Día de los Sneak Peeks

It looks like we've finally fixed the WiFi network at Chez Bergetoons.

It took almost a whole week of being able to connect only the desktop computer to either the internet or the printer, but never both at the same time, and none of our other household devices being able to connect to either one. My better half spent hours on the phone or texting our internet service provider and the company we bought our router from; it was the Filipino technician from the latter who was finally able to get our system up and working.

My iPod, the one device that hadn't been able to find our WiFi network since we had installed the present router last year, may even have located it now. While colorizing this week's cartoon this morning, I was listening to a playlist that is supposed to include "Conquistador" by Procol Harum, one of several tracks that are listed in gray and always skipped. 

This morning, "Conquistador" played.

I'll know for sure when the playlist gets to the third movement of Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto Andaluz, another track that the iPod always skips.

Well anyway, here's a sneak peek at this week's Can't Be About The Election editorial cartoon:

Just in time for the annual stewardship drive!

Campaigns Drawn to a Close

Graphical History Tour checks in one last time on the campaigning ahead of the 1926 midterms:

"Why Change" by Charles Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Nov. 1, 1926

The GOP went into the election in full control of Congress and the White House. Indianapolis News front page editorial cartoonist Charles Kuhn spent the final week of the campaign drawing variations on one theme: Republicans brought the nation six years of unprecedented prosperity, so why change?

"Anxious Days for Mothers" by James "Hal" Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 29, 1926

All politics being local, Hal Donahey highlighted the diverse issues bedeviling individual Republican Senate candidates around the country with President Coolidge looking on. Today’s tour explores some of these races.

"Nothing to Hide Behind" by James "Hal" Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 19, 1926

Since Donahey brought it up, we'll get Ohio out of the way first. In "Anxious Days for Mothers," Donahey showed Senator Frank Willis beset by "Newberryism," named for Michigan Senator Truman Newberry, notorious for the huge amount of money he spent to get elected in 1918 only to be pressured into resigning in 1921. 

Donahey tended to support Democrats (his brother "Honest Vic" Donahey happened to be the Democratic Governor of Ohio), so it's hardly surprising that he didn't see Republicans' record in quite the enthusiastic way Charles Kuhn did.

Detail from "Halloween Time" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1926

We were just discussing Klan involvement in Indiana's Republican Party (an issue Kuhn was more than happy to ignore), an unwelcome stumbling block in Senator James Watson’s race for reelection. Both of Indiana's senators had testified to an investigation led by Senator James Reed (D-MO) to deny being beholden to the KKK. 

Running for reelection, Senator James Watson played down his contacts with Klan representatives, saying that their people met with many other senators, and merely shared his views on the League of Nations and World Court. As for his meetings with former Grand Wizard D.C. Stephenson, by this time serving time for rape and murder, and threatening to tell all about Indiana Republican deals with the Klan, Watson testified,

"I know Stephenson. All Indiana politicians know Stephenson. He was an active fellow and went about at gatherings and conventions. ... Stephenson was never in my room privately but once, and then nothing was said about politics or anything else. He said, 'I came to pay you a visit.' After talking a while, he left.

"I didn't know why he came, and I don't know now. I had gone to bed when I heard a knock at the door. I got up and let him in and we sat and talked for a while. Then he left."

"Admirers of Coolidge Who Had Intended to Vote for Smith" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30, 1926

Moving along to the Senate race in Illinois: the Republican establishment was embarrassed by its standard bearer, Senator Frank L. Smith (whom Donahey drew tackled by anti-Prohibition “Wets”). It was revealed that while he was Chair of the state's Commerce Commission, Smith had accepted over $200,000 from railroad magnate Samuel Insull and other public utility officials. The steadfastly Republican Chicago Tribune reported:

The President has not lifted a finger to help Smith, presumably because the President could not stomach the scandal attaching to the candidacy of the Republican nominee as a result of the conduct of Smith in taking money from the great public utility corporations subject to his regulation as chairman of the Illinois commerce commission.

It has been known for several months that Coolidge was greatly shocked at the conduct of Smith and had hoped at one time that Smith would have the decency to withdraw after the exposure of the scandal and would relieve the party of the embarrassment of his candidacy. The President was disappointed when Smith refused to budge.

Coolidge responded to a protest by a Smith defender that the Democratic candidate, George E. Brennan, had accepted a $15,000 donation from Insull by snapping, "But Brennan wasn't regulating Insull's properties, was he?"

