Thank you to Mike Peterson for linking to yesterday's historical post!
Now, with the past as prologue:
Thank you to Mike Peterson for linking to yesterday's historical post!
Now, with the past as prologue:
There are several noteworthy events in May of 1923 that I haven't gotten around to highlighting in these Saturday History Tours, so it wasn't easy picking which one to end the month with today. I've decided that it's time to start paying attention to Wisconsin Senator Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette.
"That Kid from Wisconsin Again" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. May 16, 1923 |
LaFollette still holds a place of honor here in his home state. There are streets and schools named for him all over the place here. Save for a COVID hiatus, Madison progressives have held Fighting Bob Fest every fall since 2002 (although its website appears to have been taken over by some unrelated commercial venture these days).
His son Robert Jr. succeeded him in the Senate; his other son, Philip, served three terms as Wisconsin Governor in the 1930's. Grandson Bronson LaFollette was elected Wisconsin Attorney General from 1965 to 1969 and
again from 1975 to 1987. A great-grandson and distant cousin of Bronson, Douglas LaFollette, recently resigned as Wisconsin Secretary of State, an elected post he had held since 1974.
But you don't find a lot of love for Senator LaFollette in the editorial cartoons of a century ago. Republican partisans did not care for his open rivalry with his fellow Republican in the White House, President Warren G. Harding. Democrats remembered his opposition to Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy leading up to and during World War I.
"Valuing an Old Masterpiece" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1923 |
Regarding these cartoons, Senator LaFollette had for ten years charged that U.S. railroads were overvalued, allowing them to overcharge for passenger and freight travel. Following Progressives' gains in the 1922 election, his charges finally had to be taken seriously by Senate leadership, which promised to have the Senate's Interstate Commerce Commission hold hearings.
"Shoe the Old Horse..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 31, 1923 |
LaFollette protested that those hearings would be against Senate rules, in that the 68th Congress had still not been called into session — and would not be called into session for months to come. Four seats on the commission were left vacant at the end of the 67th Congress. Progressives wanted a greater say on the commission, but the Senate couldn't seat new members before being called into session. At May's end, it appeared that no hearings would be held, and no legislation offered.
The other Senator in Darling's cartoon is Smith Brookhart (R-IA).
"Making Progress" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. May 13, 1923 |
The Progressive bloc of Republicans in the House and Senate, LaFollette included, were isolationists. So was conservative President Harding, until convinced by his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, to support a proposal for a World Court to adjudicate international disputes before they could break into open warfare.
The other Republicans in William Morris's cartoon are Senators William Borah (R-ID), George Moses (R-NH), Hiram Johnson (R-CA) and Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA). Lodge was not one of the Progressives, but had found isolationism useful against the Wilson administration in 1918 and 1920.
"The Move that Will Settle the Argument" by Edward Gale in Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1923 |
LaFollette had turned down the idea of running for president on the Farmer-Labor Party ticket in 1920, but was now entertaining serious talk of running on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924. Sitting atop the elephant's rump in Gale's cartoon, Senator Hiram Johnson (R-CA, Teddy Roosevelt's running mate in 1912) would eventually challenge Calvin Coolidge for the 1924 Republican presidential nomination.
Meanwhile, President Harding announced what would be a fateful speaking tour of the American West from Alaska to California in the coming summer.
"Ready to Follow the President..." by Wm. A. Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, May 27, 1923 |
My thanks to D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist for identifying "CEP" for me. I was running into a lot of dead ends trying to identify the Davenport Democrat's cartoonist. (It didn't help that Davenport was the name of a much more famous cartoonist.) There is no mention of CEP in this "Our Iowa Heritage" article on Iowa cartoonists, in spite of its having a contributor from the Democrat's successor newspaper, the Quad City Times, or in "Iowa Artists of the First Hundred Years," including its list of cartoonists on page 246.
Not so much in this particular cartoon, but Ceperley's style is often reminiscent of that of fellow Iowan J.N. "Ding" Darling. Yet where Ding was generally Republican, Ceperley leaned Democratic. His last cartoon in the Davenport Democrat ran on January 1, 1933 but he continued as City Editor of the paper until 1937; he died in 1956.
"In an Open Field" by William F. "Wilfred" Canan in Minneapolis Daily Star, May 23, 1923 |
This cartoon by Wilfred Canan (pen name Billican) may be the closest thing I'll find to one sympathetic to Senator LaFollette. Canan (1889-1929) began his cartooning career drawing for publications associated with the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, a leftist political organization that gave rise to the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota.
Harding in this cartoon is singing an 1850 hymn by Emily Oakley based on the parable of the sower:
Sowing the seed by the wayside high,
Sowing the seed on the rocks to die,
Sowing the seed where the thorns will spoil,
Sowing the seed in the fertile soil:
O what shall the harvest be?
Given 100 years worth of hindsight, the parable of the rich fool also comes to mind.
Pride celebrations have been cancelled in several Florida communities this year due to the "hostile environment" created by Governor Ron DeSantis and his legislature's intentionally vague law criminalizing drag performances.
Florida is by no means alone in promulgating DeSantis-style Cancel Culture. Event organizers have cancelled similar celebrations in Kansas, and organizers are concerned that a legislation in Tennessee may yet force them to cancel events in Memphis and Knoxville.
The onslaught of viciously anti-LGBTQ legislation being regurgitated from one red state to the next makes this a bleak Pride season.
Who knew that we would come to miss the crass Pride Merch commercialism of 1992 to 2016?
Today's Saturday rummage through the archives should perhaps belong before last Saturday's, since I'm starting off here with the last cartoon I drew for the Parkside Ranger before the 1983 summer break; but I'll move on to later years when summer breaks were not an issue.
I've got no unifying theme to the cartoons this week, so join me on a hopscotch tour taking us hither, yon, and points unknown.
in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 5, 1983 |
I don't believe that I got the original of this cartoon back from the Ranger, so I've lifted this from their on-line archives. I notice that I had not written the Ranger's name on the cartoon, so perhaps I drew the cartoon I led off with last week in case the editors wanted to run it in the May 12 edition. (They ran a post-graduate cartoon I had drawn in April instead.)
At issue in the cartoon is Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The imp in the corner (possibly the last time I used him in a cartoon) is referring to Lebanon's various ethnic and religious camps fighting to control other sectors of the country: Druze, Christian, and Palestinian, and within them, splinter groups. The Syrian government of Assad carved off a sector twice as large as the one taken by Israel.
Seated at the table is Lebanon's President Amine Gemayel, who had came to office in place of his assassinated elder brother Bachir in September of 1982. Leaning in through the window is Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin — a caricature I wouldn't be able to get away with today. But seriously: the man looked like an antisemitic cartoon come to life.
May, 1993 |
This local issue cartoon from May, 1993, speaks to me now because we happen to be going through yet another hospital merger where my Better Half works. These mergers are advertised as improving cost efficiencies, and we've noticed how it works: if Acceptional Health Corp. offers its employees more paid days off than Adepture Medical Inc. does, and Adepture contributes more to its employees' 401-Ks than Acceptional does, Acceptional-Adepture employees will end up with the lesser number of paid days off and the lower 401-K contribution.
The front page of the May 20, 1993 Racine Journal-Times headlined reports of a move by All Saints Medical Center (itself a then-recent merger of St. Luke's and St. Mary's Hospitals) intention to buy up Racine Medical Clinic and Kurten Medical Clinic. The proposed merger would result in a practical health care monopoly in Racine, which had some doctors concerned, according to a sidebar article.
Another sidebar, and a subsequent editorial, complained that the legally required public notice had appeared not in the local paper, but in the Milwaukee Sentinel. A spokesperson for All Saints explained that "Our customers aren't all from Racine." The paper further alleged that a rash of hospital merger activity in Wisconsin was timed to beat a state law set to take effect on July 1 submitting mergers and major equipment purchases to review by a public panel.
The Journal Times didn't run my cartoon this time. The All Saints monopoly issue would eventually become moot anyway when Aurora Health Care moved into town. Both have been involved in mergers since then, albeit not with each other. Yet.
And Racine still has hospital facilities in and around town, unlike some communities where absentee vulture capitalists shut down the hospitals they've bought in order to finance further mergers and acquisitions elsewhere.
May, 2003 |
Speaking of cartoons that didn't get published: I've scanned this one in grayscale to show how close I was to finishing it before I gave up on it.
Why did I stop drawing? Because just about every political cartoonist and late night comedian was doing some variation on the same joke about Saddam Hussein's belligerently grandiose spokesman, whom we called "Baghdad Bob." Al-Sahhaf confidently predicted the crushing defeat of U.S.-led invading forces all the while that they advanced with only nominal opposition toward the Iraq capital.
Of course, we already had Beltway Bobs of our own. Our troops weren't exactly greeted as liberators. Nor did the war pay for itself.
Q Syndicate, May, 2003 |
If you weren't bothered by cartoon stereotypes in my caricature of an Israeli Prime Minister, perhaps you will also enjoy some mafia stereotypes, too.
What can I say? In our household, we watch "Some Like It Hot" and "Key Largo" whenever they show up on Turner Classic Movies.
