1926 Election Returns Are In

"Something's Gone Wrong with Our Two-Party Eugenics" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Nov. 4, 1926

The people have spoken and the results are in regarding the 1926 Senate races we visited on last week's Graphical History Tour. 

As with our elections a full century later, the party in power of all branches of government took a bit of a beating.

"The Off Year" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Nov. 4, 1926

Democrats took advantage of growing dissatisfaction with Prohibition, although that doesn't explain James Wadsworth's defeat for reelection in New York. 

Republican Senators knocked off their elephant in McCutcheon's cartoon include William Butler of Massachusetts, James Wadworth of New York, and one Senator we overlooked last week, John Herrold of Oklahoma. I hope you won't mind if we continue to overlook him again today.

"Thanks for the Buggy Ride" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, Nov. 4, 1926

The one Republican candidate among those we visited last week to lose his election was the one candidate for whom President Coolidge — as well as Charles Evans Hughes and future President Herbert Hoover — actively campaigned. William Butler had been appointed Senator upon the death of Henry Cabot Lodge, and was running to complete the remaining two years of Lodge's term. He was defeated by Democrat David I. Walsh, who had already served in the U.S. Senate but had lost his reelection bid in 1924.

"Who's Who in Washington" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, Nov. 6, 1926

The election cut the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to the quick: 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and one Independent, Minnesota's Senior Senator Henrik Shipstead. Shipstead had been elected in 1922 as the candidate of the left-wing Farmer-Labor Party, a successor to the Non-Partisan League.

"Adopt Me, or I'll Adopt You" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Nov. 10, 1926

The Farmer-Labor Party failed to take hold in other states, but was able to take advantage of the weakness of the Minnesota Democratic Party. As the stronger alternative to the Republican Party in that state, Farmer-Labor was a much more attractive mate for Minnesota Democrats than it was elsewhere in the country. 

William Morris was surely well acquainted with the Farmer-Labor Party, having drawn many cartoons for the Non-Partisan Leader and its later Minneapolis-based iteration, National Leader, both closely affiliated with the movement that became the Farmer-Labor Party.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was formed by merger 1944; DFL remains the state party's monogram today — with the everlasting gratitude from Gopher State editorial cartoonists who appreciated having a label equally short as GOP.

"Is It Safe to Come In" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 6, 1926

With their Senate majority on a razor's edge, the dilemma for Republicans was whether to seat William Vare of Pennsylvania and Frank Smith of Illinois, both tainted with scandal over their campaigns' financing. Vare, a political boss from South Philadelphia, had also made deals with mobsters such as "Lucky" Luciano; Smith had earned the ire of President Coolidge over donations he had received from utilities with matters before him as Chair of the Illinois Commerce Commission.

"Little Boys with Dirty Hands Shall Be Sent Home" by Jean Knott in Dallas Morning News, ca. Nov. 14, 1926

Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot (whom Vare had beaten in the Republican primary) refused to certify Vare's election victory, claiming that thousands of illegal paper ballots had been cast for Vare. His Senate seat remained vacant until the Senate eventually voted to deny it to him in December, 1929.

As for Smith, when Senator William B. McKinley, the incumbent Smith had defeated, died in December of 1926, Illinois Governor Len Small appointed Smith to take the seat early. The Senate, however, voted not to seat him on the grounds of his having exceeded allowable campaign funding limits.

Now that the midterms were over and done with, political observers naturally turned to handicapping the next presidential campaigns.

"This Makes It Tough for the Fish" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Nov. 8, 1926

New York Governor Al Smith, with demonstrated presidential ambitions, had handily won a fourth term. Cartoonist Dorman H. Smith (none of these Smiths being related, by the way) took note also of the third terms won by Ohio Governor Vic Donahey and Massachusetts Governor Al Ritchie.

But outside of the punditocracy...

