Revenge of the Sixths

This week's Graphical History Tour ventures once again into the Bergetoon vaults to haul up the stuff I was drawing about forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Mays ago.

1986

in Ranger, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, May 1, 1986

Today, Donald Joffrey Trump complains that our NATO allies are not stepping up to help him in his unilateral war excursion in Iran. Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan was similarly disappointed that only Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain lent any support to "Operation Eldorado Canyon," air attacks on purported terrorist centers in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya.

The two military operations have some elements in common, Libyan involvement in significant terrorist attacks chief among them. Yet several distinctions must be made. Reagan consulted Congress before initiating this military action. The administration also kept our European allies up to date. Operation Eldorado Canyon was launched in express retaliation for a Libyan-sponsored bombing of a Berlin nightclub popular with U.S. servicemen (two were killed in the bombing and 79 injured).

And whatever other faults he had, at least Reagan didn't start bickering with the Pope.

1996 

The university newspapers for which I drew way back in the 20th Century always suspended publication in May for finals and graduation, so my cartoons in those months were mostly on local or special interest topics.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., May 3, 1996

The NIMBYism at the heart of this one is probably fairly universal, however.

Lutheran Social Services (LSS) provides housing, counseling, and child care services to underserved and at-risk communities. Its bid purchase a house on a semi-rural road in Mount Pleasant as an eight-bed halfway house for male parolees raised instant objections from neighbors. 

One neighbor complained that the parolees would get to "live in a $170,000 home because they committed a crime." Another told the Journal Times, "If it's not safe for these men to go home, it's not safe for them to be in my neighborhood. ... Some little child is going to be molested. Some woman is going to get raped. Someone is going to get beat up. Someone's house is going to get broken into."

LSS countered, "We will know exactly where every resident is every moment of every day." Their residents were to be carefully screened, and offered alcohol and drug abuse treatment, occupational and educational opportunities, and counseling.

But at a packed community meeting, LSS yielded to pressure from residents and state legislators, and announced that it would look for another site elsewhere.

No, it didn't end up being at the local shopping mall.

But these days, our local mall would welcome just about any tenant at all.

2006

May, 2006

To get really, really parochial, this is a cartoon I was asked to draw for the 25-year reunion of my college graduating class. It must have gone astray when I sent it in (perhaps because recipients of my e-mails see my husband's name as the sender, and we've both kept our maiden names). In any event, it didn't make it into the evening program.

It was a challenge trying to winnow down the collective experience of our four years; I was not the sort of undergrad who participated in every major occasion, and lived off campus one year. The snippets that I focused on included:

•  the time ABC Sports decided to cover a football game at our college and asked the music department to come up with a halftime show
• the college's intention to tear down an old dormitory, Ytterboe, and the construction of a new one that got its name after we left
• the streaker at our graduation (didn't every graduation have at least one in those days?)
• the time Vice President Walter Mondale came to campus to swear college president Sidney Rand (New Dorm would be named after him) in as Ambassador to Norway
• our campus ID "caf" card
• the record album of of student performers at the Lion's Pause (an old theater in Ytterboe's basement)
• and of course, the hair and clothing styles of the time.

The hardest part of the drawing? Definitely the grooves of the record album.

2016

for Q Syndicate, May 2016

Here's a cartoon that brings together local, national, and special interest topics.

My hometown congressional district was represented by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) ten years ago. In May of 2016, he employed the power of his gavel to prevent passage of a component of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed time and time again to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees.

In this case, it was an amendment by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) to a Defense Department bill; his amendment would have mandated that defense contractors not discriminate against LGBTQ+ employees and applicants. With time expired for House members to cast their votes, Maloney's amendment appeared to have passed by a vote of 219 to 206.

But Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) held the vote open so that Republican party whips could pressure enough of their members to switch their votes to defeat the amendment. As soon as seven Republicans had changed their votes from Aye to Nay, the gavel finally came down.