"To the Rescue" by Fred O. Seibel in Richmond Times-Dispatch, Oct. 28, 1926

The one candidate for whom Coolidge actively campaigned was his home state Senator William Butler (the guy getting stomped by his support of tariffs in Donahey’s "Anxious Days for Mother" cartoon), who had been appointed in 1924 to finish the term of the late Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. 

Butler campaigned as "a candidate for office on a platform that pledges a continuance of the American policy of adequate tariff protection for our industries. My opponent [former Senator David Walsh] has received a Democratic nomination, and he is running on a platform that tries to fool the voters by making one gesture toward protection and another toward free trade."

"Nothing Doing" by Wm. Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 29, 1926

William Scott Vare had won Pennsylvania Republicans' senatorial primary on an anti-Prohibition platform (see here). Nebraska's Senator George Norris, praised Prohibition of alcohol because "this greatest evil of all mankind is driven from the homes of the American people," and urged Pennsylvania to elect the Democrat, William Wilson. Norris, a Progressive Republican, often voted against establishment Republican legislation, earning the epithet "One of the Sons of the Wild Jackass."

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer and its editorial page cartoonist, William Hanny, were in the awkward position of having strongly opposed Vare in the primary as a corrupt machine boss with ties to organized crime, but now urging voters to elect him anyway.

"Wasting Their Time and Bait" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Oct. 27, 1926

If criticizing a GOP candidate was uncomfortable for Bill Hanny, fellow Republican "Ding" Darling lit into Vare and Smith without hesitation. The two were the poster boys for campaign funding excess (Donahey's Senator Willis notwithstanding, it seems). Vare and gubernatorial candidate Edward Beidleman jointly spent over $788,000 on their campaign; Smith's campaign chest was about $400,000. Adusted for inflation, those amounts would be around $15 million and $7.6 million today, respectively — chicken feed by today's standards.

($15 million is slightly less than the sum nazi oligarch Elon Musk alone has spent to boost corrupt sleazebag Ken Paxton alone.)

Getting back to our History Tour, James K Pollock, Jr., described the state of campaign finance laws in his 1926 book, Party Campaign Funds (Alfred A. Knopf):

"Despite the fact that the federal laws regulating campaign funds are often referred to as corrupt practices acts, it is erroneous to believe that these laws are of the class mentioned. There is only a federal publicity law with a few subsidiary requirements, one preventing the receipt of contributions from corporations, another prohibiting bribery, and another preventing the solicitation of gifts from civil service appointees. The last laws which could properly be described as corrupt practices acts were repealed in 1894 and nothing of a comprehensive nature has since been substituted in their place." (page 227)

"Leaving It At the Wrong Door" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 27, 1926

In the New York governor's race, Republican Ogden Mills accused incumbent Democrat Alfred Smith (no relation to the Illinois Senator) of responsibility for adulterated milk sold in New York City. Touting analysis by Pease Laboratories that found no such adulteration in their test samples, Smith proclaimed his vindication of the charges.

Opposition to Prohibition was a huge issue in New York City, championed by both Al Smith and incumbent GOP Senator James Wadsworth, Jr. Upstate, both politicians' positions were a harder sell. 

"Do I Look Enough Like a Camel" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 10, 1926

Q Toon: The Bottom Line

Heading into the final stretch, the midterm election elections keep getting steered into silliness by our Codger In Chief.

Donald T. Rump campaigned in Texas for Almost As Corrupt Ken Paxton by telling voters what an homely slob the guy is. Then he went to Georgia and waxed rhapsodic about how gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson is such a hunky slab of chiseled beefcake.

In Ohio, T-Rump got even more creepy, praising Senator Jon Husted’s firm, shapely buttocks. Later, just in case he was coming across as a wee bit too gay, Trump shared how much he enjoyed gazing at Nicki Minaj’s caboose, too.

Is making callipygiosity into a campaign issue just Trump’s way of distracting everybody from Vivek Ramaswami’s totally cringe endorsement by the kitten-killer widow of Amy Acton’s child molester step-father? Maybe not; but on the other hand, he’s kept his yap shut about any of their derrières.

✍

P.S.: I had wanted to draw at least one cartoon during this campaign about Michigan’s Senate race between Mike Rogers and Abdul el-Sayed as a nod to my Between the Lines readers, but, since T-rump apparently has no opinions regarding Rogers’s posterior, I could never come up with an original LGBTQ+ angle. 

