1941.07.10 "Two can play at painting" by Ralph Lee

1941.07.10 “Two can play at painting”
by Ralph Lee (1906-1947)
14.7 x 23.3 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Ralph Lee was an editorial cartoonist for the Portland Oregonian. He died suddenly, at 41, in January 1947. His cousin, Art Bimrose, was the editorial cartoonist for the Oregonian for more than three decades. In 1937, the Oregonian hired him part-time to work on printing plates. Following Lee’s death, Bimrose was hired as the Sunday editorial cartoonist.

This cartoon is tightly keyed to the first week of July 1941, reacting to something very specific and very current, not to general war anxiety: the US occupation of Iceland (July 7, 1941)

On July 7, Roosevelt announced that US forces would occupy Iceland, relieving British troops. This was done without a declaration of war, and it was justified as a hemispheric defense measure, even though Iceland is clearly outside the Western Hemisphere. This shocked isolationists and electrified editorial pages.

Nazi expansionism reflects exactly what readers already believed Hitler was doing.

Roosevelt is not repainting everything, but he is turning the eastern edge into a dotted line. In contemporary political language, a dotted line implied that a boundary was being extended, creating a zone of responsibility, not ownership. The explicit idea is that America’s “defense perimeter” no longer stopped at the coastline: the hemisphere was being “stretched” eastward.

Maps are already being redrawn. If Hitler redraws Europe by force, Roosevelt redraws defensive boundaries by necessity.