The Recycling Bin of History

Every once in a while, I come across editorial cartoons for these Graphical History Tours that I like, but which don't make the cut for one reason or another.

Which is just to say that there ain't much by way of an overall theme to today's post. And here we go!

"The Grist of War" by Winsor McCay in New York Herald, ca. June 18, 1926

I was all set to include this Winsor McCay cartoon in a recent post about Abd El-Krim's surrender to  colonial French and Spain troops in Morocco, but something just seemed off about it.

Given the timing of its publication, it seems that the cartoon ought to be about the Rif War, but it's curious why the "Militarist" character is drawn with ridiculously exaggerated white lips, in the manner that White cartoonists and minstrel shows of the day portrayed Black people.

German cartoonists in the aftermath of World War I frequently drew African soldiers carrying out French military actions as a way of highlighting African soldiers' presence in France's occupation of the Ruhr region; the cartooning practice was meant to inflame German resentment at being policed by untermenschen.

Was McCay echoing that same racist propaganda here? If so, the cartoon was more likely about French policy against Germany, not France's adventures in Morocco.

"Well, Anyway, a Good Time Was Had By All" by James North in Washington Post, June 4, 1926

Meanwhile, a much-ballyhooed disarmament conference was underway. The French poppinjay in the foreground of James North's cartoon is more representative of how U.S. cartoonists represented France: stiffly waxed goatee and upturned mustache.

"But Isn't It Kind of Dangerous" by Jay N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, June 1, 1926

Here’s a “Ding” Darling cartoon I liked about New York Governor Al Smith’s position on Prohibition. It didn’t quite fit in with my post on spring primary results — Smith was not in a reelection race — and I already had two other Darling cartoons having to do with Iowa’s GOP Senate primary.

I do like to keep an eye out for cartoons featuring the men who were destined to run for president and vice president later on. I shouldn’t need to warn of a spoiler alert when I explain that Smith would be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928, and it’s not as if the "Happy Warrior" were an obscure pol in 1926. Nor is he largely forgotten today.

Unlike his 1928 running mate.

By the way, I came across this campaign button at a resale store recently. I wonder whether whoever wrote the price sticker was unaware that Franklin Roosevelt was not at the top of the ticket, but was the vice presidential nominee in that 1920 campaign.

"Kompromissflaggen" by Oskar Garvens in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, June 6, 1926

This cartoon suggesting designs various German political parties and interests might have had for the Weimar Republic's flag didn't fit in with recent posts on European affairs. This is an unretouched image from the Heidelberg's on-line archive; besides adding English translations, I would have tried to eliminate the yellowing of the page and to emphasize the black lines.

Perhaps Herr Garvens would have appreciated my coloring in some red on his flags, too, assuming I would be coloring the correct rectangles. My guess is that the red isn't missing because it has faded over time, but rather that it was never there — because Kladderadatsch could only afford black and yellow ink for the cartoons on its inside pages that week.

Finally, it would have been timely, in this week when the Supreme Court floods the zone with a blizzard of rulings like a college student cranking out all his term papers at once, to have put together a post about historic Supreme Court decisions. Sadly, editorial cartoons about the Court are somewhat rare in the 1920's.

"Memories of Dred Scott" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, June 5, 1926

Cartoons about the Court do show up in newspapers appealing to a Black audience, however. This Wilbert Holloway cartoon concerns the Supreme Court's decision that it had no jurisdiction to rule in Curtis & Corrigan v. Buckley et al., a case contesting the legality of private contracts restricting the sale of homes to Black persons.

The case made by the bill is this: the parties are citizens of the United States, residing in the District [of Columbia]. The plaintiff and the defendant Corrigan are white persons, and the defendant Curtis is a person of the negro race. In 1921, thirty white persons, including the plaintiff and the defendant Corrigan, owning twenty-five parcels of land, improved by dwelling houses, situated on S Street, between 18th and New Hampshire Avenue, in the City of Washington, executed an indenture, duly recorded, in which they recited that, for their mutual benefit and the best interests of the neighborhood comprising these properties, they mutually covenanted and agreed that no part of these properties should ever be used or occupied by, or sold, leased or given to, any person of the negro race or blood, and that this covenant should run with the land and bind their respective heirs and assigns for twenty-one years from and after its date.

Justice Edward T. Sanford delivered the Court's decision that the 5th, 13th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution did not apply to private contracts. Sanford, a Harding appointee from Tennessee, was a friend and protegé of Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Like Taft a conservative jurist, his earlier majority opinion in Gitlow v. New York ironically established precedent for the liberal Warren Court's decisions expanding civil rights. 

The First Month of Black History Week

Today's Graphical History Tour should have been the one I didn't post on the last Saturday of my vacation three weeks ago. Better late than never, I hope.

Exactly 100 years ago this month, historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) declared the second week of February "Negro History Week," expanding on earlier observations of Frederick Douglass's birthday. I didn't find that any of America's Black editorial cartoonists were drawing about Black history that week or that month, although each of their newspapers took note of the proposal from Woodson and the ASNLH.

Here's what America's Black editorial cartoonists were drawing about in February of 1926.

