[triumphant music] ♪ [triumphant music] ♪ [triumphant music] ♪ [triumphant music] ♪ [triumphant music] - Hello, I'm Terrence Dollard, the host of "Comic Culture".
Today we're on location at the US Army Airborne at Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where they're hosting a special exhibit of the political cartoons of Bill Mauldin.
My guest today is author Todd DePastino.
Todd, welcome to "Comic Culture".
- Thank you for having me.
- Todd, we are here at the museum in Fayetteville because they are having an exhibit of the political cartoons of Bill Mauldin, who was a very famous cartoonist, I guess, made his reputation during World War II.
So what is it about Bill that makes him an enduring figure?
- It's really his World War II cartoons.
I mean, if not for World War II, we would still remember Bill Mauldin because he became one of the premier, along with Herblock at the "Washington Post", one of the premier mid-century political cartoonists.
But his World War II work when he was in the 45th Infantry Division as a rifleman on the front lines, kind of capturing the daily life up front of combat infantry.
He did in pictures what Ernie Pyle did in words.
I mean, he delivered some of the grim realities of combat to the home front in a way nobody else ever did and for that, he's really valued and remembered, especially by the military community.
- He had, I know, a great reputation with the men on the front lines.
He, as you say, was one of them.
So did he ever get into any sort of trouble?
Because a lot of the stuff he's talking about are the troubles of being on the front line, the rain, the bad weather, the poor food.
So did he ever get into any headaches and and hassles with the folks higher up?
- Oh, yeah.
Oh yeah.
He was not popular with a lot of army brass.
Yeah, he was exposing a lot of the difficulties and neglect and hardships that, preventable hardships, that combat infantrymen were going through in World War II.
I mean, the life of the infantry is always hard.
It's always miserable.
You're always battling the elements.
It's either too hot or too cold, or too dry, or too wet, and you're, you know, you're always hungry, you're always tired and then of course, you're being shot at all the time.
And so the life of an infantryman is hard.
But during World War II, it was doubly so because of the neglect that the army had for infantry.
The original war plan was to win the war without a lot of infantry that we would win it at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, aerial bombardment, long-range artillery, armor, elite special units like Airborne, that would kind of go in and do the hard fighting.
Then the infantry would kind of come in and police, after the ground had already been taken.
Infantry was the neglected stepchild of the army in World War II in the beginning, 1942, 1943, because infantry was not expected to play much of a role.
So they got the castoffs, they were training with World War I issue equipment in 1942.
They got the worst of everything, the worst food.
They got the worst people.
I mean, you know, no kid, no 16 year old kid in 1942 dreamed of joining the infantry.
They wanted to become a pilot or maybe a Marine, or join the Navy, maybe even Merchant Marines, you know, see the world.
But nobody dreamed of being a footslogger in mud and sleeping in foxholes.
And so for that reason, the infantry was predominantly draftees or people who were so poor that they had not eaten three meals a day for years.
There were people who had grown up, had never worn shoes before.
There were people who had never been to a doctor.
There were people who couldn't read and write.
There were very poor people like Bill Mauldin who joined in 1940 because he needed a new set of clothes and he wasn't getting enough to eat every day.
So, he joined the Arizona National Guard, which was federalized and made part of the 45th Infantry Division.
The infantry, they were neglected, they were scorned, they were looked down upon, everybody tried to connive to get out of the infantry.
And so there were very few bond posters or movies about the infantry.
This was not a glamorous branch of service, but there was Bill Mauldin, there was Mauldin doing these cartoons, originally for the 45th Infantry Division News, reflecting these men's lives back to them in a really gritty, accurate way that that covered the grimness and the misery of their situation and redeemed it with humor.
And that made him more than just a cartoonist.
It really made him a hero to these men who were living such impossibly difficult lives.
- It's interesting because you're saying that he was poor and needed a new set of clothes, that's why he joined the army.
But just because one's economic status isn't in, I guess, you're not rich, doesn't mean you don't have a great sense of humor, great sense of intelligence, a great sense of, I guess, the way to put pen to paper.
