The Third Man

Caricature of Robert LaFollette by A. Barreto in Public Affairs, ca. May, 1924

We turn now to the third party candidate in the 1924 presidential race, Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Republican from Wisconsin.

I wish I could tell you more about the cartoonist who created the caricature of LaFollette at the top of today’s post. The Washington Herald identified him as being Peruvian, and credited the caricature to a publication called Public Affairs; I have not found either one on line yet.

"The Prairie Fire" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1924

With Calvin Coolidge's presidential nomination all wrapped up and tied with a bow, and the fight for the Democratic nomination still raging all the way up to and through the party's national convention, Democrat-leaning cartoonists such as Daniel Fitzpatrick seized on the aspirations of Republican Senator Robert LaFollette as a sign that Republican Party unity wasn't what it appeared to be.

"Jazz" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 12, 1924

No doubt the Wisconsin Republican's open intention of waging a third-party campaign annoyed the mainstream of his party.

"Can't Tell What Bad Boys Will Do" by Harry Murphy for Star Newspapers, ca. June 16, 1924

Just how much of a nuisance his campaign would be was anybody's guess — as well as to whom.

"Unperturbed" by "Bill" Sykes in Philadelphia Public Ledger, ca. June 6, 1924

Despite Progressives' gains in the 1922 congressional elections, conservatives were firmly in charge of the Republican Party; Wall Street interests and southern conservatives were greatly influential on the Democratic side. LaFollette hoped for a Progressive Party in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party as an alternative, which he believed would ultimately replace the Democrats.

"Whip Behind There, Robert" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, June 18, 1924

The 1924 iteration of the Progressive Party was created by the Conference for Progressive Political Action, a collection of socialists, midwestern labor unions, and farmers' coalitions. It had included the Farmer-Labor Party (formerly the Non-partisan League, which we've followed in several earlier posts) but the Farmer-Laborites had split off from the CPPA in 1922.

"What're You Laughing At" by Ed Gale in Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1924

The Farmer-Labor Party held its national convention in St. Paul in June, and was also interested in rejoining the CPPA, or at least endorsing LaFollette as its presidential candidate.

"Go Back" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, June 17, 1924

But LaFollette wasn't interested in the Farmer-Labor Party's endorsement, and their convention nominated a ticket of Illinois miners' union leader Duncan McDonald and Washington state grange activist William Bouck instead. (McDonald and Bouck were back at their day jobs within a month.)

"La Follette Cries for His Mama" by Robert Minor in Daily Worker, Chicago, June 5, 1924

If Republican stalwarts weren't about to let Sen. LaFollette off the hook for his initial support for the Russian Revolution, the Communists at the Daily Worker were not ready to forgive him for his more recent repudiation of Stalinism. "He cries and he scolds, but he doesn't leave his mama," reads the cut line below Robert Minor's cartoon for the Communist daily newspaper out of Chicago.

"I Hope You've Saved Room for This" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. June 30, 1924

When the Progressive Party scheduled its convention in Cleveland, Ohio, for July 4 and 5, they probably assumed that both major party nominees would be known. As it turned out, however, when Polly Ticks in Dorman Smith's cartoon brought out the Progressive Conference course, the diner had yet to clean the plate in front of him.

Q Toon: NSFWH

This week's cartoon posed a thorny challenge: how could I draw a cartoon fit for publication about campaign merchandise that is decidedly Not Safe For the White House?

The cartoon was inspired by a story on NPR last week about NSFW t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other gear proudly sold and worn at Trump rallies. They've got the President of the United States as the direct object of one of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on TV, and extremely crude insults about the Vice President.

“What's different about Donald Trump is that his campaign is not particularly worried about this type of misogyny being attached to his campaign, because at least to date, it hasn't hurt him that much,” explained Kelly Dittmar, director of research for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Furthermore, she says, this kind of language is often particularly directed at women of color, like Kamala Harris. The word “ho'” on the shirt undeniably makes this about race as well as sex.

Meanwhile, Dittmar says, the Republican base is majority-men.

“And of course,” she said, “of the women who do support [Republicans], they are more likely to say that this is just, you know, a joke.”

That was true of voter Christena Kincaid, who talked to me just after she had bought one of these shirts at a rally in Freeland, Michigan.

“It's just a slang. That's all it is,” she said. “It's a goofy – it is a little over the top. I get it. But they're just words.”