Now I’ve just read that el-Sayed has got an ad up on Grindr, which certainly would have been worth a cartoon. (The ad was actually produced and paid for by the Christopher Street Project, an organization solely dedicated to electing champions for the transgender community.)

Sadly, my next cartoon for Q Syndicate — based in Ann Arbor, by the way — will only come out after the polls have closed.

So Ohio will have to do.

Eking Out a Sneak Peek

What a nightmare getting this week's cartoon from paper to the internet has been!

Our cable-phone-internet provider was in the neighborhood performing a supposed upgrade last Thursday night, leaving us with no service at all for most of Friday. After the cable and phone were restored, we discovered that we still had no internet.

My better half was unable to fix it himself, so he called the service provider. They sent a guy out here Saturday evening; he spent a couple hours on the computer, in the yard, on the television cable boxes, and ultimately determined that he couldn't do anything with our router because it isn't the provider's. He left us with only the desk computer connected to the internet — no WiFi for the rest of the house.

This morning, I found that the computer and my printer-scanner had no connection. I had the scanner scan my cartoon to USB, then swapped the USB to the computer; but my god, what a horrible scan! Not having been able to adjust the threshold level of the scan, every bit of erased pencil showed up. Worse, all of the lettering (with the inexplicable exception of that on the jersey of the guy on the right) looked as if I had smeared every letter while the ink was still tacky.

I spent a full hour making the text legible again. I should have just cut it out and typed in the dialogue.

Everything about this computer, moreover, seems to struggle much, much, slower than ever before. 

Our provider suggests renting one of their routers in place of the one we bought only a year or two ago. Their router will end up costing more than ours in a matter of months.

I may be cutting back on this blog until we can get somebody to repair the mess wrought by this goddamned Spectrum upgrade. 

October and Ober Again

In lieu of enjoying fresh autumn air and colorful fall foliage, this week's Graphical History Tour rummages through the dank and dusty vaults of Bergetoon Cellars in search of a half century of October scribblings. 

1976

in Park Beacon, Racine WI, Oct. 1, 1976

This week's tour starts off with a bit of genuine juvenilia. (Is there a singular form of that word?) I drew this cartoon for my high school paper to accompany a brief column by another student about her time as a Navy brat in the Philippines four years earlier.

It sounds absolutely dreadful. After a 25-hour flight with stops in Alaska and Japan, she, her mother, and her siblings arrived in the height of monsoon season. Visibility was nil due to rain and fog, her sister was running a fever, and her step-father wasn't there to take them to Sulric (sic) Naval Base. They eventually got onto a bus for a five-hour ride on roads that were all but impassible.

Something might be missing from Brenda's story after the harrowing account of her family's arrival. They finally made it to Sulric (Subic?); her mother phoned the step-father; he arrived and asked if they were ready to go; and all plane reservations were cancelled for another week. The End.

I checked: Brenda had no Part II in the next issue.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette WI, October, 1986

I think I may have already posted in this blog every cartoon I ever drew in October of 1986, including this one.

My cartoons for the NorthCountry Journal were meant to complement each month's editorial. This one had to do with erosion control efforts for Wisconsin farmland, most of which is in the Mississippi River watershed.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Oct. 3, 1996

People (usually Republicans) used to talk about needing to run government like a business. Well, before Trump started running it like one of his businesses, anyway.

Pabst Brewery was once a premier powerhouse in the Milwaukee beer industry, but was falling on hard times by the late 1990's. The corporate solution was to renege on their commitments to retirees who had devoted a lifetime to the firm.

It took another generation before Pabst became, if not popular, trendy again in Wisconsin, and it didn't last long.

The lesson to be learned is: the folks who have done the actual work are expendable. That is how business is run nowadays, and how Republicans who want government run like a business run government.

2006

Q Syndicate, October, 2006

With yet another school shooting in the news this week, and Republicans campaigning against the LGBTQ community for lack of anything positive to say about their own record, I think it's worth bringing this cartoon back today.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it has proven nearly impossible to get through to those devotees of the second half of the Second Amendment. I thought this was worth a try.

Now, for you ammosexuals out there, I will readily admit that the latest slaughter at Bend, Oregon, was stopped by one of those fabled, if ever-elusive, Good Guys With a Gun. But only if you will also admit that a sixteen-year-old who is too young to drink alcohol responsibly is also too young to have a high-powered rifle of his very own.