"Undisturbed" by Keith Temple in New Orleans Times-Picayune, Nov. 4, 1926

Chicago Defender erroneously identified this as a cartoon from El Paso Times — which did not print editorial cartoons in those days — but I eventually found that Keith Dimple was the editorial page cartoonist at the Times-Picayune. 

Oddly enough, Temple, like his "Average Citizen," appears not to have had much interest in politics. His cartoons in October centered largely on crime, traffic, and civic boosterism.

Got Any Plans Next Weekend?

If you were excited over Democrats' Big Beautiful Blue Tsunami, Pogo Possum might have some 66-year-old bad news for you.

"Pogo" by Walt Kelly for Hall Syndicate, Dec. 8, 1960

It seems that some scientific prognosticator at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Professor Heinz von Foerster, predicted that the world would come to an end a week from today. 

And that was six decades before anybody had ever heard of AI.

"Pogo" by Walt Kelly, Dec. 9, 1960

"Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death," von Foerster with co-writers Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot, whose field was electrical engineering, calculated in the November 4, 1960 edition of Science magazine. "They will be squeezed to death."

from Science, Nov. 4, 1960 (page 1291)

World population in December, 1960 was estimated to be just under 3,020,000,000; it's over 8,300,000,000 today. The rate of population growth in the present decade, however, has been half what it was in 1960, so there is a possibility that Professor von Foerster's and his colleagues' calculations might be slightly off.

"Pogo" by Walt Kelly, Dec. 10, 1960

A widely syndicated newspaper report of Professor von Foerster's Doomsday prediction offered our generation a ray of hope:

"By 2026, we will probably be visiting other planets and colonizing them. And by that time, people will be laughing about 'earth people' who at one time thought that their planet was the only one suitable for life — and inhabited. Why of all the billions of earths and planets, should we alone enjoy conditions suitable for life?"

The paper by von Foerster et al. also considered that possibility in its final paragraph.

"Among the suggestions that have been advanced for meeting this problem — legislation, heavy taxation of families that have more than two children, cancellation of tax deductions, and so on — space travel has been proposed recently as an alternative (R.C. Christopher & T. Griffith, Time, 75, No. 2, 22, 1960). It is only unfortunate that no reentry permit can be given these space-trotters."

Might as well finish off the rest of the Halloween candy, then. 

Colorado Catholic Parish v. Roy

The Supreme Court is hearing Colorado Catholic Parish v. Roy this term, in which the Denver Archdiocese is appealing a lower court ruling that upheld the state of Colorado's insistence that charter schools participating in its free Pre-K program agree not to discriminate in their admissions policies.

"The law really was about implementing a program that said we want every kid, no matter where you live, to be able to have access to universal preschool," says Steve Fenberg, who served as president of the Colorado state Senate when the Pre-K program was enacted, complete with a $6,300 benefit for each child enrolled in the program every year, money that comes from a tobacco tax.

To accomplish that, the state did something most other states have not. It created a broad plan, including religious schools, as long as the schools abide by a state law that bars discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Colorado state Rep. Emily Sirota, a prime sponsor of the universal Pre-K bill, emphasizes that the state wanted parents to have "a robust choice" about where their 4-year-olds would go to school.

Indeed, she notes that the Catholic Church initially endorsed the program, and Catholic Charities continues to participate, along with other religious groups, including at least 35 Christian schools, one Muslim and three Jewish schools.

But now, the Church wants to discriminate against children of same-sex or transgender parents, citing the church's belief that same-sex relationships and gender therapy are intrinsically disordered and sinful.

The Denver Archdiocese and two parishes challenged the law in court, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and its CEO, Mark Rienzi. He maintains that the Colorado law flatly discriminates against Catholic schools.

"They're only excluding religious schools that are organized around beliefs that Colorado doesn't like. And that's the constitutional problem," says Rienzi. "Not everybody has to be Catholic to show up, but they do have to agree to support Catholic teachings and not publicly contradict Catholic teachings. That's the way these schools are set up."

Therefore, the church wants an exemption from the state's anti-discrimination law, which makes it illegal to refuse entrance to school for 4-year-olds whose parents or potentially other family members are gay or trans.

