Tulsa Time

We are coming up on the centennial of the race riot and massacre that wiped out the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Black Dispactch, Oklahoma City, OK, June 10, 1921

According to contemporary reports, a 19-year-old Black man named Dick Rowland accidentally stepped on the foot of a White woman, Sarah Page, in the Tulsa department store elevator where she worked. She slapped him across the face, and he grabbed her arm. Later reports suggested that Rowland tripped as he entered the elevator and grabbed Page by the arm to stop from falling. Either way, she screamed for the police, who arrested Rowland and charged him with assault and battery.

The next afternoon's Tulsa Tribune reported the story under the headline "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator," casting Rowland in the worst possible light:

"A negro delivery boy who gave his name to police as "Diamond Dick" but who has been identified as Dick Rowland, was arrested on South Greenwood avenue this morning by officers Carmichael and Pack, attempting to assault the 17-year-old white elevator girl in the Drexel Building early yesterday. ...

"The girl said she noticed the negro a few minutes before the attempted assault looking up and down the hallway on the third floor of the Drexel Building as if to see if there was anyone in sight but thought nothing of it at the time.

"A few minutes later he entered the elevator she claimed, and attacked her, scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes. Her screams brought a clerk from Renberg's store to her assistance, and the negro fled. He was captured and identified this morning by both the girl and the clerk, police say.

"Rowland denied that he tried to harm the girl, but he admitted he put his hand on her arm in the elevator when she was alone.

"Tenants of the Drexel Building said the girl is an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college."

That account (and an inflammatory Tribune editorial, all copies of which disappeared as soon as an official investigation was launched) is credited with inflaming passions in Tulsa; within days, Victor F. Barnett, managing editor of the Tribune, stated that his paper had since learned that the original story, that the girl's face was scratched and her clothing torn, was untrue.

Responding to rumors that Rowland would be lynched and reports that a White mob had massed at the jail, 75 Black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect him. Sheriff Willard McCullough assured them that Rowland was safe, so they began to leave.  But then some White man grabbed at a Black man's gun, a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose.

"Tulsa Unmasked" by Henry Brown, orig. pub. unknown, by June 18, 1921

Whites destroyed 35 square blocks of what was until then a thriving African-American community, even attacking it from privately leased airplanes.  For a complete account and contemporary photographs of the violence, I'll refer you to the official report published in 2001 by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Race Riot of 1921.

I have been searching for several months to find editorial cartoons to illustrate today's post; to my great disappointment, I have only found two*. The first is from a presumably Black artist in New York, who may or may not have drawn under a pseudonym; I found it on the front page of the Chicago Whip, an African-American weekly.

"Keeping Right Up with the Procession" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, June 6, 1921

The only other cartoon I've managed to find is this unfortunate example by "Ding" Darling of positing false equivalence between Whites' and Blacks' culpability for the violence. That the black figure looks so much like a gorilla only compounds the offensiveness of the cartoon.

But it's the only cartoon by a White cartoonist I could find anywhere. 

It is not as if the Tulsa riots were not front page news nationwide.

Speaking to the graduating class of Lincoln University Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania on June 6, President Harding lamented the violence, but promised to do nothing about it. "Much is said about the problem of the races. There is nothing that the government can do which is akin to educational work in value. One of the great difficulties of popular government is that citizenship expects government to do what it ought to do for itself. No government can wave a magic wand. The colored race, to come into its own, must do the great work itself. The government can only offer the opportunity."

Opining that White and Black citizens live together peacefully, the Chicago Tribune blamed "corrupt politics": "Corrupt politics is directly responsible for race riots. Let us face that fact and not lose ourselves in secondary considerations. Race riots are not problems of race; they are problems of government. There will be no race riots where politics has not corrupted government" (June 6). The editorial failed to explain how the Trib's charges of corruption were relevant to Tulsa, and probably didn't inspire any daredevil to try integrating any White Chicago neighborhoods to test the "living together peacefully" claim.

The New York Age (June 13) noted an editorial in Birmingham News laying blame for the riot "on the Negroes themselves. This editorial article relates how 'a band of belligerent Negroes' moved down on the jail with the purpose of liberating one of their number charged with an atrocious crime, and gives this as the cause of the uprising of the whites to safeguard the processes of law. It then comments on the actions of the Negroes in the following language: 'It is this attitude, the jungle instinct of the African, which arouses the keen resentment of the whites.'"

