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February 6, 2003
Rest in Peace, Bill Mauldin
The influential, uncompromising, and hard-living cartoonist, 81, dies after long struggle
Members' tributes to Bill Mauldin
By V. Cullum Rogers
Bill Mauldin, the greatest American cartoonist of World War II and one of the greatest editorial cartoonists of the past century, died on January 22 at a nursing home in Newport Beach, California, at the age of 81.
He died of complications from Alzheimer?s disease, including pneumonia, said Andy Mauldin, one of his seven sons. "It?s really good that he?s not suffering anymore," he said. "He had a terrible struggle."
William Henry Mauldin was born October 29, 1921, in Mountain Park, New Mexico, one of two sons born to Sidney Albert Mauldin, a handyman, and Edith Katrina Bemis Mauldin. As a child, he suffered from rickets, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin D, and was unable to engage in strenuous activity. His head seemed too big for his spindly body. When he was eight, he heard one of his father?s friends say, "If that was my son, I?d drown him."
Mauldin never forgot the insult and turned all his energy to teaching himself how to draw. His family moved to Phoenix, and while he was still in high school there he enrolled in a correspondence cartoon school.
At 17, he left high school without getting a diploma, moved to Chicago and studied for one year at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. His grandmother gave him the $300 tuition fee. One of his teachers was Vaughn Shoemaker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News. "Whatever I know about political cartooning, I learned from him," Mauldin said.
Mauldin wrote years later that he learned about Chicago?s rising bridges by trying to watch a ship pass under the Michigan Avenue bridge while he was standing on it, unaware of what the ringing bells meant. "One of the nice things about Chicago is its tolerance for rubes," he said.
He moved back to Phoenix and began to sell his drawings. Some of the first were published by Arizona Highways magazine. In 1940 Mauldin also created cartoons for both sides in the Texas gubernatorial campaign. He later said he joined the Arizona National Guard to avoid the Texas politicians, who discovered he was working both sides of the fence. The Guard required no physical examination ? Mauldin doubted he could have passed one ? and he was accepted. When the Arizona Guard was federalized in 1940, he found himself in the Army.
He scored more than 140 on his Army I.Q. test and later said that once the Army became aware of this, it did with him what it tended to do with all bright people who become enlisted men: It gave him K.P. for four months.
He managed to get a transfer to Oklahoma?s 45th Division so that he could draw cartoons for the 45th Division News, first as a volunteer, later as a member of the staff. Once the 45th shipped overseas, the Stars and Stripes, the military-wide newspaper, began publishing Mauldin?s drawings. He was later assigned to the Stars and Stripes but continued to spend most of his time with the 45th Division, where he said he received his inspiration.
That inspiration was embodied in two weary infantry soldiers named Willie and Joe, whose sardonic, foxhole-level commentary expressed the views of enlisted men everywhere and gave newspaper readers back home a taste of life at the front. Their likenesses were found in pup tents and bivouacs from Brittany to Berlin, tacked up next to the inevitable glossies of those other G.I. favorites, Betty Grable and Dorothy Lamour. Mauldin began his sojourn with the 45th, which arrived in North Africa and fought into Italy, but he sampled many divisions and places as his fame grew.
Joe was created first, well before Pearl Harbor, as a cleanshaven, well scrubbed young man, and he appeared in various Army publications, especially the 45th Division News. After December 7, 1941, he met Willie, and the two went through the Italian campaign together, becoming disreputable in their personal habits during the miserable winter of 1943-44.
During training Joe was a "Choctaw Indian with a hooked nose, and Willie was his rednecked straight man," Mauldin once recalled. "As they matured overseas during the stresses of shot, shell and K rations, and grew whiskers because shaving water was scarce in mountain foxholes, for some reason Joe seemed to become more of a Willie and Willie more of a Joe."
Mauldin said the expressions on Joe and Willie are "those of infantry soldiers who have been in the war for a couple of years."
"If he is looking very weary and resigned to the fact that he is probably going to die before it is over, and if he has a deep, almost hopeless desire to go home and forget it all; if he looks with dull, uncomprehending eyes at the fresh-faced kid who is talking about all the joys of battle and killing Germans, then he comes from the same infantry as Joe and Willie," Mauldin wrote in 1945.
The only thing that could never be questioned about Willie and Joe was their determination to survive and win. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, looked forward to their adventures, and Gen. Mark Clark so appreciated them that he saw to it that Mr. Mauldin got a specially equipped Jeep in Italy so that he could go where he wanted and draw what he wished. Ernie Pyle, one of the G.I.?s favorite correspondents, termed Mr. Mauldin the best cartoonist of the war because he drew pictures of the men who were "doing the dying." Author and former Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam wrote: "One senses that if a war reporter who had been with Hannibal or Napoleon saw Mr. Mauldin?s work, he would know immediately that the work was right."
Near Cassino, in Italy, Sgt. Mauldin was wounded by a fragment from an enemy mortar shell, while working on a cartoon. He walked to an aid station, and a medic removed the shrapnel and handed him a Purple Heart.