A pastor with whom I work was part of a protest group advocating the Green New Deal outside Trump's rally in Racine this week, and when he came back to the church that afternoon, he told me that he had never seen so many raised middle fingers — even those of children.

Now, he wasn't in clerical garb; he was wearing a tee shirt with a pro-environment slogan, so it wasn't as if all those people telling him what he could do off were necessarily aware that he was a man of the cloth. But I doubt more than a couple of them would have been deterred from flipping the bird had he been out in the hot sun wearing a full alb, stole, and collar.

It's all part of a general coarsening of society, and the corrupt former president and his congressional minions have certainly been leading by example.

Yes, if you want to play the Whataboutism Game, I've seen the internet posts of Melania Trump from her lingerie (and less) modeling days, and of Lauren Boebert on a bundt cake. But I don't think they have been sold on tee shirts at Biden campaign appearances or flying from flagpoles on Biden supporters' front lawns. (And I'm pretty sure that the bundt crack was an anti-Hillary Clinton meme first.)

Is there anything that can be done to bring back civility and decorum to our public discourse? Probably not. If there's one lesson we should have learned from Trump's Access Hollywood Tape through the Stormy Daniels verdict, it's that Trump l'oeilists have absolutely no shame.

Well, there was a guy in that NPR story who conceded that maybe he'd reconsider wearing his "🍆🌀🔥👿 Biden" tee shirt around his grandchildren.

So maybe they have just a wee tiny little vestige of a hint of a distant, fading memory of shame. Hidden away in the deep, dusty recesses of their empty souls.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Yeah, it's another multi-panel toon coming off the drawing board this week.

Four panels worth of trying to make characters look like the same person wearing the same outfit and hairstyle and jewelry from frame to frame without making them utterly static by copying and pasting like some editorial cartoonists who shall remain nameless but you know who they are do.

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, June 25, 1967

There used to be a comic strip in the local Sunday paper when I was growing up, "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, in which the facial expressions of the characters always appeared to be cut and pasted from some master file of grins and smiles. Looking back on it, one imagines a factory full of junior cartoonists in South Korea or some such gluing bits of the cartoon together every week, a la "The Simpsons" animators.

I don't care to wade through every Sunday strip today, but I'm fairly certain that there were occasions when a everything in an old panel but the dialogue was copied into a new strip (if not the entire strip itself). But compare the last panels of these next two, a month apart:

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, July 16, 1967

The family was the antithesis of much of early comic fare of bickering couples, henpecked husbands,  ditsy wives and trouble-making children. Mrs. Berry didn't call Peter a nut every Sunday, but whatever arguments they had, they could laugh all the way through them.

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, June 18, 1967

Yet somehow, their incessant smiling was ... creepy.

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, October 29, 1967

Even in silhouette!

No Organized Political Party

Last Saturday's Graphical History Tour was all about the Republican National Convention of 1924 and its mostly predetermined outcome.

"The Convention Behind the Conventions" by Robert Minor in Daily Worker, Chicago, June 7, 1924

Today, we turn to the Democratic National Convention that year, which was a completely different story. Awaiting John Pierpoint Morgan's checks are the Republican ticket of Calvin Coolidge (in front) and Charles Dawes (with pipe) as well as some of the prominent Democratic hopefuls: Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia, Sen. Sam Ralston of Indiana, Gov. Al Smith of New York, former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo lately of California, and Sen. Oscar Underwood of Alabama.

"He Loves Me.." by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. June 19, 1924

Not to be outdone, Dorman Smith records the names of all the potential candidates for Miss Democracy to choose from (yet still one petal up top blank in case of a new entry). There are too many to name all of them here, but Smith includes both William Jennings Bryan and his brother Charles, as well as 1920 nominee Cox.

"More Glimpses of Democratic Convention" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., June 26, 1924

The Democrats convened in New York City's Madison Square Garden on June 24 with no settled-upon candidate and plenty of opposing views on where the party should stand on important issues of the day. About the only thing delegates could agree on was that Calvin Coolidge and the Republican Congress should be voted out of office.

"Ever Try to Pick Up One of Those Double Handles Baskets..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, June 26, 1924

The Democrats were an uneasy coalition of leftist labor unions and anti-union southern conservatives; Wilsonists in favor of the League of Nations and Bryanist populists opposed to it; "Dry" proponents of Prohibition and "Wet" advocates for its repeal; and Ku Klux Klan devotees and Catholics, Jews, and other minorities threatened by it. (Black Americans were more in tune with the Republicans at this point, although, as we discovered here, increasing Klan influence in the Republican Party had just begun to change that.)

