The MoMA Moment:

American Propaganda, Nazi Caricature, and Racialization

Viola Burlew

Department: History

Defense Date: March 31st, 2020

Advisor: David Ciarlo, History

Committee:

Myles Osborne, History

Martin Bickman, English

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To David and Marty, for your support and for pushing me to become a better scholar.

To my parents, for listening to crazy new ideas, for editing, and for sharing in this adventure.

And to Maddy, for reading every word of this project, from its inception to its final form.

Thank you.

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Table of Contents

Introduction………...4

Historiography…….10

Chapter I…………..14

Chapter II……….…23

Chapter III………...39

Conclusion………..51

Works Cited………53

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Introduction

On November 25th, 1942, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City opened its doors

to reveal a new exhibit to an anxiously awaiting public.1 Delayed two weeks from its proposed

opening date due to the abundance of submissions, the exhibit featured two hundred propaganda

posters, selected from 2,224 submissions, created by artists from across the United States of

America. Submissions came from forty-three out of the forty-eight United States, with additional

submissions from the territory of Hawaii and Washington D.C. Eager artists created images to

bolster war-time spirit and incite patriotism. Many of these posters appeared dramatic or even

shocking. The MoMA’s walls were lined with drawings of American soldiers lifting their rifles

into the air as they charged valiantly across the fields towards the dreaded Japanese soldiers

encroaching on American borders or sketches of the vile Nazi gazing out over the scene of a

lynching with the caption “This is the Enemy” in bold print below. The exhibit, coordinated by

the Office of War Information, was titled “The National War Posters Competition.”2 The

moment the doors opened to the public, the exhibit exposed American audiences to a drastic

change in their country’s propaganda.

Many of the images on display at the National War Posters Competition, like the broader

array of images circulating around the United States from 1941 to 1945, focused primarily on

vilifying the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany. German and Japanese soldiers appeared side

by side on art within the MoMA and around the country, often pictured as staring menacingly

down over the American continent or threatening American women and children.3 Both the

1 Hereafter, Museum of Modern Art will be abbreviated as MoMA. 2 Author Unknown, “Great Number of Entries– 2,224– in National War Posters Competition Causes Postponement

of Exhibition at Museum of Modern Art.” The Museum of Modern Art Press Release, November 16, 1942. 3 If artists are unknown, the publisher is listed as the creator of the poster. For images of Nazi and Japanese soldiers

on the same poster, see sample images including: United States Forest Service, Our Carelessness, Their Secret

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figures of the menacing Nazi and the sneering Japanese soldier were meant to strike fear into the

hearts of American viewers and encourage soldiers to fight against villainy and fascism. These

American propaganda artists, both amateur creators and practiced professionals in need of

artistic employment during a time of war, sought to elicit such emotional responses by creating

shocking caricatures of their enemies. This process of “othering” made Nazi soldiers appear as

clownish buffoons or horrendous monsters. Japanese soldiers, meanwhile, appeared as

frightening creatures with yellowed skin, oversized teeth or fangs, and extremely narrowed

eyes.4 The Japanese figures appeared demonic, and so highly racialized that they were no longer

recognizably human.5 When German caricatures did not receive the same treatment, audiences

certainly left the exhibit with two distinctly different enemies in their minds: one that consisted

of only a villainous German leadership, and the other that consisted of an entire monstrous

Japanese race.

There was a difference between racialization and drawing figures in a basic, cartoonish

way. Cartoonish caricatures may have exaggerated certain recognizable facial features or made

the figure disproportionate, as exemplified by posters where Hitler is only recognizable through

his hair and mustache.6 These images may not have been flattering, but they were not tapping

Weapon: Prevent Forest Fires, 1943, poster, University of North Texas, accessed October 21, 2019,

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc494/#collections; Artist Unknown, Stamp ‘Em Out!: Beat Your

Promise, 1942, poster, University of North Texas, accessed October 21, 2019,

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc441/; Boris Arzybasheff, Happy Days! 1942, poster, University of

North Texas, accessed October 21, 2019,

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc597/?q=happy%20days%21. 4 For images of racialized Japanese caricatures, see sample images including: United States Office of War

Information, Tokyo Kid Say, 1942, poster, National Archives Catalog, accessed December 16, 2019,

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/515860; Artist Unknown, You and I Put the Squeeze on the Japanese! 1941, poster,

University of North Texas, accessed December 17, 2019,

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc183/?q=japanese%20propaganda. 5 The concept of “racialization” will be described in the paragraph below. 6 For an example of Hitler as cartoonish, see sample image: United States Office for Emergency Management,

Waste Helps the Enemy: Conserve Material, 1942, poster, National Archives Catalog, accessed March 15, 2020,

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/533960.

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into stereotypes connected to a single race or ethnicity and instead focused on characteristics

only specific to one individual. To racialize an enemy was to draw them with exaggerated

features that were recognized as part of a previously established racial stereotype, such as

drawing black characters with “eyes that bulge from the face” or “[enlarged]…lips.”7

Racialization was a technique specifically used to remove non-white figures from the sphere of

acceptable representation and to suggest that these racial groups were “a degeneration of the

[white] species” or even “a wholly different species.”8

During the First World War—a full two decades before the MoMA exhibit—American

artists had racialized German soldiers in official propaganda. Their work implied that Germans

resembled non-white racial groups, specifically African Americans. German soldiers were drawn

with “barbaric” features meant to specifically resemble anti-black propaganda from the 1880s

and 1890s.9 In order to categorize “African Americans as sub-human, ape-like beasts,” artists

drew racial caricatures that relied heavily on “unsightly exaggerations and distortions of the

human body.”10 Propaganda artists specifically exaggerated the “lips” and “‘bug eyes’” of their

characters in order to “simianize” them.11 These same techniques were then overlaid onto

caricatures of the German “Hun” in 1918 in an attempt to inform viewers that the “savagery and

bestiality” associated with African Americans was applicable to the Germans as well.12

7 Wayne Martin Mellinger, “Postcards from the Edge of Color Line: Images of African Americans in Popular

Culture, 1893-1917,” Symbolic Interaction 15, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 419. 8 Mellinger, “Postcards from the Edge,” 417. 9 Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the ‘Hun’ in Britain, North America,

Australia, and Beyond,” in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 75. 10 Mellinger, “Postcards from the Edge,” 417. 11 Mellinger, “Postcards from the Edge, 419. 12 Mellinger, “Postcards from the Edge,” 417.

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These racialized techniques not only helped justify American entrance into World War I

but also demonstrated that propaganda artists could racialize an enemy of white, European

descent. Racialization in World War I posters sold the image of a brutal, non-white enemy to the

American public by insisting that the vilified Germans were primitive brutes looking to destroy

American democracy. Posters from 1917 and 1918, after the American entrance into World War

I, relied heavily on racialization to “other” German soldiers. Images of Germans as snarling,

ravenous monsters with darkened faces and yellowed eyes played off of American fears of the

“Asiatic Hun” and the “savagery of the primitive tribes of Africa.”13 Henry R. Hopps’s poster

was one such image, representing the German race as one massive gorilla, wearing a Prussian

military helmet and the Kaiser’s mustache, stomping his way into the United States. (Figure 1)

The beast carried a bloodied club reading “Kultur” in one hand and a terrified, half-naked, white

woman in the other. The caption “Destroy This Mad Brute” and the image of the German as an

ape clawing at the bare-breasted young woman “was used at once to depict a German enemy and

to raise the specter of miscegenation and racial tension,” while also demonstrating that a white,

European enemy could be depicted as a non-white invader.14

During the Second World War, however, Nazi caricatures did not include the same

racialized features as the caricatures of the Japanese or the German caricatures from the previous

World War. American artists drew Nazis instead as cartoonish figures with disproportionate

limbs and facial features, none of which drew upon the previously established racialized

imagery. Propaganda images framed Hitler and the Nazis as distant, faceless monsters lurking in

the shadow of the swastika or as buffoonish clowns incapable of threatening American

13 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 68. 14 Harry R. Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute, 1918, poster, Library of Congress, accessed October 21, 2019,

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010652057/; Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 69.

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institutions.15 These themes were popularized by images such as the General Motors

Corporation’s “Keep ‘Em Firing!” series, which showed Hitler looking clueless in nothing but

his coat and swastika underwear.16 (Figure 13) Propaganda scholar Cécile Vallée argued in her

2012 article “Monsters and Clowns Incorporated” that Americans, after encountering

propaganda that depicted Hitler as either a lunatic or a fool, developed a consistent mental image

of Hitler and all Nazis as lumbering, ignorant monsters. There was no discussion, however, of

how these images compared to the images of World War I German soldiers as non-white

invaders, or to the hyper-racialized caricatures of the Nazi’s contemporary Japanese

counterparts. The Nazis were no longer framed as “Asiatic or apelike” Huns, even though

German soldiers of the past and Japanese soldiers of the present were characterized as exactly

that.17

The posters submitted to the MoMA exemplified this nationwide shift away from

racializing German soldiers. The two hundred winning submissions characterized the Germans

as dangerous, violent enemies but not as animalistic monsters. No winning poster relied on

racialization as a vilification technique for the Germans, not even the grand-prize winning

caricature of a Nazi officer. (Figure 3) This conscious submission and selection of posters no

longer featuring the barbaric, ape-like images of Germans acted as a small-scale representation

of the shift in propagandistic techniques utilized by American artists; what art was deemed

15 Cécile Vallée, “Monsters and Clowns Incorporated: The Representations of Adolf Hitler in British and American

WWII Propaganda Posters,” Revue Lisa / Lisa E-journal 10, no. 1 (March 2012): 126-159. For propaganda

depicting Nazis as faceless monsters, see example images including: Stefan Dohanos, Award for Careless Talk:

Don’t Discuss Troop Movements, Ship Sailings, War Equipment, 1944, poster, University of North Texas, accessed

October 21, 2019, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc560/. For propaganda depicting Nazis as

buffoonish clowns, see example image including: General Motors Corporation, Oldsmobile Division, Let’s Catch

Him With His ‘Panzers’ Down: We Will- If We Keep ‘Em Firing! 1943, poster, University of Minnesota, accessed

October 21, 2019, https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll208:4421. 16 General Motors Corp., Let’s Catch Him With His ‘Panzers’ Down! 17 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 75.

