1941.08.01 “Up to His Old Tricks.”
by Wallace Heard Goldsmith (1873-1945)
10 x 13 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author_talk:Wallace_Heard_Goldsmith

Goldsmith was a Boston institution, working over his long career at the Herald, the Post, and the Globe. This editorial cartoon is from his 25-year period at the Post.

At the turn of the century, the Boston Herald just couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to run a syndicate. Their homegrown comic section was born and died at least four different times. The Adventures of Little Allright came in the third version of their Sunday section and ran from March 6 to June 26, 1904. There really wasn’t much to set the strip apart from any other kid strip — the starring kid saying “all right” a lot seems an almost ridiculously weak hook. Goldsmith took the dubious credit for this stinker. The strip was rebooted as Little Alright (the second ‘L’ was dropped), and ran from November 11 1906 to April 14 1907. He was well known for illustrating Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost.”

Baron Münchhausen is a fictional German nobleman created by Rudolf Raspe in 1785. The character is loosely based on a real baron, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen. The real-life Münchhausen fought for the Russian Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. Upon retiring in 1760, he became a minor celebrity within German aristocratic circles for telling outrageous tall tales based on his military career. After hearing some of Münchhausen’s stories, Raspe adapted them anonymously into literary form. The book was soon translated into other European languages.

In 1941, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the production of a filmed version of Münchhausen’s exploits. Münchhausen represented the pinnacle of the Goebbels’ Volksfilm style of propaganda designed to entertain the masses and distract the population from the war, borrowing the Hollywood genre of large budget productions with extensive colorful visuals. The release of the Technicolor film, The Wizard of Oz in the United States was a heavy influence for Goebbels. Münchhausen was the third feature film made in Germany using the new Agfacolor negative-positive material.

The film’s production began in 1941, with a big public fanfare, and an initial budget of over 4.5 million Reichsmarks that increased to over 6.5 million after Goebbels’ intentions to “surpass the special effects and color artistry” of Alexander Korda’s Technicolor film The Thief of Bagdad.

The editorial “Up to His Old Tricks,” is more of a commentary on Goebbels and the disinformation campaigns taken from the headlines of the recent times.

1941.05.12 “Whittling It Down.”
by Louis Franklin Van Zelm (1895-1961)
11 x 15 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Published in the Christian Science Monitor. Born in NY and educated in parts of New England and New Jersey, Van Zelm was VP of a metal company in 1920, drawing on that side for the New York Evening World (“Rusty and Bob”).

During the 1920s he contributed cartoons to the Larchmont Gazette, and drew “Such Is Life.” A 1925 issue of The MIT Technology Review noted van Zelm’s career changed: “All the yellow journals through the Middle West in mid-December printed long stories to the effect that L.F. van Zelm, whom we all remember as the best little cartoonist we had during our days at the Institute, has deserted architecture for cartooning, and is now cleaning up hordes of shekels as the perpetrator of a comic strip which makes a daily appearance in the dailies throughout that section. I feel sure all the gang join me in wishing Van the greatest success.”

He worked for the Christian Science Monitor from 1940-47, and then off and on again for the rest of his life. It was reported that on February 20, 1955, van Zelm filled his 50-room house, an old hotel, with gnomes and elves, and drew the daily cartoon, The VanGnomes, for the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 he produced the strip Farnsworth.

The Battle of the Coral Sea, from May 4-8, 1942, was a major naval battle between the Imperial

Japanese Navy and naval and air forces of the United States and Australia. Taking place in the Pacific Theatre of World War II, the battle is historically significant as the first action in which aircraft carriers engaged each other and the first in which the opposing ships neither sighted nor fired directly upon one another.

The US learned of a Japanese plan through intelligence and sent two US Navy carrier task forces and a joint Australian-American cruiser force to oppose the offensive.

Although a tactical victory for the Japanese in terms of ships sunk, the battle proved to be a strategic victory for the Allies. The battle marked the first time since the start of the war that a major Japanese advance had been checked by the Allies. More importantly, two of the Japanese fleet carriers were damaged enough to be unable to participate in the Battle of Midway the following month.

1941.03.15 “Careful, Samuel! He’s a Shrewd Customer.”
Unknown artist
11 x 14 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Lend-Lease, enacted on March 11, 1941, was FDR’s strategy to provide military aid to Europe and the Soviet Union without (formally) breaking the US Neutrality Acts and side-stepping the radical non-interventionists who feared that the Great Depression had its roots in the debts racked up during WW1.

1935.06.12 “Outstretched Hands”
by John Francis Knott (1878-1963)
10 x 15 in., ink on drawing board
Coppola Collection

Knott started working at The Dallas Morning News in 1905. He drew daily cartoons in the paper during Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential campaign and World War I. Knott’s most famous cartoon character “Old Man Texas” was a champion for government honesty, low taxes and property ownership. It is believed his cartoons supporting American entry into World War I helped increase the sales of Liberty Bonds and donations towards the war effort.  In 1957, Knott retired from the News. During his fifty-year career as a cartoonist, he created more than 15,000 cartoons. Knott taught painting in Dallas public schools for almost twenty years.