The present Court, with its Catholic supermajority, has a strong inclination to favor religion over all other considerations, so it's hard to imagine Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett siding with the state of Colorado.

If the Supremes rule the way they are predisposed to, Colorado taxpayers will probably be forced to subsidize anti-LBTQ discrimination. That includes, of course, Colorado taxpayers who would be discriminated against.

Alternatively, the Colorado legislature would have to limit the Pre-K program to public schools only; this Court has already ruled, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) that state-based scholarship programs that provide public funds to allow students to attend private schools cannot discriminate against religious schools.

One could reasonably expect that LGBTQ families might not wish to send their four-year-old children to schools where they would be taught that mommy and mama, or daddy and dada, or their transgender-neutral parents whatever they call them, are going to hell. I haven't come across any lawsuits having been brought against the Denver Archdiocese to force it to admit children of same-sex, transgender, divorced, excommunicated, or atheist parents; so I posit that their preschool could have gone on discriminating against whomever it wanted to as long as they didn't post it on the signboard at the entrance.

After all, the current Supreme Court also believes that discrimination is discrimination only if the party doing the discriminating publicly confesses that they discriminate. 

Which only affirmative action programs and DEI policies ever get caught doing.

Día de los Sneak Peeks

It looks like we've finally fixed the WiFi network at Chez Bergetoons.

It took almost a whole week of being able to connect only the desktop computer to either the internet or the printer, but never both at the same time, and none of our other household devices being able to connect to either one. My better half spent hours on the phone or texting our internet service provider and the company we bought our router from; it was the Filipino technician from the latter who was finally able to get our system up and working.

My iPod, the one device that hadn't been able to find our WiFi network since we had installed the present router last year, may even have located it now. While colorizing this week's cartoon this morning, I was listening to a playlist that is supposed to include "Conquistador" by Procol Harum, one of several tracks that are listed in gray and always skipped. 

This morning, "Conquistador" played.

I'll know for sure when the playlist gets to the third movement of Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto Andaluz, another track that the iPod always skips.

Well anyway, here's a sneak peek at this week's Can't Be About The Election editorial cartoon:

Just in time for the annual stewardship drive!

Campaigns Drawn to a Close

Graphical History Tour checks in one last time on the campaigning ahead of the 1926 midterms:

"Why Change" by Charles Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Nov. 1, 1926

The GOP went into the election in full control of Congress and the White House. Indianapolis News front page editorial cartoonist Charles Kuhn spent the final week of the campaign drawing variations on one theme: Republicans brought the nation six years of unprecedented prosperity, so why change?

"Anxious Days for Mothers" by James "Hal" Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 29, 1926

All politics being local, Hal Donahey highlighted the diverse issues bedeviling individual Republican Senate candidates around the country with President Coolidge looking on. Today’s tour explores some of these races.

"Nothing to Hide Behind" by James "Hal" Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 19, 1926

Since Donahey brought it up, we'll get Ohio out of the way first. In "Anxious Days for Mothers," Donahey showed Senator Frank Willis beset by "Newberryism," named for Michigan Senator Truman Newberry, notorious for the huge amount of money he spent to get elected in 1918 only to be pressured into resigning in 1921. 

Donahey tended to support Democrats (his brother "Honest Vic" Donahey happened to be the Democratic Governor of Ohio), so it's hardly surprising that he didn't see Republicans' record in quite the enthusiastic way Charles Kuhn did.

Detail from "Halloween Time" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1926

We were just discussing Klan involvement in Indiana's Republican Party (an issue Kuhn was more than happy to ignore), an unwelcome stumbling block in Senator James Watson’s race for reelection. Both of Indiana's senators had testified to an investigation led by Senator James Reed (D-MO) to deny being beholden to the KKK. 

