1941.06.27 “Now I can hear you.”
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
15.5 x 20 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.
Churchill and Roosevelt met in June 1941 for talks on war strategy, and the famous Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of principles for a postwar world, was issued later in August 1941 (August 14) after their Newfoundland conference.
A June 27, 1941, joint statement confirmed extensive discussions on war efforts, acknowledging challenges but expressing optimism about munition production and increasing cargo ship output despite U-boat threats. These talks focused more on immediate war production and resource allocation between the US and UK.
Before August 1941, before the Atlantic Charter’s lofty principles, there is something more basic and more newsworthy in late June: Churchill and Roosevelt are already speaking together, publicly, about the war.
"We have taken full cognizance of our disadvantages as well as our advantages. We do not underrate the task. We have conducted our conferences with the full knowledge of the power and resourcefulness of our enemies.”
This is the world saying: I hear coordinated leadership. Up to this point: Britain had been shouting into the void, the US had been murmuring, and fascists had dominated attention through spectacle and aggression.
At the same moment, Hitler has just opened a second, catastrophic front (Barbarossa), Mussolini is increasingly marginal, and while the Axis rhetoric continues, it lacks strategic coherence.
