Jewish cartoonist Rube Goldberg is mainly remembered for his depictions of absurdly complicated machines for accomplishing simple tasks. In fact, his name (in America, at least) has become synonymous with such machines (although as is so often the case, jews are given credit for things that were invented earlier by gentiles — in this case, British cartoonist and illustrator W. Heath Robinson had published similar drawings several years before Goldberg).

While reading an online biography of Goldberg, I came across the interesting claim that Goldberg had asked his sons to change their last names to something less jewish after he had received hate mail for the political cartoons he created during the Second World War. What I found intriguing is that in no article that I looked at online was any information given about the nature of these cartoons that elicited such strong reactions. Is that information being held back because it might be either damaging to the jewish community in general or personally embarrassing to Goldberg’s family or estate? Perhaps Goldberg was a vicious, loxist war propagandist? Perhaps he drew cartoons praising communist mass-murderer Stalin, while calling for the forced sterilization of Germans, like his fellow jew Theodore N. Kaufman did in the booklet Germany Must Perish?

A Clusty search for Rube Goldberg’s political cartoons didn’t yield much, but I did find the following:

What’s interesting is that the German-American illustrator/cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, has in recent years been roundly condemned as a racist for producing wartime anti-Japanese cartoons that were in no way worse than the one by Goldberg above. Perhaps if more were known about Goldberg as a political cartoonist and war propagandist, he might be regarded as a racist too?