This Week's Sneak Peek

Don't forget: there are local and state elections next week, too.

Cubbies and Tigers and Goats, Oh My

It's Spitballback Saturday here at Bergetoons, and what better way to celebrate the generations-long-awaited return of the Chicago Cubs to the World Series than to dredge up some cartoons about their 1908 world championship?

The Chicago Tribune has stronger ties to the Cubs, but the next seven cartoons are all from the Chicago Examiner. (And to anyone who thinks its unfair of me not to include cartoons about the Cleveland Indians' last championship, 68 years is a long time, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer's copyright claims are longer.)

"Where Ignorance is ----!!!" by A.C. Fera for Chicago Examiner, October 10, 1908

A.C. Fera created a couple of easily forgotten comic strips for the Examiner: "What You Lafin At?" (which was the punch line in every one of its nearly a dozen episodes) and "Just Boy," which was renamed "Elmer" and drawn by Doc Winner after Fera's death in 1925. In 1908, he was one of the Examiner's sports cartoonists.

The Chicago Examiner didn't have a comics page in those days, although it did employ sports cartoonists, which was pretty standard practice back then. Action photos being difficult to come by, most newspapers broke up the gray print of the sports page with posed photos of the athletes, but also cartoons. Sometimes both were spliced together: a drawing of a cheering fan drawn in the background of a photograph of a pitcher, quarterback or horse.

Montage for Chicago Examiner, October 13, 1908

While you'll occasionally see editorial cartoonists taking a break from politics to draw about sports, Drew Litton is the only guy I know of still drawing a regular, dedicated editorial sports cartoon. There are a few others, such as Phil Hands, who supplement their editorial work with cartoons for the sports page cheering on the local university team during football season.

The rest of these cartoons from 1908 are by Sidney Smith, best known for creating The Gumps comic strip. The Examiner had hired him as a sports cartoonist earlier that year; he (and Fera) occasionally filled in for Frederick Opper's daily diatribes against William Jennings Bryan and Illinois States Attorney Jacob Kern on the editorial page as well.

Here's Smith's front page cartoon for the Chicago Examiner as the Cubs won the National League pennant against the New York Giants. The print in the dialogue balloons is quite tiny, even when embiggenified, so I've left these files larger than I usually do.

"Victory" by Sidney Smith for Chicago Examiner, October 9, 1908

According to the Examiner, a near riot broke out at the end of the pennant game. New York fans rushed out onto the field, pummeling and throwing debris at the players and the police. Manager Frank Chance suffered a broken clavicle; pitcher Jack Pfeister and catcher John Kling were badly bruised; and one spectator, a fireman named Henry T. McBride, was killed in a fall from the stands.

Detail of "A Tale of the Future" by Sidney Smith for Chicago Examiner, October 12, 1908

Joe Tinker and Frank Chance, of course, were two of the principals in the immortal Tinkers to Evers to Chance double play combination, executed 54 times between 1906 and 1910.

Part of the job of a sports cartoonist, of course, is drawing cartoons when your team comes up short, as the Cubs did in game 3 of the series.

"New Dish for the Tiger" by Sidney Smith for Chicago Examiner, October 13, 1908

Cubs take series before the smallest crowd in World Series history.

"Solid Comfort" by Sidney Smith for Chicago Examiner, October 15, 1908

You've probably been wondering why the hell goats keep showing up in 1908 cartoons about the Cubs. This goat is Buck Nix, a recurring character in Smith's sports cartoons. In 1911, Smith moved to the Chicago Tribune, where he renamed the goat Old Doc Yak for the daily strip and Sunday comic which were eventually turned over to the Gumps.

"Good-by to Baseball" by Sidney Smith for Chicago Examiner,  October 15, 1908

The Curse of the Billy Goat was still 37 years in the future, thanks to Billy Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, and more to the point, of a smelly goat that he brought to game four of the 1945 World Series. Kicked out of Wrigley Field because of the goat, Sianis reportedly uttered the fateful curse, "Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more." The Cubs went on to lose the Series to, as fate would have it, the Detroit Tigers.

"One of Those Old Fashioned Chewing Matches" by Carey Orr for Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1945

108 years after their last World Championship, can the Cubs pull it out this time? The final word today goes to Susan Sarandon's character in Bull Durham because, as Cubs fans know full well, you gotta believe.

"I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball... It's a long season and you gotta trust. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball." —Annie Savoy, in Bull Durham

Calling Nate Silver

Q Toon: Bad Chemistry

After two consecutive Trump cartoons, I'm taking a week off from rigging the election for Hillary Clinton to post a toon for Hallowe'en.

This was not the year for some sort of false equivalency cartoon of kids wearing Donald and Hillary masks frightening the bejeezes out of the citizenry. A cartoon of Trump as a jack-o-lantern is so obvious you could see it coming last July. A cartoon of Hillary Clinton trick-or-treating with a Wikileaky bag might have been tempting, if there were the slightest possibility of attaching relevance to my LGBT readership to it. There isn't, so some other desperate cartoonist is welcome to that idea.

