Last week, the Phillips opened a new exhibit of art work by William Gropper. Everyone should see it. Most interesting are Gropper’s political cartoons, which he made for a number of periodicals in the 1930s and 1940s.

According to Wikipedia, Gropper became an anti-capitalist socialist for several reasons, including (1) the Triangle Shirtwaist  fire in 1911 where his aunt died, and (2) the failure of his Romanian-born father, university educated and fluent in 8 languages, to find an appropriate job. But, as Jewish American with immigrant parents, he was also very anti-Nazi.

A number of his cartoons,  like the one above, attacked prominent Americans who had expressed pro-Hitler positions in the lead-up to World War II. These included Charles Lindbergh, poet Ezra Pound, publisher William Randolph Hearst, and those members of the U.S. Congress who were isolationists and America Firsters.

Here is another:

On this one, Hitler is joined with Hearst, and with Lemke (I don’t know who this is), with Father Cooughlin spewing out racial hatred for the world to hear.

Perhaps most surprising to me is this third cartoon:

It has many of the same characters casting their shadows over the Capitol. But there is one additional name that really took me aback. That of famed American socialist Norman Thomas, who had always been somewhat of an intellectual hero to me, because he was one of the first to argue for social programs like Social Security, which we now take so much for granted.

Back to Wikipedia. It turns out that Thomas had been very much against American participation in the First World War, and carried that isolationist and pacifist position into the early years of Hitler. In fact, until Pearl Harbor, Thomas thought we should stay out of it and, even after Pearl Harbor, when American socialists were split on the question, he “reluctantly” (so says Wikipedia) supported our war effort. I did not know this.

(I told you the next few posts would be short. Use your extra time well.)