An Oliphant Gallery

If you happen to be in Washington D.C. looking for something worthwhile to do, "A Savage Art" The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant" premieres today at the DC/DOX'25 film festival. Bill Banowsky's documentary examines Oliphant's career through interviews with the cartoonist himself, his family, and colleagues. We are told that the documentary also features several of his cartoons.

Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, ca., Feb. 12, 1966

I can't be there (and if the AAEC convention organizers get permission to screen it at our convention in Baltimore in September, I'm afraid it appears unlikely that I'll be able to be there, either), so instead, today's Graphical History Tour highlights some of Oliphant's amazing work. 

A collection of my favorite Oliphant cartoons would require a sequel post or seven, so I have limited my choices to cartoons that do not include caricatures of actual persons. I would like to focus on the artistry that inspired so many cartoonists of my generation to mimic his style.

by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, March 3, 1970

Compare his 1966 depiction of Vietnam, atop this post, with this one four years later. The sarcasm is the same, but the tone is entirely different.

Not only is the setting much darker, the clean-shaven kids in the first cartoon have been replaced by grizzled, war-weary adults, even though the soldiers would be about the same age in either cartoon. (The best and brightest guys in the white shirts and skinny ties are gone entirely in the 1970 cartoon.)

by Pat Oliphant  in Denver Post, April 18, 1972

Here Oliphant demonstrates an adeptness in portraying the ravages of age on his cartoon character as a parallel with the ravages of war on her country. The forty years between France reclaiming Indochina from its (brief) Japanese occupation after World War II to North Vietnam's conquest of the South three years after Oliphant drew this cartoon wear heavily on her, successive liberators notwithstanding.

By Pat Oliphant in Washington Star, Nov. 6, 1980

Here’s a theme Oliphant revisited more than once, but this is his most impressive depiction of the American Electoral Machine as something massive, complex, and somewhat antiquated. Its engines, gears, fly wheels, pistons, and furnace occupy almost every square millimeter of the frame, save for the exhausted Uncle Sam dwarfed by it in the lower right corner. You can almost feel the heat and smell the coal, soot, and metal in the air.

By Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, March 22, 1982

Ronald Reagan, complaining about TV news reporting of the recession early in his presidency, griped, "Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash who has just been laid off should be interviewed nationwide?" Pat Oliphant took that dismissive, elitist remark and created this excellent cartoon. 

Neatly divided by the railroad, we have dirty, downtrodden, and darkly satanic South Succotash on the wrong side of the tracks. Layoffs and welfare frauds (a longtime Republican byword) combine to outnumber the population. You wouldn't want to live there.

The White House sits perched high on the hills of North Succotash, home to a pleasant golf course, and lovely trees. Its 500 residents pull down millions yet somehow pay no taxes.

And it all fits in one 3-by-5 panel. No animated panorama. Not even color.

By Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, Feb. 24, 1983

Upwind of South Succotash, Oliphant’s Burfordville, named for one of Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrators (incidentally also the mother of a current Supreme Court Justice), cannot possibly exist in the real world. But Oliphant has rendered it in such rich detail that you would swear that it must be real. 

By Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, June 6, 1983

A horse cannot roll around on the ground convulsed with laughter, but if it could, this is exactly what it would look like.

Credit the portion of Oliphant's career living out West perhaps. He is a master at drawing — and sculpting — horses, and you can tell how much more loving care he puts into drawing horses than, say, cats. For years, I struggled to depict horses that appeared to be capable of motion; I credit Pat Oliphant as a reference point for every horse I have drawn successfully.

Now, I would have liked to include some more recent cartoons in this discussion, but I had a problem finding examples of superior draftsmanship that didn't include caricatures. So compare this cartoon from 2001...

by Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, Feb. 6, 2001

...with a similarly themed cartoon from 1980:

by Pat Oliphant in Washington Star, Oct. 30, 1980

Both cartoons convey the wind and chill, dampness and dreariness outside their respective pawn shops. The earlier one, however, is meticulously rendered, whereas the later one appears rushed and cursory. The elevated perspective of "Lee Iacocca Sent Us" is visually arresting in a way that the Presidential Seal cartoon isn't.

Of course, there's no point in drawing the same cartoon twice, right?

Oliphant's eyesight has betrayed him these days, and there could be some of that showing up by 2001. His having rejected the use of duoshade since 1980 also makes a difference; yet I would point out that the South Succotash, Burfordville, and Western character cartoons are all drawn without it.

With that, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. 

Calumnated Ruins Domino

I started this week with a caricature of Donald Joffrey Trump's head of the Environmental Plunder Administration. Now that the administration has released its budget proposal cutting EPA funding by nearly a third, let's end the week with a Sierraback Saturday retrospective of the Trump gang's model for environmental policy. My cartoons below date from December, 1981 to July, 1984.

"I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80% of the air pollution in this country. ... Well now, he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80%. I said 92%—93%, pardon me. And I didn’t say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93% of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we’ll still have 93% as much as we have in the air today." —Ronald Reagan, Oct. 9, 1980. (The 1979 quotation Kennedy was referring to: "The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees." —RR)

Republicans have long had a receptive ear for industrialist complaints that any attempt to protect the nation's air, water, forests, and purple mountain majesties are a job-killing, profit-choking nuisance. While Ronald Reagan's first budget cut funding for the EPA by 25%, it is useful to remember that the agency was established by a Republican president.

My cartoon above imagines that president phoning from his beachfront San Clemente estate to complain about Interior Secretary James Watt's plan to to lease a billion acres of offshore oil fields to petroleum interests.

