The role of the Supreme Court in ending the NRA was vital, and of course, the court was a key player in the whole period of the Depression and the New Deal. The second cartoon of this period, from February 12, 1937, deals with another massively contentious Supreme Court story—FDR’s so-called court-packing plan of that year. It brilliantly ties together one of the biggest national stories of 1937 with Evansville’s own biggest story of the year, the great flood. Dismayed by the Supreme Court’s consistent rulings against New Deal policies over the course of the decade, most notably on “Black Monday,” May 27, 1935, when three unanimous court decisions killed vital New Deal measures, FDR planned to add justices who would be supportive of his policies. This was done with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, the subject of this cartoon.177 It is a strong and unequivocal condemnation of what was seen by many members of the public to be an action that would have disrupted the delicate separation of powers in U.S. politics; “the Protective Power of the Supreme Court” is here threatened by the rising floodwaters of “Executive Domination.” While FDR seems delighted at the situation, Mr. Public and Kay express their firm disapproval, based on bitter experience: “Take our word for it—we know floods.” In many respects, Mr. Public here is speaking for a broad consensus, as in the end, the plan failed because of, among other things, “adverse public opinion.”178 Again, Knecht produces a cartoon that reflected and perhaps helped shape local public opinion.
Depression strangled by the NRA, June 1933. UE/EVPL.
FDR’s attempted court packing, February 12, 1937. UE/EVPL.
The years 1903 to 1939 were a period of dramatic and tumultuous change in the United States and the wider world, and it is reasonable to say the same about Karl Kae Knecht. In these years, he developed from an untested neophyte being given a chance on a small provincial daily to a seasoned and venerated editorial cartoonist on a prominent regional newspaper and a man whose activism profoundly affected the community in which he lived. He had done great things, but his golden age lay ahead; it was to come with World War II.
Chapter 5
CARTOONS 1939–45
World War II was arguably “the most destructive event in recorded human history”179 and one of the most pivotal watershed moments that has ever taken place; it was also probably the most important period of Karl Kae Knecht’s professional life. The world of the past seventy-five years is in many respects the creation of that war. Knecht certainly grasped the enormity of the conflict, and during the war years, almost every single day saw him produce cartoons that were centered on the war.180 This section will consider first the cartoons that reflected the wider, international scope of the war and will then move on to discuss the cartoons that dealt with the homefront.
The first cartoon in this section was published on August 28, 1939, under the caption “Will It, Eventually, Be Just a Bear Hug or a Bear Squeeze?” It is one of the most prophetic cartoons that Knecht ever drew, getting as it did to the incongruity of the marriage of convenience that was the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) of August 1939, something that “fascinated and puzzled cartoonists” around the world.181 As Knecht observed in this drawing, while both sides were smiling and hugging, their fundamental mutual incompatibility was just under the surface, here symbolized by the discarded scourge and sickle at their feet. In the end, of course, it would be Hitler’s decision to break the pact and invade the USSR in the summer of 1941 that would turn out to be the single most momentous decision of the war and perhaps of the twentieth century.182 And in the end, the “Bear Squeeze” was to destroy Nazi Germany—a very significant percentage of all German military deaths during World War II happened on the eastern front.183
As was seen earlier in this book, Knecht tended to be optimistic and positive, but there were also some cartoons that vigorously communicated the seriousness of the situation. This was especially true in 1942, when the Allies were staring into the abyss; Germany was running wild across Europe and the USSR, and the Japanese were having everything go their way in the Pacific. In a cartoon of February 11, 1942, entitled “When Will You Realize?,” Knecht shows a terrified Mr. Public being held by his hand while he teeters on the edge of a crumbling bridge. The bridge is supported by a variety of pillars that represent locations in the Pacific and across the world. The pillars that have snapped thus far, symbolizing falling to the Japanese, are the Pacific Islands, Singapore and the Philippines. Those that are still standing—some of which are cracking—include Burma, Java, Pearl Harbor (patched up), the Panama Canal and ultimately Alaska. Kay also looks terrified. The key to this brilliant cartoon is the presence of Uncle Sam’s feet, standing firm at top right while his strong hand supports Public; the implication is that American firmness, calmness and strength will save the day. But the risks are stark. The bridge could collapse. This was a war that could be lost.
