In a New York of conservative Hearstian newspapers, there was really only one newspaper where he could go with such left-leaning cartoons. Geisel invited PM editor Ralph Ingersoll to dinner and showed him a few of the cartoons he was working on, most of which went after Lindbergh and his fellow isolationists. Ingersoll was interested—but this time he wanted to do more than just dribble out a few Dr. Seuss cartoons that Geisel would draw only when the mood struck. Ingersoll wanted Dr. Seuss as PM’s full-time editorial cartoonist.
Ralph M. Ingersoll, Connecticut born and Yale educated, was one of publishing’s most progressive editors, both politically and professionally. Early in his career he had worked as a reporter for Hearst and a writer for The New Yorker before being hired away in 1929 by publisher Henry Luce, who put him in charge of the struggling Fortune magazine. Ingersoll was one of the first editors to grasp the importance of photographs and graphics, and his visual overhaul of Fortune made the magazine profitable. An impressed Luce then asked Ingersoll for his assistance in launching a magazine that was built almost entirely around its photographs, and the two men created Life, which would become one of the most successful magazines of the era. It was so successful, in fact, that Luce chose to edit the magazine himself and moved his editor with the Midas touch over to the struggling Time magazine. It was a post Ingersoll hated, mostly because of what he saw as its conservative editorial bent that loathed Roosevelt, denounced the New Deal, and promoted isolationist policies.
It was while he was still seething at Time that Ingersoll began drafting a treatise for a new kind of daily New York newspaper—one that would serve as a liberal crusader, in direct counterpoint to the conservative Hearst-owned newspapers. For PM—no one would ever be certain what the letters stood for, and Ingersoll would never say15—Ingersoll wanted writers with distinctive voices who were great storytellers and who had a progressive point of view. “Journalists serve two things larger than themselves,” wrote Ingersoll. “The first is the truth as it exists. The second is the idea of a better mankind.”16 When the first issue of PM was published in June 1940, its politics were markedly left leaning: anti-fascist, pro-intervention, pro-labor, and pro–New Deal. “We are against fraud and deceit and greed and cruelty,” wrote Ingersoll. “We are against people who push other people around.”17 That was just the sort of credo Geisel could get behind. “I liked that,” he said.18
Geisel liked Ingersoll, too—and for Geisel, that was always one of the most important criteria when it came to deciding who he would do business with. Only three years apart in age—Ingersoll was older—Ted Geisel and Ralph Ingersoll had similar senses of humor, similar New England sensibilities, and—perhaps most important—a similar visceral dislike of Charles Lindbergh. In one of PM’s early issues, Ingersoll had run a gigantic front-page headline that screamed “Denouncing Charles A. Lindbergh.” Inside, Ingersoll ran excerpts from Lindbergh’s speeches alongside remarks from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, effectively reflecting their similar points of view. There was nothing coy about PM or Ingersoll, and Geisel liked that, too. The two men shook hands. “The next day,” said Ted, “I was on the PM staff.”19
On April 25, two days after Lindbergh’s Manhattan Center rally, Ingersoll ran the first of Geisel’s cartoons—proudly signed as Dr. Seuss—this one depicting Lindbergh flying a child-sized plane with a banner fluttering behind it reading, It’s smart to shop at Adolf’s. All victories guaranteed. And with that, Ted was on the record; Dr. Seuss had taken his first swing at an American hero in a very public forum. Three days later, on April 28, came his second jab at Lindbergh, mocking his isolationist policies with a depiction of the “Lindbergh Quarter”—a coin featuring an ostrich with its head buried in the sand, under the motto “In God We Trust (And How!).” From here on, Ted would depict Lindbergh and other America Firsters as ostriches—a kind of political branding that could only have come from one of Standard Oil’s finest admen. The gloves were off; Dr. Seuss was in the fray—and he was pulling no punches.
