So, who do you suppose might have penned the following:
If there must be a polemic between Democrats and Republicans, it could be conducted in a more respectable and sincere way. It could turn to an examination of ideas and facts, as is customary among conservatives, and not persevere in a system of chronic slander.
Instead, here is Clinton who takes up again in his speeches the journalistic theme of the menace of the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” as embodied in Bush and of his responsibility both for intelligence failures and international terrorism.
Could it be the cock of the walk? Could it be the divine Miss A? Well…
If you guessed Virginio Gayda, editor of the Giornale d’Italia and unofficial mouthpiece of Mussolini’s fascist regime, you’d be almost right! Here is the quote in its original form, as reported in the New York Times on March 21, 1937 (“Roosevelt Rebuked By Italian Writer”, p. 25):
If there must be a polemic between democracy and fascism, it could be conducted in a more respectable and sincere way. It could turn to an examination of ideas and facts, as is customary in Italy, and not persevere in a system of chronic slander.
Instead, here is Roosevelt who takes up again in his speeches the journalistic theme of the menace of fascism as embodied in dictatorship and of its responsibility both for armaments and world-wide uneasiness.
*sigh* It appears that sniffly, faux pleas for comity by dextro-cobnuggets have changed little in 70 years. A few months back, Dave Neiwert discussed how this form of projection can be traced back at least to the era of Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, but given that the fascist impulse is driven by fear and a pervasive sense of victimhood, it would not be surprising if this rhetoric occurred across a fairly wide swath of right-wing whining.
However, thanks are due to Signor Gayda for launching the political cartooning career of one Theodore Geisel. Here is his first cartoon, which appeared on January 30, 1941:
Here is a second cartoon featuring Gayda from November 14, 1941:
Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons appeared in the left-wing, New York newspaper PM, which also employed I. F. Stone and was the birthplace of Walt Kelly’s Pogo.
(Note: according to Wikipedia, the cartoons are apparently public domain — yay!)
Here are two other articles that appear on page 25 of the March 21, 1937 NYT:
Riech Bans Whip Handle Imports
BERLIN, March 20 (AP).—The importation of whip handles made of Manila cane and paid for in foreign exchange was banned today by an official decree, a part of the Reich’s strenuous drive to throttle imports and create a favorable trade balance. Germany’s February foreign imports, it was disclosed, totalled 11,000,000 marks more than those of January.Countess Haugwitz Drops Study
CAIRO, Egypt, March 20, (AP).—Countess Barbara Haugwitz-Reventlow, the Woolworth heiress, abandoned her study of Arabic today in favor of her baby. She decided that her recently started pursuit of the ancient language was taking too much of the time that might be spent cooing to her 1-year-old son, Lance, heir to her $20,000,000 American fortune. Her attentions to the infant Count, however, have not removed the Countess from a full enjoyment of Cairo’s fashionable night life with her husband.
I’m not sure why whip handles per se would be important to block as imports, though it might be worth noting that the Wehrmacht did use a lot of horses. Perhaps they were degenerate, Islamo-fascist non-Aryan whip handles. And Countess Haugwitz was obviously just inches from being an Islamo-fascist and really dodged a bullet there. See what family values can do?
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Ah the pleas for civility! Those Geisel cartoons are phenomenal. I assume what you mean by “public domain” is “Three Bulls! Header.” On the advice of my lawyer, I will have to take you at your word, and deflect all queries in you direction.
Somewhere in my fevered brain I alluded to a “balder” influence on American political thought. I did mean Il Duce, but this is what I really meant (your post above) by my gutly intuition.
I’m not sure why whip handles per se would be important to block as imports,
It was because “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS” was going through so many of them, it was “stimulating” domestic production.
I’m shocked that the brilliant cartoons by Geisel didn’t prematurely launch the term nautilusofascists.
Great post, Plover. I don’t think it could possibly be overstated how complicity of the media is a requisite component of fascisization and how dangerous the emus out there really are.
Great post!
