“Another Case of Mental Derangement” (June 16, 1941)
by Ty Mahon (1896-?)
20 x 20 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Mahon was the editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin as well as a general illustrator Esquire during the 1930s and 1940s. He is a bit of a ghost. The 1940 census lists him as living in Philadelphia and being born in 1896.

Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess served in that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom during World War II. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace, serving a life sentence until his suicide.

Hitler decreed in 1939 that Hermann Goering was his official successor, and named Hess as next in line. In addition to appearing on Hitler’s behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the government’s legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

Concerned that Germany would face a war on two fronts as plans progressed for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union scheduled to take place in 1941, Hess decided to attempt to bring Britain to the negotiating table by travelling there himself to seek meetings with the British government.

Before his departure from Germany, Hess had given his adjutant a letter addressed to Hitler that detailed his intentions to open peace negotiations with the British. He delivered the letter to Hitler at the Berghof around noon on May 11. After reading the letter, Hitler let loose an outcry heard throughout the entire Berghof and sent for a number of his inner circle, concerned that a putsch might be underway.

Hitler worried that his allies, Italy and Japan, would perceive Hess’s act as an attempt by Hitler to secretly open peace negotiations with the British. Hitler contacted Mussolini specifically to reassure him otherwise. For this reason, Hitler ordered that the German press should characterize Hess as a madman who made the decision to fly to Scotland entirely on his own, without Hitler’s knowledge or authority.

The official press bulletin said that Hess had become “a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with hallucinations traceable to World War injuries“… hence the cartoon’s title of “another case” of derangement.

Hitler stripped Hess of all of his party and state offices, and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer.

Hess was already in a deteriorated mental state by the Nuremburg Trials, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Forty years later, while in custody in Spandau, he died by hanging himself in 1987 at the age of 93.

After his death, the prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

“Now Watch ‘Honorable’ Birdie” (May 28, 1942)
by Paul Frederick Berdanier (1879-1961)
14 x 22 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

Berdanier was an illustrator for the Post Dispatch in Saint Louis, Missouri from 1902 until 1918. During the summer of 1923 he taught a vocational class at Washington University. He was a United Features Syndicate cartoonist until 1957, when he retired.

In April 1942, Japan was bombed for the first time in the Doolittle Raid. In May 1942, failure to decisively defeat the Allies at the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4-8), in spite of Japanese numerical superiority, equated to a strategic defeat for Imperial Japan. This setback was followed in June 1942 by the catastrophic loss of four fleet carriers at the Battle of Midway, the first decisive defeat for the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Premiere of Japan Hideki Tojo addressed the Imperial Diet on May 27, 1942.

“At the present time, India is in confusion and in an unsettled state, Chungking is about to collapse, and Australia is isolated. As I review Shonan, Hongkong, and other important bases, peace and order being restored are steadily becoming the (foundation) of Greater East Asia establishment and are making great strides in its rebirth. Our sea power in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean is expanding day by day. Contrary to this, Britain has lost their overseas possessions and the route by which natural resources have been obtained has been taken control of by our forces. As a result it has added a great strain on the British domestic politics, and at the present time, Britain has reached a point of collapse. On the other hand, America that is suffering. repeated defeats is trying to cover its mortal blow by relying on vicious propaganda and is in a desperate condition trying to cover the rising criticism within the country and to preserve the right of neutral countries.”

“Triple Axis” (October 31, 1940)
by Unknown
9 x 10 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

While this drawing is an unsigned sketch, it is a nonetheless clever use of representations and commentary.

Russia was a metastable ally with Germany and Italy, at best, prior to the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Russia had a non-aggression pact with Italy that dated back to the 1920s, but through the 1930s, Italy’s wars with Ethiopia and Spain were against Russia’s interests. Russia’s pact with Germany came in late 1939, just before the invasion of Poland.

Stalin sits upon the Hammer and Sickle… Hitler on the Swastika… and Mussolini on the Fasces (an ancient symbol of power from the Roman Empire, used by the Italian fascists on their flag)… strike their uneasy truce as they move toward the invasion of the Balkans, which began with the Italian invasion of Greece.

Stalin was a known drinker, and often referred to diluted wines as “fruit juice,” which is about as close as I can get to that part.

“Anyone Seen a German ‘Band’?” (March 1945)
by Samuel (Sammy) Garnet Smith Wells (1885-1972)
17 x 21 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Samuel Garnet Smith Wells was born in North Sydney, New South Wales.

The earliest evidence of Wells’ capacity for artistic drawing was in 1911 when he was a Bombardier member of the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery at the Queenscliff Fort. He joined the staff of Melbourne Punch (1922) after the First World War and later he worked for the Melbourne Herald drawing sporting cartoons. In about 1923 he put out a book of cartoons based on his work at the Herald called Wells Cartoons. Wells left the Herald in 1933 to work in England on the Manchester Daily Dispatch. In 1939, fearing Britain would lose the war against Nazi Germany, he returned to Australia to take on the job of principal political cartoonist at the Melbourne Herald, a position he held until 1950 (compulsory retirement age). Wells then took a job drawing sporting cartoons for The Age until 1967. Richard Berry purchased the majority of Wells’ original works at a Melbourne estate auction in the mid 1980s.

