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

The World According to the Daily Worker

Today's Graphical History Tours journeys 100 Aprils into the past, with an eye to some of the leftmost cartoonists in print in the U.S.

Daily Worker was published in Chicago from 1924 to 1958, giving voice to the communists and leftist socialists of the American labor movement. Editorial cartoons and illustrations appeared throughout the newspaper, particularly in the Saturday feature section edited in 1926 by Robert Minor.

Xenophobia is nothing new in U.S. history. Congress was considering a series of bills requiring that all foreign-born workers annually register their fingerprints with the government, report to authorities any time they moved or traveled from one locality to another, and carry a certificate of identification to be shown on demand.

"Thumbs Down" by Maurice Becker in Daily Worker, Apr. 10, 1926

Looking down from the sidelines in Maurice Becker's cartoon are: Fake Labor Leader, Militarist, the Courts, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Mellon, the KKK, Election Crook, Kept Press, and Rotarian. "Fake Labor Leader" may have been a Daily Worker reference to the American Federation of Labor, which it frequently criticized for not being radical enough; but the AFL was publicly opposed to the alien registry legislation.

Labor unions such as the Machinist Locals 84 and 337 protested that "the majority of workers in the basic industries of this country are of foreign birth, and the proposed bills are clearly aimed at the working class as a whole. ... The intent of the proposed bills is clearly to intimidate the foreign-born workers; to prevent them from joining unions; to prevent them from participating in strikes, and to compel them to accept a status of subjection, forced to do scab labor during times of conflict with employers."

Unions for the Pullmans, painters, decorators, seamstresses, steamfitters, and more from Boston to San Francisco organized "Councils for Protection of the Foreign-Born" to advocate against the proposed legislation.

"The Boycott" by Rollin Kirby (?) in New York Evening World, ca. Apr. 14, 1926

The Daily Worker didn't credit the cartoonist, whom I presume was Rollin Kirby. It also seems to me that the caption doesn't fit the cartoon. I couldn't find anything in the Daily Worker reporting boycotts related to the alien registry bills; I also haven't found this cartoon printed elsewhere. [Update: see D.D. Degg's comment below.]

I did find that the U.S. had deported 55,110 resident aliens between September, 1925 and April, 1926.

"Reviving a Dead One" by William Gropper in Daily World, Apr. 9, 1926

The Democrat-sponsored alien registry bills did not make it to President Coolidge's desk, or to the drawing boards of certain mainstream cartoonists I expected would have opinions about them. Many mainstream cartoonists were more interested in proposals to create exceptions to Prohibition — one of many distractions, according to the communist press, "to get the workers' mind off the real issues."

"So That's What's in the Prohibition Barrel" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, April 25, 1926

Would you have preferred your distraction from the real issues neat or on the rocks?

"Sidetracked" by Fred B. Watson in Baltimore Afro-American, Mar. 20, 1926

The Daily Worker included this Fred Watson cartoon in its April 22 edition with an unnecessarily longer title. The cartoon answers my question of two months ago whether Watson opposed U.S. participation in the World Court, and the Worker's cut line explains that the communist leadership at the newspaper viewed the World Court as a tool of J.P. Morgan and Wall Street bankers.

The Black vote, where it could make its way into the polling place, had been reliably Republican since the end of the Civil War. Although the Anti-Lynching Bill was authored and promoted by a Republican, the repeated inaction on the bill when Republicans held all the reins of power was a sign that the party took Black loyalty for granted.

"America Protects Germany from Sin" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, Apr. 28, 1926

I had serious qualms about including this cartoon because of objections to the Daily Worker editor's decision to mess with it. For some reason, the editor saw fit to remove whatever dialogue Gropper had President Coolidge saying (and possibly also text or symbolism that might have been on the paper in Mr. Businessman's hand), substituting instead the editor's own text as a cut line.

Unless an editor is providing translation of a foreign-language cartoon, that's simply not cool. 

But I did want to include a caricature of Calvin Coolidge besides that barely recognizable one by Maurice Becker above. 

And speaking of Gropper caricatures:

"Mussolini Thumbs the Stub of His Nose" by William Gropper in Daily World, Apr. 24, 1926

On April 7, Violet Gibson, the 50-year-old daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini. Her bullet nicked il Duce's nose; her gun jammed as she tried a second shot.

