Putting together Saturday's retrospective of some of my Jimmy Carter cartoons, I should have thought to check the stuff Mom had saved for the earliest possible samples.
Better late than never. In lieu of my usual Sneak Peek, here's one from my high school newspaper before the 1976 presidential election:
The news that former President Jimmy Carter has begun end-of-life hospice care has prompted a general outpouring of sympathy from all quarters (congressional Repugnicans and Fox Noisemakers excused).
It has been a long time since I have drawn Mr. Carter in a cartoon. He didn't venture into LGBTQ+ topics during his presidency, but has offered support to our community in the years since; I am likely to find something to say about that in next week's syndicated cartoon.
In the meantime, here are some oldies from my vault.
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| Unpublished, Dec. 1977 |
This is the earliest Carter cartoon I have in my files. There were earlier ones in a folder I mislaid back in my college days which are now lost to history; I can't remember whether I ever drew Jimmy Carter for my high school newspaper. As a freshman at college in December of 1977, I drew cartoons for the student newspaper; but since we had nationally syndicated cartoons by Mike Peters, I mostly stuck to campus issues.
This old sketchbook cartoon does sum up Carter's presidential legacy, though: changing the focus of foreign policy to human rights rather than supporting any regime that claimed to oppose communism, the Carter administration was able to wrangle some successes on its own terms.
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| March, 1979 |
Neither of them came easily, but you can cite the peaceful turn-over of the Panama Canal and a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as two of those successes. Our dealings with the U.S.S.R., Cuba, and OPEC, not so much.
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| in Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, March 8, 1979 |
Domestically, the 1970's were not a great time to be president of the United States. Rising oil prices fueled inflation faster than wages could catch up with it. Carter named the national mood malaise, and his own popularity was not immune to it.
Carter had never been popular with organized labor, and liberals in the Democratic Party chafed at his centrist policies. Republicans, painting Carter as weak and feckless, promised a brighter future based on the a return to the morals and tax levels of days long past.
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| April, 1980 |
And then a bunch of Iranian university students occupied the American embassy in Teheran and held its staff hostage for 444 days, right up to the day Carter turned the Oval Office over to a has-been B-list actor from California.
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| in Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, Nov. 6, 1980 |
I drew two cartoons for the post-election issue of the campus newspaper in November, 1980: one to run if Carter won, and this one to run when he didn't. (Even as a committed Anderson supporter, I didn't see any need to draw a third cartoon.)
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March, 1982 |
I've posted this one often. It is commonplace for presidents these days to blame a poor economy on their predecessor; Reagan did so more than a year after Carter had returned to Plains.
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| in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Oct. 18, 1993 |
If the historical assessment of Carter's presidency left something to be desired, his post-presidency has been exemplary. Instead of enjoying fame and fortune, he helped Habitat for Humanity build houses well past an age when most people are happy to let more youthful hands lay bricks and pound nails.
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| in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Sept. 12, 1997 |
In addition to his work with Habitat for Humanity, Carter was known for serving as an elections monitor in fledgling democracies worldwide. In 1997, he was asked to bring this work with the Carter Center back home. Courts threw out the Teamsters' reelection of their union president the previous year due to ballot rigging and other irregularities, and challenger Jimmy Hoffa Jr. urged Carter to step in during the court-ordered election redo.
The Carter Center has monitored 111 elections in 39 countries since the 1980s, and decided after the party conventions in August that the U.S. presidential contest merited something similar, citing a "backsliding" of American democracy that started a decade ago and has accelerated during the Corrupt Trump Administration.
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I couldn't let this week's Graphical History Tour pass without also acknowledging the passing on Thursday of Tony Earl.
As a candidate for Wisconsin's Governor in 1982, he didn't make it in to our office at the Kenosha Tribune before the paper imploded, so I never did produce a caricature of him there. He did make it into a few of my cartoons for the UW-Parkside Ranger and the NorthCountry Journal during his four years in office (and once in the UWM Post as a candidate in the 1988 Senate primary).
