Off and Running

I'm out of the office this weekend, but I couldn't leave you without catching you up on the news from August of 1924.

"A One-Sided Affair..." by A.G. Racey in Montreal Star, July 28, 1924

Our Graphical History Tour will start off with this portent of the depression to come. The United States government policy of high tariffs on foreign goods, intended to protect domestic producers, would be answered in kind by its trading partners. 

But was that an issue in the 1924 presidential election? Not judging from the editorial cartoons below the 49th Parallel.

"The Democratic Machine Loses One of Its Vital Supports" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, August 5, 1924

John McCutcheon and the Chicago Tribune had no love for Robert LaFollette and his Progressive Party candidacy, but looked on with glee as the Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor endorsed LaFollette and his running mate, Democrat Burton Wheeler (how did McCutcheon miss the obvious pun?), over the Democratic Party ticket of John W. Davis and Charles Bryan.

The Democratic and Republican conventions had both rejected AFL-promoted planks calling for the prohibition of injunctions in labor disputes, the ratification of a constitutional amendment to ban child labor, expansion of workmen’s compensation laws, and recognition of the right of workers to bargain collectively through unions and representatives of their own choosing.

"The High Hats" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, August 5, 1924

The AFL’s executive board’s statement noted that its endorsement of the LaFollette-Wheeler ticket was because “throughout their whole political careers, [they had] stood steadfast in defense of the rights and interests of wage earners and farmers.” The statement cautioned, however that,  “cooperation hereby urged is not a pledge of identification with an independent party movement or a third party, nor can it be construed as support for such a party, group or movement except as such action accords with our nonpartisan political policy.”

Gompers's endorsement of LaFollette was less than enthusiastic: “It looks as if we are forced to turn to LaFollette. … There is no other way.”

"Say, Lissen Kiddo..." by Marvin P. “Hay” Bales in Labor Herald, Chicago, August, 1924

The Marxists over at the Trade Union Education League's Labor Herald monthly were not amused by the AFL's endorsement of the LaFollette campaign. (As we've covered before, the AFL expelled TUEL activists at successive conventions, so they couldn't have been surprised by it, either.)

I'm assuming that "Hay Bales" was this cartoonist's nom de plume. Does anyone know who he or she really was?

"To Robt. LaFollette from Sam Gompers" by Fred Ellis in Labor Herald, Chicago, September, 1924

There was one other not-so-Marxist option available to the AFL. The Farmer-Labor Party's ticket of miners union leader Duncan McDonald and grange activist William Bouck, however, gave up campaigning soon after their party's convention.

"By His Enemies Ye Shall Know Him" by Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. August 29, 1924

Talburt didn't include the Marxists of the Trade Union Educational League among LaFollette's enemies. It is interesting that he does include farmers (apparently not the discontented ones cited by John McCutcheon), as well as the more expected Big Biz, Private Monopoly, and Invisible Government. And of course, the Ku Klux Klan, but we'll get back to them presently.

Farmers were a vital component of the populist movement of the turn of the century, and the Progressive Party sprang from the same soil as the Non-Partisan League and Farmer-Labor Party of the 19-teens. Nationally, the coalition did not hold together well, and the Progressive Party of 1924 was more closely associated with certain labor unions, particularly the railway workers. A party plank proposing nationalization of the railroads should have appealed to farmers who were at the mercy of the railroad companies' prices for carrying their produce to market; but if you can believe Harold Talburt, who was clearly a fan of the Wisconsin senator, some farmers were content with that.

"Hard to Get Rid Of" by Chas Kuhn in Indianapolis News, August 29, 1924

If you expected labor to be in the Democrats' pocket, the association of the party's presidential nominee with Wall Street goes a long way to explain how labor's love was lost. The AFL had backed William McAdoo for the Democratic nomination, but Davis was a partner in the law firm that represented J.P. Morgan, a sworn enemy of the labor movement.

"The Persistent Talker" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, ca. August 13, 1924

I can make out "Klan Vote," "Soldier Vote," and "Patriot Vote" on the fish ignoring the Democratic donkey's bait in Carey Orr's cartoon. He faults John Davis's refuting the Ku Klux Klan and defending his running mate's opposition to military conscription.

"Nobody Wants His Friendship" by Sam Armstrong in Tacoma News-Tribune, August 25, 1024

Sam Armstrong depicts LaFollette and Davis running away from a bewildered Klansman, and Republican vice presidential nominee Dawes readying to hurl a boulder from the back of a fleeing elephant. Unless that leg in the foreground belongs to the incumbent president of the United States, it's curious that Calvin Coolidge is absent.

