This Week's Sneak Peek

Thank you to Mike Peterson for linking to yesterday's historical post! 

Now, with the past as prologue:

 

Memorial Day's Look Back

A century ago, there was already talk about folks forgetting the reason for the holiday today. Saving my sneak peek for another day, here's Ceperley's take on the topic.

"If It Wasn't for Grandpa..." by William A. Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, May 30, 1923

 

Fighting Bob LaFollette

There are several noteworthy events in May of 1923 that I haven't gotten around to highlighting in these Saturday History Tours, so it wasn't easy picking which one to end the month with today. I've decided that it's time to start paying attention to Wisconsin Senator Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette.

"That Kid from Wisconsin Again" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. May 16, 1923

LaFollette still holds a place of honor here in his home state. There are streets and schools named for him all over the place here. Save for a COVID hiatus, Madison progressives have held Fighting Bob Fest every fall since 2002 (although its website appears to have been taken over by some unrelated commercial venture these days). 

His son Robert Jr. succeeded him in the Senate; his other son, Philip, served three terms as Wisconsin Governor in the 1930's. Grandson Bronson LaFollette was elected Wisconsin Attorney General from 1965 to 1969 and again from 1975 to 1987. A great-grandson and distant cousin of Bronson, Douglas LaFollette, recently resigned as Wisconsin Secretary of State, an elected post he had held since 1974.

But you don't find a lot of love for Senator LaFollette in the editorial cartoons of a century ago. Republican partisans did not care for his open rivalry with his fellow Republican in the White House, President Warren G. Harding. Democrats remembered his opposition to Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy leading up to and during World War I.

"Valuing an Old Masterpiece" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1923

Regarding these cartoons, Senator LaFollette had for ten years charged that U.S. railroads were overvalued, allowing them to overcharge for passenger and freight travel. Following Progressives' gains in the 1922 election, his charges finally had to be taken seriously by Senate leadership, which promised to have the Senate's Interstate Commerce Commission hold hearings.

"Shoe the Old Horse..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 31, 1923

LaFollette protested that those hearings would be against Senate rules, in that the 68th Congress had still not been called into session — and would not be called into session for months to come. Four seats on the commission were left vacant at the end of the 67th Congress. Progressives wanted a greater say on the commission, but the Senate couldn't seat new members before being called into session. At May's end, it appeared that no hearings would be held, and no legislation offered.

The other Senator in Darling's cartoon is Smith Brookhart (R-IA).

"Making Progress" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. May 13, 1923

The Progressive bloc of Republicans in the House and Senate, LaFollette included, were isolationists. So was conservative President Harding, until convinced by his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, to support a proposal for a World Court to adjudicate international disputes before they could break into open warfare.

The other Republicans in William Morris's cartoon are Senators William Borah (R-ID), George Moses (R-NH), Hiram Johnson (R-CA) and Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA). Lodge was not one of the Progressives, but had found isolationism useful against the Wilson administration in 1918 and 1920.

"The Move that Will Settle the Argument" by Edward Gale in Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1923

LaFollette had turned down the idea of running for president on the Farmer-Labor Party ticket in 1920, but was now entertaining serious talk of running on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924. Sitting atop the elephant's rump in Gale's cartoon, Senator Hiram Johnson (R-CA, Teddy Roosevelt's running mate in 1912) would eventually challenge Calvin Coolidge for the 1924 Republican presidential nomination.

Meanwhile, President Harding announced what would be a fateful speaking tour of the American West from Alaska to California in the coming summer.

"Ready to Follow the President..." by Wm. A. Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, May 27, 1923

My thanks to D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist for identifying "CEP" for me. I was running into a lot of dead ends trying to identify the Davenport Democrat's cartoonist. (It didn't help that Davenport was the name of a much more famous cartoonist.) There is no mention of CEP in this "Our Iowa Heritage" article on Iowa cartoonists, in spite of its having a contributor from the Democrat's successor newspaper, the Quad City Times, or in "Iowa Artists of the First Hundred Years," including its list of cartoonists on page 246.