I have since learned that "youse" is plural. My bad.
Q Syndicate, May, 2013 |
Taking some time off to travel to a family wedding in May of 2013, I drew only three cartoons that month.
Since immigration reform is again (or rather, still) in the news these days, I'll choose this one drawn for Q Syndicate. LGBTQ+ activists had hopes of convincing the Senate to include a provision in that year's immigration reform bill to grant citizenship to same-sex foreign spouses of U.S. citizens — just like different-sex couples, including a recent First Lady, enjoy.
Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) supported such a provision, but couldn't get it through his committee. Democrats, even those sympathetic to LGBTQ+ couples' rights, realized that there was zero chance of the Republican House accepting the provision.
They might as well have included citizenship for Grindr hook-ups. The Senate passed the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" in June, but Republicans in the House never took up the measure at all, once again preventing the government from solving our immigration problems.
Instead, Republicans kept immigration as an issue they have continued to bitch and whine about ever since.
Flying a planeload of migrants to Martha's Vineyard is so much easier than responsible governance, you know.
George Santos, the prevaricating Congressboob from Long Island, has been indicted in New York on 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and "making materially false statements to the House of Representatives." According to the indictment,
"He used political contributions to line his pockets, unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits that should have gone to New Yorkers who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and lied to the House of Representatives."
That doesn't count fraud charges pending against him in Brazil, or the FBI investigation of Santos for allegedly taking money from a GoFundMe page that was started to raise money for a U.S. Navy veteran.
In response, his fellow Republican Congresscretins have courageously rejected a Democratic proposal to expel Santos from office, and Santos has vowed to fight on to clear his good name (whichever one that is).
Meanwhile, the Most Corrupt President In History has shown Santos the way to turn a criminal indictment into a quick buck. If a supposed billionaire can shake down his maga minions again and again and again, how hard can it be for Anthony Devolder, Nigerian Prince, to do the same?
On Facebook the other day, I asked why, given that Vulcans practice arranged marriage, Spock's father, Sarek, broke with tradition and married an Earth woman.
A friend answered that Sarek, as Ambassador to Earth, decided it was the logical thing to do. Besides, as he told his son in the 2009 film reboot, "I loved her."
In the sequels and prequels, Vulcans hooking up with Earthlings turns out to be relatively common... Spock and Uhura... B'Ellana and Tom... T'Pol and Trip...
Humans are a bad influence, I guess.
Drawing for student newspapers forty years ago, I had vacation time along with the undergrads come mid-May. What was an aspiring cartoonist to do (besides sending cold-mail applications to any newspaper around the country that didn't already have an editorial cartoonist on staff)?
Keep in practice, that's what. This cartoon was never published anywhere until this very morning; nor did I have any publication in mind when I drew it. If I had expected to get it into the last Parkside Ranger of the school year, or the Racine Journal Times, I would certainly have put the paper's name in the cartoon.
Some late night that month, I sketched some of the cast of SCTV, a Canadian export to U.S. television in the late '70's and early '80's. Seen here, left to right, are Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, John Candy, Martin Short and Andrea Martin.
I drew everyone too large to fit Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Dave Thomas, or Harold Ramis on the page. I couldn't even get all of Eugene Levy's hair on it.
Perhaps the other cast members didn't happen to be on the episode that ran that evening. At any rate, I never did get around to sketching the rest of them.
As the the top cartoon demonstrates, I needed to work on the human form, not just caricaturing human. The woman answering the phone didn't need to bend over to tie her shoes.
In this caricature of John Cougar Mellencamp, who probably appeared as the musical guest on SCTV that May, I was exploring the Big Head school of caricature. It's a good choice for someone whose body-drawing skills weren't the greatest. In spite of my trying to depict motion, his limbs are still stiff.
My Garrison Keillor looks more relaxed than my Mr. Mellencamp.
It doesn't show here with the drawing shrunk down to 100 dpi, but the page on which I drew Keillor bled considerably.
I kept a sketchbook (and still do) in addition to the drawings posted above; in it there are caricatures of friends from college, geometric designs, and idle doodles, all to keep my mind and hand in practice. Unlike these loose sheets, however, nothing in it is dated, so I don't remember when I drew what.
But just for gits and shiggles, here's a page of random faces to close out today's little exercise.
Now get out there and draw!
Since I drew this cartoon Sunday night, the nightly news has been able to give us breaking reports on Donald Berzelius Trump's sexual assault verdict and George Devolder Santos's fraud indictment, so Gay Homer there can be relieved that the news writers are not, in fact, on strike.
