) is the all-time best-selling author in American history. "Horton Hatches The Egg" (1942), "The Cat In The Hat" (1957), "Green Eggs and Ham" (1962), "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (1957): these, and 50 other books for young readers, have all become staples of American culture. In fact, they have become so much a part of the air we breathe that we tend to take their author for granted. But their author was a person with very strong opinions living in exciting times, and he expressed those opinions in his life and work.
Perhaps the most exciting times were the years of World War II (1939-1945). Geisel, who had grown up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and drawn cartoons for the Dartmouth College humor magazine, was making good money drawing clever ads for Standard Oil's Flit brand of insecticide. But when war clouds bean to rumble across the Atlantic in Europe and across the Pacific in Asia, Geisel decided to put his talents to more pressing matters.
From early 1941 to early 1943, Geisel drew editorial cartoons -- 400 in all -- for the leftist New York newspaper PM (1940-1948). PM, one of the eight daily newspapers in New York City, backed intervention in the war in Europe and Roosevelt's New Deal programs at home, which aimed to support "the small man" and lift the United States out of the Great Depression. According to publisher Ralph Ingersoll, PM was "against people who push other people around... whether they flourish in this country or abroad." Geisel's editorial cartoons of the period strongly reflect this sentiment.
In 1943, Geisel left PM to join Frank Capra's Signal Corps unit in the U.S. Army. The unit produced the famed "Why We Fight" series of propaganda films, among others. What follows is a sample of Geisel's wartime cartoons, originally published in PM newspaper. The images have been reproduced with permission from the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California at San Diego. |