1942.04.10 “Still There in Spirit”
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.
Bataan fell on April 9, 1942. The broken, burned flagpole planted in smoldering ruins acknowledges defeat without euphemism. There is no intact pole, no planted flag, no battlefield heroics. The ghostly American flag, hovering above the pole rather than attached to it, solves a propagandistic problem: how to show loss without conceding moral or spiritual defeat.
“American–Filipino heroism” insists on joint sacrifice, countering any tendency to frame Bataan as an American failure alone. It also reinforces wartime commitments to the Philippines at a moment when U.S. forces had visibly failed to defend them.
The title openly concedes absence (“still there” only spiritually) while refusing erasure. It reframes surrender as endurance, converting defeat into a claim on future vengeance or redemption.
Lee transforms Bataan from a military disaster to a moral shrine.
