The Recycling Bin of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlike his 1928 running mate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q Toon: Whatever Happened?

Since Max has asked:

A weekly editorial cartoon might not have been the best medium for an extended story arc. I have publications running my cartoons that only publish biweekly or monthly, for one thing. There are other news events worthy of comment a lot of the time. And installments like today’s lack a specifically LGBTQ+ element.

Last February, I drew a cartoon in which Max, the MAGA half of the Max and Leo household, discovered that Leo had been swept up in an ICE abduction action while volunteering at a food pantry. I anticipated that this Completely Corrupt Trump Regime's modus operandi would be similar to that of its previous iteration: incarcerate people in cells and cages, and dump them back in their nations of origin.

Instead, the Trump Troopers are now sentencing its captives without due process or fair trial to life imprisonment in squalid, Kafkaesque concentration camps in third world dictatorships, notably El Salvador, South Sudan, and Florida. 

You may have thought that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect persons against unreasonable search and seizure and deprivation of liberty without due process, and guarantee trial by an impartial jury. Our professed "strict constructionists" on the republic's highest court, however, have discovered a much looser interpretation of the nation's founding document.

Meanwhile, it has been three months since an ICE guard at the concentration camp where Leo has been held took note of the tattoo of Max’s initials on Leo's butt and misread it as "MS13." 

Given our polICE state enforcers’ policy of Deport ’Em All, Let History Sort ’Em Out, it doesn't seem reasonable to imagine that someone at Stalag Trumpteen would suddenly realize that Leo was swept up by mistake in that ethnic cleansing sweep back in February and send him home now.

Nor has the Trump regime chickened out on their goal of an Aryan Nation. Rather, when it comes to reining in executive branch overreach, it is the current Supreme Court that Always Chickens Out.

Q Toon: Where in the World

I introduced Max and Leo as a way of commenting on the deep political divide between the Trump cultists and the rest of us: an odd couple in a relationship who stay together in spite of their profound disagreements.

Had Republicans lost the 2024 election, Max and Leo would still be bickering over fiscal policy or, I dunno, white males being shut out of Kamala Harris's cabinet. But instead, we have been forced to endure the Criminal Trump Regime. It hasn't even been 100 days yet, and there are black vans of Trump's Gestapo disappearing civilians on suspicion of having unauthorized tattoos and opinions.

I figured I could comment on that by having Leo mistakenly caught up in an anti-immigrant sweep. Eventually, I'd have the courts step in, or someone in charge would realize ICE's mistake, and Leo and Max would be reunited, once I had figured out how to make a point with it.

Yet now it turns out that the Criminal Trump Regime doesn't care what the courts rule, or who gets swept up because of whatever mistake made by his minions. They've discovered a fellow tyrant down in El Salvador who's got a tropical gulag where they can ship their victims en masse, where nobody is afforded due process whatsoever. Instead, they are stripped naked, shaved, and put on display crammed together like sardines for Kristi Noem's Zoom background.

One of the real people trapped in this dystopian nightmare from hell is a man named Kilmar Albrego García. He had come here years ago from El Salvador to flee from the MS-13 gang there; a judge here had ruled that if the U.S. government wanted to deport him, it was forbidden to send him to El Salvador. 

ICE knew this, and decided it didn't care about the rule of law. Up and down the chain of command, they decided to just follow orders. The Department of Homeland Security acknowledges that García was the victim of an "administrative error." The Supreme Court has told the Criminal Trump Regime to "facilitate" García's return.

The Criminal Trump Regime's response is to pretend that it can't do a damn thing to rectify its administrative error. They invited El Salvador's self-described "coolest dictator" Nayib Bukele to the White House to claim that he's helpless to bring an innocent man home to his wife and children. After all, if he freed one innocent man, he'd have to free every innocent man, wouldn't he?

