The Whole World Was Watching

Last week, Selective Serviceback Saturday shared cartoons from 150 years ago about the first presidential election held after the 15th Amendment extended the right to vote to African-American citizens of the U.S. Today, against my better judgment, we step ahead 100 years from 1868 to the last presidential election held before the 26th Amendment extended the right to vote to 18- to 20-year-old citizens of the U.S.

Others in the cartoon-rehashing game have a much better recollection of the 1968 presidential election than I, so this won't be a comprehensive retrospective by any means. So much of what I do remember is actually Frank Gorshin's and David Frye's impressions of the candidates. Here goes anyway.

"I Think We Can Start Bringing Them Home Soon" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September, 1968

The #1 issue of interest to those 18- to 20-year-olds had to be the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. They couldn't vote for president, but they did have to answer to their draft board.

President Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had won his party's presidential nomination. His long liberal record, at the 1948 Democratic Convention and as lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was overshadowed by his association with Johnson and the war. He tried to promise to bring an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, only to be publicly contradicted by Johnson and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. (Laird in Oliphant's cartoon is Wisconsin Congressman Melvin Laird, who would become Richard Nixon's first Secretary of Defense.)

"Anchored" by Tom "Obadiah" Curtis in National Review, October 22, 1968

An eleventh-hour announcement that the Johnson was halting bombing raids over North Vietnam would fail to give enough lift to the Humphrey campaign. Perhaps today we'd call it Johnson Fatigue; liberals who ought to have agreed with Humphrey on civil rights and other issues remained disenchanted; Michigan's New Democratic Coalition and the California Young Democrats withheld their endorsements, and even Norman Mailer mused that Nixon wouldn't be all that bad.

"Making Like a Dove" by Roy Justus in Minneapolis Star, August, 1968

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon's anti-communist record should have indicated that he would continue the war in Vietnam, but he claimed to have a secret plan to end the war within 90 days. What he didn't tell America was that he meant within 90 days of his re-election to a second term, and that the plan involved spreading the war to Laos, Cambodia, and Kent State.

"The Newer Than New Nixon" by Robert Zschiesche in Greensboro Daily News, October, 1968

On domestic issues, Nixon's promises to bring Law and Order appealed to what he called the "Silent Majority" horrified by political assassinations and by riots in America's inner cities, universities, and at the Democratic National Convention. (Not to mention promiscuous sex and drug use. But there, I mentioned them anyway.) Consistently leading in the polls, Nixon offered mostly pablum, and — still smarting from his experience in 1960 — refused to meet Humphrey in any debates.

"The Fraidycat" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 24, 1968

Nixon's campaign themes included promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse the decisions of the Earl Warren court (Johnson would withdraw his filibustered nominations of Abe Fortas and Homer Thornberry in October), to fight inflation, and to replace the draft with an all-volunteer military. Behind the scenes, he urged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to refuse peace talks until Nixon could take office.

"Measuring Up" by Ranan Lurie in Life, October, 1968

Henry Luce's Life magazine endorsed Nixon in the election, but its cartoonist Ranan Lurie clearly was more ambivalent about the voters' choices. So were a number of others who put themselves forward as third party candidates. Most notably, Alabama Governor George Wallace ran at the head of the American Independent Party on a segregationist platform, declaring that "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats."

"Foreign and Domestic" by Herblock in Washington Post, October, 1968

He chose as his running mate retired Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had advocated bombing North Vietnam "back to the stone age," using "anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons." Yet while LeMay was more hawkish on the war than Wallace, the general stood to the left of him on Wallace's signature issue.

"There Seems to Be More Than a Dime's Worth of Difference..." by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 25, 1968

On the left, the most notable third-party candidates were comedian Dick Gregory and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver heading rival wings of the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Communist Party USA's Charlene Mitchell. Gregory made a tour of college campuses, where he promised to paint the White House black, then bring the troops home from Vietnam and "send LBJ with nothing but a barbecue gun." His counterfeit dollar bills won him considerable attention, not least from the Secret Service.

Mitchell's running mate wouldn't be old enough to serve as Vice President until 1980, and Cleaver (also not yet 35 years old) fled the country after a shoot-out between police and Black Panthers in Oakland, California. But then, getting elected was never really the point of their candidacies.

"Out of the Running," unsigned (perhaps Ted Shearer), in The Afro American, Baltimore MD, October 19, 1968

The Afro American, in an editorial accompanied by the above cartoon, counseled its readers against casting their vote for any of the three African-American candidates:

"Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver and Mrs. Charlene Mitchell are all doomed to defeat this year, and all of them know it. Their exercises in futility would be more tolerable as means of protests against ills in the society in some other election year. ...
"The danger is that some voters, frustrated with conditions as they are or wishing to make an individual protest also, may throw away valuable votes."

