This Week's Sneak Peek

This panel may look familiar if you've been following my humble blog for at least the summer. Maybe not if you were among the sudden spike of visitors looking at last week's Harley-Davidson cartoon.

Since the publications currently running my cartoons publish either bi-weekly or monthly, it's not easy for me to maintain running characters. Most of my past characters have gone by the wayside: Democratic Congressman Luke Warmish got tossed out of office in the Gingrich Wave of 1994; his Republican counterpart Charles Snollygoster IV probably got primaried by a Tea Bagger in the 2010's. Podcasters Buzz and Killer didn't last, only partly because I didn't like how much Buzz resembled a gay gym rat version of Zippy the Pinhead. (Besides, there was less and less for him to be cheerful about during the Corrupt Donald Berzelius Trump administration.)

I've been thinking that Million Moms Cat Lady ought to make a reappearance. She ought to be a fan of Hillbilly Vanilli Vance, though, and I haven't decided what she makes of him now.

Bread and Poseurs, Bread and Poseurs

All aboard the Graphical History Tour! Our destination today is Labor Day weekend, 1924.

"Boss of the World Today" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., August 30, 1924

Labor Day had been an official U.S. holiday since 1894, although I suspect it would have come as news to American workers in the 1920's that they were "boss of the world." 

Dorman Smith may have been looking at things from the perspective of the U.S. workforce being less affected by the lingering aftermath of the Great War than their European counterparts. But in this Republican-dominated era, organized labor was under assault by determined anti-union industries and their allies in state and federal government.

"One Must Push and One Must Pull" by Jesse Taylor Cargill in Sacramento Bee, September 1, 1924

Coming a little closer to the mark, Jesse Cargill at least gets it half right.

"The Cyclone Center" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, September 2, 1924

Labor Day weekend was marred by a new flare-up of violence in the strife-prone mining town of Herrin, Illinois, described by the Chicago Tribune as the "sanguinary center of Bloody Williamson County." The site of a massacre when striking miners attacked strike-breaking workers in 1922, the ensuing years saw a deadly feud between a reckless, Klan-backed prohibition enforcer named S. Glenn Young came to town and was met by anti-Klan folks who appreciated a drink or two after work.

"In Williamson County" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, September 3, 1924

Violence flared up again on August 30 started after charges were dismissed against the Shelton brothers, accused of the murder in February of Constable Caesar Cagle, a Klansman. In spite of the inevitable hostilities boiling under the surface, Sheriff George Galligan, backed by deputies and others, went to the garage owned by J.H. Smith, a known Klan headquarters, in an attempt to take possession of a car. The car had been held there for months because the Klan accused its owner of shooting at Young during an earlier riot. 

In the shooting that ensued Sheriff Galligan's confrontation with Smith and his Klan buddies, a deputy sheriff, a court bailiff, four Klansmen, and one man described as a by-stander were killed. Adjt. Gen. Carlos E. Black immediately mobilized the Illinois National Guard to restore order in the town.

"Open the Gate" by O.C. Chopin in San Francisco Examiner, ca. August 27, 1924

One of organized labor's goals in 1924 was passage and ratification of a constitutional amendment banning child labor. Supreme Court rulings in 1918 and 1922 ruled that federal laws regulating goods produced by children under 14 and 16 were unconstitutional. The House of Representatives approved the amendment on April 26, 1924, and the Senate followed suit on June 2, 1924 to send it to the states.

"They Can Stop Him" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, September 2, 1924

Opposed by business groups, the only state to have ratified the amendment by this point was Arkansas. California, Arizona and Wisconsin would follow in 1925, but the effort stalled out in the 1930's after only 28 of the necessary 36 states had approved ratification.

Since there was no time limit set on the amendment by Congress, it could still be ratified (it would need ratification by 38 states now that Alaska and Hawai'i have joined the union); but the earlier Supreme Court decisions were overruled in 1941. Still, renewed interest by some Republican-ruled states in authorizing child labor might render the issue un-moot again.

"His Day" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, September 1, 1294

Returning to 1924: the Child Labor Amendment was a key plank in the presidential platform of Progressive Party candidate Robert LaFollette — to whom cartoonist Tom Foley dedicated the entire holiday.

"The Hypnotist" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1924

Cartoonists who favored the established political parties were not so easily enthused. LaFollette's campaign and its appeal to Labor were ridiculed by his erstwhile fellow Republicans ...

"Have a Bite" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 30, 1924

... and also by Democrats. 

Both accused him of being a stooge for the Communists, despite his being roundly condemned by them as well.

"Until He Bursts" by K.A. Suvanto in Daily Worker, Chicago, August 23, 1924

All three major candidates courted the American proletariat on Labor Day. The Republicans countered their candidate's strike-breaking record by touting the current prosperity and their "full dinner pail." The Democrats sent vice presidential nominee Charles Bryan out to reassure workers that the candidate at the top of his ticket would represent the working class in spite of his Wall Street background.