In his first months at PM, Dr. Seuss would make Lindbergh and his fellow America Firsters—especially Senators Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Burton Wheeler of Montana, and the anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest and radio host Father Charles Coughlin—the constant targets of his cartoon derision. “Lindbergh and his America Firsters and their sour-note choir leaders . . . seemed to be on the radio or at a Madison Square Garden rally every night preaching the gospel that we must not get involved because we were licked before we were started,” Geisel explained in an unsent letter. “Father Coughlin, from his pulpit in the Church of the Little Flower, was poisoning the air of the entire middle west with radio sermons right out of Mein Kampf.”20 There would be cartoons of American eagles kicked back in rocking chairs, talking but doing nothing, and Uncle Sam insisting he and a sickened Europe sleep in separate beds so there was “no chance of contagion” from “Blitz pox” or “Nazi fever.”21
Geisel also understood that having the charismatic Lindbergh as the face of America First made isolationism an attractive political position—which is why he made such a point of going after Lindbergh personally. If Dr. Seuss could take down Lindbergh, he could take the air out of the America First movement as well. Sometimes Lindbergh seemed to be making it too easy. When the colonel made a speech in May accusing Roosevelt of wanting to provide aid to Europe and Asia as a step toward “world domination,” a Dr. Seuss cartoon appeared in PM days later depicting Lindbergh patting a Nazi dragon kindly on the head. “’Tis Roosevelt, not Hitler, that the world should really fear,”22 Lindbergh says reassuringly.
“I was PM’s political cartoonist in charge of Lindbergh, Wheeler, and Nye,” Geisel said later—but at times, it was a lonely post. While PM had been pushing for American intervention since 1940, most Americans remained opposed—or at best, wary—of entering a war an ocean away. Despite the newspaper images of a shattered and smoking London following the first days of the German Blitz, Americans seemed more content to send aid and supplies, rather than troops. Geisel, like Ingersoll, understood that isolationism was larger than Lindbergh, and began submitting cartoons showing Republican politicians in bed with the isolationists, creating an elephant with an ostrich body, which Geisel clumsily called a “GOPstrich.”
Things were better and funnier when Geisel let Dr. Seuss shine. In a June 23 cartoon, he showed an American eagle sitting complacently in an easy chair as bombs exploded around him, and mocked the isolationists with some punchy Seussian verse:
Said a bird in the midst of a Blitz,
“Up to now, they’ve scored very few hitz,
So I’ll sit on my canny
Old Star Spangled Fanny . . .”
And on it he sitz and he sitz.23
In another, Ted portrayed America Firsters as a kangaroo carrying in its pouch a joey labeled NAZIS—which in turn carried in its pouch a smaller roo marked FASCISTS, which in its pocket carries an even smaller kangaroo labeled COMMUNISTS. “Relatives?” the largest kangaroo says, grinning at the reader. “Naw . . . just three fellers going along for the ride!”24
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For nearly a year, contractors and workmen had cleared and improved the Geisels’ two-level property in La Jolla, to make way for the house that was slowly being built throughout late 1940 and early 1941. In June, Ted and Helen moved into the newly completed house—at the moment, it would serve mostly as a summer property—where Ted could swim in the morning and have lunch with Helen on the patio in the afternoon. Ted was surprised to learn West Coasters knew his name. “All the enlightened members of this community know about my books . . . but nobody in Southern California seems to keep ’em in stock,” he wrote to Evelyn Shrifte—still a friend, despite his move to Random House. “I gotta go out now and fight rattlesnakes, bees and man-eating rabbits in the patio, then go fight Lindbergh.”25
Under his contract with Ingersoll, Geisel had to p
roduce three, sometimes four, cartoons weekly. Every morning he would pore through the newspapers, looking for inspiration in the headlines. Once he had an idea, he worked quickly, and his cartoons from this time are drawn in broad strokes, with big gestures. With a daily deadline hanging over him—Geisel would airmail his cartoons back to Ingersoll in New York each evening—he had little time to redraw, revise, or rethink. For an artist who could fill a trash can with one discarded draft after another in the course of an afternoon, resisting the urge for perfection was perhaps the hardest part. “Looking back at them now, they’re embarrassingly and sloppily drawn. And they’re full of snap judgments that every political cartoonist has to make between the time he hears the news at 9 a.m. and sends his drawings to press at 5 p.m.,” Geisel said later. “The one thing I do like about them, however, is their frantic honesty.”26
