Historian Todd DePastino on the Legacy of Pulitzer Prize-Winning Illustrator Bill Mauldin

A dogged voice for dogfaces and other underdogs.

By ROBIN LINDLEY, Contributing Writer

“Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners. (News Item)” Copyright 1944 by Bill Mauldin. Courtesy of the Mauldin Estate.

Willie and Joe made Mauldin a hero to his fellow grunts, won him a Pulitzer Prize by age 23, and set him on a course of drawing, writing and activism for fairness and justice.

In the sweeping first biography of the celebrated cartoonist, Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (W.W. Norton), historian Todd DePastino recounts Mauldin’s unsettled childhood, wartime exploits, early fame, personal struggles, and his post-war commitment to civil rights and tolerance. Artist Jules Feiffer said the book portrays “a 20th-century life that reads like Huck Finn transplanted.”

DePastino also wrote the acclaimed history Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, and edited the new cartoon collection Willie & Joe: The WWII Years (from Seattle’s own Fantagraphics). He teaches at Waynesburg College and lives in Pittsburgh. He recently discussed his Mauldin biography from Pennsylvania.

Did the Mauldin book grow out of your history of homelessness, Citizen Hobo?
That book was a history of this wide-ranging, homeless subculture of mainly young men that rambled over the country from the Civil War until World War II, then vanished after Pearl Harbor. And [someone] said they didn’t disappear; they went into the army, like Willie and Joe.

I wasn’t familiar with Bill Mauldin or Willie and Joe. I went to my library and found a yellowed, 1945 edition of [Mauldin’s book] Up Front. I’d never seen anything like these cartoons. They weren’t about highly motivated Marines or flyboys. They were sardonic. They were dark. They were anti-establishment, anti-war— like a hidden transcript of the war: the extreme fatigue, the extreme hardship, the extreme trauma of combat. How did these anti-Army cartoons end up in an Army publication [Stars and Stripes]? That was the scholarly question that animated my research at first.

Then I learned more about Bill Mauldin. He lived for almost 60 years after the war with great celebrity. I learned of his involvement in left-wing politics after the war, of his dropping out of cartooning then coming back and winning another Pulitzer, running for Congress, going to Vietnam and being at Pleiku, going to Korea. He had such an adventurous life. I asked why there [was] never a biography, and [was told] they don’t write biographies of cartoonists. That made me want to write it even more.

And he was also a journalist and commentator.
Yes. Stanley Meltzoff, an illustrator on Stars and Stripes who was responsible for discovering Mauldin, told me, “To call Bill Mauldin a cartoonist downgrades what he did, what those pictures meant to people.” Meltzoff said he was a “picture maker”—making pictures of people in extremely traumatic situations—pictures that had a therapeutic effect. These combat soldiers would see the pictures, see themselves, and were somewhat cheered because somebody understood, and Bill Mauldin was making his understanding public and showing others what their lives were like.

Doesn’t Mauldin’s work resonate now as we fight yet another war?
We seem to have to learn the lesson in each war: that it takes (I hate the term), “boots on the ground” — armed individuals taking territory to win war, whether [in] World War II, Vietnam, or Iraq.

It isn’t generally discussed, but our game plan for Europe in World War II failed. We had expected to win through long-range artillery, aerial bombardment, naval power, [and] discounted the number of combat troops we would need, so we never had enough men. We hadn’t planned for a long, intense ground war. Does that sound familiar? There are also a lot of parallels and universals [as in the cartoon] “I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.” You wonder when your number will be up.

You stress that Mauldin’s themes of fairness and justice grew out of his childhood.
He was so shaped by his environment: the rugged, desert southwest. He had seen plenty of people bullied by cattle barons and land barons, more powerful people, including his poor farm family. He had a reflexive sympathy for the underdog that nothing could squelch. He identified with [the] oppressed; Willie and Joe were oppressed.

And Mauldin worked day and night at drawing, even during the war.

He was extremely disciplined [and] never treated his art as precious or timeless. He saw himself as a craftsman whose craft entitled him to have a voice. And for him, it was always a voice for the down and out who had no voice in society.

"I'm beginnin' to feel like a fugitive from th' law of averages." “Copyright 1944 by Bill Mauldin. Courtesy of the Mauldin Estate”

Who were his influences as an artist?
His initial influences were cartoonists, then he learned about Hogarth and Daumier from Rayson Billey, a Chocktaw Indian — the biggest, meanest soldier you could imagine, yet also one of the most educated, intellectual men Mauldin had ever met. Billey was one of his heroes [and] taught him about pictorial satire. He [attended] Oklahoma University, and Mauldin hadn’t been to college.

