A Strange Feeling of '92

It's that strange feeling you sometime....mmmms get ... that you've drawn something thirty years before.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Jan. 21, 1992

When that election year started out, the sheen was wearing off from Operation Desert Storm, Bush the Elder's splendid little war to liberate the Emirate of Kuwait from the evil clutches of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Drawn, apparently, for a January 16, 1992 issue that wasn't published

Bush entered that election year dealing with renewed concern over the state of the economy, in part due to worries that the balance of trade between the U.S. and Japan had begun to tilt in Tokyo's favor. His highly publicized trip to Japan would be remembered, however, for an unfortunate bout of intestinal flu during a state dinner with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. 

in UWM Post, January 27, 1992

Dozens of Democrats, meanwhile, were vying for the nomination to run against Bush in November. Leading the pack was one William Jefferson Clinton, a former Governor of Arkansas. When his campaign was rocked by an accusation of an extramarital affair, it seemed to be a replay of the scandal that scuttled Gary Hart's run for the Democrats' 1988 presidential nomination.

in Milwaukee Journal, "Taking Names" column, February 4, 1992

I've rerun that cartoon before, and whenever I do, I have to accompany it with this clipping — the only time I've ever appeared in the Milwaukee Journal and/or Sentinel.

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Okay now, today's post seems to be running a bit short. Christmas was kind of hectic and I topped it off with a mild case of the 'rona — thanks to my being fully vaccinated and boosted, it wasn't any worse, and I'm pretty sure I'm over it. (Although it keeps trying to flare up again after I think it's gone.)  I haven't had the energy to do the kind of research you, dear reader, deserve, so I end up today posting three cartoons from a month when I only drew four.

And I don't have anything to say about that fourth cartoon, so here's one from January, 1982, instead.

in UW-Parkside Ranger,  Somers, WI, Jan. 21, 1982

For those of you not old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State, General Al Haig, you really missed a master of military syntax. It actually earned the neologism "Haigspeak," defined as "Language characterized by pompous obscurity resulting from redundancy, the semantically strained use of words, and verbosity," or "not using one syllable when five would do." 

It's kind of a shame he only lasted in office a little over a year, because satirizing his brusque demeanor and linguistic legerdemain was actually rather fun.

R.I.P. Bill Sanders

"Put It Back" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, July 1, 1971

 

The family of past AAEC President Bill Sanders announced his passing today.

Editorial cartoonist during his life at the Japan Times (English edition), Greensboro Daily News, Kansas City Star, and Milwaukee Journal, he had time in his busy schedule to give this aspiring cartoonist valuable tips and insight when I was still scribbling on typing paper with ballpoint pen.

Rest In Power, sir!

Ink-stained Ring-side Seats

Earlier this week, I mourned the end of an era: newspapers sending their editorial cartoonists to Republican and Democratic National Conventions may soon be a thing of the past. So, in the calm between the storms of this year's conventions, let's take a look back at this by-going tradition, shall we?

"More Glimpses of the Democratic Convention" by Leo Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. June 26, 1924

Sending cartoonists to these conventions grew out of newspapers in the 19th Century not being able to reproduce photographs well (and of the earliest cameras requiring everybody to hold very still for several seconds). They sent artists to capture the drama and excitement of Americans from all around the country gathering in hot, sweltering halls to decide the fate of the nation.

Harper's Weekly, May 19, 1860

Perhaps the Republicans' second national convention was as placid an affair as Harper's Weekly's artist conveyed it, but I doubt it. Before long, illustrators wanted to portray the enthusiasm, indeed, partisanship in the hall. Here's some fellow stoked to see his fellow delegates nominating William McKinley for a second term, an outcome that had never been in doubt:

E.N. Blue in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 23, 1900

Not content simply to be neutral observers, newspapers' editorial cartoonists became reporters. As the Republicans failed in ballot after ballot to settle on a candidate at their 1920 convention in Chicago, I imagine that John McCutcheon was hoping to scoop all the other Windy City cartoonists only to have to dash off this hasty oeuvre.