LGBTQ+ media have taken interest in Andry Hernandez Romero, a Salvadoran hairdresser and make-up stylist seeking asylum in the U.S. because he is gay and was facing persecution in Venezuela who was deported to the Salvadoran Sağmalcılar. Chicago media have been reporting on the case of Yeison Rodrigo Jaimes-Rincon, whose partner only found out he had been kidnapped to CECOT when she saw him behind bars there on television. 

And there are dozens, if not hundreds of others in their predicament whom you have never heard of.

There is a reason why we all know the tragic story of Anne Frank; only if you pass through a Holocaust museum will you learn of any other individuals among the six million others slaughtered by the Nazis' extermination machine. Nor was Alexei Navalny alone. 

There are photographs of a fraction of the victims of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, yet they all remain anonymous to most of us. Ditto the victims of Stalin's purges, the Rwandan massacres, the deliberate slaughter of Palestinians...

It can be easy to resign oneself to the idea that it's too hard to care about what happens to uncounted foreigners. 

Until it happens to somebody you know.

In that disgusting Oval Office performance by Trump and Bukele, the tyrant occupying our White House promised that it certainly will. Trump wants to abduct enough U.S. citizens off to El Salvador that Bukele will need to build "about five more" CECOTs to hold them all.

Oh, sure: our Felon-in-chief said that he only wants to suspend the Constitution when it comes to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of worst of the worst.

You'll just have to overlook the occasional administrative error.

Saturday at the Party with George

"To Be Alone — Be Great" by Hal Coffman for International Features Service, Feb. 22, 1925

If Hal Coffman's cartoon strikes you as an odd way to commemorate George Washington's birthday, yes, it is. 

So before anyone gets any bright ideas about including Napoleon Bonaparte in Felonious Trump’s Garden of Heroes, let me explain. 

February 22, 1925 fell on a Sunday, and in those days, the front page of the Sunday editorial section in every Hearst newspaper was topped by a cartoon illustration stretching all the way across the page illustrating a lengthy editorial-cum-sermon from corporate headquarters. Coffman's cartoon accompanied an essay that argued that Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln were all great-minded men, but that Napoleon lacked the modesty of the Americans and thus overstepped the limits of leadership.

Napoleon also differed from Washington and Lincoln by having his birthday in August.

"Where're You Going, Cal" by Wm. A. Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, Feb. 22, 1925

Washington's birthday is usually a time to compare and contrast our first President with the current occupant of the office. The comparison pretty much always favors Mr. Washington, although I fully expect today's Brancos and Varvels to echo Mr. Trump's egomaniacal self-aggrandizement.

Returning to 1925, I didn't run across any other editorial cartoonists joining William Ceperley in trash-drawing President Coolidge.

"The Cherry Tree Moral" by Jesse Taylor Cargill in Sacramento Bee, Feb. 21, 1925

The editorial cartoonists' go-to George Washington reference has long been the entirely apocryphal tale of not lying about chopping down his father's cherry tree. Drawing Washington saying "I cannot tell a lie" and a modern-day politician responding "I cannot tell the truth" dates at least as far back as the Nixon administration; subsequent cartoonists have added later presidents chiming in "I cannot tell the difference."

I'll bet there are a bunch of such cartoons today to balance the Varvels and Brancos.

"Washington, D.C. and the Cherry Tree" by Edward Gale in Los Angeles Times, Feb. 22, 1925

Speaking of whom, is this where they get their ideas?

"It's Strange How It Keeps On Sprouting After All These Years" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, Feb. 22, 1925

I found it interesting that several cartoonists in 1925 pictured chopping down the cherry tree in a positive light. Carey Orr at the vociferously isolationist Chicago Tribune laments the "foreign entanglements" that kept sprouting from the stump of "foreign alliances."

Everything old is new again again.

"The Cherry Tree Incident Up to Date" by T.E. Powers for Star Feature Syndicate, ca. Feb. 23, 1925

Continuing the motif of Everybody Hates Cherry Trees, T.E. Powers, whose modus operandi was to present readers with multiple choice of cartoons each day,  tosses in a couple other classic George Washington references besides the Cherry Tree Incident. If one idea didn't appeal to the reader, perhaps another one would.

