Christmas 1925

Welcome to our Graphical History Tour Christmas Special! We're just about through with the year 1925, when peace, goodwill, and sobriety reigned, and all was right with the world.

"Merry Christmas" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 25, 1925

I'm going to let Bill Hanny represent all the cartoonists who updated their Thanksgiving for General Prosperity cartoon for the next holiday on the calendar. The happy recipient of an overstuffed stocking here was Father Penn, the cartoon personification of the state of Pennsylvania, and not the guy on the Quaker Oats canister.

"Uncle Sam's Dream of Christmas" by Edward G. McCandlish in Washington Post, Dec. 25, 1925

McCandlish at the Washington Post expands on Hanny's theme, depicting a serving of Plenty, a Christmas tree festooned with Peace, Security, and No Foreign Entanglements; and, at lower right, an agreement between labor and management averting a coal miners' strike. That agreement hadn't actually materialized yet when this cartoon was drawn, however.

"The Very Thing He Wanted Most" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Dec. 25, 1925

Up the road at the Star, Clifford Berryman's Everyman had a more limited wish list. To his delight, Congress had passed the Coolidge administration's tax cut, to take effect in 1926.

"Good Will to Men" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1925

Gustavo Brunstrup shared the San Francisco Chronicle's optimism that the U.S. Senate would overcome three years of obstruction by its "irreconcilables" and join Europe in agreeing to participate in the World Court.

"Christmas Bells" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 24, 1925

Critics of the Coolidge administration such as Daniel Fitzpatrick might begrudge Republicans their peace and prosperity; they could still celebrate the Locarno agreements among the major European powers putting an end to war (offer not valid in Morocco, Syria, and Iraq), and the Geneva Protocol, drafted in June, banning chemical and biological weapons.

"The Face at the Window" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, Dec. 24, 1925

Ed LeCocq used the celebration of "the new spirit of mutual cooperation" and "comforts of capital and trade intercourse" in Europe to point out one country that was left out: Russia. 

"The Face at the Window" used to be a common cartoon theme in the Christmas season. In most such cartoons I've seen, that Face is a pitiable, sympathetic figure, left out of the warmth, feasting, and bonhomie inside, reminding readers of the plight of the poor. The cultural references that Google up for this forgotten cliché, however, are tales of criminals, murderers, and ghosts plotting their way in.

Perhaps that's why cartoonists stopped using "The Face at the Window" as a caption.

"Besorgnis" by Arthur Krüger in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Dec. 13, 1925

A pair of German cartoons took skeptical views in varying degrees of Europe's newfound international comity. In Arthur Krüger's cartoon, Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy merrily dance around their Christmas tree, with its "Peace on Earth" topper, but Not-So-Jolly St. Nicholas worries that they are about to carelessly kick the whole thing over. In an age when candles, not LED lights, lit up the Christmas tree, knocking the tree over was liable to get it considerably too lit up.

"Der Untaugliche Nussknacker" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Dec. 27, 1925

Werner Hahmann's Angel of Peace found the League of Nations (Völker Bund) not up to the task of cracking Disarmament (Abrüstung). 

These German cartoonists in the 1920's really were a bunch of sour pusses. It's as if they knew they were between the Wars.

"In the Hollow of His Hand" by Jesse Cargill for King Features Syndicate, ca. Dec. 24, 1925

Returning to America, I'm not sure what to make of Santa Claus holding the globe in the hollow of his hand. Does Jesse Cargill's Santa Claus look as annoyed to you as he does to me? He almost looks like he's getting ready to throw it at someone.

"Aw-w, There Ain't No Santa Claus" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Dec. 26, 1925

There's no mistaking Leslie Rogers's intentions. Rogers's cartoon for the African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender ran alongside an editorial decrying the lynching in Clarksdale, Mississippi of Lindsey Coleman after a jury had acquitted him of murder charges. This while southern Senators were successfully filibustering the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill for the third consecutive Congress.