I tend to doubt that the $5 million civil judgment against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll suit does anything to lessen the possibility of a Trump-Biden rematch next year. It hasn't revealed anything about Trump that we, including his most devoted sycophants, didn't already know in November, 2016. Nor, not surprisingly, did his pathetic display of bullying arrogance on CNN last night.
Meanwhile, the AR-15 pandemic is still wreaking havoc across the country. Between one mass shooting and its resulting funerals, there are likely to be another dozen more mass shootings. And the political party in charge of most of the country's statehouses is firmly convinced that transgender people, wokeness, and critical race theory are the greater threats to life and limb.
With any luck, I'll be able to take a complete break with the issue of transgender persecution for at least one week, and present you with a cartoon about the freshman congresscretin from Long Island... even though that news story will be pretty old news by next Thursday.
At least I might not be competing for gags with the late night chat show writers.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, a little girl's face was blown off at an outlet mall in Texas on Saturday.
I should probably include here a trigger warning about the first cartoon, except that you've probably already looked at it before reading this text.
"Mein Altes Berlin" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, May 6, 1923 |
The satirical Berlin weekly Kladderadatsch celebrated its 75th anniversary with its May 6, 1923 issue. On the cover of the 32-page edition, the magazine's titular cartoon character is taken aback by the multicultural wokeness of Germany's capital city. He is surrounded by crude caricatures of a Moslem, a Jew, an Irishman, a Slav, and a beautiful young white woman on the arm —Schrecken aller Schrecken!— of an African man!
Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, May 6, 1923 |
The Kladderadatsch character appeared on the front page of every issue since the very first on May 7, 1848. Often portrayed as a mischievous fellow, his name, and that of the magazine, is onomatopoetic of the sound of things clattering and crashing to the floor.
A couple of recurring cosmopolitan characters, Schultze and Müller, also appeared frequently over the years.
in Kladderadatsch, May 6, 1923 |
The anniversary issue included some articles from previous issues, including this 1856 cartoon by Wilhelm Scholz.
"Zur Wohnungs-Frage" by Wilhelm Scholz, 1856 |
The dialogue is written to mimic a Berlin accent; here is the best I can do for a translation:
"Where are you living now, Wilhelm?"
"For the time being nowhere. Because they wanted to raise my rent for the third time, I moved to Dherjarten in the summer, but it's too damp for me now and the floor is too cold because it's not too hot, and I want to wait until the project for the purchase is cheaper apartments are available."
"But have you been able to find accommodation in a public building?"
"Oh, yes. Of course, they don't have any keys to the advertising pillars, they pick you up every hour in the mail. Now I just want to come to the magistrate, if they can get me a water pipe so that I can finally get some rest."
The cartoonist Wilhelm Scholz started drawing for Kladderadatch beginning with its second issue. There was a cartoon in the very first issue, which the editors in 1923 didn't include in their anniversary issue; its topic, and possibly its cartoonist, were probably long forgotten. The cartoon appears to have a signature of "RR A" carved into the shading at lower left (or perhaps "RR H"?):
"Kommen Se Heute Abend mit zu Mielentzsens" in Kladderadatsch, May 7, 1848 |
My translation below presumes that Heidereutern (forest rangers) and Müllern (millers) are proper names; Mielentzsens is a street name in Berlin.
"Heidereutern, will you come to the Mielentzsens tonight, in a club, on the Tribune?"
"No, Müllern, thank you; Prutz recently hurt my femininity too much with his nonsense about apolitical virginity."
Who or what Prutz was, other than a town in Austria, I haven't a clue. But I imagine to a reader in 1848 with a much better grasp of German than mine, the cartoon was hilarious.
Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
So back to 1923, then:
"Kundschaft" by Arnold Lindlof in Kladderadatsch, May 6, 1923 |
Arnold Lindlof depicts Herr Kladderadatsch ferrying World Republic, antiwar, Communist Party of Germany, and Prohibition advocates — to the Underworld, I assume, since the editorial position of the magazine and its new owner, industrialist Hugo Stinnes, was against each of these causes.
"Immer Gegen Denjenighten, Welcher" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, May 6, 1923 |
Many German cartoons of the period, not just those in Kladderadatsch, were drawn to illustrate little poems like the one under this one by Werner Hahmann. To preserve the rhyme, I've translated "Kanaille" as the French "canaille," a derogatory equivalent of the English "rabble."
"Glückwunsch aus Elysium" by Franz Jüttner in Kladderadatsch, May 6, 1923 |
Karl Meisnick: Strike? What kind of silly expression is that?
