“Blitz Bum’s Rush” (April 28, 1939)
by Paul Albert Plaschke (1880 – 1954)
24 x 36 in., ink and charcoal on paper
Coppola Collection

History records Hitler as an inept military leader.

During WWI, Hitler led a failed effort referred to as The Spring Offensive, which came to represent his uninformed hubris as a strategist.

During the first part of WWII, Hitler continued to be as brazen as he was naïve. He did not sit back and allow his generals to run the war. He overrode them, instead, and was proved right, or lucky, perhaps too often.

The generals argued against the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and were convinced it would lead to war. But Hitler was confident that that France and Britain would sit by. And he was right to read these countries as sheepish after WWI about restarting any conflicts, so he ended up with appeasement.

The generals also disagreed with the annexation of Austria in 1938. Hitler overrode them and this, too, went without a hitch. Same with Sudetenland (1938), and the European sell-out of Czechoslovakia, both of which the generals thought he would not get away with.

Although there does not seem to be a triggering incident for this cartoon, it might simply be a general commentary on the public criticism that Hitler would make about his timid military in the light of his victories.

This bold lucky streak built Hitler’s confidence, and eventually led to recklessness. The decision to stand firm and fight it out in front of Moscow (June-December, 1941) turned out to be the last time that Hitler was right to override his generals on something major.

The second Moscow offensive, during the bitter winter of 1941-42, ended with the successful defense of the Soviet capital, just as the United States was being brought into the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

From then on, Hitler’s decision making was generally disastrous for the rest of the war. But Germany would not have gotten to that 1941 peak, just a few miles shy of Moscow and within a whisker of defeating the Soviets for good, if Hitler had not refused to listen to his generals and overrode their recommendations on prior occasions.

“Ain’t Doing Bad for a Tenderfoot” (June 30, 1936)
by Gerald Aloysius (Jerry) Doyle, Jr. (1898-1986)
13 x 13 in., ink on board

Jerry Doyle spent most of his career at The Philadelphia Record, The Philadelphia Daily News (1951) and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He retired in 1973. Doyle’s support for the New Deal meant that his cartoons generally expressed support for President Roosevelt, whom he depicted as tall, imposing, powerful, and larger-than-life. Doyle’s early and continual criticism towards Hitler and Mussolini made him the only American cartoonist to be put on the Nazi hit list. He wrote the book “According to Doyle – A Cartoon History of World War II” (1943). His son, who carried his name, was also a part-time cartoonist (1926-2009).

The 1936 election was the last Democratic landslide in the west. Democrats won every state except Kansas (opposition Alfred Landon’s home state) by more than 10%. West of the Great Plains States, Democrats only lost seven counties. Since 1936, only Richard Nixon in 1972 has even approached such a disproportionate ratio. After 1936, the west rapidly became a Republican stronghold, the only region that has been consistent in the party it supports for such a long time.

The editorial commentary about New Yorker FDR’s ability to woo the (wild) Western states impresses the local political forces: Joseph O’Mahoney (Wyoming), Burton Kendall Wheeler (Montana), and Edward Burke (Nebraska).

In 1940 and 1944, a big patch of Red reappeared in the heartland.

“The Best Guarantee of Peace” (June 30, 1936)
by Milton Rawson Halladay (1874-1961)
16 x 18 in., ink on board

Halladay was a native of Vermont and a noted political cartoonist for the Providence Journal (Rhode Island) for nearly fifty years (1900-1947). His cartoons were published in countless other newspapers and magazines. He has been called “one of the deans of American political cartooning.” His cartoon commemorating the death of Thomas A. Edison was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

One cool footnote: Halladay’s great-great grandson is carrying on the family’s artistic tradition:
halladayart.com/halladay-history

Inching towards military preparedness.

The 1936 National Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was a coronation of sorts for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who faced little serious opposition in his pursuit of a second nomination.

FDR grappled with presenting the political issues of the day to the isolationist public and especially how Roosevelt sought to justify military investment. He gave major speeches at the convention, held in late June, that started to build the case and make the appeal for the rising trouble.

But it was slow-going.

America’s perceived lack of response to Nazi aggression from 1938 on drew national and international criticism. After Paris fell to Hitler in 1940, the United States quietly pivoted toward Britain, as it had in World War I, supplying materials and later armaments in the war against Germany.

“French Reds Greet New Premiere” (May 26, 1936)
by John Tinney McCutcheon (1870-1949)
14 x 18 in., ink on drawing board

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.

1936.04.15 “Olympic Fish!” (April 15, 1936)
by Phil Berube (1913-1989)
7.5 x 8.5 in., ink on heavy board
Coppola Collection

Berube was a sports cartoonist for the AP. During his career he also took over the art chores on a youth-oriented AP comic strip called “Oh, Diana!” He is also listed as a comic book artist, and writer, for Superman, during the mid-1940s.

The 1936 Summer Olympics were infamously hosting in Berlin, August 1-16, and opened by Chancellor Adolf Hitler. To outdo the 1932 LA Games, Hitler had a new 100,000-seat track and field stadium built. The games were the first to be televised, and radio broadcasts reached 41 countries.

Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy and antisemitism, and the official Nazi party paper wrote in the strongest terms that Jews should not be allowed to participate in the Games.

The US came in second (to the Germans) in the 1936 medal count.

This cartoon, as a lead-up to the Olympics, features Adolph Kiefer (who won gold on the 100-m backstroke, held that world record for 20 years; he was named the “father of American swimming in 2013, and he was the last surviving gold medalist from the 1936 Olympics when he died, at 98, in 2017), Johnny Macionis (a silver medalist), Ralph Flanagan (a silver medalist), and Jack Medica (the only other US gold medalist in swimming in 1936 for the 400-m freestyle, who also picked up 2 silvers).