Seuss published this cartoon in response to the infamous Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (code named “Operation Spring Breeze”), a Nazi operation in which the Vichy French government played a key collaborationist role in the internment and extermination of Europe’s Jews. The raid began on July 16, 1942, when French police arrested and confined 13,152 Jews, including 4,051 children and 5,802 women, in the insufferable summer heat, virtually without food, water, or sanitary facilities at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle velodrome and stadium. After five days the survivors were deported to Auschwitz.
Laval gave the order to round up children under age 16, which was enthusiastically carried out by the Vichy authorities. In classic Nazi “Big Lie” fashion, he characterized the children’s roundup as a “humanitarian” measure to facilitate keeping families together, but in fact the parents had already been deported and surviving documents show that Laval’s principal concern was to dispose of Jewish children.
On July 16, 1995, French President Jacques Chirac – after more than half a century of fierce French resistance to the idea – apologized for the complicit role played by French policemen and civil servants in the raid. The Vel’ d’Hiv roundups became engraved in French national memory as a symbol of national guilt and of France’s responsibility for the Holocaust of French Jews.
Though this was the only one of Seuss’s hundreds of cartoons specifically dealing with Jewish murders in Europe, he nonetheless continued to target anti-Semitism, both in Europe and in the United States. He never portrayed President Roosevelt in a cartoon or drawing because he saw America as an idealized concept manifestly distinct from whoever the president happened to be at the time. His cartoons strongly supported FDR and his handling of the war and he used his poison pen to attack and criticize Congress, Republicans, the anti-FDR press, and American isolationists and appeasers.
Seuss undertook a specific campaign against Father Coughlin, a notorious Catholic priest who preached a continuous stream of anti-Semitism on his national radio show and in his monthly magazine. Through his cartoons, Seuss played an important part in quashing Coughlin’s hate speech and in muting the priest’s effect on the American public. For example, in a February 9, 1942 cartoon he drew Coughlin stirring a huge bowl atop an oven fueled by several swastika-bearing canisters; the pot is labeled “the same old down-with-England-and-Roosevelt stew” and the caption reads: “Still Cooking with Goebbels Gas.”
Seuss also had the courage to frequently take on Charles A. Lindbergh, the American hero popular for the first trans-Atlantic flight, whom he vilified and lampooned for his anti-interventionist and anti-Semitic ideas. In a September 22, 1941 cartoon, he depicted America as a tall figure wearing a “Stars and Stripes” hat with his arms and legs shackled in stocks. Hanging from his beak is a sign reading “I am part Jewish” (i.e., Jews are American citizens and a part of American life) and, at his feet: “Publik Notice: This Bird is Possessed by an Evil Demon. Sheriffs C.A. Lindbergh and Gerald P. Nye.” (Nye was a Republican senator from North Dakota who helped establish the America First Committee and was a key proponent of American isolationism.)
In another sketch, published September 18, 1941, Seuss drew a gas mask-wearing Lindbergh atop a pile of disgusting refuse in a garbage truck marked “Nazi anti-Semite Stink Wagon.” The caption reads: “Spreading the Lovely Goebbels Stuff.”
In yet another drawing, published April 1, 1942, an Uncle Sam character is being led by a clownish figure labeled “U.S. Nazis” toward a smiling masked figure wearing an “anti-Semitism” shirt and holding a hatchet near a cauldron filled with severed body parts. The caption has the clownish figure saying; “Come on, Sam . . . try the Great German Manicure.” And, in one of my personal favorites, from his “Mein Kampf” series, Seuss employs his sharp humor in a caricature of Hitler refusing a bottle of milk because it came from a Jewish-sounding Holstein cow.
