Dr. Seuss Political Cartoons

While fishing through the many political cartoons that Dr. Seuss gave to readers everywhere before his popular children's stories it amazed me that he had so much variety and range to his cartoons. He had cartoons ranging from Holiday's to how the War is going, to Battles, to people of the war. These two cartoons, found under Ireland and Greece, are two that I not only liked, but thought that they would be O.K. to post on the blog. Unfortunately, I think that it was some of this "terriblesness" whether because of it being "politically incorrect" or something along those lines. Just that "so bad but true" type of humor. Being that it is Dr. Seuss, of course the pictures are going to be fantastic, but it is sort of the tone that makes his pictures ironic. You usually associate Dr. Seuss with really happy things and what he is writing about isn't all that joyful.

Both of these two cartoons are, in my opinion fantastic. In the Greece one, Mussolini, depicted consistently as an older man with a lot of wounds, here a band aid, is pulling off the wings of the weaker, more beautiful countries of Greece, Croatia, Albania, and Ethiopia, while an army of super-butterflies comes at him from behind daring him to pull off their wings. Not only does this article challenge Mussolini, as most do, it talks about "The Inevitable Invasion of Italy," written amongst the charging butterflies. Because the Butterflies, probably the U.S. or Britain, or France of something, are coming while he is pulling off the wings, implies that we are going to get tired of what he is doing and are going to come to the rescue of the beaten down weaker butterflies. (There is also another good cartoon of Mussolini as the master chef teaching the other world leaders how to make "Victory Spaghetti," which could probably be a lot of different things. He also notes that the ingredients will never run out which means that it can be attained over and over forever.)

The Ireland one is a great cartoon too. Discussing the Nazi's influence on happy old Ireland, Dr. Seuss pokes a bit of fun at the Irish by having the German Hitler Figure sing a rhyming song. Hitler sings, while playing the harp, that he is going to bring snakes back to Ireland. This is showing something terrible will happen to them, because Hilter's actions basically counteract St. Patrick when he drove the snakes out of Ireland. Hitler is the opposite of a saint and can sing about potentially devastating things. I think something that is so effective here and a lot of other places is how much work he puts into the detail, making sure that you know that that is Ireland with clovers and dress, or making the snakes look a little evil. Every little thing contributes a great deal to a Cartoon and can be key in understanding one.

It is ironic that Dr. Seuss went on to write children's books because some of the cartoons he drew were not for people of the younger generation, although if you look carefully enough you can still see some traces of brutality/older generation stuff (end of plot).