2016

for Q Syndicate, October, 2016

Finally, we are just about up to the moment of Donald Berzilius Trump's first election, thanks to the Electoral College, of the presidency of the United States.

His most fervent supporters, then as now, were the religious right, neoconservatives, urban-hating rednecks, alt-right neo-Nazis, and Russia Russia Russia. There were also Log Cabin Republicans and the even more right-wing GOProud gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and Caitlyn Jenner, enthusiastically shilling for Trump in spite of the palpable contempt for them from all the folks in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Conventional wisdom even in the final weeks of the campaign was that Hillary Clinton was going to trounce Trump handily. There was even talk of her winning in perennially Republican Utah and Arizona.

Which I bring up a propos of, oh, nothing ... just the excited talk of flipping House and Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and my own back yard in a couple of weeks from now.

Q Toon: J.D.'s Stand-up Act

Before coming to the defense of Vivek Ramaswami’s despicable attack ad last night, J.D. Vance was campaigning with Texas's eminently corrupt Republican senatorial candidate, Ken Paxton, last week. Some fellow in the crowd there called out "I love you" at the Vice President.

In the interest of leaving some room for drawing, I left out a little of  Vance's reply. Perhaps I should have left in the line, "I'm the Vice President," in case my caricature of him in his skivvies might not be readily identifiable. I hope readers could tell that this wasn't Volodymyr Zelinskyy, Ted Cruz, Zohran Mamdani, or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

So anyway, Republicans have determined that if they can't say anything nice about their own candidate, just make shit up about the Democrat. James Talarico isn't a gay vegan transgender commie Buddhist French dauphin, but that hasn't stopped Republicans from joking-no-joke that he is. 

All kidding aside. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

P.S.: Being a seminarian, Talarico would perhaps love that guy from the Paxton rally in an agape way.

Toon: He Calls It As He Seized It

I was considering drawing a cartoon naming Donald Joffrey Trump as Vladimir Putin's "Apprentice" (get it? get it?). Then I decided I'd rather go with a more up-to-date reference.

Brevity being the soul of wit, I'm sure that if this conversation between Trump and Putin ever occurred, Trump would go on and on about how nobody knew that dumb has a "B" in it and he's so surprised that he hadn't thought of this clever wordplay before now; and then he'd repeat the joke and congratulate himself for being such a stable genius, much better than that Jimmy Kimmel fellow who gets such lousy ratings and ABC ought to lose its broadcast license, just like CNN and the failed New York Times because everybody says Trump should have gotten the Nobel Prize for bringing peace to the Gulf of America but they refuse to report it—

All the while, Putin would have shut off the portion of his brain that translates English to Russian much earlier.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I have an update for my recent caricature of local congressional candidate Mitchell Berman.

Contribution reports for the third quarter have Berman outraising Incumbent Congressman Bryan Steil; Berman's principal donors include labor unions and the Democratic Party, but the majority of contributions have been smaller donations from individuals.

The punditocracy is chattering about Democrats having a chance here this year, and Steil has taken notice. He has a new ad on TV in which a woman, who appears to be in her bathrobe in her kitchen, says she has hear that "radical activist Mitchell Berman went to a local school and confronted school officials. With children inside, he was escorted out. His actions put the school in lockdown."

She doesn't want Berman's antics at her children's school, or in Congress. A black-and-white photo of Berman takes over the screen, and a narrator pronounces him "too radical, too crazy."

Racine County Eye fills in the missing details of this story.

Long story short: Berman lives in Raymond, a rural township in Racine County. Moms for Liberty candidates won a majority on the Raymond School Board in 2021; the next year, they decided to fire Raymond School Principal Jeff Peterson for being gay.

That's not the official reason, of course. They just wanted to replace him with a principal who wasn't gay.

Peterson had grown up in Raymond; his mother had been in the Raymond Parent-Teacher Organization, his father had served on the school board, and his sister taught at the school. He had supporters in the community, and Berman was one of them.

In December of 2022, the Raymond School Board met at the home of one of its Moms for Liberty members, in violation of the state's open meetings law; they later claimed that it wasn't a "meeting" but a "retreat." On September 27, 2023, Berman went to the Raymond School to ask for the minutes of that meeting. He was eventually told that they couldn't find the minutes, and he was escorted out of the building.