"It's a Boy" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1920

(I've already covered most of McCutcheon's cartoons for the rest of that Chicago convention.)

"And So We Say Farewell to Chicago" by Gene Basset for Scripps Howard Newspapers, Aug. 30, 1968

It would be interesting to assemble visiting cartoonists' sketches of another Chicago convention: the tumultuous Democratic convention of 1968. Did any of them witness the police riot on the streets, or were they all watching the chaos in the International Ampitheatre? Certainly what was going on outside was well-known inside; an Gene Basset cartoon earlier in the week showed Hubert Humphrey obliviously stepping over the bodies of wounded and bandaged protesters.

Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, July, 1972

For the most part, however, the stuff produced by editorial cartoonists at party conventions since I started paying attention have been fun, light-hearted observations of the passing scene, as in this mélange by Pat Oliphant at the Democrats' next convention, in Miami Beach.

"The Room Situation Out Here Is Very Tight" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, August 19, 1976

Or this Bill Sanders missive from the Republicans' 1976 convention in Kansas City. This must have been a good opportunity to get reacquainted with old buddies for Sanders, who worked at the Kansas City Star from 1963 to 1967. He discusses other convention trips in his memoir, but not this one.

I used to have a copy of the Kansas City Star with the banner headline reporting Gerald Ford winning the nomination, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I guess it must have been in the box of my stuff that was destroyed when our basement flooded several years ago. That's pretty much what I figure whenever I give up looking for something.

Paul Szep in Boston Globe, August, 1984

Paul Szep of the Boston Globe took one approach to covering the Republicans' 1984 recoronation of Ronald Reagan. The late, great Jeff MacNelly took another.

"The Culture Scene in 'Big D'" by Jeff MacNelly in Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1984

Just because one's editors sent one all the way to the convention and gave one an entire page of newsprint realty all to oneself — in full color no less, which was a big effing deal in 1984 — didn't mean one actually had to go to the damn convention.

"Yachting in North Texas" by Jeff MacNelly in Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1984

1989 in Review

Hey, since I devoted several posts last year to cartoons from 1989, here's the photo I took at that year's end of 1989's newspaper headlines.

Careful readers may notice a magazine headline that was repeated in my 2019 photo.

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P.S.: I've commented several times about how it is getting more and more difficult to assemble newspapers for these photographs. Today provides a sterling example.

On the morning after the Trump administration intentionally assassinated the top military official of a foreign, sovereign state against whom we have not declared war, while he was in a neighboring country in which we have troops stationed (and what about the Kurds?), without consulting anyone in Congress or any one of our NATO allies, here is the choice of my locally available newspaper front pages:

Only the Chicago Tribune managed to squeeze the story onto Page One.

The Whole World Was Watching

Last week, Selective Serviceback Saturday shared cartoons from 150 years ago about the first presidential election held after the 15th Amendment extended the right to vote to African-American citizens of the U.S. Today, against my better judgment, we step ahead 100 years from 1868 to the last presidential election held before the 26th Amendment extended the right to vote to 18- to 20-year-old citizens of the U.S.

Others in the cartoon-rehashing game have a much better recollection of the 1968 presidential election than I, so this won't be a comprehensive retrospective by any means. So much of what I do remember is actually Frank Gorshin's and David Frye's impressions of the candidates. Here goes anyway.

"I Think We Can Start Bringing Them Home Soon" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September, 1968

The #1 issue of interest to those 18- to 20-year-olds had to be the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. They couldn't vote for president, but they did have to answer to their draft board.

President Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had won his party's presidential nomination. His long liberal record, at the 1948 Democratic Convention and as lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was overshadowed by his association with Johnson and the war. He tried to promise to bring an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, only to be publicly contradicted by Johnson and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. (Laird in Oliphant's cartoon is Wisconsin Congressman Melvin Laird, who would become Richard Nixon's first Secretary of Defense.)