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successful at the MoMA was indicative of what art was being popularized nationwide. The

National War Posters Competition set the standard for what propaganda around the country

should look like, and artists around the nation dutifully mimicked the competition’s themes when

creating new anti-Nazi posters.

As exemplified by the 1942 National War Posters Competition, American artists actively

refrained from racializing Nazi soldiers in state-sanctioned propaganda, despite continuing to

racialize the Japanese. This intentional absence of German racialization not only encouraged

artists to use other techniques to vilify the Nazis, but also resulted in the American public

blaming exclusively the Nazi leadership and ideology, not the race of German people, for the

Second World War.

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Historiography

The study of American propaganda spans decades and includes a significant body of

work. Multiple volumes by various authors have outlined the importance of twentieth-century

American propaganda in advertising conscription, selling war bonds, and in competing with the

growing Nazi propaganda industry.18 Scholars have detailed nearly every aspect of the American

propaganda industry, from its inception in the 1910s to its domination over European propaganda

markets in the 1940s and its role in creating new forms of psychological warfare.19 Monographs

such as Alan Axelrod’s Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda address

how the American propaganda industry not only grew at a furious pace during the First World

War but completely monopolized the visual arts industry.20 Scholars such as historian Terence H.

Qualter also argue that propaganda not only became one of the most powerful tools of

nationalism and patriotism in the United States but its own form of warfare between nations.21

Many other texts, such as Anthony Rhode’s Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion During World

War II, support these arguments and offer further evidence of the psychological impact

propaganda had on the creation of national identity and the identification of international

enemies.22 These scholars, however, have addressed the significant changes in propaganda itself;

18 For propaganda’s role in advertising the draft and selling war bonds, see: Anthony Rhodes, Propaganda: The Art

of Persuasion in World War II, ed. Victor Margolin (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1976); George H.

Roeder Jr., The Censored War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of

America: Propaganda and Democracy 1941 to 1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). For American

propaganda competing with Nazi propaganda, see: Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s

Crusade Against Nazi Germany (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). 19 For the inception of American propaganda, see: Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American

Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For domination over European markets, see: John B. Hench,

Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the era of World War II (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). For propaganda as a form of psychological warfare, see: Terence H. Qualter,

Propaganda and Psychological Warfare (New York: Random House, 1962). 20 Axelrod, Selling the Great War. 21 Qualter, Propaganda and Psychological Warfare. 22 Rhodes, Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion in World War II.

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namely, the choice of how to portray the figure of the enemy. The way that German figures,

highly racialized in the First World War, were not racialized in the Second, is a striking and

crucial, if often overlooked, transformation shift in the propaganda of the United States in

wartime.

Scholarship concerning 1914 to 1918 does examine the proliferation of racialized

German caricature but fails to carry this study over into World War II propaganda. Posters

depicting the terrifying Prussian madman, with his “ape-like” features meant to liken him to

caricatures of “primitive…[Africans]” dominated the American propaganda industry.23 By

likening the Germans to non-white racial groups, American artists successfully racialized a

white, European population and could thereby use that racialization to convince the public of the

severity of the “German threat.”24 As historian Nicolette Gullace argues throughout her essay,

titled “Barbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the ‘Hun’ in Britain, North America,

Australia, and Beyond,” it was commonplace to racialize the Germans in order to remove them

from the realm of humanity, thereby justifying any violent actions taken against them.25 The

basis for German racialization, and the study of such racialization, already exists in scholarship

concerning the First World War. When examining propaganda from the Second World War,

however, there is no scholarship to explain why these previous characterizations of the Germans

were not again used. The caricatures simply disappeared.

This is more puzzling given the scholarship concerning American propaganda and race

during the Second World War. Historian John Dower’s influential monograph, War Without

Mercy, outlines how the conflict in the Pacific Theater was intentionally made into a race war by

23 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 68. 24 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 71. 25 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 74.

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American artists creating racialized caricatures of the Japanese.26 American artists consciously

racialized the Japanese to the point of dehumanization, validating any violent action taken

against the “[Tokyo] Kids,” as such actions appeared necessary to protect the United States from

the animalistic Japanese threat.27 Dower’s monograph recognizes racial caricature’s important

place in American World War II propaganda and therefore serves as an important

historiographical reference for my own research.

This thesis explores the under-discussed connection between World War I scholarship on

the evolution of German caricature, Dower’s discussion of race as a vilification technique in

propaganda, and scholarship on World War II that catalogs the impacts of the propaganda

industry on the public. World War I scholars demonstrate how German soldiers were racialized

during the First World War, but why is there no scholarship on why this racialization disappears

during the Second World War? Dower crafts a compelling argument about Japanese

racialization, but why is there no mention of the subsequent absence of German or Nazi

racialization? World War II scholars detail the wide scope of the propaganda industry and its

ability to “sell war” to the American public, but why is there no discussion of the specific impact

German or Nazi imagery had on American citizens?28 This thesis thus posits that, despite a

plethora of scholarship, the overall study of American propaganda remains incomplete. By

examining posters from the 1942 MoMA exhibit alongside posters from digitized library

archives nationwide, this thesis argues that understanding the evolution of racialized German

26 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). 27 Office of War Information, Tokyo Kid. 28 For propaganda as a method to “sell” war, see: Axelrod, Selling the Great War; Hench, Books as Weapons;

Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors.

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caricature is crucial to understanding what impact racialized propaganda had on the American

public during World War II.

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Chapter I

Artists for Victory, Inc., an organization meant to unify American propaganda artists

under a single, state-sponsored association, created the National War Posters Competition.

Artists for Victory, Inc. worked directly with “the Office of War Information, the Office of

Civilian Defense, the Treasury Department, and the War Production Board” to create a national

collection of art and artists, all of which would represent the propaganda interests of the United

States.29 The organization wanted to “serve…as a clearing house for all artists throughout the

country” who were in search of work in 1942.30 In order to ensure that Artists for Victory, Inc.

represented this coalition of successful artists, submitters to the competition were required to

“[become] members of Artists for Victory.”31 By welcoming submitters into their ranks, the

artist association crafted itself into an institution that created art directly reflective of the interests

of federal propaganda institutions.

The goal of the competition was to identify the most compelling propaganda techniques

that successfully represented the interests of the United States government, and then to circulate

those techniques nationwide. The competition’s judges, employed by Artists for Victory, Inc.,

the Office of Civilian Defense, the Office of War Information, the Council for Democracy, and

the MoMA itself, were tasked with selecting the posters that best exemplified these goals.32The

initial call for submissions directly stated that the “major [aim]” of the competition was the

“development of a direct and powerful technique for war poster work.”33 The call for

29 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition: America Needs Fighting Posters,” National War

Poster Competition, August 24, 1942, 2. 30 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2. 31 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 3. 32 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 3. 33 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2.

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submissions also outlined its specific desire for “fighting posters” that would “support” troops

overseas and bolster the moral of citizens “on the home front.”34

Artists of all types, from both professional and amateur backgrounds, submitted work for

the competition. The MoMA’s official press release regarding the competition proudly stated

that “many commercial artists and easel artists entered and many entries were received from non-

professional artists, among them high school children, elderly refugees and citizens in many

walks of life.”35 The press release also touted the “unusual number of women” that entered the

competition, “thirty-seven percent” of the entries, as well as the forty two posters submitted by

members of the Armed Forces.36 In the minds of the competition’s creators, the submissions

represented “a cross section of the country,” meaning that the artwork put on display would

likewise represent the interests of the overall United States.

Poster submissions were divided up into eight distinct categories, each with its own

theme and submission requirements, which depicted the war effort both on the home front and

overseas. The submission divisions were: “Theme A—Production; Theme B—War Bonds;

Theme C—The Nature of the Enemy; Theme D—Loose Talk; Theme E—Slave World—or Free

World?; Theme G—‘Deliver Us From Evil’; Theme H—Sacrifice.”37 These themes directed

artists to imagine what Americans struggled with at home, what the cost of war would be, and

what terrors soldiers may see overseas, but it was “Theme C—The Nature of the Enemy” that

directly called upon artists to create horrific caricatures of the United States’ enemies.38

34 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2. 35 Author Unknown, “Great Number of Entries.” 36 Author Unknown, “Great Number of Entries.” 37 Matlack Price, “2224 War Posters: A Review of the National War Poster Competition,” American Artists 6, no. 10

(December 1942): 5. The punctuation is printed here as it appeared in Price’s review. 38 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 4.

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This category instructed artists to show the “menace and atrocity” of the Axis, making it

the artists’ job to craft the most horrifying, fear-inspiring image of the Nazis and Japanese

possible.39 The call for submissions insisted that creating such terrifying images was “a job that

only an artist can do,” and furthermore, that audiences needed a “clear picture in [their] minds of

this menace to [their] lives.”40 The images submitted to this category needed to draw upon the

“vicious, treacherous, and brutish character of the enemy,” depicting the Axis “as the Beast-At-

Large.”41

The references to beasts and brutes, to vicious creatures and menaces, rang reminiscent of

the language used in previous World War I posters which used racialization as a technique for

vilifying German soldiers. Propaganda images such as Harry R. Hopps’s “Destroy This Mad

Brute” poster (Figure 1) and Frederick Strothmann’s “Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds”

(Figure 2) used the themes of treachery and brutishness in order to dehumanize German

soldiers.42 The German “Hun” had been depicted as a monstrous ape with extended jowls, sharp

fangs, and wild eyes, or as a man with a blackened face and bloodied fingers, suggesting that he

had been engaged in slaughter like an animal, ripping his victims apart with his bare hands.

These features purposefully likened German soldiers to racial caricatures of

“primitive…[Africans,]” who were considered beast-like, subhuman monsters with animalistic

qualities.43 These First World War images, created over twenty years before the call for

39 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 7. 40 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2. 41 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 7. 42 Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute; Frederick Strothmann, Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds, 1918, University

of North Texas, accessed February 1, 2020, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc29415/. 43 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 68.