Berman's behavior during his wait depends on which side of the Peterson business you're on. For some reason, someone decided to put the school on "soft lock-down," while Berman reportedly sat quietly scrolling through his phone. 

Superintendent Michael Garvey did not respond to direct questions from the Racine County Eye. Instead, he sent the statement the school issued reiterating there was no threat to students, just a fear of disruptions.

There were panicked parents who came to take their children home due to the soft lockdown, so that "fear of disruptions" was a self-fulling prophecy.

And a conveniently scary campaign ad.

WisToon: He's Not For You

Tom Tiffany, 68, is the Republican candidate to succeed Democrat Tony Evers as Governor of Wisconsin, Since 2021, Tiffany has been the congressional representative for the Badger State's 7th CD, covering the northwest quarter of the state. Before that, he rode the 2010 Red Wave into the State Assembly, upgrading to the State Senate two years later.

He had only token opposition in the GOP primary, enabling him to blanket the airwaves with a lot of folksy, feel-good advertising while some half dozen Democrats were struggling to distinguish themselves from each other. The eventual winner was Milwaukee Chief Executive David Crowley.

Attack ads from Tiffany and various Trump, Musk, anti-abortion and Chamber of Commerce outside groups were all set to portray whomever emerged as the Democratic nominee as a radical outside the mainstream woke antifa tax-and-spend liberal giving free gender reassignment surgery to illegal alien kindergartners without anyone's permission. In Crowley, they had the added benefit of his having had to raise Milwaukee County's sales taxes to make up for the drastic cuts in state revenue sharing made by Madison Republicans.

Crowley's campaign has, in turn, pointed out that Tiffany has voted consistently to further the Trump agenda, including voting against certifying the 2020 election results from Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as proposing overturning the will of Wisconsin voters, too. 

It came out earlier this month that 90% of the money donated to his campaign came from just three individuals — and that doesn't even count the ostensibly independent aid from outside groups.

All told, campaign finance reports filed this week with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission show Tiffany raising more than $26.3 million from July 1 through Sept. 23, compared with more than $10.2 million raised by Crowley.

Tiffany’s haul includes just over $2 million in individual donations, but the vast majority of funds raised, or more than $24 million, came from the Republican Party of Wisconsin. The state GOP reported raising more than $29.5 million over the roughly three-month span, with $27.6 million, or more than 93%, of that coming from just three individuals — billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who live in Illinois and own Uline Corp., and Diane Hendricks, co-founder of ABC Supply. ...

 Crowley raised more than $6 million from individual donors. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin contributed an additional $2.5 million to his campaign. The state Democratic Party’s top donors during the latest cycle were Milwaukee philanthropist Lynde Uihlein and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who each donated $1 million. Departing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ campaign donated $565,000 to the state party.

Oligarchs the Uileins and Ms. Hendricks have been the major funders of Wisconsin Republicans for decades, so there is nothing particularly surprising about this news, aside from the percentage of total donations.

Their percentage might appear more within reason once Elon Musk throws his 2% in.

Hoosier Who in the KKK

Today's Graphical History Tour takes us back to Indiana in 1926, when a Senate investigation exposed the extensive influence of the Ku Klux Klan — the MAGA movement of its day — in that state's Republican Party.

“These were the people who held their communities together. They were not the criminal element, they were not the psychopaths, sickos and all that. These were average white people that took an oath to forever support white supremacy.” — Timothy Egan:  A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

"Knosternation in Indiana" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 7, 1926

In the fall of 1926, Senator James Reed (D-MO) was in Chicago conducting hearings into the exorbitant sums of money that had poured into Senate campaigns in Pennsylvania and Illinois, and Indiana politics got tangled up in the allegations made in those hearings. Klan influence in the state's GOP was already well known; it was the influence of Klan money that made it an issue for Reed's investigation.

"Feet of Clay" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Oct. 9, 1926

Thomas Adams, editor and publisher of the Vincennes Commercial, printed allegations by former Grand Dragon of the KKK David Curtis Stephenson, who was serving time for rape and murder, of political graft and intrigue. Just two years earlier, Stephenson had bragged that his Klan controlled 85% of the delegates at the Indiana Republican convention (we mentioned that here). Now, Stephenson was upset at not having received a pardon or commutation of his prison sentence from Republican Governor Ed Jackson.