"The Day after His Holiday" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, September 2, 1924

And then the holiday was over, and the candidates moved on to other issues.

Q Toon: Board to Ride

As I mentioned last week, Harley-Davidson Motor Company has disassociated itself from the Human Rights Campaign and scrapped its employee diversity program.

“We are saddened by the negativity on social media over the last few weeks, designed to divide the Harley-Davidson community,” the company wrote in a statement posted on X.

The company added that “we have not operated a DEI function since April 2024, and we do not have a DEI function today. We do not have hiring quotas and we no longer have supplier diversity spend goals.”

But the company said it would review all sponsorships and outside organizations the company affiliates with, and the company will establish a central clearinghouse for approvals of those relationships. It also suggested it would drop some sponsorships, including LGBTQ+ Pride festivals, saying the brand going forward would focus exclusively on growing the sport of motorcycling. Harley-Davidson, based in Milwaukee, had previously been a longtime corporate member of the Wisconsin LBGT Chamber of Commerce.

It almost seems unfair to single out Harley-Davidson, since it was following the lead of Tractor Supply Co. and John Deere. And now the makers of Jack Daniels and Lowe's have joined the rush to knuckle under to the forces of Conformity, Inequity, and Exclusion. The announcement at Lowe's added that the home goods retailer would cease sponsorship of LGBTQ parades and festivals.

The unofficial leader of the corporate pressure campaign is Robby Starbuck, a video streamer and right-wing online activist. Monday, Starbuck posted on X claiming that he helped provoked the changes at Lowe's, saying he received an email from a Lowe's executive in response to a warning he sent the company that he planned to "expose" its "woke" policies.

"We’re now forcing multi-billion dollar organizations to change their policies without even posting just from fear they have of being the next company that we expose," he wrote.

So, just who the fuck is this cybergoon before whom the titans of industry tremble and quake?

A Harley-Davidson dealership in Barre, Vermont, with the caveat that it is not speaking for the company as a whole, has posted an accusation that Mr. Starbuck is just in it for the clicks. From its "Defending Harley" post:

Starbuck's recent video is not about genuine concern or informed critique; it’s about generating traffic to his content. By attacking established and respected companies, he knows he can provoke strong reactions, driving more views to his YouTube channel and increasing his ad revenue. This kind of clickbait strategy is not new, and Starbuck is just the latest figure to exploit it. The more controversy he stirs, the more views he gets, which translates to more money in his pocket and name recognition.

By focusing on hot-button issues and framing his attacks in inflammatory terms, Starbuck manipulates his audience’s emotions to keep them engaged. This tactic not only undermines genuine dialogue but also prioritizes his financial gain over truthful discourse. His baseless accusations against Harley-Davidson are part of a broader pattern of sensationalism aimed at monetizing outrage.

I'm not about to add to Mr. Starbuck's page views, but I wouldn't be surprised if he has also awarded himself responsibility for the state of Florida deleting the LGBTQ+ Destinations pages from its tourism website.

So now I wanna see Dykes on Bikes on the next cover of H-D's The Enthusiast magazine just so I can point to my little cartoon and claim the credit.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This one may not go over so well at home.

August Four the People

You've been waiting all month to find out what cartoons I drew in Augusts past, I can tell. So let's rummage around in the old storage bin and see what we can find, shall we?

Back in May, I posted a cartoon I'd posted of Ronald Reagan preparing to tell jokes at the funeral of U.S.-Soviet détente. When I had selected it for that week's Graphical History Tour, I thought I had drawn it after Reagan's "We begin the bombing in five minutes" joke. Looking the quotation up, however, I found that I must have drawn the cartoon about something else he said.

August, 1984

This was the cartoon I drew shortly after the actual bombing joke.

In case you're not familiar with the story, Reagan was in the habit of making pretend announcements during the sound checks before his television and radio speeches. The sound checks were not confined to the studio, but went out to all the stations that would carry the speech live. Usually, the media overlooked those flippant pseudo-announcements except for the technicians checking for feedback, hiss, and warble.

This time, ears perked up at Reagan's joke: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." In spite of a standing agreement with the media that Reagan's mic check jests would be their little secret, this one leaked out, was reported by Gannett newspapers, and became world news.

The Soviet government (should I have explained that this was when Constantin Chernenko was spending the last few months in his mortal coil being President of the U.S.S.R.?) was officially mum about the incident, but their state media condemned Reagan's joke as "unprecedently hostile," and proof that he wasn't interested in improving U.S.-Russia relations. Some unknown Soviet officer in Vladivostok returned the joke by sending a coded message that "We now embark on military action against the U.S. forces," knowing the message would be intercepted by U.S. intelligence. U.S. and Japanese militaries were briefly on high alert, but afterward, everybody had a good laugh over it.

Just kidding.

I still haven't figured out what incident prompted my earlier cartoon, but it was the better one; and that's why it was the one printed in the first UW-Parkside Ranger of the fall semester rather than this one.