The bottom two panels refer to President Coolidge getting the cabinet picks for his own full term through Congress (the Republican majority presented few obstacles, although there would be resistance to Coolidge's nominee for Attorney General), and a contemporary complaint that leftists wielded too much influence in children's education. 

"George W. Legislature" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, Feb. 23, 1925

Tom Foley used the cherry tree analogy to twit his Minnesota legislature for accomplishing so little "needed legislation."

That can't be a cherry tree, however. I don't think they are able to grow anywhere near that big.

"Hacking Away at It" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 22, 1925

That didn't stop Grover Page from drawing this cartoon, even while viewing the damage to his tree very differently than Tom Foley did his. What a relief to find a cartoon in which the tree didn't deserve to be chopped down!

It's not clear to me whether Page was arguing again against the proposed Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution (see here), or some other issue. Certainly the Eighteenth Amendment had been the work of "professional reformers"; but he might have wanted to depict more damage to the tree from an already ratified amendment.

"Why the Family didn't Get the Radio Program" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Feb. 21, 1925

So not all the editorial cartoonists reached for political topics that Sunday.

I have not discovered what specific radio program Dorman Smith might have had in mind when he drew the above cartoon. Coolidge's inauguration would be broadcast live on March 4, the first live broadcast of a presidential inauguration; but of course, that hadn't happened just yet.

According to a survey by the Sears-Roebuck Agricultural Broadcasting Stations WLS (Chicago) reported in the February 19, 1925 Indianapolis News, 33% of respondents listened to broadcast radio regularly. The most popular programs were classical music, followed closely by vocal music. After that came farm and home programs — not surprisingly, considering the survey base — and bringing up the rear, dramas, readings, and — again, no surprise — political speeches. 

"Not Skeptical But" by Chas Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Feb. 21, 1925

I don't know how common the practice was in 1925 of reading books by tossing them onto a nearby carpet. The fellow in Charles Kuhn's cartoon may have been far-sighted, I suppose.

In any case, the font of the book's text was large enough for Kuhn's readers to make out; but in case it's too small for you, it says "Washington never told a lie." 

"How Proud He Must Be of Some of His Children" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 22, 1925

I don't know what it is that editorial cartoonists of 1925 had against crossword puzzles, but virtually all of them kept throwing shade at them.

Child Labor Amendent

In light of a Republican congresscretin proposing that schoolchildren find gainful employment rather than eat school lunches, our Graphical History Tour stop for today looks at a proposed 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution a century ago this month. 

"The Shadow on the States" by O.P. Williams in New York American, ca. Jan. 29, 1925

The Supreme Court had overturned previous measures passed to outlaw, regulate, or tax child labor in Hammer v. Dagenhart and Bailey v. Drexel Furniture; so, with the support of African-American organizations, unions, teachers' federations, women's rights organizations, and religious groups, the House and Senate approved the amendment in 1924, sending it to the states for ratification.

The text of the Child Labor Amendment:

Section 1. The Congress shall have the power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.

Section 2. The power of the several States is unimpaired by this article except that the operation of State laws shall be suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation enacted by the Congress.

"Mowing Them Down" by Harold Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Jan. 26, 1925

In January, California and Arizona joined Arkansas in ratifying the proposed constitutional amendment; Wisconsin passed ratification in February.

"Of Such Is the Kingdom of Greed" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 1, 1925

In the same time, North Dakota, Utah, Idaho and Kansas rejected the amendment, although they reversed their stand and voted to ratify it during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana had already voted it down in 1924; Delaware, Connecticut and South Carolina also rejected the amendment in the first two months of 1925.

"Who Said Henpecked" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 1, 1925

Opposition to the amendment was led by business groups and, as Grover Page's cartoon illustrates, "states' rights" advocates in southern states.