"Tempting Him" by Douglas Rodger in San Francisco Bulletin, June 26, 1924

The top two candidates stood on opposite sides of the Prohibition divide. William McAdoo promised to enforce Prohibition, whereas Al Smith had repealed New York's prohibition laws and vowed to do the same nationally.

"Something Burning" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 27, 1924

The dividing line on Prohibition was nearly identical to that on support of the Ku Klux Klan; an unknown but significant number of delegates were members of the secret society. A proposed plank in the party platform condemning the Klan was supported mostly by Smith's delegates, but it fell short of adoption after days of rancorous debate. 

"What the Well Dressed McAdoo Delegates Will Not Wear at the Convention" by Edmund Duffy in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 24, 1924

Klan support of William McAdoo was an open secret. Born in Georgia and raised in Tennessee before finding his fortune in New York, McAdoo tailored his appeal primarily to rural and small-town America. McAdoo could have disavowed his Klan support, but chose not to.

"Crown of Thorns and Cross of Fire" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1924

Here's Democratic partisan Daniel Fitzpatrick's woeful response to the party's unwillingness to denounce the Klan.

"A Danger Signal" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1924

Even a rock-ribbed Republican like John McCutcheon responded more in sorrow than in glee to the Democrats' feuding. Curiously, his Uncle Sam's despair at religious issues being brought into American politics makes no mention of the fact that significant opposition to Governor Smith was because he was Roman Catholic.

Incidentally, the Republicans' convention earlier in the month also had the opportunity to put a plank in their party platform condemning the Klan, but never brought it to a vote.

"The Battle of the Century" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, June 28, 1924

Given that fights over the Democratic Party platform were so protracted and that none of their presidential candidates had enough support to win the nomination, balloting for the Democratic presidential nomination was put off until the second week of the convention.

The fellow in the foreground of Tom Foley's cartoon, George "Tex" Rickard, was the guy who built Madison Square Garden and was the foremost boxing promoter of his day.

"The 'Bean' Ball" by Albert T. Reid in Rutland (VT) Herald, June 26, 1924

Albert Reid overstates McAdoo's support in this cartoon; he didn't have a simple majority of delegates, let alone the required two thirds majority. When balloting for the presidential nomination began on June 30, McAdoo won 39.4% of the votes on the first ballot to Smith's 22%, with seventeen other candidates receiving at least one vote. After fourteen more inconclusive ballots, McAdoo still had only 43.6% of the votes to Smith's 27.8%

Remaining candidates, none receiving more than 5.6% of the votes, refused to withdraw, strategizing that neither McAdoo nor Smith could possibly hit the 66.67% threshold.

"Not So Docile As the Elephant" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 28, 1924

So it looks like we'll have to check back in with the Democrats in July.

Q Toon: Florida Man Yells at Rainbow

Let me preface today's commentary by saying that I generally don't check the weather forecast for my cartoon's locale before sitting down at my drawing board. So I just want to make it clear that Governor DeSantis here is not rooting for this week's torrential rains to continue pummeling Florida. This cartoon is not about the weather.

Okay, now that that's out of the way:

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Florida Republicans didn't want to see rainbow-colored lights illuminating their state's bridges in celebration of Pride Month in June. So they passed a law last month decreeing that Florida's bridges be lit up exclusively in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

They thus were able to pretend that the purpose of the law was a patriotic celebration — of the colors of the American flag. Or, if y'all'd rather, the Stars 'n' Bars. (Le tricolore? Mais non!) 

The diktat from Tallahassee is part of what Governor Ron DeSantis calls, without a trace of irony, "Freedom Summer." 

I suppose the rednecks up in Niceville are enjoying their freedom to tell the gays down in Key West how to decorate.

We'll see whether Key West gets its freedom back in time for LGBTQ History Month in October. 

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Earlier this week, prolific editorial cartoonist Clay Jones shared a comment left under one of his cartoons at GoComics, from a reader chastising him for using — stealing, even — popular cultural references in his work.

The rest of us editorial cartoonists shared — stole, even — a good chuckle over that one. Most of us reference popular cultural stuff all the time. This isn't the first time I've resorted to a Simpsons meme; and I've also based cartoons on Calvin and Hobbes, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peanuts, Monty Python, Dr. Seuss, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, and The Three Musketeers.