Many of today’s advanced economies benefited from large-scale debt relief thanks to their 1934 default on war-related debt owed to the US and UK, the two main creditor governments of the time. The amounts were substantial: in France, Greece, and Italy, the war debt relief accounted for 36%, 43%, and 52% of 1934 GDP respectively. These debts were fully written off and the debt largely forgotten.

1933.03.20 “?”
by Charles Henry (Bill) Sykes (1882-1942)
14 x 17 in., ink on coquille board
Coppola Collection

Sykes was an American cartoonist associated with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and Evening Ledger from 1911 until its closing in 1942. He was the regular editorial cartoonist for LIFE magazine (1922-1928) and a regular contributor to Collier’s and the New York Evening Post. Sykes’s early work was distinguished by usage of coquille board for shading. His later work incorporated crayon and wash. Sykes’s technique was described as “amiable. His perspectives were unique, his anatomy precise, and his shading almost theatrical.”

This example is particularly well done, representing the artistry of cartooning.

FDR and the Three R’s: Relief, Recovery, Reform

FDR’s inauguration was early March 1933. On March 6-10, President Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday as a prelude to opening the banks on a sounder basis. The Hundred Days Congress/Emergency Congress (March 9-June 16, 1933) passed a series laws to help improve the state of the country. This Congress also passed some of FDR’s New Deal programs, which focused on: relief, recovery, reform.

Short-range goals were relief and immediate recovery, and long-range goals were permanent recovery and reform. In the New Deal programs, Congress gave the President unprecedented “blank-check” powers, which included the ability of the President to create legislation. The New Deal legislation embraced progressive ideas like unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, minimum-wage regulations, conservation and development of natural resources, and restrictions on child labor. Many of the programs that gave the President this authority were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The authority of the FDR presidency never went away. In an editorial written in 1936, in the November 11 edition of The New Republic title “Mr. Roosevelt’s Blank Check,” the staff writers posed that “if Mr. Roosevelt has any mandate from the electorate, it is a mandate to remain President and do what he wishes.”

“What will the administration write on this blank check? A reelected President is said to have an immense opportunity to act as a leader unhampered by practical politics. During his first term he is making a record for reelection; during his second, since according to custom he cannot run a third time, he is making a record for posterity. This dictum seems to us superficial, especially in the president circumstances. No President, in spite of the great power of his position, is a dictator. And even dictators have to conform with social forces in the end. What any President of the United States can do depends in large measure upon his control of Congress, his support by public opinion, the interaction of pressure groups. He can express ideas, he can wield the prestige of his personality and his office, but the limits of his effective action are determined by forces outside himself.”

1931.01.31 “Smedley Butler Lecture Tour”
by John Tinney McCutcheon (1870-1949)
15 x 22 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.

The “Mussolini affair” refers to an incident when, during a speech on “how to prevent war” delivered to the Philadelphia Contemporary Club on January 19, 1931, General Smedley Butler recounted a story told to him by journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had been in a car with Benito Mussolini when they ran over and killed a young boy who was crossing the street. Mussolini told the driver to continue driving and that the boy’s life was insignificant. Mussolini and his government were at the time being widely praised by all of the mainstream U.S. media, and the American elite generally. They considered Mussolini’s Italy to be a great model that the U.S. should follow. They particularly admired his efforts to crush labor unions and communism.

The Italian government protested, Rome newspapers denounced the speech as “insolent and ridiculous,” and Mussolini issued a categorical denial: “I have never taken an American on a motor-car trip around Italy, neither have I run over a child, man or woman.” Secretary of State Stimson issued a formal apology to Mussolini for “discourteous and unwarranted utterances by a commissioned officer of this government on active duty.” Smedley was placed under arrest and ordered court-martialed by President Hoover. FDR was among those who came to Butler’s defense. The court-martial charges against Butler were eventually dropped.

He [Butler] fired a parting shot in an article entitled “To Hell With the Admirals! Why I Retired at Fifty,” published in Liberty magazine (Dec.5, 1931). He specified that he intended to “do a little swatting of some heads of some low-down-bums who tried to ruin my life for me.”

The Italian Foreign Office, having denied Mussolini ever met Vanderbilt, searched its records and conceded that Mussolini received him in 1926 but “emphatically” reiterated that there had been no car ride. Vanderbilt himself refused comment and then evasively accused Butler of having “garbled” the story. In 1959, Vanderbilt substantially confirmed Smedley’s version. He related a four-day boisterous rip with Mussolini through northern Italy: “A small child standing on the right tried to beat the Fiat across the road. The car shuddered, and I felt the car wheels go up, then come down. I turned quickly to look. I can still see the little crumpled-up body lying in the road. Then I felt a hand on my right knee and I heard a voice saying, ‘Never look back, Mr. Vanderbilt, never look back in life.”‘