Given the Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 mission of pressing the Courts to invalidate same-sex marriages like mine (and a law just passed in Tennessee legislating a right to discriminate against us), I was particularly interested to find that the state of Virginia was in the process of outlawing mixed-race marriage exactly 100 years ago this week.

"The Mongrel Bays at the Moon" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 27, 1926

Leslie Rogers's cartoon was accompanied by a sarcastic "fable" summarizing the history of the "small shipload of outcasts" from England who settled in Jamestown, only to decide twelve years later "that work was obnoxious to them," so they contracted with the Dutch to supply them with slaves from Africa. From that editorial:

"Now, seeing that there were among the slaves many comely maidens, the lusts of these outcasts were aroused, and since the slave-women could not protect themselves, their masters threw themselves upon them and bred children by them. And it came to pass that a great war freed these slaves and made them citizens of a great state and country. But interbreeding went on merrily until the land was filled with a mixed race whose people spoke out against their former masters and kinsmen.

"'We will have no more illegitimate babies,' they cried. 'If you would cohabit with us. you must marry us.'

"And the masters raised their hands and eyes to holy heaven in horror. 'How can we, the salt of the earth, marry with these people who were once our slaves? Heaven forbid! Let us hasten and pass a law to prevent intermarriage in that we may breed with their women without fear of punishment. It is our God-given right. Our law will dull their will and keep them from thinking that they, as human beings, are entitled to live, love and marry according to their desires. We will hasten this law and shroud it in a pretense that we seek to preserve the integrity of all races.'

"And so they did."

Appropriately enough, it was a case out of Virginia that eventually overturned anti-miscegenation laws. Not that the ruling in Loving v. Virginia is certain to stand against the present Project 2025-26 backlash against civil liberties.

By the way, I would have liked to include any cartoons by Black editorial cartoonists from Virginia here, but none of the Black newspapers in that state appear to have employed their own cartoonists at the time. (The Norfolk Journal and Guide did start running its own editorial cartoons later that year.)

"And It Never Says a Mumblin' Word" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 6, 1926

Leslie Rogers employed what had become a common metaphor for President Coolidge, in this case accusing him of having little to say about the lynching of Black Americans by "mob rule in enlightened society." 

"Silent Cal" did not have a lot to say about a great many things; but he did support the Dyer anti-lynching bill (which never passed Congress) and spoke against the so-called "Americanism" of the Ku Klux Klan. In October of 1925, he told a convention of the American Legion:

"Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to-day is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat."

"Taking a Black Prisoner from the Jail to the Courthouse" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 13, 1926

Meanwhile, Kentucky Governor W.J. Fields sent 1,000 troops to secure the safety of a Black defendant in a triple murder case as he was transported from jail to courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky.

The defendant, Ed Harris, stood accused of killing a White man and his two children, and assaulting the man's wife — exactly the sort of case that often excited mobs to take matters into their own hands; so Gov. Fields sent in eight infantry companies, four cavalry troops, two machine gun squadrons, and a tank company, with orders to shoot to kill.

Leslie Rogers here added dirigibles and the "U.S.S. Mobqueller," in a cartoon that reminds me very much of the style of Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist John T. McCutcheon.

"New Use for U.S. Air Fleet" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 27, 1926

Fred Watson proposed enlisting the U.S.'s new air fleet to ferry Black prisoners past the volatile mob.

"Trial by Troops" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 20, 1926

If Wilbert Holloway was not impressed, it was because there was no chance of Ed Harris being found anything but guilty. He pled guilty and was sentenced to hang, his trial lasting all of sixteen minutes.

Elsewhere, Delaware Governor Robert Robinson called out the National Guard to prevent angry mobs from interfering in the trial in Georgetown of 21-year-old Harry Butler, who pled guilty to critically assaulting a 12-year-old white girl. He, too, was sentenced to death by hanging.

As for Tennessee, Holloway may have been referring to the trial of John Franklin Webb, convicted of raping a 17-year-old white girl. The trial and jury deliberation took a combined thirteen minutes; he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.

"Finally Hooked" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 6, 1926

Holloway didn't limit himself to explicitly Black issues (two of his four February cartoons were about the weather). I can't be sure what his opinion of U.S. involvement in the World Court was; reported elsewhere on the pages of that edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, a southern Senator made his opinion crystal clear.

"The Drunken Driver" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 6, 1926

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Cole Bleas (D-SC) offered as an argument against U.S. participation in the World Court that Liberia and Haiti were members of the League of Nations and would therefore have a say in the selection of World Court judges. If you were triggered by that Tourette's advocate blurting out an obscenity at the BAFTAs on Sunday, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.

"I call the attention of Senators from the South," Bleas fulminated, "while they are voting on this reservation, to the fact that they are voting for a court where we are to sit side by side with a full-blooded [the N-word], who has as much right as we have in the election of judges of this court. I ask them if they are aware of the fact that there may be and probably will be a  representative of Haiti as a judge on this court so that the southern Senators are voting to throw the destinies of southern women and southern men into the lap of a black man?" 

Bleas used that N-word several more times in the course of his argument, mostly to describe what kind of republics Haiti and Liberia are.

