What, another Ric Grenell cartoon? Oh, well — Scott Bessent will have to wait for some other time.
So I was mindful of being inclusive when creating the host in this week's cartoon. She's completely made up, by the way; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
I suppose I could have drawn Eugene Daniels or Jonathan Capehart, but there is no way that Grenell would be caught dead on MS NOW.
This week's Graphical History Tour ventures once again into the Bergetoon vaults to haul up the stuff I was drawing about forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Mays ago.
1986
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| in Ranger, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, May 1, 1986 |
Today, Donald Joffrey Trump complains that our NATO allies are not stepping up to help him in his unilateral war excursion in Iran. Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan was similarly disappointed that only Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain lent any support to "Operation Eldorado Canyon," air attacks on purported terrorist centers in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya.
The two military operations have some elements in common, Libyan involvement in significant terrorist attacks chief among them. Yet several distinctions must be made. Reagan consulted Congress before initiating this military action. The administration also kept our European allies up to date. Operation Eldorado Canyon was launched in express retaliation for a Libyan-sponsored bombing of a Berlin nightclub popular with U.S. servicemen (two were killed in the bombing and 79 injured).
And whatever other faults he had, at least Reagan didn't start bickering with the Pope.
1996
The university newspapers for which I drew way back in the 20th Century always suspended publication in May for finals and graduation, so my cartoons in those months were mostly on local or special interest topics.
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| in Journal Times, Racine Wis., May 3, 1996 |
The NIMBYism at the heart of this one is probably fairly universal, however.
Lutheran Social Services (LSS) provides housing, counseling, and child care services to underserved and at-risk communities. Its bid purchase a house on a semi-rural road in Mount Pleasant as an eight-bed halfway house for male parolees raised instant objections from neighbors.
One neighbor complained that the parolees would get to "live in a $170,000 home because they committed a crime." Another told the Journal Times, "If it's not safe for these men to go home, it's not safe for them to be in my neighborhood. ... Some little child is going to be molested. Some woman is going to get raped. Someone is going to get beat up. Someone's house is going to get broken into."
LSS countered, "We will know exactly where every resident is every moment of every day." Their residents were to be carefully screened, and offered alcohol and drug abuse treatment, occupational and educational opportunities, and counseling.
But at a packed community meeting, LSS yielded to pressure from residents and state legislators, and announced that it would look for another site elsewhere.
No, it didn't end up being at the local shopping mall.
But these days, our local mall would welcome just about any tenant at all.
2006
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| May, 2006 |
To get really, really parochial, this is a cartoon I was asked to draw for the 25-year reunion of my college graduating class. It must have gone astray when I sent it in (perhaps because recipients of my e-mails see my husband's name as the sender, and we've both kept our maiden names). In any event, it didn't make it into the evening program.
It was a challenge trying to winnow down the collective experience of our four years; I was by not the sort of undergrad who participated in every major occasion, and lived off campus one year. The snippets that I focused on included:
The hardest part of the drawing? Definitely the grooves of the record album.
2016
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| for Q Syndicate, May 2016 |
Here's a cartoon that brings together local, national, and special interest topics.
My hometown congressional district was represented by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) ten years ago. In May of 2016, he employed the power of his gavel to prevent passage of a component of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed time and time again to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees.
In this case, it was an amendment by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) to a Defense Department bill; his amendment would have mandated that defense contractors not discriminate against LGBTQ+ employees and applicants. With time expired for House members to cast their votes, Maloney's amendment appeared to have passed by a vote of 219 to 206.
But Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) held the vote open so that Republican party whips could pressure enough of their members to switch their votes to defeat the amendment. As soon as seven Republicans had changed their votes from Aye to Nay, the gavel finally came down.
Maloney's amendment was thus defeated by a single vote, and the defense contracts of antigay wedding cake bakers and florists were saved.
Sort of. An Obama administration executive order was already in place protecting LGBTQ+ defense contractor employees.
Until, of course, the Electoral College awarded the presidency to one Donald Bifftannen Trump four years later.
ENDA is likely to come up presently in another Graphical History Tour, so please keep it in mind.
Congressional Republicans have proposed five anti-LGBTQ+ riders to the National Security and Department of State Appropriations Act, a must-pass funding bill for the State Department.
The riders range from restricting Pride flags in federal buildings to banning transgender healthcare; all attack the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans and have nothing whatsoever to do with funding the State Department or national security.