As it was, their campaigns, even lumped in with votes for comedian Pat Paulsen and comic strip characters Pogo and Snoopy, were not enough to throw any state from one of the front runners to another.

"Remind Me to Get That Fixed" by Dan Dowling, Kansas City Star,

Wallace, on the other hand, carried Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, the last third-party candidate to win electoral votes by getting a plurality of any state's votes. But it was not enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives; even in the unlikely event that Humphrey had won Wallace's five states in a two-candidate race, he would still have fallen well short of a majority in the electoral college.

But since fewer than 500,000 votes separated Humphrey and Nixon, who can say how Wallace's 9.9 million would have divided up without him?

And yet, 50 years later, with one election decided by the Supreme Court, and two awarded to the second-place candidate, we still haven't fixed our cuckoo electoral vote system.

One More RFK Cartoon

Maybe this belongs in the "Editors Who Don't 'Get' Editorial Cartoons" file.

On June 6, 1968, the same day that the Cuero Record of Cuero, Texas, ran this front page:

...a full day after running this front page:

...the editorial page editor, copy editor, editor-in-chief, and all the guys down in the composition room somehow let this syndicated cartoon by Alfred Buescher run on the editorial page:

RFK, 50 Years On

This Tuesday will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Somberback Saturday brings you a round-up from the pens of cartoonists from half a century ago.

"New Kid in the Neighborhood" by Alfred Buescher for King Features, May, 1968

Just to put things in context: Kennedy and Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy had entered the 1968 presidential race as the more liberal alternatives to incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. When LBJ withdrew from the race at the end of March, his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey (who should have had plenty of liberal cred of his own, but was tainted by association with Johnson's war in Vietnam) stepped in as the favored candidate of the Democratic establishment.

The Democratic nomination was still up for grabs when Kennedy won the California primary on June 5. After giving a victory speech to his supporters in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he started through the kitchen toward the press room but was shot three times by Sirhan Bishir Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian. (Yes, I know that RFK Jr. thinks that Sirhan was innocent. George Plympton is no longer with us, but someone can ask Rosey Grier or Rafer Johnson who it was that they wrestled the gun away from.)

Kennedy died of his injuries some 25 hours later at the age of 42.

"The Brothers' Tragic Reunion" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 7, 1968

America and the world were in shock. Robert's brother, President John Kennedy, had been assassinated only five years earlier; and this was the second major assassination in the U.S. in only two months — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's killer had not even been caught yet. (James Earl Ray would be apprehended in London a few days after Bobby Kennedy's death.)

"Bookmarks" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun Times, June 6, 1968

I'm sure that Cy Hungerford was not the only cartoonist to draw the "Tragic Reunion" of two of Joe Kennedy Sr.'s sons, but Bill Mauldin's cartoon is more representative of the craft. What I'm finding is that by and large, cartoonists and editorial writers went to their drawing boards and typewriters to argue that RFK's assassination, as horrible as it was, bespoke a larger problem in the United States.

"He Must Be Stopped," possibly by Ted Shearer in Baltimore Afro-American, June 8, 1968

In the above cartoon, Ted Shearer (I'm confident that he was an editorial cartoonist for the Afro-American chain of newspapers, although I can only speculate whether he drew any particular cartoon) listed seven leaders murdered in just over five years. His scorecard leaves room for more, but there isn't enough space in the entire cartoon to list all the other victims of gun violence in the 50 years since.

"Tell Me Again about Keeping the World Safe for Democracy" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, June, 1968

Pat Oliphant mused mordantly on what American soldiers fighting in the jungles of Vietnam must have thought of the violence back home.

Our soldiers were not the only ones overseas taking notice.

"American Folklore: Choose Your Candidate" by Rob "Opland" Wout in De Vollskrant, Amsterdam, June, 1968

Time magazine described the rest of the world's perception of the U.S. as "a blood-drenched, continent-wide shooting range where toddlers blast off with real rifles, housewives pack pearl-handled revolvers, and political assassins stalk their victims at will." "America dreamed of a government of judges, but it suffers the law of violent people," declared Le Monde of Paris, where violent protests mere days before had nearly brought down the DeGaulle government.

"Violence" by John Yardley-Jones in Toronto Telegram, June, 1968

As it turned out, the assassin was an immigrant born in Jordan acting on behalf of a conflict halfway around the world from the U.S. According to Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, Sirhan Sirhan's diary revealed that he was determined to kill Kennedy by June 5, the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in which Israel had occupied the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai peninsula.