Maloney's amendment was thus defeated by a single vote, and the defense contracts of antigay wedding cake bakers and florists were saved.

Sort of. An Obama administration executive order was already in place protecting LGBTQ+ defense contractor employees.

Until, of course, the Electoral College awarded the presidency to one Donald Bifftannen Trump four years later.

ENDA is likely to come up presently in another Graphical History Tour, so please keep it in mind.

The Fours of July

We'll get back to 1924 soon; but first, I'm gonna rummage around in my dusty old cartoons bin to check what I drew in Julys (Julies?) of decades ago.

Since we're waiting on tenterhooks to find out what lickspittle Donald Berzilius Trump will name to replace The Late Great Mike Pence as his Vice President next week, here's the challengers' ticket announced forty years ago.

Unpublished. July, 1984

Walter Mondale's choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984 was calculated to be a game-changing, historical gambit. No woman had ever been on a major party's top ticket before.

The move was somewhat blunted by the National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus — and House Speaker Tip O'Neil — having publicly pressured Mondale to name a woman to his ticket. When the announcement was made, the Mondale-Ferraro ticket couldn't escape muttered gripes that he was merely pandering to a Democratic interest group. The same thing, rightly or wrongly, nagged at Joe Biden's choice of Kamala Harris in 2020.

Contrast that to John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin in 2008. Governor Palin had her own minuses to be sure, and certainly there were more qualified Republican women for the vice presidency; but by not promising ahead of time to name a woman, McCain got credit for having made a bold move.

Of course, she turned out to be a goofball. Not that's in any way a detriment to a Republican Party career any more. But still.

At least Geraldine Ferraro wasn't the butt of jokes for the next three months as Brooklyn Barbie.

July, 1994? Sure.

The Post at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee didn't publish in July, 1994, and apparently I didn't draw anything for the Journal-Times, either. But this drawing sits in front of my August cartoons in the 1994 folder, so let's just say for the sake of having anything here that I drew it in July.

This was my one and only venture creating album art. (Is it album art if there isn't an LP?) Rev. Tim Hansen, a Lutheran pastor in Racine who had graduated a year behind me at St. Olaf College — we had an abundance in Racine pulpits that year of pastors who had been at Olaf during my four years there — asked me to create this drawing for the cover of his upcoming CD and cassette based on the title track, "Shoved by the Dove." 

That's a caricature of Pastor Tim, of course, and he had specifically asked that the dove be kicking him in the tuchus.

For those who are interested, "Shoved by the Dove" is available on Spotify.

for Q Syndicate, July, 2004

Hey, remember when Jeb Bush was the biggest threat to come out of Florida since Hurricane Andrew?

He's a kitten compared to the state's current crop of Republicans.

Anyway, this is one of several cartoons of mine poking holes in that "special rights for homosexuals" shibboleth.

The irony, jumping forward another ten years to discussion of the Employment Rights Protection Act, is that it's the bigots and 'phobes who keep insisting on having "special rights."

July 2014 for Q Syndicate

Come 2025, they might be the only ones with any rights in this country.

The Ghosts of Cartoons Past

Welcome to another Graphical History Tour. Let's rummage through my December cartoons from 2013, 2003, 1993, and 1983, shall we?

for Q Syndicate, December, 2013

I brought up Megan Kelly in this here blog the other day, quoting her fairly lengthy question to Chris Christie at last week's less-than-presidential debate. She accused him of being out-of-step with Republican orthodoxy and her own prejudices against transgender youth.

Ten years ago, Kelly was over at Fox Noise, whence she opined that everybody knows that Santa Claus can't possibly be Black because he's as Aryan as she is. Of course, we know from the historical record that the OG St. Nicholas was no such thing.

He was a Klingon. Qapla'!

for Q Syndicate, December, 2003

Once upon a time, I had an editor who objected to my depicting Santa Claus as gay. He was worried that it would offend readers' religious sensibilities. He had sold Q Syndicate by the time I drew this cartoon at the end of 2003, so I don't know if he would have had the same qualms about outing Old Man Time.

