Today in existential threats

What's the existential threat weighing on the minds of Col. McCormick and his enterprising stable of cartoonists on June 30, 1941? 

The hanky that "enterprising widow" Europe is waving is labeled "Union Now" -- the roughly two-year-old "federal union" movement for a transatlantic state (or, as the Tribune put it a day earlier, "the scheme for an immediate union of the United States and the six still-free democracies of the British commonwealth of nations"). This, as you can imagine, was not the Trib's idea of preserving the exceptional American way of life.  I mean, just look at Europe's little friends there.

Hold that thought, you guys

Well, that didn't age so gracefully.

It's July 1941, and the World's Greatest Newspaper is scoffing in a frontpage editorial at the mere prospect of an attack on this continent. Col. McCormick and his cartoonists have been busily going after the liberal plot to merge the United States with Great Britain. So far, so good when it comes to Mussolini taking on South Carolina or Franco setting out to burn the topless towers of Manhattan, but: "Is the badly shaken Japan about to assault Hawaii or even the Philippines?"

Hold that thought.

Everything old is new again

Fans of the America First movement -- the original or its 21st-century incarnation -- might get a kick out of this, from the World's Greatest Newspaper, July 1944.

I'm especially fond of "Little Tom Thumb Dewey," but there's also a certain amount of prescience in "Four years from now the Dewey-Willkie international clique will be dead ducks and a great America First party will name and elect a President. Then we will have freedom in America."