Anti-Nazi and World War II Era

During the 1930s, Jerry Doyle emerged as a leading editorial cartoonist in addressing the threat to peace and the international order posed by the rise of Nazi Germany, fascism and authoritarianism in Italy and Spain, and Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. Supported by his publisher, J. David Stern, and the progressive agenda of the Philadelphia Record, Doyle informed his cartoon readers of the looming dangers of totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and militarism. His attacks on Hitler, Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy garnered death threats and confrontations with elements of the German American Bund, the isolationist American First Committee, and the Ku Klux Klan. Doyle’s best World War II era cartoons, later compiled in the book According to Doyle: A Cartoon History of World War II, With Text by Charles Fisher (G.P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1943), earned him the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists National Headliner Award in 1942. As early as 1936, Doyle foreshadowed Germany’s ruin and Hitler’s suicide in a prescient cartoon included below entitled “Contemplating Murder and Suicide.”