"Scared Stiff" by Rollin Kirby, in New York World, ca. August 29, 1924

Democratic-leaning cartoonist Rollin Kirby drew the Republican Party haunted by Klan infiltration of the Grand Old Parties of Maine and Indiana.

We've discussed the Klan and Indiana Republicans before. In Maine, the Klan was active against the state's Catholic and Jewish minorities. The Republican candidate for Governor, Owen Brewster, had co-sponsored Klan-backed legislation seeking to outlaw state aid to parochial schools, and now tacitly welcomed Klan support against the anti-Klan Democratic candidate, William R. Pattangall.

By the way, I still have not seen any cartoons by Indianapolis News cartoonist Chas Kuhn about Klan influence in his state's Republican Party.

"Darn" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, ca. September 1, 1924

But turning back to Rollin Kirby, he here ridicules Calvin Coolidge for having little to say about the Klan.  While Coolidge did speak out in defense of Catholics, Jews, Native Americans, and Blacks on various occasions, he believed the best way to deal with the Klan was to avoid giving it publicity. 

His running mate, Charles Dawes, condemned the Klan in a speech in Maine on August 23; according to the New York Times account, the audience was "unresponsive." Coolidge would explicitly criticize the Klan in a speech to the American Legion almost a year after the election.

Q Toon: At the Independents' Table

Democrats did not even get 24 hours to savor their 51-vote majority in the U.S. Senate before Senator Kyrsten Sinema decided to upstage Rev. Raphael Warnock and announce that she was bolting the party.

She joins Socialist Bernie Sanders (a Democrat in Presidential Politics Only) of Vermont and true Independent Angus King of Maine as the kids at the table in the corner. Both of them came to the Senate without pretending to be Democrats, and their voters elected them with full knowledge of where they stand on the key issues.

Sinema, on the other hand, an erstwhile Green Party activist from Arizona, has been a difficult member of the Democratic caucus, especially in the last two years. She stubbornly defended the chamber's filibuster rules that allow Republicans to block much of President Biden's agenda. Liberal activists have been suspicious that she has allowed herself to become beholden to big-money right-wing donors. 

Given how radically the Republican Party has lurched to the extreme right, I don't expect Sinema to stray far from Democratic Party stands on personal liberties. Fiscal and border issues seem likely to be another story. If the Republican House starts impeaching Biden administration officials willy-nilly, who the hell knows what Sinema would do?

She's up for reelection in 2024, and had been facing a strong challenger in the Democratic primary. By declaring herself an Independent, she sets up a three-way general election; and since Arizona does not have Georgia-style run-offs, even a Requblican who would make Kari Lake look reasonable could take the seat with a measly 34% of the vote.

Hold onto your tater tots.

Concern Noted

Oh, poor Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine. She always has such deep concerns for so much of the rank partisanship in the Senate. Whether the issue is health care, Brett Kavanaugh, or having a fair and thorough impeachment trial, she's always concerned.

Then she votes in lockstep with the rest of McConnell's minions anyway.

Ditto Mitt Romney, Republican Senator from MassachUtah.

One wonders why any senators need to be present at the impeachment trial at all. Just let Mitch McConnell cast 53 votes in the record any time a vote is needed.

Q Toon: The Kids Are Alright

Right-wing gun nuts are finding that their ad hominem attacks against the survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Parkland High School are just not selling.

Efforts to claim that one young man, David Hogg, was a "crisis actor" and wasn't really a student from Parkland, based on his family's recent vacation to California, were shown to be laughable: a yearbook screenshot purporting to prove that Hogg had been graduated from a California high school shows the student above him wearing a Stoneman Douglas High School Eagles jersey.

A image of another prominent student photoshopped to make it appear that she was tearing up the U.S. Constitution fooled many eager believers, but a tweet from a Republican candidate in Maine about her backfired badly last month:

A week ago, [Leslie Gibson] was the only declared candidate to represent the 57th District in Maine's House of Representatives. On Friday, his fortunes vastly changed as he quit the race to represent the towns of Greene and Sabattus, according to the Associated Press.
Gibson had become known outside his little corner of Maine for what many say was his rage-tweet against the vocal survivors of the shooting that killed 17 in Parkland, Fla.
"There is nothing about this skinhead lesbian that impresses me and there is nothing that she has to say unless you're a frothing at the mouth moonbat," the now-deleted tweet read.
The 17-year-old girl he was referring to is Emma González, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken activists in the Parkland group.

