To Talk of Many Things

"News Note..." by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, March 27, 1922

Today's graphical history tour pays homage to the human interest stories and other distractions from the Truly Great Issues Of The Day.

Even cartoonists who aspire to become the Nast or Daumier of their day will, from time to time, settle for the inspiration provided by such trivia as the painting of a tree in Cleveland, Ohio.

"You Dirty Boy" by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, March, 1922

Since we have been flooded as of late by cartoons inspired by a certain movie star slapping that comedian, here's a Hollywood cartoon about Will Hays, who resigned as Warren Harding's Postmaster General (a cabinet position in those days) to become the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The Presbyterian deacon would institute the infamous "Hays Code" in reaction to clergy complaints about hedonism and sin in the movies, and such scandals as the rape and murder trial of comic actor Fatty Arbuckle.

"Grandpa Hears a Strange Language..." by Leo Bushnell for Central Press Assn., March, 1922

The exploding popularity of radio didn't escape the attention of cartoonists — or of the federal government, which wasn't about to let the airwaves become the den of iniquity it believed movies had become. Especially because the kids those days could and did build their own radio sets.

"Merrell Shudders Every Time He Thinks of It" by Dorman Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., by March 29, 1922

Dorman Smith's crystal ball didn't quite get the future of radio right, but he did sort of foresee the boombox and the cell phone.

"Spring Fiction" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, by March 31, 1922

But since the iPhone was still 82 years in the future, Americans ignoring each other at the dinner table had to make do with newspapers and magazines.

"Keen Disappointment" by Dorman Smith for NEA, by March 28, 1922

'Twas spring, and a young man's thoughts turned lightly to thoughts of Prohibition. And trying to find some new joke to make about it three years on.

"When East Meets West" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, by March 20, 1922

Henry Payne's predecessor at the Detroit News has left us this car toon, and an object lesson in cartoon structure. Whereas the punch line in Dorman Smith's maple syrup cartoon is so large that it attracts the reader's eye well before the lead-up to it does, the text in Burt Thomas's cartoon is easily overlooked.

Meanwhile, there was still no shortage of serious issues for cartoonists to tackle. Coal miners went on strike on April 1 after negotiations with the mine owners stalled. Since most American homes were heated by coal, a lot of cartoons expressed the obvious opinion that John Q. Public would be adversely affected.

"The Initial Shock Won't Hurt Him..." by Billy Ireland in Columbus Dispatch, by March 30, 1922

Any cartoonists inclined to depict the United Mine Workers as unreasonable socialists might have had second thoughts because seventeen miners working for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company were killed in an explosion on March 24.

"Anxiety at the Shaft" by Callaghan (?) in Oklahoma Leader, March 27, 1922*

I have not yet uncovered any information about the Callaghan who drew the above cartoon, save that he produced a number of pro-labor cartoons in this period. I found the cartoon in the Oklahoma Leader, a solidly pro-labor newspaper published in Oklahoma City from 1918 to 1928; the Leader often credited syndicated cartoons to their source, but I have so far not found it including a byline with any of the Callaghan cartoons it ran. It could be that, like John Baer drawing for the labor publication of train workers, Callaghan drew for a similar newspaper for a miners' union.

"Watchful Waiting" by Harold M. Talburt for Scripps-Howard News Service, by March 31, 1922

What interests me about this Harold Talburt cartoon is that I had been accustomed to his cartoons drawn with grease pencil and charcoal, whereas this early work is in pen and ink. 1922 is the year that Talburt began working for Scripps-Howard; he would be their chief editorial cartoonist until he retired in 1963, being awarded the editorial cartooning Pulitzer along the way in 1933.

"The Last of the Barons" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, April, 1922

Anyway, we'll come back to this strike on future Saturdays. The miners' strike was to last for several months, and the prediction by Talburt's cartoon officer Harding, "Wait'll they begin to shoot," would come true.

______________

* In Minnesota Daily Star, March 20, 1922. See D.D. Degg's comment below.

Q Toon: Definition on Condition

The Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee — the ones without imminent retirement plans — worked hard to besmirch the integrity of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court nomination hearings last week. Josh Hawley blasted her for not sending a teenager to prison for ten years of hardening as some other inmate's bitch. Ted Cruz fulminated about racist babies. Lindsey Graham threw a hissy fit about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

And Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) attempted to trap Judge Jackson into answering a Gotcha! question about transgender persons.