"Anchored" by Tom "Obadiah" Curtis in National Review, October 22, 1968

An eleventh-hour announcement that the Johnson was halting bombing raids over North Vietnam would fail to give enough lift to the Humphrey campaign. Perhaps today we'd call it Johnson Fatigue; liberals who ought to have agreed with Humphrey on civil rights and other issues remained disenchanted; Michigan's New Democratic Coalition and the California Young Democrats withheld their endorsements, and even Norman Mailer mused that Nixon wouldn't be all that bad.

"Making Like a Dove" by Roy Justus in Minneapolis Star, August, 1968

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon's anti-communist record should have indicated that he would continue the war in Vietnam, but he claimed to have a secret plan to end the war within 90 days. What he didn't tell America was that he meant within 90 days of his re-election to a second term, and that the plan involved spreading the war to Laos, Cambodia, and Kent State.

"The Newer Than New Nixon" by Robert Zschiesche in Greensboro Daily News, October, 1968

On domestic issues, Nixon's promises to bring Law and Order appealed to what he called the "Silent Majority" horrified by political assassinations and by riots in America's inner cities, universities, and at the Democratic National Convention. (Not to mention promiscuous sex and drug use. But there, I mentioned them anyway.) Consistently leading in the polls, Nixon offered mostly pablum, and — still smarting from his experience in 1960 — refused to meet Humphrey in any debates.

"The Fraidycat" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 24, 1968

Nixon's campaign themes included promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse the decisions of the Earl Warren court (Johnson would withdraw his filibustered nominations of Abe Fortas and Homer Thornberry in October), to fight inflation, and to replace the draft with an all-volunteer military. Behind the scenes, he urged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to refuse peace talks until Nixon could take office.

"Measuring Up" by Ranan Lurie in Life, October, 1968

Henry Luce's Life magazine endorsed Nixon in the election, but its cartoonist Ranan Lurie clearly was more ambivalent about the voters' choices. So were a number of others who put themselves forward as third party candidates. Most notably, Alabama Governor George Wallace ran at the head of the American Independent Party on a segregationist platform, declaring that "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats."

"Foreign and Domestic" by Herblock in Washington Post, October, 1968

He chose as his running mate retired Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had advocated bombing North Vietnam "back to the stone age," using "anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons." Yet while LeMay was more hawkish on the war than Wallace, the general stood to the left of him on Wallace's signature issue.

"There Seems to Be More Than a Dime's Worth of Difference..." by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 25, 1968

On the left, the most notable third-party candidates were comedian Dick Gregory and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver heading rival wings of the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Communist Party USA's Charlene Mitchell. Gregory made a tour of college campuses, where he promised to paint the White House black, then bring the troops home from Vietnam and "send LBJ with nothing but a barbecue gun." His counterfeit dollar bills won him considerable attention, not least from the Secret Service.

Mitchell's running mate wouldn't be old enough to serve as Vice President until 1980, and Cleaver (also not yet 35 years old) fled the country after a shoot-out between police and Black Panthers in Oakland, California. But then, getting elected was never really the point of their candidacies.

"Out of the Running," unsigned (perhaps Ted Shearer), in The Afro American, Baltimore MD, October 19, 1968

The Afro American, in an editorial accompanied by the above cartoon, counseled its readers against casting their vote for any of the three African-American candidates:

"Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver and Mrs. Charlene Mitchell are all doomed to defeat this year, and all of them know it. Their exercises in futility would be more tolerable as means of protests against ills in the society in some other election year. ...
"The danger is that some voters, frustrated with conditions as they are or wishing to make an individual protest also, may throw away valuable votes."

As it was, their campaigns, even lumped in with votes for comedian Pat Paulsen and comic strip characters Pogo and Snoopy, were not enough to throw any state from one of the front runners to another.

