Putting together Saturday's retrospective of some of my Jimmy Carter cartoons, I should have thought to check the stuff Mom had saved for the earliest possible samples.
Better late than never. In lieu of my usual Sneak Peek, here's one from my high school newspaper before the 1976 presidential election:
The news that former President Jimmy Carter has begun end-of-life hospice care has prompted a general outpouring of sympathy from all quarters (congressional Repugnicans and Fox Noisemakers excused).
It has been a long time since I have drawn Mr. Carter in a cartoon. He didn't venture into LGBTQ+ topics during his presidency, but has offered support to our community in the years since; I am likely to find something to say about that in next week's syndicated cartoon.
In the meantime, here are some oldies from my vault.
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| Unpublished, Dec. 1977 |
This is the earliest Carter cartoon I have in my files. There were earlier ones in a folder I mislaid back in my college days which are now lost to history; I can't remember whether I ever drew Jimmy Carter for my high school newspaper. As a freshman at college in December of 1977, I drew cartoons for the student newspaper; but since we had nationally syndicated cartoons by Mike Peters, I mostly stuck to campus issues.
This old sketchbook cartoon does sum up Carter's presidential legacy, though: changing the focus of foreign policy to human rights rather than supporting any regime that claimed to oppose communism, the Carter administration was able to wrangle some successes on its own terms.
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| March, 1979 |
Neither of them came easily, but you can cite the peaceful turn-over of the Panama Canal and a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as two of those successes. Our dealings with the U.S.S.R., Cuba, and OPEC, not so much.
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| in Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, March 8, 1979 |
Domestically, the 1970's were not a great time to be president of the United States. Rising oil prices fueled inflation faster than wages could catch up with it. Carter named the national mood malaise, and his own popularity was not immune to it.
Carter had never been popular with organized labor, and liberals in the Democratic Party chafed at his centrist policies. Republicans, painting Carter as weak and feckless, promised a brighter future based on the a return to the morals and tax levels of days long past.
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| April, 1980 |
And then a bunch of Iranian university students occupied the American embassy in Teheran and held its staff hostage for 444 days, right up to the day Carter turned the Oval Office over to a has-been B-list actor from California.
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| in Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, Nov. 6, 1980 |
I drew two cartoons for the post-election issue of the campus newspaper in November, 1980: one to run if Carter won, and this one to run when he didn't. (Even as a committed Anderson supporter, I didn't see any need to draw a third cartoon.)
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March, 1982 |
I've posted this one often. It is commonplace for presidents these days to blame a poor economy on their predecessor; Reagan did so more than a year after Carter had returned to Plains.
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| in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Oct. 18, 1993 |
If the historical assessment of Carter's presidency left something to be desired, his post-presidency has been exemplary. Instead of enjoying fame and fortune, he helped Habitat for Humanity build houses well past an age when most people are happy to let more youthful hands lay bricks and pound nails.
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| in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Sept. 12, 1997 |
In addition to his work with Habitat for Humanity, Carter was known for serving as an elections monitor in fledgling democracies worldwide. In 1997, he was asked to bring this work with the Carter Center back home. Courts threw out the Teamsters' reelection of their union president the previous year due to ballot rigging and other irregularities, and challenger Jimmy Hoffa Jr. urged Carter to step in during the court-ordered election redo.
The Carter Center has monitored 111 elections in 39 countries since the 1980s, and decided after the party conventions in August that the U.S. presidential contest merited something similar, citing a "backsliding" of American democracy that started a decade ago and has accelerated during the Corrupt Trump Administration.
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I couldn't let this week's Graphical History Tour pass without also acknowledging the passing on Thursday of Tony Earl.
As a candidate for Wisconsin's Governor in 1982, he didn't make it in to our office at the Kenosha Tribune before the paper imploded, so I never did produce a caricature of him there. He did make it into a few of my cartoons for the UW-Parkside Ranger and the NorthCountry Journal during his four years in office (and once in the UWM Post as a candidate in the 1988 Senate primary).
He is fondly remembered as an honest and decent politician from an era before our democracy backslid, before everyone bunkered in our fortified enemy camps, and when a Democrat in Wisconsin's governor's office could still get things done. I seldom had reason to aim a caustic pen at him; but if I have to narrow it down to one cartoon to post in his memory, I'll let it be this one.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Dec. 15, 1983 |
Rest in peace, Governor Earl.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants the medical records of all transgender students at his state's institutions of higher learning.
DeSantis asked to see a breakdown of the medical data of students who received gender-affirming care from public entities. This includes anyone in the general public who sought gender-affirming care at the hospitals located at these public universities. In addition, he wants their ages and the dates they received gender-affirming care. The deadline to submit those records was February 10. ...
When Insider asked why the state has requested the health data of transgender college students from public universities, the state's deputy press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said: "We are committed to fully understanding the amount of public funding that is going toward such nonacademic pursuits to best assess how to get our colleges and universities refocused on education and truth."
Leaving aside for the moment the question of why DeSantis thinks students getting medical care hampers colleges' and universities' ability to focus on education and truth, how turning over patient records to the governor is not a violation of HIPAA confidentiality rules is beyond me.
Officials at the University of South Florida announced that they would comply with DeSantis administration's demands, but assured students that their privacy rights would be maintained by redacting information that would identify who the transgender students are.
But as one USF student explained,
“Even if it’s technically legal because it doesn’t have names, it’s still immoral. Because it’s a small community and (the data is) sorted by age and very specific personalized treatment plans, you can dox someone with this. You can find people out and harass them, with the Florida sunshine law.”
Given Mr. DeSantis's record to date, I'm guessing that facilitating the doxing of transgender students is not a bug in his plans, but a feature.
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.
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| 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.
It's Monday, and time to post a tiny snippet from this week's syndicated cartoon.
Is this the first time she's noticing his bald spot?
Tune in Thursday to find out.
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.
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| "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.
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| "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.
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| "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."
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| "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.
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| "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.”
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| "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.
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.
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| "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.
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| "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.
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| "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.
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| 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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I can be a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to English grammar. The growing use of apostrophes before the "s" in plural nouns sets my teeth on edge. I insist that "literally" literally means "literally," lest it mean nothing at all. And "the media" ain't singular. ("The opera," however, is, unless you're discussing someone's entire body of work.)
I am willing to yield somewhat to the people who want to be referred to in the third person as "they" or "them," but I often find it confusing. Is they or aren't they? Should the reflexive pronoun be "themselves" or "themself"? Or do they truly contain multitudes?
The Week magazine (February 10 issue) had an interesting review of the latest album by nonbinary recording artist Sam Smith. Throughout the entire article weighing in at over 160 words, whoever wrote it carefully avoided referring to them with any third-person pronouns even once.
So that's one way of dealing with it.
Spoken language is not static but dynamic. If you don't believe that, try listening to a conversation among the Amish. Or go read some Shakespeare (who is known to have employed they/them pronouns on some singular occasions, by the way).
Still, it would be helpful if nonbinary people weren't leaving the entire onus (or onera) of remembering how many people they are on the rest of us. Meet us halfway, all right?
Would it have ruined Smith's album if their opening song were "Love Us More"?