“Will It, Eventually, Be Just a Bear Hug or a Bear Squeeze?” August 28, 1939. UE/EVPL.
Another spectacular cartoon that spelled out the stakes was drawn in October 9, 1943, and appeared under the caption “A Brute That Is More Terrible Than Any Wild One.” Civilians at a circus look at a caged gorilla who says that he is insulted by the image on the right, which is a wild savage gorilla representing Nazi Germany. This gorilla holds a bloody cudgel while destroying a series of classical structures, including a church; a dead child lies on the ground. In his right arm is a bloodied female victim with torn clothes, representing a brutalized and possibly raped “civilization.” The image is a fascinating one partly because, as will be seen, he used an almost identical image during the Cold War and partly because he simultaneously uses the trope of the gorilla-as-savage-beast while also communicating his belief in the gentle intelligence of these animals. The talking gorilla in the circus belies the savage beast of propaganda, but at the same time, the savage beast is certainly there to scare his audience. It is a familiar image—one of America’s best-known propaganda posters from World War I was “Destroy This Mad Brute” by H.R. Hopps, which depicted basically the same scene: “The primitive Hun…morphed into a savage gorilla in this highly sexualized rendition of German militarism.”184 Knecht here is taking advantage of the public perception of gorillas. As Constance Clark has argued, “These gentle animals often carried sensational, even salacious metaphorical freight—and racial connotations—in European and American popular culture.…Gorillas in particular carried associations with rapacious sexuality and with race, through, for example, the freighted term ‘miscegenation.’”185 While there are two gorillas in this drawing, one of them is plainly more significant than the other; Knecht leaves his audience in no doubt as to what is at stake here—this war, he says, is a battle for civilization itself.
“When Will You Realize?” February 11, 1942. UE/EVPL.
The reality of war is further laid bare in a March 20, 1942 cartoon, one of Knecht’s starkest, captioned “While They Go Through All Hell’s Fire—and More.” It contrasts the petty demands of both management and labor at home with the sacrifices of the men at the front, and it offers an explicit depiction of the experience of war at land, sea and air. Heavy artillery fires, planes crash and burn, ships are sinking, men engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat and, most stunning of all, soldiers die. At bottom right, at least two American soldiers are dead; the fingers of one actually cross the border of the drawing. This is a full year and a half before any American outlet published a single photo of American war dead; in September 1943, Life printed the now iconic photo of “Three Dead Americans on the Beach at Buna” by George Strock, and even that had to be accompanied by a truly remarkable full-page editorial.186 The photograph, said John Dower, was “initially withheld from release under the official US policy of accentuating the positive and not showing graphic images of dead or gravely injured Americans. Publication of this and similar stark images marked the formal end of such censorship.”187 But remarkably, Karl Kae Knecht had taken the decision, backed by his editor at
the Courier, to draw dead Americans in a front-page cartoon less than three months into the war. It can never be known, but perhaps they themselves asked the questions later spelled out in the famous Life editorial: “Here lie three Americans. What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a noble sight? Shall we say that this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country? Or shall we say that this is too horrible to look at?…And so here it is. This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns.”188 Cartoons and photographs are different, of course, but both are powerful. Long before it was officially sanctioned, Knecht offered his audience the ugly and bloody reality that lay behind the names on handsome and serene monuments.
Nazism is depicted as a gorilla, October 9, 1943. UE/EVPL.