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submissions appeared, racialized the enemy in order to demonstrate the same “menace and

atrocity” that the MoMA’s call for submissions demanded years later.44

Despite this direct call for monstrous images that could have easily recalled techniques

used during the First World War, the images of Nazis submitted to the MoMA competition of

November 1942 distinctly lacked any racialized features. Carl Koehler and Victor Ancona’s

prize-winning poster for “The Nature of the Enemy” theme featured a Nazi officer staring

menacingly back at the viewer. Audiences immediately noticed the scene of a lynching reflected

in the Nazi’s monocle, but only after taking a second glance would they take note of the officer’s

disproportionate nose and tightly pursed lips that frowned back at the viewer.45 (Figure 3)

Though the poster featured the officer with a distorted face and cruel gaze, these features made

him look like “a clever Hollywood caricature,” not a racialized monster.46 While the Nazi’s

elongated nose and staunch lips were comically oversized, those were not racialized features.

There was no visual history of Germans with long noses or Germans with frowning mouths that

suggested an instantly recognizable, race-based stereotype. The image also lacked any darkened

coloration around the face, any reference to apes, or any implication that this enemy is the same

“mad brute” the United States battled decades earlier.47 In an image that could have easily used

the same racialization techniques as the World War I posters, artists Carl Koehler and Victor

Ancona opted to draw a Nazi in a cartoonish and even caricatured, yet distinctly non-racialized,

manner.

44 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 7. 45 Carl Koheler and Victor Ancona, This is the Enemy (no. 46), 1942, University of North Texas, accessed October

17, 2019, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc413/. 46 Price, “2224 War Posters,” 9. 47 Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute.

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This decision appeared conscious, given that other submissions preserved, if not directly

copied, other popular images from the Great War. Lionel S. Reiss’s submission to the “Nature of

the Enemy” category featured a bloodied knife smashing through a window, propelled forward

by a swastika-wearing hand.48 (Figure 4) This image appeared almost identical to Joseph L.

Grosse’s “Help Us Crush the Menace of the Seas!” poster from World War I (Figure 5), which

also showed a bloodied knife rising from the clenched fist of a German soldier.49 The images

were nearly identical, and their messages about the German threat the same: a German attack

could come from anywhere, and Americans would not be their first victims. These posters,

published twenty five years apart, used the same images to communicate the same messages

about the same nation. The precedent for MoMA submissions to mirror images from World War

I existed in posters like Reiss’s, and yet even with this propaganda model in place, no

competition artist used racialization in their winning contest submissions.

Even while utilizing World War I propaganda styles, other artists appeared to consciously

remove any racialized features from their caricatures of Nazis. Joyce Wilson’s submission to the

“Nature of the Enemy” category featured a crouching German soldier, leering over the viewer,

and the implicit American public (Figure 6), in the same manner as Strothmann’s “Beat Back the

Hun” image.50 (Figure 2) Both posters insisted that the German soldier, with his weapon in hand

and his gaze turned towards the viewer, posed a threat to the United States. It was only the World

War I poster, however, that convinced the audience of this by darkening the features,

48 Lionel S. Reiss, This is the Enemy (no. 30), 1942, Pritzker Military Museum and Library, accessed February 12,

2020, http://digitalarchives.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16630coll2/id/1503. 49 Joseph L. Grosse, Help Us Crush the Menace of the Seas! 1917, Ball State University, accessed January 20, 2020,

https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/WWIPosters/id/1167/. 50 Joyce Wilson, This is the Enemy (no. Unknown), 1942, poster, Museum of Modern Art, accessed January 20,

2020. Wilson’s poster is printed in Price, “2224 War Posters,” 8; Strothmann, Beat Back the Hun with Liberty

Bonds.

19

accentuating the jowl, and bloodying the hands of the imposing German soldier. Strothmann’s

poster made the German’s face entirely black, with the only color coming from his menacing

green eyes. The soldier was also reaching towards the viewer with large, beastly, bloodied hands;

an image that, when coupled with the over-accentuation of the soldier’s jowl, made him appear

ape-like and brutal. Wilson and Strothmann’s posters mirrored each other in style and message,

yet Wilson’s MoMA submission image distinctly lacked any of these same attempts at German

racialization. Instead, the face of the German soldier is white, shrouded only by his helmet, with

no over-accentuated facial characteristics. The soldier’s hands were not visible, nor were any of

his defining facial features. The MoMA submission dropped any animalistic qualities previously

represented in art from twenty-four years prior, demonstrating how even images inspired by

posters from the previous war rejected racialization as a propagandistic technique.

Other images avoided showing Nazi faces at all, and instead relied on fear of the

unknown to shock and anger audiences. Posters featuring no image of a Nazi other than a hand,

helmet, or boot marked with a swastika, still labeled “This is the Enemy,” implied that the

German threat was better imagined by horrified audiences than put to paper by an artist. Any

racial caricature was replaced with the well-shined heel of a Nazi boot tromping over a burning

American encampment (Figure 7) or a human skull wearing a Nazi cap.51 (Figure 8) Several of

these images coupled this faceless depiction with implications of sacrilege, as the swastika-

marked hand clawed at a cross (Figure 9), shattered a stained glass window (Figure 4), or

51 For posters of Nazi boots, see example images: Charles T. Allenbrook, Deliver Us From Evil (no. 49), 1942,

poster Library of Virginia, accessed February 20, 2020,

http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs/out_of_the_box/2015/05/08/artists-for-victory/. For posters of human skulls

with Nazi caps, see example images: Ben Nason, This is the Enemy (no. 28), 1942, poster Library of Virginia,

accessed February 20, 2020, http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs/out_of_the_box/2015/05/08/artists-for-victory/;

Mary Stewart, This is the Enemy (no. 48), 1942, poster Library of Virginia, accessed February 20, 2020,

http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs/out_of_the_box/2015/05/08/artists-for-victory/.

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stabbed a dagger through the Holy Bible.52 (Figure 10) The implication of blasphemy, the

skeletal images associated with death, and the fear of what monster would exist on the other end

of an outstretched hand or marching boot were far more popular than any image of a German

soldier’s face. These artistic techniques removed any potential for German racialization and

implied that an enemy that once needed to be seen to be feared was more frightening in the

audience’s imagination than on a printed poster.

Submissions featuring Japanese soldiers, however, demonstrated that it was entirely

possible to submit an entry to the MoMA contest that insisted the “Nature of the Enemy” was a

racial one. Several submissions to “Theme C” featured Japanese soldiers assaulting American

women, either with outstretched animalistic claws or with the corpse of their victims slung

across their backs as the soldier crouched in a gorilla-like stance.53 (Figure 11) Racial

characteristic of the Japanese soldiers became over-accentuated, with artists focusing on the

narrowed, alien-like eyes, snarling lips, and exposed “fangs” of the enemy.

These submissions, sent in to the same category as the images of German soldiers, relied

heavily on race to bolster the themes of “menace and atrocity.”54 It was not as though the MoMA

had banned racial images from its competition; several of the racialized anti-Japanese

submissions were among the two hundred prize winners. The submission requirements for

52 For images of Nazi hands and a cross, see example image: Clarence West, This is the Enemy (no. 44), 1942,

poster, Library of Virginia, accessed February 15, 2020,

https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/files/original/ed78d1cc2e9b063dca08eb6446bd7ba5.jpg. For shattering stained

glass, see example image: Reiss, This is the Enemy (no. 30). For stabbing the Bible, see example image: Barbara

Marks, This is the Enemy (no. 76), 1942, poster New Hampshire State Library, accessed October 15, 2019,

https://www.nh.gov/nhsl/ww2/ww35.html. 53 For images of Japanese soldiers with claws, see example image: Harley Melzian, This is the Enemy (no. 31),

1942, poster, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed February 20, 2020,

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn612193. For images of Japanese soldier with female corpse, see

example image: United States War Department, This is the Enemy, 1942, poster, Hawaii Public Radio, accessed

February 20, 2020, https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/face-enemy#stream/0. 54 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 7.

21

“Theme C” even directly called for posters that depicted “Jap atrocities on women; Jap atrocities

on prisoners of war; using them for bayonet practice.”55 This racialized language and the

propaganda produced in response to it was celebrated by the competition judges. It was just

racialized images of Germans that failed to be among the winning selections.56

No submission that depicted a German soldier relied on this racialization, despite both the

precedent of propaganda from World War I and the contemporary style of anti-Japanese

propaganda, making the absence of such technique appear intentional. Only submissions that

characterized the Germans as a fearsome, yet non-racial enemy, or as a faceless threat, were

selected as winners for the competition. Through their selection process, the MoMA judges made

it clear that the “Nature of the Enemy” in Germany was vile and dangerous, but not in a

racialized manner. Gone were the images of apes and monsters. The Nazis, instead, became

threats to the United States without the consideration of their race, and it was necessary for the

winning contest submissions to reflect this thematic change.

By selecting these non-racialized images as contest winners, the national organizations

supporting the competition created an elite group of images meant to reflect overall American

propaganda standards. As the National War Posters Competition submissions demonstrated, it

was no longer in the interest of the United States to portray the entire German population as

brutish or beast-like but rather to focus on the looming danger of Nazism and its leadership.

Propaganda from around the country began to reflect this change in national attitude in the years

55 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 8. 56 After contacting the National Gallery of Art, and after several attempts to contact the MoMA, I was unable to

obtain a complete printed list of all 2,224 submissions. The losing images may have included racialized German

caricatures, and those images would have provided strong evidence for the idea that the MoMA judges consciously

rejected any images that racialized the Germans. This is, however, merely a hypothesis. It is possible that a

comprehensive list of all the submissions no longer exists, as many of the institutions that displayed the exhibit after

it left the MoMA only have a list of the posters that went on display to the public, or only have records of the nine

top prize winning posters.

22

following the competition, signifying to the American public that it was time for a change in

attitudes towards the German people.

