PRESIDENTS vs POLITICAL CARTOONISTS

 

I:Political Cartoonists Have Reflected (and Moved) Events, Decisions, and... History

by Rick Marschall

Politics and cartoons have not always been ingredients in an adversarial recipe. This drawing from PUCK is about a politician (publisher William Randolph Hearst) and his own cartoon characters, stars in his chain of newspapers. In 1904 he sought the Democrat Party nomination for President; he would have run against the incumbent Theodore Roosevelt. Around him are the creations of F Opper, Rudolph Dirks, James Swinnerton, and Carl Schultze.  

I recently returned from Washington DC, the Inauguration and related events, and while this will be old news to any who read this after it is archived, it will not be a news report. I was inspired, if that is the right word, to share a little history of presidents and cartoons. Campaigns and commentary by comic artists. It will run over several postings.  

Editorial cartooning, specifically politically cartooning, thrives at times of urgent public debates and vivid personalities.

This statement sounds trite or self-evident, barely a thesis except that – in a corollary of the “Great Man” theory of studying history – urgent public debates and vivid personalities sometimes are shaped and propelled by speeches, tracts… and cartoons.

The timing and the passions of the Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, the Spanish-American War, the New Deal, and various anti-war movements all mightily were influenced by cartoons and cartoonists.

Cartoons not only reflected events but have influenced history. Napoleon said that history was written by the victors – and it is just as true that our views of history often have been shaped by artists, including cartoonists.

                 

The legendary Thomas Nast, a self-caricature, sharpening his most lethal weapon, a pencil. His support of the North in the Civil War, and of President Abraham Lincoln, earned the latter's honorific, "The North's Greatest Recruiting Sergeant." On the other hand, his vicious cartoons against Democrat presidential candidate Horace Greeley helped defeat U S Grant's opponent in 1872. Greeley died only days after the election.

Much of what we think – and know; or think we know – of kings, presidents, generals, candidates, and leaders of movements, has been codified by cartoonists. Oftentimes, major figures in history have been portrayed to their detriment. Sometimes unfairly, sometimes falsely, often spot-on. No matter: our general opinions of: say, Andrew Jackson or Williams Jennings Bryan frequently are what the cartoonists said through their art.

Consider Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. Do we “know” them through their portraits? Speeches? Caricatures? Truth? Generalizations? Slander? Gossip? Facts? Cartoonists work on the blank slates of daily journalism in ink, but might as well carve in stone.

King Tut: What do we know of how he lived and loved? But his image endures. We have thousands of hours of Nixon on film, yet we remember him mostly through the cartoons of Herblock.

… Anyway, it was once so. Henry Major, a caricaturist of an earlier generation, noted that cartoonists more than occasionally were thrown in jail for what they drew. He said that later cartoonists should be arrested for what they don’t draw. If we return to our thesis – that political cartooning thrives during times of urgent debates and vivid personalities, and vice-versa – then we might well be entering a new Golden Age of political cartooning.

Time will tell, but signs are at hand. The Trump presidency, indeed the Trump phenomenon, provides an unprecedented opportunity for political cartoonists to spread their ink-stained wings as seldom before. Stand-up comedians and cable-news wiseguys have stolen a lot of cartoonists' thunder... but, really, only to the extent that artists and newspapers have weakened their platforms and surrendered their turf.

To appreciate the art form of the political cartoon, as much as to contextualize the opportunity presented by Trump, it is instructive to survey the history of political cartooning in America. We will see that the most powerful and memorable – and prescient – work has been at times when vivid personalities have predominated. Whether cartoonists have accurately or satirically recorded, or helped create, their victims, is an open question. That questions is as intractable as the chicken-or-egg conundrum.

Our job – as citizens, commentators, voters – is to appreciate and learn from this amazing art form of graphic humor, variously called “Wordless Journalism,” the “Ungentlemanly Art”: the political cartoon.

At a conference held by the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists in the mid-1970s, Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post addressed the assembled cartoonists and thanked them for providing “laughs” and “morning chuckles.” The assembled cartoonists mostly were outraged. After investing in careers as pictorial commentators they were being dismissed as court jesters. False News. By the Washington Post of all institutions (surprise, surprise in view of recent events? See the recent travails of cartoonist Ann Telnaes, chronicled in these columns) .

             

Several times in American history, there were calls to restrict and even censor, political cartoons. Sometimes these calls, by politicians of course, became legislative proposals. These bills never became laws. Spangler, Montgomery Advertiser, in the 1910s. The most serious of these efforts occured in Pennsylvania about the same time, by an aggrieved Senator Pennypacker.

It was outrageous that someone from the staff of the newspaper home of Herblock could so totally misunderstand the unique gift – yes, art form – of the political cartoon. Maybe cartoonists make their points through laughs. But that one creative tool among many others, is not the only special attribute of cartoons – there is the ideal of truth itself.

Next: The birth of American political cartoons, and the early American cartoonists Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere.