American Second World War Comics and Propaganda
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Heroes and Enemies: American Second World War Comics and Propaganda Andrew Kerr A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Lincoln for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. July 2016 1 Contents: Dedication – p. 3 Acknowledgements – p. 4 Abstract – p. 5 Introduction – p. 8 Comics as a Source – p. 21 Methodology – p. 26 Literature Review – p. 33 Comics and Propaganda – p. 41 Humour – p. 47 Heroes and Enemies – p. 51 The Physiognomy and Ideology of the Hero and Enemy – p. 62 Myth and the American Dream – p. 67 Mythic Criticism – p. 72 Stereotypes and Role Models – p. 76 Chapter One: Comics, Propaganda and the Office of War Information – p. 83 The Value of Comics As Advertising Media – p. 85 Comics, Publishers and the OWI – p. 90 The Hero and Enemy in ‘Report 15’ – p. 105 Chapter Conclusion – p. 107 Chapter Two: Types of Hero in Second World War American Comics – p. 110 The Political Hero – p. 112 Attributes of the Political Hero: Foreign Language Acquisition – p. 115 Attributes of the Political Hero: Sport and Horsemanship – p. 119 Attributes of the Political Hero: Foresight – p. 123 Attributes of the (Foreign) Political Hero: Recklessness – p. 127 The Soldier Hero – p. 131 Spectacular Violence – p. 140 The Symbolic Hero – p. 151 The Cooperation of the Categories of the Hero – p. 163 Unpublished Second World War Comics By Members of the United States Armed Forces – p. 168 Chapter Conclusion – p. 182 Chapter Three: Types of Enemy in Second World War American Comics – p. 195 Ideological Enemies – p. 190 Enemy Leaders – p. 195 Enemy Soldiers – p. 201 Chapter Conclusion – p. 221 Conclusion – p. 223 Bibliography – p. 232 Archive Sources – Library of Congress – p. 232 Book and Journal Sources – p. 233 Comics Sources – p. 264 Film Sources – p. 266 Web Sources – p. 266 2 Dedicated to Joshua (Jos) Kerr and to William (Billy) Harrison. The one never doubted. The other never brought it up. 3 Acknowledgements Firstly, my grateful thanks go to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), for their funding of my director of studies Professor Jane Chapman as principal investigator on a four-year collaborative research grant ‘Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record’. This grant included funding for two PhD projects, of which this thesis is one. I wish to sincerely thank Professor Chapman for her support and supervision throughout both the research grant and the writing of this thesis. The AHRC also gave additional support through their International Placement Scheme. This scheme provided the author with a fellowship to undertake archival research at the Kluge Centre, Library of Congress in Washington, DC. This thesis could not have been produced without the extensive resources at the Library of Congress, in particular that of the Veterans History Project and the comics archives at the Serial and Government Publications Division. As such, I wish to extend my thanks to all the librarians and staff at the Kluge Centre and Library of Congress and, in particular, to Mary Lou Reker and Georgia Higley who were both so helpful and encouraging. Thanks also to Dr. Owen Clayton, my second supervisor, for his on-going assistance and helpful comments. Finally, I wish to thank all my colleagues, including the comics grant team, the administrators and staff at the University of Lincoln. Libertas per Sapientiam. 4 Abstract During the Second World War, American comic books were put to use for the war effort as carriers of propaganda. This thesis explores the propaganda in comics that were published with the cooperation of government and military institutions such as the Office of War Information and the United States Marine Corps. The propaganda contained within titles published in tandem with government institutions was primarily communicated through the interplay of the characters of the hero and the enemy or villain. Grouping these characters into recurrent types according to their characterisation allows for close reading of their particular propaganda function. This thesis establishes a connection between the Office of War Information, The Dell Publishing Company, Parents’ Magazine Press and Street and Smith Publications, carrying forward the work of Paul Hirsch (2014). Each of these publishers produced comics that included war related propaganda, as did the Office of War Information itself. Added to this sample are the war comics produced by Vincent Sullivan, the editor of Magazine Enterprises and its subsidiaries, that were published with the cooperation of the US Marine Corps and other military institutions. In addition, a sample of the comics of William Eisner are included in order to demonstrate that the same groupings of hero and enemy occur in fictional comic narratives as well as those that purport to be non-fictional. Similar to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s famous creation of Captain America, Eisner produced Uncle Sam in response to the rising patriotic fervour in 1941 as the country increasingly debated and prepared for war. Eisner was later enlisted to produce comics for the Pentagon on war related issues. There is also a discussion of Milton Caniff’s contribution to the US military publication Pocket Guide To China and the Office of War Information publication The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States (1943). 