23

Chapter II

The MoMA’s National War Posters Competition set the standard for what the most

effective propaganda techniques would be from 1942 through the end of the war. The nine prize

winners, including Carl Koheler and Victor Ancona’s “This is the Enemy” poster (Figure 3)

which won the top prize, demonstrated to audiences that the new standard for propaganda posters

was one of implicit fears and demonizing Nazi leadership, not of racializing the entirety of the

German people.57 The goal of the competition had been to develop “a direct and powerful

technique for war poster work”.58 With that goal completed, the prize winning posters were sent

on a tour around the nation to both inspire audiences and instruct other propaganda artists in how

to create new posters. The competition successfully isolated what the Artists for Victory, Inc.

believed to be the most effective propaganda techniques. Once the best techniques were

identified, they were circulated and reproduced by the larger propaganda industry, with artists

eager to replicate these new artistic standards.

The 1942 competition reflected a nationwide phenomenon of artist mobilization. The

competition’s call for submissions insisted that the United States housed “overwhelming art

resources” that could be “applied usefully to winning the war.”59 Just as the competition’s press

release touted its ability to represent “a cross section of the country” through artists and

submissions, the broader propaganda industry sought to employ artists from around the nation in

a collective propaganda campaign.60 Artists produced not only submissions for the National War

Posters Competition, but war-time images for every street corner, newsstand, and billboard

57 Price, “2224 War Posters,” 7. 58 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2. 59 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2. 60 Author Unknown, “Great Number of Entries.”

24

across the country. Every capable artist was put to work, creating as many pro-American and

anti-Axis posters as possible.

National organizations called upon these artists to distribute propaganda across the

country, creating a specific form of propaganda that was directly tied to the interests of the

broader United States. Departments involved in propaganda creation and circulation included the

Office of War Information, Office of Emergency Management, and the United States

Government Printing Office.61 These organizations directly oversaw artists under their employ,

making the art they produced different from newspaper comics, freelance work, or other

“unsupervised” artistic publications. Artists not employed by federal agencies could create

images and dialogue freely, with no restrictions or guidelines.

Artists employed by the Office of War Information and other agencies, however, had to

adhere to the predetermined guidelines of the greater propaganda industry. Federal propaganda

agencies instructed artists to produce images that depicted the “defeat of fascism” as the only

way to protect American “ideologies and beliefs.”62 The fascist ideology was meant to be the

primary target of propaganda artists and their posters. These agencies did not instruct artists to

target a specific people or race. The Office of War Information even specifically stated that “[the

United States did] not regard the German and Japanese people as our enemies, only their

leaders.”63 All art produced and printed by federal agencies needed to adhere to these guidelines.

61 For images created for the Office of War Information and the Office for Emergency Management, see the

National Archives sample collection: Office for Emergency Management, World War II Posters, 1942-1945,

National Archives Catalog, accessed February 18, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513498. For images created

for the United States Government Printing Office, see sample image: Lawrence Beall Smith, Don’t Let That Shadow

Touch Them: Buy War Bonds, 1942, poster, University of North Texas, accessed February 10, 2020,

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc205/. 62 Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 4. 63 Roeder Jr., The Censored War, 87.

25

This “strict government control” over the visual arts therefore ensured that the agencies circulate

images which accurately represented the interests of the broader United States.64

Private companies, such as General Motors Corporation and Wickwire Spence Steel

Company, also employed propaganda artists.65 While these corporations were not required to

follow the same propaganda standards set by the Office of War Information and other federal

agencies, many of the images created by private companies were later reprinted by federal

organizations. This reprinting suggested that despite being privately commissioned, the

propaganda produced by artists in war-time industries was comparable to the art produced

federally. Corporate-produced propaganda still reflected the interests of the United States as a

political entity, and could therefore be examined alongside state-sponsored propaganda.

Across the United States, organizations employed artists for the same purposes outlined

in the National War Poster Competition’s call for submissions. The 1942 MoMA exhibit had

encouraged artists to create posters that were “simple…direct….[and expressed] the starkness of

the issues” at hand.66 The broader propaganda industry created posters that followed suit. Artists

across the country created stark, startling images that inspired the American public to take up

arms against the “enemies of democracy” with simple slogans such as “buy war bonds” or

“avoid careless talk.”67 The art produced nationwide mimicked the art produced for the MoMA,

which meant mimicking art that rejected German racialization.

64 Roeder Jr., The Censored War, 8. 65 Hereafter, General Motors Corporation will be referred to as General Motors. For posters created by General

Motors, see sample image: General Motors Corp., Let’s Catch Him With His ‘Panzers’ Down! For posters created

by Wickwire Spence Steel Company, see sample image: Boris Artzybasheff, Wire With A Kick, 1942, poster,

University of North Texas, accessed November 15, 2019, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc596/. 66 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2. 67 For posters with “buy war bonds” captions, see sample image: Harriet Nadeau, Deliver Us From Evil: Buy War

Bonds, 1943, poster, University of North Texas, accessed February 15, 2020,

26

Anti-German posters produced nationwide mirrored the anti-German posters submitted to

the National War Posters Competition. Posters from the competition may have created

cartoonish renderings of German figures but never relied on racializing their features in order to

vilify them. Posters nationwide followed suit, painting any depiction of Nazi faces as clownish or

menacing but not in a racialized way. The 1942 MoMA submissions had also tended to remove

German faces altogether and replace direct human depictions of Germans with shadows and

symbolic depictions of Nazis or Nazism, in particular using the symbol of the swastika. Art

nationwide did the same, using the “fear of the unknown” to alert audiences of the Nazi threat.

Propaganda nationwide did not use racialization as a vilification technique, demonstrating that

the MoMA exhibit represented the overall American propaganda trends during World War II.

Artists nationwide did depict German faces as menacing and dangerous but did so

without racializing any of the German’s features. Federal agencies commissioned several posters

featuring a German soldier looking threateningly out over the audience, often clutching a weapon

or aiming a rifle at the viewer. One such poster, created by Glenn Ernest Grohe for the Office of

War Information, depicted nothing more than the eyes of a German soldier staring at the viewer

from beneath the darkness of his helmet.68 (Figure 12) The weapon in the soldier’s hand, coupled

with the caption “He Is Watching You,” reminded viewers that the German threat was eminent

and frightening. This poster elicited such a response without racializing any of the soldier’s

facial features. The only distinguishable feature on the soldier’s face were his eyes which, while

eerie and piercing, were not yellowed, narrowed, or stylized to represent an animal as they would

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc565/. For posters with “avoid careless talk” captions, see sample

image: Dohanos, Award for Careless Talk. 68 Glenn Ernest Grohe, He’s Watching You, 1942, poster, National Archives Catalog, accessed March 5, 2020,

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7387549.

27

have been during the First World War. Grohe’s World War II poster even featured the soldier

wearing a commonplace German stahlhelm, or steel helmet, introduced in 1916, and popularized

to American viewers by depictions of German soldiers during the First World War. This

reference to World War I uniforms could have directly linked this image to hyper-racialized

images from the First World War, yet there was no racialization present in the Office of War

Information’s poster. There was no link between this image and World War I posters that called

from the destruction of “brutes,” beasts, or monsters.

Grohe’s poster actually more closely resembled the 1942 posters from the MoMA, which

also refused to racialize German faces. Grohe styled his poster in a strikingly similar fashion to

that of Joyce Wilson’s “This is the Enemy” poster. (Figure 6) Wilson’s poster also featured a

German soldier with an obscured face, looking at the viewer through the sights of his weapon.69

Both Grohe and Wilson’s poster used the same technique of obstruction to remove any

distinguishable facial features from their German figures; any features that remained, such as the

eyes, were distinctly not racialized. The two posters were closely aligned in their intention to

portray the Nazi threat as weaponized and dangerous, and to keep any references to racialization

out of their German representations. The only thing threatening about the German soldier in

either image was his general presence, not any dehumanized or monstrous features.

These images, and others like them from around the country, suggested that American

artists were intentionally no longer racializing the commonplace German soldier. Where posters

from World War I had depicted the everyday soldier as black-faced with extended jowls and

bloodied, ape-like hands (Figure 2), World War II posters no longer focused on the appearance

69 Wilson, This is the Enemy (no. Unknown.)

28

of the common enemy soldier. The common German man (Figure 12) was shrouded in darkness,

overcome by his own shadow, suggesting that his appearance was not what made him

frightening, but his commitment to an all-encompassing darkness—an ideology that swallowed

him whole. These posters suggested that it was a German soldier’s ideology and loyalty to a

dangerous leadership that made him threatening, not his race.70 It was no longer common, nor

acceptable, to create artistic caricatures that blamed an entire race of common men for the

actions of ideological fanatics.

The more common German “caricature” figure was not a racialized, hulking beast, but

instead a cartoonish Adolf Hitler. Cutting an easily recognizable figure with his military uniform

and short, dark mustache, Hitler appeared as a representation of all Nazis, replacing any “mad

brutes” with his own clownish or cartoonish face.71 American artists rendered Hitler buffoonish

and infantile, which General Motor’s commissioned series of posters demonstrated. These

posters, which the Office of War Information later reprinted, showed Hitler with his pants pulled

down around his ankles (Figure 13), his nose stuffed up by an American worker’s hand (Figure

14), or his scrunched face stuck between pliers.72 (Figure 15) In these various images, Hitler was

always drawn in a cartoonish style, with a disproportionately long nose, a rounded, infant-like

face, and wide, unwitting eyes, none of which were characteristics of a pre-established racial

stereotype. The various captions were puns with German punchlines such as “Let’s Catch Them

70 For more posters, see sample image: Adolph Treidler, Loose Talk Can Cause This, 1942, poster, Victoria and

Albert Museum, accessed March 15, 2020, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O122431/loose-talk-can-cause-this-

poster-treidler-adolph/. 71 Vallée, “Monsters and Clowns Incorporated.” 72 For images of Hitler with his pants down, see example image: General Motors Corp., Let’s Catch Him With His

‘Panzers’ Down!. For images of Hitler with his nose stuffed, see example image: General Motors Corp., Oldsmobile

Division, Give Him A ‘Putsch’ In The Puss!, 1942, poster, University of Minnesota, accessed January 18, 2020,

https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll208:2511. For images of Hitler with his face between pliers, see

example image: General Motors Corp., Oldsmobile Division, Put Him In A “Pincers!”, 1942, poster, University of

Minnesota, accessed January 18, 2020, https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll208:983.