So when did Bill sort of realize that he had this talent for, not only, you know, maybe putting a snappy line together, but drawing a snappy line that would reflect, you know, the men in the foxholes?
- Yeah, you're right.
Genius is distributed equally and randomly, it seems, among the general population, regardless of social class or background or geography.
And Bill was one of these geniuses who was born in the mountains of southern New Mexico.
He had a bad temperament from the day he was born, screamed from the day he was born and never stopped screaming really his whole life.
He was, he had tuberculosis, he was sick, he had rickets as a child.
He was kind of a stunted growth.
His older brother by one year was six feet tall and movie star handsome and could take apart and put back together a tractor motor with, you know, blindfolded.
Bill couldn't do any of the normal farm chores.
And he was seen as a troublemaker and the runt of the litter but he was a genius.
And his mother recognized that early on.
I mean, he could do any academic task you gave him.
He was reading novels at age five.
He was doing long division at age five.
You know, he was, he could really have done anything.
He dreamed of being maybe a surgeon or maybe a preacher or something like a general, an army general.
But that wasn't in the cards for him because he was so poor and his family was so poor.
He was essentially cast out of his house at age 14, lived on his own in a boarding house in Phoenix, Arizona, never graduated high school, and like I said, ended up in the Army.
So, he knew that he had something special.
He knew that he had a talent.
He knew that he had multiple talents, but he also knew he didn't have the luxury as a poor person of picking which one of these great talents he was going to exploit for a living.
He was 18 or 19 years old, and he realized his drawing hand was probably his quickest way to wealth.
He wanted to make a pile of dough.
He had heard that Chic Young who did Blondie made a hundred thousand dollars a year.
That was a lot of money in 1938, 39.
So he decided he's gonna be a cartoonist, and he really put his nose to the grindstone and practiced and rehearsed his cartooning, and that won him some sign painting jobs, and eventually won him this critical job in the 45th Infantry Division on the newspaper.
- And did that get him out of his role as a rifleman, or was this in addition to?
- Half a day a week.
It got him half a day a week, initially.
He would get Friday afternoon to do his weekly cartoon in the 45th Division News.
The rest of the time, he was in the infantry.
One of the few Anglos, by the way, in his infantry company.
He was the 45th Division, was probably in a segregated military, the 45th division was probably the most ethnically diverse that we had.
A lot of Native Americans, a lot of Choctaw Indian, especially, a lot of Mexican Americans.
So he would, Bill would be doing the hard, you know, marching and target practice and, you know, all the things that infantry does and then he would get one afternoon a week to do the cartoon.
And that role, he clung to that role because that's what made him special.
He clung against all odds.
I mean, in 1940 before Pearl Harbor in this, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, how is he ever gonna be discovered?
But he somehow kept the belief that if he kept cartooning, some way, somehow he will win success.
And of course he did, but it took a war to do it.
- During the war, how does he go from just working for his company, his division, to getting, you know, the attention of the US Army that's going to maybe put his work in "Stars and Stripes"?
- Yeah, very good question, yeah.
By the time the 45th Division shipped overseas for the invasion of Sicily in 1943, Bill Mauldin was now full-time on the 45th Division News.
He he had connived his way to get on the newspaper full-time.
But then as they landed and as the shooting started, he and the other handful of people who were on the, who put out the 45th Division News realized, we don't have paper, we don't have ink, we don't have any way to distribute a newspaper, and men are falling all over the place.
If we don't put out a paper, we will be given a rifle, and told to fight, and our lives will be miserable and short.
So they worked really hard to get out a newspaper and get it out, they did.
I mean, they scrounged paper where they could, they used old engine oil for the ink if they had to, you know, they ripped zinc out of coffins to do the engravings.
I mean, it's just what they did was heroic to get this newspaper out to the 45th Division.
And his cartoons, once he lands overseas, and once he starts seeing combat, they sharpen.
They get much better, much grimmer, and much more richly textured, and immediately won him fans of those men who are struggling on the beaches.
And then, you know, in Sicily and then in mainland Italy.
These newspapers, you know, they would only be 5,000 might be printed.
They would be passed hand to hand.
The legend of Bill Mauldin just grew by word of mouth.