5 As a counterpoint to the propaganda function of each type of hero and enemy contained within the commercially published sample, this thesis analyses a selection of unpublished, soldier-illustrated comics from the Second World War thanks to privileged access to the Veterans History Project (2013) at the Library of Congress. These unpublished artefacts demonstrate that the comics medium allowed space for alternative voices to express their reaction to the conflict, resisting the wider propaganda narrative exhibited by the commercial sample and reacting to the loss of individuality and authoritarian structure of the military, while stylistically demonstrating the soldiers’ affinity for comics such as George Baker’s Sad Sack and anti-heroes such as Bill Mauldin’s ‘Willie and Joe’. In this way these soldier-illustrated comics presented a democratic counter-point to the lack of democracy within the armed forces (Alpers, 2003, 158) and exhibit a form of patriotism focused on the ‘grassroots’ elements of American everyday life and culture as opposed to the jingoistic and ideological patriotism of the commercial comics. Methodologically, application of close reading to the content of comics’ narratives, on the level of a particular panel, story, advertisement, or other content, reveals comics to be significant historical sources that offer insight into the propaganda embedded in the popular culture of the period. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the rhetorical elements of the comics in order to explore how many of them served to marganilise particular groups, identifying them as the ‘enemy’ in contrast with the ‘hero’ (Brundage, 2008). Similarly, a semiotic approach informed by the work of Roland Barthes (1973; 1987) is undertaken in order to understand the significance of both visual and rhetorical elements of the texts. Alongside this approach is the methodological assumption of the ‘implied reader’ advocated by Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) that allows the analysis the virtual scope to discuss an idealised reader’s potential response to each text. This notion of the ‘implied reader’ is counterbalanced by a consideration of Stuart Hall’s (1980, 1997) three potential decoding positions in tandem with a consideration of the wider historical context. 6 Once the groups of hero and enemy are identified, subsets of both groups are developed according to their characterisation and the attributes they display. This is done in order to facilitate analysis of the ideology communicated by each of these character types. Identifying the function of each type of hero and enemy makes a new contribution to the wider field of propaganda studies. This contribution encourages a greater understanding of the role played by comics during the Second World War in encouraging ideological propaganda as well as allowing for resistance to it. 7 1. Introduction During the summer of 1941, the Dell Publishing Company (DPC) created a one-shot comic entitled U.S.A. Is Ready. This publication boasted sixty-eight colour pages of information concerning the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, and predominantly focused on describing military insignia, equipment and manoeuvers. It also visually and rhetorically identified the enemy of the United States as Nazi Germany while also pre-empting an Asiatic attack and a Pacific as well as a European theatre of conflict. The narrative also deploys a number of devices that indicate American victory on both these fronts is inevitable. The brief narrative content of the publication begins: Overseas the skies rain death over the smoking Ruins of London, over the bomb- scarred invasion ports of Calais, Boulogne. In Ethiopian mountain defiles, barefooted tribesmen and their British allies harry the thinning legions of Il Duce. Summer has come, and the world stands poised on the edge of another volcano, ready to erupt. On this side of the Atlantic, its 3,000 miles shrunk by the roaring motors of long-range flying fortresses, America is building a vast army of defense ... a stream- lined, motorized body of men built around a nucleus of peace-time regulars. (U.S.A. Is Ready, 1941) In these paragraphs can be seen several important rhetorical elements that formed part of the wider pre-Pearl Harbor propaganda narrative of the United States. The opening lines evoke the violence of the Blitz and allude to the possibility of Britain’s invasion by enemy forces. At the same time the second line implies that the British are winning against Italian forces in Africa. The third line directly contextualizes the conflict as a global issue that cannot be ignored by America and aligns the Second World War with the First World War as “another volcano”.