29

With Their ‘Panzers’ Down!” or “Give Him A ‘Putsch’ In The Puss.”73 These captions not only

took German words that many Americans may have heard in more threatening contexts, like in

reference to Hitler’s infamous Beer Hall Putsch or German Panzer tanks, and made them into

laughable punchlines, but subsequently made Hitler into a punchline as well. There was no

reference to animals or apes in these images; Hitler was meant to be a pushover and a clown, not

a dominant, racialized threat.

Hitler remained the representative caricature for the German state even in images where

American artists portrayed the Nazi threat as violent and dangerous, not laughable. In contrast to

the images that depicted him as a fool and a pushover, other posters painted Hitler as a maniac

and a murderer, highlighting his crazed eyes and over-expressive face. A poster from the Office

of Emergency Management even showed Hitler charging towards the viewer with an unsheathed

knife, ready to attack.74 (Figure 16) This image, in contrast to the clownish posters produced by

General Motors, illustrated Hitler as a deranged lunatic, ready to strike if given the chance. The

poster warned the American public that if they did not continue to push for victory, whether that

be on the home-front or overseas, Hitler would be at their doorstep. The monstrous Hitler in this

image represented the entire German threat, taking the focus away from the danger of the

everyday soldier and placing it all on the head of the Nazi party.

None of these images, however, framed Hitler as a racial or ethnic “other.” The artistic

styles were ghoulish parodies of a real figure, but no image accentuated any of Hitler’s features

that would have been tied to previous racial caricatures from World War I. His lips and mouth

73 General Motors Corp., Let’s Catch Him With His ‘Panzers’ Down!; General Motors Corp., Give Him A ‘Putsch’

In The Puss. 74 United States Office for Emergency Management, Don’t Kid Yourself…It’s Up To You: Stop Him!, 1942, poster,

National Archives Catalog, accessed March 5, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/534297.

30

were not elongated or over-accentuated, there were no dark hues around his face, and there was

no blood on his hands to suggest animal-like behavior.75 Hitler’s pose in the “Don’t Kid

Yourself” poster (Figure 16) was even more shockingly similar to that of the ape in Hopps’s

“Destroy This Mad Brute” poster (Figure 1) from World War I, yet Hitler’s features did not

resemble an ape or a monster.76 Hitler’s eyes were wide and terrifying, but not bulging out of his

skull the way the eyes on Hopps’s ape were. The lines in Hitler’s face were accentuated, but not

exaggerated. There was no coloring of the lips or eyes to suggest an animal-like appearance, and

though Hitler’s body was drawn purposefully darker than the background, his face remained

noticeably white. This image, and others like it, suggested that there was no need to vilify Hitler

through racialization, since a crazed Hitler was monster enough to frighten the American public

into action.

The abundance of Hitler imagery suggested that American artists had found a more

appropriate target for their propaganda portrayals, one that did not require them to racialize an

entire nation. Instead of creating a menacing caricature of the common man, artists could just use

Hitler to symbolize all the fear, destruction, and madness associated with Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s recognizable figure needed no racial stereotyping to be fearsome, nor did he require

stereotyping should artists decide to downplay his intellect or ability. Hitler alone was enough of

a caricature to represent the entire German state, and, as these images implied, was the individual

to blame for the Second World War. By producing propaganda that exclusively portrayed Hitler,

75 This strongly contrasted with European propaganda at the time, which used many of these racialization techniques

to turn Hitler into a primitive monster. The poster titled “Maneater,” produced in the United Kingdom in 1941,

showed Hitler gnawing on human bones labeled with the names of countries conquered by the Nazis. Hitler’s nails

were overgrown and bloodied, and his arms harried like that of a gorilla. This poster depicted Hitler as the kind of

“beast at large” that American artists had created in World War I, yet this depiction remained limited to Europe

during the Second World War. For the “Maneater” image, see: Stafford and Co, Ltd., Maneater, 1941, poster,

Australian War Museum, accessed October 21, 2019, https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1279285. 76 Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute.

31

artists did not need to racialize an entire nation in order to condemn one man for the horrors of

the war.

Propaganda posters from across the United States also relied on removing German faces

entirely and instead focused on using symbolism to represent the Nazi threat. Images from

around the nation showed Nazi symbols on knives, rings, and impending shadows of doom. A

poster commissioned by the United States Government Printing Office from artist Stephen

Dohanos showed a hand adorned by a swastika ring reaching out of a red background towards

the viewer, offering them an “Iron Cross military decoration” as an “award” for their “careless

talk.”77 (Figure 17) The swastika ring, coupled with the implication that the viewer’s “careless

talk” would be celebrated by the Nazis, elicited a fearful response comparable to, if not more

effective than, posters showing a cartoonish Nazi. Similarly, a poster created by the Office of

War Information pictured the bloodied hand of a conquered victim, stabbed through by a knife

also bearing a swastika.78 (Figure 18) The caption read “For the Conquered—Steel! Not Bread,”

implying that the swastika-emblazoned knife was all the viewer needed to see in order to

imagine the atrocities unfolding in Nazi-conquered nations. In these images it was Nazi symbols

and weaponry that were meant to terrify viewers, not a direct confrontation with the face of a

German soldier.

Other images focused less on weaponry and violence and more on the looming “shadow”

of an unknown-yet-terrifying enemy. These images, commissioned from Lawrence Beall Smith

for the United States Government Printing Office, showed frightened American children huddled

together, clutching their toys as a shadow in the shape of a swastika grew around them. (Figure

77 Dohanos, Award For Careless Talk. 78 United States Office for Emergency Management, For The Conquered—Steel! Not Bread, 1942, poster, National

Archives Catalog, accessed March 5, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513551.

32

19) The children, positioned momentarily outside the breadth of the shadow, stood above a

caption that warned: “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them.”79 It may be possible that this

poster alluded to the threat of the Nazi Luftwaffe bombings raids, as one of the American boys is

holding a fighter plane and looking up at the sky. The swastika shadow may have represented

both the terrifying Luftwaffe and Nazism as a whole; the direct fear of a bombing campaign was

demonstrated by the plane imagery, while the swastika symbolized Nazi ideology. This poster,

and others like it, captured the fear of an unseen enemy and fear of horrors to come.80

In these images there was no German face to racialize, demonstrating how state

sponsored art no longer relied on racialization as a vilification technique. The unknown

possibilities of Nazi violence in these posters inspired fear, not some caricature of a German ape.

Dohanos’s poster for the United States Government Printing Office did not show the caricatured

hand of a demon or monster reaching through the image to the viewer; it was the swastika ring

and Iron Cross that made the image threatening instead. Smith’s poster, similarly, relied on the

image of innocent children, threatened by the shadow of Nazism as an ideology, to frighten

viewers into action. The children were not frightened by a German man with over-exaggerated

racial features. The abundance of images that utilized these same visual techniques suggested

that racialization was no longer the most “direct and powerful technique for war poster work,”

but that eliciting the “fear of the unknown” was.81

These posters from across the country looked very similar to the winning submissions

from the 1942 MoMA competition, demonstrating that the MoMA posters were representative of

79 Smith, Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them. 80 For other posters with swastika imagery, see sample image: Nadeau, Deliver Us From Evil; United States Bureau

of Public Relations, The Knockout Blow Starts Here, Fellow Soldiers, 1942, poster, University of North Texas,

accessed March 14, 2020, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc197/. 81 Artists for Victory, Inc., “National War Posters Competition,” 2.

33

larger artistic trends. Clarence West’s winning “This is the Enemy” poster (Figure 10), featuring

a swastika-adorned hand stabbing a Bible against a bloody background, focused on Nazi

symbolism and weaponry in the same way as the “For the Conquered” poster (Figure 18) did.

Both posters focused on weaponry and the threat of incoming Nazi fascism, not some visible,

racialized enemy.

Posters from the MoMA and around the nation suggested a shift in American

propaganda’s intent, one that no longer blamed a group of people for the war, but rather an

ideology. Disaster, death, and doom were all represented by swastikas, not the faces of actual

German people, in posters from the 1942 competition and from federal agencies nationwide. The

swastika represented Nazism as an ideology, and that is what artists instructed the American

public to fear. American artists were no longer vilifying a nation or a people in these images, but

an ideology that had led a nation astray.

Artists nationwide did, however, continue to racialize Japanese soldiers. In these images,

Japanese soldiers appeared as animalistic, subhuman beasts with over-exaggerated racial

characteristics. Posters from the Office of War Information depicted a Japanese soldier with

yellowed skin, barred teeth, and overly-narrowed eyes with dialogue that read “Go Ahead, Please

– Take Day Off.”82 (Figure 20) The poster highlighted the racialized physical features of the

Japanese, which were commonly stereotyped in posters nationwide. Other images, such as the

Office for Emergency Management’s poster titled “Keep This Horror From Your Home,”

showed Japanese men with fangs, pursed red lips, and sinister claws grabbing white women by

82 United States Office for Emergency Management, Go Ahead, Please – Take Day Off, 1942, poster, National

Archives Catalog, accessed March 5, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513555.

34

the throat or jaw.83 (Figure 21) This poster intentionally shocked audiences due to the racialized

exaggerations that called upon fears of animalistic rape, brutishness, and destruction. It was these

images that “[raised] the specter of miscegenation and racial tension” more so than any image of

a Nazi soldier.84 American artists across the country continued to use racialization as a

vilification technique against the Japanese, despite not racializing German soldiers.

Racialized anti-Japanese propaganda found nationwide looked remarkably like art found

in the 1942 MoMA exhibit. The “Keep This Horror From Your Home” image (Figure 21) almost

identically mirrored the themes of Harley Melzian’s “This is the Enemy” poster, which featured

a sneering Japanese man dragging the limp body of a naked white woman.85 (Figure 11) Both

images turned Japanese soldiers into sinister, ape-like monsters, whose intentions were to assault

and mangle innocent American white women. If the 1942 MoMA exhibit identified the most

“direct and powerful techniques” for vilifying the enemy, then racialization appeared to be one

of those techniques when it was applied to specifically anti-Japanese posters. Both American

artists participating in the MoMA exhibit and those creating state-sponsored propaganda did not

hesitate to utilize racialization as a vilification technique against the Japanese.