The editors of the Washington Blade really liked this cartoon, however, adding color and featuring it on the front page of their year-in-review issue. How I wish I had downloaded that version of the cartoon! (I had printed a screen grab of the page back then, but that piece of paper is a bit worse for wear twenty years on.) The Blade's colorizing job was an improvement over the original —cross-hatching really is no way to draw rainbow colors. But the grayscale image now in their archives is dark and muddy.

2003 was an extraordinarily good year for the LGBTQ+ community. An openly gay cleric, Rev. V. Gene Robinson, was elected Bishop Coadjudicator of the Episcopal Church New Hampshire Diocese. The original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the most popular program on Bravo, spawning further gay-oriented "reality programming." (Chip and Reichen were a gay couple on CBS's Amazing Race; Bravo's Boy Meets Boy was a gay version of The Bachelor with the catch that some of the supposed suitors were closeted straight dudes.)

Sadly, 2004 would prove to be a year of backlash, with President George W. Bush campaigning for reelection by pledging to enshrine opposite-sex marriage exclusivity in the U.S. Constitution — and America rewarding him by making him the only Republican presidential candidate in this century to win the popular vote.

UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 9, 1993

Skipping back another decade, I have fewer cartoons to choose from, and this may be the only one in today's post that hasn't appeared in my blog before. The student newspapers for which I drew always suspended publication in early- to mid-December for finals and winter break. Local newsmakers are busy with holiday business (as are local cartoonists), so I don't believe I drew anything for the Racine Journal Times during any of the Decembers featured here today.

The baby and the muralist in this cartoon would be millennials in their thirties today; I guess the parents might be millennials, too. If so, their family is spared having a generation gap.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Jan. 19, 1984

I drew this cartoon of the 1984 Democratic presidential candidates in December of '83 for the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside after the last issue of the semester had been published, so it was held over until January.

Having a plethora of official whatnots of the Olympic games was a new development in 1984. Having sponsors actually started way back in 1908 (Soup maker Oxo sponsored the London Olympics that year), and Coca-Cola has been an official sponsor ever since the 1928 Amsterdam games. But by 1984, it seemed that every other commercial on TV boasted of being the official adhesive tape, motor oil, or hemorrhoid ointment of the Olympics.

Since we're back to December of 1983, I have to close with the Christmas break episode of my crude take-off of "The Maltese Falcon" starring thinly disguised characters from the comic pages.

At this point in my story, a police detective who looked suspiciously like Dick Tracy was interrogating an out-of-work fellow you might have sworn was Mike Doonesbury — note: Garry Trudeau had put his strip on hiatus at the end of January — when a bunch of characters from one of my all-time favorite strips suddenly interrupted:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 15, 1983

I hope you'll check back before the holidays are over; but in case we miss each other, juHqu' qechmey!

Wing Man

 A commenter at Daily Cartoonist this week pointed out an editorial cartoon about editorial cartooning from 1901 in the St. Paul Globe, so I had to go look it up.

"Two of a Kind" by Frank Wing in St. Paul (MN) Globe, Sept. 18, 1901

The cartoon was drawn shortly after the death of President William McKinley, assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. It seems that one Rev. Earl Cranston, Bishop of the American Methodist Episcopal Church, sermonized that editorial cartoonists were as much to blame for McKinley's assassination as were the anarchists.

Looking up the Globe cartoonist, Frank Wing, I quickly found that Charles Schulz had referenced him in an episode of "Peanuts." The kid with the bag over his head is Charlie Brown:

"Peanuts" by Charles Schulz, June 28, 1973

Having studied cartooning with the man, Schulz was obviously very familiar with the cartoons of Frank Wing (1873-1956), moreso than a child Charlie Brown's age could reasonably be expected to be. 

