This week's Graphical History Tour again focuses on one month, one issue, and one cartoonist: John Knott and the Texas's August 26, 1922 run-off election for the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. Senator. The election would be won by the Ku Klux Klan's candidate, Earle Mayfield.
I have to start off by admitting that I probably don't have all the cartoons that Knott drew for the anti-Klan Dallas Morning News. My contemporary source for Knott's cartoons I posted in July had identified his work as having been originally published in the Galveston Daily News, which did indeed run Knott's cartoons on its front pages. But according to a Dallas Morning News article last October, Knott was their cartoonist from 1906 to 1957, save for his three semesters studying at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, Germany (1910-11).
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| "A Sad Case" by John F. Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 19, 1922 |
So it's a pity that, as Knott himself perhaps argues here, these cartoons all hail from the Galveston paper rather than the Dallas one. (I'm dating them according to when they appeared in the Galveston Daily News.) If the Dallas Morning News campaigned against the Klan, there doesn't appear to be any such advocacy on the cartoons by Knott in the Galveston Daily News.
"A Sad Case" should, however, be appreciated by every editorial cartoonist who has had to deal with editors, publishers, and readers who think that editorial cartoons are supposed to be, first and foremost, funny. And fair and impartial. And appeal to everybody.
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| "Who's Going to Win" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 20, 1922 |
As far as I've been able to determine, Knott was the only editorial cartoonist in the employ of any newspaper in Texas at the time, and was printed exclusively in the Dallas and Galveston Newses. A few papers ran the syndicated cartoons of William C. Morris, Elmer Bushnell, Terry Gilkison, and the occasionally political Magnus Kettner; many newspapers around the state printed those of the NEA's Dorman H. Smith. Meanwhile, the Houston Post wasn't publishing editorial cartoons at all.
None of those syndicated cartoonists had anything to say that summer about Klan-supported candidates running for office in Texas or anywhere else, so Knott had the topic all to himself. By all accounts, the run-off contest between Mayfield and impeached former Gov. James "Pa" Ferguson was a lively one, with brawls breaking out in the crowds as the candidates accused each other of perjury, drunkenness, and sexual impropriety.
Now, to be fair, Dallas Morning News editor Will Pry assures us that John Knott's cartoons were not all as milquetoast as the ones on this page:
He also had considerable influence over his audience, a byproduct of being the illustrative voice of the paper of record in the era before TV, let alone Twitter. James Ferguson, former governor of Texas, once said that a Knott cartoon cost him an election. Another, drawn when the Ku Klux Klan was making headlines in Dallas, was said to have swung a school board election.
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| "Relief Promised for Today" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 26, 1922 |
Knott and his "Old Man Texas" (uncharacteristically hatless in this cartoon) could count themselves lucky that the Mayfield-Ferguson run-off wasn't conducted in an age of independent attack ads punctuating every television program. One had to go out of one's way to be subjected to the candidates' heated oratory; in the newspaper, one could easily turn the page and read the baseball scores.
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| "Thank Heaven, I'm Out of It" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 27, 1922 |
In an ordinary election campaign of those days, Mayfield's victory in the August 26 run-off election for the Democratic nomination would have meant Old Man Texas was effectively "out of it." The Texas Republican Party was not a factor to be reckoned with at this point in history.
But Republicans and anti-Klan "Independent Democrats" would make one last effort to stop Mayfield by mounting a write-in campaign for George Peddy, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, in November. Would John Knott have anything to say about it?
Stay tuned, but don't get your hopes up.
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