206 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
More Americans encountered maps during World War
II than in any previous era in American history. From
elaborate inserts in National Geographic to schematic
views in the daily news, maps were everywhere.
On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland,
and by the end of the day maps of Europe had sold
out across the United States. Two years later, the
attack on Pearl Harbor sparked another rush to buy
maps. The country’s leading mapmakers reported
their largest sales to date in 1941, and in early 1942
Newsweek dubbed Washington, D.C. “a city of maps,”
where “it is now considered a faux pas to be caught
without your Pacific arena.”
If the war drove popular interest in geography,
it was the advent of aviation that transformed its
meaning. Aviation collapsed distance and realigned
geographical relationships, and nowhere was
this more apparent than in the changing look of
maps. In the first half of the twentieth century,
most Americans had been reared on world maps
using the Mercator projection (page 210), which
dates back to the sixteenth century. This cylindrical
projection was invaluable in the age of ocean
navigation, for directions are true even though
geography is distorted as one moves away from the
equator. But though the Mercator projection had
become ubiquitous, it could not adequately depict
geographical relationships in the age of aviation.
Oceans, be they vast seas or the frozen Arctic to
the north, were no longer insurmountable physical
barriers or buffers. Air routes could not be accurately
charted on the Mercator projection, nor did it
adequately illustrate the importance of the North
Pole. For all these reasons, by mid-century Americans
needed to relearn geography, and to reacquaint
themselves with the spherical nature of the earth.
One of the most effective teachers of this new
geography was Richard Edes Harrison, an artist
and designer who drew a series of maps for Fortune
magazine during the war. Fortune was founded by
Henry Luce in the 1930s with an intent to convey an
WORLD WAR II AND THE REINVENTION OF CARTOGRAPHY
Richard Edes Harrison, “Three
Approaches to the U.S.,” Fortune
(September 1940) and “The World
Divided,” Fortune (August 1941)
internationalist message to the business community.
Harrison’s maps helped to visualize this new posture
of American stewardship. With his creative use of
color and perspective, Harrison redrew the world
map in a way that engaged and challenged readers
to consider the new realities of geography.
Shown here are Harrison’s wildly popular
global views, which he used to highlight particular
geographical relationships. Consider his well-
executed “Three Approaches to the U.S.,” first
published in September 1940 as part of a series
designed to challenge American isolationism. With a
stylized approach, Harrison brought the war home to
Detroit (from Berlin), to the West (from Tokyo), and
to the “soft belly” of the South (from South America).
No longer were the Atlantic and Pacific oceans the
protective buffers they had been on a Mercator
projection; instead, viewers were startled to see how
unfamiliar their own nation appeared with just a
minor shift of perspective. In Harrison’s schematic
view, the interior was as vulnerable as the coasts—a
direct challenge to the comfortable isolationism
voiced by groups such as America First.
Notice also that, unlike most reference maps,
Harrison’s included only the information needed
to make his point: by depicting terrain in an
exaggerated manner, and only presenting selected
cities, he conveyed particular relationships without
distracting the reader with unnecessary detail.
This visual style electrified Fortune’s readers by
pulling them into the landscape as if they were
pilots hovering over the land. No such aerial view
exists, where the curvature of the earth is visible
alongside topographic details, but this imaginative
rendering of the globe enabled Harrison to visualize
direction in a way that resonated with readers. His
oblique perspective—colorfully and confidently
executed and with a keen eye for design—helped
viewers rediscover relationships that lay obscured in
traditional maps. Geography was made new.
Harrison was equally known for rejecting the
Mercator projection. Among his most striking
efforts was “The World Divided” (shown on the next
page). Here, the world is organized around the
North Pole to highlight the proximity brought about
by aviation. Though the map grossly distorts the
southern latitudes, Harrison used a polar projection
to demonstrate the relationship of the belligerents
over the North Pole, where the great circle routes of
aviation created new geographical truths.