Watt's fire sale of federal lands and waters also benefited the coal industry and suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch, later Burford, his first head of the EPA (as discussed here a few weeks ago, now that her son is poised to claim Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court), was happy to ignore pollution of the nation's air and water in the interest of protecting commercial profit margins. When scandal forced her resignation, the Reagan administration tapped the first administrator of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, to return to the agency's helm.

Contrary to my cartoon, Ruckelshaus is generally credited with restoring public confidence the EPA, staffing the agency with competent personnel committed to its original mission. In a later interview since removed from the EPA's web page, Ruckelshaus said, "At EPA, you work for a cause that is beyond self-interest and larger than the goals people normally pursue. You're not there for the money, you're there for something beyond yourself."

James Watt's mission to make sure there was no speck of nature left unspoiled when the Lord returned was foiled by his uncanny knack for making inappropriate statements in public. He snarked that there are two kinds of people in this country, "liberals and Americans"; described Native American tribal rights as "socialism"; and banned the Beach Boys from the Washington D.C. Fourth of July celebration because they would "attract the wrong element."

He might have had a point if the Beach Boys had continued making hallucinogenic music in the mold of Smile. As it was, Watt was forced to back down and apologize. Turns out, Reagan liked the Beach Boys.

The last straw was his claim that his sale of more than a billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming was above criticism because on his federal coal commission "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

A friend and colleague of mine at the UW-Parkside Ranger, Rick Luehr, satirized Watt's remark with his Hallowe'en costume that year, donning a wig, blackface, and fake breasts covered by a pair of mogen Davids. The wheelchair was already a part of his daily life.

Aside from providing the template for Donald Trump's Twitter habit, Watt pushed genuinely destructive policies that now find favor in the Very Famous Trump White House. Unlike today, however, Watt faced a Congress willing to push back:

Watt's earlier forays included a declaration that he would open wilderness areas in the West to drillers and miners. Congress put a stop to it: the House voted 350 to 58 to withdraw wilderness lands from mineral development. Fifty-two senators cosponsored similar legislation. Watt also proposed a major dilution of the Endangered Species Act and asked Congress to hold off its review of the law. Congress ignored him and renewed the law without significant weakening amendments.

He was replaced by a long-time friend of the President, jack-of-all-trades William Clark.

Clark's crowning achievement in his two years at Interior was keeping himself out of the headlines. The policies instituted under Watt continued, but without the media-eye-catching bluster and bombast.

I Remember Mama

When speculation was circulating that Donald Joffrey Trump would name Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill Judge Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court, my first thought was to wonder if he were any relation to Anne Gorsuch Burford, Director of the Environmental Protection Agency in the first years of the Reagan administration.

As it turns out, he is her son.

A minion of Interior Secretary James Watt, Anne Gorsuch turned the mission of the EPA on its head, aiming to protect corporate profits at the expense of the environment. From her obituary in the Washington Post in 2004:

Her 22-month tenure was one of the most controversial of the early Reagan administration. A firm believer that the federal government, and specifically the EPA, was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, Ms. Burford cut her agency's budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.

Republicans and Democrats alike accused Ms. Burford of dismantling her agency rather than directing it to aggressively protect the environment. They pointed to budget cuts for research and enforcement, to steep declines in the number of cases filed against polluters, to efforts to relax portions of the Clean Air Act, to an acceleration of federal approvals for the spraying of restricted pesticides and more. Her agency tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would burn toxic wastes at 1,200 degrees centigrade.

We cartoonists were no kinder to her than we were to Watt. I drew these cartoons in February and March, 1983, as scandal exploded around Ms. Gorsuch and her agency.

Charged with mishandling of the agency's $1.6 billion "superfund" for handling toxic waste, Gorsuch refused to turn over records to Congress and was found in contempt of Congress. There was also a scandal over promising a small New Mexico oil refinery that it could ignore existing limits on lead in gasoline because loosening of the regulations was planned. The regulations weren't loosened after all, and the company ended up having to pay huge fines.

To explain a couple things in my cartoons: between the first and the second, Gorsuch married Robert Burford, whereupon she took his last name. (That's not him in the bed, by the way; it's a generic industrialist character.) The woman hanging outside the windows is newly resigned Superfund administrator Rita Lavelle, who would be convicted in 1984 of lying to Congress about the superfund scandal.

I wasn't the only cartoonist to reach for the prostitution metaphor to depict Gorsuch Burford's handling of the EPA, but there were other allusions made by better cartoonists than me. Pat Oliphant depicted her as Maleficent from Disney's Snow White. Riffing on Ghostbusters, Jim Borgman portrayed her as an ectoplasmic spectre. Herb Block drew her as a jackbooted prison guard. After her resignation, Herblock drew Reagan and an aide tossing her into a smoking volcano labeled "Administration Environmental Scandals", with a slip labeled "Lavelle" nearby, as the aide tells the President, "We've given it two of our finest maidens!"

On a less personal level, Jeff MacNelly's response to the scandal was to depict the EPA as a garbage truck with all its garbage in the driver's cabin.

Reagan later appointed Gorsuch Burford to be chair of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, a post she dismissed as a "nothing-burger." The House and the Senate passed resolutions urging on President Reagan to withdraw the appointment; in the end, Gorsuch Burford decided not to accept the position.

In her 1986 book, Are You Tough Enough, Gorsuch Burford complained: "When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only 'crime' was loyal service, following orders. I was not the first to receive his special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work."

I brought Gorsuch Burford back one more time for a cartoon marking the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1989. She's behind Reagan in the supporting cast between Robert Bork and James Watt.