All This And the Isle of Yap

Fasten your seat belts: today's Graphical History Tour is going to lurch from one theme to another like a Prokofiev symphony.

"And If You Don't Like It You're a Red" by Butler in Oklahoma Leader, Oklahoma City OK, March 14, 1923

This is a local-issue cartoon, but it will do nicely to kick off today's piece.

We last saw the work of this fellow Butler during Oklahoma's 1923 recall election that removed Governor Jack Walton from office — and I thought that perhaps Butler had laid down his pen after the recall was successful.

But here he is again, portraying a statehouse infested with, right-to-left, Cement Trust, Attorney General [George Short], Standard Oil, Reliance Shirt Factory, KKK, Bank Vampire, School Land Leech, Kept Press, Insurance Graft, School Book Trust, Bribery, [President of the State Board of Agriculture John] Whitehurst, Jack Walton, Corruption, and Loot.

The shirt factory had won a state penitentiary contract, slammed by the Leader as illegal. The Oklahoma House voted in February to impeach John Whitehurst, accusing him of corruption and neglect of duty, but fell short in a vote to impeach the State Attorney General. The Leader favored the Farmer-Labor Party, which was denounced by the state's mainstream media as "red."

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Since we're all hot and bothered about immigration today, here's where we were 100 years ago:

"Give Me More of Northern Europe" by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Feb. 28, 1924

I regret that I wasn't able to put together a Graphical History Tour with a Black American History Month theme in February, even though half of last week's oeuvre was devoted to doings of the Ku Klux Klan.

There was an plenty of bigotry to spare in this country in 1924, as evidenced by this William Morris cartoon. Mr. Melting Pot supposedly can't digest Catholic Italians and swarthy Slavs, who were on the same side as the U.S. side during World War I; apparently Morris had gotten over any lingering distaste for Germans by this time.

I'm just surprised he didn't figure out how to add Jews to his personae non gratae.

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The Daily Cartoonist featured a post about turn-of-the-century editorial cartoonist Frederick Opper last week, so here's his take on the Teapot Dome Scandal:

"The Dough-heny Minstrels" by Frederick Opper for International Feature Service ca. March 7, 1924

Opper's modus operandi was to cram as many little ideas into a cartoon as he had room for, and to repeat them as necessary or convenient. For instance, the Island of Yap had absolutely nothing to do with the Teapot Dome scandal. The tiny Pacific island and telegraph communications hub had been a German territory claimed by Japan after World War I, a claim contested by the U.S. Opper devoted a long series of post-war cartoons to Island of Yap doggerel because he thought its name was funny.

The title of his "The Dough-heny Minstrels" series was a play on the name of oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company (today's Pemex). Doheny had secured a deal with then Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall (the goat atop the mountain in the cartoon) to lease the naval oil reserves at Elk Hills, California, and was a financial backer of Democratic contender William McAdoo (fishing in the boat). The other seated figure, Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil, had won the Teapot Dome lease.

By this time, Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby had resigned from President Coolidge's cabinet, and Attorney General Harry Daugherty would be out of office by the end of the month.

George Creel, depicted by Opper in a gratuitously racist caricature, was actually a white man, a journalist with Colliers who had been Woodrow Wilson's head of the wartime Committee on Public Information. I don't know what exactly made Creel relevant to Opper's Dough-heny Minstrel series, in which he appeared repeatedly. What I find is that Creel wrote in February in defense of selling arms to Mexican President Obregon, and the editorial board at Colliers regarded the Teapot Dome scandal as something not worth Congress's time or their own pages.

Perhaps Opper thought Creel’s name was funny.

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"Fertile Soil" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1924

Speaking of Teapot Dome, third-party interests saw in it an opportunity for the Progressive presidential candidacy of Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. The Oklahoma Leader, for one, touted Fighting Bob on its front page. Col. McCormick's Chicago Tribune, with this front page cartoon, clearly felt differently.

LaFollette had been in charge of an early investigation into the scandal, his belief in Secretary Fall's innocence shaken after finding his Senate office ransacked. The investigation was turned over to Democrat Thomas Walsh of Montana, the Senate's most junior member, eventually turning up Doheny's $100,000 loan to Fall.

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Incidentally, someone commenting on D.D. Degg's post about Frederick Opper asked whether Opper had included Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in any of his editorial cartoons during the 1920 election. 

I have not come across any; by and large, veep candidates didn't attract much attention from editorial cartoonists that year. Indeed, Claude Bowman's several cartoons in 1900 that included Teddy Roosevelt and/or Adlai Stevenson Sr. stand out as the few examples I can think of when a cartoonist paid any attention to the running mates in that era.

Instead, I can offer this cartoon featuring FDR's future running mate, Texas Senator John Nance Garner.

"I Hope the President Isn't Playing Politics" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, March 13, 1924

Taxes, by the way, were due on March 15 in those days. Congress did not pass the tax cut bill in time.