"Always There Is a Black Spot in Our Sunshine..." by Stanley Franklin in Daily Mirror, London, June, 1968

Yet I came across no editorial cartoons illustrating the Mideast connection to the assassination; granted, I didn't check Ha'aretz, Ad-Dustour, or any other journal directly concerned. The Montreal Star glossed over the Palestinian connection and faulted U.S. racial injustices instead:

"It did not matter if Senator Kennedy's assailant was first believed to be a Mexican, and then a Cuban and then an Arab. The fact remains that in Harlem and Watts and every other Negro community... [assassins] exist as perpetual enemies, while the one figure who might have provided hope was removed forcibly from the arena."

Untitled, by Andy Donato in Toronto Telegram, June, 1968

Overwhelmingly, the Mideast Conflict and U.S. racial injustice took a back seat to The Gun as the root cause of America's tragedy. From within and without our borders came the demand for the U.S. to control its mass of weapons of destruction. And as has become depressingly predictable, the National Rifle Association, the 100,000-member strong enablers of our national nightmare, leapt into the fray to prevent any meaningful action from being taken.

"The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed" by Frank Benier in The Sun, London, June, 1968 

Guns don't kill people, only outlaws will have guns, registration leads to confiscation — any argument against gun control you have ever heard was already cliché in 1968. Supreme Court precedent still held that the first half of the Second Amendment established that it was about a collective right rather than an individual privilege, so the N.R.A. concentrated on the amendment's second half. (Republican majorities on the Court have since erased that "well-regulated militia" silliness.)

"How's Business?" by John Pierotti in New York Post, June, 1968

Time estimated the American arsenal to include anywhere from 50 million to 200 million handguns, shotguns, rifles, plus "uncounted machine guns, hand grenades, bazookas, mortars, even antitank guns." 3 million more were sold every year, 2 million of them by mail order sales. Some of those sales were driven by white fear of the urban riots breaking out in the 1960's, to say nothing of the lucrative market selling directly to the gangs and criminals White America was afraid of.

"In Cold Blood" by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, June, 1968

The National Rifle Association had successfully quashed every attempt to regulate America's unregulated militia even after President Kennedy's assassination. Congress did manage to pass a ban on mail-order handguns, but President Johnson scoffed that the bill was a "watered-down" half-way measure.

"I Just Don't Know What This Country Is Coming To" by Herb Block in Washington Post, June, 1968

A number of Senators who had bent to the N.R.A.'s will in the wake of Rev. King's assassination, such as Hugh Scott (R-PA), Warren Magnuson (D-WA), Bill Proxmire and Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), Ed Muskie (D-ME), Mike Monroney (D-OK), and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT), indicated support of a measure by Joseph Tydings (D-MD) to require licensing and registration for the purchase of a gun.

"So You Heard Another Shot..." by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, June 6, 1968

The Senate failed to pass the Firearms Registration and Licensing Act, and the N.R.A. successfully drove Tydings out of office in 1970.

Even among liberals, however, there was a recognition that America had a problem not just with guns, but with a culture that glorified violence.

"Make Your Move, Ringo..." by Jules Feiffer for Publishers-Hall Syndicate, June, 1968

As case in point — and because it's the only way to end this blog post on a somewhat lighter note — I have to bring you the climax of a story in "Dick Tracy" on the comics page that very same week. Sharing the page with Charlie Brown and Miss Peach, Chester Gould's police detective literally vaporized a criminal mastermind and a yacht full of henchmen and bathing beauties who had schemed to steal a shipment of gold bars from Diet Smith's mines on the moon. (You read that right.) Gould's moral in Friday's episode struck many readers, and not a few editors, as being the credo of assassins and terrorists:

"Dick Tracy" by Chester Gould in Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1968

Several papers, such as the Seattle Times and Greensboro News, deleted the strip that day or dropped the feature entirely.

Any counter-protests from the National Laser Association fell on deaf ears.

 ✍

On second thought, there is a better way to end this post, and that is with a few words from Robert Kennedy's final speech to the crowd at the Ambassador Hotel:

"What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis, and that what has been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years — the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society — the divisions, whether it's between Blacks and Whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or on the war in Vietnam — that we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country."

50 Years After MLK

When I found out that in his blog on Wednesday, Mike Peterson was going to display editorial cartoons drawn upon the assassination 50 years ago this week of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I seriously considered shelving my plans to do the same today.

But I had already begun the project; and really, what topic more deserves a trip in the wayback machine this week?

"The Nation Is Shamed — Again" by "T.S." in Washington Afro-American, Washington, D.C., April 9, 1968

I'll start with two examples I found in the African-American press. Many of the editorial cartoons in the Afro-American were left unsigned, but this one (and eventually several more in the 1970s and 80s) is signed with the initials "T.S." I believe "T.S" is Ted Shearer, most famous for creating the comic strip Quincy in 1970; Tim Jackson's Pioneering Cartoonists of Color is the only reference I have found to mention specifically his having drawn editorial cartoons. Shearer did draw for the Afro-American before launching Quincy, so until someone tells me otherwise, I'll credit this one to him.