Running for reelection, Senator James Watson played down his contacts with Klan representatives, saying that their people met with many other senators, and merely shared his views on the League of Nations and World Court. As for his meetings with former Grand Wizard D.C. Stephenson, by this time serving time for rape and murder, and threatening to tell all about Indiana Republican deals with the Klan, Watson testified,

"I know Stephenson. All Indiana politicians know Stephenson. He was an active fellow and went about at gatherings and conventions. ... Stephenson was never in my room privately but once, and then nothing was said about politics or anything else. He said, 'I came to pay you a visit.' After talking a while, he left.

"I didn't know why he came, and I don't know now. I had gone to bed when I heard a knock at the door. I got up and let him in and we sat and talked for a while. Then he left."

"Admirers of Coolidge Who Had Intended to Vote for Smith" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30, 1926

Moving along to the Senate race in Illinois: the Republican establishment was embarrassed by its standard bearer, Senator Frank L. Smith (whom Donahey drew tackled by anti-Prohibition “Wets”). It was revealed that while he was Chair of the state's Commerce Commission, Smith had accepted over $200,000 from railroad magnate Samuel Insull and other public utility officials. The steadfastly Republican Chicago Tribune reported:

The President has not lifted a finger to help Smith, presumably because the President could not stomach the scandal attaching to the candidacy of the Republican nominee as a result of the conduct of Smith in taking money from the great public utility corporations subject to his regulation as chairman of the Illinois commerce commission.

It has been known for several months that Coolidge was greatly shocked at the conduct of Smith and had hoped at one time that Smith would have the decency to withdraw after the exposure of the scandal and would relieve the party of the embarrassment of his candidacy. The President was disappointed when Smith refused to budge.

Coolidge responded to a protest by a Smith defender that the Democratic candidate, George E. Brennan, had accepted a $15,000 donation from Insull by snapping, "But Brennan wasn't regulating Insull's properties, was he?"

"To the Rescue" by Fred O. Seibel in Richmond Times-Dispatch, Oct. 28, 1926

The one candidate for whom Coolidge actively campaigned was his home state Senator William Butler (the guy getting stomped by his support of tariffs in Donahey’s "Anxious Days for Mother" cartoon), who had been appointed in 1924 to finish the term of the late Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. 

Butler campaigned as "a candidate for office on a platform that pledges a continuance of the American policy of adequate tariff protection for our industries. My opponent [former Senator David Walsh] has received a Democratic nomination, and he is running on a platform that tries to fool the voters by making one gesture toward protection and another toward free trade."

"Nothing Doing" by Wm. Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 29, 1926

William Scott Vare had won Pennsylvania Republicans' senatorial primary on an anti-Prohibition platform (see here). Nebraska's Senator George Norris, praised Prohibition of alcohol because "this greatest evil of all mankind is driven from the homes of the American people," and urged Pennsylvania to elect the Democrat, William Wilson. Norris, a Progressive Republican, often voted against establishment Republican legislation, earning the epithet "One of the Sons of the Wild Jackass."

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer and its editorial page cartoonist, William Hanny, were in the awkward position of having strongly opposed Vare in the primary as a corrupt machine boss with ties to organized crime, but now urging voters to elect him anyway.

"Wasting Their Time and Bait" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Oct. 27, 1926

If criticizing a GOP candidate was uncomfortable for Bill Hanny, fellow Republican "Ding" Darling lit into Vare and Smith without hesitation. The two were the poster boys for campaign funding excess (Donahey's Senator Willis notwithstanding, it seems). Vare and gubernatorial candidate Edward Beidleman jointly spent over $788,000 on their campaign; Smith's campaign chest was about $400,000. Adusted for inflation, those amounts would be around $15 million and $7.6 million today, respectively — chicken feed by today's standards.

($15 million is slightly less than the sum nazi oligarch Elon Musk alone has spent to boost corrupt sleazebag Ken Paxton alone.)