The Vicksburg Herald of Mississippi reported (June 8): "It was believed by authorities that the trouble was largely caused by negroes who have been preaching the gospel of so-called 'equality.' Some of these characters are described as fanatics. The white population tonight appeared sympathetic toward the negro refugees and the authorities were guarding against another outbreak of the negroes."

Then there was Independent and Harper's Weekly (June 18), which likened the Tulsa riot to Turkey's Armenian genocide: "World public opinion does not draw the distinctions we would like. Exactly as we hold Turks as a whole responsible, as Americans are held responsible, as a whole, when negro massacre succeeds negro massacre, as for two years past. ... No possible question exists that in the streets of Northern cities as well as Southern, a negro, 'a citizen of the United States' by birth and by every constitutional right, has again lacked 'the equal protection of the laws,' pledged by the Fourteenth amendment." Sharply disagreeing with President Harding, the editorial predicted, "If the States continue to fail in their duty the American people will place the task in Federal hands."

Tulsa Daily World, third extra edition that day, June 1, 1921

So where were the nation's editorial cartoonists in all this?

"The Disgrace" by Haydon Jones in New York Evening Post, March 30, 1921

There were some I had hoped would have spoken up, such as Haydon Jones. In March, Jones drew this cartoon in reaction to a murder case in Georgia involving a white landlord, John S. Williams, who had eleven Blacks working as peons on his farmland killed. (Yes, Georgia had "peonage," and so did Oklahoma for that matter.) I looked to find what Jones might have drawn in response to the Tulsa riot, only to discover that he apparently stopped drawing for the New York Evening Post in mid-April.

A photoengravers strike in New York (I'll come back to that on another Saturday) may have stopped a couple other cartoonists who might have addressed the massacre. Meanwhile, with Cartoons Magazine running only gently humorous cartoons, and periodicals such as Outlook and Independent preferring photographs to convey the horror rather than cartoonists' work, there are several cartoonists who I think are likely to have drawn about the event whose work I just haven't managed to access.

Furthermore, there quickly followed more unrest in Europe, the catastrophic Pueblo Flood in Colorado, a violent strike of miners in West Virginia, lurid crime stories, and all manner of shenanigans in state and local politics. White cartoonists' attentions and those of their publications moved on and moved away.

Chicago Whip, June 11, 1921

The Monitor, Omaha, June 16, 1921

African-American newspapers around the country, not surprisingly, followed developments closely. Very few of them, however, kept cartoonists on as regular features at this point in history. (Side note: The Tulsa Star, a vibrant Black-owned newspaper, was deliberately targeted and its building burned to the ground in the riot; no copies of the paper after January 29, 1921 exist.)

Evening News, San Jose California, June 2, 1921 

Perhaps even more shockingly than the predictable tendency of newspapers, especially in the American South, to blame African-Americans for the violence inflicted upon them, there were other supposedly professional journalists who simply did not take the matter seriously. At all. This dismissive newspaper headline was not published in Dixie, but in sunny California. Playing up local stories is not the issue;  I understand that some words change connotation over time; and I wasn't expecting 21st Century language sensitivity — but what the heck, Evening News? "Tulsa Negroes" wouldn't fit on that line?

"Life's Darkest Moment" by Harold T. Webster in New York Herald, Sept. 27, 1921

Getting back to cartoons: one comes across the occasional cartoon making light of America's race relations problem. Cartoons perpetuating the stereotype of African-Americans as lazy, unintelligent, or worse abounded. Even the normally gentle and benign work of H.T. Webster includes this specimen that, while avoiding insulting caricature, has not aged well.

I think you can, however, compare it to any of today's cartoons (including my own) of Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the QAnon Shaman, and other conspiracy fabulists. Who can predict what will be seen in retrospect 100 years hence as making light of the reprehensible?

_______

* P.S.: Fellow cartoon blogger Mike Peterson has dug up a third. As I wrote above, I am sure that there were more to be found. I'll post them as they turn up.

World News

 Come with me on a quick world tour in 1921, won't you?

"St. Patrick's Day Dream of Tomorrow" by Bob Satterfield for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., March 17, 1921

Since we've just made it past another St. Patrick's Day, we'll start with Ireland; where their British overlords celebrated the holiday by hanging six Irish Republicans convicted of killing British intelligence officers.

