Q Toon: The Great Escape

The saga continues...

I can't vouch that the chain of events in today's cartoon are entirely plausible; I just want to bring the story of Leo Jefferson's captivity to a close.

Had I been drawing this for a daily cartoon strip, I could have embellished the story with all sorts of details. It's possible Leo made it onto the Canadian evacuation flight because he bears some resemblance to an embassy staffer's husband. I could have had some Afghanis on their way back to face the Taliban deciding to stay in the war-torn shithole country rather than risk ending up en route to Kandahar again.

Details such as what happened to the shackles and handcuffs the concentration camp prisoners were wearing when they got on that plane would have had to be explained. 

I suppose that the ICE gestapo with the keys might have been fatally caught in the crossfire at Shithole International Airfield, but that ought to have sparked an international crisis if it were to happen in the real world. It might even have at least driven the Jeffrey Epstein story to a back burner for a day or two.

Let's just imagine that the keys fell out of his pocket, then.

This Week's Sneak Peek

We've got tickets to see The Scottish Play this week. Since we like to dress up nice for the theatre, I decided it would be most appropriate to wear my one plaid pattern tie.

It even has this one damned spot that I just can't get out.

Crime and Klanishment

Last month, our Graphical History Tour dealt with jay-walking and reckless driving in the summer of 1925. Today we focus on more serious criminal behavior of the time.

"The Life of the Tree Depends on Its Roots" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. August 4, 1925

Dorman Smith may have had the previous year's case of the Bobbed-haired Bandit in mind when he gave "maudlin sympathy for crooks" such prominent placement among the roots of crime. Sensational newspaper coverage of murder, robbery, and kidnapping led to a certain romanticizing of some criminals; we still remember Bonnie & Clyde, Dillinger, or Pretty Boy Floyd — or at least the movie versions of them.

Not to be overlooked are the other roots beneath Smith's tree, including "easy purchasing of arms," "crooked politics," "loose morals," and "weak judges."

"The Alienist" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1925

Also coming for popular blame was the psychiatric profession — “alienists” — expert witnesses testifying for the defense. In a case grabbing nationwide attention, a Chicago jury found Russell Scott guilty of the murder of drug store clerk Joseph Maurer, only to have Superior Court Judge Joseph B. David rule that Scott was insane. Scott was then committed to a mental asylum.

"The Big Brother of Herrin, Illinois" by Billy Ireland in Columbus Dispatch, ca. July 5, 1925

When you hear Chicago and the 1920's, what comes to mind? I'll bet that gangland violence is high up on your list.

The Graphical History Tour has made several stops in Herrin, Illinois over the past few years. The southern Illinois mining town was notorious for its bloodshed over striking union miners and overzealous Prohibition agents in league with the Ku Klux Klan.

"Chicago As the Rest of the World Must Imagine It" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1925

Chicagoan John McCutcheon's cartoon defended against the caricature of his city by Billy Ireland and others. The perception that Chicago was a hotbed of violence and illegal booze was however serious enough that the federal government was pressuring Chicago to crack down on crime. The Justice Department was particularly focused on quashing rum running, an especially lucrative organized crime business.

"Now They Are Drinking Furniture Polish and Shooting Each Other" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 10, 1925

Daniel Fitzpatrick pairs gangland violence and turf wars with injury and worse from amateur distillers. Bathtub booze, homemade hooch from wood grain alcohol or other legal substances not meant for human consumption, was the cause of increased blindness and death.

"Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in Collier's, August 15, 1925

Disregard for Prohibition, now in its seventh year, crossed social classes.

The Feds showed less interest in another serious crime issue:

"How America Makes Criminals" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, August 22, 1925

Drawing for the Black press, Leslie Rogers cited lynch mobs getting away with murder, arson, and plunder when the victims were Black as inspiration for his cartoon criminal "believing that all criminals are protected."