"Remind Me to Get That Fixed" by Dan Dowling, Kansas City Star,

Wallace, on the other hand, carried Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, the last third-party candidate to win electoral votes by getting a plurality of any state's votes. But it was not enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives; even in the unlikely event that Humphrey had won Wallace's five states in a two-candidate race, he would still have fallen well short of a majority in the electoral college.

But since fewer than 500,000 votes separated Humphrey and Nixon, who can say how Wallace's 9.9 million would have divided up without him?

And yet, 50 years later, with one election decided by the Supreme Court, and two awarded to the second-place candidate, we still haven't fixed our cuckoo electoral vote system.

Thwart the Court

It may yet be early to foresee how the current Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will turn out. Nevertheless, Seriatimback Saturday takes a look at Supreme Court nominees who came up just a little bit short. In my own lifetime, anyway.

I wasn't drawing political cartoons in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson tapped Associate Justice Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice upon the retirement of Earl Warren. Johnson had faced no significant opposition when he named Fortas to the Supreme Court in 1965, but by the time he announced his decision to elevate Fortas to Chief Justice, Johnson was politically weakened by Vietnam War weariness and had already announced that he would not run for reelection.

"Hear Ye, Hear Ye!" by Karl Hubenthal in Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,  July, 1968

A coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats filibustered the Fortas nomination, initially claiming the grounds that Johnson was a lame duck who shouldn't be deciding the direction of the Supreme Court for years to follow. More to the point was Fortas's close friendship with LBJ — he'd be accurately described as a crony of the President — and his and the Warren Court's liberal record.

"Senate Judiciary Committee Members..." by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, July, 1968

Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) attacked Fortas for his having voted with the Court's majority rulings in favor of free speech rights in pornography cases. In closed session of the Senate, Thurmond played a number of the porn films which had been at issue in those cases, even entering them into the official Senate record. Thurmond's tactic was widely ridiculed, but proved effective in blocking Fortas's nomination (and along with it, LBJ's nomination of Texas Congressman Homer Thornberry to take the seat Fortas would have vacated. Perhaps Clyde Peterson, Herc Ficklen, or some other Texan drew a cartoon or two about Thornberry's nomination, but I haven't seen one).

Richard Nixon got to name Warren Burger as Chief Justice in Fortas's stead, and every Chief Justice since has been a Republican nominee. Fortas would soon be compelled to resign from the Court over his financial association with a Wall Street financier in trouble for securities violations, opening another seat for Nixon to fill.

As a critical element of his "Southern Strategy," Richard Nixon came into office having promised Strom Thurmond that he would name a conservative southerner to the Supreme Court. To fulfill his promise he nominated Clement Haynsworth Jr., a South Carolina judge who had a record of foot-dragging on racial integration and of opposition to labor unions.

Support and opposition to the Haynsworth nomination were both bipartisan. Southern Democrats including Judiciary Committee Chairman Eastwood supported him, while liberal Republicans were troubled by accusations that Judge Haynsworth had ruled on matters in which he had a financial interest, and had bought stock in the Brunswick Corporation while hearing a case in which it was involved.

"Aw, What're a Few Conflict of Interest Stock Deals?" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 11, 1969

A tangential relationship with Bobby Baker, a Senate staffer convicted of larceny and tax evasion in 1967, proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Following the Senate's 45-55 vote to reject Haynsworth, Nixon's next nominee was a Tallahassee, Florida judge named G. Harrold Carswell.

Civil rights leaders were skeptical of his repudiation of a 1948 racist speech he had given, yet Democrats were at first wary of mounting opposition to a second southern judge. Sen. Edward Brooke (R-MA), the lone African-American in the Senate, led opposition to Carswell.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved his nomination 13 to 4 in spite of Carswell's spectacularly mediocre judicial record. Seven out of 24 of his rulings had been overturned on appeal. Florida State University law school dean Joshua Morse claimed, "I cannot think of a single thing of Judge Carswell's that I am familiar with." Harvard Law Dean Derek Bok said, "The public record of Judge Carswell's career and accomplishments clearly does not place him within even an ample list of the nation's more distinguished jurists."