By 1937, only 28 states ratified the Child Labor Amendment, eight short of the number required by the Constitution. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, however, limiting child labor (as well as establishing a minimum wage and mandating overtime pay) was upheld by the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Darby Lumber Co. in 1941, and ratifying the Child Labor Amendment became unnecessary.

Given our present Court's disdain for precedent, that could always change.

No time limit was set for the amendment's ratification, meaning that it could still be added to the Constitution. Because of the entry into the union of Alaska and Hawai'i in 1959, it would require ratification by ten more states, not just eight.

Bread and Poseurs, Bread and Poseurs

All aboard the Graphical History Tour! Our destination today is Labor Day weekend, 1924.

"Boss of the World Today" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., August 30, 1924

Labor Day had been an official U.S. holiday since 1894, although I suspect it would have come as news to American workers in the 1920's that they were "boss of the world." 

Dorman Smith may have been looking at things from the perspective of the U.S. workforce being less affected by the lingering aftermath of the Great War than their European counterparts. But in this Republican-dominated era, organized labor was under assault by determined anti-union industries and their allies in state and federal government.

"One Must Push and One Must Pull" by Jesse Taylor Cargill in Sacramento Bee, September 1, 1924

Coming a little closer to the mark, Jesse Cargill at least gets it half right.

"The Cyclone Center" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, September 2, 1924

Labor Day weekend was marred by a new flare-up of violence in the strife-prone mining town of Herrin, Illinois, described by the Chicago Tribune as the "sanguinary center of Bloody Williamson County." The site of a massacre when striking miners attacked strike-breaking workers in 1922, the ensuing years saw a deadly feud between a reckless, Klan-backed prohibition enforcer named S. Glenn Young came to town and was met by anti-Klan folks who appreciated a drink or two after work.

"In Williamson County" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, September 3, 1924

Violence flared up again on August 30 started after charges were dismissed against the Shelton brothers, accused of the murder in February of Constable Caesar Cagle, a Klansman. In spite of the inevitable hostilities boiling under the surface, Sheriff George Galligan, backed by deputies and others, went to the garage owned by J.H. Smith, a known Klan headquarters, in an attempt to take possession of a car. The car had been held there for months because the Klan accused its owner of shooting at Young during an earlier riot. 

In the shooting that ensued Sheriff Galligan's confrontation with Smith and his Klan buddies, a deputy sheriff, a court bailiff, four Klansmen, and one man described as a by-stander were killed. Adjt. Gen. Carlos E. Black immediately mobilized the Illinois National Guard to restore order in the town.

"Open the Gate" by O.C. Chopin in San Francisco Examiner, ca. August 27, 1924

One of organized labor's goals in 1924 was passage and ratification of a constitutional amendment banning child labor. Supreme Court rulings in 1918 and 1922 ruled that federal laws regulating goods produced by children under 14 and 16 were unconstitutional. The House of Representatives approved the amendment on April 26, 1924, and the Senate followed suit on June 2, 1924 to send it to the states.

"They Can Stop Him" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, September 2, 1924

Opposed by business groups, the only state to have ratified the amendment by this point was Arkansas. California, Arizona and Wisconsin would follow in 1925, but the effort stalled out in the 1930's after only 28 of the necessary 36 states had approved ratification.

Since there was no time limit set on the amendment by Congress, it could still be ratified (it would need ratification by 38 states now that Alaska and Hawai'i have joined the union); but the earlier Supreme Court decisions were overruled in 1941. Still, renewed interest by some Republican-ruled states in authorizing child labor might render the issue un-moot again.

"His Day" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, September 1, 1294

Returning to 1924: the Child Labor Amendment was a key plank in the presidential platform of Progressive Party candidate Robert LaFollette — to whom cartoonist Tom Foley dedicated the entire holiday.

"The Hypnotist" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1924

Cartoonists who favored the established political parties were not so easily enthused. LaFollette's campaign and its appeal to Labor were ridiculed by his erstwhile fellow Republicans ...

"Have a Bite" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 30, 1924

... and also by Democrats. 

Both accused him of being a stooge for the Communists, despite his being roundly condemned by them as well.