The column running alongside Leslie Rogers's cartoon in the Chicago Defender further explained:

A comparison of the number of crime stories on the front pages of American and European newspapers is a terrible indictment of the United States. Statistics show that the city of Chicago alone has annually more holdups and murders than England and Wales put together.

From this there can be drawn but one conclusion: the present appalling prevalence of mob rule and lynching has bred wholesale disrespect for law and order. The fact that America is the home of lynching and mob psychology has much to do with her first place position in the crime line-up.

When a mob has lynched a black man, those who took part in this lawlessness are seldom, if ever, brought to justice. And should public indignation be aroused to the extent that an "investigation" seemed advisable, the result is always a verdict of "hanged by persons unknown."

That last quotation comes straight from the ruling that shut down investigation of a lynching in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. 

"Cant See for Looking" by Fred Watson in Baltimore Afro-American, August 22, 1925

The Afro-American had run a photograph of the lynching, attended by nearly 200 people, on its August 15 front page. An editorial accompanying Fred Watson's cartoon in its next edition provided details missing from the initial reporting:

Walter B. Mitchell was lynched by a mob in Excelsior Springs, Mo., last week on the charge of halting an automobile, beating up a white man and attempting assault upon his female companion.

Investigation afterwards proved that the white man attacked was in the cattle stealing business with Mitchell, and owed the later [sic] money. Mitchell stopped Utt's car and demanded his pay. They quarreled and fought. Utt was licked. His companion interfered. Mitchell threw her in the back seat and went home. Angered by the incident, Utt spread the talk about criminal assault and the mob got in its Ku Klux law enforcement.

"Better Watch Both Holes, Kitty" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, August 29, 1925

The Chicago Defender drew a straight line from Volstead Act enforcement to a lack of protection of Black American's rights to life and liberty:

Today we find the eye of law enforcement intently fixed upon the latest addition to the Constitution — the 18th or prohibition amendment. So concentrated are the efforts of the federal government upon apprehending the violators of this amendment that others more important, as far as national welfare are concerned, go unnoticed. 

The amendments receiving less attention of any are the 13th, 14th, and 15th. These three happen to deal with the citizenship and rights of 12,000,000 black people. Hence the enforcement of them is deemed unimportant!

"A Great Day" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, Aug. 9, 1925

Meanwhile, the Klan marched 35,000 strong in the nation's capital on August 8, 1925. Klansmen and women paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument. Festivities were interrupted by heavy rain. 

Edmund Duffy's cartoon, above, ran on the Baltimore Sun's front page instead of its usual place on the editorial page.

Q Toon: Driven to Destruction

Pete Buttigieg's successor as U.S. Secretary of Transportation is a former reality show celebutante and congresscritter from Wisconsin, Sean Duffy.

It's not the same Transportation Department now.

In a development that could impact all 50 states and the District of Columbia, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on July 1 announced a “nationwide roadway safety initiative” that political observers say could be used to require cities and states to remove LGBTQ supportive rainbow-colored street crosswalks. ... 

A July 1 statement released by the U.S. Department of Transportation says Duffy sent a letter that same day to the governors of all 50 states that followed an earlier letter sent to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser informing them of the department’s “Safe Arterials for Everyone” initiative to be carried out by the Federal Highway Administration. ...

“Secretary Duffy also noted in his letter that intersections and crosswalks need to be kept free from distractions,” the statement continues. “This includes political messages of any nature, artwork, or anything else that distracts from the core mission of driver and pedestrian safety,” the DOT statement says.

Although the DOT statement and Duffy’s letter to the governors do not specifically mention rainbow crosswalks, the [South Florida] Sun Sentinel reports that Duffy stated in a July 1 social media post that “Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks.”

One could just as easily argue that rainbow crosswalks enhance roadway safety, becoming more visible than the everyday white-only versions. Certainly they are no more distracting to motorists than, say, Christmas decorations or Chamber of Commerce banners displayed from light poles.

