Eight Days' and Nights' Sneak Peek

Must be cold in these guys' apartment.

Thanksgiving Leftovers Again?!

I still think I had probably posted last week's Thanksgiving leftovers some years ago, so here are some old Thanksgiving editorial cartoons from 1921. I know I've never rewarmed these before.

"His First Thanksgiving Away from Home" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, Nov. 24, 1921

Nearly all of the political cartoons that Thanksgiving Day were about the arms limitation talks then underway in Washington, D.C. Of chief concern was the three-way naval arms race underway among the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan.

"All the Fixin's for a Real Thanksgiving" by Herbert Johnson in North American, Philadelphia PA, ca. Nov. 24, 1921

Republican stalwart Herbert Johnson was quick to give credit to the GOP administration and Congress not only for Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes's proposal to freeze warship building for ten years, but also for yet-to-be-seen tax cuts and economic prosperity.

"All for World Peace" by John Cassel in New York World, Nov. 23, 1921

Democratic-leaning John Cassel also lauded the disarmament conference, but reminded his readers that former President Woodrow Wilson's idealism had produced the League of Nations, with the promise that future wars could be averted there.

That promise of peace would not outlast the promise of prosperity by all that much.

"The Proof of the Dinner, Etc." by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 23, 1921

The Hungry World, like "Ding" Darling's diners, looked forward to its Thanksgiving feast; yet Nelson Harding left open the possibility that the dinner might not live up to the menu.

"I'm Bubbling Over..." by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, Nov. 23, 1921

The holiday produced lots and lots of turkey jokes, as it does every year.

"The Idea of World Disarmament Is a Beautiful Thing..." by Wm. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Nov. 24, 1921

The disarmament talks hit a snag just before Thanksgiving, which might explain a tiny bit of skepticism in the cartoons of Harding, Berryman, and Morris.

"The Barnyard Delegates..." possibly by Elmer Bushnell for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca.Nov. 24, 1921

I could not find a copy of this cartoon with the cartoonist's signature; I'm guessing that it might be Elmer Bushnell largely because the original caption (which I have replaced to make it more legible) was in the font and box style that I've seen over many of his cartoons. The heavy border also suggests Mr. Bushnell to me.

"The First Move to Curb Excessive Immigration" by G. Burr Inwood in Life magazine, Nov. 24, 1921

Aside from family dinners and turkeys, the other leitmotif in Thanksgiving cartoons is of Indians and Pilgrims. Here G.B. Inwood gets all sorts of ethnic details wrong, but it does show that the cartoon idea of Native Americans Against Immigration is older than you probably thought.

"Thanksgiving 1621 and 1921" by unknown cartoonist, ca. Nov. 24, 1921

I was hoping to find this cartoon in a newspaper that did not crop out the cartoonist's signature; but other than in the Miami (OK) Record-Herald of November 25, I have only found it in two New York newspapers, one of which also cropped out the signature and the other in which it is completely illegible. 

The cartoon's depiction of Native Americans is only slightly less fanciful than Inwood's. To my 2021 sensibilities, it seems to mark the 300th anniversary of Thanksgiving by giving thanks that Uncle Sam no longer needs to worry about hostile Injuns lurking behind trees. Given Oklahoma had been created from what was officially "Indian Territory" only fourteen years before this cartoon appeared, its thankfulness strikes me as being at the very least, smug. And at worst, racist. 

Most certainly, confident that no Native Americans subscribed to the Miami Record-Herald.

"The End of a Perfect Day" by Magnus Kettner, for Western Newspaper Union, ca. Nov. 23, 1921

Let us, however, turn to the non-political cartoonists end on a lighter note. Magnus Kettner trafficked in the quaint and gentle — most of the time — as in his "The End of a Perfect Day" series. Kettner's Thanksgiving proved to be a perfect day for Fido; not so much for Tom Turkey.

"Naturally You Feel Terrible" by Alfred "Zere" Ablitzere in New York Evening Post, Nov. 23, 1921

For the meleagrically sympathetic, Alfred Ablitzere's cartoon offers a happier ending.

Finally, I had expected to find many daily comic strips celebrating Thanksgiving 1921, but most strips' gags were no different than any other day of the year. A marked exception was "Doings of the Duffs," a family cartoon that paid attention to current events. (For example, the older son in the family, Wilbur, joined the Army during the Great War, although he didn't see much action.)

