Mapping Global War: Los Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens's Pictorial Cartography

Abstract

Writing on popular geographies has emphasized the shaping role of media. Newspapers and magazines, school texts, and atlases, had particular impacts on the twentieth century American geographical imagination, notably during World War II when news cartography became entwined with geopolitical mapping. The wartime mapmaker Richard Edes Harrison has been cited as exemplary of the role graphics played in promoting and popularizing an “air-age” geographical imagination. But Harrison was only one of a number of innovative mapmakers whose work reflects broader graphic traditions in mid-twentieth-century America. The Los Angeles Times artist Charles Owens, whose dramatic color maps of the World War were published weekly between 1942–1945, offers a West Coast perspective on the emerging spatiality of the air age in the context of wartime geopolitical mapping. Images that were powerfully influenced by Southern California's modern cultural landscape—specifically by air photography, automobiles, and the movies—provide insight into a more general association of mass media, popular culture, graphics, and geopolitical “imagination” in mid-twentieth-century America.

Key Words:

• popular geographies
• geopolitics
• World War II
• Pacific
• Charles H. Owens
• mapping

Notes

1. The more general context of “air age geography” at this time is discussed in Cosgrove (2001, 243–48). The term “geopolitical imagination” draws upon the concept of “geographical imagination,” the complex of culturally and historically specific geographical knowledge and understanding that characterizes a social group (Gregory 1993), but narrows it to those aspects of geography that relate to politics and strategy. Roosevelt's “cartographic” fireside chat is discussed by Schulten (2001,; 204).

2. A series of Owens's pencil sketches of Arizona desert scenes appeared in the magazine during 1926.

3. The St. Francis Dam collapse was highly significant in the interwar history of Southern California. In early March 1928, a dam on a tributary of the Santa Clara River collapsed, with the consequent flood killing 450 people and destroying vast areas of irrigated farmland in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The Italia airship, piloted by Ernesto Nobile, embodied Italian national pride in flying over the North Pole. Unfortunately, the return journey ended in disaster as the ship deflated and was forced to land on an ice flow, from which part of its crew was rescued in a dramatic dash, widely reported throughout the world.

4. On the density of toponymy on American printed maps, see Schulten (2001, 210–11, note 6).

5. The Los Angeles Times was not alone in providing a set of maps intended to build as a war atlas, but most other papers published more conventional cartographic images.

6. After 1945, Owens produced occasional maps—to illustrate the Berlin airlift and Korean War, for example—in the Times along the lines of his wartime work.

7. For a discussion of the response within academic geography to the early 1940s geopolitical “fever,” see Neil Smith (2003, 283–92).

8. Harrison's mapping style owes much to the influence of the Harvard cartographer Erwin Raisz, whose physiographic method produced a highly pictorial form of mapping by approaching relief depiction “from an entirely new angle; instead of showing slopes or elevations, it shows the type of landscape with more or less pictorial symbols which derive from airplane views.” (Raisz 1938, 149)

9. See Schulten (2001, 148–75, note 6).

10. Discussing “othering” in geopolitics, John Agnew (1999, 33) defines essentializing places as “identifying one trait as characterizing a particular spatial unit,” exoticizing as “focusing on differences as the single criterion of comparison between areas,” and totalizing as turning “relative differences into absolute ones.”

11. The archive is currently housed at the Geography department of UCLA. It consists of some 100,000 images.

12. The high-oblique perspective “map,” or “bird's eye view,” was developed in the early years of modern European cartography and landscape art. The best-known examples include Jacopo de' Barbari's Venice of 1500 and Egnazio Danti's maps of Papal Italy in the Vatican's Galleria delle Mappe, dating from the 1580s. It was revived in the late nineteenth century by such popular mapmakers as Alfred Concanen to illustrate landscapes of the Franco-Prussian War.

13. Best known among the many instances of ethnic and racial tensions in wartime Los Angeles were the so-called Zoot suit riots of August 1942 between Hispanic and white Americans.