"Peace and Permanent Settlement" by David Low in London Star, Jan./Feb., 1921

Sir Edward Carson was the Conservative MP given the task of finding a peaceful settlement to Britain's Irish problem. His was the novel observation that if Irish Catholics and Protestants would just stop killing each other, they wouldn't have to live in fear of each other. 

"The Dove of Peace" by Jon Cottrell in Chronicle, Manchester, ca. March, 1921

Coming to England from Australia, David Low saw the issue of Irish independence (and Indian independence as well) differently than most of the other cartoonists on that Blessed Isle. According to his memoir, Low's Autobiography, he received some strongly worded pushback from other newspapers and their readers.

"When Are You Going to Pay This Bill?" in London Opinion, ca. March, 1921

Meanwhile, London (and Paris) were insisting upon steep war indemnity from Germany, and had no patience for Germany's protestations that it couldn't afford to pay. 

"The Island of Yap" by Frederick Opper for Star Publishing, ca. Feb. 16, 1921

William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers were eager for the U.S. to call in debts supposedly owed by the major Entente powers and a smattering of other countries around the world. The issue has nothing to do with dispute between the U.S. and Japan over the Micronesian island of Yap, but that didn't stop Hearst cartoonist Frederick Opper from drawing a series of cartoons in which Yap features prominently in merry songs about how nobody is in a rush to repay loans from Uncle Sam.

(I have to apologize for his characterization of Liberia, which appears in all of Opper's "Island of Yap" cartoons. Crude caricatures of Blacks, and, for that matter, foreigners, were the rule in this era, and nowhere moreso than in Mr. Opper's work.)

"Where He Will Be Waiting for Us" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1921

Not every cartoonist thought that Japan staking a claim on the island of Yap was a joke.

"The Sick Man Sees a Silver Lining" by Fred Morgan in Philadelphia Inquirer, March, 1921

Meanwhile, since the Harding administration wasn't interested in governing a mandate over Armenia, the allies decided to let the Ottomans retain control there, in spite of the Turkish genocide of civilians. Between 1915 and 1923, Turkey literally decimated its Armenian population through deportation, forced conversion to Islam, death marches, and outright execution.

"La Civiltà È Finalmente Nelle Nostre Mani," in Pasquino, Torino, ca. March, 1921

Turkey found a new ally in its former adversary Russia. The Bolsheviks, discarding the Romanovs' concern for defending Christianity south of the Black Sea, shared the Ottomans' interest in subjugating their Armenian citizens.

"Who Will Suffer Most?" by Winsor McCay, December, 1920

Any time there was an uprising somewhere in Russia, cartoonists in the U.S. and elsewhere rushed to their drawing boards to proclaim the imminent demise of the Soviet Socialist Republic. March, 1921 witnessed a flurry of such cartoons. What I find more interesting, however, are cartoons like this one in support of Western capitalists who saw financial opportunity in Communist Russia. Winsor McCay was not the only cartoonist who thought the U.S. was losing a potentially valuable market to other countries (especially Great Britain).

Speaking of the class struggle of the proletariat...

"Polonia ha Ordinato Trecento Aeroplani.." in Pasquino, Torino, ca. February, 1921

I have to respect Cartoon Magazine's translation, awkward as it is, of this cartoon by someone whose signature I can't read. (Why, moreover, does the Italian agitator who doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to the Russian leader have "W. Lenin" tattooed on his belly?)

Translating these cartoons isn't as easy as typing words into Google Translate, and here are a couple of cartoons that exemplify that.

"Die Seindlichen Schwestern" by Oskar Theuer in Ulk, Berlin, March 4, 1921

I include this cartoon as one of the earliest cartoons I have come across featuring the Nazi party — the sister seated on the left of her rival, the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People's Party). Both parties were anti-socialist, no matter what that uncle of yours who watches Fox News all night tells you that Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei means.

The caption on this cartoon doesn't seem to translate well; "Die seindlichen Schwestern" is literally "The Enemy Sisters." For all my searching, "Extratour" seems only to translate to English exactly as it looks. I'm only guessing that Oskar Theuer was making some sarcastic allusion to these "enemy sisters" returning to the dance floor in the final panel.

