Day for Night Magazine

Politics, Beauty, and the Cartoon

American Propaganda Films during the Scond World War
By Sam Johnson

Although many Americans, including myself, often associate the word “propaganda” with oppressive political regimes – such as Hitler’s reign during the 1930s and 1940s or Kim Jong-il’s administration today – the United States has produced its share as well. The U.S. government did not have an office specifically devoted to propaganda before the 1940s, but during World War II the government thought it was necessary to produce and commission hundreds of short films with the intention of ‘educating’ the American public about international affairs in general and the war in particular.

The most famous example of American propaganda during the war is probably Frank Capra’s series of seven films, known collectively as Why We Fight, which was intended to convince the American public that WWII was a necessary effort to preserve democracy and freedom. Capra was a major in the United States Army Signal Corps, a division of the military established in 1860 that has taken responsibility at various times for weather forecasting, radio communications, and military intelligence; it was this division of the military that produced Capra’s propaganda films, among others.

The 1942 short film “It’s Everybody’s War,” produced by the Army Air Forces First Motion Pictures Unit, edited by 20th Century Fox, and narrated by Henry Fonda, encouraged Americans to make more sacrifices and take more responsibility for the American war effort. “Winning Your Wings,” released in 1942 starring Jimmy Stewart and directed by John Huston, is an attempt by the Air Force to encourage young Americans to become military pilots. “Safeguarding Military Secrets” (1943) was written by Preston Sturges as a warning primarily directed toward American soldiers about inadvertently disseminating information that could be used by the enemy.

Even studio films that were not commissioned by the military were influenced by government policy. Through the U.S. Bureau of Motion Pictures, studios were encouraged to ask of every film made, “Will this picture help win the war?” The Bureau also produced a report for every film made during the war. The report for Casablanca, released in 1942 and directed by Michael Curtiz, describes the film as “a very good picture about the enemy, those whose lives the enemy has wrecked and those underground agents who fight him unremittingly on his own ground.”

Many of the films commissioned by the government were cartoons, often screened before feature films in theatres. Warner Brothers made a film called “The Ducktators,” which dramatizes Hitler’s life as a duck. Max Fleischer created a Popeye cartoon called “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap!” in which the Japanese – portrayed in a way that appears absurdly racist to our modern eyes – attempt to trick Popeye into signing a peace treaty, all the while plotting to renege on it. Popeye, of course, does not stand for this. MGM produced the cartoon “Blitz Wolf,” which re-allegorizes the “three pigs” story to comment on the events in Europe. The cartoon is prefaced by the written foreword: “The Wolf in this photoplay is NOT fictitious. Any similarity between this Wolf and that (*!!*##%) jerk Hitler is purely intentional!”

Of those firms that produced cartoons, the most prolific was the Walt Disney Company. Indeed, during much of the war, 90 percent of Disney’s employees were assigned to government-commissioned projects. Although Disney made both military training films and propaganda intended for the American public, it is undoubtedly the domestically distributed “educational” cartoons which are most shocking to Americans today. These animations can be divided into two broad categories: those intended to persuade Americans to take some sort of action (such as saving their grease or buying war bonds) and those that vilify the enemies, particularly Germany and Japan.

The most famous of Disney’s persuasive cartoons is probably “Spirit of ’43.” In this short film, Donald Duck receives his paycheck (or rather, in a typically cartoonish simplification, a wad of cash), and is immediately confronted by the two sides of his personality: the old Scottish duck who encourages him to save his money and the dapper duck who encourages him to spend it. The narrator explains that this is a choice encountered by every American worker. It is at this point that the viewer, anticipating the usual hilarious antics, is disappointed by an admonition to pay his quarterly income taxes.

The film was commissioned by the Treasury because Americans were facing tax rates far higher than they had ever been in United States history – the lowest tax bracket was paying 19 percent of their income, nearly five times as much as ten years prior in 1933, and income in the highest tax bracket was assessed at the unprecedented rate of 88 percent. The government believed that many citizens would not pay their taxes on time, which would hinder the war effort – hence the commission of this cartoon.

After Donald is the subject of a literal tug of war between the two sides of his personality, he sees that his spendthrift side was trying to pull him into a club with a Swastika-shaped door. The narrator then presents the dilemma with a catchy slogan: “Spend for the Axis, or save for taxes?” Donald, of course, makes the correct choice, punching the wastrel duck, who has now donned a Hitler mustache, directly in the face.