You might be thinking, wait, haven't Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ executive orders already accomplished all of the crap in those riders? Yes, exactly.
But the point of Congress passing these discriminatory and homophobic provisions into law would be to prevent some future, more enlightened administration from signing an executive order to return things to pre-Trump conditions. It would take another act of Congress to undo this act of Congress.
So I came up with this literal interpretation of the figurative term "riders." Since primatologists have recently discovered that homosexual behaviors are not exclusive to humans and bonobos, I might have tried to depict the Republican riders as some creature more associated with LGBTQ+ophobia instead.
But having the bicyclist carrying five GOP elephants would have been a difficult draw.
Besides, pachyderms aren't all that straight and narrow, either.
This week's Graphical History Tour celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first flights over the North Pole by people who weren't puffins.
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| "Over the Top" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, May 11, 1926 |
U.S. newspapers excitedly reported that Admiral Richard E. Byrd became the first explorer to fly over the North Pole on May 9, 1926. Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett announced that they had flown their tri-motor monoplane, the Josephine Ford (named after Edsel Ford's daughter) from Spitsbergen, Norway, circling the pole in a nearly 16-hour flight.
According to Byrd's account written for the New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"I took my calculations and found that we were at the Pole. We reached it at 9:04 Greenwich time, just about the hour we had hoped to get there. Bennett and I shook hands simply, and went back to the cabin, stood at attention and saluted for Admiral Peary. The Navy had reached the pole again, the blessed old Navy. I did not drop an American flag. Peary had done that.
"The ice and snow were similar to that which Peary had described, but the ice was not the same as in the polar sea. There it is in constant motion. It was slightly rougher here than it had been when I first described it, but criss crossed in the same way.
"We flew several miles further, circled and then took some still and motion pictures. As we flew there at the top of the world, circumnavigating it in a few minutes' of flight, I regretted that we had not found land, and that our leaky oil tank would prevent our returning by way of Cape Morris-Jessup."
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| "The Eagle Over the Pole" by Wm. A. Rogers in Washington Post, May 11, 1926 |
Byrd was an instant American Hero in the press, and editorial cartoonists rushed to crank out jingoistic cartoons, most of them very similar to each other.
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| "Our Private Flag Pole" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, May 11, 1926 |
Aside from the flags and eagles, a commonality that strikes me in these cartoons is that nearly all of them show North Pole as a huge inverted icicle, rather than the barber pole that I think of as cartoon cliché. This is only a guess, but the striped pole with the ball on top must have been popularized later.
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| "The First Over the Top" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1926 |
John McCutcheon celebrated the news of Byrd's flight as a relief from all the dismal news he was typically faced with — although by bringing up political scandals, wars in Morocco and Syria, labor strife in London, a riot in Paris, and a rum-running ring in New York, McCutcheon was being the wet blanket at the party himself.
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| "The Hurdle Race" by Dean O'Dell in Dayton Daily News, May 13, 1926 |
Meanwhile, Norwegian aviator Roald Amundsen was also heading for the North Pole in a semi-rigid airship christened the Norge. The Italian-made airship was delayed by weather on each leg of its journey from Rome, but eventually headed north from Vadsø, Norway on May 11 with a crew of 18 men and one dog.
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| "Fremdenverkehr" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, May 30, 1926 |
The Norge crossed the North Pole at 1:25 a.m. GMT on May 12, dropping U.S., Norwegian, and Italian flags onto the ice. In Amundsen's account published by the New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"[W]e went down to a low height, slowed the engines, and [engineer/financier Lincoln] Ellsworth, [pilot Umberto] Nobile and myself dipped our countries' flags. We mounted banners on steel-pointed rods. These rods we steered vertically into the ice as we dropped them, and they remained standing. The crew took their caps off during the ceremony, and it was a beautiful sight to see the flags standing against the glittering snow."
I have colorized the flags in Arthur Johnson's cover cartoon; the copy scanned by the University of Heidelberg appears to have faded considerably. His version of the Norwegian flag somewhat resembles the obsolete Norway-Sweden union flag, except that the faded blue broken bar that I have darkened ought to be yellow, and a black cross in that quadrant of the flag is missing altogether.
The airship, its propellers damaged by shards of ice during its flight, suffered further damage as it landed at Teller, Alaska. It was dismantled there, short of its announced goal of Nome, and shipped back to Italy; it was never repaired.
