Dr. Seuss Japanese cartoons: what this record holds

Dr. Seuss Japanese cartoons are not objects in this snapshot. The one sheet the archive credits to a drawing by Dr. Seuss is a 1941 Douglas production poster, "Squeeze in one more," redrawn by Lee Morehouse (NAID 514471), and it does not depict Japanese people.

Searchers looking for "Dr. Seuss Japanese cartoons" usually mean the editorial drawings Theodor Seuss Geisel made for the newspaper PM in 1941 and 1942, including caricatures of Japan. This site does not hold those drawings. It does not redraw them, and it does not invent captions for sheets that are not in the FRAME snapshot. Rights for a cartoon that is not in the record are not a blank check to reproduce it.

The sheet that is here

What the archive does credit is one Douglas Aircraft War Production Drive poster, 1941: Help win the war: Squeeze in one more. Lee Morehouse drew the published cartoon "from an original drawing by Dr. Seuss." The imprint spells the name "DR. SUESS." The National Archives identifier on the record is NAID 514471, Record Group 44, 44-PA-964. The picture is a crowded car and a song. It is not an anti-Japanese caricature.

Why the gap is the answer

A page that promised the PM cartoons and then showed a carpool joke would be a bait. The honest answer is the gap. Anti-Japanese imagery that this edition does reproduce is the material with a recorded identifier: the Tokio Kid sheets and the US anti-Japanese posters gallery. Those are plant and government sheets. They are not Geisel's newspaper work, and they should not be labeled as if they were.

The parent topic is anti-Japanese propaganda.