"Hey, there's this cartoonist, you've gotta see his stuff."
And that's how General Patton found out about Mauldin's cartoons.
And man, he didn't like what he saw.
- Well, it doesn't seem like General Patton liked much.
So, you know, it's interesting because I'm pretty sure that back home we were, civilians were being shown a different picture of the war.
And Bill is doing something that is really soldier centric.
So, if Patton's unhappy with you, how do you eventually get past him to the point where, you know, you are, they're hoping that you're going to give us something to look forward to?
- Great question.
The only way he could have gotten past Patton, the only, and many other generals who really hated his work, and they hated his work because it promoted insubordination in their view.
They were subversive.
These were dirty, filthy, sardonic, sarcastic soldiers who griped about the food, they griped about their officers.
They griped about the stupid orders they got, they griped about the equipment that didn't work.
I mean, they just griped all the time.
And to Patton these were just a bunch of gripers, and with no use, no value whatsoever.
And Mauldin really, in any other situation, Mauldin absolutely should have been shunted aside, fired from his job.
But he was allowed to continue with the cartoons because more powerful generals liked him.
They liked him.
The Commander of the 45th Infantry specifically said, you know, "Bill Mauldin is the most popular man "in our division.
"I cannot remove him from our newspaper "or morale will plummet."
He was good.
There were, Eisenhower thought that Mauldin's cartoons were good for morale.
They, soldiers liked to see their gripes aired, and once they're aired, they can get past them and move on.
So Mauldin was protected.
He was protected because of generals who were concerned about the plunge in morale among American service men in the infantry overseas.
And he was also protected and this is interesting, this is something I discovered in writing the book, he was also protected because of a very important and little known order that came from the Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall in Washington, DC on September 1st, 1943, Marshall sent out a memo to all theaters of operation, all Commanders saying that essentially we need to loosen up, liberalize the propaganda about the war that we are allowing to be printed and distributed.
That, in other words, the highly restricted censorship, the optimistic, you know, the sanitized, highly overly optimistic view of war was backfiring.
There was a concern about, in the home front, rising expectations.
In other words, polls showed that a third of Americans believed that we actually were winning every battle.
The enemy was cutting and running.
Morale was high, our boys were clean cut and got everything they needed to win the day.
And because of that, people back home were starting to gripe about wage and price restrictions, about the rationing, about their sons and brothers and husbands being overseas and they were expecting the war to be over by Christmas, 1943.
So that's what you call a crisis of rising expectations.
And there would be a price to pay, a political price to pay.
Franklin Roosevelt, you know, everybody in power if that expectation about winning the war by Christmas was not met.
And so there was a new publicity campaign intended to sober the American people up, to kind of let them in on the truth, which was the war is a long, difficult slog.
The enemy is lethal, and there are combatants overseas sacrificing far more than you are here at home.
And George Marshall put out in the memo that we need to show some of the grimness of war to sober the American people.
And if it was just a snapshot of grimness that George Marshall want, Mauldin had it, he was perfect.
He showed it in a way that the people back home could relate to and understand, but not gross them out.
- Right, it's different to see soldiers in illustration, complaining about the mud or the cold.
- [Todd DePastino] Yes.
- As opposed to seeing photographs like during the Civil War, you'd see these horrific photographs of a battle where there were thousands of bodies along the field.
So, I'm imagining this is a way, like you're saying, to kind of soften that blow, but kind of let them in.
- Yes, it's a tightrope that you had, that Mauldin had to walk and that anybody who would, who wanted to show writers, Ernie Pyle walked this tightrope.
You know, all the photographers, all the journalists for "Stars and Stripes", they all walked this tightrope.
How do you show some of the truths of the battlefield without discouraging or disillusioning or turning off the folks back home without being too graphic, too candid, just enough, it kind of showed just a glimpse of the reality.
Just to pull back the curtain a bit, it was a very fine line to walk.
There were no written rules about it necessarily.
It's stunning to me that Bill Mauldin, at age 21, 22 knew where that line was, and he never crossed it.