On Thanksgiving Day 1921, The Duff family were sucked through a hole in the space-time continuum and emerged three centuries earlier.

"Doings of the Duffs" by Walter R. Allman for NEA, Nov. 24, 1921

But only for one day.

Happy Hanukkah!

Q Toon: He/Him/Hissy Fit

Newly elected Republican darling Glenn Youngkin hasn't even been sworn in as Governor of Virginia yet, and already the Trumpist-CrazyAss wing of the party is pissed at him.

To begin with, Youngkin is promising not to overrule local COVID-19 protective measures. Republicans who believe in small government except when they are in charge of it are upset that he won't dictate that local municipalities must allow COVID-19 to spread like wildfire.

They also have their panties in a wad over Joshua Marin-Mora, a 2021 Georgetown University graduate whom Youngkin brought over from his campaign staff to work under his Press Secretary. It seems that young Mr. Marin-Mora is openly  LGBTQ+ and openly Latinx, and — horrors! — lists "he/him" as his preferred pronouns in his Twitter bio.

“So, Youngkin chose a guy with pronouns in his bio to do his comms who also served on the Georgetown Latinx Leadership Forum and supports virtually everything Youngkin's voters voted against,” blared Pedro L. Gonzalez, a writer for the influential conservative think tank Claremont Institute, in a series of tweets. When other Twitter users unearthed pictures of Marin-Mora wearing LGBTQ Pride clothing, Gonzalez snarled, “The new GOP is actually worse than the old GOP.”

The lengthy thread attacking Marin-Mora was elevated by the likes of Pizzagate conspiracy [fabulist] Jack Posobiec and far-right activist Lauren Witzke.

Not every conservative shares the umbrage of the right-wing wackosphere. Some of them can actually conceive of the possibility that attracting LGBTQ+ Latinxes might help Republicans hold onto Arizona or Texas someday. (I can hear the campaign rally music already: "All My Latinxes Live In Texas.")

I have no doubt that Gonzalez, Posibiec, Witzke and their ilk will soon forget all about the underlings in Youngkin's press office anyway. Before you know it, they'll be back attacking Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan, and whatever other counterrevolutionary criminals they root out of  the Republican ranks.

This Week's Sneak Pique

 Bergetoons issues another Angry White Guy alert:

Subject is considered ill-informed and dangerous.

Toon: The Verdict

I've been hesitant to weigh in on this story. I feel too close to it.

I work just up the street from the used car lot Kyle Rittenhouse was supposedly trying to defend, and just around the corner from Kenosha's Uptown district, which was almost completely destroyed as a result of the riot. The Kenosha Fire Department was still trying to put out the flames when I arrived at work the next morning. While our building was untouched by fire, the air inside reeked of smoke.

I know people who no longer speak to each other because of the Jacob Blake shooting, the riot, and the deaths that came from it all.

And yes, I call it a riot, not a protest.

There were protests that night. People may riot in protest.

But to call what happened a protest is like calling a hurricane "a weather event."

That said, a riot is no place for a 17-year-old boy to be gallivanting around with an AK-15. I really don't care if he had a father who lived in Kenosha once upon a time, or that he wanted practice being an Emergency Medical Technician. This was not the movies. It was not a video game.

Real people were bound to get hurt or killed.

Young Master Rittenhouse could just as easily have been one of them.

And his killer would have claimed self-defense.

Thanksgiving Leftovers Already?

It's Saturday, so time to rummage through the archives and post a bunch of old cartoons; so let's get ready for Thanksgiving.

I thought I had posted a Thanksgiving retrospective of my own cartoons before this —as a matter of fact, I'm 99.44% sure I have— but I apparently didn't give the post a "Thanksgiving" tag. What the heck, then; Thanksgiving is a time for traditions, so let's just go ahead and thaw these turkeys again.

in The Chalice, Racine, Wis., 1977 or '78

This was an illustration I drew for the church newsletter sometime in the late 1970's. It might not even have been for Thanksgiving; the reference is clearly to the parable of Lazarus and Dives. But there is a turkey on the table, so, yeah, let's go with saying it's a Thanksgiving cartoon.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Nov. 2003

Here's a more traditional Thanksgiving cartoon, with pilgrims and Wampanoags and more food than you can legally shake a stick at. The story of the First Thanksgiving is acknowledged these days to be a heavily ornamented myth, but one that is firmly ingrained into American culture — and thus the setting of many a cartoon the product of cartoonists and editors needing to get over the river and through the woods with their whole family before the snow starts falling.

for Q Syndicate, Nov. 2006

I have occasionally found ways to make the traditional myths relevant to my readers of the LGBTQ+ press.

in InStep News, Milwaukee, Wis., Nov. 27-Dec. 12, 1996

 

Since Turkey Day follows so closely after Election Day, defeated candidates are an easy holiday target.