Germans were often pictured alongside these grotesquely racialized caricatures of the

Japanese, though the German soldiers were not subject to the same style of caricature. Both

MoMA artists and state-sponsored artists demonstrated proficiency with using racialization as a

vilification technique, yet the faces of German soldiers remained unmarred by this artistic style,

when compared to the faces of the Japanese. An image from the United States Forest Service

83 United States Office for Emergency Management, Keep This Horror From Your Home, 1942, poster, National

Archives Catalog, accessed March 5, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/534105. 84 Gullace, “Barbaric Anti-Modernism,” 69. 85 United States War Department, This is the Enemy.

35

warned against forest fires by placing the giant heads of Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo over a

burning forest, with a caption underneath that read “Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon!”86

(Figure 22) Tojo’s over-racialization was apparent upon first glance, as his face was so distorted

by its yellow color, his over-pronounced teeth, and his narrowed eyes that he was nearly

unrecognizable. When examining Hitler’s face, however, there was no attempt made at

racialization. His features were cartoonish, disproportionate, and irregular, but there was no

animalistic quality to his face, nor was there any image of a brute or “beast at large.”

Another image from the Office of War Information showed an American factory worker

standing over his machines, while behind him a German soldier threatens to throw a plane at

him, and a Japanese soldier threatens to throw a tank. Both soldiers were shrouded in darkness

with only the whites of their eyes and teeth gleaming through the darkness.87 (Figure 23) Upon

further inspection, however, it is only the Japanese soldier that was hunched over like a monster,

with shoulders raised and teeth once again overly-pronounced in his sneer. Both soldiers

appeared threatening, but only the Japanese soldier was threatening because of his animalistic,

less-than-human appearance. Countless more images with this same dichotomy appeared across

the United States, pitting the American soldier against one racialized enemy and one non-

racialized enemy. Despite appearing side by side on posters, German soldiers did not receive the

same racialized treatment that their Japanese counterparts did, a trend true of art at the MoMA

and art produced around the country.

This is not to say that there were no images that racialized Nazi soldiers, but rather that

these images appeared so infrequently that German racialization could not have been a common

86 United States Forest Service, Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon. 87 Office for Emergency Management, They’re Closer Than You Think, 1942, poster, National Archives Catalog,

accessed March 5, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513559.

36

vilification technique. In 1942, the Office for Emergency Management published a poster titled

“Stop This Monster That Stops at Nothing. Produce to the Limit. This is Your War.”88 (Figure

24) The image showed a two-headed, broad-chested beast ripping apart the Statue of Liberty

with one hand and threatening an American worker with a bloodied knife in the other. One head

depicted a sneering caricature of a Japanese soldier, blood dropping from mouth, while the other

head depicted a fearsome, roaring, distinctly ape-like Adolf Hitler. The monster Hitler’s mouth

was turned into an open chasm filled with blood-dripping, animal-like fangs, his lips were

exaggerated and protruded, and the lines around his nose and mouth made his entire lower jaw

into the extended jowl of an animal.

There was no questioning that this image utilized themes from World War I posters to

create its “monster.” The bloodied knife in the creature’s right hand looked remarkably like the

bloody knife rising from the seas in Joseph L. Grosse’s “Help Us Crush the Menace of the Seas!”

poster from 1917. (Figure 5) The iron-fisted hand clutching the gauntlet may also call back to

World War I posters produced directly by Germany. The iron gauntlet was featured in pro-

German posters such as Lucian Bernhard’s poster “Das ist der Weg zum Frieden—die Feinde

wollen es so! (This is the way to peace—the enemy wills it so!)”89 (Figure 25) In a pro-German

context, the iron fist may have represented the resilience and “iron will” of the German people;

in this American, anti-German context, it may have been a warning about dangerous German

persistence. These World War I themes and images were front and center in the Office for War

88 Office for Emergency Management, Stop This Monster That Stops At Nothing. Produce To The Limit. This Is Your

War, 1942, poster, National Archives Catalog, accessed March 5, 2020, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/513557.

89 Stefan Goebel, “Chivalrous Knights versus Iron Warriors: Representations of the Battle of Materiel and Slaughter

in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940,” in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 82. For Lucian Bernhard’s poster, see: Lucian Bernhard, Das ist der

Weg zum Frieden—die Feinde wollen es so! 1918, poster, accessed March 20, 2020. The poster is printed within

Goebel’s chapter.

37

Time Management’s poster, leaving no room for interpretation as to what the poster was meant

to symbolize.

Several of the significant images in the 1942 poster were even direct callbacks to

Hopps’s “Destroy This Mad Brute” poster.90 (Figure 1) The gorilla in Hopps’s poster carried a

bloodied club in his right hand, just as the World War II monster carried a bloodied knife.

Hopps’s monster clutched a half-naked woman, a symbol of innocence, in his other bloodied

hand, while the two-headed beast from 1942 clutched the Statue of Liberty, a female

representation of freedom, in his bloody hand. The World War I gorilla even wore Kaiser

Wilhelm’s famous pronged mustache and riveted helmet. The World War II creature followed

suit, sporting Hitler’s infamous mustache and swastika-emblazoned helmet. The images’ themes

and German depictions were nearly identical, with the only real difference being that the 1942

image included the second, Japanese head. The poster from World War II proved that it was

entirely possible to not only racialize German caricatures, but to directly copy images from the

First World War to do so.

Despite the ease with which this poster mimicked German racialization from First World

War posters, it was the exception that proved the rule. In the dozens of images that warned

Americans of the German threat and vilified Hitler, the Nazis, and fascism, no other artists chose

to communicate those ideas by racializing Germans. No winning MoMA submission and no

poster popularized by federal agencies looked like this image. No other poster attempted to

harken back to the days of the German “mad brute.” Other propaganda artists could have used

these exact same techniques to vilify Hitler and the Nazis, however they overwhelmingly

90 Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute.

38

decided against this. Their conscious decision to pursue other methods of portraying the Nazis

suggests that the methods of racializing them no longer reflected the interests of the United

States government.

Art from around the country mirrored art submitted to the 1942 National War Posters

Competition, demonstrating how themes from the competition set the standard for propaganda

themes nationwide. It was no longer in the interest of the United States to create art that heralded

the Germans as racial others and monsters, therefore the depictions of Germans nationwide

needed to change. Art from the MoMA set the standard as to what those changes would be, and

federal propaganda industries dutifully adhered to those standards. State-sponsored art valued the

“unknown” threat of the Germans over any racialization tactics, though this was not true of anti-

Japanese art. American art began suggesting that it was not the German race that was to blame

for the war but perhaps a more select group of leaders, ideological fanatics, and Hitler loyalists.

The reason for this change in policy was a result of the contemporary administration’s desire to

build a durable post-war order, one where the American population did not hate the entire

German race.

39

Chapter III

Artists featured both in the National War Posters Competition and around the country

actively refrained from racializing depictions of German soldiers. Artists who did highlight

German faces in their art created undoubtedly menacing caricatures, but these caricatures

remained distinctly human. Other artists, meanwhile, opted to remove German faces altogether

and focused instead on the fear of the unknown represented by a looming swastika or on the

threat presented by Hitler himself. But what effect did this have on the American perception of

Nazis, and why would artists intentionally refuse to racialize their German enemies—particularly

when previous propaganda in earlier wars (most notably the First World War) had shown no

such restraint? Why stray from practiced techniques, and why actively refuse to racialize German

figures when Japanese caricatures remained racialized?

The answer rested in the changing intentions of the American government. The United

States had once vilified the entire nation of Germany and subsequently, the entire German race.

After the First World War, however, attitudes shifted. It was no longer a primary or even

secondary goal of the American government to blame the entire population of Germany for the

actions of a select leadership group. Where once the United States insisted that the entire German

race existed outside “the boundaries of civilization,” was more like the “savage” populations of

“Darkest Africa,” and needed to be depicted as such, attitudes during World War II were far

more concerned with select Nazi individuals, not all German people.91 Propaganda produced by

the American government needed this shift in priority. The intentional move away from

racializing German soldiers marked a conscious effort to vilify not "the German people" but

91 Gullace, Barbaric Anti-Modernism, 68.

40

rather exclusively target the Nazi leadership. Artists refused to racialize the Nazis because they

did not intend to blame an entire “race” of people for the actions of Hitler and his military

officials.

It is crucial to remember that American propaganda came, both temporally as well as

intellectually, as a response to the overwhelming amount of German propaganda produced in

Europe.92 The Nazi leadership, particularly Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda,

recognized early on that propaganda and visual arts were crucial in influencing public opinion.

They saw propaganda as essential to winning public support for political, cultural, and military

campaigns. Propaganda in Germany was a “weapon” used “to gain national goals,” and was

furthermore considered a “psychological weapon” that could be gainfully deployed “against their

enemies.”93 In response, the United States Office of War Information called upon American

artists to do the same. The mobilization of the American propaganda industry was a necessary

“defensive [measure]” to counteract previously unchallenged “Nazi propaganda

attacks.”94American art needed to sell war time policies and influence public opinion just as

successfully as Nazi art had in Germany—only they needed to do so in a way that distinguished

themselves from the opposing Nazi regime rather than evoked parallels with it.

92 For American propaganda as a temporal response to Nazi propaganda, see Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 17:

“Critics correctly asserted that little was done to counter Nazi propaganda attacks [before 1939.] Attempts by the

Allies to decide on a joint counterpropaganda effort quickly came to nought amid interservice and nationalistic

bickering.” From Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 29: “The private sector of American society was the first to

react to the threat of Nazi propaganda and call for defensive measures [in 1939.]” For American propaganda as an

intellectual response to Nazi propaganda, see Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 49: “The [committee appointed to

study Nazi propaganda] concluded that the nation ‘needed to counter foreign propaganda, especially Axis

propaganda.’” From Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 213: “When Nazi propagandists emphasized Allied

weakness…the [Office of War Information] …quickly moved on to news in other areas demonstrating Allied

strengths.” 93 Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 8-9. 94 Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 29; Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors, 17.