He was still annoyed with Virginio Gayda, tearing into the propogandist twice in two weeks, and Mussolini himself was now making appearances, usually drawn as a thuggish, petulant little boy. Adolf Hitler, too, was showing up regularly—but at the moment, no one, it seemed, could get Ted’s political and creative juices flowing like Lindbergh. The famed aviator’s isolationism was one thing; quite another was his increasingly vocal anti-Semitism. Lindbergh already had been accused of having Nazi sympathies—his 1938 acceptance of the Reich’s Order of the German Eagle with Star hadn’t helped—and some of his most active followers were loudmouthed bigots like Father Charles Coughlin, who spewed anti-Semitism in his weekly radio addresses. In a September speech to America Firsters in Des Moines, Lindbergh had finally gone all in with a lecture he called “Who Are the War Agitators?” in which he made a sharp distinction between Americans, the British people, and the “Jewish race”:
I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours.27
The backlash was immediate. “The most un-American talk made in my time,” said former Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, while over in the pages of Liberty—one of Geisel’s old stomping grounds—Lindbergh was derided as “the most dangerous man in America.28 In PM, Geisel depicted a gas-mask-wearing Lindbergh standing atop a garbage pile in the back of a “Nazi Anti-Semite Stink Wagon” from which he was “Spreading the Lovely Goebbels Stuff” by the shovelful.29
Two days later came one of Dr. Seuss’s most memorable political cartoons, showing an American eagle—with a sign reading I AM PART JEWISH dangling from his beak—sitting with his feet and winged hands locked in stocks; at his feet leans a card announcing This bird is possessed of an evil demon! with Lindbergh’s name among the arresting officers.30 A week after that came one of Ted’s hardest-hitting cartoons, in which a bespectacled woman with an America First sweater reads aloud to two children from a fairy-tale storybook titled Adolf the Wolf. “And the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones,” says the woman, reading from the book as the children’s eyes go wide. “But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.”31 The political tide was turning against the American Firsters, the isolationsists, and Lindbergh—one political columnist noted that the aviator had gone from “Public Hero No. 1” to “Public Enemy No. 1” almost overnight32—and Dr. Seuss was helping to lead the charge. “I was intemperate, unhumorous in my attacks,” Geisel said later, “and I’d do it again.”33
Not everyone was amused. Some conservatives threatened to boycott Flit, Essomarine, and other Standard Oil products, arguing that the company’s favorite adman was a communist. Others were offended by the way Ted drew his American eagle. “Much as I admire the work of Dr. Seuss,” wrote one PM reader, “I question the fitness of continuing to picture our Uncle Sam as an ostrich.”34 That might have been a fair criticism; in true Seussian style, Ted’s eagle did have a lengthy beak and, at times, a long neck that made it look more like a buzzard than an eagle. Ingersoll responded by printing one of Ted’s drawings of an eagle in a Stars and Stripes top hat, with a rifle slung over one shoulder, ready for action. “He looks pretty perky to us,” wrote Ingersoll.35
Ted and Helen left La Jolla and returned to New York by train in late November 1941, missing Sterling Holloway’s reading of Mulberry Street on CBS Radio’s Family Hour on November 30. Originally, Holloway was to have read the story to the accompaniment of an original Deems Taylor score called Marco Takes a Walk, but the composer wouldn’t complete the score for another year—at which time it would be performed by the New York Philharmonic exactly one time. Ted would miss that performance, too.
As winter approached and the Geisels settled back into their Park Avenue apartment, Ted, as he scanned the headlines each morning, rightly seemed to sense there was something in the air involving Japan. He began drawing cartoons warning of Japanese aggression against Siam (now Thailand) and even the United States; a November 28 cartoon shows an angry Japan asking the United States for “a brick to bean you with.”36 Ted also suspected that isolationists were losing steam, as a November 25 cartoon shows one of Dr. Seuss’s isolationist ostriches stuffed and mounted in a museum exhibit labeled HALL OF THE EXTINCT.