He is fondly remembered as an honest and decent politician from an era before our democracy backslid, before everyone bunkered in our fortified enemy camps, and when a Democrat in Wisconsin's governor's office could still get things done. I seldom had reason to aim a caustic pen at him; but if I have to narrow it down to one cartoon to post in his memory, I'll let it be this one.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Dec. 15, 1983 |
Rest in peace, Governor Earl.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants the medical records of all transgender students at his state's institutions of higher learning.
DeSantis asked to see a breakdown of the medical data of students who received gender-affirming care from public entities. This includes anyone in the general public who sought gender-affirming care at the hospitals located at these public universities. In addition, he wants their ages and the dates they received gender-affirming care. The deadline to submit those records was February 10. ...
When Insider asked why the state has requested the health data of transgender college students from public universities, the state's deputy press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said: "We are committed to fully understanding the amount of public funding that is going toward such nonacademic pursuits to best assess how to get our colleges and universities refocused on education and truth."
Leaving aside for the moment the question of why DeSantis thinks students getting medical care hampers colleges' and universities' ability to focus on education and truth, how turning over patient records to the governor is not a violation of HIPAA confidentiality rules is beyond me.
Officials at the University of South Florida announced that they would comply with DeSantis administration's demands, but assured students that their privacy rights would be maintained by redacting information that would identify who the transgender students are.
But as one USF student explained,
“Even if it’s technically legal because it doesn’t have names, it’s still immoral. Because it’s a small community and (the data is) sorted by age and very specific personalized treatment plans, you can dox someone with this. You can find people out and harass them, with the Florida sunshine law.”
Given Mr. DeSantis's record to date, I'm guessing that facilitating the doxing of transgender students is not a bug in his plans, but a feature.
I'd like to start by thanking D.D. Degg for linking to Saturday's post about editorial cartoon dingbats yesterday at the Daily Cartoonist.
As the cartoon at the end of my post indicates, mine wasn't a comprehensive round-up of every dingbat. It had escaped my notice, however, that the last dingbat was officially retired only very recently: David Fitzsimmon's quail flew off into the sunset at the end of December. I'm grateful to D.D. for furthering the research.
Speaking of dingbats, I've come across a few other cartoons among my juvenalia in which I added a dingbat. I was checking through the on-line archives of the student newspaper at my alma mater, St. Olaf's Manitou Messenger. There are some original drawings I never got back from the Messenger, and this is one of them.
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| in Manitou Messenger, April 20, 1978 |
It's about an on-campus party that was busted, resulting in punishments for several people who gave their actual names when caught. (Until senior year, most of my Messenger cartoons concerned campus issues.)
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I also ran across this front page story advertising an upcoming campus lecture by a "Kennedy-esque" Senator from Delaware:
I'm afraid I must have skipped Senator Biden's lecture, and since his visit to campus came after the last Messenger before Christmas break was published — the next issue wouldn't come out until February — I have no record of what he said.
C'mon, man. It was probably a lot of malarkey about trains. No joke.
It's Monday, and time to post a tiny snippet from this week's syndicated cartoon.
Is this the first time she's noticing his bald spot?
Tune in Thursday to find out.
Last Saturday's post looked back on my abortive attempt to add a little character in my editorial cartoons giving postscriptive commentary on the topic of the day. Although I didn't keep it up, such characters are a longstanding tradition that dates back at least to the marginalia in medieval manuscripts, if not to paintings on cave walls.
In editorial cartooning, they're called dingbats, after the typesetters' term for non-alphanumeric characters used for everything from bullet points to paragraph dividers to space filler.
The best known of these in the present day was Puck, the little penguin Pat Oliphant drew at the bottom of his editorial cartoons from his early days Down Under with the Adelaide Advertiser until his retirement in 2015.