Surely Dr. King's legacy influenced King Features' decision to syndicate Shearer's comic strip centered on Black American children in an un-whitewashed urban setting.

"Leadership..." by Robert S. Pious for Continental Features, April, 1968

Robert Savon Pious, in addition to drawing for pulp magazines, posters and WPA murals, had an established a career drawing editorial cartoons for the African-American press since the 1930s. His memorial cartoon here attempts to sum up Dr. King's life in images and brief quotations, and one can only imagine how difficult emotionally it must have been for Pious to draw it. (Regrettably, The Indianapolis Recorder cropped this cartoon rather poorly, and there is an unfortunate typo in the cut line.)

"Civil Rights Report" by Herblock in Washington Post, April, 1968

So, on to the white guys.

In those first days of April, 1968, editorial cartoonists must have felt inundated by the monumentally important news events cascading one after another. You may have become numb to the barrage of earthshaking news we feel on a minute-by-minute basis every day of the Corrupt Trump Administration in which this morning's lead story is this afternoon's sidebar; but 1968 was before the age of Twitter, or 24-hour news channels propelling the national conversation.

"Below Olympus" by Frank Interlandi in Los Angeles Times, April, 1968

President Johnson had gone on TV on March 31 to announce a halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and also that he would not run for reelection. The first was to bolster peace talks, still foundering on the shape of the negotiating table at that point; the second threw the presidential race wide open. Students across the nation were protesting against racial discrimination and the war; an occupation of  college officials' offices at Bowie State College in Baltimore had just ended. A group of white students at the University of St. Thomas in Houston had organized themselves as a barrier to protect black protesters on college campuses from hostile police. In Congress, Conservative Southern Democrats, Goldwater Republicans, and real estate lobbyists were trying to block the Fair Housing Act.

And Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King announced that he would return to Memphis meet with strategists of the Garbage Collectors' strike and business boycott, in spite of violence having broken out while he was there to march in support of the sanitation workers on March 28. People started breaking windows, and in the police response, a 16-year-old was fatally shot and 62 were injured. From the April 2 edition (above) of The Washington Afro-American:

Dr. King, admitting a mistake had been made when he joined the march without having done some intelligence work or brought in staffers to control the violent element declared:
"Riots are here. Riots are part of the ugly atmosphere of our society now."

"What So Proudly We Hailed—" by Reginald Manning in Arizona Republic, April, 1968

After King's assassination, riots and looting broke out in several cities across the nation at once, including Washington D.C; Columbia, South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; Macon, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chicago, Illinois. That Sunday, a white gunman named Norris Edwards burst into a black church in Indianapolis and began firing at parishioners, killing three. Many cities imposed curfews on their citizens, including my hometown. (I was 8 years old at the time, old enough to imagine from media coverage that marauding hordes might come charging over the hill and down my dead end suburban street any minute.)

"Note to Congress" by Jack Knox in Nashville Banner, April 6, 1968

While some cartoonists' first response after King's assassination was to decry the riots, a more hopeful theme was repeated among others wishing to focus more on Dr. King's legacy.

"His Truth Goes Marching On—" by Lou Grant in Los Angeles Times, April, 1968

"...But His Truth Is Marching On..." by Hugh Haynie in Louisville Courier-Journal, April, 1968

Since my source for Hugh Haynie's cartoon is a little out of focus, I'll note that the printing on the man's sleeve identifies him as "Dr. King."

"His Spirit Marches On" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 6, 1968

From the vantage point of 50 years later, it seems curious that these three white cartoonists would all reference the same poem written by a white woman, yet I could find only two cartoons which quoted Dr. King himself. (Mike Peterson's post includes two others that refer to the "I Have a Dream" speech; but although we have posted a few cartoons in common, I am not copying cartoons from his post.)

"NOW!" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, April, 1968

As tragic as Dr. King's assassination and the ensuing urban violence were, they succeeded in bringing a sense of urgency to the need for progress in racial justice in the United States that some had refused to acknowledge.

"The Time Has Come to Face the Challenge" by Dan Dowling in Kansas City Star, April, 1968

On April 5, President Johnson sent Congress a strongly worded letter (cited in the Jack Knox cartoon above) demanding passage of the Fair Housing Act. Also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1968, it passed on April 10 with provisions making it a federal crime to interfere with anyone's civil rights. Its main aim was to add federal enforcement provisions to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and to explicitly prohibit discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, national origin, or religion.

"More Lasting than Flowers" by Bill Crawford in Newark News, April, 1968