Last week, Fox squawking head Laura Ingraham had to apologize when advertisers pulled their support of her show over a tweet from her taunting Mr. Hogg for not getting accepted into four of the colleges to which he had applied; she promptly went on vacation. Washed-up rocker Ted Nugent quickly stepped into the breach, calling the students mushy-brained soulless liars. Parkland student Cameron Kasky fired back, tweeting, "If only he saw all the tears. If only he had to look into the eyes I’ve looked into. If only he saw what this did to all of us. And here the NRA is, receiving more fear-based donations than ever. Talk about ‘no soul.’"

The NRA and its minions had likewise savaged the bereaved parents of Sandy Hook; but this time, they're trying to beat a bunch of social media-savvy teenagers who show every sign of being better at this game than any middle-aged or gray-haired troll on the internet, TV, or the campaign trail.

God willing, they'll prove better than the Russian bot army, too.

Laugh It Up, Fuzzball

So Trumpatine plans to send in a attack squadron of wookiees and ewoks?

Rall Entando al Fine

Ted Rall continues his series on How I Got Fired And Nobody Cared at rall.com this week, coming around to the failure of his fellow cartoonists to leap to his defense.

"You guys suck" was Rall's header for an August 9 screed on the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) listserv blasting the AAEC's silence on his case -- described as deafening in another cartoonist's posting, the first on the topic, on July 28. (Postings on the listserv are supposed to be confidential, but since Rall has brought the discussion out into the open, I think the cat is out of the bag.)

Between July 28 and the publication of the AAEC statement on August 11, there was a lot of back and forth on the listserv over whether Rall had proven that his case was any worse than that any of the scores of other editorial cartoonists who have lost their jobs in the last 20-30 years, none of which have produced official statements from the AAEC. Of course, hardly any of those cartoonists were sent out the door with an editorial calling them liars.

So far this year, the AAEC has condemned the killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and editors, condemned the arrest of Malaysian cartoonist Zunar, condemned the shootings at the "Draw Mohammed" confab in Dallas, called for Maine's Governor LePage to apologize for telling a cartoonist's son that the governor would like to shoot the boy's father, and, of course, called for an investigation into the tape the Los Angeles Police Department gave to the L.A. Times editors to get Rall fired.

On the other side of the coin, I can't recall any instance of the AAEC officially criticizing any cartoonist by name -- although accusations of plagiarism have resulted in heated discussion on the listserv, a few well-known cartoonists leaving the association, and eventually, a code of ethics (see the update at the end of this story). There was plenty of internal discussion whether or not the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the Texas anti-Islam cartoon contest were defensible, but in the end, the Free Speech absolutists won out.

We cartoonists are used to having our work criticized; we love praise, of course, but see criticism as a sign that our cartoons have succeeded in sparking conversation. Bill Sanders, for example, devoted three pages of The Sanders Book (1977) to hate mail. Today's editors, on the other hand, see editorial cartoons as little more than a graphic to break up an otherwise gray page. The occasional threat from a reader to cancel a subscription may not get a cartoonist fired, but complaints from advertisers, law enforcement, or the publisher's golfing buddies are likely to prompt an editor to discover reasons to "tighten the budget."

At issue here is not just whether the L.A. Times unjustly besmirched a cartoonist's reputation by calling him a liar, but also whether it should have leapt to conclusions based upon accusations by the LAPD supported only by a poor-quality recording.

I don't know who is qualified to step in at this late date, but a recent cartoon by Matt Wuerker was parsed by Politifact (and found "mostly true"), so perhaps we should let the Tampa Bay Times judge whether Rall's or the LAPD's pants are on fire.

Postscript:  (The Times defends its actions here, including a link to a recording from the LAPD purporting to document LAPD's failed attempts to contact Rall after his initial complaint about his treatment.
(But according to one of Rall's colleagues, J.P. Trostle, "As someone who has known Mr. Rall for almost 20 years, and was calling him frequently during this time period (as we finished collaborating on the book Attitude: The New Subversive Alternative Political Cartoonists), I can assure you that that is NOT Ted Rall’s voice on the answering machine, nor was it the greeting message he was using at time — which means the LAPD was calling the wrong number.")

Q Toon: A Totally Gay Election

2012 will go down in history as the first year that voters approved marriage equality.

Different-sex marriage remains the law in Minnesota; but voters in Washington and Maryland approved prior action of their legislatures in favor of marriage equality, and voters in Maine overturned a previous referendum restricting marriage to straight couples. (And voters in Iowa rebuffed an effort to unseat a fourth justice of their Supreme Court who had ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009.)