This is the cartoon Charlie is talking about:

"Yesterdays" by Frank Wing, reprinted in Minneapolis Star-Journal, June 18, 1946

Wing drew a single-panel cartoon titled "Yesterdays" in the Minneapolis Journal starting around 1910. He moved to the Minneapolis Tribune in 1920.

Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, February 22, 1920

After disappearing from the Twin Cities newspaper stands in 1937, old "Yesterdays" were rerun in the Minneapolis Journal (by then bought out by the Star) in 1946.

in Minneapolis Star-Journal, March 8, 1946

It would have been around this time that Wing encouraged Schulz, then in his 20's, to cartoon professionally. Aside from some juvenalia, Schulz's first published cartoon was the single-panel "Li'l Folks" in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press from 1947 to January, 1950. "Peanuts" launched in October of that year.

In the "Peanuts" series excerpted above (and later adapted for a 1983 TV special), Charlie Brown, having gone to summer camp, has taken to wearing a sack on his head because of an embarrassing rash resembling the seams on a baseball. This makes him suddenly popular and, as "Mr. Sack," he is elected camp president by the other kids.

There is a saying in cartooning circles: Three Things Make A Blog Post. So here's the third:

Little did Sparky Schulz realize that he would be referencing not one, but two Twin Cities cartoonists on June 28, 1973.

by Steve Sack in Minneapolis Star-Tribune, February 1, 1984

Remembering Fritz Mondale

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Nov. 1, 1984

The news was quickly overshadowed — perhaps even in Minnesota — by the Derek Chauvin verdict this week, but we lost one of the good guys this week. Former Vice President Walter "Fritz" Mondale passed away Monday at the age of 93.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to honor the man by pulling up some of my old cartoons in which he was featured — with the recognition that, like most editorial cartoonists, I tend not to draw a lot of cartoons about what a swell person the object of the cartoon is.

July, 1978

This unpublished cartoon from my notebooks is the earliest Mondale cartoon I have. It was not necessarily the first Mondale cartoon I ever drew; I lost a folder with four years' worth of these sketches while I was in college, and I couldn't possibly tell you what I drew about the 1976 Democratic ticket.

I can tell you that Mondale, with Washington experience that his president lacked, was a vital asset to the Carter administration, which gave him an office in the White House and sent him on important foreign trips such as this one to Israel. Menachem Begin was not particularly receptive to the U.S. administration's criticism of its settlements on territory seized in 1967 and 1973.

August, 1980

This is another unpublished cartoon from my notebooks. Curiously, I don't seem to have drawn Mondale in any published cartoons during his vice presidency, in spite of my stint as editorial cartoonist at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, during those same years. Even when Mondale came to our campus to install College President Sidney Rand as U.S. Ambassador to Norway — the political highlight of the year at St. Olaf! — what did I draw for the Manitou Messenger?

I drew one cartoon that week about John Anderson's campaign for president, and another about the possibility of reinstating the draft (neither original of which I still have, nor any other cartoons from that semester).

Oct., 1983; in UW-Parkside Ranger, December 15, 1983

Drawing for another school newspaper, I took plenty of opportunities to draw Walter Mondale during his 1984 presidential campaign. I drew this one in October, 1983 when the movie "The Right Stuff" seemed tailor-made to benefit the campaign of Democratic astronaut John Glenn (although the cartoon only saw print as part of a "Berge's Year In Review" feature).

As a note of explanation for you youngsters, "Look for the Union Label" was an advertising jingle for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the 1980's, pleading with consumers to buy union-made clothing rather than the cheaper imports that soon put the union's members out of work. And to you oldsters, I apologize for the earworm.

Dec., 1983; in UW-Parkside Ranger, January 19, 1984

Going into the 1984 campaign, Mondale had the endorsements of most of the major unions and liberal interest groups in the country.

July, 1984

What was a decided advantage for Mondale in the Democratic primaries (and even moreso in the caucuses) became more of a liability in the general election.