In a letter Adams smuggled out of the Indiana state penitentiary in Michigan City, Stephenson claimed that "a prominent Indiana politician" owed him $825,000 as part of a deal for a campaign contribution. He also named 40 other Indiana politicians, including three mayors, as owing him favors.

"Editors Keep Out" by Bob White in Indianapolis Times, Oct. 6, 1926

Governor Jackson refused demands from Adams, the Indianapolis Times, other members of the Indiana Republican Editorial Association, as well as from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago American, to interview D.C. Stephenson in prison. Instead of quashing the story, however, it was spread across the top of several Indiana newspapers' front pages (yet subordinate to the World Series in others). 

The Times did not have a regular editorial cartoonist on staff in those days, and ran only light humor cartoons on its editorial page; but it found room on its front page for Bob White's cartoon of Stephenson above.

"Dirty Linen" by Grover Page in Courier Journal, Louisville KY, Oct. 18, 1926

By the way, there was nothing unusual about an openly partisan media organization like the Indiana Republican Editorial Association. Many cities had a Republican newspaper and a Democratic newspaper, and everyone knew which was which.

The Republican Party Central Committee of Knox County, Indiana, responded to Mr. Adams's role in this scandal to drum the publisher out of their membership:

"Thomas H. Adams is not a Republican; that his newspaper, the Vincennes Commercial, is not the Republican Party organ for Knox County; and when he speaks, whether personally or through his newspaper, he is not speaking for the Republicans of Knox County. ... It is apparent that the actions and conduct of Mr. Adams for the last six months is a deliberate attempt to defeat the Republican state ticket and the local ticket in this county. His pretended cleanup is not in good faith."

"Indiana's White Elephant" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, Oct. 12, 1926

Tom Foley's cartoon calls out specific Indiana Republicans by name: Gov. Jackson, Indianapolis Mayor Duvall, Senators James Eli Watson & Arthur R. Robinson.

Allegations against Senator Watson included that there had been a deal between him and national Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans for Watson, a member of a panel questioning the election of Senator-elect Earl Mayfield (D-TX), to vote in Mayfield's favor in return for Klan support of Watson's 1926 reelection campaign and a possible presidential bid in 1928.

When the Graphical History Tour checked into Indiana's Republican Klansmen during the 1924 elections, here, your Humble Scribbler noted that I could not find any editorial cartoons by Indiana's own Chas Kuhn on the subject. Here again, in spite of the national attention drawn by Senator Reed's hearings (and the banner headlines above Kuhn's cartoons gracing the Indianapolis News's front page), Kuhn appears to have been more interested in Reed's other hearing into mob activity in Chicago.

"Spiked" by Chas Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Oct. 23, 1926

The only cartoon Kuhn drew for the Indianapolis News in October about Senator Reed's investigation into the Indianapolis GOP was this one regarding the state's senior Senator.

Senator Jim Watson was recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident on his reelection campaign trail, so Senator Reed and a stenographer came from Chicago to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis to hear Watson's statement. Watson and Robinson (the latter at an Indianapolis courtroom) categorically denied any connection to Evans; Watson admitted only to receiving two visits from Klan lawyer William Zumbrunn during the Mayfield hearings conveying the Klan's objection to some of the witnesses before Watson's committee. 

Otherwise, Watson testified, "I met with Dr. Evans several times, and I assume all senators, or practically all, met him at various times, because he was about and was talking to many of them." 

"The Situation at Present" by Karl Kae Knecht in Evansville Courier, Oct. 14, 1926

Elsewhere in Indiana, the Evansville Courier's long-time cartoonist Karl Kae Knecht was less convinced that the scandal had been put to rest. One of the figures holding up the poster blaming the "League o' Nations an' foreign debt thing" is Clyde Walb, Chairman of the Indiana Republican Party. The other might be U.S. Secretary of Labor James Davis, a native Hoosier who came home to campaign for the GOP ticket in October; but I can't completely rule out Oren Davis, the Republican candidate for Marion County Sheriff.

"Where Knighthood Was in Klover" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 22, 1926

In time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series by the Indianapolis Times would bring down Governor Jackson — but not the state Republican party — while internal feuding would tear the Indiana Klan down as well.

Q Toon: Chaos at Kennedy Center

I introduced Max's mother into the Leo and Max series last winter as working in some undefined capacity at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Leo and Max are avatars for the divisions in the Ostensibly United States of America in general; Karen is just my opening for addressing a specific topic.