"The Night Before Christmas" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Star, Dec. 24, 1925

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Progressive and Liberal Parties had both lost seats to the Conservatives in October elections, but not enough of them for the Conservatives to have a majority. Robert Forke's third-place Progressives had lost 36 of their previous 58 seats in Parliament, but held the balance of power between William Mackenzie King's Liberals, with whom they were more ideologically inclined, and Arthur Meighen's Conservatives.

"The Spirit of a White Christmas" by James Fitzmaurice in Vancouver Daily Province, Dec. 24, 1925

Shunting politics aside, James Fitzmaurice gets us back to some Christmas Spirit. The cartoon's "Mr. Citizen" had finished his shopping, subscribed to the newspaper's charitable fund (charity drives were a common newspaper practice at Christmastime), and apparently had a couple of libations he doesn't want to talk about. 

"Minus Whiskers and Reindeer" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, Dec. 24, 1925

Roy James noted that Santa was not the only one doing the heavy lifting for the holiday. 

"The Annual Daze" by Chester Gould in Chicago Evening American, ca. Dec. 25, 1925

The editorial cartoons of Chester Gould, later creator of "Dick Tracy," have appeared here before. This cartoon predates the pointy-chinned copper by about five years, and seems at first glance to be a light-hearted little gag about office employees not having their minds on their work between Christmas and New Year's.

Then one notices the little dingbat in the lower left corner. What Lincoln getting shot has to do with anything else in Gould's cartoon is completely beyond me.

So let us wrap up this week's Graphical Holiday Tour with a simple Christmas card with no weirdness, politics, faces at windows, or diareses

"Merry Christmas to Our Readers" by J.T. Alley in Commercial Appeal, Memphis Tenn., Dec. 25, 1925

And likewise to mine.

Dingbats Revisited

I'd like to start by thanking D.D. Degg for linking to Saturday's post about editorial cartoon dingbats yesterday at the Daily Cartoonist.

As the cartoon at the end of my post indicates, mine wasn't a comprehensive round-up of every dingbat. It had escaped my notice, however, that the last dingbat was officially retired only very recently: David Fitzsimmon's quail flew off into the sunset at the end of December. I'm grateful to D.D. for furthering the research.

Speaking of dingbats, I've come across a few other cartoons among my juvenalia in which I added a dingbat. I was checking through the on-line archives of the student newspaper at my alma mater, St. Olaf's Manitou Messenger. There are some original drawings I never got back from the Messenger, and this is one of them.

in Manitou Messenger, April 20, 1978

It's about an on-campus party that was busted, resulting in punishments for several people who gave their actual names when caught. (Until senior year, most of my Messenger cartoons concerned campus issues.)

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I also ran across this front page story advertising an upcoming campus lecture by a "Kennedy-esque" Senator from Delaware:

I'm afraid I must have skipped Senator Biden's lecture, and since his visit to campus came after the last Messenger before Christmas break was published — the next issue wouldn't come out until February — I have no record of what he said. 

C'mon, man. It was probably a lot of malarkey about trains. No joke. 

Meet the Dingbats

Last Saturday's post looked back on my abortive attempt to add a little character in my editorial cartoons giving postscriptive commentary on the topic of the day. Although I didn't keep it up, such characters are a longstanding tradition that dates back at least to the marginalia in medieval manuscripts, if not to paintings on cave walls.

In editorial cartooning, they're called dingbats, after the typesetters' term for non-alphanumeric characters used for everything from bullet points to paragraph dividers to space filler.

The best known of these in the present day was Puck, the little penguin Pat Oliphant drew at the bottom of his editorial cartoons from his early days Down Under with the Adelaide Advertiser until his retirement in 2015.

"Here I Am, the Last Livin' Person in Ireland..." by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, ca. Feb. 18, 1973

Puck came into being after a colleague at the Adelaide Advertiser brought a penguin in a paper sack to the newspaper office. The 20-something Oliphant, whose political leanings were well to the left of his editors and the publisher at the Advertiser, began adding Puck to his cartoons as a way of sneaking his true opinions past those editors. By the time they caught onto this device, Puck's popularity with readers ensured that the penguin would continue whether the editors liked it or not.