- I'm familiar with Bill's work because of the comic strip, Snoopy, "Peanuts" rather, where Snoopy, every Veteran's day there would be a strip where Snoopy is having root beers with Willie and Joe and there would always be, you know, "To Bill Mauldin, from Sparky."
It's hard to think of that being so influential on what is the quintessential American comic strip.
And yet, you know, Bill's work is.
So, what is it about, you know, Willie and Joe that kind of resonates with the soldiers and when do they start to come around?
- The soldiers start to see Bill Mauldin's cartoons in "Stars and Stripes in early, very, very late 1943, December, 1943, January, 1944.
"Stars and Stripes", you know, the viewers should know, had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world during World War II.
It was read by, you know, all 12 million service members across the globe.
And it was, you know, if you wanted to become a celebrity, you got in the pages of "Stars and Stripes".
So when Mauldin starts getting a daily cartoon in "Stars and Stripes", it makes him a celebrity instantly.
And it makes him a celebrity, especially in the US Army.
I mean, here is a three stripe sergeant speaking truth to power and putting on the front pages, as it were, the forgotten branch of the military.
These generally, you know, hard fighting, poor, long suffering soldiers who are doing the dirty work up front.
- These characters of Willie and Joe are, well, they're behind us.
Obviously, they represent the every man.
- [Todd DePastino] Yes.
- But when does he sort of introduce them and when do they sort of become that every man that the soldiers can relate to.
- They evolve.
Joe was originally a Native American, a Choctaw Joe Barefoot in the 45th division.
He evolved as did Joe into this pair.
By early 1944, there they are, fully formed.
And what's interesting about them is they speak in this like urban patois.
You know, I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I always imagine Willie as a steelworker, but if people in Detroit imagined him as an auto worker or you know, somebody in California might imagine him as a dock worker.
He's kind of like the blue collar, they're both blue collar every man.
Willie seems to be a little bit older, a little bit wiser.
Joe seems to be a little bit younger and more temperamental.
But Americans could, everybody knew somebody like these, you know, they were your uncle, your father, your brother, your cousin, your neighbor, your buddy from elementary school.
You know, they were people that could be related to.
- We are in this museum, they have this wonderful exhibit and there are some original strips.
How difficult is it for somebody on the front lines?
I mean, I'm assuming at some point the Nazis are thinking to themselves, you know, if we get this guy Bill Mauldin, we're gonna probably knock down, you know, morale and we can maybe have a victory.
How difficult is it for him to stay with his unit and not get killed?
- Oh, good question.
Very hard.
It was a harrowing job that Mauldin did.
Now, of course, he was not on the front lines like the combatants were, but he would go and actually stay in a foxhole for four, five, six days at a time, kind of experiencing the incoming fire, you know, seeing the wounded, getting wounded.
He was wounded once and then he would go back to the rear for an equal amount of time, maybe one or two weeks, do a week or two worth of cartoon, and then he would have to go up front again.
And he always said, going back up front to see the combat was always the hardest thing, 'cause you never knew if you were gonna get hit.
And the other thing was, he said it was a grief filled experience 'cause you might go to the same foxholes that you were there two weeks before and they would be all new people because the people who had been there two weeks before were either killed, wounded, or psychologically so traumatized that they couldn't serve on the front lines anymore.
And he said it was a harrowing experience and it haunted him the rest of his life.
- And the rest of his life, he continues to be an editorial cartoonist.
And I'm looking at a couple of pages over there from when he was in Vietnam and some work with LBJ.
When does he, when he comes back from the war, how does he kind of, is it easy for him?
Let me restart that.
When he comes back from the war, is it easy for him to get picked up by a major syndicate who wants him to be their editorial cartoonist?
Or is that a bit of a battle as well to, you know, get recognized for more than just being folksy and of the people?
- Oh, it's really easy, too easy.
I mean, he comes home with, he comes home a millionaire and a celebrity.
He's got a four year syndicate deal with United Feature Syndicate that he is held to until April, 1948.
The problem is he wants to quit.
He doesn't want a cartoon after the war.
He's never been, he grew up in the army.
He doesn't know what civilian life is like.
What is he gonna, you know, he's got a wife he barely knows, he's got a kid he's never met.