Getting back to our History Tour, James K Pollock, Jr., described the state of campaign finance laws in his 1926 book, Party Campaign Funds (Alfred A. Knopf):

"Despite the fact that the federal laws regulating campaign funds are often referred to as corrupt practices acts, it is erroneous to believe that these laws are of the class mentioned. There is only a federal publicity law with a few subsidiary requirements, one preventing the receipt of contributions from corporations, another prohibiting bribery, and another preventing the solicitation of gifts from civil service appointees. The last laws which could properly be described as corrupt practices acts were repealed in 1894 and nothing of a comprehensive nature has since been substituted in their place." (page 227)

"Leaving It At the Wrong Door" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 27, 1926

In the New York governor's race, Republican Ogden Mills accused incumbent Democrat Alfred Smith (no relation to the Illinois Senator) of responsibility for adulterated milk sold in New York City. Touting analysis by Pease Laboratories that found no such adulteration in their test samples, Smith proclaimed his vindication of the charges.

Opposition to Prohibition was a huge issue in New York City, championed by both Al Smith and incumbent GOP Senator James Wadsworth, Jr. Upstate, both politicians' positions were a harder sell. 

"Do I Look Enough Like a Camel" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 10, 1926

Q Toon: The Bottom Line

Heading into the final stretch, the midterm election elections keep getting steered into silliness by our Codger In Chief.

Donald T. Rump campaigned in Texas for Almost As Corrupt Ken Paxton by telling voters what an homely slob the guy is. Then he went to Georgia and waxed rhapsodic about how gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson is such a hunky slab of chiseled beefcake.

In Ohio, T-Rump got even more creepy, praising Senator Jon Husted’s firm, shapely buttocks. Later, just in case he was coming across as a wee bit too gay, Trump shared how much he enjoyed gazing at Nicki Minaj’s caboose, too.

Is making callipygiosity into a campaign issue just Trump’s way of distracting everybody from Vivek Ramaswami’s totally cringe endorsement by the kitten-killer widow of Amy Acton’s child molester step-father? Maybe not; but on the other hand, he’s kept his yap shut about any of their derrières.

✍

P.S.: I had wanted to draw at least one cartoon during this campaign about Michigan’s Senate race between Mike Rogers and Abdul el-Sayed as a nod to my Between the Lines readers, but, since T-rump apparently has no opinions regarding Rogers’s posterior, I could never come up with an original LGBTQ+ angle. 

Now I’ve just read that el-Sayed has got an ad up on Grindr, which certainly would have been worth a cartoon. (The ad was actually produced and paid for by the Christopher Street Project, an organization solely dedicated to electing champions for the transgender community.)

Sadly, my next cartoon for Q Syndicate — based in Ann Arbor, by the way — will only come out after the polls have closed.

So Ohio will have to do.

Eking Out a Sneak Peek

What a nightmare getting this week's cartoon from paper to the internet has been!

Our cable-phone-internet provider was in the neighborhood performing a supposed upgrade last Thursday night, leaving us with no service at all for most of Friday. After the cable and phone were restored, we discovered that we still had no internet.

My better half was unable to fix it himself, so he called the service provider. They sent a guy out here Saturday evening; he spent a couple hours on the computer, in the yard, on the television cable boxes, and ultimately determined that he couldn't do anything with our router because it isn't the provider's. He left us with only the desk computer connected to the internet — no WiFi for the rest of the house.

This morning, I found that the computer and my printer-scanner had no connection. I had the scanner scan my cartoon to USB, then swapped the USB to the computer; but my god, what a horrible scan! Not having been able to adjust the threshold level of the scan, every bit of erased pencil showed up. Worse, all of the lettering (with the inexplicable exception of that on the jersey of the guy on the right) looked as if I had smeared every letter while the ink was still tacky.

I spent a full hour making the text legible again. I should have just cut it out and typed in the dialogue.

Everything about this computer, moreover, seems to struggle much, much, slower than ever before. 

Our provider suggests renting one of their routers in place of the one we bought only a year or two ago. Their router will end up costing more than ours in a matter of months.

I may be cutting back on this blog until we can get somebody to repair the mess wrought by this goddamned Spectrum upgrade.