"Now Is the Time to Save Gas" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1943

I also mentioned Fred O. Seibel and his crow last week. The crow also had a name, but sources disagree whether it is Moses or Jim. Since I have not been able to track down an origin story for him, I'll leave both names here with the caveat that I found him named Jim in a contemporary source, Moses in an article written long after Seibel had died.

"Alas Poor Yorick" by Fred Seibel in Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1933

Getting his start in upstate New York in 1908, Seibel was the editorial cartoonist at the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch 1926 to 1968. Representing oneself with a crow named Jim would hardly raise an eyebrow at the start of his career; by 1968, and certainly by 2021 when the above-linked article was written, there was nothing quaint or cute about "Jim Crow."

"No Trespassing" by Bob Satterfield for Satterfield Cartoon Service, ca. November, 1914

Bill Rowell might have confused Seibel's crow with Bob Satterfield's bear, whose name was Moses according to Cartoons Magazine. 

The bear's name might also have been Bizzy, however. Satterfield also drew comic strips, including one starting in 1903 starring a bear named Bizzy. A typical episode of the strip, titled "Oh, Thunder," consisted of four square panels showing the bear and perhaps another cartoon animal with a four-line poem. It ran until at least 1933.

Sat's Bear (yet another of its names) was inspired by the popular tale about Teddy Roosevelt declining to kill a bear cub brought to him to shoot at. The incident inspired a famous cartoon by Clifford Berryman, and the more enduring teddy bear dolls. Berryman's bear reappeared once in a while, whereas Satterfield's bruin was a daily constant.

"Advice from One Who Knows" by Bob Satterfield in Detroit Times, ca. July, 1916

 

In 1914, another cartoonist we've featured here from time to time, John Baer, offered Satterfield $1,000 for the rights to use the bear in his cartoons. Satterfield turned down the offer, writing, “He has become an indispensable and highly honored member of our firm, and I assure you that his place could not be successfully filled by anybody else.”

"When Doctors Disagree" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Dec. 27, 1898

If you've been following my blog long enough, you are familiar with the work of Minneapolis Tribune cartoonist Rowland C. Bowman, and his little dog. 

When Bowman died in 1903 at the age of 32, the Tribune article eulogizing him explained that the dog had originally appeared as one of many characters in a Bowman cartoon celebrating a Minneapolis baseball team winning a pennant. Something about the dog appealed to readers, so Bowman kept bringing it back again and again.

"Castro Thinks the Venezuelan Trouble Is a Fuse" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 5, 1903

The dog never had a name as far as I've been able to ascertain, and never spoke a word of dialogue. Occasionally, he would be hidden in the cartoon, peering out from behind a fence for instance, resulting in letters to the editor from readers who couldn't find him, or were proud of themselves that they could.

"Willie Bryan Starts in Early" by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 18, 1903

A dingbat we met just last month was William K. Patrick's wise-quacking duck.

Patrick's duck originated in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, and when the Times-Democrat merged with the New Orleans Daily Picayune in 1914, the duck took over as the dingbat in charge of reporting the weather. This put the Picayune's weatherfrog out of work after 20 years of faithful service to the Big Easy.

"Meanwhile, the Value of the Eggs" by William K. Patrick in Fort Worth Star Telegram, Feb. 1, 1923

After Patrick left New Orleans for Fort Worth, taking his duck with him, New Orleanians were left with no weathercritter telling them whether to bring an umbrella to work. That is, until 1952, when Times-Picayune editors enlisted Walt Kelly's Pogo to take the job.

The paper's readers, however, would have none of the out-of-state Okeefenokian marsupial, and voted to give the job back to the old frog, who continues his frognostications to this very day.

"What Does His Birthday Mean to You" by Wm. K. Patrick in Fort Worth Star Telegram, Feb. 22, 1923

All of which is a round-about way of telling you that I don't have any interesting tidbits to pass along about the duck itself, save that a whimsical 1918 article in Cartoons Magazine cast Patrick's duck as the colonel in charge of a convocation of cartoon dingbats assembled to pledge their support to the war effort.

in Cartoons Magazine, Chicago, August, 1918

Alas, none of us are including those beloved dingbats in our editorial cartoons any more. (Unless you count Stan Kelly.)

Perhaps that what's ailing our profession these days...

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