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| "Here I Am, the Last Livin' Person in Ireland..." by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, ca. Feb. 18, 1973 |
Puck came into being after a colleague at the Adelaide Advertiser brought a penguin in a paper sack to the newspaper office. The 20-something Oliphant, whose political leanings were well to the left of his editors and the publisher at the Advertiser, began adding Puck to his cartoons as a way of sneaking his true opinions past those editors. By the time they caught onto this device, Puck's popularity with readers ensured that the penguin would continue whether the editors liked it or not.
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| "Now Is the Time to Save Gas" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1943 |
I also mentioned Fred O. Seibel and his crow last week. The crow also had a name, but sources disagree whether it is Moses or Jim. Since I have not been able to track down an origin story for him, I'll leave both names here with the caveat that I found him named Jim in a contemporary source, Moses in an article written long after Seibel had died.
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| "Alas Poor Yorick" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1933 |
Getting his start in upstate New York in 1908, Seibel was the editorial cartoonist at the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch 1926 to 1968. Representing oneself with a crow named Jim would hardly raise an eyebrow at the start of his career; by 1968, and certainly by 2021 when the above-linked article was written, there was nothing quaint or cute about "Jim Crow."
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| "No Trespassing" by Bob Satterfield for Satterfield Cartoon Service, ca. November, 1914 |
Bill Rowell might have confused Seibel's crow with Bob Satterfield's bear, whose name was Moses according to Cartoons Magazine.
The bear's name might also have been Bizzy, however. Satterfield also drew comic strips, including one starting in 1903 starring a bear named Bizzy. A typical episode of the strip, titled "Oh, Thunder," consisted of four square panels showing the bear and perhaps another cartoon animal with a four-line poem. It ran until at least 1933.
Sat's Bear (yet another of its names) was inspired by the popular tale about Teddy Roosevelt declining to kill a bear cub brought to him to shoot at. The incident inspired a famous cartoon by Clifford Berryman, and the more enduring teddy bear dolls. Berryman's bear reappeared once in a while, whereas Satterfield's bruin was a daily constant.
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| "Advice from One Who Knows" by Bob Satterfield in Detroit Times, ca. July, 1916 |
In 1914, another cartoonist we've featured here from time to time, John Baer, offered Satterfield $1,000 for the rights to use the bear in his cartoons. Satterfield turned down the offer, writing, “He has become an indispensable and highly honored member of our firm, and I assure you that his place could not be successfully filled by anybody else.”
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| "When Doctors Disagree" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Dec. 27, 1898 |
If you've been following my blog long enough, you are familiar with the work of Minneapolis Tribune cartoonist Rowland C. Bowman, and his little dog.
When Bowman died in 1903 at the age of 32, the Tribune article eulogizing him explained that the dog had originally appeared as one of many characters in a Bowman cartoon celebrating a Minneapolis baseball team winning a pennant. Something about the dog appealed to readers, so Bowman kept bringing it back again and again.
The dog never had a name as far as I've been able to ascertain, and never spoke a word of dialogue. Occasionally, he would be hidden in the cartoon, peering out from behind a fence for instance, resulting in letters to the editor from readers who couldn't find him, or were proud of themselves that they could.
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| "Willie Bryan Starts in Early" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 18, 1903 |
A dingbat we met just last month was William K. Patrick's wise-quacking duck.
Patrick's duck originated in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, and when the Times-Democrat merged with the New Orleans Daily Picayune in 1914, the duck took over as the dingbat in charge of reporting the weather. This put the Picayune's weatherfrog out of work after 20 years of faithful service to the Big Easy.
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| "Meanwhile, the Value of the Eggs" by William K. Patrick in Fort Worth Star Telegram, Feb. 1, 1923 |
After Patrick left New Orleans for Fort Worth, taking his duck with him, New Orleanians were left with no weathercritter telling them whether to bring an umbrella to work. That is, until 1952, when Times-Picayune editors enlisted Walt Kelly's Pogo to take the job.
The paper's readers, however, would have none of the out-of-state Okeefenokian marsupial, and voted to give the job back to the old frog, who continues his frognostications to this very day.
