“Our Civilian Defense Program is Weak” (undated, WW2 era)
by Unknown
11 x 14.5 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Given the clues, it ought to have been easy to nail this one down. Two names… one a judge… a radio broadcast…

World War II, with its greater real threat to the US homeland, engaged a significantly greater use of civil defense than WW1. Even before Pearl Harbor, the Council of National Defense was reactivated by President Roosevelt and created the Division of State and Local Cooperation to further assist the Council’s efforts. Very soon, however, the idea of local and state councils bearing a significant burden became viewed as untenable and more responsibility was vested at the federal level with the creation of the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) within the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP) on May 20, 1941.

This scenario strikes me as something reasonable after Pearl Harbor but still in the days of early response. I am thinking that these characters might be local rather than national, making the identification more difficult.

“A Reasonable Amount of Fleas…” (August 22, 1941)
By Bert Thomas (1883-1966)
12 x 16 in, ink on board
Coppola Collection

Bert Thomas was a wonderful British cartoonist and longtime contributor to Punch magazine (1905-1935). Thomas gained his initial popularity during WWI, with a well-known cartoon that raised 250,000 pounds sterling in aid for British soldiers.

There is only a relatively short period of time when the Soviets were aligned with the Allies and the US was still on the sidelines of WW2, driven by the lingering isolationist policy prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As Europe moved closer to war in the late 1930s, the US Congress continued to demand American neutrality, even though FDR, at this point, was leaning towards the responsibility that the US might have. By 1937, Congress had passed the Neutrality Acts (for example, Americans could not sail on ships flying the flag of a belligerent nation or trade arms with warring nations).

Things were changing by 1941. In early 1941, FDR managed to get the Lend-Lease Act, which enabled the US to provide arms and munitions to the Allies. American public opinion supported Roosevelt’s actions. The Russians, who had been aligned with the Germans from just before the 1939 invasion of Poland, became a target of Hilter’s interest with a June 22, 1941 invasion of Russia, and a quick turnaround in Stalin’s belief that the Allies could, in fact, prevail.

The US involvement and general sympathies were shifting quickly. Attacks on the US were harder to ignore. On October 31, the USS Reuben James, for example, was torpedoed and sunk near Iceland. By late 1941, 72% of Americans agreed that “the biggest job facing this country today is to help defeat the Nazi Government,” and 70% thought that defeating Germany was more important than staying out of the war. And in December: Pearl Harbor.

“War Debts” (June 24, 1932)
by Frank “KET” Kettlewell (1889-1969)
15 x 18 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

“KET” is Frank Kettlewell, a political cartoonist who published mainly in the Oakland Tribune in the era of the early twentieth century. Joining the staff in 1912, he rose quickly to become chief of the Tribune’s Art Department. He also created a drawing of Sutter’s Mill that was adapted by the U.S. Post Office into a 1949 Gold Rush commemorative stamp.

Disarmament between the World Wars: 1919-1939.

The death and destruction of World War I motivated an international interest in ways of preventing future large-scale wars. Disarmament and/or parity was one of the policy targets.

Woodrow Wilson included disarmament as an Article in the charter for the League of Nations. After him, Harding pushed for parity in the three strong Naval forces: the US, UK, and Japan. The Coolidge administration developed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, also known as the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War (1928), which renounced offensive war as an instrument of national policy. It called on nations to settle their differences by peaceful means. There was no teeth in its enforcement, and so it really went nowhere, although its terms ended up being the foundation for the Nuremberg Trials of crimes against humanity.

A World Disarmament Conference was convened in Geneva on February 2, 1932.  President Hoover, and then FDR after him, attempted to spur these negotiations periodically. Citing the Kellogg-Briand Pact’s outlawing of aggressive war, Hoover (June 22, 1932) proposed a one-third reduction in all armies and battle fleets. Additionally, he urged the abolition of tanks, large mobile guns, and chemical weapons and the prohibition of aerial bombardment.

“But Look at the Eggs!” (August 10, 1940)
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
14 x 17 in, ink, pencil and chalk on board
Coppola Collection

Pease was cartoonist for the Newark Evening News from 1914 to 1954, and received the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a miner in Alaska for 5 years before beginning a career in art. He was an illustrator for the Oregonian and famously interviewed Mark Twain. From his retirement in 1954 until his death in 1963, he devoted himself to fostering his skills as a painter of portraits and landscapes.