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| "Die 'Norge' Zurück" by Wilhelm Schulz in Simplicissimus, Munich, June 7, 1926 |
Wilhelm Schulz lampoons Italy's involvement in the flight of the Norge, and perhaps the fate of the airplane itself, depicting an expedition member presenting Benito Mussolini with a helmetful of melted ice.
Italian hubris over its part in the journey was a valid target for satire. Somewhat contrary to his newspaper account, Amundsen was peeved that the Italian flag dropped at the pole by Nobile was larger than the Norwegian and American flags, and that Nobile continued to drop so many other flags that Amundsen later complained of Nobile turning the Norge "a circus wagon of the skies." Mussolini sent Nobile on a speaking tour of the United States to tout the genius of Italian engineering, putting Amundsen's nose further out of joint.
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| "Amundsen am Nordpol" by Oskar Garvens in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, May 30, 1926 |
In German cartoons, at any rate, Amundsen was the star of the show. Berlin cartoonist Garvens gave us something other than an inverted icicle at the north pole: some sort of pepper-, nut-, or coffee-grinder.
As for the caption, it must be a play on the name of Admiral Byrd. My best, albeit wild guess is that un-byrdlich might be a pun on unberührt, untouched; while that might explain the open tin and the eaten sardines, that cactus remains a mystery.
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| "Another of the Great Silent Places Opens to the Tourist" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 11, 1926 |
"Ding" Darling's cartoon makes a similar point for us English-speaking readers. The aviators in the cartoon have left behind not just empty sardine tins, but also empty Uneeda Biscuit boxes, a spent campfire, and graffiti on the pole itself, while planning to "bring the folks up here some day for a picnic."
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| "Men Must Be Men to Wrestle with Me" by Ernest R. McTaggart in Vancouver Daily Province, British Columbia, May 15, 1926 |
I am duty-bound to point out that the general consensus since Admiral Byrd's death in 1957 is that he could not possibly have flown his trimotor monoplane, with its maximum speed of 85 mph, from Spitsbergen to the North Pole and back in sixteen hours.
There is evidence that his flight records were erased and modified. Yet even though doubts of Byrd's claims were raised not long after he landed, he was still awarded the National Medal of Honor and celebrated with a New York ticker tape parade.
This is on top of adding his scraggly signature to paper currency, minting gold coins bearing his likeness, tacking his name above John F. Kennedy's at the Kennedy Center, proposing a fleet of so-called Trump class battleships, and unfurling ginormous banners of his puss (when you're a star they let you do that) outside every government building in D.C.
Not to mention the Arc de Trump and that goddamn Gaudy Ballroom, intended as permanent monuments to the nation's shame for having elected such a preening peacock, not once, but twice.
Even Hitler, Mussolini, and Kim Jong Un never put their faces on German, Italian, or North Korean passports.
I'm so glad I renewed my passport last year.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was a guest on Stephen Colbert's show recently — it seems that there is a different Democratic politician on every night trying to get their fare-thee-wells in before CBS pulls Colbert's plug — and was asked about the possibility of his running for president in 2028.
It's too early for Democrats to declare candidacies for president, and Colbert acknowledged as much in his question, so Buttigieg naturally did not throw his metaphorical hat in the proverbial ring on late-night television. I nevertheless see a lot of his posts on my social media feed, even more than those of Gavin Newsom.
That's the fault of Al Gorithm, I suppose. Al and I have never met, but he seems to think he knows a lot about me.
Anyway, Mr. Buttigieg tells us that his main priority these days is getting Democrats elected to office around the country. That's the sort of thing a former Secretary of Transportation and small-city mayor has to do in order to have elected Democrats return one's calls after one launches a presidential campaign.
There isn’t much Buttigieg can do in the present Gerrymandering War, but he has been lending his star power to various congressional candidates. His strategy for helping get Democrats elected also appears to involve a good amount of showing up on TV.
He certainly has the skills to hold his own against the Republican mouthpieces on Fox Noise. Perhaps he should give Chuck Schumer some lessons.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this little respite from the constant Trump Trump Trump of Invasive, Pervasive, Inescapable, Omnitrumpified Trumpitude.
If not, please tune in again tomorrow.
The story does not have an expressly LGBTQ+ angle (well, at least I hope it doesn't), and the only way I could imagine coming up with an editorial cartoon tailored to the LGBTQ+ press about it would be to have a Max & Leo episode in which Leo falls for the notion that it was some sort of staged hoax. And I intend for Leo to be a liberal, but not a gullible one.