He's been in the Army since he was 18 years old.
He has no idea about the home front.
And how's he gonna do political cartooning?
He wants to take a sabbatical.
The syndicate won't let him out of the contract.
So he does four, five, six cartoons a week for United Feature Syndicate and he kind of feels his way through post-War America.
And you could, if you read every cartoon that he did in those years, immediately after the war, you could kind of track his progress, track his disillusionment with the home front.
Track his stunning, his budding awareness of civil rights violations and racism and discrimination and all these things that he had never really thought about before.
They all outrage him and they attract his attention as a cartoonist and he starts cartooning about them intensely.
- How does that work?
Because it's one thing for Eisenhower to say, "No, these cartoons are, are good for morale."
It's another thing for maybe a newspaper group that has papers that print in the South, they might not want to talk about, you know, civil rights.
So how does he kind of negotiate that and still, you know, have his message heard?
- It didn't go well.
United Feature Syndicates censored his cartoons, they changed captions.
They whited out offensive things in the, you know, images.
They would not distribute certain cartoons.
And the more they censored Mauldin, the more, the harder he hit back.
I mean, he was a fiery temper.
So he said, "If I had one civil rights cartoon censored, "then I would hit back with five more, even harder."
And it was just such a frustrating experience.
He was so happy, finally, in April, 1948 when his contract with United Features ended and he quit cartooning altogether.
He was done.
"I'm done.
"I'll never do another cartoon."
So what does he do?
He stars in a Hollywood movie.
He writes for Hollywood, he becomes an airplane pilot and writes a book about piloting airplanes.
He runs for Congress in the New York 28th Congressional District and loses to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first cousin, the Delano conservative Republican.
And then finally gets back into cartooning in 1958, a full decade later.
He went to Korea, covered the Korean War, and then finally takes a job as a daily political cartoonist for the "St. Louis Post Dispatch" in 1958.
And that launches his third career as an artist, and he becomes the Dean of American political cartooning in the 1950s and 1960s.
- And does he, I guess, learn a lesson from his initial work with United Features- - [Todd DePastino] Oh yes.
- Where maybe the "St Louis Dispatch" is going to not be able to censor his work?
- Great question.
Yeah, he absolutely learns his lesson.
He realizes it took him 10 years he said to understand fully that, you know, when he was doing those hard-hitting cartoons, which I love from the 1947, 1948, he said, "I was wielding a sledgehammer "when I really should have been sticking them "with a stiletto."
He said, the most, the best cartoon is somebody who's been skewered and that blade is already six inches in them before they realize they've been cut.
[laughing] He was very graphic about it, but he said, you know, yeah, he wasn't subtle and he learned to be subtle.
He learned to be thoughtful.
He learned to moderate his commentary.
- I know that you were in involved with an organization called the Veterans Breakfast Club, and I was wondering, in the few minutes we have left, can you tell us a little bit about that?
- Yeah, you bet.
Yeah, the Veterans Breakfast Club was born from my work in Bill Mauldin.
I started talking to veterans about their service and discovered that just like Mauldin, they each have a story.
"Every veteran has a story," that's our slogan.
We're a nonprofit based in Pittsburgh, but we hold veterans storytelling events in person and online around the country.
Every Monday night at 7:00 PM we have our VBC happy hour where we get veterans together to share stories and have conversations about the military experience, past and present.
People could go to veteransbreakfastclub.org and they could check out our events.
We do interviews, we publish a magazine, a quarterly magazine.
We're all about veterans stories, creating this community with veterans and non-veterans around the military experience.
It's been the joy of my life for the past decade.
- And the book that you wrote about Bill, it is called?
- It's called "Bill Mauldin, A Life Upfront".
- And this is something that our viewers could find on any online bookstore.
- You can find at any online bookstore or you could write to me, I have copies stacked in my garage.
- And where can they find you on the web?
- Go to veteransbreakfastclub.org and you could contact me.
- Well, Todd, I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of your day.
I know you have a lecture here tonight that by the time the show airs will have already happened, so I'm sure it was a success.
- Thank you Terrence.
- And I wanna thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture".
We will see you again soon.
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