She then tweeted a quotation from the Constitution, except that it happened to be a quotation from the Declaration of Independence.

Republicans have decided that 2022 is the year to go all in on their war against transgender people, so Blackburn must have thought herself mighty damned brilliant to stump Judge Jackson with the question "Can you provide a definition for the word 'woman'?"

“Can I provide a definition?” Jackson replied, clearly bemused. “No. I can't.”

“You can’t?” Blackburn replied.

“Not in this context,” Jackson said. “I’m not a biologist.”

“So you think the meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn said, obviously framing Jackson’s response unfairly.

“Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes,” Jackson said. “If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments and I look at the law and I decide. So I’m not —”

“Well, the fact that you can’t give me a straight answer” — here Blackburn offered a wry chuckle — “about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” the senator said.

I've read to scientific discussions about X and Y chromosomes, intersex persons, and so on; I've read transgender persons' attempts to explain feeling that they were born in the wrong body or couldn't accept the social constructs around being one gender or the other. I still don't completely understand what that must feel like, but I have tried to understand it.

I can guarantee you that Marsha Blackburn and her ilk have never tasked a single brain cell to consider why a person is transgender.

No, they're busy raising the alarm that allowing a transgender collegiate swimmer to compete against other women is the greatest danger to life on Earth since, well, Hunter Biden's laptop. That's a transgender swimmer who, by the way, is good, but has not been leaving every other female swimmer eating her dust, or her spray, or whatever it is that unbeatable swimmers leave the rest of the field eating. 

They're busy censoring and cancelling any transgender author who writes a book to explain to other transgender people, especially children, that they aren't alone. Or to urge cisgender people, even children, to be accepting and understanding of others. Republicans demand isolation and shame upon such crimethink.

And they're still busy making sure that transgender people aren't allowed to go to the bathroom anywhere. Or use public drinking fountains. Or sit near the front of the bus. Or swim at cis-only beaches.

Of... course...

Steve Roper en français

Just something I ran across while looking for something else: the adventure cartoon "Steve Roper" in a Québécois weekly newspaper:

Steve Roper, created by Allen Saunders and Elmer Woggon, entered their comic strip, "Big Chief Wahoo," as a blond news photographer in 1940. Roper eased out the titular Seminole from the strip, and somewhere along the line he quit bleaching his hair, turning it black. Here in 1956, he and Clark Kent obviously have the same barber.

By the time I was old enough to follow the plots, Roper's temples had gone gray; and a crew-cut, blue-collar, often shirtless friend of his, Mike Nomad, was starting to have all the adventures. Roper actually vanished into the Bermuda Triangle for ten years, and I'm not making that up.

"Steve Roper and Mike Nomad," by then drawn by Frank Matera, was a wrap in 2004.

This Week's Quick Sketch

From the pre-cartoon sketchbook for this week's cartoon, and looking like she's ready to storm up on stage and slap me in the face:

Ratification of the Four-Power Treaty

"It Went Through" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, by March 30, 1922

After defeating a series of amendments proposed by treaty opponents, the U.S. Senate ratified Four-Power Treaty among the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan, on March 24, 1922 by a vote of 67 to 27. The lone "reservation" to pass the Senate stipulated that nothing in the treaty should require the U.S. to commit to military action or alliance.

"Getting Rid of the Jinx" by Albert Reid in New York Evening Mail, March, 1922

The vote was bipartisan on both sides: twelve Democrats joined the Republican majority in favor, while four isolationist Republicans voted nay with with the Democratic minority. Quite a few of those Republicans voting aye had been against the international agreements brought home by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson; the Republicans who remained against treaties signed by Republican Warren Harding and Democrats who had been opposed to them all along were called "bitter enders."

"In Spite of All the 'Bitter Enders'..." by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., by March 29, 1922

If the era of U.S. isolation was over, its end wasn't accepted by all quarters of U.S. isolationism. Foremost among them in American media was the newspaper empire of William Randolph Hearst.

"'Con' and 'Bull'" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, by March 24, 1922

For all Hearst's accusation that the treaty put American interests subservient to those of Great Britain and Japan, by requiring its signatories to consult with each other in the event of any conflict in East Asia the Four-Power Treaty was in fact to America's advantage. American and Japanese interests there and in the Pacific had been in conflict before World War I, and were so again in places like Yap, the Philippines, China, and Siberia.