"Until He Bursts" by K.A. Suvanto in Daily Worker, Chicago, August 23, 1924

All three major candidates courted the American proletariat on Labor Day. The Republicans countered their candidate's strike-breaking record by touting the current prosperity and their "full dinner pail." The Democrats sent vice presidential nominee Charles Bryan out to reassure workers that the candidate at the top of his ticket would represent the working class in spite of his Wall Street background.

"The Day after His Holiday" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, September 2, 1924

And then the holiday was over, and the candidates moved on to other issues.

This Week's Sneak Peek

In writing the part in last Saturday's posting about disaffection of Blacks in Indiana with that state's Republican Party, I summarized the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution as guaranteeing civil right to all.

Then I had to stipulate that they only applied to men.

Within a generation, they didn't apply to Chinese men in this country.

And before the civil rights amendments turned 50, they didn't apply to Japanese men here, either. Or Hindoos, or Musselmen, or Filipinos...

Just wanted to note that I would have mentioned this before, except that it was beside the point then.

Anyway, as you were saying ... ?

The Knee Jerk Review of Books

Your humble scribbler couldn't go to this month's convention of the AAEC without coming home with a couple of books (what, only two this time?), so instead of the usual Graphical History Tour today, I herewith present my highly amateurish book review.

The cover

I spotted May It Amuse the Court: Editorial Cartoons of the Supreme Court (H.L. Pohlman and Michael A. Kahn, Hill Street Press) in the bookstore at the Cartoon Art Museum and knew right away that I would have to buy it. The fellow manning the register told me that one of the authors was supposed to have attended our opening reception but had been unable to make it.

I have editorial cartoon books that focus on presidents, on foreign policy, or on specific wars; this is the only one I've seen devoted to the Court and the Constitution. The text is generously illustrated with editorial cartoons dating back to the mid-19th Century. Thankfully, most of those early cartoons are well-reproduced, considering that many of the original drawings no longer exist.

From the book: "Waiting" by James Albert Wales in Puck, April 20, 1881

Each chapter focuses on a specific constitutional issue: for example, the Civil War constitutional amendments, labor law, women's suffrage, Prohibition, New Deal legislation, and mid-20th-Century civil rights. The chapters are presented chronologically, but the chronology of the cartoons overlap from one chapter to the next.

The book came out in 2005, so there are some chapters that deserve updating — particularly the one on abortion rights — and there is only passing mention of LGBTQ+ rights. Certainly Republicans' denying President Barack Obama his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court nearly a year before the 2016 election and then ramming Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett through barely over a month before the 2020 election in order to pack the court with a right-wing supermajority should merit a new chapter.

If an updated edition ever comes about, there are a few cartoonists from past eras whose names need correction: Winsor McCay is in the book as Winsor Mecay; John Cassel is misidentified as Ino Cassals. Other cartoonists whose signatures are difficult to read, such as Al Frueh and Edwin Marcus, aren't identified at all. Of course, many of the earliest cartoons are unsigned and essentially anonymous. Properly and consistently crediting the rest would be an improvement. An index listing of the cartoonists would also be helpful, as would an index of the several court cases referenced by name in the text.

The authors' habit of describing each cartoon within the text becomes a little grating over the course of the book. Useful when discussing some of the more difficult-to-read and obscure cartoons in the earliest chapters, it seems superfluous in the later ones. Perhaps not in the audio book, if there is one.

Those are minor complaints I have, which I mention at the risk of dissuading someone from seeking out the book — well, that's the trouble with quibbles. 

On balance, I can heartily recommend Pohlman and Kahn's work to anyone interested in cartooning, the Supreme Court, or constitutional law.

From the cover of Terry Mosher's book

The other book I brought home was Terry "Aislin" Mosher's Aislin's Favourite COVID Cartoons from Around the World. Mosher was giving away signed copies of his book, originally published to raise funds for Community Healthcare in his hometown of Montréal. The cartoonists in this 336-page collection all donated their work for the cause.