The US Army crossed the Rhine on March 22, and the British (Operation Plunder) carried out their invasion the next day.

Diary entries from the German leadership, seen years later, would affirm the handwriting-on-the-wall fear that the end was near. Within 5 days, the Operation was over, and as the historical accounting puts at least 30,000 German POWs taken by the Allies.

Here we have a take on an old German folk song, part of which goes like this:

“Come and hear the German band, German band, German band!

Oh, the weather is so grand for the big parade!”

In the first panel, Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels are trumpeting their victories throughout 1940. By the second panel, Germany is worse for wear and there is nothing coming out of the leadership after the British invasion.

The song is famously parodied by Mel Brooks in “The Producers” in the number “Haben Sie Gehört Das Deutsches Band?”

“The Willing Slaves” (June 21, 1941)
by Unknown
9 x 10 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

This drawing is an unsigned sketch, and although undated, I’m assigning it nonetheless.

On June 21, 1941, Winston Churchill made a radio address in which he spoke of “the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers … [and] the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.”

Close enough.

“French Reds Greet New Premiere” (May 26, 1936)
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.

1936… the Olympics in Berlin, Italian aggression in Ethiopia, Germans reoccupying the Rhineland… and a push by Stalin to push Bolshevism through Mediterranean Europe.

After the right-wing demonstrations in Paris of February 1934, Leon Blum worked for solidarity between Socialists, Radicals, and all other opponents of Fascism. In 1932, he had developed a Socialist program of pacifism, nationalization of French industry, and measures against unemployment. These efforts contributed to the formation of the electoral alliance of the left known as the Popular Front, which in the elections of April and May 1936 won a large majority. Blum, its chief architect, became premier as leader of the Popular Front government of June 1936. He was the first Socialist and the first Jew to become premier of France.

Blum’s plans to establish effective state controls over private industry and finance aroused bitter hostility among French business leaders, who refused to cooperate with his government, and it was at this time that sections of the right wing adopted the ominous slogan, “Better Hitler than Blum.”

Blum resigned in June, 1937.

Communist leader Maurice Thorez, supported by Stalin and a Communist Party leader since 1923, presided over massive growth in the Communist Party, beginning with the elections of 1936.

“Peace at Any Price?” (undated, WW2 era)
by James Harrison (Hal) Donahey (1875-1949)
15 x 21 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

James Harrison (Hal) Donahey was the chief editorial cartoonist for the Plain Dealer from 1900 to 1949. Before working for the Plain Dealer, Donahey worked for the Ohio Democrat in New Philadelphia and as an illustrator for the Cleveland World. According to A History of Cleveland (vol.1), “As a cartoonist Donahey wields an exceedingly clever pencil; his humor is never offensive and shows the man of heart. He is of a creative mind, studious, modest, and altogether a charming fellow, and a real artist.”

“Peace at Any Price” became an attack phrase for political appeasers.

The economic problems that resulted from World War I and the Depression led people to question whether democratic government could improve their lives. Totalitarian governments rose up in the 1920s and appeared to provide a sense of security and offered a strong direction for the future. Stalin… Mussolini… Horihito… Franco… Hitler…

Putin… Kim…

As Benjamin Franklin departed the Constitutional Convention, he was asked if the framers had created a monarchy or a republic. “A republic,” he famously replied, and then added,

“if you can keep it.”

“Unlike Her” (July 28, 1947)
by Paul R Carmack (1895-1977)
11 x 15 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Paul Carmack was a staff cartoonist for the Christian Science Monitor.

Resettlement of the displaced persons (DPs) outside continental Europe proved to be a huge political obstacle immediately after liberation. The Allies were prepared to help the people reclaim their homes, but no one was ready to open their gates and offer the DPs new homes. Sympathy was high, but there was a strong notion that the survivors would only hamper already war-weakened domestic environments, the Allies deliberated and procrastinated for years before resolving the emigration crisis.

President Truman said in his annual message, on January 6, that the United States was not doing its part in admitting displaced persons. He urged that Congress “turn its attention to this world problem, in an effort to find ways whereby we can fulfill our responsibilities to these thousands of homeless and suffering refugees of all faiths.”

The Exodus 1947 was carrying 4,515 Jewish DPs when it was stopped by British forces on July 17, 1947. The crew and passengers resisted surrender, prompting a British attack in which three men from the Exodus 1947 were killed and many others wounded.

Hearings were held in June on a bill [HR 2910] by Rep. Stratton (R., Ill.) to permit the entrance of 100,000 refugees a year for four years but the bill had not been acted upon by either house when the session came to a close.