According to Dr. Seuss Goes to War, Richard H. Minear’s 1999 book on Geisel’s editorial cartoons, PM was founded as an outspoken liberal publication, free of advertising, and funded by its five-cent purchase price. Ralph Ingersoll, its founder, described part of the paper’s mission as opposing “people who push other people around just for the fun of pushing, whether in this country or abroad.” Sometime around January 1941, Geisel drafted his first political cartoon and showed it to a friend who worked at PM, who passed it on to Ingersoll. It depicted Virginio Gayda, an Italian journalist and Fascist whom many saw as a mouthpiece for the dictator Benito Mussolini, beating furiously at the keys of a steam-emitting typewriter, all while suspended from a hook behind him. Geisel attached a note about Gayda with the cartoon that read, “Almost every day, in amongst the thousands of words that he spews forth, there are one or two sentences that, in their complete and obvious disregard of fact, epitomize the Fascist point of view.”

By May 1941, Geisel was publishing as many as seven cartoons a week in PM, and many of his most impassioned works came during this time, in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. One drawing, published in April, depicted a coin featuring an ostrich burying its head in the sand, inscribed as “The Lindbergh Quarter.” Another published the next day showed Americans standing in line to purchase their own ostrich hats, guaranteed to relieve “Hitler headache.” The caption: “We always were suckers for ridiculous hats.”

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Geisel’s antipathy toward anti-interventionists possibly stemmed from his German-American upbringing in Springfield, Massachusetts, and his circle of friends in New York. Minear told me that in 1976, Geisel wrote a note responding to an interview request from Dartmouth College, saying, “I believed the USA would go down the drain if we listened to the America-First-isms of Charles Lindbergh and Senators Wheeler and Nye, and the rotten rot that the Fascist priest Father Coughlin was spewing out on radio. I, probably, was intemperate in my attacks on them. But they almost disarmed this country at the time it was obviously about to be destroyed.”

Geisel took aim at Hitler and Mussolini, at Lindbergh, and particularly at America First adherents, whom he saw as turning a willful blind eye to the dangers posed by Hitler’s Fascist regime, or even directly associating themselves with Nazism. One cartoon, “The Isolationist,” even featured a limerick, accompanying a drawing of a whale suspending himself “safely” on top of a mountain, out of water, and thus out of danger. It reads, “Said a whale, ‘There is so much commotion/Such fights among fish in the ocean/I’m saving my scalp/Living high on an Alp/(Dear Lindy! He gave me the notion!)”

UC San Diego Library

UC San Diego Library

But after Pearl Harbor, Geisel’s cartoons became more overtly opposed to Japan, and more crude in style. He depicted Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister and Supreme Military Leader of Japan, as an ugly stereotype, with squinting eyes and a sneering grin. In February 1942, he drew a long line of Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. collecting blocks of TNT from a kiosk labeled “Honorable 5th Column,” with one pointing a telescope across the ocean. The caption read, “Waiting for a signal from home.”