Bill Mauldin Postage Stamp Unveiling A free public event

The History Museum welcomes the U.S. Postal Service to its auditorium for an unveiling of the new postage stamp honoring beloved editorial cartoonist and New Mexico native Bill Mauldin. Philatelists will surely flock to this onetime event, where first-day cancellations will be available on site. Seating is limited at this free, public event.

During World War II, military readers got a knowing laugh from Mauldin’s characters Willie and Joe, who gave their civilian audience an idea of what life was like for soldiers. After the war, Mauldin became a popular and influential editorial cartoonist.

The History Museum's core exhibition, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, includes a section on World War II that attendees will be able to tour after the unveiling.

William Henry Mauldin was born on October 29, 1921, in Mountain Park, New Mexico, where his family had a farm with apple orchards. He is said to have made impressive drawings before he could talk, and his mother kept him supplied with paper and pencils. Though thin, sickly, and given to daydreams, he was tough and scrappy. When a teacher scolded him for doodling in class, he replied that he couldn’t think without drawing.

While leafing through a magazine in 1935, Mauldin saw an advertisement for a correspondence course in cartooning. The ad suggested that cartoonists could make a good living; seeing this as a way to capitalize on his natural ability, Mauldin enrolled in the course. He began offering his services as a freelance artist to the community at large, and was hired to create various forms of advertising.

In 1936, Mauldin moved with his older brother to Phoenix, Arizona, and went to high school while continuing to do freelance work. He also worked as an editorial cartoonist for the school newspaper. At the age of 17, Mauldin went to Chicago, where he enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He diligently sent work to prospective buyers, with discouraging results. Unemployment was high, and war was beginning in Europe.

After returning to Phoenix in 1940, Mauldin enlisted in the Arizona National Guard. Days later, the Arizona Guard was federalized and Mauldin found himself in the United States Army. His first Army cartoons were published that year in 45th Division News. The war took Mauldin to North Africa and then to Europe; he was in Italy in 1943, when his work began appearing in Stars and Stripes, a large daily newspaper then published by an independent unit of the headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander.

In Stars and Stripes, Mauldin’s cartoons first appeared under the title “Up Front … with Mauldin.” He subsequently changed the name to “Up Front … by Mauldin” because, though he was at the front—and received the Purple Heart after being struck by a fragment of mortar—he never drew in a foxhole and was strictly rear-echelon. Commenting later on his injury, he said, “I had been cut worse sneaking through barbed-wire fences in New Mexico.”

Mauldin’s work made him a hero to many military men, who could tell he was on the side of the lowly soldier in a time when glamorous fighter pilots got more attention. His sympathy for “dogfaces” (the slang term for soldiers in the infantry) was clearly expressed in his presentation of his unshaven protagonists, Willie and Joe. The celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle touched off wider interest in Mauldin’s work when he wrote admiringly, “Bill Mauldin appears to us over here to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real.”

For civilian readers back home, Mauldin’s syndicated cartoons offered an eye-opening look at the experience—sleeping in barns, dodging bullets in foxholes, and so on—of American soldiers in Europe. Above all, his cartoons show the tedium of war; when there is heroism, it’s understated. With humor or small acts of kindness, Willie and Joe support each other in grim circumstances.

Some of Mauldin’s cartoons touched on relations between officers and enlisted men. In one panel, two officers admire the scenery from a mountaintop, with one exclaiming, “Beautiful view! Is there one for the enlisted men?” Gen. George S. Patton publicly questioned Mauldin’s patriotism—among other things, he objected to the bedraggled appearance of Willie and Joe—but Mauldin’s success and growing fame protected him from serious repercussions.

Another iconic cartoon depicted a cavalryman shooting his disabled jeep. Mauldin later commented proudly on this effort: “It is one of those cartoon ideas you think up rarely; it has simplicity, it tells a story, it doesn’t need words. It is, I believe, the very best kind of cartoon.”

By the time Mauldin came home to the United States in 1945, he was famous. He won a Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished service as a cartoonist” and the Allied high command awarded him its Legion of Merit. His illustrated memoir, Up Front, was a bestseller. That same year, his “dogface” Willie appeared on the cover of Time.

After the war, Mauldin grew tired of censorship battles with editors and temporarily retired from cartooning to try his hand at a variety of freelance endeavors. He acted in two films (Teresa and The Red Badge of Courage), covered the Korean War for Collier’s, and made an unsuccessful run for Congress in New York’s 28th Congressional district, losing narrowly to the Republican incumbent. In 1958, he took a job as a cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The following year, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his cartoon portraying Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, as a Soviet prisoner: “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?”

Some of Mauldin’s other targets during these years were segregationists and red-baiters. In 1962, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where one of his most famous cartoons, drawn on tight deadline after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, expressed the nation’s grief by showing a monumental Abraham Lincoln burying his head in his hands. The Sun-Times later sent Mauldin to Vietnam to observe the war there firsthand. An irreverent memoir, The Brass Ring, was published in 1971.

Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other complications, Bill Mauldin died at age 81 on January 22, 2003, at a nursing home in Newport Beach, California. He had received mail and visits there from many combat veterans hoping to lift his spirits much as Willie and Joe had lifted theirs during the war nearly 60 years earlier. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

U.S. Postal Service art director Terry McCaffrey chose to honor Mauldin through a combination of photography and an example of Mauldin’s art. The photo of Bill Mauldin is by John Phillips, a photographer for Life magazine; it was taken in Italy on December 31, 1943. Mauldin’s cartoon, showing his characters Willie and Joe, is used courtesy of the 45th Infantry Division Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.