July, 1984

Even breaking ground by naming a woman, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY), as his running mate, failed win him the sort of credit it ought to have. It came off instead as catering to yet another interest group.

A lot has been made of Mondale's vow that because of Ronald Reagan's ballooning federal deficit, "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." He was right, of course: Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all had to raise taxes before the budget would balance. But it wasn't something Americans wanted to hear in 1984.

More significantly, the U.S. economy was on the rebound. A decade of escalating energy prices had come to an end, double-digit inflation was in check, business was picking up as interest rates fell; and Reagan was only too happy to take credit for it all. Reagan contrasted this renewed sense of optimism with the national "malaise" proclaimed by his predecessor, which he pinned on Mondale's tail at every opportunity.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, October 4, 1984

Reagan recovered from a shaky performance in the candidates' first debate with the quip during the second one that "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." It was a scripted line, but Mondale reportedly knew at that moment that the election was lost.

The media had already come to that conclusion. Given television journalism's obsession with polls and sound bites, the only question about the outcome of the election was just how badly Mondale would lose.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 13, 1984

All things considered, it isn't fair to remember Fritz Mondale only for ending up on the bottom of the biggest electoral landslide in U.S. history, so here are just a few accomplishments from his career:

As a young senator, he co-wrote the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a pillar of federal civil rights legislation. He later engineered a 1975 bipartisan deal that ended the two-thirds rule for stopping filibusters, so that 60 senators instead of 67 could cut off debate.

Under President Jimmy Carter, he became the first vice president with a day job, as adviser to the president, not just a bystander. He called it the “executivization” of the vice presidency.

And as a Democratic presidential nominee, he chose the first female nominee for vice president from a major party.

No Fool Like an Old Fool

It's Spoofback Saturday and April Fool's Eve to boot, so let's take a break from wallowing in the centennial of World War I just a bit.

This is not a Mike Peters cartoon. It's a parody I drew for my college newspaper's mock issue in 1979. In addition to scribblings by resident St. Olaf cartoonists, the Manitou Messenger ran Mike Peters's cartoons distributed by College Press Service. They were more dependable than my editorial cartoons were; but as irrepressible as Mr. Peters was and is, he didn't send us material for the parody issue in which we student journalists blew off steam.

So I mimicked his style as best I could in a cartoon buttressing up one of the conceits of that year's parody issue: that there had been some sort of nuclear accident involving Ytterboe Hall, a 79-year-old red brick dormitory that, in reality, the school administration wanted to tear down (over the objection of its residents and our "Keep Ytt Up" slogan. Ytt would be demolished a few years after I graduated, but St. Olaf eventually put the Ytterboe name on a new building more in keeping with the campus's limestone motif.)

One of my other Mike Peters parodies didn't involve campus issues at all. Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State Al Haig was the John Bolton of the day, famously declaring after the president's attempted assassination by John Hinckley, "I am in charge!" I think, however, that the caption beneath this cartoon must have been copied from a real Mike Peters cartoon, because I don't remember inking it. I don't have the original of this cartoon, and it was a long time ago, so I could be wrong. On the other hand, I wasted a lot of time mimicking halftone with a Bic pen and a ruler on these things; the forgery of Peters's print style in the caption, if that's what it is, is considerably more true to Peters's handwriting than that of the word "France" on the map.

But how does one parody one's own work?

For one thing, I answered any reader who had told me "I don't get it" by drawing cartoons so impossibly dense, inside, and disjointed that nobody could possibly "get it." Except for Idi Amin (referencing an earlier cartoon that had him hiding out in the utility tunnels beneath the campus), most of the characters in the above cartoon were campus personages. And just to be as obscure as possible, Gwenellda's time-traveling friend was a character from The Uglies, a Manitou Messenger cartoon by L.K. Hanson, dating from a decade before any of us students had come to campus.