41

In their own propaganda efforts, American artists simultaneously challenged the German

stranglehold on visual arts and attempted to convince Americans to pursue a “Germany first”

military campaign. Public opinion of the war swayed back and forth from 1941 to 1942, with the

American people and press torn between the prospect of a Pacific or Atlantic war. Much of the

press insisted that Japan posed the greatest immediate threat to American safety, while even after

the attack on Pearl Harbor, forty-six percent of the American public believed Germany was the

greatest threat, compared to the thirty-five percent that cited Japan.95 President Franklin D.

Roosevelt personally favored a “Germany first” campaign, and instructed the Office of War

Information to use targeted propaganda efforts to ensure the public agreed.96 Propaganda posters,

like those on display during the National War Posters Competition, and other posters circulated

nationwide, needed to depict the Nazi state as not just a menace, but an international menace and

an immediate threat to the United States. Posters needed to explain to the public that Hitler and

his Nazi leadership were the most pressing threat to American safety; the Empire of Japan would

be dealt with in due time, but for the safety of the public, Germany needed to be dealt with first.

Furthermore, propaganda posters needed to explain to an anxious American public that

any threats they faced came from external, not internal, sources. While some may have

considered both Germany and Japan to be dangerous threats, the majority of Americans were

more concerned with the prospect of internal subversion. The fear of threats from within

American society, specifically the fear of fascist spies, seemed to overwhelm the notion that the

greatest threat would actually come from outside the United States’ borders.97 The Office of War

95 Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War Against Nazi

Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 49. 96 Casey, Cautious Crusade, 49. 97 Author Unknown, “Internal Enemies: American People Warned Against Active Fascists Sympathizers,” The

Hartford Courant, April 19, 1939, https://search-proquest-

com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/559185288/A47ACBCDA0AC417CPQ/1?accountid=14503.

42

Information under Roosevelt was tasked with informing the American public, via propaganda,

that the enemy resided not within American borders, but across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.98

This was what made the National War Posters Competition, and specifically the “Nature

of the Enemy” submission theme, so crucial. Posters that depicted German and Japanese soldiers,

armed with guns and daggers and the intention to destroy American freedoms, informed the

public that their greatest threats were external. “This is the Enemy,” all the captions read, but

never was the enemy the viewer’s neighbor, religious other, or political rival. While other

competition themes did highlight the cost of “loose lips” and “careless talk,” the intention behind

these 1942 competition posters was never to mark the American public as its own worst enemy.

The enemy existed only overseas, not in any viewer’s hometown. Whether these images may

have also indirectly celebrated a fictional “racial [American] harmony” to “make Hitler mad,” or

attempted to negate Nazi propaganda obsessed with the internal “purity” of the state, remained

open for discussion.99 By creating images that directly cited an external enemy, the MoMA

competition identified a larger threat to American freedom than any internal subversion. These

posters, however, created two different types of enemies, and therefore two different public

responses to said enemies.

Posters depicting the Japanese soldiers, meanwhile, created an enemy that was ape-like,

barbaric, and subhuman. These images showed the Japanese as not only a foreign race, but often

as an entirely different species. The animalistic actions of imperial Japan's soldiers were

98 From Casey, Cautious Crusade, 50: “The administration employed the term divisionist ‘to designate all those

persons who, from various motives and with carrying degrees of intensity, oppose and obstruct’ the prosecution of

the war against the Axis.” The term would have been applied to anyone who continued to insist that fighting

external battles against the Axis powers was futile compared to fighting subversion within the United States. 99 Roeder Jr., The Censored War, 46. For images and more information on Nazi racial purity, see: “The Biological

State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933-1939,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed March 15, 2020,

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-biological-state-nazi-racial-hygiene-1933-

1939?fbclid=IwAR2mylXJvQyrOKSz8NR5zQs1C0jxzcAlH0czbPVbx5nkCrUI8ZWtQP7qV0o.

43

representative of a “medieval,” crude culture.100 It was not just Tojo highlighted in these images,

but everyday soldiers, businessmen, women, and families; no member of Japanese society was

spared from the implication that the entire race was barbaric and primitive. (Figure 26) This

depiction, which relied heavily on pictorial tactics/patterns of racialization, encouraged the

American public to view not just Japanese soldiers as the enemy but the entire Japanese race as a

threat to democracy and freedom. The racialization of the Japanese created a blanket of

American racism that was applied to civilian and military populations of Japan.

Posters depicting German soldiers, however, created an enemy that was cold-hearted,

violent, and tactful, but such figures were not depicted as being necessarily representative of the

larger population or culture. The caricature of the German soldier, much like Carl Koheler and

Victor Ancona’s “This Is The Enemy” poster featuring the monocle-wearing Nazi officer, may

have created a “Hollywood” caricature of a Nazi, but it did not target the entirety of German or

even Prussian identity. (Figure 3) Images of German soldiers with obstructed faces similarly

avoided identifying any one aspect of German identity that was responsible for the brutal nature

of the Nazis. The villain in these images was not the entire German race, just the Nazi official.

There was no implication that the officer’s race was the reason for his horrific behavior, but

rather it was the swastika boldly visible on his cap that drove him to violence.

This idea from the 1942 competition existed in stark contrast to propaganda from 1917

and 1918. Propaganda from World War I was directly concerned with not only blaming Germans

but blaming the entirety of German culture itself for the destruction of the war. Hopps’s

notorious “Destroy This Mad Brute” poster featured not only an ape meant to look like the

100 Author Unknown, “The Japanese: Their God-Emperor Medievalism Must Be Destroyed,” Fortune Magazine,

February, 1942. The article and background image were reprinted in: Jolyon Baraka Thomas, Faking Liberties:

Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 135.

44

Kaiser, with his long, pointed mustache and steel helmet, but an ape wielding a bloodied club

that read “Kultur.”101 (Figure 1) Hopps’s poster not only blamed German leadership for the

atrocities of war, but the entire German, and more specifically Prussian, culture. This rejection of

German culture, and more specifically the Prussian culture within a unified Germany, was what

propaganda artists highlighted as the cause for World War I. It was not just German leadership at

fault, it was the entire German race who had been influenced by their own “primitive” society.

Propaganda artists from World War I had to racialize the entire German population in

order to sell this message in a visual art form. By implying that all Germans, not just soldiers,

wielded a bloodied club of “Kultur,” artists condemned the entire nation to fault for starting the

war. This implication created an “us versus them” paradigm that propaganda artists could use to

justify the state’s political and military action in Germany. If the enemy was of an entirely

different race, of an entirely different culture that promoted barbaric violence, the rape of

American women, and the destruction of American freedoms, then the public needed to be able

to identify that enemy as quickly as possible. Separating Germans by race ostensibly made this

identification and isolation all the easier. Such separation ensured that the American public

would support punishing the entirety of the German state at the end of the war.

During the Second World War, however, the United States no longer wanted to blame the

entire German population for the crimes of its leadership. President Roosevelt was firm in his

belief that “anti-German” activities and blaming the entire German population for the actions of

Hitler and the Nazi leadership were counterproductive strategies.102 This attitude suggested that

the United States government did not want to repeat the end of the First World War, which had

101 Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute. 102 Casey, Cautious Crusade, 57.

45

resulted in anti-German hysteria across the United States. Such hysteria led to the questioning of

German-American loyalty and the forced assimilation of German immigrants into “American

culture.”103 There was no desire during World War II to replicate this unstable reality, therefore

there was no reason to target the entire German race for Nazi crimes. “It would be far easier to

establish a durable postwar order,” the administration argued, “if hatred was not directed at each

and every German.”104 By “detaching their efforts from any connection with the tainted activities

of World War I,” the United States demonstrated that it had learned its lesson from the previous

international conflict.105 The American government would no longer blame an entire population

for the actions of a select leadership group.

This change in attitude is what led to the subsequent change in artistic form, present in

both the MoMA exhibit and propaganda nationwide. It was no longer acceptable to fault all

Germans for the war in Europe, nor was it acceptable to point to some larger “kultur” as the

cause of the conflict. It was the shadow of Nazism, represented by the looming hand reaching for

a dagger, or the swastika-emblazoned fist crashing through a stained-glass window, that had

swallowed up German society and morphed it into an enemy state. Nazi leadership was to blame

for the war, not German principles or general behavior. Since it was no longer the goal of

propaganda to vilify the entire German population, then it was no longer sensical to define an

entire population by its race.

This psychological and political shift explained why many posters from the 1942 War

Posters Competition did not feature Nazi faces but rather a symbol; the most frequent example of

103 Chris Capozzola, Enemy Aliens: Loyalty and Birth of the Surveillance State (New York: Oxford University Press,

2008), 200, https://www-oxfordscholarship-

com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335491.001.0001/acprof-9780195335491. 104 Casey, Cautious Crusade, 61. 105 Casey, Cautious Crusade, 65.

46

this was the swastika on a hand, weapon, or uniform. Artists were not intentionally blaming a

generalized German person for the actions of a select group of people. Instead, artists blamed

Nazism for the violence of the war, and Nazism was best represented in the abstract. There was

no one type of person who represented a Nazi; there was no violent society that promoted

barbarism or brutality. There was, rather, a political ideology that had enslaved “a bunch of poor,

misguided people who deserve more pity than bullets and bombs.”106 Nazi practices, represented

by the swastika and not by a people, were to blame for World War II.

This intentional artistic shift also explained why an abundance of propaganda posters

focused exclusively on depicting Hitler, and not on creating a greater Nazi caricature. Posters

that showed a clownish Hitler incapable of pulling his pants up from around his ankles (Figure

13) or posters that showed him as a crazed maniac with a dagger (Figure 16) put all the emphasis

of an enemy directly onto Hitler himself, not onto a wider German public. In these images Hitler

functioned as both a symbol for Nazism as an ideology and as a figurehead for the Nazi state.

