1939.10.10 “Speaking of Air Offensive”
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
15 x 19 in., crayon and ink on board
Coppola Collection
Pease was a cartoonist for the Newark Evening News from 1914 to 1954 and received the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a miner in Alaska for 5 years before beginning a career in art. He was an illustrator for the Oregonian and famously interviewed Mark Twain. From his retirement in 1954 until his death in 1963, he devoted himself to fostering his skills as a painter of portraits and landscapes.
Duff Cooper served in the British Cabinet as Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty. Chamberlain saw him as indiscreet and as a firebrand. By the time of the Munich (peace for our time) Agreement, Cooper was isolated in the Cabinet as the most public critic of Chamberlain's appeasement policy.
On October 3, 1938, a few days after the Munich Agreement, he denounced it and resigned from the Cabinet. On doing so he said, "War with honor or peace with dishonor", he might have been persuaded to accept, "but war with dishonor… that was too much."
The October 3 speech was in direct opposition to appeasement, which would have also been seen as “hot air aggression” from the isolationist US perspective. Similarly, despite the saber-rattling of the Nazis, Hitler was still seen as a local problem with grand designs. In his own speech on October 9, Hitler calls out Cooper, Churchill, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.
Cooper: During the last four weeks we have been drifting, day by day, nearer into war with Germany, and we have never said, until the last moment, and then in most uncertain terms, that we were prepared to fight. We knew that information to the opposite effect was being poured into the ears of the head of the German State. He had been assured, reassured, and fortified in the opinion that in no case would Great Britain fight.
Hitler: Nevertheless, the experiences, especially of the last eight months, must strengthen our resolve to be careful and never to leave anything undone that must be done for the protection of the Reich. Opposite us are statesmen who - that, we must believe of them - also want peace. HOWEVER, THEY GOVERN IN COUNTRIES WHOSE INTERNAL CONSTRUCTION MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM AT ANY TIME TO BE SUPPLANTED BY OTHERS WHO DO NOT AIM AT PEACE. THESE OTHERS ARE THERE. IN ENGLAND, IT MERELY IS NECESSARY THAT INSTEAD OF CHAMBERLAIN, A DUFF COOPER OR AN EDEN OR A CHURCHILL COME INTO POWER. WE KNOW THAT THE AIM OF THESE MEN WOULD BE TO START WAR. They do not attempt to hide it. That obligates us to be on the watch to think of the protection of the Reich.
By now German propaganda ranked Cooper with Churchill and Eden as Britain's most dangerous Conservative warmongers. Cooper was not offered a job on the outbreak of war in September 1939. He went on a lecture tour of the US, where he called for the democracies to stand firm against the dictatorships, and predicted that Churchill would become Prime Minister, which seemed an eccentric prediction at the time. Starting from May 1940 he was Minister of Information under Churchill.