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| "What Does His Birthday Mean to You" by Wm. K. Patrick in Fort Worth Star Telegram, Feb. 22, 1923 |
All of which is a round-about way of telling you that I don't have any interesting tidbits to pass along about the duck itself, save that a whimsical 1918 article in Cartoons Magazine cast Patrick's duck as the colonel in charge of a convocation of cartoon dingbats assembled to pledge their support to the war effort.
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| in Cartoons Magazine, Chicago, August, 1918 |
Alas, none of us are including those beloved dingbats in our editorial cartoons any more. (Unless you count Stan Kelly.)
Perhaps that what's ailing our profession these days...
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I can be a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to English grammar. The growing use of apostrophes before the "s" in plural nouns sets my teeth on edge. I insist that "literally" literally means "literally," lest it mean nothing at all. And "the media" ain't singular. ("The opera," however, is, unless you're discussing someone's entire body of work.)
I am willing to yield somewhat to the people who want to be referred to in the third person as "they" or "them," but I often find it confusing. Is they or aren't they? Should the reflexive pronoun be "themselves" or "themself"? Or do they truly contain multitudes?
The Week magazine (February 10 issue) had an interesting review of the latest album by nonbinary recording artist Sam Smith. Throughout the entire article weighing in at over 160 words, whoever wrote it carefully avoided referring to them with any third-person pronouns even once.
So that's one way of dealing with it.
Spoken language is not static but dynamic. If you don't believe that, try listening to a conversation among the Amish. Or go read some Shakespeare (who is known to have employed they/them pronouns on some singular occasions, by the way).
Still, it would be helpful if nonbinary people weren't leaving the entire onus (or onera) of remembering how many people they are on the rest of us. Meet us halfway, all right?
Would it have ruined Smith's album if their opening song were "Love Us More"?
Although I'm sure someone else has done it by now.
The musical performances were impressive, one way or another. Sheryl Lee Ralph gave a stirring rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (which has stirred up the hornets nest of Butthurt Right Wingers). I schedule the Black National Anthem every February, so we had sung it at Redeemer that morning — if not quite as slowly as Ms. Ralph's version. We did sing three verses of it to her one, however.
A few weeks ago, Daily Show guest host D.L. Hughley showed film of himself asking White people-on-the-street if they could sing the Black National Anthem; and I realized that while I could sit down at a piano and play it from memory, I wouldn't make it through the second line singing the words.
Which would at least save me the embarrassment of trying to hit the two pairs of high E's in every verse. 40 years ago, I could just barely hit the high E in the bass part of "Even So In Christ Shall All Be Made Alive" in Handel's Messiah, and that's just an eighth note at the top of a run up from a low A. In "Lift Every Voice," the high E's come as a climactic dotted quarter and a triplet in a song meant to be sung at a stately pace, and they're quite out of my range now.
I'd transpose the song down a step, but that puts the low notes out of the range of most sopranos and tenors. The song spans well over an octave, just one step less than "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Which makes Ms. Ralph's modulation up a step for the final two lines all the more impressive.
Today's wayback machine is set forty years ago to February, 1983, and we start off with the British royal family.
If it's any consolation to Prince Harry and Meagan, their forebears (his, anyway) had to put up with plenty of palace gossip and intrigue before either of them had even been born.
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| unpublished |
There may have been a day when intrusion by British tabloid photographers on the royal family's privacy wasn't so obnoxious as it is today, but not within living memory. My cartoon included the Queen Mother, Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward, and Princesses Diana, Anne, and Margaret hounding a fictional tabloid photographer and his wife.
I don't believe that this cartoon was ever published; the usual markings on the back of the paper telling layout what reduction percentage to get the cartoon to fit on the page are missing.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 3, 1983 |
When you hear about President Biden's lackluster approval ratings, it's useful to remember that the U.S. President in February of 1983 wasn't doing particularly well at the same stage of his presidency, either.