Oh, I suppose I could have come up with some brand new LGBTQ or + character watching Breaking News coverage on TV, but we're bound to learn something completely different about the gunman by Thursday rendering moot whatever bon mot I might have them say. We've already gone through the incident being used to promote Trump's Gaudy Ballroom, to Norah O'Donnell asking Trump about the gunmanifesto ranting about a pedophile rapist, to social media debating whether the guy is a registered Republican, Democrat, floor wax, or dessert topping.
Graphical History Tour Inc. couldn't let April get away without celebrating the centennial of J.N. "Ding" Darling's return to the drawing board after a year battling peritonitis.
Jay N. Darling, "Ding," returns to the Register's front page this morning with the first cartoon he has drawn after more than a year's absence. Mr. Darling has completely recovered his health, following the serious illness with peritonitis with which he was stricken March 19, 1925. Ed LeCocq, the young cartoonist who substituted for Mr. Darling, will draw cartoons for the Evening Tribune.
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| "If You Don't Think the World Moves..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, April 5, 1926 |
In Ding's first cartoon upon return, he appears undaunted by the challenge of catching up with the whirlwind of world events since his pen fell silent.
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| "Things Seem Just About Where We Left Them a Year Ago" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 6, 1926 |
But one day later, he realized that it was still the 1920's after all. Prohibition was still the law of the land, if not universally observed; the Democratic Party was still out of power and searching for some winning issue; Congress was still promising aid to farmers but not delivering; isolationists were still thwarting Uncle Sam trying to fetch peace off the shelf; and, apparently, President Coolidge was hard at work sawing logs.
Darling approved of Calvin Coolidge, which is why he is the only figure not beset by cobwebs in the cartoon.
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| "Looks As Though He'd Adopted Something" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 13, 1926 |
Darling returned to his drawing board just in time for the culmination of Iowa Democrat Daniel Steck's challenge to overturn Republican Senator Smith Brookhart's 1924 election victory.
Brookhart was elected to the Senate in 1922 to fill out the term of William S. Kenyon, and immediately challenged Senate norms, preferring cowhide shoes and overalls to suits and ties. A progressive "radical," he publicly backed Robert La Follette's 1924 presidential campaign over Coolidge's reelection while running for a full Senate term of his own. Republican party leaders withdrew their support over this unforgiveable defection from party loyalty.
Election night returns appeared to indicate that Steck would be the first Democrat elected to the Senate by Iowans since the Civil War; but late results from rural counties gave Brookhart a 754-vote margin of victory. Brookhart was sworn into office on March 4, 1925.
Steck, backed by the Iowa Republican Party, filed an official challenge with the Senate Committee on Elections and Privileges. On April 12, 1926, 16 Senate Republicans figured they would rather have another Democrat in the minority than Brookhart within their caucus, and joined their 29 Democratic colleagues voting to recognize Steck as the winner of the 1924 election.
Brookhart promptly announced that he would challenge Iowa's Senior Senator, Albert Cummins, in 1928. He did so, successfully.
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| "First Blood" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Evening Tribune, Apr. 13, 1926 |
Since "young cartoonist" Ed LeCocq has graced our pixels repeatedly over the past year, I thought it only fair to let him comment on Brookhart's ouster here. I wonder if he had been prepared to draw a glum Miss Democracy in case the Senate vote had gone the other way. His GOP Elephant could have remained disappointed in either event.
LeCocq's editors at the Evening Tribune seemed to view Steck's victory as a portent of Democratic victories yet to come. It wasn't; even the Great Depression couldn't get Steck reelected in 1930.
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| "To Retrieve the Family Fortunes" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 7, 1926 |
Getting back to those Things Where We Left Them a Year Ago, the Democratic Governor of New York, Al Smith, was a champion of the "Wets," pushing for loosening, if not repeal, of Prohibition. In the spring of 1926, the Wets proposed decriminalizing beer and "light wines" (5.5-10% Alcohol By Volume), while leaving hard liquor fully illegal.
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| "Important If True" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 20, 1926 |
One argument in favor of loosening Prohibition laws was that organized crime was trafficking profitably — and violently — in contraband hooch. It was well known that powerful crime bosses had help from corrupt elected officials, law enforcers, and judges, not to mention otherwise upstanding citizens.
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| "The Voice of Authority" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 25, 1926 |
This Darling cartoon points out a powerful force within the "Dry" constituency: the Women's Vote.
