The Map as an "Idea": The Role of Cartographic Imagery During the Second World War

A revolution occurred during the early 1940's in the way Americans visually imagined the earth and represented it cartographically. The traditional "seaman's view" and "landsman's view," exemplified by the conventional Equator-based Mercator's projection, was replaced by a new "airman's view," typified by the North Pole-centered azimuthal projections. The increased use of these and other novel map forms resulted from and at the same time helped to promote a new world outlook among Americans, termed "Air-Age Globalism," which profoundly shaped the conduct of the war and the planning of the peace. The new geographical conception was made up of four basic elements: a fresh recognition of the earth's sphericity; a growing realization of the earth's continuity and unity, which brought into question its division into separate "continents" and "hemispheres" an imaginative ascension to an aerial perspective; and a centralized cartographic fixation upon the Arctic, which illustrated the proximity to the United States of the Soviet Union. On the spherical and contraoted territorial map base of the Air-Age world spheres of political influence seemed to overlap. Americans and Russians obeyed more or less the same national imperatives they had always obeyed but in a radically altered spatial context. Their new real and imaginary physical setting, it is suggested, was an underlying cause of the Cold War.