The six congressional candidates alluded to in this cartoon are incumbents Jared Polis (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), and newly elected candidates Mark Pocan (D-WI), Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Mark Takano (D-WA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The lone gay candidate to lose last Tuesday was Republican Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost to incumbent John Tierney (D-MA).

I went somewhat out on a limb by including Sinema in that list when I drew the cartoon on Sunday night. That race wasn't called in her favor until Tuesday. She will be the first openly bisexual member of Congress, and possibly its second out atheist.

And I'm particularly proud that my home state elected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. I'll admit that I occasionally had some doubts that Wisconsin would elect as Senator one of the most liberal members of the House (and I was not alone here) after making such a sharp turn to the right in 2010 and 2011. But, the unrelieved nastiness from all advertising comers in the fall notwithstanding, she did a great job of introducing herself to the voters while Tommy Thompson and his Republican rivals were busy attacking each other in the spring and summer.

÷ ÷ ÷

Regarding Saturday's blog entry about in the Strand Magazine, I've been trying to find the next article in Arthur Lord's series on American editorial cartoonists in 1902, so far without success. In fact, I have been unable to find Mr. Lord's article in Google's on-line digitization of the October, 1902 edition of Strand Magazine in which it is supposed to have appeared.

What Mr. Gus Frederick says on his Homer Davenport site is: "Through Ebay, I recently obtained a selection of nine original pages from the October, 1902 number of The Strand Magazine from London. This was an article entitled The American Cartoonist and His Work by Arthur Lord and featured short bios and examples of four 'famous' cartoonists of the day."

Mr. Frederick posted an Optical Character Recognition rendition of the text and illustrations rather than images of those nine pages, so we can't confirm that they have "The Strand Magazine" in the top margin of alternate pages, as the magazine would have had. I have so far found no reference to anyone in the U.S. or Canada having started up a "Strand Magazine" stateside, or that there was a separate North American edition of the London publication. (Perhaps in London, Ontario?)

One reason I suspect that the publication is American is the lack of any British condescension toward the New World cartoonists or the U.S. press. When Ohio Senator Mark Hanna is first mentioned in the article, it is by his last name alone, indicating that the author expected all of his readers to know who "Hanna" was. It's a reasonable assumption that American readers would recognize "Hanna" as the Karl Rove of William McKinley's presidency, but would British readers?

Mr. Frederick notes the British spellings -- "draughtsman," rather than "draftsman"; "abhour" instead of "abhor" -- and florid language of the article, but that doesn't guarantee that the pages were published in London. "American" spelling was not universally accepted in in this country in 1902. American spelling dates back at least as far as Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, but there were resistance and ridicule when Teddy Roosevelt proposed making "simplified spelling" official in 1906.

My first thought was that the pages might be from another publication. I thought of Public Opinion, which was fond of printing editorial cartoons; but it was published weekly, not monthly, and doesn't appear to have attached bylines to its feature articles. It seems unlikely that Puck would have profiled a cartoonist from the competing Harper's Weekly while ignoring its own remarkable cartoonists. Harper's Weekly, of course, was published weekly; and, like any other magazine of its day, put its own name on the top of every page.

I'll keep looking.

Q Toon: Marriage Equality on Balance

With election day 13 days away, it's time for this cartoonist to stop frittering his time away on cartoons about National Coming Out Day, evangelicals slumming in the gayborhood, and TV sitcoms.

The 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last week that the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) is unconstitutional.

[Judge Dennis Jacobs] said the law was written so broadly that it touches more than a thousand federal laws. "Homosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public," Jacobs wrote.
He rejected arguments by supporters of the law that it was intended to limit new categories of eligibility for federal funds, promote uniform administration of federal law, protect traditional marriage and encourage responsible procreation.
"Even if preserving tradition were in itself an important goal, DOMA is not a means to achieve it," he said.

That DOMA was headed for the Supreme Court was a virtual certainty, so the question is how the ruling will affect ballot initiatives in Minnesota, Maryland, Maine and Washington state on November 6. The legislatures of Maine, Maryland and Washington have voted for, and their governors have signed into law, marriage equality. Opposite-sex marriage exclusivity, on the other hand, is the law in Minnesota, where the Catholic Church is dropping everything else to enshrine it in the state constitution.

The Washington, opponents of marriage equality succeeded in putting Measure 74 on the ballot, possibly confusing voters because passage would actually affirm what the legislature and governor have already done.