That imp in down in the corner was a gimmick I tried out that year of having a little character to add further comment on cartoons. Like Pat Oliphant's Puck, or Fred Siebel's crow, or R.C. Bowman's puppy (except I hadn't heard of R.C. Bowman yet). Mr. Imp didn't last very long.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 10, 1983 |
In fact, he was already missing by the next week's cartoon.
He was more trouble than he was worth. After spending a whole lot of time thinking up a cartoon in the first place, who needs to spend even more time coming up with lines for an imp that might well be saved for a later cartoon?
Of course, these days, I have to come up with a headline to go along with the cartoon when I send it in to the syndicate. Otherwise, some editor there will send it out to my subscribers with a headline that steps all over the punch line. Imagine the third cartoon here under a headline "Telling Reagan to Let Them Think for Him."
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 24, 1983 |
Alas, poor demon. Well I knew him, Horatio; an imp of limited jest.
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And you can't have it back.
Wisconsin voters have to winnow down four Supreme Court judicial candidates to two on Tuesday, February 21. The candidates are running for the seat of retiring Justice Patience Roggensack, one of the four conservatives on the State Supreme Court.
Milwaukee County Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz was first on the airwaves with commercials relying heavily on the message that she is biased in favor of abortion rights. She doesn't use euphemisms like "choice" or "reproductive rights." She comes right out and says "abortion," and so do the women in her We-Support-Protasiewicz ads.
A shadowy third-party group quickly followed suit with this "Madison Liberals Want OUR SUPREME COURT" ad. After showing rioters in the background, it then accuses her of letting rapists out onto Wisconsin streets — well, just one case, but you're supposed to conclude that she does it all the time.* The ad concludes by endorsing former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, appointed to the Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016, but who lost the seat in 2020.
Right-wing groups have consistently accused judicial candidates who don't hew the conservative, pro-business, pro-Republican line of being soft on crime. Their attacks date back to 2008, with unfair soft-on-crime accusations against Gov. Doyle appointee Justice Leroy Butler, who lost to Mike Gableman (who has since gone on to peddle Trumpist lies about the 2020 election).
These groups don’t necessarily care about stocking the Court with judges who sentence every criminal defendant to life behind bars, but they have seen that it wins them elections.
Kelly's own ads this year tout his decision with the conservative majority to strike down Governor Evers's "stay-at-home" directives in the early weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Kelly is one of the two right-wingers on the ballot this year, and interestingly, now a liberal group is running an attack ad using the same tactics against the other conservative, Waukesha County Court Judge Jennifer Dorow. "Better Wisconsin" found some case in which she allowed a defendant convicted in a domestic abuse case two days to report to prison, “time he used to violently assault his own family members.”
Dorow became familiar to Wisconsinites this year as the judge in the trial of the asshole who drove his pick-up through the Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing six people. She justifiably sentenced him to life in prison, and her ads play up that case.
Although he has a few endorsements from some prominent Democrats in Wisconsin, we haven't heard much yet from the fourth candidate, Dane County Court Judge Everett Mitchell, who presides over the Juvenile Division in Branch 4.
If he should happen to be one of the final two after February 21, I'm sure we'll be hearing about any kid in his courtroom who grew up to murder, rape, pillage, shoplift, or jaywalk.
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* Update: The Protaseiwicz campaign this evening his fired back with a TV ad charging that as lawyers before they became judges, Dorow and Kelly defended criminals, including in Kelly's case, youth pastors (plural) who molested children.
The Pope isn't backing down from Catholic dogma that homosexual acts are a sin, mind you, but in light of antigay laws in 57 countries around the world — 11 of which make it punishable by death — and moves in some of those nations to make being gay or lesbian even more illegal than it already is, I for one appreciate the Pope for speaking out.
For the record, the Anglican Communion worldwide is deeply divided over issues surrounding LGBTQ+ persons, while the Presbyterian Church is officially welcoming.