On the other side of the pond, editorial cartoonists can get away with aping Serious Art that would go over the heads of many readers stateside; Dave Brown of the Independent signals his readers that he has redrawn someone else's classic by showcasing the cartoon in a fancy gilt-edged frame. The rest of us could do that, too, except that it would be stealing the idea from Mr. Brown.

Down under, David Rowe redrew Manet and David paintings on successive days this week; Financial Times readers may have caught the references without spying the obligatory apologies in the corner of the cartoons. American readers would likely have missed the parodies unless published in the student newspaper of the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Elsewhere, references to artwork are rife in editorial cartoons in other countries where keeping the cartoon wordless makes it saleable outside of the cartoonist's native language.

My own thought on all of this is that one shouldn't make the same reference over and over. Once one has parodied Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for Topic A (another choice I could have made for this week's cartoon), one should seriously consider not parodying "The Scream" again for a good long time. Unless you want to be known as That Guy Who Keeps Drawing The Scream.

Which, if you can pull it off, isn't ipso facto a bad thing. At least you won't have to worry whether readers will think your cartoons are about the weather when they're not.

Just make sure that someone else isn't already That Guy.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I much prefer caricaturing faces than architecture. But I guess I'll have to draw that bridge when I come to it.

Campaign Song of Ice and Fire

June 9, 1924

We just got through the presidential primary elections in the District of Columbia, South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico and New Jersey this week. In case you weren't paying attention, I won't spoil it for you by telling you who won. Results from party caucuses in Guam and the Virgin Islands should be known sometime today.

Caricature of Calvin Coolidge by Henry Major for Hearst newspapers, ca. June 15, 1924

100 years ago this week, Republicans met for their national convention in Cleveland to go through the motions of nominating Calvin Coolidge for President. Coolidge had trounced California Senator Hiram Johnson in almost every contest — Johnson received fewer floor votes than Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette, who was widely expected to make a third party run.

"Irreconcilables" who wanted a more isolationist foreign policy plank, and anti-Klan delegations who pushed for language explicitly condemning the Ku Klux Klan provided a bit of drama as the party platform was hammered together; but both were both disappointed.

"Don't Let It Happen Again" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, June 10, 1924

The only real topic generating any suspense was the selection of Coolidge's running mate. Having succeeded to the presidency after the death of Warren Harding, four decades before passage of the 25th Amendment, Coolidge was in office without any understudy.

(I hope you noticed Coolidge's profile in Mr. Foley's block of ice, by the way.)

"Got Him, By Thunder" by Rollin Kirby in New York Evening World, ca. June 16, 1924

Illinois Governor Frank Lowden and Idaho Senator William Borah both declined the second spot on the Republican ticket, even though Lowden actually won the vice presidential nomination on the second ballot. Herbert Hoover was Coolidge's next choice, but he fell well short on the third ballot.

Instead, the nomination went to Charles Dawes. I have to assume that Rollin Kirby drew "Got Him, By Thunder" before Dawes's nomination was known, and only added the man's name on his suit at the last minute.

"On the Knees of the Gods" by Rollin Kirby in New York Evening World, ca. June 18, 1924

Kirby could well have had this cartoon ready and waiting for him to add the face of Coolidge's running mate before Dawes's name was announced, too. For Calvin "The Business of America Is Business" Coolidge to have shared the ticket with anyone who wouldn't sit comfortably on Big Business's lap would have been extremely out of character.

"The Kite that Mother Made" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 1924

Bill Hanny's is another probable example of a cartoon nearly completed before Dawes accepted the nomination. He's lucky that a candidate with a longer name such as Senator Albert Beveridge didn't get the nod.

"Unity..." by Sam Armstrong in Tacoma News Tribune, June 16, 1924

Charles Dawes, a diplomat and former Director of the Bureau of the Budget, was best known for presenting the Coolidge administration's proposal for settling German reparations for the Great War. Under the Dawes plan, U.S. banks loaned enough money to Germany to enable Germany to meet its Versailles Treaty obligations to France and Belgium, which in turn promised to withdraw their occupation troops from the Ruhr valley.

"We May Have to Remodel..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, June 17, 1924

The one and apparently only other thing anybody knew about Charles Dawes was that he was reputed to have a short-ish temper and his favorite expletive was "Hell 'n' Maria!"