Police stopped the crowd from killing her then and there. She probably would have been executed like Mussolini's other three failed assassins but for the British government interceding on her behalf. Gibson was allegedly mentally unstable (she had attempted suicide in Rome the previous year), so Italy deported her to England, where she spent the rest of her days in a mental asylum.

But speaking of womenfolk and guns...

"The Lady Might Get Hurt" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, April 1, 1926

The Daily Worker was highly skeptical of international agreements, such as the Locarno Pact, that did not originate in Moscow.

Have we another example of the Daily Worker editor editing a cartoon? Why would Gropper attach a label to the gun if not to identify what it is supposed to represent? Could this cartoon have been drawn about a completely different topic?

"No Team Work" by Maurice Becker in Daily Worker, Apr. 3, 1926

No such question about Maurice Becker's cartoon here. It does reminds me a lot of the Arthur Racey cartoon that led last week's Graphical History Tour. It is possible, I suppose, that Becker could have seen the March issue of Macleans; I think, however, that this was simply a case of two cartoonists reaching for a common image to illustrate a similar situation.

What does puzzle me is why Becker thought it necessary to label which country in the rowboat was which. I mean, shouldn't a reader just assume that the characters are a bunch of different national leaders? How does knowing who's who matter?

"The Spirit of Locarno" by Viktor "Deni" Denisov in Pravda, ca. Apr. 13, 1926

Soviet cartoonist Deni uses caricature to indicate the nationality of some of the League members in this cartoon: the gentleman sprawled on the floor at left resembles Germany's Hans Luther, and the mustachioed fellow at top right looks like French Prime Minister Aristide Briand. Below Briand are a probable Briton and a likely Japanese, but it hardly matters to whom each butt belongs.

"Glorious Garbage" by Marvin P. "Hay" Bales in Daily World, Apr. 24, 1926

I explain these cartoons because they're 100 years old and make references that have grown obscure over time. The editors of Daily Worker explained this cartoon because they didn't trust readers to catch the subtle clues left by the cartoonist that the skull labeled "The League" is dead and that "Geneva Garbage Co." is a trash can.

At least they left the rather clever "Loco Peace Pact" nickname to stand on its own.

"With Rubber a Dollar a Pound" by Maurice Becker in Daily Worker, Apr. 17, 1926

Every once in a while, U.S. presidents would look into the possibility of granting demands for independence by the Philippines, a U.S. possession taken as spoils of the Spanish-American War at the close of the 19th Century. The Coolidge administration had recently appointed Col. Carmi A. Thompson, commander in chief of the United Spanish War Veterans, to conduct just such an investigation.

Members of Congress raised their objection to Philippine independence on a number of grounds, one being the high price of rubber from the British East India Company. U.S. firms were working to establish rubber plantations in the Philippines to rival the British monopoly.

Philippine independence would come only after World War II. 

"The Imperialist Policy in China," uncredited, in Daily Worker, Apr. 17, 1926

China's future was up in the air after the death of Premier Sun Yat Sen in March, 1925. Various warlords sought to establish their own local fiefdoms. Against the warlords, the Chinese Communist Party and  Nationalist government cooperated in the First United Front, with Soviet backing, until the Canton Coup on March 20, 1926.

The communist captain of the S.S. Zhongshan, with a Soviet naval adviser on board, moved to support a leftist uprising in Guangzhou. Chiang Kai-Shek, then the commander of the National Revolutionary Army, declared martial law in Guangzhou and arrested communists in China's armed services and their Soviet advisers.

"The Helper of Imperialist Thieves" by O.R. "Zim" Zimmerman in Daily Worker, Apr. 10, 1926

The Daily Worker promoted a rather different narrative to the purge of communists from China's National Revolutionary Army; Christian missionaries were hardly a factor in the Canton Coup.

Only from an atheist communist would you expect a Jesus Christ drawn as a Jewish stereotype 100 years ago. (Robert Minor drew the Christ with an even longer hooked nose than in this Zimmerman toon — see page 48 here.) It would be a welcome departure from the auburn-haired northern European Jesus found elsewhere but for the undercurrent of antisemitism tapped into by these cartoons.

"My Gawd, How the Money Rolls In" by William Gropper in Daily Worker, Apr. 5, 1926

And thus with yet one more William Gropper cartoon, we must leave 1926 behind for another week or two, returning to the present day secure in the knowledge that we have come so far since those bad old days.

The Good, The Bad, and The Cheney

A special Graphical History Tour bulletin: former Vice President Dick Cheney passed away this week. Since the man was often the subject of editorial cartoons, not least by your humble scribbler, this week's installment is dedicated to his memory... for better or worse.