In Maine, this marks the first time that gay-rights supporters -- rather than opponents -- have chosen to put same-sex marriage before voters. A gay-marriage law passed by the legislature in 2009 was overturned in a referendum that fall. Marriage equality supporters in the state decided to put a measure in support of marriage equality on the ballot this year, when the presidential election would draw out more voters.

The polls have the Minnesota amendment on the razor's edge, while there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about one of the other three states becoming the first in the nation to support marriage equality by popular referendum.

In Maryland, as in Maine and Washington, the most recent polls show a lead for the supporters of same-sex marriage. But comparable leads in other states -- notably in California in 2008 -- evaporated by Election Day, and Josh Levin, manager of the Marylanders for Marriage Equality campaign, expects the final result to be extremely close.

With races this close, anything, from a judge's ruling exciting one side, to the Obama and Romney campaigns' decision to focus their efforts elsewhere, could have an effect on the outcome.

This week's Q Syndicate cartoon

The anti-marriage movement overturned marriage equality in the state of Maine by repeating the ridiculous charge that allowing same-sex couples the rights and responsibilities of marriage would result in having to teach schoolchildren how gay people get it on. The pro-marriage side's efforts showing real-life families and how they are affected by marriage rights and the lack thereof couldn't win out against the frightening thought of some hypothetical kindergarten class learning what some hypothetical classmate's two daddies do in the bedroom by watching a hypothetical Colt video.

Meanwhile, here in Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court has declined to hear a Wisconsin Family Action lawsuit to overturn Domestic Partnership benefits in our state. Given the bought and paid for majority of conservative justices on the court, it seems unlikely that a majority of the court disagrees with the WFA position that domestic partnership benefits are a violation of the constitutional amendment approved by 1.2 million Wisconsin voters in 2006 which prohibits the state from recognizing same-sex marriages or any other "substantially similar" legal arrangement.

More likely, some of the conservatives didn't want to set a precedent by allowing WFA to skip over the lower courts by taking their case directly to the Supreme Court. That's simply my guess, since the court did not issue any statement with their decision; but that fits in with my suspicion that a majority reached the conclusion not to hear the case for entirely different reasons from each other.

The court has heard arguments in a separate case charging that the 2006 referendum on the constitutional amendment improperly put two separate questions before the voters in the same ballot issue: namely, whether the state would recognize same-sex marriages on the one hand, and whether the state would recognize "substantially similar" legal arrangements. Theoretically, a voter who was against same-sex marriage but in favor of allowing a "substantially similar" alternate arrangement would be forced to vote against his/her convictions with either a yes or a no vote. A decision in the case is still pending, but it's hard to imagine Gableman, Ziegler, Prosser and Crooks finding a conservative-sponsored constitutional amendment unconstitutional.

It's also hard to imagine that should our domestic partnership be nullified by the Supreme Court, Chris and I would be able to get our filing fees back.

This week's Q Syndicate cartoon/s

Voters in the states of Maine and Washington will go to the polls on November 3 to approve or rescind legislation passed by their representatives and signed by their governors. In Maine, the ballot question seeks to overturn marital equality; in Washington, religious conservatives want to overturn domestic partnership benefits.

I couldn't jigger this week's cartoon to account for both situations, but the magic of photoshop makes it possible to do two nearly identical cartoons without having to draw two actual cartoons.

So here's the Washington state version of the cartoon:

To my mind, the religious conservatives in Washington give evidence that their fight has nothing whatsoever to do with "preserving the sanctity of marriage," since same-sex couples in that state still have no right to marry. The issue for them is now, and always has been, punishing homosexuals for not being heterosexuals.

This Week's Totally Gay Cartoon

In Maine, the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a marriage equality bill. Christian Civic League Maine Family Council leader Michael S. Heath wrote an op-ed piece offering the observation that a spell of cold, damp weather and a potato blight just might be a sign of God being peeved with the state legislature and Governor Baldacci.

I just thought it curious that the right wing of this country firmly doubts that a century of CO2 and methane emissions by billions of people couldn't possibly affect global climate, but same-sex marriage can.

Incidentally, the cold snap in Maine has since broken.

But a tornado hit Minneapolis just as the ELCA Churchwide Assembly there was about to vote to adopt (by the exact 2/3 margin required!) a statement on human sexuality that pointedly refuses to condemn homosexuals. Hmmm.

Marriage Equality in Maine

"In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions. I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage....
"This new law does not force any religion to recognize a marriage that falls outside of its beliefs. It does not require the church to perform any ceremony with which it disagrees. Instead, it reaffirms the separation of Church and State."
--Maine Governor John E. Baldacci, May 6, 2009