WHEN ELECTION DAY IS CONFRONTED BY DEADLINE DAY

 

How Cartoonists Addressed Presidential Campaigns' Results...

BEFORE the Votes Were Taken

by Rick Marschall

Appropriate to the theme of this post, I wrote this before the results of the Trump-Harris were known (medical distractions...) and before the votes were cast. The "mysterious" aspect resonates, however. 

Back in B.I. (Before the Internet), voting in America was different than now. There were election days, although some rural areas extended the times to cast ballots. Paper ballots everywhere, excpet for arcane wrinkles -- dropping balls in separate boxes (hmmm... poll watchers could tell who you were and which party you favored); glass "fishbowls (so observers could see your ballot), and so forth. Eventually, the United States adopted the "Australian Ballot" -- private preferences.

Results were, of course, eagerly awaited. Telegraph messages were prized. And for years the New York World cast giant magic-lantern messages with the latest headlines and vote tallies onto the face of their imposing building on Park Row, New York City.

But the staffs of weekly magazines -- especially their cartoonists -- had a tougher challenge. The journals might appear on newsstands the day of the election, or close to it... but conceiving, drawing, engraving, printing, and distributing the magazines obliged the cartoonists to either skip the topics (no way!) or fudge the issue. Somehow. 

Joseph Keppler, the founder, chief cartoonist, and editor of Puck Magazine embraced the challenge. He loved creating cartoon puzzles -- if they could be called that: incorporating faces into the backgrounds, props, peripheral elements of his cartoons. One Christmas, Puck even offered a readers' contest for those who could discover and identify the faces of celebrities Keppler "hid" in his cartoons. In 1880, the political wisdom reckoned that the presidential candidates were neck-and-neck. Republican James Garfield was challenged by Gen. Winfield Hancock. 

How to address the campaign, which would be stale news -- anyway, not "new" when the issue would be on sale? Keppler draw two figured representing the two parties, shaking hands in unity. And he incorporated a great number of contemporary politicians' faces on the trees, rocks, and bushes. Here is the cartoon, from the issue dated Nov 3, 1880 -- but drawn and printed several days earlier:

You will find Sen. Roscoe Conkling (after whom the comedian Fatty Arbuckle was named); Sen. James Gillespie Blaine; Interior Secretary Carl Schurz; Marshall Jewell, former postmaster-general; GOP vice-presidential nominee Chester Alan Arthur; former President Ulysses S. Grant, who had contended for the nomination in 1880; Pres. Rutherford Birchard Hayes; Samuel Jones Tilden, 1876 Democratic presidential nominee; Democrat VP nominee William English; Senator John Logan; Tammany Hall boss John Kelly; presidential aspirant Benjamin Butler; Sen. Thomas Bayard; and future New York City Mayor (he would defeat young Theodore Roosevelt in 1886) Abram S Hewitt.

Bernhard Gillam addressed the same challenge in 1892; but he answered in a different manner. Grover Cleveland had been elected president in 1884, the first Democrat since before the Civil War. In 1888 he lost to Benjamin Harrison -- despite winning the popular vote, he lost in the Electoral College... corruption and chicanery winning the day for Harrison in his own state of Indiana. Not unique.

In 1892 the two "incumbents" met. The race was expected to be tight, so Gillam did not feel safe drawing with crossed fingers. His outlet was Judge Magazine. It was a Republican version of Puck, which was generally Democrat. Gillam had drawn the effective "Tattooed Man" cartoons at Keppler's side in 1884, be bolted and made Judge his new home.

Gillam's idea was to draw a political train wreck... and leave blank on his lithographers' stone the pertinent elements until the very last minute! This included the face of the losing candidate. One can discern that he expected, or hoped, that Cleveland would be the loser, because the body on the tracks is more like the corpulent Cleveland than the diminutive Harrison. But... Harrison's bearded and bewildered face was drawn in at the last moment. As were a few other elements, including the annoyed face of The Judge, the magazine's symbolic boss. And -- the elephant with the eye patch? Gillam originally intended that the animal would be a triumphant, rampaging GOP pachyderm.

Two more "in jokes" Gillam managed to fit in: lower left, the bitter face of Judge's publisher and Republican activist James Arkell; and Gillam's self-caricature on an upside-down monkey's body, with an arrow pointing to him from the signature. 

"Honesty is the best politics." 

-- Stan Laurel 

AT THE INTERSECTION OF FUNNY AND FUNNY -- CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND BUD FISHER

 AMERICA'S FAVORITE

FUNNY-MAKERS OF THE 1910s MEET

by Rick Marschall

If a poll had been conducted in the early 'teens in America -- and there might indeed have been such surveys -- despite the heavy competition, it is certain that the nation's favorite comedian was Charlie Chaplin; and the nation's favorite comic strip was Mutt and Jeff.

Chaplin burst on the scene in 1914, and was an immediate hit. His tramp character evoked sympathy, affection, a bit of derision, and even identification, all at once. Seemingly overnight he was a major star of the nascent "movies"; there were Chaplin dolls and toys; and there would be two comic strip featuring him as a character (one would be drawn by the newcomer E C Segar, years before Popeye). In 1915 he was writing, producing, and starring in a series of shorts for Keystone; Mutual, Essanay, and United Artists in his lucrative future.

In newspaper comics, Bud Fisher was the virtual father of the daily strip, certainly the first successful one. After Mr A Mutt wowed readers in San Francisco, Fisher moved to New York, was hired by William Randolph Hearst, introduced a second-banana, Jeff; and -- where have we heard this before? -- had a national sensation on his hands. Toys, dolls, sculptures (!), lapel pins, and comics' earliest successful daily-strip reprint books flooded the nation. A coupon-clipping promotion of a Boston newspaper proved that the public would be interested in comic-strip compilations, and the Ball Publishing Company produced five reprint books during the 1910s. 

Here is the cover of Volume 4, published in 1915, the year Chaplin hit it "biggest" in moving-picture theaters... and the year that Mutt and Jeff was so popular that (thanks in part to the legerdemain of syndication pioneer John Wheeler) Bud Fisher slipped away from Hearst and drew his strip for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

In a "meeting of the mirths," we see in my copy of this book that the funnyman Bud Fisher inscribed it to his cinematic counterpart, Charlie Chaplin. (Even though he spelled Charlie's name wring. So, he didn't win any spelling bees...) And the book has Charlie's bookplate! This is how he saw himself at the beginning of his career -- the drawing (alas, unsigned) show the Tramp, rather more bedraggled than usual, as a new arrival in the Big City.

Chaplin recently had arrived in America from England as a member of Fred Karno's music-hall troupe (Stan Laurel, his young understudy) and this indeed might have represented his very first impressions of America.