Dr. Seuss goes to Fort Fox

       In class, we looked at cartoons and propaganda that ensured that all Americans were invested in the war effort and absorbing the right attitude towards the war effort and the enemies. Nowhere was better at coming up with these, particularly the short films, than Fort Fox. Fort Fox was where people in entertainment and media went to help the war effort. One example of one of these people is Theodore Geisel, or Dr. Seuss.
       Theodore Geisel, shifted his attention from children's stories to political cartoons after hearing on the news that Paris had fallen to the Nazis. Many of his cartoons were aimed at Adolf Hitler and isolationists. In the period between 1941 and 1941, he made over 400 cartoons for a newspaper called PM that was leaning heavily towards the U.S. getting involved in the war. He drew cartoons of Lindbergh making him out to be in league with Hitler and trying to depict him as not a good example of American ideals (as when he replaced the American Eagle with a Lindbergh ostrich).
        After hearing the news about Pearl Harbor, he drew a bird labeled isolationism being blown up. Now that war on Japan had been declared, Geisel began incorporating some of the racial stereotypes discussed in class today into his political drawings. He gave Japanese leaders with bucked teeth and impossibly narrow eyes and he in one cartoon, he even went as far as to imply that Japanese-Americans were waiting for "the signal from home" to blow the U.S. up themselves.
         Initially, the U.S. had only asked him to make cartoons to encourage people to contribute to the war effort by buying bonds and by conserving their resources. However, Geisel decided he wanted to do even more for the war effort. He decided that he would enlist in the U.S. Army and he was soon deployed to Fox Studios in Hollywood (Fort Fox). He worked with the top media people of the time in journalism, film, screenwriting, and animators, including Frank Capra. Some work Geisel did includes making the training manuals more interesting with creative characters and working on animation and short film projects directed towards helping the war effort and informing the men of what not to do in the Army and what their goals and missions were in the individual parts of the war. After his 3 year stint in the army, Geisel returned to civilian life and went back to publishing kids books.