I would gladly have donated a cartoon or two if I had been asked. For that matter, I would gladly have paid for this book ($30CDN).

I've read less than a third of the book so far, but it's a wonderful sampling of cartoons about the pandemic representing Canada, the U.S., China, Israel, Iran, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Philippines, Mexico, Mosher's native Canada, and many more.

Uncaptioned, by Ilya Katz, Israel

What is not represented, quite intentionally as Mosher told us, are cartoonists who are COVID skeptics, antivaxxers, and conspiracy fabulists. Their opinions may eventually be of interest to future generations marveling at the hysteria of our own, but they have no place in a book dedicated to health care professionals who have been at the front lines throughout the crisis.

✍

Daily Cartoonist reported last night the death of British cartoonist Tony Husband, whose book America in Cartoons I reviewed here six years ago. (The link to his books at my 2017 posting is broken; Daily Cartoonist has a better one.)

My review of America in Cartoons lamented that there was nothing about Watergate or the impeachment of President Clinton in it; the Pohlman & Kahn book reviewed today has chapters on both.

Q Toon: Getting Creative

The Supreme Court happily carved out a right in Creative LLC et al. v. Elenis et al. for Lorie Smith to discriminate against same-sex engaged couples, essentially nullifying a Colorado non-discrimination law.

Ignored by the right-wing justices in the majority were several factors that should have rendered the case moot. Creative LLC had not ever created any wedding announcement web pages. Furthermore, the client whose same-sex wedding announcement web page she had supposedly refused on religious grounds to design is 

• a straight, cisgender man
• in a different-sex marriage
• who never approached Creative LLC to design a web page
• who didn't know someone had done so in his name
• and besides, owns his own web design company in the first place.

Now as someone who considers himself a creative person myself, I can sympathize with not wanting to expend creative energy on a project one disagrees with. I'm not going to accept a commission to draw cartoons for nazis, racists, or antigay bigots.

I can also appreciate that the court's decision is not entirely without precedent. We've had a conservative majority court for decades now, after all. The Supremes have previously ruled that private groups such as the Boy Scouts are free to discriminate against LGBTQ+ children and parents, and so may religious groups. This case extends the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ persons to businesses offering a public service.

But this case, along with Biden v. Nebraska (in which no student loan lending firm had sued the administration), demonstrates how the current Court is not just conservative, but activist. There was no plaintiff with standing — that is, who had suffered actual damages of some kind. You can't take a case to the Supreme Court just because you don't like a law.

For example, the budget passed by Madison Republicans representing villages and rural communities around the rest of Wisconsin last month allowed the city of Milwaukee to raise sales taxes, but dictated how the tax money must and must not be spent. I might disagree with those restrictions, but I do not live in Milwaukee. I have no standing to challenge the budget law.

Our present activist Supreme Court went out of its way to find a trumped-up case, based entirely on a fiction, and ruled in favor of a plaintiff whose primary reason for starting up her business appears to have been not to operate a business, but to overturn a non-discrimination law she didn't like.

Keep the Cons in Constitution Day!

Depending on personal preference, Americans are celebrating Constitution Day or Citizenship Day today. It's the 235th anniversary of the ratification of the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787, replacing the deeply flawed Articles of Confederation with a document that has endured for more than two centuries. In spite of allowing disgruntled misanthropes to be in charge of well-regulating their own personal militiae.

The day is often marked with swearing-in ceremonies for new citizens, hence the coincidence of Citizenship Day. Since I've lived in this country all my life, and I'm not swearing in any new citizens, I'm celebrating instead by resurrecting some of the cartoons drawn for an edition of Washington Post Magazine marking the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987.

by Jeff MacNelly for Washington Post, June 28, 1987

Some of the country's leading editorial cartoonists were privileged to draw full-page, full-color cartoons to illustrate articles by the likes of Garry Wills, Roger Wilkins, Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, Frank Easterbrook and Charlie Haas.

