Is this tomorrow? America under Communism
The pins
Context
For discussion
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1
Loaded question The title "Is this tomorrow?" A question whose answer is the picture. The reader is asked to consider a possibility that has already been drawn as fact.
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2
Appeal to fear The burning flag The flag in flames. The cover has to persuade a reader to open the book, and fear is the fastest way.
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3
Stereotyping The mob Dark-faced men in green attacking a priest and a workman. The Communists are a mob with no leaders and no reasons, drawn so that a reader knows them on sight.
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4
Hyperbole "America under Communism!" A party with under 75,000 members is shown taking the country. The exaggeration was the premise of the next decade's politics.
The cover of a 1947 comic book published by the Catechetical Guild, a Catholic publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota, and distributed in about four million copies to parishes and schools. Inside, a Communist takeover of the United States is told as a story; on the cover, the flag burns while a mob attacks. It is an early Cold War artifact from a private publisher, before the government's own campaigns, and it set the visual vocabulary of the red scare.
- A question in the title. What answer does the cover expect?
- Who published this, and why would a religious publisher do so?
- What does the burning flag assert about Communists that an argument would have to prove?
See also
Same era, or the same techniques.
