Introduction
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) was a life-long cartoonist: in high school in Springfield, Massachusetts; in college at Dartmouth (Class of 1925); as an adman in New York City before World War II; in his many children's books, beginning with To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937). Because of the fame of his children's books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.
The Dr. Seuss Collection in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, contains the original drawings and/or newspaper clippings of all of these cartoons. This website makes these cartoons available to all internet users. The cartoons have been scanned from the original newspaper clippings in the UCSD collection.
Dr. Seuss Goes to War by historian Richard H. Minear (The New Press, 1999) reproduced some two hundred of the PM cartoons. That means that two hundred of the cartoons available here have received no airing or study since their original appearance in PM. The cartoons Dr. Seuss published in other journals are even less known; there is no mention of them in Dr. Seuss Goes to War. Dr. Seuss also drew a set of war bonds "cartoons" which appeared in many newspapers as well as in PM. They are the following:
In Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography (Random House, 1995; p 100), Judith and Neil Morgan recount the story of how Dr. Seuss and PM joined forces in 1941:
Ted [Dr. Seuss] was haunted by the war in Europe, and one evening in Manhattan he showed an editorial cartoon he had drawn to his friend Zinny Vanderlip Schoales, the brilliant, hard-drinking intellectual.... She had joined the patrician liberal Ralph Ingersoll when he launched the tabloid newspaper PM in New York with the backing of Marshall Field III. Zinny took Ted's cartoon to Ingersoll and PM published it on January 30, 1941...
The PM cartoons in this website are arranged in chronological order, by year, by month, by day. These images are also browsable by subject terms, e.g., Hitler, Japan.
Some content in this collection includes images or language that may be discriminatory or offensive. The content is intended to serve as valuable evidence for analyzing and challenging the legacies of history both as it occurred and how it unfolds in the modern-day, rather than to perpetuate or endorse any discriminatory or offensive attitudes or acts. Please refer to the UC San Diego Library’s Historical Context and Cultural Sensitivity Statement for more information.