Dornan in this cartoon was flamboyantly antigay Bob Dornan (R-CA), a D-list actor elected to Congress in 1984. He publicly outed Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-WI) as gay on the floor of the House, accusing him of having "a revolving door on his closet." Dornan made a laughable stab at running for President in 1996, then lost reelection to his House seat that November. Setting the standard for a certain future presidential loser, Dornan claimed that Democrat Loretta Sanchez only won because of illegal votes cast by undocumented immigrants.

The other turkeys in the cartoon, by the way, are Republicans Mark Neumann, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Dick Armey.

for Q Syndicate, Nov. 1998

Two years later, when voters failed to reward congressional Republicans for pressing the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, I took advantage of his name to depict Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as something other than a turkey.

for Q Syndicate, Dec., 2000

Two years later, when an Arizona soup kitchen snubbed the district's Congressman, Republican Jim Kolbe because they objected to his being gay, their eventual apology opened up the opportunity to draw a Thanksgiving cartoon that departed from the usual pilgrims and turkeys.

In closing, whether you will spend your Thanksgiving celebrating with a houseful of family, or on your own over pizza or dim sum, may your holiday be healthy, happy and harmonious!

for Q Syndicate, Nov., 2018

All things being relative.

Tales from the Crypto.com Stadium

 

Dulce Sloan threw off this idea during the ad-libbed banter with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show the other night, and I thought the image was too good not to put together visually.

But, since it's not my own idea, not good enough to spend a couple hours at the drawing board for.

Q Toon: Library Checkout Time

The people who insist that we mustn't do anything to keep guns out of our schools are now on a crusade to get books out of our schools instead.

Specifically any books that touch on issues of race or sexual orientation. 

Whipped up by the usual right-wing media agitators, Republican targets include Beloved by Toni Morrison, All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by  George M. Johnson, and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. And literally, by which I always mean literally, 847 other books.

I will grant that some of these books contain passages that aren't suitable for second graders — but then, so does the Old Testament. And high school libraries can't be limited to second-grade material.

You can't discuss race in this country without acknowledging racism, including the institutional racism that well outlasted slavery, forcibly destroyed African-American attempts to enjoy prosperity, legally assaulted Asian-American liberties, and stole the country from its original inhabitants.

Nor can you discuss sexuality without discussing sex. This idea that you can limit sex education to "when a man and a woman really love each other, the man plants his seed in the woman and nine months later there's a baby" is how you get dudes who fetishize farm equipment. 

Our radicalized Republican party and their base, of course, don't want anybody discussing race or sexuality in the first place. 

Or science. Or plutocracy. Or economics. Or public health. Or justice. Or logic. 

Or arithmetic.

This Week's Sneak Peek

If one were to judge by the car commercials on TV, Americans always park their cars diagonally across the driveway, when they come home.

And if we do park inside the garage, that garage is absolutely empty of anything else but the car.

Through History with D. Henry Smith

Our Saturday History Tour this week looks at some of the November output of editorial cartoonist Dorman H. Smith on the topic of that month's Disarmament Conference.

"Brought Into Court at Last" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., by Nov. 12, 1921

I've come across two slightly different curricula vitae for Smith (1892-1956). John Adcock reports that Smith sold his first published drawing to Life magazine at the age of 17. Per Adcock, Smith began his editorial cartooning career with the Cleveland-based Newspaper Enterprise Association, a division of Scripps-Howard Newspapers, in 1921, then left for the Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1933.

"Annoying, to Say the Least" by Smith for NEA, by Nov. 1, 1921

AskART, citing "Artists in California, 1786-1940" by Edan Hughes, Who's Who in American Art 1940; Who's Who in California 1942; and Smith's March 2, 1956 obituary in the New York Times, says that "Smith worked briefly in the steel mills before getting a job as an advertising artist in Columbus [Ohio]. A self-taught artist, he was a cartoonist for the Des Moines News (1919-21) and New York American (1927-29). He then was a cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner while living across the Golden Gate in San Anselmo."