The next three cartoons are comments on the end of war in Europe and the Pacific. His “A Nation That Followed a Book of Hate” appeared in the paper on May 4, 1945. Berlin had fallen at the beginning of the month, and Hitler’s death was reported the previous day. Hitler’s Mein Kampf lies in the foreground, torn to shreds. A skull and a bone lie beside it, and in the distance are enormous piles of human skulls and an infinite number of graves. A single blasted, leafless tree still stands, and in the smoke-filled sky fly carrion-eating birds. In perhaps the darkest comment he ever has her make, Kay sees only “Disaster, Destruction, Desolation, Degradation, [and] Death.”189 In the words of Craig Yoe, “It is hard to decide whether documentary photographs of war’s human destruction are more gut-wrenching, or the graphic cartoonists’ poignant pen and ink tableaus are. There are different ways to look at the same terror, uniting in the same conclusion: War is Hell.”190 Knecht told his audience many things over the years, but in this cartoon, he told them unambiguously that war was hell. The war is over, but there is no hint of celebration here—just regret and loss.
“While They Go Through All Hell’s Fire—and More,” March 20, 1942. UE/EVPL.
His reaction to the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima was published on August 7, 1945. Captioned “Better Fold Up or Be Blown Up,” it shows the bomb about to land on a racially stereotyped Japanese officer who is “folding up” the island that he is on. The smiling sun says that the bomb is made of “the stuff I’m powered with” while the bomb itself says that it is “the equal of 20,000 tons of TNT.” A grim-faced Kay is in a boat close to Japan and reports that the bomb is two thousand times more powerful than any previous explosive. There is a gleeful and celebratory tone to the cartoon that seems incongruous today, but it has to be read in the context of a population that was tired of the deprivations of war, certain of the savage brutishness of the enemy, convinced of the legitimacy of the target and sure that there were no alternatives other than a hugely costly invasion of the Japanese homeland. The Evansville Courier spoke in an editorial on August 11, 1945, of “the intense satisfaction Americans feel over the destruction wrought in Hiroshima by the first atomic bomb.…It is frightening as well as exhilarating to be the possessor of a weapon of such terrifying power, even though it is being used, at the moment, on an enemy who deserves no better fate.”191 Knecht’s cartoon here is merely a visual representation of that view.
“A Nation That Followed a Book of Hate,” May 4, 1945. UE/EVPL.
The third end-of-the-war cartoon is Knecht’s reaction to the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, published on September 1, 1945. While it is a powerful record of a hugely important symbolic moment, it is again a strikingly jovial, celebratory image, with strong overtones of the same racist stereotyping discussed earlier. The Japanese he draws are squinting, small and bucktoothed, rendered as scowling child-like figures in ostentatious uniforms, heavy with decorations and medals. The Allied representatives are tall, noble and heroic, smiling and proud at the moment of victory. Kay salutes and raises her trunk in triumph. The document is signed on the barrel of a naval gun rather than on the sober table that was actually used. Again, while it does not sit very comfortably with a modern audience, it is a reflection of the profound sense of the total nature of the Allied victory—it was, after all, an “unconditional surrender.” It is also very much an American victory in this picture—all the named characters are American, although in reality eight of the ten Allied signatures on the surrender document were non-American. Again, this cartoon needs to be read carefully in the context of its time, and to condemn its self-righteousness, triumphalism and racism is perhaps to be anachronistic.
The atomic bomb falls on Japan, August 7, 1945. UE/EVPL.
Japanese surrender is signed, September 1, 1945. UE/EVPL.
