NEW YORK Dr. Seuss' flights of fancy created some of the mostfamous characters in children's books, including the Grinch and theCat in the Hat. But few fans know that the whimsical doodler alsodepicted far more frightening figures - Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss' real name) drew cartoons for PM,a progressive New York daily, in the early 1940s, scribbling some 400drawings that took aim at Americans' complacency about fascism andurged Washington to enter World War II.
Some 200 of them will be published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War (theNew Press, $25) by Richard Minear, a historian with the University ofMassachusetts. Most have not appeared in print for nearly 60 years.
The cartoons are filled with a familiarly Seussian stable ofcreatures - birds with human faces, charmingly sinister dragons, sad-sack dachshunds, wide-eyed fish, dodo birds, woodpeckers, ostrichesand talking cats.
Seuss also used comically improbable gizmos to get his anti-isolationist message across. Props in the wartime cartoons includeda steam-powered typewriter, an impossibly large tuba and a RubeGoldberg-style contraption that uses turtles and a baby carriage in afoot-dragging, seven-step effort to put out a fire.
Those chuckle-inducing images appear alongside caricatures of someof the 20th century's most feared leaders.
Seuss' Hitler is alternately hapless and haughty. BenitoMussolini is depicted as an overweight, unshaven buffoon withdelusions of grandeur. Josef Stalin groans while carrying a dozensuitcases labeled "Our War Load" and, in another sketch, offers up apig-on-a- platter dinner called "Roast Adolf."
"Dr. Seuss made these drawings with the fire of honest indignationand anger that fuels all real political art," Pulitzer Prize-winningcartoonist Art Spiegelman, creator of the "Maus" series, wrote in anintroduction to the book, coming out in October. "If they have aflaw, it's an absolutely endearing one: They're funny."
Seuss began working for PM in early 1941 and produced severalcartoons a week until January, 1943, when he left to join an Armypropaganda unit headed by Hollywood moviemaker Frank Capra.
PM was influential but short-lived, publishing from 1940 to 1948.The daily paper, which catered to left-leaning intellectuals,campaigned hard against isolationism, racism and anti-Semitism, andurged the United States to throw its weight into the fight againstfascism.
Seuss, who died in 1991 at age 87, used the artistic genius thatwould make him a children's favorite to try to unite Americansagainst Hitler and the Axis powers. He approached these grownupsubjects with his trademark irreverence.
"There's a lightheartedness, a sense of humor . . . a wonderful,overflowing creativity" in the cartoons, Minear said. But he addedthat Seuss "had very serious concerns that underlay the whimsy andthe fantasy."
His drawings attacked Hitler, Mussolini and Japan's wartimeleadership, but also delved into domestic politics. He was tirelessin his broadsides against those he believed were out to divideAmericans or profit from the war.
Among his favorite targets were aviator Charles Lindbergh, whopublicly opposed U.S. involvement in the war, the anti-Semitic priestCharles Coughlin and the isolationist group America First.
"He called 'em as he saw 'em, and most of the time he was on theside of the angels," Spiegelman wrote.
Although Seuss won fame with sweetly screwball drawings and catchyrhymes, his venture into political cartooning should not surprisethose familiar with his children's books, which often carriedserious, politically liberal messages.
His 1984 best seller The Butter Battle Book spoofed the nucleararms race, The Lorax urged environmental preservation and TheSneetches is often read as a plea for racial tolerance.
Minear said the PM cartoons might help readers find deepermeanings in other Seuss classics.
The dictatorial title character of Yertle the Turtle, he said, wasbased partly on Hitler, an interpretation confirmed by Seuss. Thebook's ladder of turtles appeared first in a PM cartoon, stacked intoa victory "V."
Despite the strong convictions behind the PM cartoons, Minear andSpiegelman both wonder whether humor can ever be a meaningful weaponagainst a foe as horrid as the Nazi war machine.
"They're a little like taking a peashooter against a tank,"Spiegelman said of the cartoons.
For Seuss, though, fantastical visions were indispensable, even atthe grimmest moments.
"It's a way of looking at life through a distorted telescope, andthat's what makes you laugh at the terrible realities," he once said.
"Without whimsy, none of us can live."