There is one subtle tie between this week's cartoon and the 2016 campaign which some page designers may have caught. The caption is in a font, BF Tiny Hand, which creator Mark Davis based on Donald Trump's handwriting.
🎃

This Week's Sneak Peek

If you have things that go bump in the night, perhaps your poltergeist just needs glasses.

Campaign 1916

As we draw tantalizingly closer to the end of the 2016 campaign, Stumpback Saturday takes a look over its shoulder at editorial cartoons of the issues of the final weeks of the presidential election of 1916.

"Troubles of a Good Natured Man" by Luther Bradley in Chicago Daily News, 1916

Luther Bradley's Woodrow Wilson seems nonplussed by pups bearing his own foreign policy slogans of Watchful Waiting and Too Proud to Fight, here joined by his decision to stay out of arbitrating the railroad workers strike.

The Wilson campaign slogan that lived on in popular memory was "He kept us out of war," which inspired Republican John Darling to draw the following cartoon. Uncle Sam smarts under a barrage of bricks and planks representing national humiliation, the Lusitania, Mexican insolence, British naval blockade and opening of U.S. mails, 1914 hard times, Democratic extravagance, and "After the War?"

"He Kept Us Out of War" by John "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, 1916

I like a couple of John McCutcheon cartoons from late October. In the first, he flips "He kept us out of war" on its head; and indeed, as the Zimmerman telegram would show, the German foreign office would have been perfectly happy to keep us out of their war, too.

"He's Curious to Know" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1916

In the second, McCutcheon grudgingly acknowledges Wilson's claim to prosperity and peace (signed "World War" and "Watchful Waiting" in reference to the president's initials), but begs to attribute problems of national prestige, Mexico, pork, patriotism and paper preparedness to him as well.

"The Ones He Exhibits" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1916

At the Duluth Evening Herald, where they were confidently predicting a landslide victory for Wilson, C.F. Naughton, repeating a frequent image in Democratic cartoons, sees Hughes haunted by Wilson's question "What would you have done?" regarding American response to the war in Europe.

"The Republican Tam O'Shanter" by C.F. Naughton for Duluth Evening Herald, October 23, 1916

The Republicans at the New York Evening Sun weren't fazed by that question at all.

"He Never Had to Ask That" by Robert Carter in New York Evening Sun, 1916

Up the street at the New York World, Rollin Kirby depicts, for the umpteenth time, Hughes as a patsy for the German Kaiser. Hughes had given up a seat on the Supreme Court to accept the Republican nomination, so Kirby draws his replacement robe as a patchwork quilt of former presidents Taft and Roosevelt, the Republican old guard, Wall Street, jingoism, pacifism, women's suffrage, and hyphenated Americans (especially German-Americans).

"In Place of the Ermine" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, 1916

In fact, Hughes proclaimed himself neutral regarding whether to support Europe's Allied or Central Powers. For that matter, Wilson actively pursued the German vote; German-speaking surrogates promoted the incumbent president to German-American audiences. In the end, German-Americans did not vote as a bloc, and were not a significant factor in the election's outcome.

"The Missing Link" by Wm. C. Morris for Harpers Weekly Independent, November 6, 1916

Sid Greene's summary of the campaign probably resonates as strongly today as it did a century ago.

"You Poor Fish" by Sidney J. Greene for New York Telegram, October 28, 1916

The label on the fish reads, "Catostomus commersonmii — in plain English, this means sucker."

Q Toon: Gays for Trump

I watched most of last night's presidential debate. I was driving with it on the car radio as it began, then called it up on an iPad once I got home (my husband had the Cubs-Dodgers game on TV). I tried reading the npr.org transcript to catch up on what I missed between car and what they were live streaming, but deciphering the Verb8im Inc. account was rather challenging. Editors have fixed it now, but I kid you not: last night, it had Donald Trump praising the late Justice Coolio.

Anyway, an hour into the debate, my iPad got so upset that it severed its internet connection and refused to go on. So I missed the last half hour of the program; please excuse me if I make some statements below that would be proven false by the final thirty minutes of the debate.

There hasn't been much attention paid to LGBT issues this election cycle (Republican primary roadkill such as Mike Huckabee notwithstanding).

Hillary Clinton mentioned her support for LGBT issues such as marriage equality very early in the debate last night, but discussion for the evening quickly snagged onto her emails, Trump's boorish behavior, whether she lied, and whether he'd accept defeat. Chris Wallace had questions about other things, but nobody is going to remember what they were.

Which is a shame, since there have been so many important issues that have been entirely ignored by the candidates and most of the media. The Veterans Affairs system is a complete mess, even as the nation's endless wars are still producing more and more demand for its services. Or, given how heavily our banking, infrastructure and election systems rely on the internet, what would the candidates do toward shoring up the nation's cyber-security? And how do you solve a problem like Korea?

No, the media are all talking about how Donald Trump wouldn't promise to accept the results of the election. If the question had been whether he thinks it's responsible to keep telling his rabid followers that nefarious forces ("You know what I'm talking about!") are plotting to steal the election from them, that would be one thing. But as phrased, it was just another version of the question every candidate who is behind in the polls gets: "Are you ready to concede the election today?"

Well, at least Trump had his sniffing and snorting under control last night. For the first sixty minutes at any rate.