Adolax von Stindt: Boy, your memory! Striking, that was the most popular parlor game around 1923! Until Breitscheid banned it. In the middle of the Battle for the Ruhr, after his beautiful speech, a wallpapering strike broke out and thwarted his hopes for an armchair [Fauteuil]. Then he went over to Hitler, but remained true to an old conviction until his death—
Biermörder: Only to become a minister again.
"Das Europäische Gleichgewicht" by Oskar Garvens in Kladderadatsch, May 6, 1923 |
As things turned out, Kladderadatsch, the only satirical magazine in Berlin to survive the Revolutions of 1848, would not outlast a little thing called World War II. Having become an enthusiastic mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda, the magazine fell four years short of celebrating its 100th anniversary in 1948.
For last week's cartoon about Republicans and their assault on transgender Americans, I drew a generic GOP elephant because I hadn't wanted to single out any one anti-trans, red-state Republican as being any worse than the rest of them. This week, however, I'm singling out the state of Montana, where Republican legislative leaders muzzled and expelled Representative Zooey Zephyr (D-Missoula), a transgender woman herself, who dared to speak up in no uncertain terms against a bill outlawing gender-affirming therapy for minors.
Obviously, Republicans feel very deeply about some horrible danger that is posed whenever transgender people are allowed to be their authentic selves, so I'm trying here to understand what is motivating them to rush these laws through one state legislature after another over the objections of medical professionals, and transgender citizens and their parents.
They even ignore their own children: Governor Greg Gianforte's 32-year-old non-binary son David, who lobbied their dad to veto the bill — to no avail.
David said they had asked their father to think about transgender Montanans with empathy and compassion, even if the governor didn’t share their experiences. In his letter to lawmakers explaining the amendments, [Governor] Gianforte referenced those same values — empathy and compassion — while also expressing support for the bill. To David, the letter didn’t make sense.More mystifying than Governor Gianforte is the case of Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe (R-Billings Heights), a sponsor of Montana's anti-trans bill, who told lawmakers that she would rather her daughter commit suicide than have gender therapy — and it was no mere hypothetical scenario.
“It’s bizarre to me to read the press release that my father put out,” David said. “He talks about compassion toward children, the youth of Montana, while simultaneously taking away health care from the youth in Montana. It’s basically a contradiction in my mind.”
Republican Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, who recently sponsored a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors, suggested in March during a debate on the floor of the Montana statehouse that she had blocked the treatment for her own daughter, even as her daughter was suicidal.
“One of the big issues that we have heard today and we’ve talked about lately is that without surgery the risk of suicide goes way up. Well, I am one of those parents who lived with a daughter who was suicidal for three years,” Seekins-Crowe said, according to a clip shared on Twitter, demonstrating how close to home the issue hit for her family.
But it was what she said next that left observers so stunned.
“Someone once asked me, ‘Wouldn’t I just do anything to help save her?’ And I really had to think and the answer was, ‘No,’” Seekins-Crowe said.
She went on to call her daughter’s suicidal tendencies “emotional manipulation” and claimed that it was her responsibility as a parent to make decisions when her daughter had no “vision” for her life.
I hope Ms. Seekins-Crowe doesn't have high expectations for Mother's Day gifts this year.
Would I find a more compassionate response by looking beyond the political elite?
Republican editorial cartoonist Mike Lester included commentary with his cartoon for Counterpoint the other day that gave me Tucker Carlson Face for the rest of the day:
[A]s long as I can remember, both sides have always relied on the one thing we could all agree on: "the next generation." Children were our future. Now they're our lab frogs and it's THE hill to die on for every parent I know.
What I take from this is that he truly believes that allowing parents of a child with gender dysphoria the option of gender therapy will result in mad scientists working for Big Wokernment performing experimental gender surgery on children without their parents' consent.
This is not like our fight against conversion therapy, the quack science that purports to turn LGBTQ+ patients into flaming heterosexuals, and which is usually performed against the patient's wish. Judging from Lester's cartoon, however, he must think that The Left wants to perform gender reassignment surgery on unsuspecting youth not just without their consent but without their knowledge.
(I should note here that gender-affirming therapy on minors involves hormonal therapy and puberty blockers, but — aside from the now discouraged practice of allowing parents to decide whether they want their intersex infant to be surgically made male or female — not genital surgery.)
One thing I agree with Mike Lester, however, is that children are our future. Or, more to the point, not ours but theirs.
Someday, those children are going to view these anti-trans laws the same way we adults see antiquated laws against dancing on Sunday or shooting rabbits from a motorboat.
And perhaps that day is sooner than today's Republicans think.
If you've been following the news, the topic of this week's cartoon shouldn't come as a surprise.
Tune in later for some high level cancel culture.