Having a time-traveling character in my cartoon would have been more impressive if I had somehow known to include the work of 2018 Herb Block Award winner Ward Sutton, who drew for the Messenger eight years later than I had.

But if I had had that power to see into the future, I wouldn't have been so cocksure that I'd never need to know Thing One about computers. And I might have made it to the Messenger's staff photo on time senior year.

For the UW-Parkside Ranger (renamed the Stranger) in 1984, I depicted the swearing in of the unnamed police detective in the "Funny Paper Caper" I was drawing that year as the 37th president of the United States (with a character from fellow Ranger cartoonist John Kovalic's "Wild Life" as Veep).

Various political figures and a few Ranger staffers populate most of the rest of the cartoon.

But there's more to a parody newspaper than cartoons. Photo editors liked to get in on the laughs, too. Holland Hall at my alma mater is blessed with the most massive urinals you have ever seen in your life, so some enterprising Messenger staffer depicted the school track team posing inside one.

Other memorable photos I remember involved an enormous abstract iron art piece called "The Spirit Also Helpeth Us" by Dorothy Berge (no relation as far as I've ever been able to tell), depicted in various situations such as addressing a convocation in Boe Memorial Chapel. Or gigantic mutant squirrels menacing the campus due to that nuclear leak in Ytterboe.

And in those days, they did it all without PhotoShop.

So did I, taking a file photo from 1955 that appeared to show Ronald Reagan talking to an empty space, and using it to illustrate a bogus story about Basil Wraithbone, a washed-up actor who used to be one of the Ghostly Trio on "Casper, the Friendly Ghost."

If PhotoShop had been around in those days, and if I had had the foresight not to be so snooty about eschewing computers, I could have made it so that you could still see the empty space behind Mr. Wraithbone.

That story is too long to include here in full; so here's another bit of Fake News I wrote.

It's too long, too, but short enough for today's post, and I got to use a couple names I picked up in Medieval History class.

Because being able to namecheck Frankish kings seemed so much more useful back then than getting into the vanguard of the computer revolution.

R.I.P. John Glenn

Space pioneer and former Senator John Glenn (D-OH) slipped the surly bonds of Earth yesterday. I had only drawn a handful of cartoons about him, mostly during his unsuccessful race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.

On paper, he was a formidable candidate: a national hero, a popular senator from a swing state, spotless reputation — he was a major figure in a highly anticipated movie that had just come out in the fall of 1983. Sadly for him, it was not his year.

Um Yah Yah

The reunion committee for my alma mater requested a drawing for this week's reunion booklet. I couldn't make the reunion myself, so you'll have to indulge me this Semesterback Saturday as I wallow in a bunch of personal nostalgia.

I had fun thinking up things to put together to make this drawing, although I did have to start all over once I recalled that while Kodak "110" cameras were yielding rectangular pictures since 1972, square photos were still quite common.

I tried to come up with things that might spark memories (while most of us still have them), so I included a "caf card" for a student with an implausibly Norwegian name. The Lion's Pause was a student-run coffee shop in the basement of Ytterboe Hall where student musicians would perform; students produced LP records of those groups in 1980 and 1981. Ytterboe Hall is gone now, in spite of student protests to "Keep Ytt Up," but there is a new Lion's Pause in Buntrock Commons.

There was the football game covered by ABC television, whose producers expected a marching band to perform during halftime. We didn't have a marching band per se, but St. Olaf is a musical school, so it wasn't difficult to pull one together. It even had a cellist.

A streaker ran through our graduation ceremony; the shorts we wore back then were almost as immodest. The "New Dorm" opened for residence in time for our senior year; it was later named for Sidney Rand, President of the College during our freshman through junior years. President Carter named Rand as Ambassador to Norway in 1980, sending Vice President Mondale to our campus to swear him in.

Back in my salad days, I cartooned for the campus newspaper, the Manitou Messenger. I've got one cartoon that shows a little bit of campus geography:

And one that betrays the fact that I had been in the utility tunnels underneath the campus, which was and presumably still is a no-no.