Cheney, then a Congressman from Wyoming, was President George H.W. Bush's second choice for Secretary of Defense, after his first choice, powerful Texas Senator John Tower was forced to withdraw over a drip, drip, drip of allegations of womanizing and heavy drinking.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March, 1989

No, there were no such pesky rumors against Mr. Cheney, who had not cultivated the kind of resentment among his colleagues that Mr. Tower had. 

As Defense Secretary, he oversaw the Bush administration's military overthrow of General Manuel Noriega's regime in Panama; and later, Operation Desert Storm. The latter successfully repulsed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, but Cheney allowed General Norman Schwarzkopf to be the public face of the military action.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 23, 1991

Operation Desert Storm was one of the Bush administration's many foreign policy wins, even though it left Saddam Hussein in power; the international coalition behind Operation Desert Storm would not have held together for an advance on Baghdad. By the time I drew the above cartoon, the Soviet empire was crumbling, reformer Boris Yeltsin was the hero for thwarting a hardliners' coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and the U.S. had extended Most Favored Nation trading status to Communist China.

Moving on to the year 2000, I've got a couple cartoons that I drew but didn't submit for publication:

August, 2000

After George H.W. Bush lost the presidency to Bill Clinton, Cheney was in charge of energy conglomerate Halliburton. Then Republican nominee-presumptive George W. Bush tapped him to lead the search for his 2000 running mate. After vetting several potential vice presidents, Cheney found the perfect choice staring back at him from the mirror.

I didn't submit the above cartoon for publication because I was not satisfied with how this cartoon came out visually; a vertical format might have worked better than this horizontal one.

Every once in a while, a cartoonist gets an idea that is too mean to publish, but too wicked not to draw.

November, 2000

When Dick Cheney suffered one of his five heart attacks while the outcome of the 2000 election was still being decided in the courts, I drew this take-off of the running gag in the TV cartoon South Park. I posted it to the GeoCities page I had at the time, and nowhere else.

The joke here was that the Kenny character got killed off in every episode only to reappear in the next. Yet aside from being such an insensitive cartoon, the one other problem with it is that no Republican then (or now) would pronounce the "ic" in "Democratic bastards!"

As for worrying that the level of political discourse had sunken so low, none of us a quarter century ago would have imagined a President of the United States posting a video on line of himself literally bombarding citizens of an American city with a planeload of shit.

February, 2002

I think this was another unpublished cartoon, but only because I didn't have a market for it: not local enough for the Journal Times, not addressing LGBTQ+ issues for Q Syndicate, and not aligned with a Business Journal editorial. I apparently expended quite a lot of ink on it anyway.

The cartoon comments on Cheney's efforts to intercede for California energy provider Enron from his position as Vice President. When mismanagement from the top forced the company to go belly-up and under-the-table deals between the company and government came to light, any association with Enron could have been injurious to one's political career.

March, 2003

I drew this one for a former editor of mine from In Step days, Jamakaya, who liked my conceit of a Journal of Faith-Based Statistics. The imaginary magazine's medical advice has since come to fruition in the Health Department of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy the Lesser.

Cheney would be the most forceful advocate for achieving the unfinished task from twelve years earlier of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but unlike so many of my colleagues, I didn't draw any cartoons depicting his role in Iraq War II (or, for that matter, any cartoons about the famous incident when he accidentally shot a friend in the face while quail hunting. What could I possibly draw for publication a week later that outdid what all the other cartoonists and late night comedians put out the next day?).

Q Syndicate, January, 2004

Instead, I drew a series of cartoons highlighting how his daughter Mary living openly with her partner, Heather Poe, left Cheney in the awkward position of having to support President Bush's advocacy of amending the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as existing only between one man and one woman (at a time, one presumes) despite how it directly affected his own flesh and blood.

His rival for the vice presidency in 2004, Senator John Edwards, attempted to needle Cheney about this during their televised debate.

for Q Syndicate, Oct., 2004

John Edwards: "I think the Vice President and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And and you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy. ...." (He went on to criticize the GOP's Definition of Marriage constitutional amendment.)

Moderator Gwen Ifill: "Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds."

Dick Cheney: "Let me simply thank the Senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much."

Ifill: "That's it?"

Cheney: "That's it."