The final cartoon in this section, from August 6, 1945, is a really fine demonstration of his considerable talents as a caricaturist. Knecht here reflects on the just concluded Potsdam Conference, a meeting that has been called “a crucial turning point in modern history.”192 At it, the Allied leaders met to decide the fate of a remade world, but what Knecht comments on here is that the only Allied leader to have been present at every one of these leaders’ conferences from beginning to end of the Alliance was Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, and Churchill was defeated in the British general election, the stunning results of which were declared on July 26, leaving the Soviet dictator as the last man standing. Knecht records Stalin’s meetings with various Allied leaders at the Moscow Conferences (1942 and 1944), Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July–August 1945). There is a picture of Stalin and German foreign minister Ribbentrop in the trashcan—a humorous bookend to his “Bear Hug” cartoon discussed earlier. He captures all of the leaders very effectively in this image, which is both an interesting historical commentary and a fine example of his ability to capture the physical essence of famous figures.
Stalin is depicted as the great survivor, August 6, 1945. UE/EVPL.
Having considered a number of his cartoons that focused on the war abroad, it is now time to look at the work that he did that focused on the homefront. Evansville was a truly remarkable place during the war, with a workforce that grew by tens of thousands, producing by the end of the war billions of bullets, thousands of airplanes and hundreds of oceangoing ships, as well as numerous other items both large and small. In the words of Patrick Wathen, what was done in the city was “nothing short of outstanding.”193 In examining Knecht’s wartime cartoons, it emerges that he covered virtually the whole range of homefront activities in Evansville, and what is fascinating is that it is possible to find evidence that the activism of many of these cartoons really did have an effect. Knecht received complimentary letters from, among others, the director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (future treasury secretary John Snyder), the Office of Defense Transportation, the State of Indiana Alcoholic Beverage Commission, the Belgian Red Cross in New York, the Office of Price Administration and even from the City of Evansville Rat Control Program Committee. In October 1944, the administrator of the Office of Price Administration, Chester Bowles, wrote a letter to the editor of the Courier to express thanks for “the fine work your paper has done in supporting the OPA programs,” mentioning specifically Knecht’s cartoons. He also received grateful letters from Edward Stettinius Jr., U.S. secretary of state and first U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.194
A fine specific example of this is “There is a War Going On,” published on June 5, 1944. It is another very stark cartoon that contrasts a large group of women playing bingo, along with several more who are playing cards, with a wounded and possibly dying soldier in a foxhole who does not have the bandages that he needs. One of the soldiers is talking about the fact that the “local Red Cross chapter is appealing for volunteer workers to make bandages to send over for us at war.” This is in reference to the fact that in Evansville hundreds of local women volunteered with the Red Cross, making tens of thousands of surgical dressings, but more volunteers were always needed. It clearly had a real-life effect, as a c
ouple of days later, Knecht received the following letter on Red Cross notepaper: “My dear Mr. Knecht, Thanks very much for your drawing in Monday’s Courier on behalf of surgical dressings. The telephone buzzed all day Monday as a result of the publicity and we had new workers come in. I do not know whether they were Bingo players or not. I certainly appreciate your interest, and do not know how we could exist without it. Sincerely, Aline E. Igleheart.”195
Knecht drew numerous cartoons in support of the sale of war bonds, basically year-round but with more emphasis when there was a war bond drive being pushed particularly hard. A great example, printed on May 21, 1945, was published in support of the Seventh War Loan Drive. Captioned “Come On, Help Put Us Over,” it shows Uncle Sam, whose eyes are on the viewer, raising a gigantic number seven that is about to become a bridge to Japan. The Japanese leader, bespectacled and bucktoothed as always, is urging his followers to fight to the death but does not see what is coming. Kay leaps up and down in enthusiastic encouragement. Knecht had also drawn cartoons supporting this drive on both of the previous two days. On May 23, the chair of the Vanderburgh County War Finance Committee, Mike Schaeffer, wrote to him to say, “We truly appreciate the wonderful cooperation you are giving us in your cartoons during the Seventh War Loan. We have had any number of comments which show that people are really getting the messages as you intended. I ran across one this morning.”196 It is almost impossible to quantify the effect of a cartoon most times, but these two examples show that there is evidence that Knecht’s cartoons hit their mark during World War II.
The Cartoons of Evansville's Karl Kae Knecht Page 7