"How Can You Ask Us to Support a Guy..." by Tom Curtis in Milwaukee Sentinel, March 18, 1970

Speaking in Carswell's defense, Sen. Roman Hruska (R-NE) famously replied, "So what if he is mediocre?  There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers.  They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?  We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there."

"Holmes v. Carswell" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, March 25, 1970

Nixon pulled out all the stops to convince Republicans that they had a duty to confirm Carswell, but in the end, 51 Republicans and Democrats voted down the nomination. Grousing that Senators would never confirm any southern conservative, Nixon named Minnesotan Harry Blackmun as his third choice for Oliver Wendell Holmes' seat on the high court. (Blackmun would author the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, and conservatives would resolve never to nominate any but the most reliably right-wing justices ever again.)

I have no editorial cartoons to accompany this next item (nobody draws cartoons about the dog that didn't bark), but this is a good moment to point out that Jimmy Carter remains the only president since Andrew Johnson not to name a single justice to the Supreme Court. Even James Garfield, president for only six months and on his deathbed for almost half of that time, got to name Stanley Matthews to the Court.

We now come to appointments I had the opportunity to draw about myself, so I don't have to continue stealing other cartoonists' work. In 1987, Ronald Reagan raised liberals' hackles by appointing former Solicitor General Robert Bork to the seat vacated by Justice Lewis Powell. Bork had been the Nixon underling who fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox when his superiors, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy A.G. William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than carry out Nixon's order. He was also outspoken on his goal of overturning the civil rights and privacy rulings of the Warren and Burger courts.

After the Senate voted 42-58 to reject Bork, Reagan's next choice was Douglas Ginsburg (no relation to RBG), a 41-year-old whom he had named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia a year earlier.

The Ginsburg nomination quickly collapsed after news broke of his marijuana use in the 1960s and 70s as a student and as an assistant professor at Harvard. Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration after only ten days in the national spotlight, and the spectre of Reefer Madness breaking out in judges' chambers was averted.

George W. Bush had two Supreme Court vacancies to fill in the summer of 2005: longtime Bush friend Harriet Miers led the search for a successor to Sandra Day O'Connor, for which she recommended John Roberts. But when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died of thyroid cancer, Bush decided to nominate Roberts to replace Rehnquist and Miers to succeed O'Connor.

Democrats and Republicans alike found her answers to Senators' questions lacking, contradictory, and even insulting. Having no experience as a judge, elected official, or academic, her record was even thinner than Carswell's.

With Republicans in the majority, it was their reservations about her commitment to conservative orthodoxy that would doom her appointment. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) saw to it that every one of her verbal missteps, especially statements that suggested that there was an outside glimmer of a ghost of a chance that she might perhaps uphold Roe v. Wade, made it into the press. Miers withdrew from Senate consideration before a vote could be taken.

Finally, we come to Barack Obama's foiled appointment of Merrick Garland after the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Whereas Republicans this year have expressed a sense of urgency to fill the Anthony Kennedy vacancy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) found no necessity to have nine justices on the court when its fall term was to begin nine months later, on the grounds that there was to be a presidential election a month after that and the inauguration of a new president after yet another two months.

Unlike Abe Fortas, Merrick Garland never even got a hearing.

Speaking of lame duck appointments, here's another bit of historical Supreme Court trivia for you. Having been defeated his reelection campaign in 1840, President Martin Van Buren nominated Peter Vivian Daniel to the Court one week before leaving office in 1841. The U.S. Senate confirmed Daniel's appointment in five days. 

Hält die Klappe und Geh Raus!

Sprechenback Saturday continues last week's discussion of the push in the U.S. to repress all things German during World War I. I got somewhat distracted toward the end of last Saturday's post, so I'm going to get the distraction out of the way right off the bat today with a cartoon about Prohibition.

