U.S. cartoonists fell short in exposing Nazism, Holocaust

By Natalie Cortes
freedomforum.org

07.11.02

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WASHINGTON — During World War II, few American political cartoonists tried to unmask the evils of Nazism or proclaim the plight of the European Jews.

Like most Americans, cartoonists — with one or two exceptions — were in an isolationist frame of mind, according to Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist at The Birmingham News.

The Depression was ending, the economy was improving, and most people seemed to think that “to get involved and mired in yet another European war” was the last thing the United States needed, Stantis said at a recent panel discussion on World War II editorial cartoons.

"I can understand the motivation” for isolationism, he said. “I can understand the emotion, but … it’s so galling.”

Sandy Northrop, co-author of Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons, said: "Although you saw things like ... a skeleton, war is on the doorstep of Europe. Very few (cartoonists) sensed it and wanted to deal with it."

Stantis emphasized that a lack of information about what was happening to the Jews in Europe was another reason most cartoonists avoided the subject in their drawings.

"The Holocaust and the structure and the laws of the movement leading up to it were not well documented in the American press,” Stantis said at the program, which took place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and was co-produced by the Newseum.

"It’s difficult to comment about something that no one knows anything about,” he said. “You had stories about Kristallnacht or other German atrocities on page 17 of The New York Times.” Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,” was a deadly anti-Jewish rampage in cities throughout Germany in November 1938.

Still, Stantis called most cartoonists’ failure to address the Nazi threat and the Holocaust a “disservice to America and a disservice to journalism.”

Northrop agreed: “I’m almost mad that more cartoonists weren’t speaking up.”

Panelists said most U.S. political cartoonists during World War II played on American patriotism with images of Uncle Sam waving the flag, rather than depicting the horrors of the Holocaust.

Polish-born artist Arthur Szyk, who came to the United States in 1940, was an exception. Scholars note that, unlike many of his contemporaries, Szyk used his pen as a weapon against the Nazis. His raw images illustrating the Nazi threat to Jews and all of humankind served as a call to action.

"Szyk’s work … places the viewer in the position of being a witness — that you know that the Nazis planned to murder the Jews and now it’s up to you to do something about it,” said Steven Luckert, curator of the Permanent Exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and co-curator of a new exhibit, “The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk.”

Szyk’s cartoons appeared in major newspapers and magazines such as Esquire, Collier’s, the Chicago Sun and New York Post. But he began his career in the United States at the leftist daily newspaper PM.

Northrop said, “Cartoonists appear in mass newspapers … but they get a chance to really speak their mind in the smaller ones.”

Political cartoons “really are propaganda,” Northrop said. “But they’re propaganda for what that artist believes.”

Szyk used a variety of symbols in his drawings to get his message across. One of them was the figure of death dressed in a German uniform. According to Stantis, Szyk’s depiction of the Nazi uniform was unique.

"American artists … saw the costumes as comical and Nazism as comical” until 1938 or 1939, Stantis said. Nazis “had the funny parades, this little guy that looked like Charlie Chaplin … Szyk took these uniforms and made them menacing and made them dangerous,” he said.

Political artist Geoffrey Moss agreed that Szyk was "totally seduced by costumes, the costumes of evil."

"That’s the first thing I noticed about him, that he spends a lot of time and therefore is probably seduced by the people he hates," Moss said.

Another artist who shared Szyk’s view of the Nazis as the ultimate evil was Dr. Seuss.

"In some ways they’re parallels,” said Luckert, “They both [worked] for PM at the same time ... . In Seuss you see a lot more … humor in all of this, but they both emphasize a particular liberal cause. Both attacked isolationism, both attacked Lindbergh for anti-Semitism after 1941.”

For Szyk the cause of calling attention to the horrors of the Holocaust was a very personal crusade. Szyk’s mother and brother were in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, Luckert said, so “there’s a personal link to what’s happening in Poland for Szyk that perhaps drives him a little more than another cartoonist.”

One of Szyk’s most powerful cartoons was “Anti-Christ,” which the Office of War Information distributed to hundreds of newspapers and used to promote a Frank Capra film explaining to soldiers why they were entering the war.

"He’s included so much detail in trying to explain who Hitler is, portraying him in the most sinister fashion,” Luckert said. He said he found it “fascinating … for a Jewish artist to identify Hitler as the antichrist,” described in the New Testament books of 1 John and 2 John as a false Messiah who denies the true Christ. “This is Szyk’s interpretation of Hitler, who preaches inequality of people and persecutes,” said Luckert.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Szyk began to portray the Japanese in a more sinister fashion than he had before and to dehumanize them. As Stantis noted, Szyk’s depiction of Japanese was a mongrelization that exploited racial stereotypes of the time — ironic given Szyk’s strong stand against anti-Semitic and anti-black discrimination.

On the cover of the Dec. 12, 1942, issue of Collier’s magazine is a Szyk cartoon that depicts a Japanese soldier as a bat with fangs. “If you take a look at a lot of animated cartoons from the same time, whether you’re looking at Popeye or some of these others you’ve seen, you see the same types of stereotypes that come across,” said Luckert. “I think it was very pervasive in the United States and I think Szyk picks up on that.”

Although Szyk’s cartoons appeared in prominent publications, the panelists agreed it was hard to gauge their effectiveness in shifting American public opinion.

"If there had been CNN or Fox back then, would there have been the Holocaust?” Stantis asked. “We have CNN, Fox and other news networks now, (and) we still have Rwanda, we still have Ghana, we still have Sudan, we still have Tibet. So the call to action is what the cartoonist’s job is. Szyk certainly did that and obviously after Pearl Harbor, Americans (realized) the guy was right,” Stantis said.

Before he died in 1951, Szyk continued to be an advocate for European Jews and used his art to promote the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

The panel was held on June 19. "The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk” is on display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum through Oct. 14, 2002.