Strand Magazine: The American Cartoonist

Gus Frederick, whose blog is the [Homer] Davenport Project , discovered my site while researching turn-of-the-century editorial cartoonist Rowland Claude Bowman because of a write-up in the October, 1902 edition of Strand Magazine: "The American Cartoonist and His Work" by Arthur Lord. The article profiles the New York Journal's Homer Davenport, Harpers Weekly's W. A. Rogers, and the Chicago Tribune's John T. McCutcheon, in addition to R. C. Bowman of the Minneapolis Tribune.

"Where Davenport, in short, would make an enemy, Bowman would make a friend, so great is the difference in the styles of the two men. Bowman is a careful student of politics, and his picture editorials always present a strong argument. He possesses a rare originality and spontaneous humour, and that his drawings are well thought out is proved by their simplicity in detail. ... Bowman is a humorist and not a satirist, and has attained his success through close adherence to well-defined principles of directness, simplicity, and gentleness. The Tribune reader opens his paper with the knowledge that he is going to get a laugh, and the man made fun of may open his copy with the knowledge that he is not going to squirm."

The Strand article includes three more samples of Bowman's cartoons (I suspect they are details of portions of cartoons, however). The article appears to be one of a series, insofar as it promises more about Bart Bartholomew of the Minneapolis Journal in the next issue.

And, as long as I'm on the topic of R.C. Bowman again, here's another cartoon, from page 14 of the 1900 edition of his cartoons, in which the Populist Party is depicted as a bunch of frogs pestering Vice Presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson Sr.

Stevenson hollers for help.

I wonder if the Illinois Senator laughed at the gentle treatment of consistently being drawn wearing a little girl's dress.

Two More McGovern Cartoons

I finally located the folders with my cartoons from 1983 and before, and found George McGovern in two more cartoons about the early race for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.

Fair warning: both cartoons reference death, so I hope people don't find them in bad taste today. The first cartoon is from September, 1983, imagining Democrats' response to the announcement of McGovern's third try for the presidency:

The state of the race at the time was that former Vice President Walter Mondale was the front runner with the support of organized labor and a number of other interest groups. Ohio Senator John Glenn was a more centrist alternative, while California Senator Alan Cranston and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson were competing for the party's far left. Some of the party faithful held out hope that Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy would change his mind and run a second time, and there were Senators from Colorado, and South Carolina and a former Governor of Florida (Gary Hart, Fritz Hollings, and Reuben Askew) who were trying to get some attention.

McGovern's bid for the 1984 nomination was doomed from the start. In recent history, Democrats have shunned any of their candidates for president who had previously run and lost (although Teddy Kennedy could have easily been an exception had he tried in '84).

It hasn't always been this way: Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland for a third time in 1892 after he had been thrown out of office in 1888; and Williams Jennings Bryan won three out of the next four Democratic nominations. Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson for a rematch against Eisenhower in 1956; and if it weren't for the McGovern rule changes of 1968, Hubert Humphrey might have been a shoo-in for the nomination in 1972 or 1976.

As the nominating process stands since -- and even including -- 1968, the only way for a failed Democratic candidate to win the Democratic nomination is to have served as Vice President in the meantime. The examples of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore do not bode well for Joe Biden.

Back to George McGovern. He is only an extra in the cartoon below, but it might have some resonance for Republicans today. Democrats felt they had an opening to unseat President Ronald Reagan because the economy had been in recession since 1981. By December of 1983, however, all reports indicated that the recession was over.

If you missed the cartoon from December, 1983 (published in January), my earlier blog post is here.

More 1900 Cartoons of R.C. Bowman

This is part 2 of my series retrieving the editorial cartoons drawn by R.C. Bowman for the Minneapolis Tribune in 1900.
(They get real mad at Teddy for getting "solid" with the Dakota girls.)

There are no cartoons of the incumbent President, William McKinley, in the Meanderings of Willie and Little Steve series of cartoons. McKinley considered it unseemly for a president to campaign for his own reelection, so that put the campaign in the hands of surrogates such as Vice Presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt.

(That nasty Croker boy teaches Willie how to smoke.)

An issue included in each of these cartoons is the Ice Trust scandal which sunk New York Mayor Robert Van Wyck that year. It was revealed that the American Ice Company, having secured a monopoly over the supply of ice to New York City, planned to double the price, and that the mayor owned $680,000 in American Ice stock which he had not paid for. Teddy Roosevelt, as Governor of the state of New York, launched the investigation of the scandal. It didn't really have much to do with Bryan or Stevenson, save that NYC's Tammany Hall was a major force in Democratic Party politics. The tiger was the conventional cartoon representation of Tammany Hall.

(It looks like they are going to get caught in an awful storm.)

By now, it should be pretty obvious that Bowman's and the Tribune's sympathies lay with the Republicans. That said, the Bryan campaign was pretty hopeless from the start. McKinley had been elected in 1896 during a severe recession and presided over a robust recovery; the U.S. won a relatively easy victory in the Spanish-American war; and the discovery of gold in Alaska, the Yukon, and South Africa greatly expanded the world's supply of the precious metal (rendering moot Bryan's signature issue from 1896 of getting the U.S. off the gold standard.)

(The storm has passed, and thus endeth the second battle.)

Coming soon: Big Trouble in Big China.