Prohibition became law because of a coalition of Progressive social reformers, religious conservatives, Southern Democrats, and wives tired of their husbands coming home drunk all the time.
Moving on to foreign affairs...
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| "The Audience Will Kindly Refrain from Applause Until the Act Is Over" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 9, 1926 |
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| "All There Was" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 10, 1926 |
The Coolidge administration reached agreements with World War I allies France and Italy for their repayment of war debts to the U.S. Both countries were left heavily damaged after the war, yet many editorial cartoonists and their publishers demanded prompt repayment in full and would settle for nothing less. Darling took a more nuanced view of things.
I really like how, in his cartoon about settling the debt from France, he draws your eye from the oversized trapeze artiste, to the gentleman reaching to catch her, to the Master of Ceremonies on the ground, and finally to the expectant crowd.
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| "No Wonder the Neighbors Are Beginning to Talk" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Apr. 23, 1926 |
By the way, it was another month before Darling resumed drawing cartoons for Collier's. He tweaked one of the above cartoons for this last one.
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| "Putting It Up to Papa" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Collier's, May 29, 1926 |
The Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ was dealt a setback in its persecution campaign against transgender Americans last week. A federal judge in Oregon rejected in no uncertain terms Health & Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s new policy threatening to block Medicare and Medicaid funding from any hospital that offers gender reassignment therapy to transgender youth who want it.
At least 40 hospital systems across the country had halted gender therapy services after the Department of Health and Human Services issued the "Kennedy Declaration" on December 18, 2025; as a result, even families who had left transgender-hostile red states for transgender-friendly blue ones found that their children were still denied proper care.
“Unserious leaders are unsafe. There is nothing more serious than our leaders’ dedication to the rule of law so that we might maintain the integrity of our constitutional democracy,” [U.S. District Judge Mustafa T.] Kasubhai wrote.
“This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”
Ruling in favor of the 21 states* and the District of Columbia who filed suit against the Kennedy Declaration, Judge Kasubhai found that it exceeded the administration’s authority, violated federal rulemaking requirements, and conflicted with existing law, "effectively banning by fiat an entire category of healthcare."
Judge Kasubhai's 49-page decision rejected as "absurd" the HHS contention that reversing the Kennedy Declaration would deny the Secretary his right to express his views on important public issues.
"Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy — the freedom of speech — when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated. Rather, Plaintiffs' claims challenge Kennedy's authority to unilaterally, categorically, and without any process, supersede professional standards of care regarding gender-affirming care that apply in the Plaintiff states."
A higher Court (ahem) might have five or six more charitable opinions of an unserious leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law. But for now, let's enjoy our successes and liberties while we still have them.
_____________
* The 21 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai'i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
It's time once again for the Graphical History Tour to venture down into the deep recesses of your friendly tour guide's basement to rummage through some April cartoons decades old.
Starting with—
1986
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| in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., April 28, 1986 |
Just five years after a mentally deranged person attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Congress, with the full support of that assassination target, decided it was time to relax gun controls.
The so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to redefine "gun dealer," excluding those making occasional sales or repairs, and legalized interstate sales of firearms provided that seller and buyer meet in person.
Another provision of the Act prohibited "the establishment of any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions."
On the other hand, it did add penalties for the use of armor-piercing bullets during the commission of a crime involving illegal drugs.
1996
Gun rights in this country depend to some extent on one's socio-economic status.
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| in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 18, 1996 |
Nowadays, the Citizen's Militia types even get presidential pardons and Justice Department pressure on judges to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions for trying to overthrow the U.S. government.
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| in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 22, 1996 |
Speaking of eternal constants, consider the plight of poor, cursed Lebanon. Once considered the Paris of the Middle East, capital Beirut was ripped apart by a sectarian religious war in the 1970's and pummeling by its neighbor to the south, Israel.
The main difference between then and now is that Shimon Peres appeared to have genuine regret at the death and destruction, whereas the Netanyahu government seems to revel in it. Targeting ambulances, schools, journalists, and hospitals all seems entirely intentional now.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where this cartoon was printed, has long had Islamic and Jewish student groups very vocal about matters involving Israel, Palestine, and their neighbors. I might have expected some blowback over this cartoon, but the next issue's letter to the editor from the Israel Activist Center defending Israel's actions made no mention of my cartoon.