When Walt Disney testified as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, he explained that the Treasury Department “had 13 million new taxpayers, people who had never paid taxes, and they explained to me that it would be impossible to prosecute all those that were delinquent, and they wanted to put this story before those people so they would get their taxes in early.” He added that a Gallop poll of the public found that “29 percent of the people admitted that it had influenced them in getting their taxes in early and giving them a picture of what taxes will do.”

My favorite World War II cartoon is a 1943 Disney cartoon called “Der Fuehrer’s Face.” It begins with a brass band composed of several misshapen Germans, along with Hirohito on sousaphone and Mussolini on piccolo, marching through a German village and singing the title song, which extols the virtue of the Nazi philosophy: “Are we not the supermen? / (Aryan pure supermen!) / Yah, we is der supermen / (Super-duper supermen!)” The band marches past Donald Duck’s home, where he is awakened by an alarm clock with the time replaced by Swastikas.

When Donald arrives at the factory to work, he is set to screwing the caps onto artillery shells. He is interrupted only by portraits of Hitler on the conveyer belt, to which he salutes “Heil Hitler!”, and by a barrage of pro-Hitler propaganda (“What a glorious privilege is yours to be a Nazi! To work forty-eight hours a day for the Fuehrer!”). The conveyor belt carrying the shells predictably accelerates, until Donald can no longer keep up with the shells. After a brief hallucination in which Donald is haunted by anthropomorphized shells, he wakes up to find himself in America, wearing red, white, and blue pajamas: “Am I glad to be a citizen again!” The Disney Company did not re-release the cartoon until 2004.

Do these cartoons have truth-value, or do they merely conjure up fantasy for the sake of public opinion? My own opinion is that while many of the historical circumstances that are supposed to have inspired these films (the evils of Fascist politics, the necessity of tax revenue to effectively wage war, etc.) approach indisputability, many of the films’ implications, when subjected to even a cursory analysis, turn out to be exaggerations of the truth at best. When Donald’s spendthrift personality wears a bowtie in the shape of a Swastika, the filmmakers imply that spending money for one’s pleasure will directly help Germany to win the war; not even minimal knowledge of economics is needed to determine that this position is untenable.

A question that is perhaps more relevant to an analysis of these films is why and how they were so effective. It is not as though these films were received in some sort of information vacuum – there was no shortage of information about Hitler and income taxes. Yet, according to Disney’s testimony, 29 percent of the American public was found to have been influenced to pay their taxes on time by a six-minute cartoon. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, I think the answer lies in the very fact that these films were animated.

Plainly put, there are things that can be done in animation that cannot be done in live action film; Disney animators conjure images that cannot occur in reality. For example, the end of “Spirit of ‘43” is a single, beautiful shot of American artillery rolling along the ground, the sky aligned with the clouds such that they comprise the image of an American flag. There is nothing literally dishonest about this image, although it is almost certainly a fictive one. The emotions stirred by it are potent, and thus it may be its mode of presentation rather than its specific content that gives the image its power. With this single animated image, the filmmakers communicate simultaneously many ideas: that war is sometimes a necessary evil to preserve freedom, that freedom will in the end prevail because it is the natural state of being, and, when juxtaposed with the rest of the film, that the mundane contribution of tax dollars is a small price to pay for victory in such a righteous battle. This rhetoric is, of course, so heavy-handed that it is quite hard to swallow; indeed, it sounds like propaganda. But the image itself is far from unpalatable; it is beautiful.

Such artistry and aesthetic manipulation can convey any number of ideas, and consequently the potency of the images in these films far surpasses any firmly grounded sense of truth or falsity. And if there is no one universal definition of righteousness, the danger of propaganda begins with the susceptibility of human beings to its fictive power, which is blind to truth. In hindsight, we can ask whether the Americans of the 1940s were merely lucky that their government had no plans to rob them of their liberty. One cannot help but wonder what proportion of the German people during that same time were influenced to support the Nazi regime because they saw the beautiful films of Leni Reifenstahl. Beauty of the kind that Walt Disney was able to create has an unmatched ability to stir emotions and to create impressions of truth, regardless of whether it has any correlation to reality. For this reason, I believe propaganda to be a weapon that must be carefully guarded in all circumstances. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but its power is in the hand of those who create it.