"Not a Drum Was Heard" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, May, 1918

Indiana approved state-wide prohibition of alcohol on April 2, 1918, followed by Michigan on April 30. While Burt Thomas's cartoon features ward heelers lamenting the loss of their occupation and restaurateurs fretting that they must now provide quality food, what I want to point out is that John Barleycorn's casket is adorned with a beer stein and pretzel. And I suppose that's a bottle of liebfraumilch.

Before the war, cartoonists tended to portray the evils of liquor using Demon Rum or Wicked Whisky. Associating booze with the hated Hun, however, would soon facilitate passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Increasing voting rights for women and shifting revenues from alcohol excise taxes to federal income taxes were also significant, but our topic today is animus toward German-Americans.)

"No Compromise" by Archibald Chapin in St. Louis Republic, ca. May, 1918

Even in German enclaves such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, there were drives to force German language out of the public sphere. Streets, hospitals and entire cities changed their names: Germantown, Nebraska, for example, being renamed Garland, for a local soldier killed in the war. There were contests to find a more Amurikin word for sauerkraut, although the name "liberty cabbage" didn't last as long as actual sauerkraut does. A Massachusetts doctor tried to get German measles renamed "liberty measles" ... but it didn't catch on.

Detail of "Saluting 'Cincy, the Queen City of the West'" by Manuel Rosenberg in Cartoons Magazine, July, 1918

It is a shame that neither the Milwaukee Journal nor Milwaukee Sentinel employed editorial cartoonists of their own at this point in history, because I would have liked to see the sort of reaction they would have drawn to all this Germanophobia. The Journal played up Teddy Roosevelt's May 29 visit on Page 1, at which the former president called for an end to "all societies, social, political, or any other" based on European heritage. That included ethnic churches (the norm for American Lutherans, Catholics, and some smaller denominations) and, of course, newspapers.

"I wish we could provide by law so that within a reasonable space of time, a space of time that will avoid unnecessary hardship, there shall be no newspaper published in the land except in English. ... If... treasonable or semi-treasonable matter is published in a newspaper in another tongue, people do not know that the poison is being instilled at all."

"Beware the Snake" by J.E. Murphy in San Francisco Call-Post, May 13, 1918

Of course, if Milwaukee had paid any heed to Mr. Roosevelt's "campaign against the hyphen," its summers would not be anywhere near as fun.

Roosevelt's advice appealed to Sidney Greene, possibly one of the most strident Germanophobes to sling ink; his cartoon drawn after Roosevelt delivered much the same speech in New York appeared here last week.

"Marooned" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Evening Telegram, June 2, 1918

Suspicion of foreigners from whatever country one is at war with has always been fairly commonplace, and the Great War was no exception. And certain spectacular acts of German espionage had gotten cartoonists' attention, so you can't categorize all the anti-German immigrant cartoons as entirely baseless. Yet Greene seems to have been particularly anxious for the censorship of German-language media, returning to the topic again and again.

"How Long Must We Stand for This?" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June, 1918

On May 16, 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act as an amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act, criminalizing "insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military" by speech or publication. (Since I discussed Teddy Roosevelt above, I should mention that he opposed passage of the Sedition Act.) Although the government used the law to go after International Workers of the World union leaders and a few German-American businessmen, it never used the law to prosecute any German-language American publication for collusion with the enemy.

"Drop It Now" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June, 1918

But what, you may ask (go ahead, I'll wait), about the other side of the coin?

"Time to Abolish Everything That Is Foreign" by C.F. Naughton in Duluth Evening Herald, May 25, 1918

I have not been able to locate Kaiser Wilhelm's speech about abolishing everything foreign, although I did find a satiric poem about it in the American Punch magazine. Whether the quotation is accurate or not, I have no doubt that it was reported in the American press (along with the reports of German soldiers tossing Belgian babies into ovens and infecting Red Cross blankets with pathogens), and it does seem to reflect the Kaiser's policy throughout his reign of promoting German cultural identity in his empire.