Not so much in this particular cartoon, but Ceperley's style is often reminiscent of that of fellow Iowan J.N. "Ding" Darling. Yet where Ding was generally Republican, Ceperley leaned Democratic. His last cartoon in the Davenport Democrat ran on January 1, 1933 but he continued as City Editor of the paper until 1937; he died in 1956.

"In an Open Field" by William F. "Wilfred" Canan in Minneapolis Daily Star, May 23, 1923

This cartoon by Wilfred Canan (pen name Billican) may be the closest thing I'll find to one sympathetic to Senator LaFollette. Canan (1889-1929) began his cartooning career drawing for publications associated with the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, a leftist political organization that gave rise to the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota. 

Harding in this cartoon is singing an 1850 hymn by Emily Oakley based on the parable of the sower:

Sowing the seed by the wayside high,
Sowing the seed on the rocks to die,
Sowing the seed where the thorns will spoil,
Sowing the seed in the fertile soil:
O what shall the harvest be?

Given 100 years worth of hindsight, the parable of the rich fool also comes to mind.

Q Toon: Pride 2023

I like to come up with an LGBTQIA+ Pride themed cartoon in time for monthly publications' June issues. This year, it just feels impossible to come up with anything upbeat, let alone funny.

Pride celebrations have been cancelled in several Florida communities this year due to the "hostile environment" created by Governor Ron DeSantis and his legislature's intentionally vague law criminalizing drag performances. 

Florida is by no means alone in promulgating DeSantis-style Cancel Culture. Event organizers have cancelled similar celebrations in Kansas, and organizers are concerned that a legislation in Tennessee may yet force them to cancel events in Memphis and Knoxville.

The onslaught of viciously anti-LGBTQ legislation being regurgitated from one red state to the next makes this a bleak Pride season. 

Who knew that we would come to miss the crass Pride Merch commercialism of 1992 to 2016?

This Week's Sneak Peek

 Alert readers may have noticed that George Santos did not, in fact, win the Preakness over the weekend.

Be That As It May

Today's Saturday rummage through the archives should perhaps belong before last Saturday's, since I'm starting off here with the last cartoon I drew for the Parkside Ranger before the 1983 summer break; but I'll move on to later years when summer breaks were not an issue.

I've got no unifying theme to the cartoons this week, so join me on a hopscotch tour taking us hither, yon, and points unknown.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 5, 1983

I don't believe that I got the original of this cartoon back from the Ranger, so I've lifted this from their on-line archives. I notice that I had not written the Ranger's name on the cartoon, so perhaps I drew the cartoon I led off with last week in case the editors wanted to run it in the May 12 edition. (They ran a post-graduate cartoon I had drawn in April instead.)

At issue in the cartoon is Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The imp in the corner (possibly the last time I used him in a cartoon) is referring to Lebanon's various ethnic and religious camps fighting to control other sectors of the country: Druze, Christian, and Palestinian, and within them, splinter groups. The Syrian government of Assad carved off a sector twice as large as the one taken by Israel.

Seated at the table is Lebanon's President Amine Gemayel, who had came to office in place of his assassinated elder brother Bachir in September of 1982. Leaning in through the window is Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin — a caricature I wouldn't be able to get away with today. But seriously: the man looked like an antisemitic cartoon come to life.

May, 1993

This local issue cartoon from May, 1993, speaks to me now because we happen to be going through yet another hospital merger where my Better Half works. These mergers are advertised as improving cost efficiencies, and we've noticed how it works: if Acceptional Health Corp. offers its employees more paid days off than Adepture Medical Inc. does, and Adepture contributes more to its employees' 401-Ks than Acceptional does, Acceptional-Adepture employees will end up with the lesser number of paid days off and the lower 401-K contribution. 