"Sounds Like a Bad Egg" by Smith for NEA, by Nov. 14, 1921

These accounts aren't necessarily mutually exclusive; either contains some information that the other lacks. Also, while the NEA had its cartoonists' offices in Cleveland, Smith might have at times worked from offices at another newspaper. 

For example, I found this classified ad, in which Smith had a California P.O. address, run in various newspapers between 1932 and 1941, when Smith was reportedly working for the Chicago Herald and Examiner. Yet a September, 1935 column by O.O. McIntire identified Smith as "a San Francisco cartoonist." A syndicated list of celebrity birthdays in February, 1937, however, identified him as "Dorman H. Smith, of Chicago, cartoonist." 

Cartoonists generally did not write the name of their home newspaper or syndication service on their cartoons; that information might be typeset alongside or below the other cartoonists' captions, but I haven't seen that with Smith's work. 

"The Key to the Whole Situation" by Smith for NEA, by Nov. 15, 1921

In any case, Smith's cartoons quickly appeared in some 700 NEA newspapers around the country in 1921, and it's not difficult to see why. His simple pen-and-ink drawing style appealed to editors, readers, and any lay-out guys who preferred white space to lots and lots of gray grease pencil. (He would employ grease pencil in some of his later work, however, including cartoons for Collier's — a job neither Adcock nor AskART mentions.)

His Republican, isolationist leanings suited the popular mood of the day; since he generally approved of the actions of the decade's Republican presidents and congresses, any criticisms he made tended to be aimed at foreigners and such bêtes noirs as high prices, rents, and taxes.

"China Knows Good Style" by Smith for NEA, by Nov. 19, 1921

Until I found that Adcock has probably left out a few details, I imagined Smith leaving the NEA to draw for the Chicago Herald and Examiner, his train passing by Herblock's, who left the Chicago Daily News in 1933 to replace the NEA's then cartoonist. Was that Smith? Adcock says so, but Herblock never mentions Smith by name in his own memoir, Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life (Random House, 1998).

"We Won't Have Any Peace Until the Cook Is Fired, Too" by Smith for NEA, by Nov. 22, 1921

Whereas Smith's isolationism was a perfect fit with William Randolph Hearst's newspapers whether in Chicago or San Francisco, Herblock repeatedly clashed with the anti-New Deal, isolationist President of the NEA, Fred Ferguson. When, in 1943, Herblock answered the draft to military service (albeit stateside), Smith returned to the NEA as his replacement's replacement.

I guess he might have been the Grover Cleveland of editorial cartoonists.

"Let's Hope She Doesn't Stumble Over Anything" by Smith for NEA, Nov. 26, 1921

Smith was considered for Pulitzers for editorial cartooning in 1930 and 1946, but never won the prize. Adcock reports, however, that Smith "won numerous awards for cartooning and in 1950 was awarded the George Polk Memorial award presented by the journalism department of Long Island University for his two 1949 interviews with Stalin." (I'm not finding that award here. Meanwhile, according to Editorial Cartoon Awards, 1922-1997, Heinz Dietrich Fischer, ed., Smith was working for the San Francisco Examiner in 1930 and Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1946.)

"Little Lord Fauntleroy" by Dorman H. Smith for NEA, by Nov. 25, 1921

Some of his awards I've found in news reports include the Sigma Delta Chi award for editorial cartooning in 1946, and a medal from the Freedom Foundation in 1949 for a cartoon titled "Every Man a King." Smith was too ill to attend the ceremony in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when he won the National Headliners Club medal for "consistently outstanding editorial cartoons" in 1950.

So now you know just about everything I know about Dorman H. Smith, and I haven't managed to tell you one damned thing today about the Washington Disarmament Conference, China, Anglo-Japan alliances, the Open Door Policy, or Burr Shafer.

R.I.P. F.W. de K.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, WI, Feb. 8, 1990

Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last Apartheid Prime Minister of South Africa: March 18, 1936 - November 11, 2021

Q Toon: The Eternal Sunshine of the Smoochless Screen

Because the director of the Marvel superheroes flick Eternals would not cut a scene of Phastos kissing his husband, authorities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have banned the movie from being shown.