I love Dr. Seuss! If you spend any time around La Jolla you can really see where Dr. Seuss got some of his his ideas for the plants in his books. Also, “The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss” was a revelation but I guess that I shouldn’t be suprised that he was a very good artist. I think the title of my favorite painting was “tired thunderbird.”
Although I enjoy Pogo, my all time favorite cartoon is Krazy Kat by Herriman. To my mind it really is the most poetic and beautifully stylized cartoon of all time.
I guess I was a little surprised btu maybe shouldn’t have been about the caricatures of japanese empire in the form of a very stereotypical, racist figure, but perhaps it was so mainstream that even an otherworldly genius (to us) would also work that way.
I went to the UCSD site and have to agree with you PP. Although it was a very mainstream stereotype, and it was WWII and it was political caraciture, it’s hard to excuse the racist stereotyping. It’s a tough issue but I would say bulk of TG’s other work indicates that he was a really decent and thoughtful person.
There is a very beautiful Krazy Kat cartoon set in the evening with Krazy and Mock Duck (!!) carrying chinese lanterns at night. It’s so beautifully drawn but the dialog is just painfully stereotypical. Beauty and ugliness, it breaks my heart. But again I think that Herriman was a very gifted person, and from what I’ve read also conflicted but generous and kind. How to resolve?
When I think about these things I wonder how generations of the future will find fault with us. Can we even fathom what they might find objectionable?
It kind of depends on if futures societies are under the thrall of the emunian order, islamofascism, blogofascism, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland where even the way back machine will be mooted.
Warner Brothers did some propaganda cartoons during WWII. The difference between the one I saw directed at Germany and the one directed at Japan was quite large. Tex Avery did a “3 Little Pigs” with a Hitleresque wolf, and while it was as gung-ho and jingoist as one might expect, it was pretty clearly aimed at Hitler himself and not the German people. The other one I’ve seen, called “Bugs Bunny Nips The Nips” (I don’t recall the director), is just utterly painful. The Japanese are portrayed as the most one-dimensional racial stereotype imaginable.
I do have to wonder, though, how much of this is due to total ignorance more than any real racism per se, especially for someone like Dr.Seuss. Artists can only work with what they know, and if they’re too ignorant of the culture to even have a meaningful awareness of the stereotypes, then it’s not surprising that that’s what they’d end up producing. It doesn’t excuse the result, but I do wonder if, with a little more knowledge, those results would have been different. I wonder what Dr. Seuss thought of those cartoons later in life.
You can see that exact same thing in Geisel’s treatment of Hitler as Germany versus what appears to me to be an anonymous Japanese for Japan (this could be because perhaps in OUR racism we don’t recognize a specific caricature of Tojo or Hirohito, for example, but I doubt it). I expect that the racial differences for some artists make it less obvious what characteristics would be available for caricature than for a native artist of that race or culture. The otherness that plover mentions I think is essentially Said’s Orientalism and I think somewhat natural for foreign cultures to do to one another, but when there are inequalities in power, this is where bigotry becomes much more obvious. In America we have all our various views about “Europeans” and people in the rest of the world not even realizing they do the same with us and are much more virulent with specifics of their view of Americans as cartoons than just generic anti-Americanism, even though I don’t think we would really think anything of it, or at least not think of it as bigotry. I don’t know.
One has to be careful with Said’s term “Orientalism” as such as it’s directed at the British conception of the “Orient” which is conceived more as the area from the Levant to India, rather than the American version which is conceived of as East Asia. (Said notes this himself in the introduction.) Remember the “Orient Express” goes to Turkey, and an “Oriental” in older British novels is likely a Turk or an Arab.
Of course, the broader point about how images of cultures conceived as “other” are formed is quite germain.
Oh p, you are so right. I confused myself. I remember reading it a million years ago, and I think my personal thesis was that I couldn’t understand his argument about Orientalism (as you rightly correct me) versus the Middle East as being operationally distinct from the otherness that was placed on the Far East, or any other geographically or culturally distant place (specifics of course being distinct, but the machinery and drives being identical).
I and my mate had been in conflict about an issue similar to this! Now I know which i is correct. lol! With thanks for the facts you post.