Highlighting the ratcheting tensions of World War II, this cartoon uses the announcement of the local Boy Scouts Skill-O-Rama competition to draw a comparison to the Hitler Youth.
This might seem extreme, but the Nazi party indeed modeled much of the Hitler Youth organization on sporting and scouting groups like the Boy Scouts. These voluntary sporting and outdoor skill programs were transformed into a mandatory, statewide project designed to radicalize, indoctrinate, and provide proto-military training to the children of Germany. The organization served first as a pipeline to jobs, higher education, and military service, but by 1945 children as young as 12 began being conscripted straight out of their Hitler Youth chapters into front line service.
Howard Fisher’s cartoon shows the Hitler Youth as unhappily obedient, contrasted to “The American Way” of the Boy Scouts, led by the light of American liberty, “for a more useful and constructive citizenship”.
Howard Fisher, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1890, started his career in Portland, Oregon at the Oregon Journal in 1919. By 1930 he was the paper’s official editorial cartoonist, a position he occupied until retirement in 1956. His original illustrations were in high demand from some of the biggest names in America, from J. Edgar Hoover to president Harry S. Truman, and he won top prize in a contest sponsored by the newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher in 1935.
Howard Fisher’s work appears in the collections of the University of Washington, the Oregon Historical Society Research Library, and the Library of Congress.
SKU: 21V23208
Highlighting the ratcheting tensions of World War II, this cartoon uses the announcement of the local Boy Scouts Skill-O-Rama competition to draw a comparison to the Hitler Youth.
This might seem extreme, but the Nazi party indeed modeled much of the Hitler Youth organization on sporting and scouting groups like the Boy Scouts. These voluntary sporting and outdoor skill programs were transformed into a mandatory, statewide project designed to radicalize, indoctrinate, and provide proto-military training to the children of Germany. The organization served first as a pipeline to jobs, higher education, and military service, but by 1945 children as young as 12 began being conscripted straight out of their Hitler Youth chapters into front line service.
Howard Fisher’s cartoon shows the Hitler Youth as unhappily obedient, contrasted to “The American Way” of the Boy Scouts, led by the light of American liberty, “for a more useful and constructive citizenship”.
Howard Fisher, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1890, started his career in Portland, Oregon at the Oregon Journal in 1919. By 1930 he was the paper’s official editorial cartoonist, a position he occupied until retirement in 1956. His original illustrations were in high demand from some of the biggest names in America, from J. Edgar Hoover to president Harry S. Truman, and he won top prize in a contest sponsored by the newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher in 1935.
Howard Fisher’s work appears in the collections of the University of Washington, the Oregon Historical Society Research Library, and the Library of Congress.
SKU: 21V23208
DIMENSIONS
14.25” wide x .75” deep x 19.25” tall
ESTIMATED WEIGHT: 1 lbs