"State's Rights or State's Wrongs" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 20, 1926

Here's a rare cartoon that includes criticism of California's treatment of Japanese Americans. The topic occasionally came up in the context of protests from the Japanese government, but most white cartoonists and their newspapers approved of cutting off immigration from the Orient, and were content to overlook the restrictions against Japanese-Americans owning property.

Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie's moves to undermine Prohibition would be a topic for another day, but serves as a segue to a couple of editorial cartoons about local issues.

"An Unwelcome Serenader" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 13, 1926

Watson cites a song popularized by the California Ramblers to express the plight of Black school teachers in his native Baltimore. The story about which he appears to be editorializing concerned two female Black high school teachers, Mabel Jackson and Mary Craft Cottrell, who filed lawsuits against the Baltimore school board for hiring two White women for positions for which Jackson and Cottrell were more qualified.

Jackson and Cottrell had passed the state examination for teachers of domestic art in 1924, placing first and second on the eligibility list. But the Baltimore School Board instead hired Susie Jennings and Elizabeth Burrell, neither of whom had a college degree or a graduation certificate from an accredited normal school, nor had they passed a competitive examination for teaching domestic arts.

The School Board contended that tailoring and dressmaking were trade vocational subjects not requiring a teaching degree. Jennings and Burrell, in their view, were not high school teachers per se, in spite of instructing high school students in a high school building during high school hours.

"An Alarm He Doesn't Heed" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 20, 1926

In Chicago, Blacks could apply for and qualify for employment as city firefighters, but would have to wait for a vacancy at the Taylor Street station, the one and only fire station open to Blacks. Any vacancies at any other fire station in town could only be filled by White applicants.

Even if their only qualifications involved tailoring and dressmaking.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But you get the general idea of where race relations were in this country 100 years ago.

✍

Well, this is a little off-topic, but since Fred Watson brought up Prohibition a couple cartoons ago, I'll close with one of Leslie Rogers's other regular features in Chicago Defender, a more or less non-topical panel titled "The Hardest Job in the World." 

"The Hardest Job in the World" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 20, 1926

Anyone who has had to live with dietary restrictions should understand.

Memorial Day 1924

In observation of Memorial Day Weekend, today's Graphical History Tour resurrects a handful of Memorial Day cartoons from 100 years ago.

"To-Day" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, May 30, 1924

Memorial Day, as I'm sure you know, was established to commemorate the soldiers killed in the U.S. Civil War. By 1924, that war was almost 60 years in the past, and few of that war's generation were still around.

"A Message from Arlington" by Jim Ring in Washington (DC) Times, May 30, 1924

So it is hardly surprising that cartoonists such as Jim Ring chose to honor the fallen of the nation's most recent armed conflict. 

"Through the Curtains of Time" by Dennis McCarthy in Fort Worth Record, May 30, 1924

Memorial Day now honors the dead from all wars, police actions, and those undeclared hostilities we get into nowadays, since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I'm not quite sure why Dennis McCarthy chose to overlook American soldiers who died in the final year of World War I; perhaps he was referencing the years in which the nation entered into conflict.

"Precious Memories" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, May 30, 1924

The tombstones in Winsor McCay's cartoon mark the years of the Declaration of Independence, the start of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, and the end of World War I. The tombstone for the Mexican-American War must be hidden behind Miss Columbia.

This, by the way, was the only cartoon I came across featuring Miss Columbia. In earlier decades, she, rather than the more political, even comical Uncle Sam, was the go-to figure for cartoonists wishing to portray the nation's sorrow.

"Lest We Who Inherit Its Blessings Forget..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Tribune, May 30, 1924

But as the 20th Century progressed, Uncle Sam became the preferred figure to represent the United States on solemn occasions.

"A Real Tribute..." by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1924

John McCutcheon used Memorial Day to comment on current events: the House had just voted  adequate defense shipbuilding funds to achieve the "5-5-3 ratio" of U.S., Great Britain, and Japan's navies stipulated by post-war treaty. Coming as this did after passage of the Japanese Exclusion Act, relations between the two Pacific powers had soured greatly.

"From Bunker Hill to Metz" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, May 31, 1924

If a 1924 cartoon acknowledges that Black soldiers fought and died in America's wars, you know it was by a Black cartoonist drawing for a newspaper with a Black readership base. Wilbert Louie Holloway, 1899-1969, came to Pittsburgh from Indiana. His first cartoons appeared on the Courier's editorial page in October, 1923 and became a regular feature. With the May 31, 1924 issue, his name (as "W.T. Holloway") was added to the paper's masthead as Staff Artist. Launching a weekly comic strip, "Sunny Boy Sam" in 1928, Holloway remained on the Courier staff until his death.

"100 Per Cent Americans" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, May 30, 1924

Roy James's attempt to advocate for interracial brotherhood of comrades in arms, I think, falls a bit flat — at least by today's standards. Nice try, though.

"This Day We Dedicate to the Memory of Those Who Have Passed" by Harold Wahl in Sacramento Bee, May 30, 1924

Returning to our focus on Memorial Day, Harold Wahl allows the reader to project whatever race or nationality you like (but one belief system) onto his silhouetted figures.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.