On Sunday, December 7, Ted and Helen were listening to classical music on radio station WQXR in the New York apartment when the broadcast was interrupted for a report that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Whatever cartoon Ted may have had on his drawing board that morning immediately got set aside. On the afternoon of Monday, December 8, PM ran a large Dr. Seuss cartoon with the gigantic word WAR exploding upward, blasting one of Geisel’s isolationist ostriches skyward, with Xs for eyes, clearly down for the count. He never knew what hit him, read the caption.
For editor Ralph Ingersoll, PM had just seen one of its foundational editorial policies realized: Lindbergh, Wheeler, Nye, Coughlin . . . all the isolationists were as cataleptic as Dr. Seuss’s ostrich. That same afternoon, Ingersoll rallied the PM staff and readers with a new mission. “Today,” he wrote, “we begin a new task . . . WINNING THE WAR.”37 Now the real work would begin.
It was a responsibility Geisel was determined to take seriously. On December 9, PM ran the Dr. Seuss cartoon “The End of the Nap,” depicting an eagle in a rocking chair being awakened by miniature Japanese officers, who hit him with a mallet, zing him with a slingshot, and even give him a hotfoot.38 For Geisel, who had started his career at PM as the “angry cartoonist in charge of Lindbergh, Wheeler and Senator Nye,”39 there was now no longer any need to convince Americans to enter the war. Americans were in. Their long nap was over. Now Dr. Seuss saw it as his job to keep them awake.
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While Ted would do most of his cartooning at his apartment, he often visited the headquarters of PM on Dean Street in Brooklyn, climbing up two flights of rickety stairs to reach Ingersoll’s offices on the top floor. He almost always found someone interesting around to talk to, and there was no shortage of political conversations that might serve as inspiration for the next afternoon’s cartoon. Ingersoll was an editor who appreciated his editorial staff and encouraged them to write in their own voices, rather than imposing a stilted house style. It was “a newspaperman’s newspaper,” said one PM journalist, “as well as a newspaper that spoke the language of the people.”40 That made PM an attractive place for writers. In its brief existence, PM would see bylines by Dorothy Parker, Tip O’Neill, and Ernest Hemingway; Dashiell Hammett had served briefly as a proofreader. For Geisel, being in the top floor offices of PM was a lot like hanging out in the offices of Jacko, and he would always feel a special bond with the men and women of PM. “We were . . . a bunch of cockeyed crusaders,” Geisel said warmly, “and I still have prideful memories of working alongside such guys as Ralph Ingersoll and dozens of other hard working sou
ls.”41
But Ingersoll’s editorial approach would literally cost him. Ingersoll refused to accept any advertising in PM out of concern that his reporters might slant their own personal points of view in deference to advertisers. While reporters loved this policy—“we were blazing a new trail—no advertising pressures,” crowed one writer42—it meant Ingersoll had to look elsewhere for revenue. That was one reason PM was more expensive than most daily newspapers, costing five cents per day instead of the more usual three—but even that wasn’t enough to keep PM solvent. From its inception, PM had been propped up with the generous support of progressive donors like chewing gum manufacturer Philip K. Wrigley, women’s rights activist Elinor S. Gimbel, and the department store magnate Marshall Field III, who would eventually be floating the newspaper almost single-handedly.
With a cartoon in nearly every issue, Dr. Seuss remained one of PM’s most visible and popular contributors. More than once, rival publications tried to woo him away; the managing editor of the left-leaning Nation thought Dr. Seuss might be a good fit for his magazine, though he acknowledged that Geisel’s particular style of cartooning was “pretty far removed from anything we have attempted in the past, but that might well be all to the good.”43 An editor at The New Republic gave up trying to hire Dr. Seuss and just wrote him an admiring fan letter instead, telling him, “You are merely the greatest man that ever lived. I don’t see how you can be really so funny day after day. I wonder if you enjoy your stuff as much as a reader can enjoy it.”44 A February 1942 article in Newsweek praised Dr. Seuss for “blasting away at his political hates with razor-keen satire,” alongside a photo of Geisel, dapper in a suit and round-rimmed glasses, smoking at his drawing table.45
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