Sometimes looking for visual or rhetorical patterns--repeated images, words, ideas--offers another entry point for developing good historical research questions. Historians are interested in how people understood their own world, so representations that were used to explain positions or to try to sway public opinion can offer a window into a culture from the past, a worldview, or a shared cultural vocabulary.
This page focuses on visual representations in the form of editorial cartoons or posters created by advocacy organizations (like America First or the Committee to Defend the United States by aiding the Allies) that had the goal of influencing the views of the public. As with photos, you always want to start by looking and describing a visual source. You should also ask who produced it, where and when it appeared, and how it was circulated. You might not always know all of that for every source, but you might find out, for example, that one particular cartoonist or the newspaper s/he (alas, mainly he at this point in time) was either pro or anti-intervention. Theodore Geisl, for example (better known as Dr. Seuss) worked for the left-leaning New York magazine, PM, in the early 1940s; he produced a large number of cartoons that were critical of America's neutrality laws and that advocated aiding Britain. (You can check more of them out at Dr. Seuss Went to War)
So let's look at some visual materials and think about the kinds of questions they might inspire before you try it yourself. All told, this page and activity should take you about twenty minutes to complete.
Start by looking at the thumbnails of these four images. I know they are small--you'll look at larger versions next, but the idea here is to see them all at the same time and next to each other.
Image #1
Image #2
Image #3
Image #4
OK, now let's look at a bigger version of each of these so you can really get a sense of what each is.
This cartoon created by Dr. Seuss appeared in PM Magazine on October 1, 1941. It shows a woman wearing an "America First" shirt sitting in a chair and reading a story to two children. The book she is reading is titled "Adolf the Wolf" and shows a wolf with dripping fangs on the front cover and a swastika on the spine. The line she is reading is: "...and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones...But those were Foreign Children and it didn't really matter."
Digital object made available by Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, La Jolla, 92093-0175 (https://lib.ucsd.edu/sca)
The national Fight for Freedom Committee created this poster. The group was formed in April 1941 to advocate for immediate American entry into the war. While other interventionist organizations encouraged aid to Britain as the best way to keep America out of the war, the Fight for Freedom Committee believed that the U.S. must join to protect the cause of freedom against dictatorship. The group distributed pro-war literature and posters, held rallies, and monitored anti-interventionists. This poster shows a menacing looking soldier shaded red with white eyes looming over a woman with two small children. The text reads: "STOP 'EM OVER THERE NOW---And You'll Keep 'em Away from Here."
This America First Committee poster is undated, but it likely appeared shortly after Congress voted to approve the Cash-and-Carry policy in 1939, which was considered a revision of the 1936 embargo on any arms sale to belligerents. Here we see Roosevelt reading a book labeled "Bedtime Stories" to a small boy labeled as "The People." Roosevelt is reading a story about the "the destruction of religion through the world," to which the boy replies, "Gee, that's awful. Now read the one about Uncle Joe killing the fifty thousand Christians." The cartoon implies that interventionists are critical of Germany for its violation of religious freedoms, while ignoring the USSR's persecution of Christians, and it suggests the USSR may be a greater danger to the world than Germany.
This Clarence Robert Klessig cartoon appeared in Wisconsin's Sheboygan Press on March 20, 1941. It offers a juxtaposition of life in the United States versus life in Britain in the spring of 1941. The cartoon shows an American father and son outside on a bright sunny day looking at the first robin of spring; behind them is a building flying two American flags. The other side of the cartoon depicts a British mother fleeing a bleak landscape with her two young children. They are heading to an air raid shelter as a formation of German bombers threatens to attack.
Let's look at some of the symbols and visual representations in these four cartoons.
The most obvious representational pattern here is that all of these cartoons or posters feature children. Images of children are being deployed in at least three different ways here.
First, we see representations of vulnerable children endangered by German aggression used as a way to mobilize sympathy for the plight of the British and to make a case for the need to intervene. Portrayals of children are often used to try to cultivate an empathetic connection with people affected by a conflict that is taking place elsewhere. As Helen Berents writes in her 2020 article, "Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children," images of children "are often invoked as rationale or justification for political action; the concept of ‘the child’, a product of particular western historical, cultural and political developments, as innocent, vulnerable and in need of protection has become universalized in significant ways." Children in danger, in other words, has become a common rhetorical and representational trope to signal the need for action and to make clear the moral stakes of a conflict. Thus in Figure 1, Dr. Seuss portrays America First as heartless and uncaring because, he argues, they don't care about the fate of foreign children who are being hurt by Hitler. Clarence Kessig brings this point home in his cartoon (Figure 4) with his insistence that we pay attention and be moved by the dangers to British children even if American children are not directly affected by it.
Second, vulnerable children are also used here to help make a case about America's own stake in this fight. The interventionists had to try to convince Americans that the dangers of not aiding Britain were greater than those of doing so. The Fight for Freedom Committee poster includes a woman with two young children to make the case that if we don't help Britain stop Germany, America's own women and children will be in danger. The poster thus frames aiding Britain as a way to protect vulnerable American women and children.