The late Jeff MacNelly fancied the members of the Supreme Court sailing the 200-year-old S.S. Constitution through outer space with gavels for oars. (It works better as an image than in text.) I don't spot Sandra Day O'Connor or Thurgood Marshall — the sole woman and the only non-White man on the Court to that point — in his cartoon, so I'm just going to assume that MacNelly was trying to represent the overwhelming White male majority of the Court through history. 

by Pat Oliphant in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

Pat Oliphant produced this illustration of the imbalance of power that had developed between the Executive and Legislative branches since the dawn of the nuclear age. 

Nearly half of the cartoonists represented in the Post Magazine's package put then-President Ronald Reagan in their cartoons...

by Don Wright in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

...and not at all favorably.

by Doug Marlette in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

by Mike Peters in Washington Post Magazine,  June 28, 1987

That there were no cartoons featuring Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, or any other member of Congress only goes to support the point Pat Oliphant was trying to illustrate. Congress had made some attempts to reassert its prerogatives in the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal; but with eight years in office, the Reagan administration was rather successful in reasserting the primacy of the presidency.

by Tony Auth in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 9187

That so much of what goes on behind the scenes answers to the President rather than the legislature has had a lot to do in fostering growth over the 20th Century of the imperial Executive Branch. Tony Auth's cartoon suggests that it almost doesn't matter who —if anyone— sits behind the Oval Office desk.

(It also reminds me of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch in which Reagan, portrayed by Phil Hartman, is genial if doddering when the cameras are on, but a cunning mastermind behind closed doors.)

Leaving the presidency aside, two articles in the Post's package centered on groups excluded from the document ratified in Congress Assembled in 1787:

by Jules Feiffer in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

Roger Wilkins's essay, which Feiffer's cartoon accompanies, notes that the people pictured in paintings of the first constitutional convention "are white and male. And, no matter how powerful the celebratory culture is — and it is immensely powerful — a black American cannot help testing those images and the purported constitutional promises against the dailiness of his own life."

The words of Jemmy Madison in Feiffer's cartoon ring hollow against Wilkins's remembrance of growing up in the 1930's, '40's, and '50's.

When the Brown decision was announced on May 17, 1954, I was in my freshman year at the University of Michigan Law School. I was 22 years old. It would be three years before I would go to work in the Black slums of Cleveland and 11 before President Johnson would sent me to work among the smoldering embers of Watts. It would be eight years before the schools of Norfolk, Va., would be integrated, so my future wife — a junior high school student in 1954 — graduated from a still-segregated high school, thoroughly disillusioned. Martin Luther King was an unknown 25-year-old. He had just under 14 more years to live. It would be just over 14 years before King's Poor People's Campaign would descend on the Mall in Washington and begin the fundamental probe to find out just how big the promise of the Constitution really was and to whom it was extended.

To accompany the essay by Rose Bird, then recently having been defeated for reelection to the California Supreme Court, the Post Magazine turned to Nicole Hollander.

by Nicole Hollander in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

Not to disparage Feiffer or Hollander in the least, I do wonder whether the Post approached any Black or female editorial cartoonists for this project. Feiffer's bona fides on the issue of racial justice are without question and go back before I was born, but I suspect that an editor from the present day would have solicited Ted Shearer, Robert Pious, Brumsic Brandon Jr., or Chester Commodore.

Female editorial cartoonists of the time included Etta Hulme, Kate Salley Palmer and Signe Wilkinson. Hollander's work was not typically found on the editorial page, but her syndicated comic strip "Sylvia" (1981-2012) evolved out of her "Feminist Funnies" comic strip, and prior to that, her work as graphic designer for a feminist publication, The Spokeswoman. "Sylvia" could be every bit as topical as Feiffer's work. Hollander just didn't give presidents speaking parts in her strip.

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That's all for now. So whether you observe Constitution Day, or whether Citizenship Day is your family tradition, or even if you're stretching Mexican Independence Day throughout the weekend...

...please celebrate responsibly.