At another point in the debate, Cheney dismissed Edwards as an empty suit: “I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.” When Edwards's running mate, Sen. John Kerry, brought Mary Cheney up during the next presidential debate, Cheney told reporters that "I am a pretty angry father," and his wife, Lynne, accused Kerry of "a cheap and tawdry political trick."

for Q Syndicate, February, 2007

Mary and Heather welcomed son Samuel into their family in 2007, so I supposed that Dick and Liz were still tight-lipped on a subject about which most grandparents are more than happy to regale passers-by. Drivers-by, too.

This cartoon broke free of my clientele of LGBTQ+ niche publications, catching the eye of my esteemed colleague Joel Pett, who put together weekly editorial cartoon round-ups for the Sunday Los Angeles Times in those days. (February 11, page M2, at the top of the display, for gosh sakes! Thanks, Joel!)

I did check with my syndicate editors in case having the cartoon in the LA Times might scoop a subscriber in the local LGBTQ+ press. They gave the go-ahead.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2007

Early in the 2008 presidential campaign cycle, some genealogist with lots of time on their hands determined that Dick Cheney and Democratic candidate Barack Obama are ninth cousins once removed. It was a news story that didn't stop certain other people from making up stories about Obama being born in Kenya. Nor did it get Cheney and Obama to invite each other to family reunions.

for Q Syndicate, 2013

By the time Cheney's other daughter, Liz, ran for Congress, Dad had mellowed on the question of marriage equality. Liz, however, campaigned on a platform of anti-LGBTQ Republican orthodoxy. But she and her father deserve credit for putting country above partisanship after Donald Trump's attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Unfortunately for them and the rest of us, the MAGA Kool-aid has proved thicker than TEA.

That, ladies and gents, would be my last cartoon of Mr. Cheney, except that I have drawn one more. See you next week.

Take a Bite Out of Krim

The Graphical History Tour is waiting to take you away to September of 1925, where we find France and Spain launching a new offensive against the Rif rebels in Spain's Moroccan territories.

"Madame Fiasko" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Sept. 6, 1925

Johnson's cartoon hinges on wordplay in German, blending "Geh' ab" (go away) with the name of Rif leader Abd-el-Krim.

In 1925, Abd El-Krim's Riffian guerillas controlled roughly three quarters of Spanish Morocco. Styling himself to the outside world as President of the Republic of Rif (Al-Jumhūriyyah al-Rif), el-Krim, he was popularly known as mujāhid (war leader). He had set up a functioning government and a cabinet which employed no small number of his relatives.

"Bei Abd El Krim" by Friedrich Heubner in Simplicissimus, Munich/Stuttgart, Sept. 21, 1925

I'm rather confused by this German cartoon, which appears to me to depict German tourists asking Abd el-Krim, a Moroccan Berber, where to find Turkish concubines. 

The cartoons in the satirical Munich weekly Simplicissimus in the middle of the 1920's seem to have steered away from explicitly political commentary in favor of light jokes about societal stereotypes (the lovable drunk, the lothario, the hausfrau, the ingenue, etc.). Although Abd El-Krim spent some time during World War I in prison for expressing German sympathies contrary to Spain's official neutrality, that doesn't appear to be relevant to Heubner's cartoon in any way.

"The Jolly little Game of Tossing the Pancake" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Sept. 19, 1925

I'm also not familiar with this game of tossing the pancake of which Dorman Smith speaks. Yeah, you bake pancakes by flipping them, but what's the game? Seeing which one of you can catch it?

I guess the game is to see how high you can toss the pancake without it landing on the floor. There must be some military equivalence there that explains why Spain and France were having so much fun with it.

In any event, France and Spain launched a new offensive in September of 1925. Spain landed 18,000 troops at Alhucemas Bay, while 20,000 French soldiers marched into the Spanish protectorate from the French-controlled south.

"Another 'Contemptible Little Army'" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, Sept. 29, 1925

According to modern estimates, Edmund Duffy overestimates Riffian manpower; Encyclopedia Britannica puts the Moroccans' forces around 13,000 men. Just the same, the Riffians overran the French front line positions in the initial stages of the offensive.

"Abd-el-Krim" by Edward Gale in Los Angeles Times, Sept. 26, 1925

El-Krim's forces won several initial battles, justifying Gale's depiction of the armored hands of France and Spain having so much trouble catching a tiny fly.

Those hands could still swat, however, and that is how the game would end.

"Can't Pay for the Old War" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 21, 1925

At the same time as the Franco-Spanish offensive, French Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux was in Washington to present the French counterproposal for repaying its World War I debts to the U.S., a debt American cartoonists were impatient to collect.