Any cartoon that depicts bullets flying at a president of the United States (or any other real person for that matter) runs the risk of becoming in bad taste if that person does in fact get shot. Which, as you surely know, Ronald Reagan had been three months into his first term. Even though Reagan was known for his roles in B-grade western movies, Americans don't like watching their leaders get shot at.

Could've been why no TV network would broadcast Reagan's film The Killers (1964) while he was president. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., August 22, 1994

In June of 1994, I confidently drew a cartoon assuming that the Republican Party would have a tough time finding a candidate to run against my district's Democratic Congressman, Peter Barca. Barca had won a special election one year earlier to succeed eleven-term Rep. Les Aspin after the latter was appointed Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Defense.

As it turned out, the 1994 election would see a rematch between Kenoshan Barca and Mark Neumann, a real estate developer from Janesville. And Neumann would coast to victory in the Gingrich-led Republican "Contract with America" wave in November, putting an end to the longest stretch of having Democrats in the First Congressional District seat.

Neumann was (and presumably still is) a hard-line right-winger, solidly anti-abortion and against President Bill Clinton's attempt to reform the U.S. health care system. The GOP talking point against the Clinton reforms was that Americans would be denied the right to make their own health care choices — ignoring that their Contract with America also called for denying women the right to make their own reproductive health care choices.

Which was a fine and dandy campaign slogan for Republicans until their Supreme Court justices granted their wish and Republicans had to deal with women upset by government control over their uteri.

Wisconsin's First Congressional District has had two Congressmen, both Republicans, since Mark Neumann's failed run for Russ Feingold's Senate seat in 1998. In the meantime, Peter Barca served as Bill Clinton's Midwest Regional Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, then went back to representing Kenosha in the Madison legislature, and later headed the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

And now, thirty years later, he's running for his old congressional seat against incumbent Republican Bryan Steil. My better half and I talked with him at an open-air party in downtown Racine last month; he liked my Kamala Harris For The People button.

I neglected to mention that I had been drawing cartoons about him for the Journal Times thirty years earlier.

Hearkening back to 2004, here are a couple of people you did not see at the Republican National Convention last month:

for Q Syndicate, August, 2004

Come to think of it, I don't think we saw any former Republican nominees for President or Vice President on the Republican National Convention dais except for the current ones. Although to be fair, if Al Gore, John Kerry, or John Edwards spoke at the DNC this week, I missed it.

✍

I couldn't think of a good segue to any of the cartoons I drew in August of 2014, so here's some eye candy.

for Q Syndicate, August 2014

"That's So Gay" was the motto of the 2014 Gay Games, held in Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, that August.

By the way, given the kerfuffle over two female Olympians who had aspersions cast upon their gender, you might be interested to know how the Gay Games address transgender and non-binary-identifying athletes.

The Sydney Gay Games in 2002 defined gender by social identity: In the game of netball at those Games, the solution was for women’s, men’s, mixed and transgender competitions, with negotiations of rules and membership according to the gender that participants lived. These measures included removing the burden of proof from athletes to provide documentation, and instead assuming that all are genuine in their gender category selection. This was the most inclusive gender policy developed at that time, and it remains in place today.

The Gay Games were scheduled to be held in Hong Kong in 2022. They were pushed back a year due to COVID-19. New Chinese laws criminalizing "effeminate men," as well as concerns by Taiwanese athletes that they risked arrest, plus pandemic-related travel restrictions, led to a decision to split the 2023 games between Hong Kong and Guadalajara, Mexico. 

If you missed (or miss) the Paris Olympic Games this summer, the Gay Games in Valencia, Spain, are just two years away.

 

You Know You’re Governor of Minnesota When…

Time photo: Dan McCoy. The Week illustration: Jason Seiler. 

Q Toon: Do Not Disturb

Red state colleges are welcoming students back to campus by emptying their libraries of books about feminism, LGBTQ+ experience, African-American and other minority studies, and anything else reeking of social justice. Students returning to New College in Florida last week discovered waste receptacles overflowing onto the ground with such books. 

University of Kentucky President Eli Capilauto also announced this week that UK has disbanded its Diversity office. This after he had criticized anti-DEI lawmakers in February, arguing, "Let’s not extinguish the thirst for knowledge because certain questions aren’t allowed because they are uncomfortable or challenging."

Elsewhere, George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Wyoming are among the other institutions of higher learning that have knuckled under to the demands of politicians who have decreed diversity, equity, and inclusion to be anathema. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are now literally thought crimes in Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Kansas.

Those of you who know me know that I do not use the word "literally" figuratively.

Even private enterprise is succumbing to Republican Cancel Culture. Tractor Supply, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson have broken ties with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and announced that they will would strike any "socially motivated content" from their employee training materials. So I guess I won't need my Harley-Davidson tee shirts any more.

Not that little old me would be able to dissuade the farm equipment companies from chasing those lucrative red-state contracts to haul all those academic books and their dangerous ideas to landfills.