The front page of the May 20, 1993 Racine Journal-Times headlined reports of a move by All Saints Medical Center (itself a then-recent merger of St. Luke's and St. Mary's Hospitals) intention to buy up Racine Medical Clinic and Kurten Medical Clinic. The proposed merger would result in a practical health care monopoly in Racine, which had some doctors concerned, according to a sidebar article. 

Another sidebar, and a subsequent editorial, complained that the legally required public notice had appeared not in the local paper, but in the Milwaukee Sentinel. A spokesperson for All Saints explained that "Our customers aren't all from Racine." The paper further alleged that a rash of hospital merger activity in Wisconsin was timed to beat a state law set to take effect on July 1 submitting mergers and major equipment purchases to review by a public panel.

The Journal Times didn't run my cartoon this time. The All Saints monopoly issue would eventually become moot anyway when Aurora Health Care moved into town. Both have been involved in mergers since then, albeit not with each other. Yet.

And Racine still has hospital facilities in and around town, unlike some communities where absentee vulture capitalists shut down the hospitals they've bought in order to finance further mergers and acquisitions elsewhere.

May, 2003

Speaking of cartoons that didn't get published: I've scanned this one in grayscale to show how close I was to finishing it before I gave up on it.

Why did I stop drawing? Because just about every political cartoonist and late night comedian was doing some variation on the same joke about Saddam Hussein's belligerently grandiose spokesman, whom we called "Baghdad Bob." Al-Sahhaf confidently predicted the crushing defeat of U.S.-led invading forces all the while that they advanced with only nominal opposition toward the Iraq capital.

Of course, we already had Beltway Bobs of our own. Our troops weren't exactly greeted as liberators. Nor did the war pay for itself.

Q Syndicate, May, 2003

If you weren't bothered by cartoon stereotypes in my caricature of an Israeli Prime Minister, perhaps you will also enjoy some mafia stereotypes, too. 

What can I say? In our household, we watch "Some Like It Hot" and "Key Largo" whenever they show up on Turner Classic Movies.

I have since learned that "youse" is plural. My bad.

Q Syndicate, May, 2013

Taking some time off to travel to a family wedding in May of 2013, I drew only three cartoons that month.

Since immigration reform is again (or rather, still) in the news these days, I'll choose this one drawn for Q Syndicate. LGBTQ+ activists had hopes of convincing the Senate to include a provision in that year's immigration reform bill to grant citizenship to same-sex foreign spouses of U.S. citizens — just like different-sex couples, including a recent First Lady, enjoy.

Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) supported such a provision, but couldn't get it through his committee. Democrats, even those sympathetic to LGBTQ+ couples' rights, realized that there was zero chance of the Republican House accepting the provision.

They might as well have included citizenship for Grindr hook-ups. The Senate passed the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" in June, but Republicans in the House never took up the measure at all, once again preventing the government from solving our immigration problems.

Instead, Republicans kept immigration as an issue they have continued to bitch and whine about ever since. 

Flying a planeload of migrants to Martha's Vineyard is so much easier than responsible governance, you know.

Q Toon: First Ten Callers Get Brooklyn Bridge Free!

George Santos, the prevaricating Congressboob from Long Island, has been indicted in New York on 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and "making materially false statements to the House of Representatives." According to the indictment,

"He used political contributions to line his pockets, unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits that should have gone to New Yorkers who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and lied to the House of Representatives."

That doesn't count fraud charges pending against him in Brazil, or the FBI investigation of Santos for allegedly taking money from a GoFundMe page that was started to raise money for a U.S. Navy veteran.

In response, his fellow Republican Congresscretins have courageously rejected a Democratic proposal to expel Santos from office, and Santos has vowed to fight on to clear his good name (whichever one that is).

Meanwhile, the Most Corrupt President In History has shown Santos the way to turn a criminal indictment into a quick buck. If a supposed billionaire can shake down his maga minions again and again and again, how hard can it be for Anthony Devolder, Nigerian Prince, to do the same?