The United States was still struggling to recover from the Great Depression when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the Second World War. While the Great Depression had seen unprecedented unemployment in America, once the U.S. began to gear up for war this problem would quickly evaporate and be replaced with a new one. New factories to build the tanks, guns, and ships necessary to defeat the Axis would need workers, but many of the young white men who would otherwise have been employed in these factories were being drafted to fight.
Of course, the United States population was not just made up of young white men. Still, high-paying and high skilled manufacturing jobs had been barred to African Americans and women before the war. In anticipation of the coming war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had attempted to address this issue on June 25, 1941 in his Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in hiring workers from the defense industry on the basis of race. Despite the President’s order, many employers remained hesitant to hire African Americans at the beginning of the war.
Geisel published this cartoon on June 30, 1942, a full year after Executive Order 8802. In it, he is critical of the continuation of discriminatory hiring practices in the industry during a time of national crisis. The central figure of the cartoon, a top-hat-clad cigar-chomping capitalist labeled “War Industry,” plays an organ whose black keys have accumulated spider webs from disuse. Behind him, Uncle Sam looks on sternly while advising him that if he wants “real harmony,” or rather efficient production, he will need to use the “black keys.”
What is remarkable about this cartoon is that it shows that opposition to employing African Americans remained even after the intervention of the President and the outbreak of war with the Axis powers. It also shows that while Geisel had internalized some of the racially prejudicial ideas about Japanese Americans he did not support discrimination against African Americans. During the course of the war, American industry would increasingly accept African Americans into its ranks, helping to fuel the Great Migration of African Americans into northern cities.