Nor did the counter-response from the President of the Collective Union of Arab Students a week later. And with that, the school year ended, and any further salvos in the conversation went up on some long forgotten BBS.
2006
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| for Q Syndicate, April, 2006 |
Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, and Tony Gonzales most certainly did not invent sex scandals. One such scandal, quickly forgotten among the parade, involved sexting of underage girls by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle.
55-year-old Doyle, believing he was sexting with a girl of 14, was caught in an on-line sting by the Polk County, Florida, Sheriffs Department. Charged with sending the fictitious girl sexually explicit photos and movie clips, Doyle had even given her his name, that he worked for DHS, and his office and governmental cell phone numbers.
This embarrassment came on top of the department's woefully inadequate response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and the revelation that someone at DHS had disposed of an envelope of suspicious white powder out an office window. (There had been a few incidents of envelopes being mailed to news anchors and Democratic politicians made to appear as though they contained a toxic chemical.)
Going for a Three Stooges reference here was complicated by the fact that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff bore no resemblance to Larry, Moe, or Curly. I do think that I got his caricature down in this, the one and only time I ever put him (or Brian Doyle, for that matter) in a cartoon.
2016
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| for Q Syndicate, April, 2016 |
I haven't set a cartoon in a diner in a long time, which is too bad. I like the setting, with its possibilities for slightly altering the point of view.
In the years before I started colorizing my cartoons, the second or third panel would have probably shown this couple in silhouette. It keeps the cartoon from being too static, since the characters aren't actually moving around doing things.
The situation also allows for this sort of twist ending in a way that, say, talking heads on Fox Noise might not.
Legislation continuing Tennessee Republicans' persecution of their transgender minority is working its way through Nashville. Not satisfied with criminalizing transgender care for minors, legally requiring trans men to use women's rest rooms and trans women to shit beside men, forbidding state prisons from allowing gender care medication for trans inmates, et cetera ad nauseam, the state's Republicans now want to require extensive data collection on patients receiving gender-affirming care to the state.
The Tennessee House passed House Bill 754 in March; the Senate passed a version of its companion Bill 676 on Monday, amended to authorize the state Attorney General to investigate non-compliance with the law.
Supporters of the bill describe the measure as a tool for understanding medical outcomes. Opponents say it is something else entirely. They say it is a mechanism for tracking a vulnerable population. ...
The legislation would require clinics to report detailed information about gender-affirming care to the state, part of a broader effort, lawmakers say, to study treatment trends. But similar proposals in Tennessee have already raised alarms about what happens when “data collection” begins to resemble [patient] identification.
The legislation does not apply to cisgender patients getting estrogen or testosterone treatments, only to transgender patients, making any claims that its intent is to quantify patients who come to regret their transition — a tiny minority within a tiny minority — and to guarantee their right to de-transition —highly suspect. The absolute number of cisgender patients who later regret estrogen or testosterone treatment is probably very similar.
This legislation is not health care. It's intimidation. It’s big government. It’s Big Brother Watching You.
The measure now returns to the Tennessee House for reconciliation with the Senate's amended version. Given the overwhelming Republican majority in both statehouses, passage is all but absolutely certain.
Well, this isn't a clipping from this week's cartoon as much as it's an update of Saturday's Graphical History Tour.
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| from Miami Daily News editorial page, April 1, 1926 |
Searching for the number 764268, friend of the blog D.D. Degg hunted up the probable Rollin Kirby cartoon in Saturday's posting of cartoons in the Daily Worker. Newspapers.com yielded only one other appearance of that cartoon in any available newspaper, the Miami Daily News and Metropolis edition of April 1, 1926.
I had not tried using the number hanging around the neck of the man in the cartoon as a search term, but now I have, coming up with the same result. (New York Evening World archives after 1923 are not currently available on line anywhere I have been able to find, unfortunately.)
The Miami Daily News printed the cartoon with the same curious headline as did the Daily Worker, and, like the Daily Worker, also without the cartoonist's signature. So I'm still left with the question of who was boycotting what over the congressional bill to require foreign-born workers to register with the government every year.
The boycott in the mainstream news at the time was a Chinese boycott of English goods over Great Britain's possession of Hong Kong, which was serious enough that the British government wanted the U.S. and Japan to intervene. This cartoon clearly has nothing to do with that.
Anyway, thank you to D.D. for digging up this cartoon, and for filling me in on the given name of Daily Worker cartoonist Marvin Pierce "Hay" Bales. Much appreciated!