Under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, had the U.S. and Japan gone to war, Great Britain would have been obliged to join Japan against the U.S. But the Four-Powers Treaty superseded the earlier bilateral one.

"Sammy and His Pals" by Frederick Opper for Star Company by March 23, 1922

Hearst's cartoonists nevertheless daily painted a picture of a hapless Uncle Sam tricked into an unwanted alliance, his negotiating team comprised of witless nincompoops bamboozled by wily furriners.

"Some Folks Are Never Satisfied" by Gaar Williams for Chicago Tribune, by March 20, 1922

Isolationism ran strong at "Colonel" McCormick's solidly Republican Chicago Tribune, so it's rather surprising to see one of his cartoonists touting the main advantage to the U.S. of the Four-Party Treaty.

"Post-War Dog" by Gaar Williams for Chicago Tribune, by March 30, 1922

Word must have come down from management that if the Tribune's cartoons couldn't stop the Senate from passing the treaty, they could complain about complying with its limitations on the size of our Army and Navy.

"We're Hardly Going to Hold Our Own" by Gaar Williams for Chicago Tribune, by March 31, 1922

The fact that it also limited the other countries' militaries notwithstanding. The numbers on Williams's rowboats reference the 5:5:3 naval ratio agreed to at the Washington D.C. Naval Conference.

"Those New Boots" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, March, 1922

Outside of the Hearst and Tribune empires, even Magnus Kettner, whose usual fare was the sort of genial, inoffensive slice of life cartoon beloved by circulation managers everywhere, expressed alarm at the treaty's limitations on the U.S. military.

William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, March/April, 1922

William Morris probably correctly divined how Teddy Roosevelt would have felt about trimming the U.S. military, although Morris was one of the many cartoonists helping argue that it was time to do so a little over a year earlier.  

 

I also find it peculiar that Morris felt a need, only three years after Roosevelt's death, to label what appears to me to be an instantly recognizable caricature.

"He Will Not Bother Us Again" by Charles Kuhn in Indianapolis News, by April 13, 1922

In closing, this cautionary note: We can't all be as clairvoyant as this guy.

Q Toon: Free Brittney

I freely confess that I struggled coming up with anything to draw about Brittney Griner, the WNBA star and Olympic medalist who has gotten caught up in the international standoff between Putin's Russia and the rest of the world.

On February 17, one week before Putin's invasion of Ukraine but well after his troops were poised at the border, Russian police arrested Griner at Sheremetyevo airport, reportedly having found a vape cartridge and hashish oil in her luggage. Whether there is anything to the charges or if they were completely trumped up, none of us in the cheap seats may ever know.

Her wife has pleaded with everyone to honor their privacy, which also limits what one might say in a cartoon. Nor has her plight worsened to the level of so many citizens of Ukraine; a representative of the American embassy has been able to visit Griner in detention and reports that she is in good health and spirits.

As an American, a lesbian, and a black woman, Griner faces an uphill climb getting a fair trial in Russia. Instead of an American-style legal system in which a prosecutor presents one side of the case and the defense presents the other, in a Russian court, an investigator appointed by the government presents a case file that determines what can and cannot be argued in court. Her defense is free to conduct its own investigation, but concepts such as an impartial jury of one's peers and a right against self-incrimination simply do not exist.

If found guilty, Griner could face up to ten years in prison, or even in a labor camp.

Griner did not come to Russia as a tourist:

Ms Griner had a second job, and that was why she had flown to Russia — to play for EuroLeague team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she had worked since 2014 during the US off-season.

Roughly half of WNBA players compete overseas in the off-season. For most, it's a way to augment their domestic income: WNBA players receive roughly five times more in Russia than they do in the US.

"If she were Steph Curry or LeBron James, she wouldn't be over there at all because she'd be making enough money," [sports journalist Tamryn] Spruill said. 

After Griner's detention and arrest, I'm fairly sure that any remaining WNBA players moonlighting on Russian basketball teams are seriously reconsidering whether any salary is worth being set up to be a pawn in geopolitical brinksmanship.

Story Time with Ted Cruz

Revisiting this one from February, 2016: