Since reminding anyone about this sort of thing is verboten in Florida, our Graphical History Tour turns once again to the rise of the Klan in the U.S. in the wake of World War I.
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| "There's Nothing Else to Do About It" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 23, 1923 |
Memphis, Tennessee cartoonist James Alley often drew cartoons critical of the Klan. (The day after the above cartoon appeared on the Commercial Appeal's front page, he followed up with the cartoon I posted here last week showing himself threatened by a hooded klansman and other cartoon targets.)
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| "I'm Unworthy" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 28, 2023 |
In real life, this veteran would have been unlikely to live to see another day with that attitude. Black veterans quickly found that their uniform bought them no respect at home.
White Americans felt entitled to take their prejudices with them when traveling abroad, too. As reported in Time magazine (August 13, 1923):
"Some American tourist threw from a bus a French Negro, a War veteran, who was touring the battlefields. The French Foreign Office issued a communiqué, directing the police to protect Frenchmen at all costs, regardless of color, and threatening offensive tourists with expulsion if they tried to import Jim Crow tactics. France needs the loyalty of her colored colonies even more than she needs the cash of American tourists."
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| "Evolution" by Frank "Spang" Spangler in Montgomery Advertiser, August 20, 1923 |
Editorial and Political Cartooning by Syd Hoff describes Frank Spangler as having joined Alley as having "loathed groups attempting to spread doctrines of race hatred"; but looking back on this cartoon a century later, one realizes he wasn't a paragon of wokeness.
Granted, Spangler was a creature of his time and space. His point, as I see it, is that wars between European peoples (France and Germany, certainly; Italy and Greece were also threatening hostilities that summer) worked to the advantage of darker peoples. Those in the foreground certainly do not appear at all benign. It's the same sort of racist cartoon we saw from Harry Murphy and other Cassandras of the "yellow peril," and cartoons leading up to and after the Civil War mocking the very idea that Blacks could be part of civilized society.
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| "Evolution of the Dunce Cap" by Al Frueh (?) in New York World before August 27, 1923 |
It is difficult to make out the signatures, but I believe this cartoon and the next are by Al Frueh, who was better known for his caricatures of celebrities than for his editorial cartoons.
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| "The Klanited States of Klamerica" by Al Frueh in New York World, September, 1923 |
Frueh may have been making light of the Klan's obsession with the letter K and the shape of the their hoods, but he made a point that the Klan's influence was not restricted to the states of the former Confederacy.
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| "Americanism" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, before August 23, 1923 |
Speaking of former officials of the Klan, Rollin Kirby takes a dig "Col." William Simmons's Knights of Kamelia (see also Roy James's cartoon here). Simmons, ousted as leader of the Klan earlier in the year, attracted thousands of members to his so-called fraternal society, also called the Knights of the Flaming Sword, but it never truly rivaled the original terrorist group in numbers.
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| "Frankenstein Simmons" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, August 28, 1923 |
In August, Simmons accused this successor, Hiram Wesley Evans, of leading a riot in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, "bristling with guns and daggers, and his very presence was an offense against peace and order, and a challenge to peaceful and loving and law-abiding citizens to either intercept or expel him and his followers." Klansmen had gathered in the town near Pittsburgh on the night of Saturday, August 26 to initiate new members and to intimidate Carnegie's Catholic and Jewish residents.
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| "A Change in the Wind" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, ca. Aug. 25, 1923 |
When police stopped the Klan parade at a bridge over Chartiers Creek, Carnegie residents began throwing bottles at the intruders, and a riot quickly ensued. One klansman, Thomas Abbott, was killed in the melee; the national Klan offered to pay a $7,500 reward for the capture of Abbott's killer. Patrick McDermott, a local mortician, was soon arrested for the murder, but was eventually acquitted at trial.
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| "Mob Lawlessness Breeds Mob Lawlessness" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Sept. 1, 1923 |
There was, indeed, pushback against the Klan, although, Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer (R-MO) toured the country speaking on behalf of his anti-lynching bill, defeated in the previous session of Congress. We have previously discussed Minneapolis Mayor George Leach's campaign against the Klan.
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| "Biting the Hand that Feeds Him" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, Sept. 1, 1923 |
As suggested by the cartoons at the top of this post, some of this reaction came as the Klan expanded its terrorism to white citizens. A jury in Tulsa, Oklahoma, convicted three klansmen in August of flogging Ben Wagner in October, a farmer living near Broken Arrow, who had supposedly torn up a Bible. (I plan to return to the situation in Oklahoma next week.)
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| "Masked Outlaws" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 18, 1923 |
Lawmakers seeking to do something about the Klan took inspiration from New York's legislation prohibiting mask-wearing in public. Following Daniel Fitzpatrick's logic that no good came from hiding one's face, several states and municipalities passed similar laws and ordinances in the 1920's, and again during a resurgence of the Klan in the 1950's.
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| Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Sept. 8, 1923 |
Courts have since ruled that anti-mask laws infringe upon the individual's constitutional right of free association. (This right of anonymity would also be extended to corporations when the Supreme Court ruled the McCain-Feingold campaign financing laws unconstitutional.)
Here at last is my cartoon response to Fox Noise's cattle call in Milwaukee last week of eight of the Republican candidates hoping against hope that something, anything, will force Corrupt Donald Trump to drop out of the presidential race.
At the moment, even though Trump is facing four separate felony trials going into the election, for everything from paying off a porn star to trying to subvert an election to sending a lynch mob into the halls of Congress, that seems like a long shot. Trump does not know the meaning of defeat.
Or truth, or integrity, or perfect, or democracy, or Constitution, or Corinthians.
My cartoon, of course, is riffing on Bret Baier's asking the candidates to raise their hands if they would support Trump as the nominee of their party even if he were convicted in one of those trials. Depending on whom you ask, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was the only candidate who kept his hands down.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been most vocal of any of the eight in proclaiming that Trump is unqualified to be President again; but he sort of halfway raised a hand. Perhaps he was asking recognition to speak.
The other six definitely raised their hands: Tech Bro Vivek Ramaswami right away; Florida Governor Ron DesAntis after checking what the candidates to his right and left were doing.
It was a trick question anyway. Each candidate, in order for permission to be on stage at all, had to first sign a promise to support the Republican presidential nominee, whoever that trumps out to be.
Meanwhile, the only thing more universal among Republicans than slavish loyalty to Donald P0115809 Trump is their fear and loathing of transgender Americans. The candidates pledged to continue their party's assault on transgender student athletes especially:
"If you’re able-bodied in America, you work. If you take out a loan, you pay it back. If you commit a violent crime, you got to jail. And if God made you a man, you play sports against men." — Sen. Tim Scott, closing statement.
“[T]here’s a lot of crazy woke things happening in schools ... biological boys don’t belong in the locker rooms of any of our girls.”— former Gov. Nikki Haley, in response to a question
“I’m saying in North Dakota, we made a priority of protecting women’s sports and we’ve done that in our state." —Gov. Doug Borgum (who vetoed one anti-trans athlete bill in North Dakota but signed two others)
"There are only two genders." — Vivek Ramaswamy
I think we have finally found here one thing that might just possibly shake Republicans' unquestioning devotion to Trump — as absurdly incredible as his declaring himself a transgender student athlete would be.
But then, he does seem to think that he's 6'3" and 215 pounds.
And he does have the vocabulary of a third grader.
Well, mostly incorrect. It's not really him in the cartoon.
It was a pillow with the face from that Trump balloon.
You remember that balloon... it was well over 6'3"; but filled with hot air, it just might have weighed in at 215 lbs.
Today's Graphical History Tour returns to Germany, August, 1923, when the government of a guy you've never heard of fell and was replaced by the government of a guy you've completely forgotten.
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| "Das Neue Licht" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderatsch, Berlin, August 26, 1923 |
Well, if you've been paying attention to these blog posts, you have heard of German Reichkanzler Wilhelm Cano, who resigned on August 12, 1923 after 264 days in office. A businessman, not a politician, Cano's administration oversaw disastrous hyperinflation, widespread food shortages, French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr valley, and a breakdown of reparations negotiations over French insistence that Cano first bring a halt to Germans' active and passive resistance to that occupation.
Having thus soured on the businessman's leadership (why does anyone still think that skill set translates well?), President Friedrich Ebert tapped politician Gustav Ernst Stresemann to form a new coalition cabinet.
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| "Die Große Koalition" by Karl Arnold, Simplicissimus, Sept. 3, 1923 |
Contrary to what the red bride in Karl Arnold's cartoon suggests, Stresemann's "grand coalition" included no communists. The left was represented in Stresemann's cabinet by Ebert's Social Democratic Party.
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| "It's Strange Where Some Folks Go to Avoid the Heat" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 18, 1923 |
Cartoonists (and politicians) in the U.S. were similarly convinced that the threat in Germany was from communists. But in fact, Streseman's German People's Party (DVP) was somewhat right of center at the time, eventually tending toward more and more conservative positions as the decade came to an end.
Communists did, however, seize power in Lübeck in August, and fought against government militia in Saxony. Martial law was declared in Hamburg when striking shipyard workers rioted.
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| "Het Aanbod van de Duitse Industriëlen" by Albert Hahn [Dijkman] Jr. in de Notenkraker, Amsterdam, August, 1923 |
And in September, Time magazine reported a riot in Munich "because retailers of beer tried to keep the price down by increasing the froth."
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| "Deutsches Orchester" by Oskar Theuer in Ulk, Berlin, Aug. 31, 1923 |
That was not the Beerhall Putsch you may remember from history class (where permitted by law). The putsch would come in November, followed later that month by the fall of the Stresemann government.
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| "The Trials of a Cartoonist" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Aug. 24, 1923 |
Just something I came across on its 100th anniversary yesterday.