"The 'Icy-Hot' Parade" by Harold Wahl in Sacramento Bee, June 17, 1924

"Queer Treatment for 'Miss-a-Meal' Cramps" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 17, 1924

Tune in next week, when we'll turn our attention to the Democrats.

"Enjoying Himself" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 1924

Q Toon: The Overturners

Our ethically challenged Supreme Court is set to hand down their rulings for the year this month. Given the right-wingers' determination to overturn precedent wherever it suits them, we can anticipate some doozies.

Justices Thomas and Alito in particular have expressly condemned established case law involving privacy rights under the 14th Amendment that has granted citizens the right to contraception, extramarital sex within one's own home, and same-sex marriage. (Those 14th Amendment rulings include mixed-race marriage rights, too, but least one of them seems okay with leaving that precedent alone. Although overturning Loving v. Virginia could render Justice Thomas's ethical dilemma moot.)

The Justices in today's cartoon have already overturned half a century of precedent on abortion rights— which, frankly, shouldn't have surprised anybody as much as it did. The Court had been hacking away at the edges of Roe v. Wade for most of those fifty years, stocked as it has been by every Republican administration with committed anti-abortion activists.

Those Republican Justices are equally committed to bolstering the rights of corporations over individuals of lesser means. The monies, properties, vacations, and campers Justice Thomas has accepted from well-heeled amici curiae would have made Abe Fortas blush. But you really can't argue that such corporate largesse influenced his opinions. That stuff was not so much bribes as loyalty perks.

And then there's United States v. Trump. Handed the open-and-shut question in April of whether a Former President Named Donald Trump has absolute and permanent immunity against being charged with his crimes, the Supremes decided they needed more time to think about it. Perhaps our Constitutional Originalists and their ouija boards will have figured out by the end of June how the Founding Fathers meant to grant Trump immunity without extending the same to Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter.

Oyez, oyez, oyez.

WisToon: Ask Not For Hovde Bell Tolls

Eric Hovde is making his second try for the Senate seat held by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) this year. In 2012, he lost in the primary to former Governor Tommy Thompson; this time around, he's the Republican Party favorite.

Like a traditional Republican, he promises to end budget deficits (without saying whose budget he intends to slash). His ads blame Senator Baldwin for inflation, illegal immigration, and the supposed Biden plot to get rid of gas-powered cars. A TV ad by a shadow group funded by Hovde's brother charges that Baldwin of told people to stay home when COVID-19 first spread, “but used your money to fly to New York to live with her girlfriend at her lavish multimillion dollar apartment.”

When not playing up what Senator Baldwin has done for Wisconsinites, the Democrats' TV and social media ads attack Hovde for being a wealthy hedge fund manager living in sunny California (he counters that he grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University in Madison), and that he wants to take away old people's right to vote.

The ad by Senate Majority PAC includes a sound bite of Hovde, whose company owns a nursing home, telling a radio interviewer, “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.”

The Hovde campaign responded that he was only talking about Republican-fueled (and exaggerated) complaints about what they charge was a suspiciously high rate of voting at some nursing homes in Racine and Madison in the last election.

Just the same, I wouldn't want my loved ones in a nursing home run with that attitude.

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Speaking of my loved ones, we joke that Eric Hovde might be a cousin of ours.

It's conceivable. My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Hovde. We have her family traced back a few more generations, but we know nothing of any of her siblings' descendants. It's entirely possible, however, that the surname refers to the farm where she was raised, and that anyone who worked there would be given that last name whether they were blood relatives or not.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Had enough upside-down flag cartoons yet?

Well, tough. 

As it happens, I was out of town for a family wedding over the weekend. An old friend of my husband's lives in the area near the wedding, so I drew this week's cartoon early in case we had the opportunity to stop by for a visit. (The visit didn't work out, but at least it wasn't because I was anxious to get home to my drawing board.)

At the end of every year since 1972, I've taken a photo of the year's front page headlines. One of this year's major front page stories was in Friday's newspapers (you may have heard of it), and I very much wanted to pick up a copy of the local paper.

Couldn't find one.

Not very long ago, one used to find a small stack of newspapers in the lobby of one's hotel, free as part of the cost of one's room. Once upon a time, it would be the local newspaper; then somehow every hotel agreed to stock USA Today. Now they don't even offer that. The young men at the front desk didn't even know where a newspaper might be sold.