But erasing LGBTQ+ and minority presence from the public eye has been a sacred mission to Republican leaders, such as Florida's rabidly homophobic Gov. Ron DeSantis. If Sean Duffy has only insinuated intention to paint over rainbow crosswalks, DeSantis has explicitly demanded their removal.

A number of Florida cities have already complied with a new anti-rainbow crosswalk law; other communities are fighting it. A grass-roots coalition in Orlando hopes to save the rainbow crosswalk created as a memorial to the 49 victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. (The nightclub itself is due to be demolished.) Key West city council planned to discuss a resolution to protect its rainbow crosswalk at Duval and Pretonia this week.

If Key West is successful, someone can compare and contrast its accident rate with Pensacola’s.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I had a letter to put in the mail today, so I went looking for my postage stamps.

They used to be in the second drawer from the top on the right side of my rolltop desk, but I don't have that desk any more, and they haven't found a home in the desk housing my computer and scanner. This desk has only three drawers and a couple of shelves, none of which were empty to begin with. So for now, stamps and address labels are among a bunch of other stuff in a box in the basement.

I found half a sheet of Black Heritage stamps featuring Ella Fitzgerald, and was about to use one of them when I noticed that they were not Forever Stamps.

Issued in 2006, they were 39 cents — exactly half the present rate for a standard envelope.

Hardly seems like 2006 was that long ago, does it?

Then again, when I was 19 years old, postal rates had almost quadrupled since the day I was born.

August Assembly Required

Back when I was drawing cartoons for University of Wisconsin student newspapers, there would be one cartoon I drew every August in order to make the deadline of the first edition of the new fall semester.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Sept. 5, 1985

As it happens, the UW-Parkside Ranger did publish Volume 14, Issue 1 on August 29, 1985; but this cartoon I drew that August only made it into Volume 14, Issue 2. I don't remember whether I hadn't known there would be an August 29 issue, or whether there wasn't space for this cartoon. It was probably the former, though.

Anyway, there was a white minority government ruling South Africa in those days. Apartheid meant a strict segregation of the races; native Blacks were kept subjugated in impoverished villages, forbidden the vote, and generally treated like trespassers in their own land. In response, corporations and universities were responding to demands to divest from South African companies.

Amid violent suppression of Black South African protests against a new constitution, President Ronald Reagan resisted congressional and citizen calls to impose sanctions on the South African government. Even with a Republican majority in the Senate, Congress would pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 over Reagan's veto, banning new U.S. investment in South Africa and sales to the country's police and military, while cutting off South African imports.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Sept. 5, 1995

The UWM Post published three issues during the summer semester in those days; I would contribute cartoons to the summer editions in 1996.

As for this cartoon, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) was a prominent fiscal conservative, and the lead namesake of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act on 1985. The bill promised to balance the federal budget by 1990 by mandating across-the-board cuts in government programs if Congress failed to pass budgets beneath a prescribed deficit level.

It didn't work. The federal deficit would be eliminated, temporarily, under President Bill Clinton, but thanks to tax increases that were anathema to Gramm and the rest of his party — which were reversed as soon as the supposed deficit hawks were back in total charge of things.

The line in the third panel of my cartoon is a direct quote of his rationale for simultaneously cutting benefits for the poor and taxes for the rich — still Republican dogma to this day. They got their way in spades with the Big Abomnibus Budget Bill of 2025, which proved that Republicans never really cared about running up the deficit in the first place — in case anybody thought that George W. Bush's deficits were a fluke.

Gramm was running for president in the summer of 1995, and made a good showing in an Iowa straw poll in August; but his campaign didn't make it past the Iowa caucuses in January. The one positive thing I can say about him is that he was a hoot to draw.

✍

I've got one other cartoon from August, 1995 that I'd like to include here, because it never got published. I'll leave it up to you to decide why that was.

