1944: Hell Bent for Election

 

Political advertising is pretty dire, its the most transparent of advertising, "give us your vote and in exchange you will have x" so this short 1944 animation was pleasant surprise. While still extremely blunt it uses clever imagery and a simple plot with a hero and a villain. If I didn't know FDR was a real person and President or about WWII I might have thought this was a cartoon morality story. Well, the cheering for the "win the war special" train that is armed to the teeth would've made for a strange moral.

This short was the first major work of United Productions of America, then still known by its boring name Industrial Films. It was funded by United Auto Workers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, two powerful American labour organisations. The short is an openly pro Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaign film during his bid to be re-elected President in 1944. He won by a comfortable margin, it was the last election campaign he ran as he died in 1945. His opponent Thomas E. Dewey I had not heard of until watching this film, unless you count Truman holding up the newspaper with the infamously incorrect headline. So I don't know how accurate the caricature of Dewey's positions were. 

 

But in a vacuum, my sympathies lie more with Roosevelt based on the argument of the film. The workers struggling against a candidate supported by a businessman who has fascist sympathies, its not a hard choice really. One detail I enjoyed was that during the presentation of Dewey's social policies, or rather lack of policies, the music accompanying the scene is a rendition of the Preacher and the Slave, a popular labour song written by Joe Hill an important organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World, untill his death by firingsquad in 1915. 

So an ashamedly partisan piece, but the sequences and images were quite clever and well thought out. The hallucinations of the rail worker and the increasingly demonic capitalist out class thousands of political cartoonists. Though given that United Productions of America was founded by ex-animators for Walt Disney who parted ways with him after the 1941 cartoonists strike I'd hazard a guess that they had some personal experience with a similar tycoon with some interesting political views.