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Requiem for the home front: a cheer for Irma the caricaturist

A personal look at how the US moved from people’s wars to “people-less wars,” from the national mobilization of WW2 to the demobilized American “home front”.

By Tom Engelhardt
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My mother draws a soldier on the set of the movie The Stage Door Canteen. Tom Engelhardt/TomDispatch. All rights reserved.

Almost three quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Still, what happened, even stripped of the metaphors, does astonish me. So here, on the day after my 71st birthday, is a little story about a bottle, a message, time, war (American-style), my mom, and me.

Recently, based on a Google search, a woman emailed me at the website I run, TomDispatch, about a 1942 sketch by Irma Selz that she had purchased at an estate sale in Seattle. Did it, she wanted to know, have any value?

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0