Open homocon Ric Grenell could have served as my excuse to draw cartoons about the JFK Center; I had drawn a few cartoons about him before Trump named him as his Trump’s chief lieutenant there. But he didn't last very long in that position; his career is in foreign policy after all, not performing arts.

So it turns out that having a recurring character remaining behind among Trump’s lickspittle Board of Misdirectors comes in handy. Leo, the liberal, seems to enjoy needling Karen about Donald Diva Trump’s mission of recreating it as a memorial to himself or razing it to the ground.

I took a risk in drawing this cartoon that the JFK Center would still be standing by the time my cartoon saw print. Trump's modus operandi has been to tear things down before anyone has a chance to stop him (e.g, the East Wing, trees of the East Potomac Golf Links, ethical standards, constitutional norms, and he's still just getting started).

Is it telling that the JFK Center board named a new Artistic Director, but as a contractor, not a hire? No, it's not Kimberly Guilfoyle; it's Rick Canny, who, I hear, has worked with ZZ Top and Tommy Lee, so at least he's not some random Trumpster. Since performers have cancelled in droves, and Executive Director Matthew Floca closed the Center's main building months ago on account of supposed life-safety concerns, however, I'm not clear on what art Mr. Canny has to direct.

The Center's current regime put an end to those rainbow ribbons that came with JFK Center awards, so perhaps Mr. Canny can work on a more Trumpy design for when Trump celebrates giving all the awards to himself. A Confederate flag motif, perhaps.

You can guess whose scowling face will be on the gold-plated marble award medal.

Well, if I keep this up, I'm gonna spoil any possibility of bringing Karen back in a future cartoon, so enough is enough. 

Unless she ends up working along with everybody else from the JFK Center at the Donald Commodius Trump Presidential White House Memorial Ballroom and Bunker for the Performing Arts.

Toon: Meet Mitchell Berman

I thought I'd try caricaturing the Democrat running for Congress in my home district this year, and here's what I came up with. 

Mitchell Berman is an emergency room nurse who won a three-way race for the Democratic nomination in August. The national Democratic Party sees potential for him to oust four-term Republican incumbent Bryan Steil, so Berman has gotten the benefit of some television advertising, unlike most Democratic candidates for Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District in this century.

If Berman were to win election this November, he would be the first Democrat to represent this district since Rep. Peter Barca was defeated in the Red Wave of 1994. (Barca ran again and lost thirty years later.)

Berman's first TV ad showed him fishing from the banks of a small river somewhere with his dog, offering his bone fides as a regular guy. He wasn't wearing his nurse uniform in that ad; he was, however, wearing a holstered gun on his side — a quiet nod to the sportsmen hereabouts. In a subsequent social media video, he explained that he sometimes goes fishing in areas where one might encounter a bear or wolf. Hence the side arm.

In a preliminary sketch for this caricature, I had a holstered gun at Berman's side. I had to scratch that idea when I switched which hand his fishing rod was held in. 

Most of the mail pieces from Berman's campaign show him in his nurse's scrubs and flag-themed do-rag. His latest TV ad depicts him on the job, talking about health care reform.

Steil, and outside organizations supporting him, are attacking Berman with the same charges of being a radical activist that Republicans are flinging willy-nilly at every Democrat. Steil's ads tout his "Stop Insider Trading Act," prohibiting members of Congress (but not Supreme Court justices, Presidents, or their families) from trading stocks while in office. The bill passed the House with a rider requiring voters to show photo identification before voting, but has not passed the Senate.

Steil's bill has "more holes in it than Swiss cheese," according to Berman, because congressional representatives are not required to divest stocks they already own.

Steil is way ahead of Berman in campaign fund raising: the incumbent's war chest is over $5 million, while Berman's was only $713,000 as of mid-September. Outside interest group advertising is similarly lop-sided in Steil's favor.

This Week's Retro Peek

I'm reposting this panel from a Leo & Max cartoon back in January just as a reminder of Max's mother, Karen, and where she works. 

Leo's family background may get treatment someday. Somehow, they never showed up while Leo was abducted by ICE agents and flown to some s-hole country's civil war, so perhaps they're just not very close. 

Or maybe we just haven't seen them because they're terribly shy.

Dispatches from the Workers Paradise

Today's Graphical History Tour brings us to October of 1926.

