“As Japan Considers International Complications” (August 30, 1937)
by John Tinney McCutcheon (1870-1949)
14 x 18 in., ink on drawing board
Coppola Collection

On the Purdue campus, where he was a student, McCutcheon (class of 1889) is memorialized in a coeducational dormitory, John T. McCutcheon Hall. The lobby displays an original of one of his drawings, a nearly life-size drawing of a young man.

After college, McCutcheon moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked at the Chicago Morning News (later: Chicago Record) and then at the Chicago Tribune from 1903 until his retirement in 1946. McCutcheon received the Pulitzer Prize for Cartoons in 1932.

On August 26, 1937, the British ambassador to China (Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen) was wounded when a Japanese plane strafed and attacked his limousine. First hospitalised in Shanghai and then invalided home to Britain, he narrowly escaped paralysis. On August 29, Britain sent a sharp note of protest to the Japanese government demanding a formal apology for the wounding of their ambassador.

The lack of any significant reply from Japan is represented here as the Japanese learning from the past few years in Europe, where Hitler and Mussolini defied the terms of many terms of prior treaties and civil agreements.

Without creating an army of thugs as your enforcers, laws and agreements are social contracts that provide deterrence as much as they provide for consequences. The moment you think you can walk out into the middle of a crowd and commit a crime with no consequence, civil systems begin to break down.

“Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day Either” (June 18, 1947)
by Harold I “Tom” Carlisle (1904-1993)
14 x 19 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Tom Carlisle grew up in Jefferson, IA, and graduated from the University of Iowa. He joined the Des Moines Register as an assistant to J.N. “Ding” Darling, the newspaper’s long-time editorial cartoonist.  After Darling’s retirement in 1949, Carlisle served as the Register’s primary cartoonist until his retirement in 1953.

Several attempts were made to codify international law after WWI. The work that led to the International Law Commission was begun in the Resolution of the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1924, which established the Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law, consisting of 17 members, for the purpose of making recommendations as to which issues required to be addressed in international law and the steps desirable to that end.

The name “United Nations,” coined by FDR, was first used in the Declaration by United Nations of January 1, 1942, months after the US entry into WWII, when representatives of 26 nations pledged their governments to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers.

In 1945, representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter. Those delegates deliberated on the basis of proposals worked out by the representatives of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States at Dumbarton Oaks in August-October 1944. The Charter was signed on June 26, 1945, by the representatives of the 50 countries, and the final ratification was on October 24.

On December 11, 1946, The General Assembly passed Resolution 94, which called to establish a committee of legal experts to make recommendations to the UN Secretary-General on the ways the General Assembly could encourage the progressive development of international law and its codification. The committee of experts consisted of 17 members and convened from May 12 to June 17, 1947. It recommended to establish a permanent UN commission to promote these objectives.

On November 21, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 174, which provided for the creation of an “International Law Commission” in order to fulfill the obligations of the Charter.

“Bad Weather Forecast from Benito’s Gout” (May 16, 1943)
by Hugh McMillen Hutton (1897-1976)
20 x 22 in., ink and crayon on heavy board
Coppola Collection

Hugh M. Hutton (1897-1976) was an American editorial cartoonist who worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer for over 30 years.

Hugh Hutton grew up with an artistic mother. After attending the University of Minnesota for two years, Hutton enlisted in the armed forces and served in World War I. Hutton pursued coursework in art through correspondence school, the Minneapolis School of Art and the Art Students League.

He worked at the New York World from 1930 to 1932 and with the United Features Syndicate in 1932 and 1933, drawing illustrations and comic strips. Hutton relocated to Philadelphia and worked as the cartoonist at the Public Ledger in 1933 and 1934. He became the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial cartoonist in April 1934, where he stayed throughout his career, retiring in 1969.

Mussolini, the father of fascism, partnered with Hitler in 1936.

Mussolini’s dreams of waging a short war almost independently from Hitler faded away during 1941 in the snows of Greece. His main concern became how to secure an important place for Italy in a German-dominated Europe. Hitler blamed his need to go rescue the Italians on the Greek front for delaying his invasion of Russia.

As the war turned against Germany, Mussolini wanted to find a political solution to the conflict by negotiating a separate peace agreement with Moscow.

May 10, 1943: On the day that the Enabling Act of 1933 was set to expire by its terms, Adolf Hitler signed an order extending his dictatorship indefinitely. Published in the Reich Law Gazette, the decree stated “The Reich government will continue to exercise the powers bestowed on it by virtue of the law of March 24, 1933. I reserve for myself the obtaining of a confirmation of these powers of the Reich government by the Greater German Reichstag.”

Following the defeat of the Axis Powers in North Africa in May 1943, there was disagreement between the Allies as to what the next step should be. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in particular wanted to invade Italy, which in November 1942 he called “the soft underbelly of the axis.” Popular support in Italy for the war was declining, and he believed an invasion would remove Italy, and thus the influence of Axis forces in the Mediterranean Sea, opening it to Allied traffic.

When it became clear that no cross-channel invasion of occupied France could be undertaken in 1943, the US agreed to invade Sicily, with no commitment made to any follow-up operations. However, both Churchill and FDR accepted the necessity of Allied armies continuing to engage the Axis in the period after a successful campaign in Sicily and before the start of one in northwest Europe.

With an Allied invasion of Italy imminent, Pope Pius XII sent an appeal to FDR, asking that American bombers spare the destruction of Rome, noting that its “many treasured shrines of religion and art” were “the precious heritage not of one people but of all human and Christian civilization”

By mid-June, 1943, the war was all but lost for the Italians. The Italian population was alienated, and the Grand Council and the king were pressing Mussolini to negotiate a way out of the war.

In late June, Mussolini was continuing his psychological contest with Hitler. On July 1, 1943, against the Hitler’s wishes, Mussolini met with the Romanian deputy premier, Antonescu, with whom he agreed to promote the long-debated inter-Axis conference (and a Nazi-Soviet settlement, which was of no interest to Hitler).

Allied forces landed in Sicily starting on July 10, 1943 and moved northward. Support for the war and for Mussolini had dropped substantially, and he was ousted on July 25, 1943. On September 3, an armistice was reached between the new government of Italy and the Allies. Hitler was already in the north of Italy, and the Italian peninsula became a contested war zone.

On October 13, 1943, one month after Italy surrendered to the Allies, it declared war on its one-time Axis partner, Nazi Germany.

“Cupid Claims Sabotage!” (February 7, 1941)
by Marshall Alston (MA) Dunning (1894-1949)
12 x 13 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

MA (Marshall Alston) Dunning enlisted in 1918, serving first with the 158th Depot, then with the Medical Department at Debarkation Hospital no. 52 at Richmond College (now University of Richmond) in Richmond, Virginia. Dunning’s cartoons began appearing in the hospital newspaper Head’s Up January 4, 1919 and ran until the paper ended on April 7, 1919.

After being honorably discharged from the army in 1919, Dunning returned to Cleveland, graduating from the Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art) in 1921. Over the next 28 years, his career spanned the continent, as he worked for the Akron Times and Cleveland Press in Ohio, and the Miami News and Jacksonville Journal in Florida. Dunning travelled west to California, where he worked for the San Diego Tribune, as well as for the Walt Disney Company and Columbia Pictures as an animator. As an animator, Dunning contributed to movie shorts for Walt Disney Company, including The Three Little Pigs (1933) and the Krazy Kat shorts at Columbia Pictures.

In 1938, Dunning joined the Austin American-Statesman staff, focusing on international political issues as well as local Texas issues for his editorial cartoons. He returned to Florida in 1943, and died of a heart attack in Jacksonville in June 1949.