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Dr. Seuss goes to war : the World War II editorial cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel  Cover Image Book Book

Dr. Seuss goes to war : the World War II editorial cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel / Richard H. Minear.

Geisel,Theodor Seuss : (author ). Minear, Richard H., : (author.). Geisel, Theodor Seuss, 1904-1991 (illustrator.). Seuss, Dr., (illustrator.). Spiegelman, Art, (writer of introduction.).

Summary:

Well before Sam ever considered eating green eggs and ham or Horton heard a who, Dr. Seuss was drawing biting cartoons for adults that expressed his fierce opposition to anti-Semitism and fascism. An editorial cartoonist from 1941 to 1943 for PM magazine, a left-wing daily New York newspaper, Dr. Seuss launched a battle against dictatorial rule abroad and America First (an isolationist organization that argued against U.S. entry into World War II) with more than 400 cartoons urging the United States to fight against Adolf Hitler and his cohorts in fascism, Benito Mussolini, Pierre Laval, and Japan (he never depicted General Tojo Hideki, the wartime prime minister, or Togo Shigenori, the foreign minister). Dr. Seuss Goes to War, by Richard H. Minear, includes 200 of these cartoons, demonstrating the active role Dr. Seuss played in shaping and reflecting how America responded to World War II as events unfolded. As one of America's leading historians of Japan during World War II, Minear also offers insightful commentary on the historical and political significance of this immense body of work that, until now, has not been seriously considered as part of Dr. Seuss's extraordinary legacy. Born to a German-American family in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, Theodor Geisel began his cartooning career at Dartmouth College, where he contributed to the humor magazine. After a run-in with college authorities for bootlegging liquor, he had to use a pseudonym to get his work published, choosing his middle name, Seuss, and adding "Dr." several years later when he dropped out of graduate school at Oxford University in England. He had never planned on setting poison political pen to paper until he realized his deep hatred of Italian fascism. The first editorial cartoon he drew depicts the editor of the fascist paper Il Giornale d'Italia wearing a fez (part of Italy's fascist uniform) and banging away at a giant steam typewriter while a winged Mussolini holds up the free end of the banner of paper emerging from the roll. He submitted it to a friend at PM, an outspoken political magazine that was "against people who push other people around," and began his two-year career with the magazine before joining the U.S. Army as a documentary filmmaker in 1943. Dr. Seuss's first caricature of Hitler appears in the May 1941 cartoon, "The head eats, the rest gets milked," portraying the dictator as the proprietor of "Consolidated World Dairy," merging 11 conquered nations into one cow. Hitler went on to become one of the main caricatures in Seuss's work for the next two years, depicted alone, among his generals and other Germans, and with his allies Benito Mussolini and Pierre Laval. He is also drawn alongside "Japan," which Dr. Seuss portrays quite offensively, with slanted, bespectacled eyes and a sneering grin. While Dr. Seuss was outspoken against antiblack racism in the United States, he held a virulent disdain for the Japanese and rendered sinister and, at times, slanderous caricatures of their wartime actions even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But Dr. Seuss's aggression wasn't solely reserved for the fascists abroad. He was also loudly critical of America's initial apathy toward the war, skewering isolationists like America First advocate Charles Lindbergh, the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert McCormick, Eleanor Medill Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald, and Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News, whom he considered as evil as Hitler. He encouraged Americans to buy war savings bonds and stamps and to do everything they could to ensure victory over fascism.

Record details

  • ISBN: 156584565X
  • ISBN: 9781565845657
  • ISBN: 1859847811
  • ISBN: 9781859847817
  • ISBN: 1565847040
  • ISBN: 9781565847040
  • Physical Description: 272 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
  • Publisher: New York : New Press, 1999

Content descriptions

General Note:
Political cartoons originally published in PM.
"Published in cooperation with the Dr. Seuss Collection at the University of California at San Diego."
Introduction by Art Spiegelman.
Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references (page 267).
Subject: Seuss, Dr. > Catalogs.
Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945 > Caricatures and cartoons.
Editorial cartoons > United States > 20th century.
Political cartoons > 20th century.
World politics > 1900-1945 > Caricatures and cartoons.
World War, 1939-1945 > Caricatures and cartoons.
World War, 1939-1945 > Japanese Americans > Caricatures and cartoons.
World War, 1939-1945 > United States > Caricatures and cartoons.
American wit and humor, Pictorial.
United States > Politics and government > 1933-1945 > Caricatures and cartoons.
Genre: Caricatures
History
Nonfiction
Catalogs.
Cartoons (Humor)

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scottsboropl R 940.5 Gei 32269001248031 Storage - Adult Non-Circulating -


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