"Una Colazione Andata a Male" by Sirti in Il 420, Florence, May 12, 1918

"No other language permitted except German" proclaims the sign on the wall in this Italian cartoon. France, Italy, England and the U.S. present gold to the German at the table, whose feet rest on "International Law" and a "Directory of Mankind"; neutrals, Serbia, Montenegro and Belgium hunt for scraps in the foreground amid torn-up treaties and the skulls of Justice and Liberty.

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Monday is Memorial Day, which did not escape cartoonists' notice in 1918, and it won't escape mine now. At roughly this time, Cartoons Magazine noted the death in action of Boston cartoonist Herbert Wolf, known for his cartoons of military camp life, and that of pilot Gordon Levy, son of cartoonist Bert Levy.

"When a Feller Needs a Friend" by Clare Briggs for Red Cross, May, 1918

American newspapers observed a week of emphasis on the Red Cross in late May, and the Committee on Public Education's Bureau of Cartoons must have promoted the image of a soldier tangled in barbed wire, because a number of cartoonists used it. "When a Feller Needs a Friend" was a regular feature of Clare Briggs's usually light-hearted, folksy cartoons for the New York Tribune.

(A bit of cartoonist-military trivia: Briggs's math professor at the University of Nebraska was John J. Pershing, later U.S. commander of the Western Front in the war. "I believe he will testify that it was easier to conquer Germany than to teach me math," Briggs said later. "One day he ordered me to the blackboard to demonstrate a theorem, and while I was giving the problem a hard but losing battle, he remarked: 'Briggs, sit down, you don't know anything.' Right then and there, I decided to become a newspaper man.")

The Chicago Tribune's John McCutcheon was inspired to draw the cartoon below upon the death of  Major Gervais Raoul Lufbery, 33, a famous French-American flying ace in the Lafayette Flying Corps with a reputation for coolness and daring. "Luff," as he was known throughout the U.S. Army and French Air Service, was a recipient of the Croix de Guerre, Legion of Honor, Ten Palms, and Médaille Militaire, plus four British medals and one from Montenegro.  He was shot down over France on May 19, 1918.

"The Fallen Ace" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1918

According to newspaper reports,

"It was after six American aviators had attacked in vain yesterday that Maj. Raoul Lufbery took the air back of the American sector north of Toul against an enormous enemy biplane, a few seconds later to leap from his machine as it burst into flame and drop to the Earth.
"This type of  'flying tank,' it became known here today, is practically invulnerable to the bullets and machine guns now used by American flyers.
"So it was in a hopeless struggle that America's foremost ace lost his life, after his bullets had rattled harmlessly off the armored German machine."

Lufbery was buried with full military honors with high-ranking French and American officers in attendance. After the war, Lufbery's remains were moved to the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial near Versailles as a permanent monument to the 68 American pilots and their French officers who lost their lives during the war.

2017 in Headlines

I've been taking photos of the year in newspaper front pages and magazine covers at the end of every year since I was a kid; here's the 2017 effort.

As noted many times before, many very important stories get overlooked this way. They happen gradually, or too late for early Sunday deadlines, or, frankly, they happen too far away and editors prefer to focus on more local events.

Or, in the interest of brevity, daily headlines have no staying power. If you're reading this post years down the road, you may think it was awfully considerate of Harvey to drive so many to shelters, whoever he was. The Journal Sentinel headline offers no clue why Fear Gripped Vegas.

Or there were so many natural disasters that it was impossible to display them all; the hurricane that left Puerto Rico in ruins was Maria. The same goes for terrorist attacks. And I don't have any headline to represent any of this year's devastating earthquakes (e.g., Mexico, Iran, Italy).

Here, too, is a collage of my favorites of the cartoons I drew this year. I don't pretend for them to be a comprehensive review of the year. They're just the ones I happen to like right now.