He turned the incident into a memorable cartoon: Joe slouches in front of a medic, sitting at a table piled with Purple Hearts. "Just gimme th? aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart," he says.
In one drawing, soldiers are marching, bone-weary. Says Willie: "Maybe Joe needs a rest. He?s talking in his sleep." An exhausted and dirty Joe guarding three equally exhausted and dirty Germans was captioned with a quote from a rah-rah news dispatch: "Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle weary prisoners."
That cartoon was cited by the Pulitzer committee when it gave Mauldin the prize for political cartooning in 1945. At the age of 23, he became ? and remains ? the youngest person ever to win the award. Also that year, Willie?s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine and Mauldin?s cartoon collection "Up Front" became a bestseller. It went on to sell three million copies.
Gen. George S. Patton was one of a small minority who had no use for Willie, Joe and Bill Mauldin. Early in 1945, he demanded that Stars and Stripes drop Mauldin?s work. Gen. Eisenhower, aware of the morale value of Willie and Joe, intervened, arranging a meeting between the cartoonist and the famously gruff Patton.
"I was scared to death," Mauldin recalled, at Ike?s death in 1969. "For 45 minutes, Patton lectured me on military history and his theories of discipline. It was a very eloquent chewing-out."
Gen. Patton never gave his account of that meeting, but asked toward the end of the war to comment on Sgt. Mauldin?s cartoons, he said, "I?ve seen only two of them, and I thought they were lousy."
Mauldin seemed to have trouble adapting to civilian life after the war. "I never quite could shake off the guilt feeling that I had made something good out of the war," he told Time magazine in 1961. "It wasn?t a nice feeling."
His wartime marriage, to Norma Jean Humphries in 1942, ended in divorce in 1946. He married again in 1947, to Natalie Sarah Evans, who was killed in a car crash in August 1971. The next year, he married for a third time, to 26-year-old Christine Lund, an editorial assistant at the Chicago Daily News. They later divorced.
In his postwar cartoons, many of which were collected in the 1947 book "Back Home," Mauldin turned his fire on more overtly political targets?segregationists, redbaiters, and veterans? organizations that he thought were too far to the right. The work was forceful but sometimes strident, and Mauldin later said he thought he had gone too far in his denunciations and "became a bore." Many newspapers agreed and began to drop him. At one point, the list of his syndication clients was falling at the rate of one paper per day.
Mauldin later disputed accounts that he was floundering during this period. "I made the fatal mistake of signing up with United Features syndicate before the war was over," he told Target magazine in 1984. "The damn fools at the syndicate thought that they were dealing with an entertainment feature and they had sold it as such.... A lot of editors suddenly realized, holy Christ, this is editorial-page stuff, and we don?t agree with it. Then the syndicate panicked and started editing my stuff, which the small print, which I hadn?t read, gave them the right to do. The result was I quit when my contract ran out [in 1948]."
Mauldin became an advocate for veterans and joined the American Veterans Committee, which saw itself as an alternative to more traditional organizations like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He served two terms as its president in the 1950s.
Mauldin covered the Korean War briefly for Collier?s but was not entirely pleased with his work. He resuscitated Joe, made him a war correspondent and had him writing letters to the stateside Willie. That material formed the basis for his 1952 book, "Bill Mauldin in Korea." He also wrote five unpublished novels and acted in two war movies, both made in 1951. One was John Huston?s "Red Badge of Courage," with Audie Murphy, the most decorated hero of the war. Mauldin received good reviews, but the movie failed at the box office. The other was "Teresa," directed by Fred Zinnemann.
In the middle 1950s he moved to Rockland County, New York, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1956 as a left-of-center Democrat against a conservative Republican incumbent named Katharine St. George. The experience left him, he later said, "broke and through with politics," but also with a heightened respect for its practitioners. "I suddenly realized I was playing this thing to win," he recalled later. "I didn?t lie to anybody but I found myself being very economical with the truth.... I?ve never been able to feel contemptuous of a politician since then just because he?s a politician."
In 1958 he visited Dan Fitzpatrick, editorial cartoonist for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who disclosed that he was planning to retire. Mauldin applied for the job and got it. He seemed to regain his old form and was regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of his day, earning a second Time cover in 1961?this one featuring his own face instead of Willie?s?and winning a second Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for a cartoon on the plight of the Russian author Boris Pasternak. The cartoon showed two prisoners in Siberia, one of whom said to the other: "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?"
George Hall, a former editorial page editor at the Post-Dispatch, recalled only being "sort of in charge" of Mauldin. "He had his own views," said Hall, "and sometimes they weren?t in good taste, although he was a very good artist. He did what we suggested, and he did a good job."
One cartoon that Hall had him alter was of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pushing a wheelbarrow filled with something icky that Hall decided needed to be replaced with rocks. "He signed that cartoon for me," Hall said, "addressing it George ?Long Suffering? Hall. We got along."
