Children's Book Author Drew 400 War Cartoons FBI Opened File Got Death Threats

Before The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham made him beloved, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) spent two years as a different kind of artist—a warrior with a pen. From January 1942 to 1943, the 37-year-old children's book author drew over 400 brutal political cartoons for PM, a left-leaning New York newspaper. His targets: Hitler, Mussolini, American isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, and the America First Committee led by Charles Lindbergh. Using the same whimsical style that would later create beloved children's characters, Geisel transformed his art into propaganda weapons. He drew Hitler as a grotesque beast, Mussolini as a buffoon, and isolationists as ostriches with their heads buried in the sand while bombs fell. His most famous cartoon showed the "Isolationist" ostrich ignoring the war—it became iconic and was reprinted across America. But this work came at a cost. The FBI opened a file on Geisel, monitoring him as a potential subversive for his association with the left-wing PM newspaper. Nazi sympathizers and America First supporters sent death threats to his home, calling him a traitor. Geisel kept drawing. His cartoons reached millions, helping shift American public opinion toward total commitment to defeating fascism. In 1943, the US Army recruited him to Frank Capra's propaganda unit, where he created training films and wrote scripts for the Private Snafu animated series that educated millions of soldiers. After the war ended in 1945, Geisel returned to children's books and never drew another political cartoon. He later said he'd rather be remembered for his children's books—and he was. But for two years during World War II, the man who would create The Cat in the Hat was something else entirely: a children's author who turned his pen into a bayonet and went to war on paper.