It's about a local news item, and drawn for the Racine Journal Times. The Ku Klux Klan announced plans to hold a rally on August 19 in front of the courthouse in Elkhorn, population then around 5,000, in Walworth County. In response, the county's Republican and Democratic parties issued a joint statement denouncing the Klan while affirming their First Amendment right "to have and declare" their beliefs. 

"We do not support the belief that hatred solves problems," their joint letter read. "We believe hate crimes and hate group activities negatively affect everyone in the community."

When the Walworth County board took up a resolution in support of "peaceful counteractions against hate groups," someone objected to the term "hate groups." So the board amended the resolution so that it lent its support to "peaceful counteractions against unhappy groups."

Unpublished, August, 1995

Lake Geneva Supervisor Dan Janowak explained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Meg Jones that he suggested the alternative phrasing because the KKK "is not a hate program. It's more or less people that are unhappy with what's going on and they don't necessarily hate."

Board Chairman Lawrence Scharine weaseled, "'Hate' or 'unhappy,' it doesn't make much of a difference. The point is still there."

"Lied" or "weaseled," it doesn't make much of a difference. The point is still there.

The Klan rally took place as planned, separated from counter-protesters by "a small army of police in riot gear." The Journal Times didn't offer an estimate of the number of Klansmen involved (and Imperial spokesWizard David Neumann wouldn't say how many members the local Klan had), but implied that they were outnumbered by the 400-500 counter-protesters and curious on-lookers. "Klansmen spoke against affirmative action and hiring quotas," the JT''s Joseph Scolaro reported. "They continually called protesters 'scum' and decried homosexuals and minorities."

The only arrests made at the rally were of two anti-Klan protesters from Milwaukee, released on signature bonds.

Speaking of affirmative action...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, August 5, 2005

As difficult as it may be to remember only twenty short years ago, a little corporate diversity was thought to be a good thing. I drew this cartoon to accompany a Business Journal editorial in favor of favoring "disadvantaged" businesses.

The idea was that businesses owned by racial minorities, women, and/or physically challenged persons should be given favorable consideration in bidding for government contracts; in practice, just having one or two such persons serving on the corporate board would qualify a company as labeled disadvantaged.

Under the present regime, of course, these companies would have to fire any racial minorities, women, and physically challenged persons on their corporate board just to have a glimmer of hope to compete with and out-bribe all-white, all-male, all-cis family and golfing partners of La Cosa di Trump.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2015

And finally today, marriage equality vs. religious liberty.

Q Toon: Fire and ICE

I really do have to wrap up this story arc, and soon. Berkeley Breathed is taking over the job of sentencing a comic character to languish in a Trumpster gulag, and I would rather not risk my Leo and his Opus the Penguin reaching for the same jokes.

Or running into each other.

I’m sure that Breathed will handle the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime’s suspension of human rights under the U.S. Constitution deftly and with insight. After all, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning could have centered his concentration camp story on Bill the Cat, which would just be damned silly.

For the benefit of any readers who have entered the theatre late, Leo is the liberal half of a gay Odd Couple; his partner, Max, has fallen under MAGA’s sway. In February, Leo was swept up in an ICE Gestapo raid and disappeared to Trumplinka Prison. A guard there misinterpreted a tattoo on Leo’s buttocks as an MS-13 insignia, which has now landed him and some fellow detainees on a third world airport tarmac.

Where a civil war is underway. 

I am confident that neither Emperor Trump nor Cruella de Noem nor Oberbefehlshaber Tom Homan nor what is left of the State Department would know nor care what is going on in this unnamed country. I imagine that its head of state agreed to accept custody of American non-persons in exchange for buying up our overstock of Trump Sneakers.

While we wait for the next exciting installment of this gripping saga, let us hope that the government and rebel soldiers fighting over control of the airfield have all learned their marksmanship from the Imperial Storm Troopers of Star Wars Inc., and that Leo is presently rescued and returned to his Max, to argue happily ever after about tariffs, climate change, and Konservative Kancel Kultur.