Apparently Director Chloe Zhao wasn't able to stop that scene — and others depicting heterosexual intimacy as well — from being cut from versions shown in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. The film had been scheduled for release in the Middle East today.

Phastos is played by Brian Tyree Henry; his husband, Ben, is played by Haaz Sleiman, a Lebanese immigrant to the U.S. who came out as gay in 2017.

At the “Eternals” world premiere last month, Sleiman spoke passionately about how much representation and visibility matter. “Beyond a dream come true, it’s lifesaving,” he told me. “I wish I had that when I was a kid, to see this. My god. I wish! Can you imagine how many lives this is going to be saving — kids, young queer folk, who are being bullied, committing suicide and not seeing themselves being represented? And now they get to see this — it’s above and beyond.”

Henry has apparently been less involved in the promotion of the film, at least as far as discussing his character is concerned, but he did offer this during a press conference last month:

“I remember when I was coming to this project that I, Brian, had kind of lost faith in humanity, just looking at all the things that we’ve been through and just what the images of Black men were and how we’re being portrayed and how the power was taken from us, the lack of power or feeling powerful,” Henry said. “What I really loved the most about Phastos is that through all of that — him being eternal, him never being able to die — he still chose love. He still decided to have a family, even though he may have to watch them perish. He still tried to find a way to bring heart and love to everything he did, even though his genius was used against him. It just really resonated a lot with how I felt my place in society was. How we can be kings and queens, and at the same time, they’ll take our pedestal and take our superpowers from us like that. So what I love the most about ‘Eternals’ is that Chloe and [producer] Nate [Moore] just re-instilled that power back in me again.”

The film has received tepid reviews from professional critics, and was "review-bombed" by garden-variety trolls on imdb.com so heavily prior to its release that site had to deactivate its reviews section. I haven't been watching the Marvel superhero films (or the recent DC Comics ones either, for that matter), so I'm afraid I wouldn't know whether this is a worthy addition to the franchise or not.

All I know is, we've been seeing heterosexual superheroes, even the ones from distant planets, locking lips with earthlings of the opposite sex for decades now, and nobody seems to have complained that it was a distraction from the plot.

Except, I guess, the Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Emiratis. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

It occurred to me after posting on Saturday those cartoons from November 11, 1921, that I might be adding to the tendency nowadays to confuse Veterans' Day and Memorial Day.

Memorial Day honors servicemembers who died in war; one is to lower the flag to half staff during the morning and raise it to full staff at noon. Veterans' Day honors those servicemembers who came home and are still alive; one is to display the flag at full staff all day.

We also have Armed Forces Day on the third Saturday in May to honor our military personnel still in uniform, but that keeps getting coopted by Peace Officers' Memorial Day on May 15, another half-staff occasion. I guess when May 15 falls on a Saturday, one is supposed to display the flag at three-quarters staff.

The cartoonists in 1921 were not being confused about whom the nation was honoring on November 11. The day was Armistice Day to them, its honors not restricted either to the living or the dead. The change to Veterans' Day was not made official until 1954, by which time the armistice of World War I had been demonstrated to be less than permanent.

Relax!

 It may be roughing the quarterback to pile on when he's down, but....

I don't think there are too many people out there to whom I need to explain this news item: Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers was pulled from Sunday's football game after testing positive for COVID-19. This after teammates Davante Adams, Allen Lazard, and Malik Taylor were placed on the "reserve/COVID-19" list in October.

You can't keep 6' (2m) distance between players in American football, so the National Football League has devised supposedly strict protocols to keep COVID-19 from spreading like wildfire among them; and it now appears that Rodgers has been flouting those protocols. Asked at a press conference last summer whether he had been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Rodgers claimed "Yeah, I'm immunized" — a weasel word nobody caught at the time.

Rodgers now claims that he couldn't take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because his doctors told him he was allergic to some ingredient in them, and that he (like many others once a Michigan woman died from a rare complication after receiving the J&J vaccine last April) didn't trust the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Rodgers is within his rights under NFL protocols not to get vaccinated, for whatever reason he fancies, but those protocols require unvaccinated players to wear a mask at press conferences and on the sideline at games, to travel separately from the rest of the team, and not to mingle socially with more than three fellow NFL team members at a time.

Rodgers has violated just about every one of those rules.