Today's Graphical History Tours journeys 100 Aprils into the past, with an eye to some of the leftmost cartoonists in print in the U.S.
Daily Worker was published in Chicago from 1924 to 1958, giving voice to the communists and leftist socialists of the American labor movement. Editorial cartoons and illustrations appeared throughout the newspaper, particularly in the Saturday feature section edited in 1926 by Robert Minor.
Xenophobia is nothing new in U.S. history. Congress was considering a series of bills requiring that all foreign-born workers annually register their fingerprints with the government, report to authorities any time they moved or traveled from one locality to another, and carry a certificate of identification to be shown on demand.
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| "Thumbs Down" by Maurice Becker in Daily Worker, Apr. 10, 1926 |
Looking down from the sidelines in Maurice Becker's cartoon are: Fake Labor Leader, Militarist, the Courts, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Mellon, the KKK, Election Crook, Kept Press, and Rotarian. "Fake Labor Leader" may have been a Daily Worker reference to the American Federation of Labor, which it frequently criticized for not being radical enough; but the AFL was publicly opposed to the alien registry legislation.
Labor unions such as the Machinist Locals 84 and 337 protested that "the majority of workers in the basic industries of this country are of foreign birth, and the proposed bills are clearly aimed at the working class as a whole. ... The intent of the proposed bills is clearly to intimidate the foreign-born workers; to prevent them from joining unions; to prevent them from participating in strikes, and to compel them to accept a status of subjection, forced to do scab labor during times of conflict with employers."
Unions for the Pullmans, painters, decorators, seamstresses, steamfitters, and more from Boston to San Francisco organized "Councils for Protection of the Foreign-Born" to advocate against the proposed legislation.
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| "The Boycott" by Rollin Kirby (?) in New York Evening World, ca. Apr. 14, 1926 |
The Daily Worker didn't credit the cartoonist, whom I presume was Rollin Kirby. It also seems to me that the caption doesn't fit the cartoon. I couldn't find anything in the Daily Worker reporting boycotts related to the alien registry bills; I also haven't found this cartoon printed elsewhere. [Update: see D.D. Degg's comment below.]
I did find that the U.S. had deported 55,110 resident aliens between September, 1925 and April, 1926.
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| "Reviving a Dead One" by William Gropper in Daily World, Apr. 9, 1926 |
The Democrat-sponsored alien registry bills did not make it to President Coolidge's desk, or to the drawing boards of certain mainstream cartoonists I expected would have opinions about them. Many mainstream cartoonists were more interested in proposals to create exceptions to Prohibition — one of many distractions, according to the communist press, "to get the workers' mind off the real issues."
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| "So That's What's in the Prohibition Barrel" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, April 25, 1926 |
Would you have preferred your distraction from the real issues neat or on the rocks?
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| "Sidetracked" by Fred B. Watson in Baltimore Afro-American, Mar. 20, 1926 |
The Daily Worker included this Fred Watson cartoon in its April 22 edition with an unnecessarily longer title. The cartoon answers my question of two months ago whether Watson opposed U.S. participation in the World Court, and the Worker's cut line explains that the communist leadership at the newspaper viewed the World Court as a tool of J.P. Morgan and Wall Street bankers.
The Black vote, where it could make its way into the polling place, had been reliably Republican since the end of the Civil War. Although the Anti-Lynching Bill was authored and promoted by a Republican, the repeated inaction on the bill when Republicans held all the reins of power was a sign that the party took Black loyalty for granted.
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| "America Protects Germany from Sin" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, Apr. 28, 1926 |
I had serious qualms about including this cartoon because of objections to the Daily Worker editor's decision to mess with it. For some reason, the editor saw fit to remove whatever dialogue Gropper had President Coolidge saying (and possibly also text or symbolism that might have been on the paper in Mr. Businessman's hand), substituting instead the editor's own text as a cut line.
Unless an editor is providing translation of a foreign-language cartoon, that's simply not cool.
But I did want to include a caricature of Calvin Coolidge besides that barely recognizable one by Maurice Becker above.
And speaking of Gropper caricatures:
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| "Mussolini Thumbs the Stub of His Nose" by William Gropper in Daily World, Apr. 24, 1926 |
On April 7, Violet Gibson, the 50-year-old daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini. Her bullet nicked il Duce's nose; her gun jammed as she tried a second shot.