Detail from "A Week in Cartoons" by Marvin P. "Hay" Bales in Daily World, Chicago, Oct. 9, 1926

We have a couple stops in this week's Tour, starting back in the U.S.S.R. 

Last week's post closed with an overly optimistic cartoon by A.G. Racey on the promise of lasting peace (a view shared, to be fair, with several other cartoonists). Marvin Bales's cartoon reminds us that there was no cessation of international rivalries in Europe, nor any shortage of bilateral pacts in defense against them. 

"The Cause of the Pause in Disarmament" by James North in Washington (DC) Post, Oct. 3, 1926

Fears of Russian expansionism, however, united governments in Europe and the United States. James North depicted the League of Nations' Disarmament Conference interrupted by the Russian bear reaching to grab Poland, the Baltic states, and China.

It's interesting that North included Turkey as also threatened by Russian domination. The countries actively discussing taking over and dismembering Kemal Attaturk's Turkey at the time were Italy and Greece.

"These Must Be Heard" by A. Jerger in Daily Worker, Chicago, Oct. 2, 1926

Meanwhile, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) held its annual convention in Detroit, in an atmosphere of  alarm over Soviet influence in the worldwide labor movement. Anti-communist prosecution had largely hobbled the "Wobblies" of the International Workers of the World union; the AFL, on the other hand, shunned communist involvement.

"Not the Sort of Recognition I'm After" by Clifford Berryman in Evening Star, Washington DC, Oct. 14, 1926

The 1926 convention unanimously passed a resolution denouncing "the Soviet regime of Russia as the most unscrupulous, most anti-social, most menacing institution in the world today. Between it and our form of political and social organization there can be no compromise of any kind." 

"Through the Red Internationale, which is controlled by the Communist Party of Russia, the Soviet regime has continued its efforts to undermine and destroy the Democratic-Labor movement of the United States. Its lack of any progress in that direction is due, not to any lack of determination on its part, but to the strength and deep determination of the membership of the American trade union movement." 

A competing resolution urging U.S. recognition of the Russian government was not brought to a vote.

"Putting on the Lid" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times-Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1926

A similar resolution against the fascist regime in Italy received less attention from American editorial cartoonists. It read in part, "In fascism we find only another form of dictatorship and autocracy, a principle of government that can never find anything but opposition in the minds of free people."

"The Big Parade" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn. ca. Oct. 11, 1926

A more controversial stand taken at the AFL convention was advocating for a five-day work week. At the time, most workers were expected to be on the job six, even seven days a week, for ten or more hours each day. Workers rights organizations had been calling for shorter hours for years; AFL President William Green noted that the five-day work week had already been adopted in some branches of the printing and building trades, and during the summer in some department stores.

The most prominent convert to the five-day work week in 1926 was a big name in the automotive industry.

"Can He Make the Grade" by Dean O'Dell in Dayton Daily News, Oct. 9, 1925

Henry Ford instituted the five-day, 40-hour work week at his automobile plant on May 1, 1926, believing that it would benefit both the company and its workforce — and not incidentally, dampen any enthusiasm among employees for joining a union. His public explanation was that “Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation.”

"The New Commandment" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Oct. 6, 1926

"Ding" Darling cited the biblical command to labor six days out of every seven. I would note that by phrasing its caption as a question and drawing a car in danger of overheating, Dean O'Dell's cartoon casts a shade of doubt upon the success of Ford's five-day work week.

"Out of Order" by Jesse Cargill for Central Press Assn., ca. Oct. 13, 1926

A feature story by L.L. Stevenson for Detroit News marking the 80th birthday of Elbert "Judge" Gary, Chairman of United States Steel, summed up his opinion on the five-day workweek and other labor issues:

For the steel industry, he holds that such a week would be utterly impractical since so many of the operations are continuous. He does not think much of the proposal to unionize the automotive industry. Labor unions when they attempt to dictate when and where a man shall work are in the wrong. English labor unions have become too radical.  Prohibition has increased the efficiency of the American workingman.

"I don't absolve the bad features," he continued. "You must average up things. On the whole, the workingman is better off. If I had been writing the law, I would have excluded beer and light wines, though in my opinion, neither benefits the workingman in any way."

And yet, the five-day work week soon became the norm in much of the industrialized world. For younger generations, it was all they knew since childhood.

"A Popular Movement" by Harold Talburt for United Feature Syndicate, ca. Oct. 9, 1926