1941.09.03 “Not Enough!”
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
12 x 14 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.
On Sept. 1, 1941, FDR gave a Labor Day radio address. It was his first broadcast from the new Presidential Library he had built next to his ancestral home in Hyde Park, NY.
American labor now bears a tremendous responsibility in the winning of this most brutal, most terrible of all wars. In our factories and shops and arsenals we are building weapons on a scale great in its magnitude.
To all the battle fronts of this world these weapons are being dispatched, by day and by night, over the seas and through the air. And this Nation is now devising and developing new weapons of unprecedented power toward the maintenance of democracy.
Why are we doing this? Why are we determined to devote our entire industrial effort to the prosecution of a war which has not yet actually touched our own shores?
We are not a warlike people. We have never sought glory as a Nation of warriors. We are not interested in aggression. We are not interested—as the dictators are—in looting. We do not covet one square inch of the territory of any other Nation.
Our vast effort, and the unity of purpose that inspires that effort, are due solely to our recognition of the fact that our fundamental rights– including the rights of labor—are threatened by Hitler’s violent attempt to rule the world.
These rights were established by our forefathers on the field of battle. They have been defended—at great cost but with great success—on the field of battle, here on our own soil, and in foreign lands, and on all the seas all over the world.
There has never been a moment in our history when Americans were not ready to stand up as free men and fight for their rights.
The editorial assessment of this American effort is “not enough is being done.”