The Imperial Japanese Army had gained a reputation both for its fanaticism and for its brutality against prisoners of war and civilians alike – with the Nanking Massacre being the most well known example. Even through the start of WW2 in Europe, Emperor Hirohito was focused on the ongoing wars in Asia, and particularly in China.

Pressure for a military response to threats from the West began to accumulate in the early 1940s, well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. A few of these that were percolating in late 1940 are the “eggs” that Japan was resisting breaking, opening up entirely new offensives in the Pacific region.

Singapore was of strategic importance to the British Empire second only to the Suez Canal. If Britain wanted to protect Australia and New Zealand, then Britain had to be a Pacific naval power. And Singapore was Britain’s gateway to the Pacific. Winston Churchill, newly installed as Prime Minister in May 1940, noted that since the German battleship Tirpitz was tying up a superior British fleet, a small British fleet at Singapore might have a similar disproportionate effect on the Japanese. The Foreign Office expressed the opinion that the presence of modern battleships at Singapore might deter Japan from entering the war.

In August 1940, Churchill sent reassurances to the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand that, if they were attacked, their defense would be a priority second only to that of the British Isles. A defense conference was held in Singapore in October 1940.

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese occupied the Shanghai International Settlement. A couple of hours later, landings began at Kota Bharu in Malaya. An hour after that, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor.  Singapore surrendered on February 15, 1942, and was described by Winston Churchill as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”

In late July 1940, a cabinet change in Japan signaled a more aggressive Japanese policy in South-east Asia. With that, the United States imposed an embargo on aviation gasoline and high-grade scrap iron to Japan. This embargo affected only a fraction of exports to Japan, and the US government went to some lengths to justify the embargo on the grounds of American domestic needs rather than any displeasure with Japan. Still, the embargo signaled the Japanese that the United States would oppose any moves against Southeast Asia.

US likelihood of providing aid to China increased after July 7, 1937, when Chinese and Japanese forces clashed on the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, throwing the two nations into a full-scale war. As the United States watched Japanese forces sweep down the coast and then into the capital of Nanjing, popular opinion swung firmly in favor of the Chinese. Tensions with Japan rose when the Japanese Army bombed the USS Panay (December 1937) as it evacuated American citizens from Nanjing, killing three. The US Government, however, continued to avoid conflict and accepted an apology and indemnity from the Japanese. An uneasy truce held between the two nations into 1940.

In 1940 and 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formalized U.S. aid to China.

The Japanese Government made several decisions during these two years that exacerbated the tensions in Asia. Unable or unwilling to control the military, Japan’s political leaders sought greater security by establishing the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in August 1940. In so doing they announced Japan’s intention to drive the Western imperialist nations from Asia. However, this Japanese-led project aimed to enhance Japan’s economic and material wealth so that it would not be dependent upon supplies from the West, and not to “liberate” the long-subject peoples of Asia.

“The Kaiser’s Route” (October 8, 1916)
by Jack Wilson
14 x 17 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

I can find little about the life of Jack Wilson. He spent a few years at NEA in Cleveland in the mid-teens, was at World Color Printing in 1919 and produced a short-run revival of the “Handy Andy” strip. A “Home Sweet Home” feature was produced at the same time.

One of the earliest radio-related comics was Wilson’s “Radio Ralf,” which arrived in April 1922, just three years after the first widespread radio broadcasts in 1919. The strip ended a mere three months later.

Kaiser Wilhelm oversaw the end of the Imperial Era in Germany, thanks in great part to waging a losing war on the back of nothing more than exceptional hubris. Started over the invasion of Serbia by its ally, Austria-Hungary, in 1914, Germany, with barely a few months of material back-up in war readiness, ended up taking on France, Britain, and Russia on two major fronts.

The year 1916 was characterized by two year-long wars of attrition, at Verdun and the Somme, with millions dead on each side. German morale went into decline.

The US entered the war in 1917, and through continued attrition, incredible demand on resources, idiotic policy, and a revolution, the war – and the Imperial Era – ended in Germany at the end of 1918.

A newly formed democracy, the Weimar Republic, faced an uphill battle of resentment and strife. Rampant inflation, domestically, was combined by severe international constraints set out in the Treaty of Versailles. Hindenburg, one of the Generals running the show in Germany by the end of the war, took over as President in 1925, and presided over an economic depression with its accompanying rampant unemployment. In 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in a coalition government with the Nazis. And in 1934, upon Hindenburg’s death, the single-party Nazi dictatorship was established with Hitler as both President and Chancellor.