"Desafinação no Continente" by José Carlos de Brito e Cunha in Careta, Rio de Janeiro, March, 1921

I'm similarly stymied by the last word in this Brazilian cartoon, which may mean goals or ends, or, judging from Tio Sam's left hand, it could be a slang term for money and influence.

At any rate, a border conflict between Panama and Costa Rica over the latter's incursion into Almirante presented the Harding administration with its inaugural foreign crisis. Bound by treaty to protect Panama's sovereignty (and because we had seized the isthmus from Columbia in order to build a canal through it), the U.S. did indeed step in to mediate the conflict, and the matter was settled fairly quickly.

Saturday Hash

Uncaptioned, by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, Dec. 3, 1920

The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas during a presidential transition can be a slow news period as far as political cartoonists are concerned. The incoming president is busy filling his cabinet with people the cartoonist hasn't learned to draw yet, and the outgoing president is not desperately trying to stage a coup to overturn the popular vote. Well, not normally.

1920 was a pretty normal year as presidential transitions go, so editorial cartoonists had plenty of opportunity to address topics of general interest. Some of them, as illustrated by Clifford Berryman's complaint against unregulated gun sales above, are if you'll pardon the yuletide expression, evergreen.

"Big Flap Jack Contest" by Frederick Opper for International Feature Service Inc., ca. Dec. 3, 1920

Fred Opper's complaint about high prices never gets old, either, although it would be hard to find a mainstream cartoonist today blaming "grocery profiteers" and "rent gougers." What went up, however, must have come cheap; those "pick pocket prices" are the same ones my generation's grandparents used to remember fondly in the '60's and '70's.

"Out" by Bob Satterfield for NEA, ca. Dec. 1, 1920

Bob Satterfield commends a drive to oust criminals, indecent dancing, and vice from the nation's dance halls.

"Tormentors" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 3, 1920

Nelson Harding begs to differ. Besides opposing dirty dancing, "fanatical reformers" were pushing to extend prohibition to tobacco and any number of other vices. There was even a push by something called the Lord's Day Alliance to nationalize "blue laws," making any commercial activity, interstate travel, or newspaper publication on Sundays a federal offense. That particular proposal died for lack of any member of Congress wishing to be associated with it.

"Broken Idols" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, ca. Dec. 3, 1920

Speaking of vices: I've somehow made it through the last two years without posting anything about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, but Magnus Kettner gives me an opportunity to get around to it at long last. A grand jury handed down indictments against eight baseball players and five gamblers in October. A committee headed by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis convened in December to begin setting rules to clean up professional baseball.

"An Ounce of Prevention" by J. N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, Dec. 11, 1920

"Ding" Darling offered some advice on avoiding strikes of the non-baseball variety.

"Ireland, 1920" by David Low in London Star, ca. Dec., 1920

Meanwhile, overseas, 100 Irish "Black and Tan" guerillas killed 17 police cadets in an ambush near Macroom, and British police uncovered a plot to attack the House of Parliament and 10 Downing Street. In retaliation, the British arrested the Irish Vice President (President De Valera being in the U.S. at the time) and three politicians who were members of both Parliament and Dail Eireann.

John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, ca. Dec. 4, 1920

Armenia's armed conflict against Turkey was not going well. Tsarist Russia had fashioned itself as the protector of the Ottoman Empire's Christian minorities in the Caucasus; Soviet Russia's support of the Armenian cause, however, was limited to diplomatic protest. The same was true of western powers, each of whom would rather that someone else step in.

"A Peaceful Change" by Bob Satterfield for NEA, ca. Dec. 2, 1920

Mexican President Venustiano Carranza was killed during a coup led by General Álvaro Obregón in April, 1920 (most historians believe he was assassinated, but some argue that he committed suicide). On December 1, the provisional government of Adolfo de la Huerta turned power over to Obregón. This marked the end of ten years of civil war, and the beginning of a quarter century of military generals heading the Mexican government.

"Can They Untangle It?" by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Dec. 2, 1920

In 1920, the California revisited a 1913 "Alien Land Law" severely restricting non-citizens' rights to own agricultural property in the state. The law's primary targets were Japanese immigrants, and the 1920 law sought to close loopholes left open by the original law. Japan regarded California's actions as a violation of the spirit of a 1911 friendship treaty between Japan and the U.S. 