Finally, children in these images function as avatars of innocence who are put in the role of speaking truth to power. Encapsulated by the old phrase, "out of the mouth of babes," children are frequently represented as expressing a kind of purity and moral reasoning unaffected by adult machinations. Thus in the Dr. Suess cartoon, the two children are clearly appalled by the idea that the lives of foreign children don't matter; they are the stand-ins for the interventionist argument here (note that even the cat is appalled which suggests that not caring about others just because they are foreign is so unnatural that even animals know it is wrong). America First uses children in this role too, however; in their poster, it is the child who points out the seeming hypocrisy of Roosevelt's policies vis-a-vis Germany and the USSR.
It's interesting that two of these images feature an adult reading a story to a child or children, reflecting a shared vocabulary of the common cultural experience of parents' reading their children bedtime stories. But both the Seuss cartoon and America First Committee poster in some ways put that trope on its head. Instead of loving parents imparting moral wisdom to their children with their storytelling, here we see adults leading children astray by telling them a story, a fictionalized or false narrative. Both Seuss and America First equate the views of their opponents as a false narrative, a story constructed to serve a particular agenda and they use the image of an adult reading to children from a book to reinforce that perspective.
How the enemy is represented in a foreign policy conflict is always worth exploring. In the debate over US aid to Britain, those favoring intervention had much more scope to create representations of the enemy in their efforts to mobilize public opinion. Anti-interventionists had to walk a fine line; they didn't want to seem pro-German but they didn't see the British as the enemy either, so most of their imagery, visual or otherwise, focuses on domestic issues and actors rather than portrayals an enemy.
But for the interventionists, visual (and rhetorical) representations of Germany were another way to make the case for the necessity of American aid to Britain. We see three different representations of Germany here. In Figure 1, the Dr. Suess cartoon, Adolf Hitler is described as a wolf and drawn as a wolf with sharp teeth that are dripping saliva (or perhaps blood?) Of course, that imagery harkens back to a very famous story, that of Little Red Robin Hood who is eaten by the Big Bad Wolf. Portraying Hitler as a ravenous wolf who "chews up" children and "spits out their bones" offers an easy to understand, culturally resonant critique of Germany and its war program.
The Fight for Freedom poster offers a different kind of visual representation of Germany. This poster portrays German aggression, here symbolized by a looming German soldier, as monstrous threat to American women and children. Portrayed in red with white eyes and a mouth that looks quite a lot like fangs, this German threat is inhuman in a different way than the wolf. This image could harken to popular representations of zombies or vampires. Although subtle, this image also portrays Germany as a sexual and racialized threat. The fact that this soldier looms over a cowering women and the decision to highlight the whiteness of the woman and her two children emphasizes how dangerous he is in ways that resonated with the common racial representations of white female purity.
Finally, we see Germany represented as a squadron of bomber planes flying towards Britain out of a roiling cloud in a triangle formation as part of a "planned Nazi invasion" of Britain. The Germans here are clearly bringing death, destruction, chaos, and storm clouds with them. We see no Germans in Figure 4; they are faceless, nameless, and seeming heartless, as emphasized by the civilians who are fleeing in their wake. In contrast, Klessig includes the image of a sole British soldier holding a gun standing guard at the border. On the one hand, this imagery suggests that the British were outgunned by the Germans, but the lone soldier also symbolizes resistance and resiliency. The cartoon associates the Germans with machines while humanizing the British as individuals.
Of course, there are other interesting visual aspects of these representations as well, and when you try it yourself, you'll be asked to make an additional observation about these same four cartoons. But for now, let's think about some questions that we might develop based on the observations so far. Here's five possible questions:
How did the materials produced by either the anti or pro-interventionist draw on common cultural references--such as fairy tales or children's stories--to support their positions?
What does this debate over aiding Britain demonstrate about the ways Americans sought to cultivate a sense of empathy to or connection with people outside the United States?
These cartoons suggest that both sides in the debate drew on representations of children, albeit in different ways. Did children also play a role in legislative debates about US policy? How did political actors draw on, use, or complicate the kind of representations of children that we see in these cartoons?
What strategies did interventionists use to portray the German threat and what do those strategies reveal about American racial or gender hierarchies?
The America First poster here mentions "the destruction of religion through the world," although not as part of building a case against Germany. To what extent did German's anti-Jewish policies shape the debate over aid to Britain?
Now take a look at these cartoons and posters. Then go to the open window with your activity sheet to try it yourself by making some observations and suggesting at least two research questions that emerge from those observations.
Jerry Costello, "The Restraining Hand Needed," Albany Knickerbocker News, July 7, probably 1941
Bill Chase, "Be Careful Uncle Sam," Amsterdam News, June 8, 1940 [The Amsterdam News was an African-American newspaper in New York City]
Casey Orr, "The Only Way We Can Save Her," Chicago Tribune, 1939
"It Ain't What it Used to Be," undated, publication information unknown
Now It's time to try it yourself! Click the button to go to the activity form for Patterns of Representation.