Mauldin frequently lamented that editorial cartoonists were too soft and that more of them needed to be "stirrer-uppers."
"If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it," he once said. "If it?s big, hit it. You can?t go far wrong." From his point of view, too many newspaper artists tended to "regard editorial cartooning as a trade instead of a profession."
"They try not to be too offensive," he said. "The hell with that."
Mauldin left St. Louis for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962, following a disagreement over syndication with Post-Dispatch publisher Joe Pulitzer. "Pulitzer told me he wanted to syndicate me," Mauldin told Target magazine. "What I didn?t realize was what he had in mind was pocketing the money. He raised my salary by $5,000 [to $23,000] but he didn?t give me a cut of my royalties... When Chicago made an overture, I went for it."
The Sun-Times greeted Mauldin with great fanfare, even chauffeuring him to his first day on the job in an Army jeep, and sent him around the world on assignments. When James Meredith enrolled to integrate the University of Mississippi, backed by federal troops, Mauldin was at the riot. In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous "I am a Berliner" speech at the Berlin Wall, Mauldin was there.
In 1965, he visited Vietnam and was the only correspondent present when the Viet Cong hit the U.S. air base at Pleiku, where his son was stationed. His sketches and reporting of the assault ran all over the country.
In 1967, he went to Israel just in time for the Six Day War. He was unabashedly pro-Israel, drawing the country as a tiny but brave soldier menaced by giant hooknosed Arab figures. He also visited troops in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, toward the end of his career. He did not approve of the war, and his cartoons were especially hard on President George Bush.
The most famous cartoon of Mauldin?s postwar career?and one of the most famous editorial cartoons of all time?was penned the day Kennedy was assassinated. The captionless cartoon shows the Abraham Lincoln figure from the Lincoln Memorial, bowed forward in his seat, face buried in his hands in grief.
The Sun-Times ran the cartoon over the entire back page, and many vendors sold the newspaper back page up, to display Mauldin?s work. More than 250,000 requests for reprints of the drawing came in, and it earned Mauldin a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism. Jacqueline Kennedy asked for the original and placed it in the Kennedy Library at Harvard.
For many of his years with the Sun-Times, Mauldin lived in his native New Mexico and submitted cartoons from there. He cut down from five cartoons a week to three in the early 1980s because of arthritis in his drawing hand, and gave up regular cartooning assignments in the early 1990s.
In retirement, the honors kept pouring in. In 1993, the U.S. Postal Service announced it would feature Willie and Joe on one of a series of stamps commemorating 20th-century American life. In a telephone interview that year with the Post-Dispatch, Mauldin showed he was still willing to take on authority if he felt put upon.
"They used the same artist to do all these stamps, and he really screwed Willie and Joe up," he told his old newspaper. "I raised a lot of hell about it. They sent me the original, and I reworked some of it. I worked with him, but not very happily. It?s still not great, but it?s OK. The wrinkles are all wrong; the packets are all wrong, but the noses are all right."
"Up Front" was republished in a 50th anniversary edition in 1995. Among Mr. Mauldin?s other books were "A Sort of a Saga," 1949; "Bill Mauldin?s Army," 1951; "Bill Mauldin in Korea," 1953; "What?s Got Your Back Up," 1961; "I?ve Decided I Want My Seat Back," 1965; and "The Brass Ring," 1972. He also illustrated many articles for Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated and other publications.
In recent years, as Mauldin battled Alzheimer?s, thousands of veterans, widows and other well-wishers sent him letters, offering thanks and stories of survival.
The campaign to recognize him was sparked by veteran Jay Gruenfeld, who spent years wondering what happened to the man who had made him laugh in a foxhole under fire. He sought out Mauldin in a nursing home in Orange County, California, and then wrote to veterans organizations and contacted newspaper columnists urging people to remember him. Soon Mauldin was receiving hundreds of letters a day.
Said Andy Mauldin: "They tried to pay him back for support he had given them."
Mauldin was also revered by fellow cartoonists. "He is a complete giant," Mike Peters told the Post-Dispatch on hearing of Mauldin?s death. "I?ll tell you, he?s the reason I?m a political cartoonist. My mom [the late St. Louis television personality Charlotte Peters] called Mr. Mauldin and asked if she could bring her son to meet him. I was 13 at the time, and he had just won his second Pulitzer, and his face was on the cover of Time magazine. He was so kind. I would sit there watching him and be so quiet."
"Last week, I flew out to California to see him," said Peters. "I talked with him for an hour and a half and told him everything he?s meant to me. He didn?t talk, and at first had his eyes shut. But he did open his eyes and didn?t take his eyes off me for an hour and a half."
Bill Mauldin is survived by his first and third wives, and all of his seven sons?two from his first marriage, four from his second, and one from his third. A daughter died in 2001. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Information from the Associated Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Chicago Sun Times, Time Magazine (7/21/61)
and Target (Winter 1984)