Rodgers went on Pat McAfee's podcast to complain that he's the unfair victim of a cancel culture woke mob that refused to get vaccinated when Donald Trump was president. (I don't remember things that way, unless we're talking about Trump's recommendations to ingest bleach and shine light up our butts.) Rodgers explained that he is under the expert medical care of former Surgeon General Joe Rogan and has been declared completely free of horse worms.

Rodgers's robust popularity in Packerland has been sacked in its own end zone since all of this came out; a Madison medical clinic has dropped Rodgers as its commercial spokesjock, and, judging from the ads on Sunday's game, Jake from State Farm appears to be pivoting away from offering a Rodgers Rate, too.

I can't speak for the hit on Rodgers's popularity within the sizeable base of anti-vaxxer Trump l'oeilists in Packerland, of course.

I suspect that those people are convinced that the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs yesterday.

Bigly.

Saturday Pot Pourri

I'm keeping this week's Saturday History Tour short and sweet and in search of any unifying theme today, so let's just get started.

Last week, I happened to see celebrity news about some actor or musician or social influencer or whoever he was posting photos of himself and his son because it was Father And Son Day. I had never heard of the celebrity or the Day before, so naturally, I looked up Father And Son Day. 

It turns out that Father And Son Day was founded seven years ago by cancer survivors Jack Dyson and Daniel Marks to raise awareness of and funds for cancer research. I'm still a little confused about when the day is, but it certainly seems that it's for a worthy cause.

"Father and Son Week" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., by Nov. 4, 1921

So imagine my surprise a day or so later to run across this 100-year-old cartoon about Father And Son Week!

Whenever this year's F&S Day might have been, Dorman Smith's F&S Week was definitely in the fall (note the tree). So, really, you can celebrate it whenever you want and for a day or a week or a fortnight if you want. Heck, celebrate it throughout Daylight Savings Time.

Nobody's going to argue with you about it.

And wasn't it nice to start out today's post with something nobody needs to argue about for a change?

"The Storm Centers" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, by Nov. 11, 1921

On the other hand, Magnus Kettner presents us with a cartoon that I find deceptively sweet, hiding an inner core of rural antipathy toward their urban compatriots — a hostility that has festered into today's Red-Blue divide.

Not that there was anything new about that in 1921; you can trace the attitude all the way back to Aesop's city mouse and country mouse.

But I have one more bone to pick with Mr. Kettner: one of the major news stories of November, 1921 was a big strike by coal miners, few of whom lived in "the city." You just don't find many coal miners living in New York City, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but rather in small towns like Hazard, Kentucky; Welch, West Virginia; or Diamondville, Wyoming.

"Pruning the Wrong End" by John Baer, by Nov. 2, 1921

Cartoonist and former Congressman John Baer was part of a self-named Nonpartisan movement that attempted to forge links between rural farmers and urban and small-town laborers. The 1920's would be tough on the Nonpartisan movement, and its non-partisan angle slowly closed. Labor interests became increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, and farmers have, a century later, become a reliably Republican voting bloc.

If there's nothing new about ginning up animus between country and city mice, there's nothing new about the top 1% pitting the bottom 99% against each other's interests, either.

"Slow, But So Is Congress" by Art Young, by Nov. 3, 1921

You know what else is not new? It's Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas blocking popular legislation because all they see is the price tag. 

If you asked the average man or woman on the street or in the field in 1921, you would have found overwhelming support for the idea that the United States owed a debt to its Great War veterans who lost health or limb making the world safe for democracy. Art Young here wonderfully satirizes how long it was taking for legislation to give these veterans "bonus" payments to get anywhere, even given that the Republican Party had control of the White House and both houses of Congress.

Lastly, this Veterans' Day marks the 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Virginia receiving its first occupant; so, without further comment, I close with a few examples of the nation's editorial cartoonists marking the event.

"Armistice Day" by Leo Bushnell for Central Press Assn., by Nov. 11, 1921

by Clifford Berryman in Washington DC Evening Star, Nov. 11, 1921

"The Unknown Mother" by John Cassell in New York Evening World, Nov. 11, 1921

"Lord God of Hosts..." by Cleon Larson, "a Salt Lake school boy," in Deseret News, Nov. 11, 1921

"My Boy" by Charles Dana Gibson in Life Magazine, Nov. 10, 1921