"One Can Carry this Business of Bluffing Too Far" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Sept. 25, 1925

Elsewhere in the Islamic world, Turkey sought to reclaim Mosul, in the north of present-day Iraq, from Great Britain.

"Another Explosive Situation" by Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Sept. 30, 1925

There is very little mystery as to Mosul's importance to the British Empire and the Turkish republic. Until the opening of the Suez Canal, Mosul was once a vital trade post between Europe and the Middle East on one side and India and China on the other. Since then, the major powers have had a keen interest in the region's oil.

"The Old, Old Story" by Orville Williams in New York American, Sept. 26, 1925

The British assumed control of Iraq at the end of World War I, up to then a distinct region of the Ottoman Empire since the 16th Century, consisting of the three districts of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Turkey claimed that Mosul was still under Ottoman control when the armistice ending the war was signed.

"They Tear Up Tickets in Europe, Too" by Cecil Jensen in Los Angeles Post, Sept. 30, 1925

Under the Treaty of Lausanne, the status of Mosul was left for the League of Nations to decide. In the meantime, the British had set up Faisal ibn Husayn as King of the three districts of Iraq, ruling under British mandate.

"Fact Versus Fiction" by Orville Williams in New York American, Sept. 30, 1925

Although Turkish-British disagreements did not erupt into armed conflict, the disputes over Mosul and Morocco offered plenty of ammunition to politicians, publishers, and editorial cartoonists who opposed U.S. participation in the League and any other international institutions.

Jimmy, We Harshly Drew Ye

Today's Graphical History Tour leafs through some editorial cartoons from the scrapbook I kept back during Jimmy Carter's presidency. 

Back then, almost every major newspaper in the world had its own editorial cartoonist or two, and very often supplemented them with syndicated editorial cartoons from elsewhere. (And every major city had more than one daily newspaper.) Any given issue of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and National Review would have several editorial cartoons illustrating their reportage, even occasionally commissioned for their covers.

So I got to see many cartoonists' work in print. I'm afraid this can't be a comprehensive account of every cartoonist's caricature of the 39th President of the United States. There were hundreds of editorial cartoonists plying the trade in those days, and most of them were quite good at it.

These are the cartoons I liked best for one reason or another: some for the artwork, and others that I thought were most effective at the time, even if I disagreed with them. None of my own cartoons are in that old scrapbook, so none of them follow. (Besides, I've done that post before.)

"Don't You Fret About These Little Rascals," in Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1977

I'll start with the only one of the cartoons in my scrapbook whose cartoonist I don't know for sure. There's no signature on this cartoon, and the Chicago Tribune didn't run a credit line under it. It was not someone who regularly appeared in the Trib. 

I was impressed by the stylish line technique, as well as the caricature; coming early in the Carter administration, cartoonists were just then having to develop a Carter characterization that did not involve him smiling broadly. Quite a few came to exaggerate the distance between nose and mouth.

Next up come two of the giants of editorial cartooning from that era, both here tackling the challenge of drawing President Carter without the smile. Even taking into consideration that both of them inspired imitators in the biz, I wouldn't need to see signatures to identify the work as theirs.

"Performer and Critic" by Pat Oliphant in Washington [DC] Star, April, 1977

The simplicity and spareness of Pat Oliphant's drawing apart from that tuba sells the cartoon. Jeff MacNelly's idea below is carried by the detail and heightened perspective.

"I Sure Picked a Rough Neighborhood to Run Out of Gas In" by Jeff MacNelly in Richmond News Leader, Oct., 1977

Jack Ohman wrote in his Substack this week that both Oliphant and MacNelly hated Carter — well, Oliphant hated everybody, Ohman says. He knew them both, and I don't. Anyway, Oliphant quickly began to draw Carter as a much smaller man than he actually was, and MacNelly gradually followed. By the eve of the 1980 election, both drew cartoons in which Carter didn't even come up to Reagan's knees — their way of saying that instead of growing into the job, Carter had done the opposite. 

"Not a Bad Man" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, Feb. 1979

Such was also the point of this devastating cartoon by the Trib's Dick Locher. He must have really liked this idea, rehashing it decades later with President Barack Obama in the title role.

"For Human Rights" by Don Wright in Miami News, ca. Feb. 1977

I doubt that was the message behind the relative sizes of Carter and the Russian bear in Don Wright's cartoon, drawn only a month or so into the Carter administration. It does illustrate, however, a significant foreign policy change instituted by Carter to emphasize human rights. 