In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California's laws were not a violation of 14th Amendment rights of equal protection. Eventually, the California Supreme Court decided in 1952 that the 14th Amendment did indeed invalidate the Alien Land Laws.

ArmeniaWhile...

Sivasback Saturday this week marks the 100th anniversary of when the United States didn't occupy Turkey.

William Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Oct./Nov., 1918

The chief Entente forces battling the Ottoman Empire in World War I were Russia and Great Britain; but since the Bolsheviks took over Russia and pulled out of the war a year before Armistice Day, it was the British and their ANZAC forces who defeated the Turkish army.

"While the Going's Good" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (D.C.) Everning Star, October 10, 1918

When the war was over and the allies divvied up the spoils, the British took Ottoman territories in Palestine and the Arabian Gulf (and see how smoothly that worked out?), and the French claimed Syria and Lebanon. Had Russia seen the war through to the end, Armenia and other portions of modern-day Turkey would probably have fallen to St. Petersburg. But since Russia had bugged out early — and given the major powers' fear of the spread of communism — British Prime Minister David Lloyd George proposed that Turkey be made a "mandate territory" of the United States.

"This Old Bird..." by Fred Morgan in Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1, 1919

In mandate territories, as created under the Article 22 of the League of Nations' Covenant, governing power was transferred from whatever their Central Power ruler had been to one of the victorious Entente nations. The theory was that their peoples weren't able to rule themselves just then, but would be guided by their mandatory power toward self-rule in the future — as distinct from colonies, to which there was no promise of future independence.

"Uncle Sam, Please Take the Lady Under Your Protection" by Johan Braakensiek in De Amsterdamer, probably in late 1919

The League had no authority to assign any mandate to a non-member country such as the United States. Lloyd George argued, however, that somebody would have to take care of the place, and preferably not the Sultan.

A map of Armenia in the May 8-15, 1920 edition of The Independent surely stretches things a bit.

A major sore point of the Turkish question was the status of Armenia. The 12th of Wilson's 14 Points suggested that Armenia and other ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Empire might someday gain independence:

"The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development..."

"Prohibition's Greatest Martyr" by Leo Thiele in Sioux City Tribune, ca. July, 1919

The Armenian genocide was well known outside the Ottoman Empire, although the word "genocide" wouldn't be coined until 1943. The Ottoman government had long viewed its second-class Christian citizens as a fifth column responsible, if only by their mere existence offending Allah, for the country's losses in war dating back to the 19th Century.

"Crated in Constantinople" by Ralph O. Yardley in San Francisco Chronicle, June/July, 1920

"He'll Be Leaving As Soon As That Fuse Burns" by Hubert Harper in Birmingham Age-Herald, by May 9, 1920

After a disastrous defeat in battle by Russia in Russian Armenia early in World War I, the Ottoman government's tacit approval of massacres of Armenians escalated into an active, official policy of arrests, deportations, death marches, and executions. Depending whom you believe, 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered between 1914 and 1918.

"Armenia" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1920

As horrified as American and European governments (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) were by the Armenian genocide, and fully aware that it would continue as soon as Turkey was left to its own devices, none of the Entente victors were keen to remain involved in the Caucasus.

"Armenia, the Wall Flower," by Johan Braakensiek (?) in De Amsterdamer, ca. early 1920

After all, unlike the British and French mandate territories, Armenia had no oil, no Mediterranean vacation spots, and no sites precious to Western Christianity. The strongest argument to be made was that somebody had to keep Bolshevism from spreading southward.

"The Armenian Mandate" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1920

So on May 24, 1920, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for the authority to administer the
 Armenian mandate. Given the Chicago Tribune's stiff isolationist stance, John McCutcheon's cartoon seems surprisingly open to the idea.

"Who! Me?" by Albert T. Reid in The National Republican, May, 1920

"Can He Give It a Home?" by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, June, 1920

The cartoons here by Albert Reid and William Morris were more typical of U.S. Republican-affiliated cartoonists and columnists.

"Go Away" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, June, 1920

Between isolationist Republicans and anti-imperialist Bryanist Democrats, Americans were increasingly disinterested in foreign entanglements. To nobody's surprise, the G.O.P. majority in the Senate rejected Wilson's request on June 1, 1920, joined by thirteen Democrats.