Police stopped the crowd from killing her then and there. She probably would have been executed like Mussolini's other three failed assassins but for the British government interceding on her behalf. Gibson was allegedly mentally unstable (she had attempted suicide in Rome the previous year), so Italy deported her to England, where she spent the rest of her days in a mental asylum.
But speaking of womenfolk and guns...
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| "The Lady Might Get Hurt" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, April 1, 1926 |
The Daily Worker was highly skeptical of international agreements, such as the Locarno Pact, that did not originate in Moscow.
Have we another example of the Daily Worker editor editing a cartoon? Why would Gropper attach a label to the gun if not to identify what it is supposed to represent? Could this cartoon have been drawn about a completely different topic?
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| "No Team Work" by Maurice Becker in Daily Worker, Apr. 3, 1926 |
No such question about Maurice Becker's cartoon here. It does reminds me a lot of the Arthur Racey cartoon that led last week's Graphical History Tour. It is possible, I suppose, that Becker could have seen the March issue of Macleans; I think, however, that this was simply a case of two cartoonists reaching for a common image to illustrate a similar situation.
What does puzzle me is why Becker thought it necessary to label which country in the rowboat was which. I mean, shouldn't a reader just assume that the characters are a bunch of different national leaders? How does knowing who's who matter?
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| "The Spirit of Locarno" by Viktor "Deni" Denisov in Pravda, ca. Apr. 13, 1926 |
Soviet cartoonist Deni uses caricature to indicate the nationality of some of the League members in this cartoon: the gentleman sprawled on the floor at left resembles Germany's Hans Luther, and the mustachioed fellow at top right looks like French Prime Minister Aristide Briand. Below Briand are a probable Briton and a likely Japanese, but it hardly matters to whom each butt belongs.
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| "Glorious Garbage" by Marvin P. "Hay" Bales in Daily World, Apr. 24, 1926 |
I explain these cartoons because they're 100 years old and make references that have grown obscure over time. The editors of Daily Worker explained this cartoon because they didn't trust readers to catch the subtle clues left by the cartoonist that the skull labeled "The League" is dead and that "Geneva Garbage Co." is a trash can.
At least they left the rather clever "Loco Peace Pact" nickname to stand on its own.
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| "With Rubber a Dollar a Pound" by Maurice Becker in Daily Worker, Apr. 17, 1926 |
Every once in a while, U.S. presidents would look into the possibility of granting demands for independence by the Philippines, a U.S. possession taken as spoils of the Spanish-American War at the close of the 19th Century. The Coolidge administration had recently appointed Col. Carmi A. Thompson, commander in chief of the United Spanish War Veterans, to conduct just such an investigation.
Members of Congress raised their objection to Philippine independence on a number of grounds, one being the high price of rubber from the British East India Company. U.S. firms were working to establish rubber plantations in the Philippines to rival the British monopoly.
Philippine independence would come only after World War II.
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| "The Imperialist Policy in China," uncredited, in Daily Worker, Apr. 17, 1926 |
China's future was up in the air after the death of Premier Sun Yat Sen in March, 1925. Various warlords sought to establish their own local fiefdoms. Against the warlords, the Chinese Communist Party and Nationalist government cooperated in the First United Front, with Soviet backing, until the Canton Coup on March 20, 1926.
The communist captain of the S.S. Zhongshan, with a Soviet naval adviser on board, moved to support a leftist uprising in Guangzhou. Chiang Kai-Shek, then the commander of the National Revolutionary Army, declared martial law in Guangzhou and arrested communists in China's armed services and their Soviet advisers.
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| "The Helper of Imperialist Thieves" by O.R. "Zim" Zimmerman in Daily Worker, Apr. 10, 1926 |
The Daily Worker promoted a rather different narrative to the purge of communists from China's National Revolutionary Army; Christian missionaries were hardly a factor in the Canton Coup.
Only from an atheist communist would you expect a Jesus Christ drawn as a Jewish stereotype 100 years ago. (Robert Minor drew the Christ with an even longer hooked nose than in this Zimmerman toon — see page 48 here.) It would be a welcome departure from the auburn-haired northern European Jesus found elsewhere but for the undercurrent of antisemitism tapped into by these cartoons.
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| "My Gawd, How the Money Rolls In" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, Apr. 5, 1926 |
And thus with yet one more William Gropper cartoon, we must leave 1926 behind for another week or two, returning to the present day secure in the knowledge that we have come so far since those bad old days.