U.S. foreign policy after World War II had been focused on containing communism, even at the cost of allying ourselves with repressive right-wing regimes. That the Soviet Union was both communist and repressive meant that U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. relations were not likely to change all that much.

"Is It True You're Not Leaving Washington" by Mike Peters in Dayton Daily News, ca. Nov. 1977

In matters of style, Carter was given to performative gestures: walking from his inauguration carrying his coat bag, addressing the nation in a cardigan sweater, and cancelling a foreign trip because Congress hadn't passed his energy policy bill.

Mike Peterson posted a selection of cartoons from the Carter presidency on Monday, and Steve Greenberg observed that he was the only cartoonist in that bunch who is still producing editorial cartoons for publication. I believe that Mike Peters is the only such cartoonist in this here post. 

"Of Course I'm in Charge Here" by Clyde Peterson in Houston Chronicle, ca. Nov., 1977

Clyde Peterson drew under the pen name CP Houston with a fetching style all his own. I do suspect that had he drawn a Black politician with lips this large, he would have been labeled, even in pre-P.C. 1977, racist. Plenty of other cartoonists on this blog post would have run the same risk.

"Born Again" by Ivan Licho in Militant, New York, Feb. 3, 1978

This cartoon by Ivan Licho for the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (one of my college roommates had a subscription) unfairly likens Carter to the two presidents who preceded him, but I found the drawing itself compelling. 

Its caption's reference to President Carter's religious faith sets up this next cartoon, when Carter's sagging poll numbers were lifted by achievement of a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt:

"Borne Again" by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, March, 1979

I'm not sure that there is anything special about Paul Conrad's drawing, aside from my hometown newspaper's decision to crop it rather severely. I just like the pun.

As I said above, this was not intended to be a comprehensive collection of U.S. cartoonists by any means; others have already tackled that task. What I haven't seen is any sampling of foreign editorial cartoonists; so here's a random bunch from my scrapbook.

"Either This Man Is Dead or My Watch Has Stopped" by Leslie Gibbard in Manchester Guardian, Sept. 1977

Under President Carter, the U.S. officially recognized the government of "Red China," 28 years after Maoist forces overthrew Chiang Kai-Shek. It was an opening made possible by Richard Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972, although our continuing "Two China" policy doesn't quite mean we've surrendered Taiwan to Beijing. Yet.

Even more impressive than transforming Carter into Groucho Marx is Leslie Gibbard's transformation of Chinese President Hua Guofeng into Margaret Dumont.

"You're Not Going to Let a Little Teng Like That Spoil Your Appetite" by Ed Uluschak in Edmonton Journal, ca. Feb., 1979

While I was in college, my parents gifted me a subscription to the monthly Atlas World Press Review, later just World Press Review, which published articles, columns, and editorial cartoons from around the world. (I continued subscribing to it after I graduated until I noticed that my income was falling far short of my expenses, forcing me to cut it along with Cinemax and pre-packaged frozen dinners.)

Ya'acov "Ze'ev" Farkash in Ha'aretz, Tel Aviv, ca. Jan., 1980

Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev sent Russian troops into Afghanistan to bolster a client government there in the winter of 1979-1980, while the Carter administration was hobbled by preoccupation with the hostage crisis in Iran.

by Keith Waite in Sun, London, Feb., 1980

Carter's response of pulling the U.S. out of Moscow's 1980 Olympic Games is beautifully skewered by Britain's Keith Waite. Russia retaliated by pulling out of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

"Scoops" by Doug Sneyd, self-syndicated, Oct., 1980

In a way, what doomed the Carter administration from the start was that there was no outside voice coming to its defense or lauding its achievements. Its triumphs quickly faded, while the mistakes, misfortunes, and malaise lingered on.

I've read some historical fiction recently imagining Carter reelected to a second term. He would then have been in office as OPEC's grip on world economic power was broken, the Soviet Union became unable to hide losses in Afghanistan and two of its sclerotic leaders died in quick succession. The Equal Rights Amendment might have passed. He'd have gotten to name a Justice to the Supreme Court. 

He'd also have been in office as HIV/AIDS spread like wildfire, terrorists killed 143 Marines in Beirut, and the U.S. went through a recession.

Assuming he didn't get shot to impress Jodie Foster.

Instead, he went on to be one of the most exemplary ex-presidents in history, and his family got to celebrate his 100th birthday with him.