Now, as for whether wearing white after Labor Day or putting pineapple on pizza is the greater crime, I defer to the experts. Or at least to my Italian-American husband if I know what's good for me.
Some people consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral. And some people come to the State of the Union in February wearing this:
I suppose it could be worse.
But we were discussing men's fashion today, and — not having seen whether Senator Fetterman was wearing his hoodie Tuesday night — in the halls of the Holy See, not those of Congress.
They don't observe Labor Day in Rome, of course. At least, not in September. Like the rest of the civilized world, they celebrate May Day. If there are fashionistas at the Vatican, the proscription against wearing white would come after the Feast Day of St. Ultan of Ardbraccan this year.
Although I'm pretty sure that the Pope gets a dispensation either way.
I'm still trying to figure out which of my posts Blogger told me last week that it is putting a trigger warning in front of. Saturday's post about Ku Klux Klan terrorism hadn't been posted yet; last week's sneak peek didn't have any racist or salacious material.
I've visited my blog on various devices, and have yet to encounter that trigger warning, although the notice from Blogger is still atop my posting home page.
Could it have been something older? The nudes in Karl Arnold cartoons in the previous Saturday's discussion? They were tasteful enough for German readers in 1923. Athletes in the shower in some of my cartoons from years ago? I thought those were respectfully done. The few times I've drawn anyone in flagrante delicto, the cartoon has only shown it from the chest up or the thighs down.
Well, just about any given post in this here blog is bound to run afoul of the DeSantis Inquisition, Truth Social, Elon Musk, or the internet censors in China, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and much of Africa.
It is African-American History Month again. Having spent the last two weeks dwelling on foreign affairs 100 years ago, it's high time to turn to domestic affairs — particularly, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.
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| "A Blot on the Escutcheon" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Jan. 3, 1923 |
We'll start with a Klan lynching that attracted national media attention — quite possibly because the victims were white.
In August 1922, members of the Ku Klux Klan tortured and killed Filmore Watt Daniels and Thomas Fletcher Richards. (Some accounts omit "s" at the end of both last names; I'm using the names from contemporary newspaper reports.) Daniels was the adult son of a wealthy landowner in Mer Rouge, Louisiana, a town near the Arkansas border; he and his father were vocal opponents of the Klan. Richards, a mechanic, was a good friend of the younger Daniels.
The Danielses, father and son, were returning home with Richard and two others from a ballgame in nearby Bastrop when they were stopped by heavily armed, black-hooded men. The five were blindfolded and abducted to a remote site where they were whipped and beaten for information on the location of another person. Their captors released the elder Daniels and the other two men; but the younger Daniels and Richards were tortured and killed, and their bodies dumped in Lake Lafourche.
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| "When Klanhood Was in Flower" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 28, 1922 |
After their bodies were discovered on December 22, Louisiana Governor John M. Parker sought help from the U.S. Department of Justice in suppressing Klan violence within the state.
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| "A Blot on the Old Man's Journal" by Dennis McCarthy in New Orleans Times Picayune, ca. Dec. 29, 1922 |
If the meaning of Times Picayune cartoonist Dennis McCarthy's December 29 cartoon left any doubt what sort of "mob violence" was a blot on Old Man 1922's journal, his front page cartoon on January 9 was explicit.
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| "Explain This" by Dennis McCarthy in New Orleans Times Picayune, ca. Jan. 9, 1923 |
Reaction by members of the Klan differ from that depicted by McCarthy, according to the Shreveport Times, of January 7:
Publication of the membership of the Morehouse klan 34 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan excited only passing interest here. Most of the charter and later membership were already known. The list included many of the many of the best-known and most substantial business and professional men, farmers, and officials of the parish. And the most pungent comment regarding it was, "why didn't they print the whole list, I felt slighted because they didn't have my name."
Prominent in the list was the name of J. Fred Carpenter, who happens to be the sheriff of Morehouse. The sheriff does not appear to be bothered that anyone should know he is a klansman.
"Resign?" he was asked.