And Mauldin became part of the 1943 campaign of President Roosevelt and Gen. George C. Marshall to show civilians the reality of the war.
Yes. Before then, every battle was a victory, so expectations ballooned that the war would be over by Christmas 1943. The idea was to publish images of American war dead, of soldiers in grim situations. You think you’re sacrificing by only getting three gallons of gas a week and not getting butter every week, but these soldiers are living in foxholes, encountering artillery fire, and fighting a very lethal enemy, and we need to give them all the support we can muster.

Mauldin was part of this campaign of selective truth. American war dead would be shown, but they’d be face down in the sand, not in twisted or grotesque positions.

Mauldin knew he couldn’t get away with everything he wanted to say about the gruesomeness of combat, and especially about battle fatigue where soldiers literally forgot their own names, couldn’t respond, couldn’t hear, were nearly catatonic. He had seen men walk to the front as though they were going to the gas chamber — but he couldn’t talk about it in cartoons.

Gen. George S. Patton threatened to jail Mauldin for his sardonic art.

Patton hated the cartoons as much for the disheveled appearance of the characters as for the insubordination expressed in the cartoons. Patton was a spit and polish guy, [and] I think didn’t understand a lot of humor, but he understood the pictures well enough to know these guys were disheveled and therefore insubordinate.

Was Mauldin affected by posttraumatic stress disorder?
He certainly had a special survivor’s guilt. Not only did he survive, but he became a celebrity. He carried that paradox his whole life. He survived and his whole company got wiped out. He felt that he had exploited these people, and he had never told the whole truth.

Mauldin’s fervor for fairness continued in his postwar work.

Civil rights was the issue that meant the most to him. It infuriated and outraged him when he saw discrimination. He came home thinking that nothing could justify the slaughter he witnessed [and] was desperate to find some meaning for the war. He hit on the idea that if we’re not living up to the American ideals of freedom and democracy, the war was true hypocrisy and a true, unmitigated catastrophe. So he went out as a crusader for civil rights very early on in 1945, not only for African-Americans, but for Jewish Americans, Nisei, Mexican-Americans, Native-Americans. He was at the forefront of all this.

The redbaiting he saw also infuriated him. Bill Mauldin, like many Americans, came home very grateful for the Red Army. Eventually, when he [learned of] the actions of Joseph Stalin, he was upset. He was caught between the left, which he saw as apologists for the Soviet Union, and the right, which he saw as [having] a fascist enthusiasm for a catastrophic war with the Soviet Union. He was a lone voice of independent liberalism for a while.

And he soon gained an adversary in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

It didn’t take long. By late 1945, the FBI opened a file on him, kept him under surveillance, collected his cartoons, kept a record of his speeches and the groups he joined. That was used in his 1956 congressional race by his opponent, who had access to that raw FBI data. And things were added into the early ’70s.

He ran for Congress in a conservative district in New York as a liberal Democrat.

He ran an exhausting campaign, and he outscored any Democrat before him. He took it very seriously, and didn’t want to be just a celebrity candidate.

Mauldin covered both the Korean War and Vietnam where he survived a mortar attack at Pleiku when visiting his son.

His son [was] stationed at Pleiku [in 1965], a little base, and no one expected that the Vietnam War as we know it would start there, but it did. This was the first direct Viet Cong attack on American troops. Mauldin just happened to be there — the only correspondent there. He took some photographs, did some sketches, and helped with the dead and wounded.

He wouldn’t say this, but I think he avoided combat in Korea. He didn’t want to hang around the front lines. He’d had enough of that in World War II.

Didn’t Mauldin support the Vietnam war after the attack on Pleiku?
He did. He saw friends of his son hurt and killed and he was outraged [but] he said it didn’t take him long to realize it was an ill-defined adventure. By 1968, he was radically against the war.

And LBJ befriended Mauldin?
Yes, as long as he embraced the war, LBJ liked him. In some ways he was a kindred spirit. Two smart, ambitious “shit kickers,” as LBJ put it, from the Southwest, with a shared fierce sense of humor [and] a sense of grievance toward those who were better bred. But when Mauldin turned against the war, he was never invited back to the LBJ Ranch or the White House.

It was very moving to read of his last years and how veterans still admired him and sought him out. Have you heard from many veterans?
I have, and it’s heartbreaking: these old men with a deep connection to Mauldin, thanking me for writing the book.

And Mauldin got hundreds of letters on his deathbed. One was in shaky, spidery scrawl from a woman who thanked Mauldin for drawing for her husband who was killed in action in 1944. She’s writing about a trauma [of] 60 years [earlier]. It taught me how those traumas are so fresh, and how intimately connected Mauldin is with that generation’s grief.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle writer and attorney. He is a past chair of the World Peace through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association.