The Sinking of the Lusitania by Winsor McKay represented the high point of World War I animated propaganda films. Courtesy of the Cartoon Art Museum, from the collection of the Glad Family Trust.

Hell-Bent for Election
The great classic election year animated propaganda film is Hell-Bent for Election. It was made to encourage people to vote and to reelect Roosevelt for his fourth term in 1944. The United Auto Workers produced it and Chuck Jones was the director. At 14 minutes, it comfortably combines facts with humor, drama and music to make its points.

The film is a race to Washington between two trains. One is the streamlined "Win the War Special" and the other is the "Defeatist Limited," an old-fashioned steam locomotive polluting the countryside. The front of each engine is a caricature. The streamlined engine is Roosevelt and the other is a creaky-looking Thomas E. Dewey. The phrase "win the war special" is a glittering generality -- a vague, but highly respected concept -- while "defeatist limited" is name-calling. As you might expect from these two phrases, the Democrats are shown as attractive workers and the lone Republican is an ugly out-of-step businessman/politician wearing an old-fashioned suit (negative stereotyping).

The plot is quite simple. Joe, a railroad worker, has control of a switch and can only let one train get through to Washington on time. The evil Republican tries to lull Joe to sleep so his train can get through. Before he ultimately succeeds, Joe tells him, "We are out to win the war." The infuriated conservative cries out, "War, war, this is Roosevelt's war," and he briefly turns into a caricature of Hitler. (A very effective negative image.) He then plies Joe with "campaign champagne, no proof," a cigar labeled "Phillie Buster," and lots of meaningless doubletalk, similar to the opening sequence in the Ike ad.

After he falls asleep, Joe has a surreal dream that's full of dubious Republican assertions. "Prices haven't risen very much, have they?" We see Joes trying to climb a ladder that keeps getting higher and higher. "Business is entitled to a fair profit. Wages must be frozen. The workers are making too much money for their own good." The dream-like artwork uses a thin white line on a black background.

In the dream, the old smoke-belching locomotive is seen pulling a series of unusual train cars that are sight gags. Right behind the locomotive is a heavy tank car labeled "hot air" and it is floating above the tracks. One flatcar with three outhouses on it is marked "housing for workers." Another flatcar has a businessman holding a fist full of dollars while a laborer struggles under a giant bundle marked "cost of war." The caboose is labeled "Jim Crow car."

The cartoon ends with Joe waking up in time to throw the switch. It then goes into a three- or four-minute jingle urging people to go out and vote.

(Note: Both I Like Ike and Hell-Bent for Election are available on YouTube and other sites, although the picture quality is not the best.)

Additional Propaganda Techniques
It may surprise you to learn that, after the Ike campaign, subsequent twentieth-century political contests apparently avoided the use of animation. Aside from Kennedy presenting a low-cost series of still photos in one commercial, and two or three independent shorts that had limited distribution (e.g., Esculations (1968) by Disney animator Ward Kimball, which is available on YouTube, showing live-action footage of candidates apparently was a more practical and effective way to promote them on TV. Animation was expensive before Flash and it simply took too long to get an ad on the air. In campaigns, the issues being debated can change quickly, so a good idea for a 30-second animated spot may be old news by the time it is ready for broadcast. I suspect that animated propaganda on TV was also suppressed by the complex rules regarding equal time for opposing views and the Fairness Doctrine (eliminated in 1987 from the FCC rules).

In Hollywood the studios avoided political content in animation, except during times of war. In their important book about wartime cartoons, Doing Their Bit (2004, McFarland), Michael Shull and David Wilt devote a very small amount of space to political content between the wars. They mention only films like Betty Boop for President (1932) and Peace on Earth (1939). (Famous Studios also made Olive Oyl for President in 1948.)

Before discussing the reemergence of animated political messages today, there are other basic propaganda techniques you should know about. You may see some of them being used in the coming months and, if you ever try your hand at making your own short political statement, this discussion may help you create a more convincing work.

Transfer. By simply showing a candidate standing next to an American flag, having the Capitol building in the background, or putting a portrait of a political hero on a desk or a wall (Kennedy, Washington, Reagan, etc.), you are saying this man is patriotic, etc. Showing images of the candidate next to or shaking hands with a political hero is also a reinforcement of his image. (Of course the interpretation of the message can change, as it did with the series of Elvis photos taken with Richard M. Nixon.)

Testimonial. These films show somebody believable speaking as the voice of authority. For example, Fred Flintstone endorsed cigarettes on TV and Captain Crunch sold a product named after him.

Patriotic symbol. Put a National Park Service ranger's hat on a bear and you have Smokey the Bear. The National Rifle Association selected as their mascot for their gun safety campaign an American bald eagle. Eddie Eagle has appeared in several animated propaganda pieces. The bird tells kids not to go near a gun unless an adult is present. He isn't encouraging kids to avoid guns; he is encouraging them to have an adult teach you to shoot and to handle the gun in a safe way. The NRA knows that people who learn to shoot when they are young are more likely to want to own guns as adults. Adults who were not into guns as kids are less likely to want to buy a gun later in life. The NRA supports gun commerce.

Card stacking. Stacking (as in "stacking the deck") is organizing information to give the most favorable or negative image possible. If you are observant, you will notice how one-sided stacked messages are, but most people don't pay attention to this simple manipulation trick. Good examples of stacking can be seen in recent works about the life of Walt Disney. Marc Eliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince is so full of misinformation and fabrications that the book is basically fiction. On the other hand, Walt and El Grupo, a new feature-length documentary on Walt's trip to South America in 1941, is so trivialized that the trip comes across as a pleasurable vacation rather than what it was: a serious government-sponsored trip to help improve our nation's image in neutral countries just before we entered into WWII.

Political ads are of course "true," until the other side cries foul and the ad is taken off the air. So the first lesson is to accept what the CIA tells their recruits, that propaganda can be black, gray or white. In other words it can be lies, half-truths or the truth. The main thing the creator of the message needs to do is to deliver it so well that people will believe it even if it is a pack of lies.