"Not yet."
"Going to?"
"I hadn't thought of it."
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| "Mer Rouge (Red Sea)" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 7, 1923 |
Other klansmen unmasked by the probe included a former mayor, the district attorney, the local postmaster, and a town marshal. The testimony of former klansman "Big Jim" Norsworthy exposed several locals as members, but in the end proved to be more flash than fire.
Meanwhile, Captain J.K. Skipworth, "exalted cyclops of the Morehouse klan" held court outside the courthouse to make sure that the media and anyone else in the vicinity could hear his opinion of the goings on inside.
There were klansmen in the grand jury, too. As a result, kidnapping and murder charges against named klansmen were dropped for "insufficient evidence." Even the minor charges against 17 men were dropped while the accused sheltered themselves out of state.
By the end of 1923, the judge in the case had lost his reelection bid, and Governor Parker had retired.
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| "His Own Property" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, before Jan. 26, 1923 |
At the same time that investigative hearings were underway in Louisiana, a White mob burned the predominantly Black city of Rosewood, Florida, to the ground on January 8, 1923. Six Black Americans and two White rioters were killed. and the rest of the city's population fled by train.
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| "With Loose Rein" by Rollin Kirby in New York World before Feb. 4, 1923 |
As was usually the case in these pogroms, a White woman claimed that she had been assaulted by a Black man. The assault allegedly occurred on New Year's Day; enraged White mobs, bolstered by a Klan rally in nearby Gainesville, descended on Rosewood on January 4.
White mobs sought out one suspected Black man, then another, then turned their rage against the whole town. First setting fire to churches, they then began setting fire to homes and shooting at the residents as they tried to flee. White merchant John Wright sheltered some people in his home; others hid in the swamps outside of town.
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| Anonymous (Watson?), for Watson Studio, in Baltimore Afro-American, Feb. 23, 1923 |
It will come as no surprise that although a grand jury was convened in February, 1923, nobody was ever charged with a crime of any kind in the Rosewood massacre. Nor will you be shocked to hear that it wasn't until 76 years later that any of the survivors received any compensation for their losses.
As for the nation's editorial cartoonists, when it came to addressing current events from their drawing boards, white riots and klan terrorism were just one issue out of many.
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| "The Three (Dis)Graces" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Jan. 24, 1923 |
Even though these were only two klan/mob attacks among over 50 of them in 1922, many of the nation's cartoonists never even broached the subject at all in January or February, or at least never got an idea past their editors. On the other hand, every single editorial cartoonist at some point in January put out at least one cartoon satirizing Emile Coue's mantra of "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better." (Coue was the Stuart Smalley of his day.)
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When your humble scribe started writing this essay several days ago, Blogger, the host of this site, began posting the following notice at the top of my post list screen:
I can't say whether Blogger's content monitoring bots flagged this week's essay as possible hate speech, or if Blogger management is cowering in fear of southern Republican politicians who have been cracking down on history lessons that make bigots feel bad.
To those of you brave enough to click past whatever content warning Blogger threw up at you, thank you.
For this week's cartoon, travel with me to exotic Utah:
Seeming to acknowledge that he was doing something truly awful, Cox continued, "While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures.” But “love and respect” are the furthest things from what is being offered. And again, the science and consequences of this bill are already clear: The lack of treatment options within the state for trans youth will lead to higher rates of depression and suicide.
The overwhelming majority of medical, pediatric, therapeutic, and psychology professionals argue that bills such as this interfere with their ability to act in the best interest of their patients.
Cox claimed that it was necessary to put a halt to "these permanent and life-altering treatments for new patients until more and better research can help determine the long-term consequences." Tellingly, however, there is no provision in the bill preventing, say, breast augmentation for cis girls, or testosterone boosters for cis boys. Utah Republicans, and their ilk in 18 other states where laws just like SB16 have been proposed, have no problem with this kind of medical treatment per se.
But when it comes to the transgender community, they're perfectly happy to play doctor.