Newspaper vending machines are a thing of the past now that the cost of a newspaper is well above the amount of change anyone carries in their pocket. There were no newspapers at the nearby gas station; the clerk told me that they only sold the paper on Sunday. Nor were there any newspapers at the nearest grocery store. The nearby Shoppe-ing Centre had a bookstore; no newspaper there. Maybe I should have checked any of the half a dozen coffee shoppes, but I wasn't in need of half a dozen overpriced cups of coffee.

Yesterday, I saw the premiere post on a new substack by fellow cartoonist Jack Ohman, writing from vacation in Hawai'i about trying to get away from the news. Yet, in spite of that, he apparently had no trouble in paradise coming up with a copy of the local paper.

From https://jackohman.substack.com/p/on-vacation-with-donald-trump

Was it because he was in a Blue State where they get their news from, well, the news, and I was in a Red State where they get their news from Trump Social?

Pride Cometh to North Pratt Falls

It's LGBTQet-al. Pride Month, so let's start today's Graphical History Tour with something in a lighter vein than Thursday's cartoon.

Q Syndicate, June, 2004

Here's a cartoon I drew in time for client publications' Pride Month issues in 2004 (meaning that I drew it in May, of course), observing that Gay Pride celebrations were no longer found exclusively in major metropolitan cities.

"Boy Meets Boy" was one of those "reality" TV shows — on Bravo if I remember correctly. A gay twist on "The Bachelor," the main contestant was presented with several potential male suitors to choose among — the catch being that some of them, unbeknownst to him, were straight.

I have no recollection who the geeky straight contestant was, whether he was the guy picked in the end, or whatever happened to him or anybody else connected with the show. And it's just as well.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., June 18, 1984

Let's keep talking about sex, but step back 20 more years to 1984.

That year, the Racine Unified School Board voted to reject five recommended textbooks, including two sex education books for teenage readers. Married and Single Life and Living Today offered frank discussion of the sorts of questions real adolescents have about relationships, loving, and, yes, sex. Beyond "When a man and a woman love each other very much they share a special kiss and have a baby."

The ban ignited controversy between Racinians who believed that teens deserve access to books that deal frankly and honestly with sex, and others who believed that frank and honest discussion of sex should wait until after teens grow up, get married, share a special kiss, and have children of their own.

The very night after my cartoon appeared in the local newspaper, the school board voted to reverse the ban on the two sex ed books. But the board upheld their vote on rejecting three American history textbooks for supposed liberal bias. The Journal Times reported that board member Barbara Scott said the textbook flap could have been avoided if the board had had time to review the books.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., June 14, 1994

Continuing with the local scene: Democrat Peter Barca was elected to Congress from Wisconsin's First Congressional District in 1993 to succeed Les Aspin, whom Bill Clinton had appointed Secretary of Defense. Aspin had represented the 1st CD since 1970, routinely trouncing his Republican challengers.

My crystal ball here proved faulty. Republican realtor Mark Neumann, who had narrowly lost the 1993 special election, won the rematch in the 1994 GOP wave. A series of Republicans have held the seat ever since, mostly with only token opposition whom the Democratic National Congressional Committee never lifted a finger to help.

In the meantime, Peter Barca went back to representing Kenosha in Madison, including six years as Assembly Minority Leader, before accepting Governor Tony Evers's appointment as Secretary of the Department of Revenue. This year, he's running for Congress again, hoping to unseat three-term incumbent Bryan Steil.

For the moment, the DNCC thinks that Steil might be vulnerable to a challenge. Unlike the other Democratic congressional candidates here since 1998, Barca has plenty of governmental experience — although heading the Department of Revenue is a point on his résumé that Republicans will be more eager to emphasize than he will.

June, 2014

And finally, I began sketching this cartoon ten Junes ago after Judge Barbara Crabb of the United States District Court, Western District of Wisconsin, ruled my state’s antigay “marriage amendment” unconstitutional. 

Before inking it, I saw that Wisconsin State Journal editorial cartoonist Phil Hands had published a similar cartoon of the sailor and miner shaking hands. He's syndicated throughout Wisconsin, whereas I haven't been published in my home state since InStep magazine folded in 2003. So I decided not to send this cartoon out to my editors at Q Syndicate, on the theory that few readers elsewhere would recognize the men on the Badger State flag.

But I inked, scanned, and colorized it anyway, and here it is again.