These themes were utilized first by pro-Nazi posters from within Germany, which depicted

Hitler as a God-like figure, a savior, and as the one face for all of Germany.107 American artists

inverted these images in order to demonize Hitler, not the entire German people, to the American

public. American posters, like those published by the Office of War Information, sold the

message that it was Hitler, and Hitler alone, that deserved to be feared and defeated.

Americans accepted this message, as evidenced by public opinion polls taken throughout

the war. “The overwhelming majority of citizens,” reported a 1942 article in The New York

106 Roeder Jr., The Censored War, 87. 107 For images of Hitler as German’s savior, see example image: Richard Schroeder and Billy I. Ross, Es Lebe

Deutschland! 1933, painting, Texas Tech University, accessed March 20, 2020, https://swco-

ir.tdl.org/handle/10605/11901.

47

Times, “believe that the German leaders and not the German people are the chief enemy.”108

“Harsh punishment” was reserved for “Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders,” but

should not be forced upon the German people.109 American “hatred for Germany [was]

concentrated largely on a few public officials,” and not on the German culture as a whole.110

There was no longer a need to racialize and “other” the German people, when the American

public no longer blamed them collectively for the Second World War.

These sentiments, however, were not extended to the Japanese, explaining why anti-

Japanese posters still relied so heavily on racialization. Though the Office of War Information

clearly stated that they only regarded military “leaders” as their enemies, “not…the German and

Japanese people,” their anti-Japanese posters from both the MoMA and around the country

suggested otherwise.111 The “This is the Enemy” posters displayed inside the MoMA continued

to racialize Japanese soldiers to the point of disfigurement, and many posters from around the

country followed suit. Several posters featured caricatures that were so grotesquely racialized

that the Japanese soldier was not only unidentifiable, in terms of whether it was a caricature of

Tojo or of a commonplace soldier, but was seemingly subhuman. There was no distinction

between Japanese leaders, Japanese soldiers, or the Japanese public. In the eyes of American

artists, they were one and the same.

The American public was, as a result, unable or unwilling to separate the actions of

Japanese civilians from the actions of Japanese military leadership. While Americans primarily

108 George Gallup, “War Guilt Laid to Nazi Leaders: Most Voters Believe People Are Not Our Chief Enemies,

Gallup Poll Finds,” The New York Times, June 13, 1942, https://search-proquest-

com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/106425590/805D5561125F48C1PQ/9?accountid=14503. 109 George Gallup, “The Gallup Poll: American Public Wants Harsh Treatment For Hitler and Nazi Leaders After

the War,” The Washington Post, July 1, 1942, https://search-proquest-

com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/151580725/805D5561125F48C1PQ/5?accountid=14503. 110 Gallup, “The Gallup Poll.” 111 Roeder Jr., The Censored War, 87.

48

blamed German leadership for the actions of the Nazi state, “Japanese war leaders [were not]

clearly identified in the public mind.”112 Instead, Americans viewed the Japanese as a collective

race of undesirables, a “herd of yellow rats” that needed to be exterminated.113 The American

public applied the same logic to the Japanese at the end of World War II as they had to the

Germans at the end of World War I: the entire race and culture was to blame for what had

happened during the war, and as a result, the entire race deserved to be punished.

This logic may, in part, explain the American public’s response to the end of the war

measures taken in the Pacific and Atlantic theater. By late 1944, the public favored

“[abandoning] military targets” in Japan and wanted to focus instead on the “‘madmen’ and

‘yellow vermin’ of the homeland.”114 Many Americans, both overseas and at home, wanted to

target the entire Japanese race for Japan’s militaristic crimes, just as propaganda had encouraged

them to. The portion of public that held these sentiments got their way, as “only a small fraction

of the more than one hundred thousand people who died at Hiroshima were in the Japanese

military.” 115 American citizens remained focused on collective racial punishment against the

Japanese, all the way through the end of the war. In contrast, the American public fully

supported the initial “conviction of 700,000 Nazis” in Germany during the Nuremburg trials.116

These two drastically different responses, one violent and targeted towards civilians and the

other paying deference to humane legal systems, characterized the effect racialized propaganda

had on the American conscience. The public may have accepted civilian casualties when dealing

112 Gallup, “The Gallup Poll.” 113 Dower, War Without Mercy, 92. 114 Dower, War Without Mercy, 300. 115 Roeder Jr., The Censored War, 86. 116 Marguerite Higgins, “U.S. Demands Conviction of 700,000 Nazis,” New York Herald Tribune, December 18,

1945, https://search-proquest-

com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1291133846/B7892D76F3F84B89PQ/11?accountid=14503.

49

with a society that American propaganda had collectively demonized, while proceeding with

legal prosecution of exclusively military leadership in a society that American propaganda had

insisted was only twisted due to its leaders.

The perception of American “whiteness” may have had something to do with why

Americans continued to racialize and vilify the entire race of Japan, despite instructions not to do

the same to the Germans. Between 1918 and 1939, American racial divides shifted from

divisions between white ethnic groups such as Irish and German, to a more centralized “color

line.”117 The American public became more concerned with “white” versus “non-white” than

superiority within an exclusively white hierarchy. This meant that the German “race” was no

longer its own minority but part of collective American “whiteness.” The German American

community was “characterized” by “ethnic disappearance,” as it became part of an “acceptable,”

white population.118 This transition was part of a “pattern of [gradual] Caucasian unity” that took

place in the 1920s.119 German Americans were “[renegotiating] their place in U.S. society,” and

as a result, were no longer enemy aliens.120 They could begin “generally benefiting from their

‘whiteness,’” instead of being ostracized by the broader American public.

It may be that because the Japanese were excluded from this definition of “white,” the

American public found it acceptable to continue to racialize them. The American public’s focus

117 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998,) 98 118 Peter C. Weber, “Ethnic Identity During War: The Case of German American Societies During World War I,”

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2012): 186, https://heinonline-

org.colorado.idm.oclc.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/npvolsq43&id=181&men_tab=src

hresults. 119 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 91. 120 Christian Wilbers, “Saxon? German? American? Negotiating Germanness and Belonging in the United States,

1935-1939,” German Studies Review 39, no. 1 (February 2016): 89, https://muse-jhu-

edu.colorado.idm.oclc.org/article/610455.

50

on “the color line” intensified anti-Japanese sentiments leading up to World War II.121 “The

branch of the white racial group,” stated eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in his 1927 book Reforging

America, “most emphatically [did not] apply to non-white immigrants, like the Chinese,

Japanese, or Mexicans.”122 American artists may have taken sentiments like this into account

when deciding which of America’s enemies to racialize and which to vilify by other means.

Artists could disparage the entire race of Japan because they were a non-white race. The

Germans, meanwhile, had “successfully” integrated into “white” American society, and could

not be vilified for a racial difference that no longer existed.123

121 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 98. 122 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 98. 123 Scholars continue to debate how successfully Germans integrated into American society, and when exactly

Germans were accepted into the American definition of “whiteness.” Due to the still-developing nature of this topic,

this argument as it pertains to American propaganda and the 1942 National War Posters Competition remains purely

speculative.

51

Conclusion

The winning submissions from the 1942 National War Posters Competition represented

the changing attitudes of American artists from around the nation. No winning submission to the

MoMA competition relied on racialization to vilify the nation of Germany, a trend reflected in

art nationwide. Propaganda artists no longer utilized old World War I tropes of beasts and apes

to create caricatures of the Germans, despite the fact that the same racialized techniques were

used against the Japanese. Artists instead created caricatures of Hitler or played with images of

shadows and symbols in order to frighten American viewers into war-time action. The artists’

focus was no longer on vilifying an entire race of German people but on vilifying Nazism and its

terrifying leadership. This intentional, conscious decision reflected the attitudes of the United

States government and dutifully shaped the opinions of eager American viewers. The American

public no longer viewed the entire German race as alien, just as art inspired by the 1942

competition had intended.

The National War Posters Competition demonstrated how competition bred the newest,

most effective artistic techniques and how quickly those techniques could be adopted

nationwide. The competition inspired artists from around the country to participate in

propagandistic war-time efforts, and as a result, direct and effective artistic techniques became

instantly popularized. Art from around the country mirrored art from a single propaganda exhibit

in 1942, and all of this art sent the same message: the newest, most direct, and most effective

propaganda techniques relied on vilifying Nazi ideology, vilifying Nazi leadership, and vilifying

the Japanese people entirely, but not on racializing white Germans.

Above all, the 1942 MoMA competition, and the art it inspired, demonstrated the power

of art over the American public. Artists encouraged audiences to scoff at Hitler’s buffoonery and

52

fight back against his tyranny, to defend American borders and protect against the shadow of

Nazism, and to strike back against the “sinister” Japanese and pursue vengeance against their

race. All of these themes were represented in shocking visual techniques that, when applied to

state-sponsored propaganda, had the power to shape, alter, and solidify American opinions.

These posters turned a single German man into the enemy of the nation, and the American public

took up arms. These posters pointed to an entire fascist ideology and cried out “This is the

Enemy,” and the American public agreed. When these posters insisted that the German people,

and Germans as a race, were no longer the enemy, the public listened.

53

Works Cited

Allenbrook, Charles T. Deliver Us From Evil (no. 49). 1942. Library of Virginia. Accessed

February 20, 2020.

http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs/out_of_the_box/2015/05/08/artists-for-victory/.

Artists for Victory, Inc. “National War Posters Competition: America Needs Fighting Posters.”

National War Posters Competition. August 24, 1942.

Artist Unknown. Stamp ‘Em Out!: Beat Your Promise. 1942, poster. University of North Texas.

Accessed October 21, 2019. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc441/.

Artist Unknown. You and I Put the Squeeze on the Japanese! 1941, poster. University of North

Texas. Accessed December 17, 2019.

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc183/?q=japanese%20propaganda.

Author Unknown. “Great Number of Entries—2,224—in National War Posterts Competition

Causes Postponement of Exhibition at Museum of Modern Art.” The Museum of Modern

Art Press Release, November 16, 1942.

Author Unknown. “Internal Enemies: American People Warned Against Active Fascists

Sympathizers.” The Hartford Courant, April 19, 1939. https://search-proquest-

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