My freshman year cartoons tended to be pretty non-topical, but by my sophomore year, campus administrators began showing up in my cartoons fairly regularly, as well as a reincarnation of Rollin Kirby's prohibition-era "Mr. Dry" to represent the college alcohol policy. This one riffs on the limestone architecture of every 20th Century building on campus:

(Some older buildings, such as the women's gymnasium — converted to being the Speech-Theatre building before our freshman year but still smelling of chlorine — were painted gray to more closely resemble the limestone ones.)

And finally, a cartoon one of my Resident Assistants freshman year asked me to draw to cajole students selected to participate in a psych survey he and a classmate were doing. Mark (on the right) wanted the Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum motif, even though his partner didn't exactly have a roundish face. The dialogue is also theirs.

I have no word how their career trajectory has been, or how famous their psych study became, in the decades since.

Two More McGovern Cartoons

I finally located the folders with my cartoons from 1983 and before, and found George McGovern in two more cartoons about the early race for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.

Fair warning: both cartoons reference death, so I hope people don't find them in bad taste today. The first cartoon is from September, 1983, imagining Democrats' response to the announcement of McGovern's third try for the presidency:

The state of the race at the time was that former Vice President Walter Mondale was the front runner with the support of organized labor and a number of other interest groups. Ohio Senator John Glenn was a more centrist alternative, while California Senator Alan Cranston and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson were competing for the party's far left. Some of the party faithful held out hope that Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy would change his mind and run a second time, and there were Senators from Colorado, and South Carolina and a former Governor of Florida (Gary Hart, Fritz Hollings, and Reuben Askew) who were trying to get some attention.

McGovern's bid for the 1984 nomination was doomed from the start. In recent history, Democrats have shunned any of their candidates for president who had previously run and lost (although Teddy Kennedy could have easily been an exception had he tried in '84).

It hasn't always been this way: Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland for a third time in 1892 after he had been thrown out of office in 1888; and Williams Jennings Bryan won three out of the next four Democratic nominations. Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson for a rematch against Eisenhower in 1956; and if it weren't for the McGovern rule changes of 1968, Hubert Humphrey might have been a shoo-in for the nomination in 1972 or 1976.

As the nominating process stands since -- and even including -- 1968, the only way for a failed Democratic candidate to win the Democratic nomination is to have served as Vice President in the meantime. The examples of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore do not bode well for Joe Biden.

Back to George McGovern. He is only an extra in the cartoon below, but it might have some resonance for Republicans today. Democrats felt they had an opening to unseat President Ronald Reagan because the economy had been in recession since 1981. By December of 1983, however, all reports indicated that the recession was over.

If you missed the cartoon from December, 1983 (published in January), my earlier blog post is here.

George McGovern

This morning comes the news that former Senator from South Dakota George McGovern is "coming to the end of his life" and has been entrusted to hospice care.

I don't have any of my own cartoons from his 1972 race for the Presidency, although I do recall having tried to sketch a Time magazine cover image of Richard Nixon only to have my drawing look more like McGovern than Nixon. I do have a college newspaper clipping of a cartoon from December, 1983, when McGovern was making yet another try for the Democratic nomination:

If I remember correctly, I had difficulty drawing McGovern this time around and ended up drawing him on another sheet of paper and pasting that head over the one on the page with the rest of the cartoon. That would account for all those marks around his head on the printed copy, as the exposure here appears quite dark.

By 1984, I had a lot more experience drawing Richard Nixon, so I doubt that it would have helped me to try to draw that Time magazine cover again.

Geraldine Ferraro

Geraldine "Gerry" Ferraro, former congresswoman from New York and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 1984 has died. In memoriam, here's a cartoon of her from my juvenalia file:

I was trying to draw Walter Mondale holding himself rigid and still -- which was a particular challenge, since just about anyone I drew in those days looks rigid and still.